Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [240]
Balfour, following his uncle’s line of thought, feared that the Lords would let themselves be provoked into making mistakes. He at once suggested to Lord Lansdowne, Conservative leader of the upper House, that the Government’s strategy would be to send up bills with more extreme provisions than needed, trusting to the Lords to amend or reject them until they had built up a case against themselves. Then the Liberals would appeal to the country for a mandate to limit the Veto. Never before, he warned, had the Lords been called on to play a role “at once so important, so delicate or so difficult.”
The tone of debate in the Lords on the Education Bill showed no sign of caution and their temper was not improved when they received from the Commons a Plural Voting Bill designed to end the ancient usage whereby owners of land in more than one constituency had more than one vote. “Something will happen,” said Lloyd George almost visibly rubbing his hands. “There will be a great game of football on that field before long, I can assure you.” In December, fulfilling his anticipation and Lord Salisbury’s foreboding, the Lords threw out both the Education and the Plural Voting Bills. Significantly, however, they did not interfere with the equally, if not more, unpalatable Trades Disputes Bill, although the Liberals would have been only too pleased if they had. This bill, reversing the Taff Vale judgment, had been introduced in the Commons and passed against the real wish of the Government and over the objections of several ministers because of the pressure of Labour joined by the Radical members. “We could not resist the numbers pledged to it,” Haldane, the Liberal Minister of War, admitted. Cautiously steered by Lansdowne, the Lords let the bill pass because they did not wish to antagonize the working class and cement its alliance with the Liberals.
Making the most of the rejection of the other two bills, Asquith denounced the situation as “intolerable” and warned that a way must be found “by which the will of the people expressed through their elected representatives will be made to prevail.”
His challenge was explicit and the House of Lords was waking up. The home of England’s 544 hereditary peers, including twenty-two dukes, and of the bishops and law lords who sat with them was a high, dark oak-paneled chamber ninety feet long filled by two banks of red leather benches. Stained-glass windows held portraits of royalty since the Conquest. Walls and ceiling were thick with elaborately carved gothic molding and heraldic emblems. Between the windows, statues of the barons of Magna Carta, inadvertent founders of the parliamentary system, looked down a little grimly on what they had wrought. At one end of the chamber under a golden canopy were twin thrones for the King and Queen flanked by tall candelabra standing like guardsmen at attention. Below the throne the Lord Chancellor presided on the Woolsack, a square cushioned bench. Crossbenches in the aisle accommodated princes of the royal family and peers not affiliated with party. Sovereigns and judges in scenes from English history lent their shadowy presence in murals on the upper walls. The light was subdued, the general tone one of dignified somnolence.
Now the prospect of assault began to fill the benches usually sparsely dotted with forty or fifty peers. Lansdowne encouraged his followers to speak, paid attention