A Royal Week-End

I

THE last change of government in England might well appear to foreign eyes miraculous, since even to Englishmen it seemed no less. In the month of August, which is the national vacation, in the week-end when everybody is away from town, the Socialist administration fell and another of a character entirely different took its place. In England the government is supposed to stand upon the support of the House of Commons and to fall when that support is withdrawn; but Parliament was not sitting when the change occurred. The Legislature, then, had nothing to do with it. The imposing figure of Democracy, to which everything is referred nowadays, was asleep and snoring when her child was withdrawn from her side and another put in its place. Parliament had risen at the end of July with one government in office; it reassembled in September to find another on the Treasury Bench. It had not even been consulted, nor did it seem in the least to resent the neglect.

If we are to understand this phenomenon, we must consider what led up to as well as what surrounded it. The late lamented Socialist government came into office in the spring of 1929 less by the strength of Socialism than by the weakness of what Socialists call the bourgeoisie. There was between Liberals and Conservatives a feud of Guelf and Ghibelline; since a certain famous Carlton Club meeting, at which the Liberal leader had been deposed from the leadership of the war and post-war coalition, Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Baldwin had not been upon speaking terms, and, if there was a master motive in the Welshman’s politics, it was to pay out the Tory Party for the trick it had served him. It was in pursuit of this feud that Mr. Lloyd George put the Socialists in office. They were in fact a minority government, since the Labor Party numbered less than 300 of a total House of 615; but Mr. Lloyd George commanded the services of 58 Liberals, and so could boast that he stood on the centre of the seesaw. He put and maintained the Socialists in office. The 260 Conservatives could not hope to defeat the government without the assistance of the Liberals, and were not likely to get that assistance as long as Mr. Lloyd George was Liberal leader.

Sir William Flinders Petrie, in the course of his studies of dead and buried civilizations, discovered that ‘the government moves from autocracy to democracy until the democracy eats up everything and a stronger power starts the cycle over again.’ The Socialist government between June 1929 and August 1931 seemed to be fulfilling its part of this natural law with complete precision; it was ’eating up everything,’with the enthusiastic approval of Mr. Lloyd George, who whetted its appetite whenever it showed signs of flagging. He had, himself, a plan of raising loans of at least £200,000,000 sterling to be used for making new roads and all manner of other public works, and he told the Socialists not to be afraid of those ‘frozen penguins,’ the Bankers of the City of London, who, when he was Prime Minister, had received him in the ‘flapping silence’ of disapproval, who always opposed expenditure, and who were always wrong. The Socialists were by no means loath to take this advice; but they had plans of their own for spending money. At the elections they had appealed for support to a solid army of more than a million unemployed, and in office they set to work to repay this electoral debt. In 1928-29 the state contribution to the Unemployment Insurance Fund was £12,077,651; by 1930-31 it had risen to £26,671,700, and by a series of Acts of Parliament the borrowing powers in aid of the Fund were raised to a total of £70,000,000 sterling. Miss Margaret Bondfield, the Socialist spinster who presided over the Ministry of Labor, introduced two bills designed to make it as easy to live out of employment as in it, and the number of the unemployed grew in close and alarming correspondence, until by July 1930 it had reached the total of 2,011,467.

The upward course of expenditure on what are called ‘Social Services’ — such as Unemployment Insurance, Health Insurance, Old Age and Widows’ Pensions, Free Education, Maternity Benefits, and so forth — had not begun, it is fair to say, with the Socialists. Mr. Lloyd George himself long before had commenced the auction for votes, the Conservatives had continued it; but the Socialists, having less to lose, were able to outbid both parties, and the expenditure under this head, which had been in 1900 in the neighborhood of £30,000,000, had reached by 1929 the enormous figure of £403,000,000, a burden which not even the richest of countries could support.

II

It was with such a crew, and so overloaded, that the Ship of State met the blizzard of the world depression which set in at the end of 1930 and continued with growing intensity through the spring and summer of 1931. The only member of the government who tried to bring his comrades to a sense of their danger was the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Philip Snowden, a Yorkshireman by birth, a Civil Service clerk by training, in theory a Socialist, was by temperament a Radical of the old school. A little old man of frail and ramshackle body, — injured, according to tradition, in a bicycle accident, — hobbling upon two sticks, with a face like a death’s head, a rasping voice, a curling lip, and a withering power of sarcasm, this formidable politician dominated his colleagues by keenness of mind and force of character; but he did not belong to the hierarchy of the great trade unions and was thus not really of the ‘Labor Movement.’ In Russia he would be called one of the ‘Intelligentsia of the Proletariat.’

On February 11, 1930, Comrade Snowden took his courage in both hands and publicly warned his party of the mess into which they were getting themselves and the country. ‘I say,’ he said, ‘ with all the seriousness I can command, that the national position is grave; that drastic and disagreeable measures will have to be taken if the Budget equilibrium is to be maintained and industrial recovery is to be made’; and he went on to warn Parliament, with an admonitory finger that pointed as much at Mr. Lloyd George as at his own people, that ‘schemes involving heavy expenditure, however desirable, will have to wait until prosperity returns.’ ‘If,’ he continued, ‘I may put it so plainly as this — an increase of taxation . . . would be the last straw.’

The first Budget of 1930 contrived a dubious balance by such expedients as taking twenty millions from the Dollar Exchange Fund and anticipating part of the income tax; but as the year went on all the receipts were seen to be heavily under the estimates, and the prospect of a great deficit yawned before the eyes of Parliament. The day before the House rose, in the debate of July 30, one of the richest men in the country and at the same time one of the most respected members of the Conservative Party, Colonel Gretton, uttered a warning more grave than the Chancellor’s. It was not, he hoped, too late; the country could be saved. Democracy had always been extravagant, and the fault lay with politicians who did not dare to take the necessary steps to prevent ruin. Mr. Neville Chamberlain took the same line, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer agreed with them. The position was ‘very serious.’ ‘I shall,’ Mr. Snowden said, ‘ make every effort to balance next year’s Budget, although it may involve rather disagreeable consequences to certain classes and to certain people; but the necessity of doing this is so important and so urgent that so far as I am concerned it will have to be undertaken.’

If the House of Commons had known all that the government knew at that time, it would have been even more disturbed. At the beginning of the year a committee on National Expenditure had been set up with Sir George Ernest May as chairman. The report was not ready when the House rose, but, as Mr. Snowden sardonically remarked, would make cheerful reading for Members during their holidays. Enough to say that it fully disclosed a position which sloped steeply down to disaster.

The government by that time was financing itself by loans which could no longer be obtained in the country; it was supporting sterling by similar expedients. The £50,000,000 of credit recently granted to the Bank of England approached exhaustion, and foreign bankers refused to go further. There was no way but to cut down expenditure. Here the May Committee had set forth a programme for the government to follow; but the more Socialist Ministers looked at it, the less they liked it. To cut down the army and the navy was something they did not mind doing and had done before; but to touch the salaries of their most ardent supporters — the school-teachers, the lower ranks of the Civil Service, the Post Office workers — and to reduce the ‘benefits’ of the unemployed, these were expedients which they found it hard to stomach. Yet it had to be done; a committee of five Ministers was appointed to draw up the scheme, their report was laid before the Cabinet on August 19, and after debating far into the night that body accepted the ‘cuts’ as its working policy.

III

These plans, of course, were kept from the public, but there were several powers which the government thought wise to acquaint with their decision. As the economies would be politically unpopular, it was thought well to secure the coöperation both of the Liberals and of the Conservatives. Mr. Lloyd George, indeed, was in the hands of the surgeons, which simplified things, for his deputy, Sir Herbert Samuel, a Jewish financier of the City, was ready to take up the negotiations; Mr. Baldwin was at Aix-les-Bains, but Mr. Neville Chamberlain and Sir Samuel Hoare were on the spot. To reconcile these three to the programme it was necessary to show that the cuts were at least as thorough as the increase in taxation proposed was drastic. The Bank of England had also to be consulted, since the government could not get along without another loan, and to get more money it was necessary to show some prospect of repayment. There also only drastic economies would secure the desired approval.

But there were two other bodies of a very different order to be consulted. One was the consultative committee of the Labor Party, the caucus which jealously scrutinized every act of the Socialist Ministers, and the other was a body outside Parliament altogether, but a body which was none the less paymaster and controller of the Socialist Party — that is to say, the General Council of the Trade Union Congress. That Council represented a federation of the great trades unions of the country, and (in 1929) represented over two million subscribing members of the Labor Party. Of the miners alone, about eighty members of Parliament were either paid from their funds or returned by their vote. They controlled the Socialist Party in the House of Commons, and nothing could be done without their approval.

If we take the events of Thursday, August 20, in their chronological order, we get some idea of the nature of the crisis. At ten o’clock members of the government met the leaders of the Conservatives and the Liberals; at eleven o’clock the five members of the Cabinet Economy Committee met the Consultative Committee of the Parliamentary Labor Party; at three o’clock the Economy Committee had a joint sitting with the General Council of the Trade Union Congress and the National Executive of the Labor Party, and at half past eight the Cabinet met to consider the results of these various conferences. The Cabinet sat for an hour; then the Economy Committee received a deputation of the Trade Union Council, which had been sitting in judgment on their proposals, and finally the Cabinet sat again until a quarter past eleven.

On Friday, August 21, these complicated negotiations were still being pursued. The Cabinet sat from half past nine until a quarter past one at Downing Street, while the General Council of the Trade Union Congress was sitting at Transport House. After lunch the Cabinet resumed and sat for four and a half hours. At five o’clock the Prime Minister and Mr. Snowden received Mr. Neville Chamberlain and Sir Samuel Hoare. Shortly afterward two Liberals, Sir Herbert Samuel and Sir Donald Maclean, joined them. The Cabinet resumed its sitting a little later and adjourned until the following day.

Now it is extremely unusual for a Cabinet Council to meet on a Saturday. Such a thing had not happened for years. The reason why it happened on this particular Saturday was that the complications had reached a deadlock. The General Council of the Trade Union Congress would by no means agree to the ‘cuts’ proposed by the Economy Committee of the Cabinet. In particular, they refused their consent to the reduction of 10 per cent in unemployment benefit. Faced with this decision, the Cabinet divided into two unequal parts. The Prime Minister, the Lord Chancellor, and the Secretary of State for the Dominions stood by the Chancellor of the Exchequer; all the others accepted the orders of the Trade Union Congress. The government then was split; there seemed to be nothing for it but the resignation of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald.

It was by no means an ordinary political crisis, since there was no ordinary way out. The usual course would have been for the King to send for the leader of the next strongest party in the House of Commons, but of the three parties the Labor Party was still the strongest, and there was no doubt that the Labor Party stood substantially with the Ministers who refused to follow Mr. MacDonald and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Of these, Mr. Arthur Henderson, Foreign Secretary and manager of the party, was the natural leader; but if Mr. Henderson formed a government he could hardly expect to live without the support either of the Liberals or of the Conservatives. If, on the other hand, the King were to send for Mr. Baldwin, the leader of the Conservative Party could hardly look for the support either of the Liberals or of the Socialists. Mr. Lloyd George was known to be against any such combination, and the two parties were sharply divided on the immediate financial remedy which the Conservatives proposed — a fiscal tariff. Thus, whichever of these courses might be taken, the result promised nothing but uncertainty, a continuation of the crisis, and a general election. In normal circumstances a general election would have been the way out; but the circumstances were not normal, for the Bank of England reported that without an immediate measure of financial economy and political reassurance it would not answer for the consequences.¹

IV

Here, then, was the situation on that fateful Saturday, August 22: the Bank of England could secure no further credit for the government without a measure of economy; the Conservative and Liberal Parties refused to support the governments unless that measure of economy was taken; if it were taken, the Prime Minister would lose the support of the majority of his Cabinet and practically the whole of his party; and, finally, no party was in a position to offer an alternative government without a general election.

Such was the hopeless dawn of Sunday, August 23, when the King arrived at Buckingham Palace. It is not the custom for the King to be in London in the month of August; as a matter of fact he had gone to Balmoral for the grouse shooting on the twenty-first, intending to remain there for the remainder of the shooting season. In the ordinary way, a Prime Minister in difficulties would have gone to the King; in this case the King came to the Prime Minister.

Here it seems appropriate to say something of the place of the Crown in the British Constitution. If we were to follow the old lawyers, we should say that the King is all-powerful; if we were to follow some of the moderns, we should say he has no power at all. In form, and according to ancient theory, the King of England is the sole magistrate of the nation. He has the chief place in Parliament and the sole executive power. He is head of the army and the navy; he declares war; the Empire is his possession — he could give it away; he summons, assembles, prorogues, and dissolves Parliament; the Judges are his deputies who sit in his Courts and administer his law; he is head of Church and State; yet all these formal prerogatives have dwindled into mere ceremonies. When we touch them, as Dicey says, we are in the midst of unrealities or fictions. The King has deputed his various powers to his Ministers and Judges; Parliament has secured the power of the purse, which in the end governs all. While every act of the State is done in the name of the Crown, the real executive is the Cabinet.

And yet, though every act of the Sovereign is deputed, no King or Queen of England would ever agree to the proposition of Thiers that the Crown reigns, but does not govern. George III was always taking the bit between his teeth; we have only to read Queen Victoria’s letters to see how that great lady insisted on playing her royal part in every activity of government. The Queen, indeed, took sides. She was so strong-minded and yet so much a woman that she sometimes let her partiality run to the point of conflict. Melbourne, her first Prime Minister, tactfully suggested that she should never let the Opposition come ‘smack’ against the Crown, and she stopped just short of this upon several occasions. Thus in the political crisis of 1880 she wrote to Lord Beaconsfield that ‘she should not take any notice of Mr. Gladstone who had done so much mischief. It is most essential that that should be known.’ The Prince of Wales, taking the same line as Melbourne had taken close on forty years before, advised: ‘Far better that she should take the initiative [of sending for Gladstone] than that it should be forced upon her,’ and in the end he carried his point. The Prince of Wales himself, both before and after he became King, had a main hand in English foreign policy, not so much by virtue of his royal prerogative, but because he was more expert in these matters than any of his Ministers.²

The working of a government does not follow the theory of a constitution, especially when that constitution is for the most part unwritten. The precise degree to which an English King intervenes in the affairs of state is undefined and remains a question of his character, his interests, and his intimacy with his Ministers. He is normally informed of everything of importance that goes forward; it is part of his profession to understand the character of his Ministers and the feeling of his people; he will never fly in the face of his government, but he will frequently suggest, advise, and influence his Ministers, and there are some situations, as in the resignation of a government or the dissolution of a Parliament, in which, in the absence of any other impartial authority, he naturally becomes arbiter.

King George V is not like his father, l’oncle de l’Europe; on the contrary, he could not be induced, even by the exhortations of his doctors, to leave his beloved England for the Riviera. He is most at home in the stubbles, the covert, and the grouse moor, more typically an Englishman than his father, and, as the national demonstration of anxiety during his illness went to show, no less beloved. As much as any king that ever reigned over England, he has the trust and confidence of his people.

V

Such, then, was the situation and such the man. The King had traveled from his castle in the North overnight and arrived at eight o’clock on Sunday morning. Two hours later the Prime Minister waited upon His Majesty at Buckingham Palace and remained with him for over an hour. What happened at that momentous interview a future generation may gather from the memoirs of some court official or politician. In the meantime we must be content to go upon the facts and the probabilities of the case as far as they are known. When he went to the Palace, Mr. Ramsay MacDonald was at the end of his tether, a tired, even a beaten man. Dreamer by nature, in genius a rhetorician, experienced and astute in the political game, Mr. MacDonald has no great reserves of either mental strength or physical solidity to draw upon. He is of those natures which consume themselves, typically Celtic, temperamental, easily elated, easily depressed. For days and weeks he had been beating with ineffectual wings the ever-narrowing range of political possibilities. There was now no way out; he was bankrupt both in finance and of support; most of his Ministers were in sharp disagreement with the only policy which a government could follow and live; his party also had fallen away from him; there was nothing for it but resignation. And that, according to rumor and probability, is what actually did happen. Mr. MacDonald tendered his resignation to the King as his contribution to the unsolved, and to him insoluble, crisis.

The King, however, had his contribution to make, a contribution of manhood and of courage. We may imagine him putting his hand on the shoulder of his depressed Celtic Minister and saying: ‘Come now, my dear fellow, pull yourself together! Be a man! You cannot possibly leave your country in this mess; there must be some way out.’ And then, it is believed, the King did suggest what was indeed the only way out — the formation of a government of all parties to meet the national emergency. And here was a work in which the King really could help, both by his position and by his experience. He was the one man in the kingdom who had the necessary authority; he was the one man in the kingdom who could be called impartial; he had, besides, the friendship of the leaders of all the parties; he was, in fact, the ideal mediator.³

Whatever these private conversations may have been, they speedily took constitutional form. ‘On the Prime Minister’s advice’ the King sent for Mr. Stanley Baldwin and Sir Herbert Samuel, ‘because His Majesty wishes to hear what the position of their respective parties is.’ Mr. MacDonald left the Palace at eleven-thirty, Sir Herbert Samuel saw the King at twelve-thirty; Mr. Baldwin, who had just returned from Aix-les-Bains, went to the Palace at three o’clock.

Here again the conversations are shrouded in reticence. ‘Open covenants openly arrived at’ is not a maxim that finds any place in the British Constitution. We may suppose, however, that there was some little difficulty with Sir Herbert Samuel, since he was only acting as leader of the Liberal Party during the illness of Mr. Lloyd George — and Mr. Lloyd George might have been expected rather to side with the Socialists who had deserted the Prime Minister than with the policy of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. However, it is still the prerogative of the King to command a subject, and when that command takes the flattering form of a portfolio it is not easy, even if it is possible, to refuse. As for Mr. Baldwin, he could speak with confidence; the Conservatives were ready to do anything to save the country.

With the party chiefs brought into accord, the principle of the new combination was settled; the details might safely be left (ill afterward. The thing was done, and with the great decision behind him the Prime Minister returned to his Cabinet. What happened at that Cabinet meeting of the Sunday evening must have been even more interesting, even more dramatic, than what had happened at the Palace that Sunday morning. His colleagues, let us remember, had seen the Prime Minister go to the King with the evident, and no doubt declared, intention of resigning. If Mr. MacDonald did resign, the expectation was that Mr. Arthur Henderson, the ringleader of the rebels, the real head, because the organizer, of the Labor Party, the chief who never thought beyond his caucus, with whom the Trade Union Council was something much more than the country, would certainly be asked to take the Prime Minister’s place. He would, of course, form a new administration out of the dissident Ministers of the old; there might be no money in the Treasury, but there were still the banks, which would not dare to foreclose on the country.⁴ There were, besides, the super-taxpayers. What although Mr. Snowden had said the limits of taxation had been reached? There were still rich men in the country; there were, besides, the banks, with their great deposits — a world to loot! And of course there was the electorate, to which they could make resounding appeal. They would have the unemployed with them, and the trade unions; they would have the school-teachers and the civil servants — everybody who stood to suffer by the economies which they had refused to endorse; they could pose as a largehearted, generous party which had refused to make these harsh cuts in the pitiful stipends of the poor — a most promising electoral situation.

Such, no doubt, were the expectations of most of his colleagues when Mr. MacDonald returned to the Palace. Only Mr. Bernard Shaw, in a sequel to The Apple Cart, could do full justice to the scene of their disillusion. The Prime Minister was not going to go, after all, and their services would not be required — that is to say, except those of the three colleagues who had been willing to agree on the economy policy, Mr. Thomas, Mr. Snowden, and Lord San key, the Lord Chancellor. Such was the Cabinet meeting of Sunday night which closed the most crowded week-end in English political history.

The Socialist Cabinet resigned on Monday, August 24, in the afternoon; on the Wednesday following, the King held a Council in the morning at which the Prime Minister and most of the members of the new government were present. Mr. Baldwin was made Lord President of the Council; Lord Sankey kissed hands as Lord Chancellor, Sir Herbert Samuel took the oath as Home Secretary; the new government, in fact, was sworn in and took the seals of office, after the late government had delivered up the seals and taken leave of His Majesty. And that same evening a tired but happy monarch, attended by his gentlemen, left the Palace for the North. The King arrived at Balmoral on the twenty-seventh of August and was out shooting grouse on Micras Moor on the twenty-eighth. The birds, we are told, were ‘plentiful, strong, and healthy.’