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Sir Henry

Campbell-Bannerman

Prime Minister who showed ‘a shrewd sense of what the public wanted at the moment’

23 April 1908

In the opinion of his followers, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman has been a successful Prime Minister; but few would be found to say that his life offers a specially interesting subject of study to the biographer. In his case the interest was not that of genius, of versatility, of obstacles unexpectedly overcome, of high intellectual variety, of impassioned eloquence, or of mordant wit. It was just the interest which in a lesser degree attaches to the career of any very successful business man. A line of action early and definitely adopted; strong party consistency rigorously observed; a shrewd sense of what the public wanted at the moment; a firm will, a temper never ruffled except with intention, a gift of speech just adequate to its purpose and no more; a pleasant humour, a ready tact in dealing with friends and opponents, and behind it all the valuable background of ample wealth – these were the endow-ments of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and they made him Prime Minister.

By origin he belonged to the middle-class, being by birth a member of an outlying branch of the clan Campbell, and no known relation to the Bannermans who hold the baronetcy. He was born in 1836, the second son of James Campbell, who after making a considerable fortune in business in Glasgow became Lord Provost of that city, and was knighted. Sir Henry’s elder brother, who lives at the family place of Stracathro in Forfarshire, and whose own serious illness was an added sorrow to the closing months of his brother’s life, is a strong Conservative in politics, and as such represented Glasgow and Aberdeen Universities till 1906, when he retired, and was succeeded by Sir Henry Craik. Sir James Campbell married Janet, daughter of Henry Bannerman, a Scotsman settled in Manchester, who became very rich and whose son Henry, dying in 1872, left all his property to the young Henry Campbell on condition that he added the name Bannerman to his own.

It was in this way that be became possessed of Castle Belmont, near Meigle, where so much of his later life was spent. Henry Campbell’s early education was received partly near home, partly abroad, where he became a good French scholar; then, after passing through Glasgow University, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took his B.A. degree in 1858 and his M.A. in 1861. In 1860 he married Charlotte, daughter of General Sir Charles Bruce, K.C.B. a lady who, till her death in 1906, was, in spite of the ill-health which incapacitated her for many years, the close associate of all his thoughts and plans. They had no children, but this only threw them closer together, and the long holidays which they spent in each other’s company, in Scotland or on the Continent of Europe, are said by those who knew them to have been ideal episodes in the “marriage of true minds.”

In 1868 Henry Campbell had his first chance of entering Parliament, and in the May of that year he was brought forward by the advanced Liberals of Stirling to contest the burghs at a by-election. The new voters under the Reform Act of 1867 had not yet taken their place on the register, so that on a poll of 1,059 votes the young “advanced” candidate suffered defeat at the hands of Mr. Ramsey, a Liberal of more Whiggish colour, by a majority of 71. Then came the dissolution, and at the end of the year, on a poll which had grown to 3,883, Henry Campbell secured a majority of 519. He thus entered on that flood tide of Liberal opinion which made Mr. Gladstone Premier and gave him what was thought in those days to be an overwhelming majority.

In Gladstone’s third session the sensible, steady-going, impeccable Scotch member, who had married a general’s daughter and was about to inherit a great fortune, was chosen to be Financial Secretary of the War Office. From 1874 to 1880 Disraeli and the Tories were in power; when Gladstone returned, Campbell-Bannerman was moved, in 1884, to what was at that time the most conspicuous and difficult post in the Ministry, that of Chief Secretary for Ireland, in which he succeeded Sir George Trevelyan.

It was a fortunate appointment. Of the three former occupants of the post one had been driven to resign by the intrigues of his own party, one had been murdered, the third, Sir George Trevelyan, had, after two short years, come back prematurely aged. Campbell-Bannerman was immediately called, by his opponents, “our chief antagonist and our hapless target … and a very dull man.” But it was not many days before they began to have an inkling they had made some mistake. Before the end of the year the story went round that his critics were describing him as “the only possible Chief Secretary, with the hide of a rhinoceros and the heart of an iceberg.” This, of course, was only a pleasant way of saying that Campbell-Bannerman went on quietly administering the law and that he was the very last man in the world to take the Irish members at their own valuation.

Up to the time when Campbell-Bannerman, with the rest of the Gladstonian Cabinet, went out of office, in the summer of 1885, there seemed no reason to doubt the sincerity of the Chief Secretary’s Unionist principles. During the election campaign in October and November, 1885, he not only repudiated the notion of yielding to what he called “the Separatist faction,” but argued forcibly that the law should be specially and permanently amended to strengthen the arm of justice against intimidation and boycotting, and to secure that Irish jurymen should not be allowed to combine to create impunity for terrorist violence and menaces.

A very few weeks later, when Lord Salisbury’s Government was thrown out on the Address and Gladstone once more came into office prepared to solve the Irish question by a deal with Parnell, Campbell-Bannerman blossomed out at once as an undisguised Home Ruler. In spite of the brave words of his election address and his campaign speeches, he went with his leader in the full adoption of the policy of Parnell and Davitt. Indeed he declared to a colleague, in a phrase of which he was the inventor and which had much success at the time, that he had “found salvation long ago, though he had kept his secret well.” But he did not return to Ireland; the Chief Secretaryship was given to Mr. Morley, who was no new convert, and the member for the Stirling Burghs went back as Secretary of State to the scene of his earlier labours.

He remained at the War Office during the short Government of 1886, and returned again during Gladstone’s second Home Rule Government of 1892-93. Of his first tenure of this high post there is little to record, except that within the office itself and in Parliament he made a good impression.

His tenure of the War Office was brought to an end in June, 1895, by a chance vote on the insufficiency of small-arm ammunition. He, of course, was blamed as Secretary for War; but it must be added in fairness that Mr. Balfour, speaking at Manchester in the following January, at a very anxious moment in our history, paid a handsome tribute to the “additions to the fighting power of the Army” which had been made by the Home Rule Government between 1892 and 1895.

The cordite vote, in fact, was only a pretext to get rid of a Government of which the country was tired, and which ought, in the opinion of most people, to have resigned or dissolved after the defeat of the Home Rule Bill by the House of Lords.

Campbell-Bannerman was made a G.C.B; but for some years afterwards he remained one of the least prominent of the Liberal leaders. But all this time the internal of the party continued; and on December 14 the world was taken by surprise when Sir William Harcourt announced his withdrawal from the leadership of the Opposition in the House of Commons. The party deliberated in private, and, at a meeting on February 6, 1899, at the National Liberal Club, the names of Mr. Asquith and Sir Henry Fowler having been withdrawn, unanimously voted that Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman should lead the party in the House of Commons. This position Sir Henry filled till the end of 1905, if not with overmastering ability, at least with sufficient success to make his choice as Prime Minister almost inevitable when the time came for a change of Government.

For a long time one question, and one question only, filled the public mind − our relations with South Africa, and the war which broke out in October. With regard to this crisis in our history, it is impossible for the impartial historian not to blame Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman both for the unwisdom of his initial policy and for the costly injudiciousness of some of his phrases. Speaking at Ilford, soon after the Bloemfontein Conference, he used a sentence which he liked so well that he repeated it in the City of London on June 30, thus proclaiming it as the deliberate policy of his party; it was “I can see nothing whatever in all that has occurred to justify either warlike action or military preparations.” Of course the Boers took this to mean that, whatever they did, we should not proceed to extremities. The Liberal leader was also accused of attacking British soldiers when he spoke of the destruction of farms and the policy of the concentration camps as “methods of barbarism.” It was in vain that he subsequently explained: “I have always borne public testimony to the humane conduct of the officers and men of the Army, and absolved them from all blame.” But the word went round among the Boers that public opinion in England was bitterly divided, and that they had only to hold out.

Meantime the party itself was by no means a happy family, and Lord Rosebery opened a split, when he came out of retirement to propose the abandonment of Home Rule, and went on to found the Liberal (Imperialist) League, with himself as president and Sir Edward Grey, Sir Henry Fowler, Mr. Asquith, and Mr. Haldane as vice-presidents, all of them men destined within a few years to enter a Campbell-Bannerman Cabinet; but with their titular chief he himself had henceforth no political relations.

Very little need be said of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s conduct of his party during the last four sessions of Unionist rule. It was sound and competent, and, as the subsequent general election showed, was efficient in keeping the party together and in educating the country, but it was not marked by any unexpected qualities.

On December 4 Mr. Balfour resigned, and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was sent for. For a moment it seemed uncertain whether Sir Edward Grey and the other vice-presidents of the Liberal League would accept office; but the difficulties were quickly removed; and by December 10 Sir Henry had completed a strong Cabinet, containing, on the one hand, Mr. Asquith, Mr. Haldane, and Sir Edward Grey, and on the other Mr. Lloyd-George and Mr. John Burns.

In January, 1906, came the general election. The rout of the late Government was complete. The Unionists, who had numbered 369, came back 157; while the Liberals, who, with a few Labour members, had been 218 all told, now comprised 379 faithful followers of the Government, and − the most astonishing feature of all − no fewer than 51 Labour members who, on most questions, could be depended on for votes. Such a majority had never been seen in any Parliament since that following the first Reform Bill; and, though both sides had expected that the new House of Commons would be strongly in favour of the new Government, none of the party prophets anticipated anything like what really happened.

It may suffice to say that, as regards domestic legislation, a great deal was achieved; but the fate of several of the most important measures of the Government shows that even the strongest Minister, with a vast and obedient majority behind him, cannot in this country expect to have everything his own way. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was not conspicuous either in the statement of policies or in the conduct of Ministerial measures in the House of Commons; but, on the whole, he proved himself an adroit tactician and especially skilful in holding together a party composed of incongruous and often unruly elements. The determination he displayed to push his measures through and to obtain the full advantage of his party’s numerical strength at whatever cost to the traditions of free debate and the rights of minorities produced continual friction.

During the debate on the Address, a year later, he went out of his way to give an indirect answer to Lord Rosebery’s challenge on the Irish question. The Prime Minister asserted with deliberate emphasis, “The Irish people should have what every self-governing colony in the Empire has − the power of managing its own affairs. That is the larger policy I have spoken of.”

The principal measure of 1906 was the Education Bill; it was so much amended in the Lords that the Government took offence and refused to proceed with it. Another important measure was Mr. Harcourt’s Plural Voting Bill; but this the Lords refused to pass until they had before them a complete scheme of electoral reform. In the following Session a Scotch Land Bill, the effect of which would have been to assimilate the Scotch land system, not to that of England, but to that of Ireland, was postponed by the Lords until they could compare it with the Government’s Small Holdings Bill for England − another cause of deep offence, for which the House of Lords was threatened with condign punishment.

The House of Lords, however, have not been cowed upon this point by the menaces of the Prime Minister and his colleagues, and they have again refused to yield to the demand that the Scotch Lowlands should be turned into another Ireland. Gradually the threats against the Upper House have lost their shrill tones, and the Prime Minister’s effort to whip up the agitation once again last autumn was so conspicuous a failure that, at the beginning of 1908, he practically withdrew from it and exonerated the Peers from anything like deliberate obstruction. Nevertheless, he proposed, early in February, a verbose and lengthy resolution, to the effect that the Scotch Bills passed by the House of Commons and rejected by the House of Lords should be sent up again without delay and by the most stringent use of the closure. But after the repeated Liberal defeats since the close of the autumn there ceased to be any probability that a renewed effort would be made to precipitate an agitation originally intended to end in an early dissolution or a complete victory.

His impaired health prevented Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman from taking any share in the recent discussions of Licensing and Education, and Mr. Asquith discharged the duties of leader of the House of Commons practically since the opening of the Session. Grave trouble of a personal nature fell upon him during the years of his Ministry. The health of his wife, with whom, as we have said, he had lived for six and forty years in the most perfect union, had been for some time seriously affected; and on August 30, 1906 she died at Marienbad. He himself was physically not so strong as he looked, and this heavy blow affected him deeply. In the autumn of 1907, after he had helped to entertain the German Emperor at the Guildhall, he had to attend the Colston banquet at Bristol where he made a speech. The effort was too much for him; he had a serious heart attack, and for some hours his life was in danger.

He recovered, but not entirely; and was compelled to spend all December and the first three weeks of January at Biarritz. A few days after the opening of the Session he caught influenza, suffered from a recurrence of some of the former symptoms, and was soon found to be unfit either to attend Cabinet Councils or to be present in his place in Parliament, except for two or three days, when he unfortunately overtasked his powers in the delivery of an important and exhausting speech on February 13. Two days after he had again to withdraw from his place in the House of Commons and to leave his duties to Mr. Asquith, who it was well known was to succeed to the Premiership when a vacancy was created. His condition, grave from the outset, rapidly grew worse. For a time it was hoped that he might still continue to retain his office, at least temporarily, but increasing weakness compelled a prompt decision. On the 5th of April the King received at Biarritz a letter from Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman tendering his resignation in compliance with the urgent recommendations of his medical advisers. This was graciously accepted, and Mr. Asquith was summoned.

Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s loss to his party is almost irreparable at a crisis when electoral difficulties are multiplying when there are ominous signs of disintegration and division which he, more than any of his colleagues, had the gift of smoothing over, if not removing.