At that time the Lords, the “upper house,” could veto bills passed by the Commons, the “lower house,” though since 1660 money matters, by custom, had been left to the commoners. Until now there had been few confrontations between the two because members of both houses had come from the same background, and within a fairly narrow range they shared the same political convictions, regardless of party. But Asquith’s Liberals were introducing new concepts of government. The burning question, said Balfour, was whether the Conservatives “should still control, whether in power or whether in opposition, the destinies of this great Empire.” The upper house, AJB pointed out, still had a heavy Tory majority. They could block or mutilate social legislation. He urged them to do it, and they did. An education bill was so maimed by the Lords that Asquith had to drop it. A voting bill was rejected outright. A land-reform program met the same fate, and so did a liquor-licensing bill. This last was a favorite of Winston’s. Among the radical causes he had embraced—this from Churchill!—was temperance. Lucy Masterman was with him on November 26, 1908, when word arrived that the Lords had killed the measure. She wrote in her diary: “Churchill was perfectly furious at the rejection… stabbed at his bread, would hardly speak: murmured perorations about ‘the heart of every Band of Hope in this country sinking within them.’ He went on: ‘We shall send them up a budget in June as shall terrify them, they have started a class war, they had better be careful.’ ”106
Actually, the “People’s Budget” of 1909 came in April. Its essence was a revolutionary concept. Until now, with the exception of progressive death duties the taxing power had been used solely to raise revenues for the government. Now it would also redistribute the wealth. Churchill and Lloyd George drafted the budget together. On Tuesday, April 27, Winston wrote Clementine: “Tomorrow—Sweated Trades! Thursday—the deluge [the budget]!!! Thus the world wags—good, bad, & indifferent intermingled or alternating, & only my sweet Pussy cat remains a constant darling.” The next day he reported that his minimum-wage bill had been “beautifully received & will be passed without division,” but: “Tomorrow is the day of wrath! I feel this budget will kill or cure. Either we shall secure ample funds for great reforms next year, or the Lords will force a Dissolution in September.” Clementine, replying from Blenheim, noted that “Sunny is much preoccupied about the Budget.” She predicted: “It will make politics vy bitter for a long time.” She was right, but it is an astonishing fact that scarcely anyone realized the budget’s implications when the chancellor introduced it in the House. He began by stating his intention to “wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness” and went on for more than four hours while “Churchill,” according to Virginia Cowles, “watched him like an anxious nannie.” As a performance, Violet Asquith wrote, “it was a flop. I went to the House of Commons, agog to hear it, and I failed to sit it out…. It was read so badly that to some he gave the impression that he did not himself understand it.” Even the press missed its implications; the following day The Times, the trumpet of the Conservative establishment, dismissed it as “unadventurous.”107
It was hardly that. Taxes were raised on everything: whiskey, gasoline, pub licenses. But the stinger, cloaked in elaborate periphrases, provided that the rich, for the first time, be singled out for special treatment. Death duties were up, the aristocracy’s great estates were assessed whether their land was used or not, capital gains were taxed if the land was sold, and everyone who received over £3,000 a year was subject to a supertax. Only some 11,500 Englishmen had that much, but they were the people who ran the country, including members in the House of Lords. The aristocracy was enraged—Winston and Sunny were estranged—and they decided that if Liberals could break precedents, so could they. Against the advice of wiser Tories, the peers vetoed the People’s Budget. This created a constitutional crisis. Winston’s dander was up; he relished the fight ahead. As early as June 1907 he had described the Lords as “one-sided, hereditary, unpurged, unrepresentative, absentee. Has the House of Lords ever been right?” he had asked. “I defy the Party opposite to produce a single instance of a settled controversy in which the House of Lords was right.”108 Until now their blunders had been borne. But never before had they usurped the lower house’s power of the purse. He meant to right this wrong by taking the issue to the country, and he meant to pour it on.
So did Lloyd George, who went for the dukes, the leaders of the peerage. The economy was flourishing under the Liberal administration, he said; “only one stock has gone down badly; there has been a great slump in dukes. A fully-equipped duke costs as much to keep up as two dreadnoughts; and dukes are just as great a terror and they last longer.” A nobleman’s elder son, he said, was merely “the first of the litter.” Since that definition fitted Sunny, Winston was expected to curb Lloyd George’s invective. Instead, he matched it. In a speech which the Daily Express headed HIS OWN RECORD FOR ABUSE OUTDONE, he pictured “the small fry of the Tory party” falling back on their dukes, from whom nothing could be expected but childish behavior. “These unfortunate individuals,” he said, “who ought to lead quiet, delicate, sheltered lives, far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife, have been dragged into the football scrimmage, and they have got rather roughly mauled in the process…. Do not let us be too hard on them. It is poor sport—almost like teasing goldfish. These ornamental creatures blunder on every hook they see, and there is no sport whatever in trying to catch them. It would be barbarous to leave them gasping upon the bank of public ridicule upon which they have landed themselves. Let us put them back gently, tenderly in their fountains; and if a few bright gold scales have been rubbed off in what the Prime Minister calls the variegated handling they have received they will soon get over it. They have got plenty more.”109
Lloyd George was forgiven because of his background, Churchill condemned because of his. Cartoons depicted him denouncing the aristocracy and then retiring to Blenheim for the weekend. A Manchester Tory said that what was “neither excusable nor permissible is the lack of common decency shown by vulgar abuse of the dukes on the part of a man who is the grandson of one duke, the nephew of another, and the cousin of a third; who belongs to a family which has produced nine dukes; who figures in Debrett * as boasting a dozen titled relatives; and who owes every advantage he possesses over those whom he contemptuously calls ‘the small fry of public life’ to his aristocratic connections.” In the great country houses during that summer of 1909 venomous gossips agreed that the Churchill family, for all its power and glory, had never produced a gentleman; the first Duke of Marlborough had been a rogue, Lord Randolph a knave; Sunny’s duchess had left him because he was a cad—actually, Consuelo had left him for a lover—and now Winston had revealed himself as “utterly contemptible.” For a traditionalist like Churchill, with his great pride in his family, this was bitter medicine. Once he hesitated. He wrote Clementine that he was working on a speech “and am gradually getting some material together but of doubtful merit. I cannot make up my mind whether to be provocative or conciliatory and am halting between the two.” She stiffened his spine. Again and again, in these stormy years, she warned him not to be seduced by those Tories like F.E. who, even when public abuse was thickest, dined and drank with him. One morning she wrote him: “My dear Darling Amber Pug—Do not let the glamour and elegance & refinement & the return of old associations blind you. The charming people you are meeting today—they do not represent Toryism, they are just the cream on the top. Below, they are ignorant, vulgar, prejudiced. They can’t bear the idea of the lower classes being independent & free. They want them to sweat for them when they are well & to accept flannel & skilly [cheap clothes and thin soup] as a dole if they fall ill, & to touch their caps & drop curtsies when the great people go by—Goodbye my Darling. I love you very much. Your Radical Bristling”—here she drew an indignant cat.110
Probably he would have rejected propitiation anyway. Once committed to battle, he was almost incapable of restraint. Asquith complained tha
t Winston’s letters to him were all “begotten by froth out of foam.” Asquith’s wife, Margot, wrote Churchill: “Believe me cheap scores, henroost phrases & all oratorical want of dignity is out of date.” He was unrepentant and untamed. “The House of Lords,” he told his audiences, was “not a national institution but a party dodge”; the peers had been “tolerated all these years because they were thought to be in a comatose condition which preceded dissolution.” All they could do, “if they go mad,” was “to put a stone on the track and throw the train of state off the line and that is what we are told they are going to do.” He was ready for bloodshed, if it came to that: “If the struggle comes, it will be between a representative assembly and a miserable minority of titled persons who represent nobody, who are responsible to nobody and who only scurry up to London to vote in their party interests, their class interests and in their own interests.” Then, savagely, to a huge crowd in Inverness: “Just as they clutched greedily at the last sour, unpalatable dregs of the bottle before it was torn away from them at the last election, so now when they see a possible chance of obtaining power and place, they kick over the whole table in an ugly wish to jam their noses in the trough.”111
The King, dismayed, directed his secretary, Lord Knollys, to write The Times deploring Churchill’s diatribes. This was unconstitutional; flagrantly so. Winston wrote Clementine that Edward “must really have gone mad. The Royal Prerogative is always exercised on the advice of ministers, and ministers and not the Crown are responsible—and criticism of all debatable acts of policy should be directed to ministers…. This looks to me like a rather remarkable Royal intervention and shows the bitterness which is felt in those circles. I shall take no notice of it. It will defeat itself.” He sent Asquith a memo: “The time has come for the total abolition of the House of Lords.” But the prime minister wasn’t prepared to do that. Indeed, he felt that under these extraordinary circumstances, he could no longer claim the Liberal victory of 1906 as a mandate. In January 1910 he called for a general election; the party slogan would be “The People versus the Peers.” Churchill was the most popular campaigner in the election, but the results were disappointing. The Conservatives picked up 116 seats, reducing the Liberal majority to 2. The Annual Register called the verdict “obscure and indecisive.” Nevertheless, with the support of Labour MPs and Irish Nationalists, the Asquith government still held the field. Then, on May 6, 1910, Edward VII suddenly died. There was just enough time for Queen Alexandra to send a brougham to fetch Mrs. Keppel so she could be at the bedside of her royal lover when he breathed his last.112
Margot Asquith dined at Jennie’s home that evening. Winston was there, and at the end of the dinner he rose and said: “Let us drink to the health of the new King.” Lord Crewe added: “Rather to the memory of the old.” Jennie, her face puffy from weeping, gave Crewe a grateful look. She and Edward’s other mistresses knew now that their long social reign had ended. Some hoped that the younger generation would pick up their torch. Alice Keppel told Clementine that if she really wanted to advance Winston’s career, she would take a wealthy, influential lover. Mrs. Keppel even offered to act as procuress and, when Clementine declined, called her “positively selfish.” But other faded beauties realized that this was, in the words of the song they had adored, After the Ball. They stood forlornly, sobbing among a quarter-million other grievers as the gun carriage bearing Edward’s coffin passed them on the Mall, between St. James’s Park on one side and the stately buildings, including St. James’s Palace, on the other, Big Ben tonguing with muffled clapper, the cortege led by the new King, George V, flanked by his uncle the Duke of Connaught and, wearing the scarlet uniform of a British field marshal, Kaiser Wilhelm II, to whom, said The Times, “belongs the first place among all the foreign mourners,” because “even when relations are most strained [he] has never lost his popularity amongst us.” Later Edward’s mistresses paid him their own tribute. Jennie, Alice, Lillie Langtry, and the others celebrated that year’s Ascot as Black Ascot, standing in their old box wearing black feathers and ribbons on enormous black hats—wrinkled, graying women in their late fifties, but still slender, still pert, still flirtatious, and, in Jennie’s case—her marriage to Cornwallis-West was headed for the divorce court—still available.113
Winston’s mother was not invited to the new King’s coronation, but her daughter-in-law was. George sent Clementine a ticket to the Royal Box in Westminster Abbey, and when he learned that she was indisposed, he made special arrangements for her to arrive just before the crown was set on his head and then be whisked away. Her husband was another matter. Churchill tactlessly insisted that the King name a new battleship the Cromwell, which George flatly refused to do. Worse, when the King told him that he felt Asquith was “not quite a gentleman,” Winston repeated it to Asquith.114 The big issue facing the new monarch, however, was the unresolved People’s Budget. The Liberals urged him to appoint enough new peers to swing the House of Lords’ vote their way. He hesitated, and the country prepared to go to the polls again. Andrew Bonar Law, who would succeed Balfour as the Conservative leader, tried to exploit Churchill’s gambling instincts by proposing that he and Winston run for the same constituency in Manchester, with the understanding that the loser would stay out of the next Parliament. Winston declined to abandon his safe seat, preferring to spend his time and energy campaigning for other Liberal candidates. He was a political celebrity now. Crowds gathered wherever he spoke, eager to hear his biting wit and pitiless philippics.
The second election confirmed the close results of the first. Still the Lords refused to budge. Winston wrote Clementine: “Things are tending to a pretty sharp crisis. What are you to do with men whose obstinacy & pride have blinded them to their interests and to every counsel of reason? It would not be surprising if we actually have to create 500. We shall not boggle about it when it comes to the pinch.” Three weeks later he wrote her: “If anything goes wrong we make 350 Peers at once.” It proved unnecessary. Lloyd George had derided the upper house as “Mr. Balfour’s poodle,” and on this issue it was; they would take their cue from him. Asquith wrote Balfour, telling him the King would pack the Lords with new peers. The diehards—originally a regimental nick-name, the word entered the language at this time—were finished. Balfour resigned his post as party leader, signifying defeat, and in the sweltering summer of 1911 the upper house passed a parliamentary reform act, emasculating their powers, by the thin margin of 131 to 114. The Liberals, however, had paid a price. During the campaign Austen Chamberlain had predicted that Asquith’s government, if kept in office, would “establish Home Rule in Ireland.” Churchill later wrote of Austen: “He always played the game, and he always lost.” But this time he was right. To win the backing of the Irish MPs in the “People versus the Peers” struggle, the Liberals had agreed to introduce a new Home Rule bill, thus reviving that old and bitter quarrel.115
Winston and Jennie, 1912
Winston’s parliamentary skills and his services to the party entitled him to a promotion—a long step toward the prime ministership which, it was generally agreed, would be his before long. Even the Tories believed it; Balfour told him: “Winston, I believe your hour has come.” Churchill never waited for recognition. When the polls closed on the first of these two elections, he wrote Asquith that “Ministers should occupy positions in the Government which correspond to some extent with their influence in the country.” He wanted, he said, “to go either to the Admiralty (assuming that place to become vacant) or to the Home Office.” He was advised that “the First Lord could not be changed… without being slighted. But if you cared for the HO, no doubt it would be at your disposal.” He cared for it, and on February 14, 1910, he was appointed home secretary. He was thirty-five. Only one home secretary, Sir Robert Peel, had been younger.116
Churchill’s salary now reached the promised £5,000, and he was working hard for it. His responsibilities included the welfare of seven million factory workers and a million miners, natio
nal security, England’s police force, immigration, and law and order. Every evening when the House was in session he had to write a longhand report on its proceedings for the King. He was answerable for conservation, the censorship of stage plays, regulations governing automobile mudguards, the licensing of Italian organ-grinders—everything, in short, which directly involved the people living in the United Kingdom. His view of the office was liberal and humanitarian. He said: “There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.”117 Bills drafted by him limited the hours of shop assistants and introduced safety measures in the mines. Most important, at the outset, were his role in guiding Lloyd George’s National Health Insurance Act through the House and his penal reforms.
On his appointment he told Violet Asquith that he was less interested in his policemen than in their quarries. Memories of his POW imprisonment in Pretoria were still vivid. Prisoners, he said, must have entertainment, “plenty of books, that’s what I missed most,” and anything else which would relieve their feelings of confinement, “except of course the chance of breaking bounds and getting out of the damned place—I suppose I mustn’t give them that!” She said she would prefer hanging to a life sentence; he vehemently disagreed: “Never abandon life. There is a way out of everything except death.” He soon found that the duty he liked least was signing execution warrants; after visiting him, Blunt noted in his diary that it had “become a nightmare to him to have to exercise his power of life and death in the case of condemned criminals, on an average of one case a fortnight.” One death warrant which did not trouble him was that of Dr. H. H. Crippen, who had left his wife’s dismembered remains in the cellar of his London home and boarded a transatlantic steamer with his mistress, only to be intercepted on the other side by Canadian Mounties—the first fugitive to be caught by a wireless alert. Crippen was hanged at first light in Pentonville Prison on October 18, 1910. Churchill celebrated with a champagne breakfast.118