of Lords meant to lose their last check upon the advance of the besieging classes. They looked on the attainment of power by the Populace, wrote Masterman, who saw their point of view too, as the Deluge. “They see our civilization as a little patch of redeemed land in the wilderness; preserved as by a miracle from one decade to another” and the rise of the Populace as the rush of a crowd upon a tranquil garden, “tearing up the flowers by the roots … strewing the pleasant landscape with torn paper and broken bottles.” Their resistance, however, was weakened by a split in their ranks. As leader of the party, Balfour held to a policy of warding off at all costs a creation of peers large enough to saddle the House of Lords with a permanent Liberal majority. This in his mind was “revolution.” Loss of the Veto, that is, acceptance of the Parliament Bill, he considered a lesser evil. Opposed to this view a group of “Diehard” peers was beginning to form, taking its name from a famous regiment. Its symbol and champion was that “antique bantam of a fighting breed,” Lord Halsbury, and its active organizer was Lord Willoughby de Broke, nineteenth baron of his line, one of the eighteen members of the House of Lords whose title was created before 1500. Before succeeding to it he had served in the House of Commons, and besides political flair, possessed “unbounded energy and a marked talent for forcible and humorous oratory.” At forty-two he was a personality of ingenuous charm whose father’s dying wish was that his son should do everything he could “to prevent motor cars being used for any purpose connected with hunting,” and whose great-grandfather “had never tired of voting against the Reform Bill and died many a silent death in the last ditch, or in the last lobby, in defense of the existing order.” Willoughby de Broke looked on industrialism and democracy as forces which had “reacted hideously on the nation at large,” talked in hunting and racing metaphor and dashed about like a foxhound to rally the Backwoodsmen. In a circular letter addressed to them, Lord Halsbury urged each peer “to take your stand on your Constitutional hereditary right and stoutly resist any tampering with it.”
In the midst of tense maneuvering around the throne, King Edward suddenly and unexpectedly died. Extreme Tories claimed the wickedness of the Government had caused his death and regarded the Liberals as regicides. There was a general sense as of an anchor slipping away and of a recognized order of things gone. People somehow felt that the familiar royal bulk had stood between England and change, between England and outside menaces. A song sung by the charwoman in Pelissier’s Follies of 1909 was widely popular:
There’ll be no wo’ar
As long as there’s a King like good King Edward
There’ll be no wo’ar
For ’e ’ates that sort of thing!
Mothers needn’t worry
As long as we’ve a King like good King Edward.
Peace with ’Onner
Is his Motter
So God Sive the King!
When he died people expected times would now get worse. “I always felt,” said one Edwardian, “that he kept things together somehow.”
In verse for the occasion the Poet Laureate urged Englishmen to cease their “fateful feuds” and “fractious clamors” and declare “a truce of God.” In an effort to spare the new King a crisis at the moment of his ascending the throne, the parties agreed to try to reach a settlement in a Constitutional Conference attended by four leaders from each side including Asquith and Lloyd George, Balfour and Lansdowne. Through twenty-one meetings during the summer and fall of 1910 they discussed and bargained, tried out the idea of a popular referendum and came close to an agreement only to founder finally over Home Rule. The Conference at least demonstrated that the Parliament Bill itself was something less than a fundamental issue, but statesmen would not or could not disengage themselves from the combat. Lloyd George, who was nothing if not a realist, tried. Principles being now thoroughly muddied, he approached Balfour with a proposal for a Coalition which, being free