known, with visitors’ galleries jammed and peers standing in passages and doorways. They wore morning coats with wing collars, ascots, spats and light waistcoats and after the dinner recess many appeared in white tie and tails. The Diehards wore white sprigs of heather sent by the Duchess of Somerset, while many of the Hedgers wore red roses. As Halsbury marched to his seat with the air of a knight entering the lists he seemed to an observer to be accompanied by an almost audible sound of jingling spurs. In a shrill appeal to conscience he demanded defeat of the Bill. Lord Curzon spoke for the majority and afterward sat “pale and angry” while Lord Selborne sprang to the table and “in strident tones with dramatic gestures” fiercely renewed the intention to die in the last ditch. New suspense was injected by the speech of the Liberal leader, Lord Crewe, whose reference to the King’s “natural reluctance” and whose own unhappy conclusion, “The whole business, I frankly admit, is odious to me,” reinvigorated a belief that the Government was bluffing. Anxious counts and recounts took place. Of six peers who sat at the same table during the dinner recess, two of whom, Lord Cadogan and Lord Middleton, were former Conservative Cabinet members, not one had made up his mind how to vote. When, on reassembling, one of the “sacrificial” peers, Lord Camperdown, announced his intention to vote with the Government, the Duke of Norfolk, enraged, replied that if any Conservative peer voted for the Bill, he and his group would vote with the Diehards. Lord Morley, whose peerage was barely three years old, nevertheless felt “deeply moved” when obliged to make explicit the Government’s intention to follow defeat of the Bill by “a large and prompt creation of peers.” Upon request he repeated the statement. A pall settled on the chamber. The Archbishop of Canterbury urged members not to provoke an act that would make their House and indeed the country a “laughing stock.” Lord Rosebery, whose vacillations had confused everyone but who had been expected to abstain, suddenly jumped up from the crossbenches and announced, in “this last, shortest and perhaps most painful speech of my life,” that he would vote with the Government. Since, whatever the outcome, “the House of Lords, as we have known it, disappears,” he said he intended never to enter its doors again, and he never did.
At 10:40 P.M. amid “intense excitement” the division was called. Abstaining peers who could find room squeezed onto the steps of the throne where they could remain without voting while the rest of the abstainers led by Lord Lansdowne left the chamber. The two groups, as they gathered to file out in two streams into the lobbies on either side of the chamber, appeared to the tense watchers in the galleries about equal in number. Counting was done by tellers with white wands who tapped the shoulder of each peer as he returned from the division lobby. Slowly the streams reappeared while from the open doors the tellers could be heard counting aloud, “one, two, three, four.…” For a quarter of an hour which seemed like a full hour the process continued. During an accidental pause in the Government stream, the undaunted Lord Halsbury was heard to whisper, “There! I knew we should beat them!” Lord Morley waited anxiously for the sight of the bishops’ lawn sleeves, feeling certain that they would vote with the Government. The procession came to an end. The tellers brought their count to the Chief Whip, Lord Herschell, who handed the results on a piece of paper to the Lord Chancellor. Amid profound silence Lord Loreburn rose from the Woolsack, shook back the panels of his wig and in clear tones announced the result: for the Bill, 131; against, 114; majority, 17. Unable to contain her emotion Lady Halsbury hissed loudly from the Peeresses’ Gallery. No cheers or enthusiasm came from the victors except for M.P.’s who dashed off with the news to their own House, where it was greeted with roars of triumph. The Lords left at once and in five minutes their hall was empty. Thirty-seven Conservative