Mr Balfour's Poodle by Roy Jenkins

Author:Roy Jenkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mr Balfour’s Poodle
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1954-09-05T16:00:00+00:00

X The King and then the People

On Novemberc 10, the day of the breakdown of the Constitutional Conference, Asquith did not go to Sandringham to see the King, as the quotation from his wife’s autobiography at the end of the last chapter suggests. He held a Cabinet in London, at which it was decided, with some doubters, that the correct course was to dissolve at once and to get the election over before Christmas.1 It was only on the following day that he travelled to Norfolk, not, in his own words, ‘to tender any definite advice, but to survey the new situation created by the failure of the conference, as it presents itself at the moment to His Majesty’s Ministers.…’a

As part of the survey he informed the King of the decision to seek an early dissolution, said that if this were followed by another Government victory the issue with the House of Lords would have to be put to a conclusion, and, while pointing out that it would be theoretically possible for this to be done by the Crown either withholding writs of summons or exercising the prerogative of creation, stressed that there were precedents for the latter course but not for the former. He added that he had no doubt that the threat of creation would alone be sufficient to bring about an agreement.

The King, however, was so pleased with one aspect of this audience that he could hardly notice anything else about it. ‘He asked me,’ he wrote in his notebook after the Prime Minister had gone, ‘for no guarantees.’b ‘(Mr. Asquith) did not ask for anything from the King,’ Sir Arthur Bigge1 confirmed in a minute written the same night: ‘no promises, no guarantees during this Parliament.’c

Neither the King nor his private secretary understood that this was merely a preliminary discussion, intended to show the way the mind of the Cabinet was moving, and that exact advice would follow later. It was, indeed, an example of Asquith’s over-delicate method of approach to the King on the constitutional issue. ‘Unaccustomed as he (King George) was to ambiguous phraseology he was totally unable to interpret Mr. Asquith’s enigmas,’ Sir Harold Nicolson has written.d A more direct, even if more brusque, approach would have been better understood. It might have avoided the very delicate situation which arose three days later, when Lord Knollys came up from Sandringham to Downing Street and discovered that the Prime Minister’s intentions had become more definite. ‘What he now advocates,’ Knollys wrote to the King, ‘is that you should give guarantees at once for the next Parliament.’ The King’s response was to instruct Bigge to telegraph to Vaughan Nash, Asquith’s private secretary, in the following terms: ‘His Majesty regrets that it would be impossible for him to give contingent guarantees and he reminds Mr. Asquith of his promise not to seek for any during the present Parliament.’e This message was despatched and received on the same morning (November 15) that the Cabinet was giving final

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