Edward VII (1901–1910)

The next thirteen years of life in Britain display a curious mixture of the ultra-modern existing side by side with the traditions of the past. Fifteen per cent of Britons were still employed as servants, making possible the grand lifestyle enjoyed by the well-to-do in the wake of the example set by the new monarch Edward VII. The long dresses and formal outfits we see in photographs of the Edwardians speak of an age still very different to ours. On the other hand, after the first election of Edward VII’s reign, over fifty British constituencies had Labour MPs. More women had jobs than ever before as teachers and nurses and in the new profession of typist. Although they did not have the vote, a suffragette movement was beginning.

With the extraordinary Liberal landslide at the 1906 election the battles for hearts and minds waged by social reformers over the past twenty years seemed to have resulted in a great victory for humanitarianism. Ploughshares had truly become more important than swords. It was accepted that the state had a duty to care for the people in sickness and old age. By 1911 the harsh old Poor Laws had been thrown out and old age pensions and national insurance had been brought in. War went out of fashion and seemed uncivilized; it belonged to a less advanced age. Yet the period was overshadowed by an awareness of the increasing German arsenal. To defence chiefs the disarmament conferences and peace movements of the time could leave Britain disastrously vulnerable. When the period ended in the immolation of the First World War, ten million dead worldwide made a belief in progress seem like vanity.

But at the beginning of the twentieth century the omens were favourable. Telecommunications continued to shrink the globe. In 1901, after experiments conducted with the backing of the British government, the Anglo-Italian Guglielmo Marconi sent the first electro-magnetic signal across the Atlantic, from the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall to Newfoundland–Britain was linked to the North American continent by radio wave. By 1912, some 700,000 British people had telephones. Even the most distant regions of the earth, its North and South Poles, yielded up their secrets. The Briton Captain Robert Scott led his first expedition to the Antarctic in 1900–4 and discovered what he called King Edward VII’s Land, while the American Admiral Robert Peary got within a hundred miles of the North Pole in 1902. London became full of motor buses. The Bakerloo and Piccadilly lines were sunk deep underground, making travel round London much faster.

Around 1905 arose the starry constellation of left-leaning intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury Group. A handful of gifted publishers, writers, artists and art historians did more to end Victorian attitudes than the death of the queen herself. Champions of the avant-garde with their art exhibitions, Roger Fry and Clive Bell introduced Britain to the conceptual revolutions taking place on the continent. Often the children of eminent Victorians–like the writer Virginia Woolf, whose father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was the founder of The Dictionary of National Biography–the Bloomsbury circle mercilessly deconstructed the Victorian assumptions they had grown up with. Just as the Cubists refused to go on representing the world literally, writers like Woolf challenged literary form with their fractured, allusive technique. They were mesmerized by the new science of psychoanalysis and its emphasis on the subconscious. Pioneered by Sigmund Freud it began casting its spell at the turn of the century. The importance of the instinct versus the intellect made a huge number of converts, of whom the most famous was D. H. Lawrence, a coalminer’s son from Nottingham whose novel Sons and Lovers came out in 1913.

Presiding over these changes was the old-fashioned figure of the new king. The most abiding image of Edward VII is in the waisted Norfolk jacket he used for his favourite sport, shooting, at his unpretentious house Sandringham. The style of the Marlborough House Set, as his friends were called, harked back to the days of the prince regent. Edward revelled in meals that were not only extremely rich but involved eight to ten courses and port and cigars in profusion. But in his way he was an innovator. He made it his business to get to know people from all walks of life, including union leaders and some of the new Labour MPs. As a young man he had insisted on meeting Italian revolutionary Garibaldi when he visited Britain, to his mother’s consternation. Where Queen Victoria’s court had consisted of the landed aristocracy, Edward VII preferred plutocrats and Jewish financiers.

Edward’s immense girth and genial presence had been a constant feature of ceremonial occasions in Britain and the empire for forty years. But Queen Victoria had prevented him from taking on any real kind of royal responsibilities and jealously guarded her powers. In fact, she disliked her eldest son, and despite protests from ministers, until he reached the age of fifty refused to allow him to read state papers. On his accession he was almost sixty. Deprived of a real role Edward had thrown himself into pleasure and did all he could to live in a way quite different to the Queen. Though the Victorian Sunday was sacred, and for many Victorians began and ended with church services, the Prince of Wales made a point of holding extravagant Sunday-night suppers. Though devoted to his beautiful and elegant wife Queen Alexandra, he had numerous mistresses, the most celebrated of whom were Mrs Alice Keppel and the Jersey actress Mrs Lillie Langtry. The subject of paintings and hundreds of society prints, Mrs Langtry was fondly known as the Jersey Lily. As Prince of Wales, Edward was cited in two divorce cases, but he shocked the manners of the day even more when it emerged that he had played the illegal game of baccarat at a house named Tranby Croft. He was called as a witness in a slander trial when Sir William Gordon Cumming sued some of his fellow gamblers at Tranby Croft for saying he was a cheat.

Once he became king, Edward VII took himself and his role far more seriously. Throughout his reign he was assiduous in maintaining peaceful relations with other European sovereigns, to many of whom he was closely related, gaining the nickname Edward the Peacemaker. His charm and extremely good French made him an important weapon to end the hostility between the two western democracies. After he had made a state visit to Paris, the final thawing out of relations between France and Britain reached a natural conclusion with the diplomatic understanding known as the Entente Cordiale in 1904. In fact ever since Fashoda a series of agreements over territories had started to lessen the hostility between Britain and France, culminating in a historic breakthrough when many old colonial disputes across the globe which went back to the early eighteenth century, including one over fishing rights off Newfoundland, were settled once and for all. France recognized Britain’s occupation of Egypt unconditionally, while the British allowed the French ‘a free hand in Morocco’ which joined up France’s north and west African imperial possessions.

This was a time of anxiety for Britain, for the Boer War had revealed her as having no friends in Europe. The early part of Edward VII’s reign saw a great many attempts to improve Britain’s relations with the rest of the world. Though Britain’s territories had never been more widespread, the last few years had been an inglorious period, and the once magnificent isolation seemed positively irksome. To counter it, in 1902 under the new foreign secretary Lord Lansdowne, Britain made her first alliance with Japan, the rising power in the east.

Like many British politicians the king was disquieted by German intentions. His wife Alexandra, the former Danish princess who had watched with horror as Prussian troops marched into her country, regarded most Germans with suspicion. For all Edward’s desire to be a peacemaker, he greatly disliked his nephew, the rash and often scintillating know-all Kaiser Wilhelm II. The kaiser’s personal diplomacy was unpredictable: he would send messages abroad or make speeches on foreign affairs without consulting ministers. Born with a withered arm, into a militaristic society which detested his mother for being English and therefore a dangerous liberal, the kaiser both admired and resented his English relations. But, though the English laughed at him and found his obsession with uniforms absurd, William was deadly serious about building a navy to rival his uncle’s.

In the face of that fleet-building, Britain’s greatest threat suddenly seemed to come from across the North Sea instead of from across the Channel, as it had done since the late seventeenth century. The king had strongly supported the commander of the Mediterranean fleet and future first sea lord ‘Jacky’ Fisher, when he had insisted that a naval base be built at Rosyth in 1903 on Britain’s east coast to guard against attack from the north coast of Germany. To counter the German menace Fisher invented the huge ironclad battleship called the Dreadnought and the fast and heavily armed battle cruisers. The Dreadnought made every other warship of lower tonnage and smaller guns obsolete against it. By 1907 for the first time Britain had a General Staff; it was felt that she could no longer do without one when all the other major European powers had possessed them for the previous fifteen years.

Britain began to tie her naval security arrangements together with those of France. The Mediterranean fleet based on Malta was reduced as part of an exercise to bring more of the Royal Navy into home waters. Britain would rely on the French navy to help her patrol the Mediterranean. The two nations were to let one another in on their military secrets. There was no quicker way to draw an Entente closer together, although for fear of angering the ever touchy Germany British diplomats perpetually avoided a final commitment to France.

The last years of the Conservative government have an air of played-out exhaustion about them. Lord Salisbury resigned in July 1902 on grounds of ill-health, and was succeeded as prime minister by his nephew the gifted intellectual A. J. Balfour, formerly the chief secretary to Ireland. The Irish Land Purchase Act of the following year was the most successful attempt made by Britain to solve the Irish land problem. It put loans of £5 million a year at the disposal of tenant farmers wishing to buy out their landlords. By an annual redemption payment or mortgage, tenants would become owners of their farms after sixty-eight years. Two hundred and fifty thousand people had taken up the scheme by 1909. But, with belief in a separate Irish state gathering momentum again, the fact remained that a separate nation for the Irish was going to be a far more powerful idea than mortgages.

Balfour addressed Britain’s industrial decline with a new Education Bill in 1902 which brought secondary education under control of the state and caused the building of hundreds of local grammar schools. But the problems of the poor in Britain were too immediate to be dealt with by the education of the future. An incontrovertible shock had been given to the empirically minded and practical British by the youthful science of statistics. The solid evidence of Charles Booth’s figures showing the almost inevitable link between poverty and old age, published in his exhaustive Life and Labour of the People in London in 1903, combined with the equally influential B. Seebohm Rowntree’s groundbreaking 1901 Poverty: A Study of Town Life in York, could not be denied. It appeared that around a third of the British people were living below what Seebohm called the poverty line.

Joe Chamberlain’s faith in an ingenious new form of imperialism, an Imperial Customs Union which would have preference over the rest of the world, did not fit the mood of urgency. The Tariff Reform League–which he formed after resigning from the Colonial Office–and the import duties that would fund social programmes at home were denounced as a threat to food prices. It was Chamberlain’s fate to split parties: this time it was the Conservatives’ turn. Free trade was a shibboleth on which Britain had built her immense prosperity. Conservative free traders like Winston Churchill believed that an Imperial Customs Union would drastically increase the cost of living because other countries would slap on their own retaliatory import duties. The Tory free traders accordingly went over to the Liberals to campaign for the forthcoming general election under the slogan of the Big Loaf (free trade and the Liberals) against the Little Loaf (tariff reform and the Conservatives). In December 1905 the Conservative government had to resign and the Liberals under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman–whose moral bravery in attacking the conduct of the Boer War at the height of war fever united a party split into imperialists and anti-imperialists–returned to power. Chamberlain himself suffered a stroke the year after and had to retire from politics. The Tories had come to represent a sort of callousness. It became known that, with the high commissioner Lord Milner’s acquiescence, Chinese labourers were being imported to work in the Rand goldmines on contracts that were little short of slavery. Much was made of their treatment at a time when the Labour movement was starting to feel its strength.

At the general election in June 1906 the Liberals won a landslide victory, 377 Liberal seats against only 157 Conservatives and Liberal Unionists, which gave the new government a convincing mandate from the nation to implement real social reforms. But it contained a great surprise. The number of Labour MPs had leaped from two in 1900 to fifty-three (twenty-nine for the Labour Representation Committee and twenty-four others who counted themselves Labour). The Liberals’ passive acceptance of the landmark 1901 Taff Vale legal decision, which allowed a trade union to be sued for damage caused by its members during a strike, had driven the unions towards Labour. The large number of MPs fielded by the Labour Representation Committee pointed to the desire for radical change in the way that the working man was treated. After the 1906 election the twenty-nine LRC members called themselves the Labour Parliamentary party and Keir Hardie became its chairman. In fact the mood of many Liberals was very close to the new Labour party; after all, until recently the Liberals had been the party representing the working class, and in many constituencies they still were. The Liberal MP John Burns, who became minister for the Local Government Board, was the first working man to be a member of the Cabinet. A socialist engineer and trade unionist, he had been one of the chief instigators of the great strikes of the late 1880s.

The new Liberal administration contained some of the twentieth century’s most outstanding politicians, future prime ministers who would steer Britain safely through the First and Second World Wars. The chancellor of the Exchequer was H. H. Asquith, a Yorkshireman and gifted Nonconformist barrister. Somewhat to the surprise of his down-to-earth relations he had married the high-spirited daughter of a chemical bleach magnate, Margot Tennant, a member of the most dashing section of Edwardian society. David Lloyd George, the solicitor known as the Welsh Wizard, was at the Board of Trade but would soon become chancellor of the Exchequer; his views were informed by personal experience of the poverty he had grown up with in the Welsh valleys as the nephew of the local cobbler. Winston Spencer Churchill, under-secretary at the Colonial Office but about to go to the Board of Trade and then to the Home Office, was the son of the Tory Democrat Lord Randolph and the American beauty Jenny Jerome. He may have been born in Blenheim Palace but he had a hatred of injustice as strong as Lloyd George’s. The Northumbrian landowner Sir Edward Grey became foreign secretary, a post he would hold until after the outbreak of the First World War. In 1906, to all these men the twentieth century promised a fresh start in attempts to solve the problems that had disfigured the nineteenth.

In the case of the African colonies, as in India, most Liberal and Labour politicians believed that the British Empire was merely a trustee for the future. Britain’s role was to guide them to democracy when they were ready–which meant when education had become widespread.

The black African colonies began to be governed at arm’s length by Britain, the Liberals preferring to rely on local leaders and local institutions, or ‘indirect rule’. British MPs formed an important part of the international mission in 1908 which investigated rumours that King Leopold had ordered massacres of African people in the Belgian Congo. When it reported that the ‘mission to civilize’ had resulted in the Congo becoming a private slave kingdom for Leopold, where any resistance was met by death, the king was forced to hand over its administration to the Belgian state.

As a result of Campbell-Bannerman’s outspoken defence of the Boers during the war, he found their leaders easy to deal with. The Boer War peace treaty of 1902 had anyway been generous. None of the leaders was punished for going to war with Britain, and £3 million compensation was given to restart the farming destroyed by Kitchener’s scorched-earth policy. The Liberal decision to grant the Boers self-government in 1907 also improved relations, although two former rebel leaders, Louis Botha and Jan Smuts, became the most important figures in the Transvaal government. In 1908 the Liberal administration invited the four South African colonies, the two Boer ex-republics and the two British, the Cape and Natal, to form a Dominion of South Africa.

However, the price of creating another Dominion, as the self-governing colonies had elected to be known since 1907, was black votes. Despite their idealism, it was a price the majority of the British government was willing to pay. When the four colonies created not a federation of colonies but a Union of South Africa in 1910, Boer ideas predominated. The old Cape Parliament had a ‘colour blind’ franchise, but under pressure of the Boers the new constitution of the Union included the Boers’ colour bar. A deputation representing the nine million-strong black majority in South Africa led by William Schreiner, and protests from the Aboriginal Protection Society and others like the Liberal MP Sir Charles Dilke and the Labour MP Ramsay MacDonald, were ignored. The Liberal government washed its hands of the affair, on the ground that insisting on safeguards for black African rights might cause the peaceful Union process to collapse. Ministers did assure Schreiner, however, that the three black High Commission territories of Bechuanaland, Basutoland and Swaziland, which had no white population whatsoever and which were to be absorbed into the new Union, would be protected by various guarantees, and they were. But the colour bar passed. Relations with London grew much more amicable. South Africa came into the war on the side of the British Empire in 1914. Smuts, who had followed Botha as prime minister, became a member of the British War Cabinet.

Campbell-Bannerman’s energy had been exhausted dealing with the aftermath of the Boer War. Some important domestic measures were passed under him, but it was not until after April 1908, when on account of Campbell-Bannerman’s ill-health H. H. Asquith took over as prime minister, that the progressive wing of the party came to the fore. A flood of bills made dramatic changes to the social fabric of Britain.

Profound advances were made in the treatment of prisoners. Jail sentences were shortened. Young people under fourteen could no longer be sent to prison; instead they were held in borstals–remedial centres with educational facilities. The use of solitary confinement for all prisoners on arriving at jail was stopped, as was automatic imprisonment for non-payment of fines. The Liberal government anticipated the concerns of many penal reformers fifty years later, believing that the experience of prison was in itself harmful. Prison libraries were introduced, as well as a lecture system, to fit prisoners for the outside world to which they must in the end return. The Liberals believed that the treatment of crime and criminals was one of the real tests of civilization.

Legislation to compensate workmen for injuries received at their place of employment was finally passed in 1908. The hours to be worked in a coalmine were fixed at eight hours per day. The Trade Disputes Act of 1906 repudiated the Taff Vale case, which had forced the railway union to repay the cost of its strike in damages to the Taff Vale Railway Company. Union funds became untouchable. In 1909 a Trade Boards Act produced wage-fixing machinery to prevent sweated labour, while another act created stricter safety standards for coalmines. In 1914 the Liberals tried to reduce the number of hours of work in shops from eighty to sixty per week, but were defeated by pressure from shopkeepers. However, the government succeeded in getting one early-closing day a week, and the British tea break was enshrined in law in 1911.

The misery of seasonal unemployment was tackled by a national system of Labour Exchanges pioneered and run by a protégé of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, a young university lecturer named William Beveridge, whose special interest it was. Thirty-five years later in 1944, after a career as director of the London School of Economics, the same man would issue the Beveridge Report that gave birth to Britain’s welfare state and the National Health Service, to protect the population ‘from the cradle to the grave’.

But an early version of that care was given by the 1911 National Insurance Act and the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908. They were the greatest innovations of the Liberal government and they were driven through the Commons and the Lords by the energy and conviction of Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. The Old Age Pensions Act ensured that every old person had five shillings a week from the age of seventy, if he or she did not have more than eight shillings a week income from other sources. In return for a small weekly contribution by employer and employee, the National Insurance Act gave sickness benefit, free care by a doctor, and money for every week out of work. The Liberal government was on a crusade against poverty. But how was it to finance the reforms, especially as the threat from Germany was prompting a level of expenditure on both the army and navy that was unheard of in peacetime Britain?

The Liberal secretary of state for war, R. B. Haldane, who had close links with Germany, was so alarmed by the military preparations taking place there that he not only increased army spending but created the small, superbly equipped British Expeditionary Force with which Britain would help defend France against the Germans at the beginning of the First World War. The Anglo-French Entente had the effect of driving a paranoid Germany to still greater lengths to increase her navy and throw her weight around over her further colonial expansion. Germany believed that she was merely protecting her commercial interests. For France and Britain, however, she was unacceptably aggressive when in 1905, in a bid to halt the French colonization of Morocco, she threatened war if there were not a conference to discuss its future. The great-power conference at Algeçiras in Spain the following year demonstrated that Germany’s rough behaviour had worked: the development of Morocco was to take place under international supervision, which would make room for German trade.

Then at the Hague Conference on Disarmament in 1907, Germany refused utterly to decrease her Dreadnought-building programme in return for reductions by the British. She was convinced that this was a cunning British gambit to make her navy less powerful. Admiral Tirpitz, head of the German navy, had been delighted that the Liberal government had lowered the amount of spending allotted by the Conservatives to Dreadnoughts in order to finance its social reforms. This had given him time to start his own programme to build Dreadnoughts, which he did with gusto.

In a world perpetually anxious about Germany it was inevitable that Britain would seek ways to protect the empire from German activities. The Entente drew her into a relationship with France’s ally Russia. Once Britain’s greatest enemy in central Asia, Russia had been revealed as a spent force when she was defeated by Japan in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. Now it seemed far more important to achieve joint collaboration to check German penetration of the Middle East. The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 in theory committed Britain to nothing. It merely declared that Britain’s influence was recognized as supreme in Afghanistan and southern Persia, while Russia was accepted as the dominant power in northern Persia. But the understanding between Russia and Britain increased Germany’s fear of encirclement.

In 1908 the underlying tension in Europe was ratcheted up several levels when Serbia threatened to attack Austria–Hungary, and Germany retaliated by announcing that Russia would face war with her if she backed Serbia. Fearing that the Young Turk revolution at Constantinople would undermine the position she had built up over thirty years, Austria–Hungary had finally annexed the Balkan lands of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which she had occupied since 1878. But, just as the days of deference were passing in Britain, new forces were operating in relations between old empires and young upstart nations like Serbia. Austria–Hungary might think of Bosnia and Herzegovina as compensation for her lost empire in Italy and Germany, but Serbia believed she had more right to the two provinces because of their large Serb population. She was sufficiently self-confident to fight for them to create her dream of a greater Serbia, a South Slav or Yugoslav Empire, and she appealed to Russia as the special protector of the Slavic peoples to back her against Austria–Hungary.

After being so recently defeated by the Japanese, Russia was in no condition to take on Germany as well as Austria–Hungary. Austria–Hungary retained her new provinces, but that only stored up trouble for the future. Though Serbia was forced to back off, agitation about her Serb brothers in Bosnia and Herzegovina did not die away. In fact it became stronger with every passing year. The European atmosphere was not improved by an interview the kaiser gave to the London Daily Telegraph in which he said that most Germans detested the British and would happily go to war with them, and that he was their only friend.

In 1909, right in the middle of the crisis over the Balkans and as Britain’s demands for an international conference were being ignored, came news of secret German plans for a vast increase in the size of the German navy. The German naval estimates revealed to Parliament spread panic through the country. Admiral Tirpitz had already caught up with Britain in the number of Dreadnoughts. With the new programme, he might overtake the British. Many soldiers, including Lord Roberts the commander-in-chief of the Boer War, wanted immediate conscription. The urgent need to build new Dreadnoughts was captured in the music-hall song, ‘We want eight and we won’t wait’. Even the Liberals, with their antipathy towards military spending, were convinced that the naval race with Germany called for more battleships to be built that year and the next.

But where was the money to come from? Not only did extra money have to be found for the ships, the new welfare provisions had to be funded too. For David Lloyd George, the chancellor of the Exchequer, the answer was a graduated income tax to get the rich to pay more. But the super-wealthy had their well-ensconced defenders in the House of Lords. Ever since the split over Irish Home Rule there had been no peers left on the Liberal side of the House. Moreover the Lords had become far too accustomed to using its Conservative majority to defeat bills sent up by the Liberal Commons.

The Liberal government’s measures to promote greater fairness in British life had created a malevolent hostility in the House of Lords. Encouraged by the fact that the last two prime ministers Salisbury and Balfour had been aristocrats, many peers felt a resurgence of the conviction that those born to wear ermine were born to the purple too. Bills to end plural voting, a new licensing bill which allowed a drinks licence to be withdrawn by the local council if it so wished, and a bill to increase the number of smallholders in Scotland, all incensed their lordships for one reason or another, and were rejected.

In 1894 Gladstone had warned the Lords when they rejected Home Rule that they were tampering with the constitution, since an unelected House was interfering with the wishes of the elected House. He had told them that they should fear for their future if they continued to thwart the democratic will. The Liberals had experienced thirty years of the Lords throwing out their measures whenever it suited them. They had had enough of their smart new twentieth-century legislation being destroyed by a group of people whom Lloyd George daringly described as being ‘five hundred men, ordinary men, chosen accidentally from among the unemployed’. Should they, he asked, ‘override the judgement–the deliberate judgement–of millions of people engaged in the industry which makes the wealth of this country?’ Hereditary privilege was beginning to look absurd. Lloyd George decided to get rid of the powers of the Lords once and for all. He would raise the immense funds he needed by a method almost guaranteed to arouse the wrath of the Lords: a super-tax on top of income tax for higher incomes, plus a higher rate of death duty for the wealthier estates. Most infuriating of all was a tax on any unearned increase in the value of land, to be paid whenever land changed hands.

It was a tradition that only the House of Commons could alter money bills. If the Lords rejected the budget, it would be in breach of a constitutional convention. The People’s Budget would be the test, as Lloyd George put it, of ‘whether the country was to be governed by the King and the Peers or the King and the People’. But the House of Lords was so enraged by the budget, and by the idea of the state preparing to value every field in the country to estimate its unearned increment, that it completely lost its head. In 1909 the greatest landowners in the country still were, as they had been for centuries, the aristocracy and the landed gentry, whose relatives represented them in the House of Lords. Lloyd George’s tax seemed aimed at them, the 1 per cent of the population who owned 70 per cent of the country.

Lloyd George’s budget passed the Liberal House of Commons, but was thrown out by the House of Lords. The chancellor’s response was to cry, ‘We have got them at last!’ Asquith dissolved Parliament and called a general election for January 1910 on the ground that the rights of the Commons had been usurped. The election was bitterly fought. The peers made the great mistake of taking part in it. Their collective wisdom might have been encyclopaedic and their knowledge of local affairs second to none, yet the hustings revealed the lottery of heredity at its worst. Many of the lumbering backwoodsmen appeared eccentric and selfishly concerned with their own interests.

The election, the second of Edward VII’s reign, returned the Liberals to power, but the result was disappointing. The landslide had vanished. The Liberals had only three MPs more than the Unionists. To push their measures through, the Liberals were dependent on the votes of the Labour party and the Irish Nationalists. A new Home Rule Bill would be the payment demanded for the Irish Nationalists’ co-operation.

The Conservative Lords suddenly agreed to pass the budget. But Asquith and Lloyd George were not put off. Asquith introduced the Parliament Bill, which strictly limited the House of Lords’ powers: it should no longer be able to change or throw out a money bill; any bill which was passed by the House of Commons in three successive sessions, even if it was rejected by the Lords each time, should become law.

The Parliament Bill had only had its first reading in the Commons when the House adjourned for the Easter Break. But on 6 May 1910 the nation was abruptly distracted. Following a holiday in his favourite French resort of Biarritz, the genial Edward VII had died at Buckingham Palace after a series of heart attacks.