Читать книгу The King's Grace - John Buchan - Страница 14

Table of Contents

In such an hour of strife and confusion at home and of crisis abroad the new King was called upon to make a grave decision.

The powers of a constitutional monarch must always be indeterminate and delicate, brittle if too heavily pressed, a shadow if tactlessly advertised, substantial only when exercised discreetly in the background. But they are none the less real for that, since he has the privilege and duty of advising his advisers (the phrase was Sir Wilfrid Laurier's), the custody of his custodians; and he may have in the last resort the heavier duty of deciding on his own account a weighty constitutional problem. The prerogative may have to be called in to cut the tangle.

The first task King Edward had skilfully and happily performed. He rather liked a political crisis, and Lord Esher has told us that he enjoyed the excitement caused by Mr. Chamberlain's resignation in 1903. He had protested to the Prime Minister about the platform style of his Chancellor of the Exchequer, protests which Mr. Lloyd George received with complete good humour and with unfulfilled promises of amendment. He had endeavoured to avert the rejection of the Budget by the House of Lords, and had summoned Lord Lansdowne and Mr. Balfour to confer with him. The second duty he was not yet called upon to face, but he saw it approaching. He saw that the problem of the Second Chamber had been raised and could not be dropped, and the resolutions passed by the Commons in December 1909 and Mr. Asquith's pre-election speeches made the Government policy clear. He did not like it; he thought it meant the destruction of the House of Lords; he had his own scheme of reform, which he discussed with Lord Crewe at Windsor in January, 1910, and which would have confined the right of voting to one hundred peers.

After the election King Edward realised that the crisis was near. A bill would be introduced to limit the power of the Lords; they would not accept it: what then? A dissolution would not help matters if the nation returned the same verdict. If government was to be carried on, the only way was the use of the royal prerogative. A request to know the Cabinet's intention brought, on February 11th, the discreet reply that Ministers did not propose to advise any exercise of the prerogative until the actual necessity arose. Ten days later Mr. Asquith announced that he had sought no guarantee from the King and had received none; it would be wholly improper to ask in advance for a blank authority. But private conversations had carried the matter further. The King had made it clear that he recognised that the new Parliament Bill must go on the statute-book if the nation plainly demanded it, but he asked that the nation's approval should be sought by an election fought definitely upon that issue. The Prime Minister was therefore justified in assuming that, if this condition was carried out and the result of the election was a decisive verdict, the royal prerogative would be brought into play to give that verdict effect. "In no case," he told the House of Commons on April 14th, "will we recommend dissolution except under such conditions as will secure that in the new Parliament the judgment of the people as expressed in the election will be carried into law."

King Edward's death in May flung everything into the melting-pot. Could not some way be found of settling the quarrel which would not force upon a new and inexperienced monarch the necessity of a difficult decision? Moreover, the King's death had revived a feeling for our historic institutions which took some of the heart out of the Liberal crusade. A conference was agreed upon, and eight honest gentlemen, four from each side, sat down in June round a table to try to settle terms. At first they seemed to be making progress, but very soon it appeared that neither side had sufficient small change with which to purchase the assent of the other. There were not enough free assets to bargain with. The Conservative members desired that measures involving constitutional change should be put into a separate category, but under "constitutional" there fell the business of Irish Home Rule, on which the fate of the Government depended. Few people were surprised, and many were relieved, when on November 11th it was announced that the Conference had drawn to a fruitless close.

The time had come to approach the new King to discover if he took his father's view. On November 11th the Prime Minister went to Sandringham and put the matter fully before him. The King had hoped for much from the Conference, and was greatly distressed at its failure, but he realised that the responsibility must now lie on his own shoulders. If a deadlock came, the opposition of the Lords could be overcome only by limiting or increasing their numbers. The first way—of withholding writs of summons—was invidious and possibly unconstitutional, but the prerogative of new creation was undoubted and had fairly recent parallels. In Mr. Asquith's view the mere knowledge that such a step was contemplated would probably bring about agreement. On the 15th the Cabinet drew up and dispatched to Sandringham a memorandum which advised an immediate dissolution. "His Majesty's Ministers cannot take the responsibility of advising a dissolution, unless they understand that in the event of the policy of the Government being approved by an adequate majority in the new House of Commons, His Majesty will be ready to exercise his constitutional powers, which may involve the prerogative of creating Peers, if needed, to secure that effect shall be given to the decision of the country." Next day Mr. Asquith and Lord Crewe went to Buckingham Palace for their answer.

The King liked the Lords policy of the Government no more than his father had done. To him it seemed the destruction of an ancient and precious thing. Burdened as he was with the thought of the foreign situation, he felt that it would not increase our prestige in the world "to see Britannia," as Lord Rosebery put it, "in her old age casting away her helmet . . . apparently prepared to revise at ten days' notice the constitution of eight hundred years." But what other course remained? If the coming election showed a clear popular verdict, the obstinacy of the Lords would mean the Cabinet's resignation. A Conservative Government would not survive for a week, and in the dissolution which must follow the Sovereign would become a subject of debate, and that kingship of which he was the trustee would be grievously compromised. After a long discussion he said that he saw no other way but to assent to the Cabinet's advice. He made one proviso—that the Parliament Bill should be submitted to the House of Lords before the election. Mr. Asquith had not received a guarantee in the formal sense, but he had achieved what he described as a "hypothetical understanding."

The December election removed the hypothetical element, for the Government was returned with a majority of one hundred and twenty-six. In January the King insisted on having an interview with Lord Lansdowne at Windsor, not to ask for advice but to find out at first-hand the views of the Opposition—a perfectly correct step, to which surprisingly Mr. Asquith at first raised objections. But the air was electric and even the stout nerve of the Prime Minister was shaken. The Parliament Bill was introduced in the Commons on February 22nd, and early in May had been carried through all its stages. The Lords had sought at first to counter it with their own scheme of reform, but the atmosphere was not congenial to the construction of a brand-new Second Chamber, one of the most difficult enterprises of statecraft. The Coronation interrupted the debates for the better part of a month, and they were resumed by the Lords in a rising temper. Amendments were carried there which wholly altered the measure, and on July 14th the Cabinet submitted a memorandum to the King, pointing out that the expected deadlock was approaching, in which "it will be the duty of Ministers to advise the Crown to exercise its prerogative."

Up till then no mention had been made by Mr. Asquith or his colleagues of the understanding arrived at in the previous November. But now it was necessary to make it plain to the Conservative leaders, in the hope that the knowledge might enable them to control their followers. The King himself was anxious that the facts should be published. So on July 20th Mr. Asquith wrote to Lord Lansdowne and Mr. Balfour to inform them that the House of Commons could not accept the Lords amendments; that, should the need arise, the Government would advise the King to exercise his prerogative by the creation of new peers; and that His Majesty had been pleased to signify that he would act on this advice. It was the signal for violent outbursts. On July 24th the Prime Minister was shouted down in the Commons. Votes of censure were moved in both Houses, and Ministers were accused of having shattered constitutional etiquette in the interest of a corrupt bargain over Irish Home Rule. On August 8th Lord Crewe, in the Lords, explained what had happened at the interview with the King the previous November, and how there had been no request for unconditional guarantees.

The final debate there on August 10th and 11th was tense and dramatic. Lord Lansdowne urged that the Bill be passed lest a worst thing should befall, but the irreconcilables under Lord Halsbury refused to yield. Lord Morley, who had at first been opposed to the use of the prerogative, read a formula which the King had approved: "If the Bill should be defeated tonight His Majesty will consent to the creation of peers sufficient in number to guard against any possible combination of the different parties in opposition by which the Parliament Bill might be exposed a second time to defeat." Till the last moment no one dared to forecast the result. In the end the majority of the peers abstained, and the measure became law by one hundred and thirty-one votes to one hundred and fourteen, thirty-seven Conservatives and thirteen bishops voting with the Government.

It was a controversy which interested the politicians rather than the people of Britain. The ordinary man would probably have resented the abolition of the House of Lords, but he had no objection to its being taught its place. Under the Parliament Act it was deprived of all control over the Budget of the year, if certified as a money Bill by the Speaker, and its power of rejection was limited to measures sent up no oftener than twice within two years by the Commons. To those who argued that the whole scheme was slovenly and unscientific there was no real answer, except that this was the way that changes had always come to Britain. Elaborate constitutional reform in cold blood seems to be beyond our national capacity; we correct an immediate abuse by a piece of hasty extemporisation, and trust to Providence to make it work. We have always preferred the provisional to the absolute. The Parliament Act turned part of our constitution into a written word, but it did not finish the sentence; there was no full-stop, only a line of dashes.

But to the King, just entering upon his reign, the situation was most delicate and perplexing. He had not behind him his father's wide political experience. He had had no training in the arcana imperii, the imponderables of our paradoxical government. He was dependent upon the counsel of one set of advisers; etiquette forbade him to take advice from their opponents; his personal suite might be consulted, but they were not experts; in the end he had to act alone. In these difficult circumstances he behaved with strict constitutional probity, because he had to guide him that instinct which he shared with the majority of his subjects—the good sense of the plain man. In this common touch was to lie the true secret of his power. The Parliament Bill wrangle was an auspicious beginning.