PITCHED BATTLES
“Though it appear a little out of fashion,
There is much care and valour in this Welshman.”
Shakespeare’s Henry V, Act I, Sc. iv.
David Lloyd George had gone to Parliament as a Welsh Nationalist; and, as the months passed, it became clear that the task of moulding and defending the new national cause in Wales would absorb his main energies.
It was not a popular task at Westminster, where it cut right across the party divisions. It was not even yet wholly an easy task in Wales, where the old spirit of feudalism had many strongholds and was still “an unconscionable time in dying.”
Throughout the following years (1892-7) David Lloyd George had to fight a double battle—at Westminster and in Wales. At Westminster he took the lead of a small group of Welsh members—often only four—who greatly dared to put the cause of Wales before the cause of party—never an easy task in a House where the party system is the very oxygen of the political atmosphere. On all great public questions that arose in those years—tithes, free schooling, local option, clergy discipline—he steadily and daringly pursued the national course and built up a national policy.
The influence that kept him straight on this course came ever from his own native soil. For he was in daily touch with that faithful little family group—those four loyal souls—his uncle, his brother, his sister, and his mother—who kept for him, while he battled in London, the fires burning on the home hearth, helped his wife by looking after the children in moments of stress, and steadily aided him with counsel and inspiration. David wrote to that little family party a daily record of his doings; and day by day Uncle Lloyd wrote to his “Di” long letters, partly in Welsh, partly in English, advising him on every question that arose, always taking the bold side, always bringing his nephew back to the goals of his pilgrimage—faith and fatherland. “Land of our Fathers” was the key-phrase in Uncle Lloyd’s politics; and, amid the stress and distraction of Westminster, his boy was never allowed, for a single day, to miss hearing that clear call from the Eagle mountains.
Here was the source of his strength in the struggles that now lay before him, calling for the utmost exercise of will and decision. For, if the Welsh cause was to be kept to the front, it was necessary to fight continually against the submerging influence of the party machines.
The most remarkable among these contests of the early nineties was undoubtedly that memorable fight undertaken by Mr. Lloyd George and a small band of Welsh fellow-members against Mr. Gladstone in the zenith of his power and frame over the Clergy Discipline Bill.
The Bill seemed a very innocent and reasonable measure. It aimed at strengthening the control of the Anglican Bishops—always weak enough—over their clergy. To Englishmen reasonable enough; but not so to Welshmen, to whom the very word “Bishop” was almost as hateful a sound as to the Presbyterian Scotch. Not until the Bishops released their hold on Wales would they consent to give them a stronger hold over their own clergy.
Now the Bill happened to be a very special favourite of Mr. Gladstone, who still loved his Church with a mighty love, and Mr. Gladstone was at that moment a very formidable opponent. It is difficult now to realise the power of his authority at that moment. The Liberals who had remained faithful to him regarded him with a loyalty that amounted to a passion. To dispute his word would seem to them the nearest secular approach to heresy or sacrilege. It was that spirit that Mr. Lloyd George dared to defy.
It was a sight for the gods to see those young Welshmen, night after night, facing the Grand Old Man. There he sat, almost alone on the Front Opposition Bench, battling against those eager young members. He took them very seriously. He argued with them, pleaded with them, rebuked them. Mr. Lloyd George thoroughly enjoyed the experience. “Ah! But he is a great debater!” he would say. But one thing he never forgot—the Grand Old Man’s eye. He has often said that to face that eye in anger was one of the most trying experiences in his parliamentary life. Years after, when some of us were discussing the points of likeness between the Grand Old Man and that gallant grandson who so splendidly gave his life for his country, Mr. Lloyd George suddenly burst out: “Ah! But he has not got the Old Man’s terrible eye!”
Mr. Gladstone pursued the matter to the end. He took a seat on the Grand Committee that was to consider the Bill. He and Mr. Lloyd George fought the matter out. It was only towards the end that Mr. Gladstone realised one day that his own speeches were prolonging the fight; and then the Old Man would sit glaring at the impudent youngsters in speechless anger.
But Mr. Gladstone bore no grudges against a good fighter who stood up for his own honest faith; and some years afterwards, when he met Mr. Lloyd George at Sir Edward Watkin’s house on the slopes of Snowdon, he made a special point of singling him out for special friendly speech.
Such revolts did not make Mr. Lloyd George more popular with the orthodox English Liberals. But things were to become worse before they became better. In the years 1892-5 came that great and prolonged contention between the Welsh members and the English machine over the position of Welsh Disestablishment among the Liberal fighting measures. In that contention Mr. Lloyd George took a leading part.
Welsh Disestablishment in Wales, ever since 1868, had taken the same position and grown to the same power as the Home Rule Movement in Ireland. The Welsh was a Nationalist movement in a religious dress. But English Liberalism had been chilly towards this movement, and treated it with scant favour. Mr. Gladstone opposed it in 1870, and it was only in 1891 that he first supported it, and allowed it a place in the famous Newcastle Programme. But so greatly was the Liberal Party absorbed in the Home Rule struggle that in 1892-3 the Welsh cause slipped back and the Liberals showed a definite tendency to shelve it.
It was at that moment that that small group of young Welshmen again stepped forward and definitely demanded that Welsh Disestablishment should be carried through the House of Commons and sent up to the House of Lords.
Mr. Lloyd George was the leader of this revolt; and for those two years he conducted it with a ruthless persistence which galled and embittered the Liberals, wearied by the great fatigues of the Home Rule struggle. For it was precisely in 1893, just after the great disappointment of the rejection of the Home Rule Bill by the House of Lords, that he roused the whole of Wales to demand the production of the Welsh Disestablishment Bill.
There followed one of those intense sectional struggles which in our party system are largely veiled from public view, but are none the less bitter for that.
Those of us English Liberals who were actual spectators of the battle certainly regarded Mr. Lloyd George as far from reasonable. We were looking at the matter from the angle of English Liberalism. His was the angle of Welsh Nationalism. Those angles sometimes crossed.
Mr. Gladstone resigned on March 1st, 1894; and Mr. Lloyd George instantly demanded of the new Government that the Welsh Disestablishment Bill should be carried through the Commons in 1894, unless they were prepared immediately to take up the struggle with the Lords, in which case he was prepared to forego the claim of Wales based on the Newcastle Resolution to legislative attention immediately after the Home Rule Bill.
The harassed Liberals—sensitive from weakening vitality—struggled on their bed of torture. Sir William Harcourt, the new leader in the Commons, at first refused. Mr. Lloyd George pursued his offensive with a fierce attack at Holywell. Then came Mr. Asquith with a vague speech at Plymouth; and at last on April 26th, 1894, the Disestablishment Bill was introduced. Again came delay. But the revolt went steadily forward; and the unhappy Government, with its dwindling majority, squirmed like some victim under the mediæval torture of the peine forte et dure.
At the opening of the Session of 1895 the Rosebery Government were perforce obliged to push the Disestablishment Bill forward. It was carried by a majority of 44 on April 1st, 1895. But yielding brought no peace. The Government was forced to pass the Bill through Committee; and during that stage Mr. Lloyd George and his friends fiercely pressed certain nationalist amendments which the Government reluctantly accepted. These convulsions proved too much for a sick Ministry. On August 11th, 1895, while the Welshmen were away in Wales devising new measures of torture, the Rosebery Administration fell over the “cordite vote.”
Mr. Lloyd George was fiercely attacked by orthodox Liberals for his conduct in this affair. He was roundly accused of hastening the downfall of the Government. He answered by saying that the Government was already doomed from internal dissensions.
But in Wales his attitude was greeted with acclaim; and in the General Election that followed, he was able to defeat Mr. Ellis Nanney once more with a majority practically identical with that of 1892.[[37]]
The reason was clear. The Welsh now cared more for their own causes than for the causes of the Liberal Party. The spirit of nationalism had spread from Ireland to Wales. They cared nothing for the Rosebery Government. They did not believe that the Commons could any longer legislate—not until the Lords were fought and crushed. What they were looking to was that the future claims of Wales should be pegged out as clearly as the claims of Ireland.
It was for that spirit that Mr. Lloyd George stood now in Wales.
Not that, even in Wales, the victory of Welsh nationalism was achieved without a struggle. During these years (1893-7) parallel with his activities at Westminster, David Lloyd George was engaged in a great campaign within Wales itself. It was a campaign for unity and concentration.
He found in 1892 the political energies of Wales divided between a number of purely party organisations, precisely after the fashion of England. Parliament Street had carved up the Welsh counties in the same spirit and method as Canterbury had carved up the Welsh dioceses. There were the North Wales Federation and the South Wales Federation, and a number of other similar bodies, with all the various staffs and camp-followers who find their meat and malt in local distinctions and differences. The worst of it was that these local divisions often blazed up into national divergences on points of policy.
On the other hand, there were simultaneously growing up among the younger generation of Wales a vast number of common national organisations and societies, literary, social, and political. There was the same ferment that we have of late years seen in Ireland—the ferment of a new national growth, shown in language, literature, and even in costume. There was the Cymru Fydd (“Wales of the Future”), the Cymmrodorion, and, above all, the revived Eisteddfod, that remarkable annual Welsh festival of poetry and song which seems to combine the spirit of classical Greece and of Celtic Britain.
Mr. Lloyd George aspired to bring into Welsh politics some of the strength and hope of this new national rebirth.
His definite aim, in the long series of great orations which he delivered on this subject between 1889 and 1896, was to bring patriotism to the help of Welsh politics in place of party—
“The spirit of patriotism has been like the genie of Arabian fable. It has burst asunder the prison doors and given freedom to them that were oppressed. It has transformed the wilderness into a garden and the hovel into a home.”[[38]]
It was his aim that the same spirit should transform Wales.
A simple aim, it would seem. But no sooner did he set finger on the various political Arks that had been set up for worship in the different competing capitals of Wales than he found himself faced with the fiercest hostility. Among his bitterest opponents was one of his own followers in the House, Mr. D. A. Thomas (afterwards Lord Rhondda). Mr. Thomas set himself up as the champion of the South Wales Federation; and he succeeded in maintaining the cause of local independence.
So tense and prolonged was the struggle that Mr. Lloyd George was content in the end to achieve his purposes in another way, by way of a Welsh National Council. “A rose by any other name will smell as sweet”—that is an important thing to remember in politics. Mr. Lloyd George has never forgotten it.
Here, in Wales, was evidently a case of nationalism only slowly struggling into consciousness, with many forces still to contend against. But if we take a long survey, and cast our eyes over the last half-century (1867-1920) how great is the contrast! Then (1867) there was a Wales almost entirely subject to its feudal chiefs, scarcely daring to assert its own language or nationality. Now (1920) there is a Wales returning an almost unbroken national party, and a majority of Welsh-speaking members.
In this great change David Lloyd George played a leading part.
The division between Welsh Nationalism and British Liberalism did not last long. British Liberalism, essentially in sympathy with Nationalism, soon forgave Mr. Lloyd George. Welsh Nationalism, always essentially Liberal, soon made its peace again with Liberalism.
It was during the struggles of 1896-9 that the reconciliation came. Then in the great parliamentary strife over the Agricultural Rates Bill and the Voluntary Schools Bill, Mr. Lloyd George first showed his mettle as a leader of parliamentary guerillas. Nay, more. At the moment when British Liberalism was bereft of leadership he gave it a lead. That was the great point.
Mr. Lloyd George’s great fight against the Agricultural Rates Bill in 1896 marked, indeed, his first great advance towards an assured parliamentary position. It was the first of the measures put forward by our Agrarians for the special relief of agriculture from the misfortunes which had befallen them in the seventies and the eighties. A small affair as compared with later proposals; but Mr. Lloyd George conceived against it an implacable hatred. It was not the relief that he hated; but he argued that under our land system the money would all go finally into the pockets of the landlords. He believed this sincerely; and he fought a great fight against the whole proposal.
The struggle went on through the early months of the Session of 1896. The Unionists at first took it lightly; then they grew angry. Here, it seemed, was a man who must really be reckoned with. This little Welsh attorney, this chapel-trained Nonconformist, actually seemed to know a thing or two about the sacred land system of these islands. He could not be ignored. His pertinacity and resourcefulness seemed to be inexhaustible. The fight went on from day to day, and there seemed no end.
On May 21st the Government moved and the Chairman accepted the “block” closure on the vital clause of the Bill—Clause four.
When the Chairman called the House to go into the division lobbies it was seen that a little group of members were sitting still on their seats, refusing to move. They were Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Herbert Lewis, backed by a little group of sympathetic Irishmen—Mr. John Dillon, Dr. Tanner, and Mr. Donald Sullivan—and by one Radical—Sir John Brunner.
“I must request honourable members to proceed to the division lobbies,” said the Chairman.
“I decline to go out under the circumstances,” said Mr. Lloyd George, speaking with his hat on, as in duty bound.
It was a new event. The Chairman was puzzled what to do. So he called the House back, summoned the Speaker—then Mr. Gully—from his repose, and reported to him what had happened.
“Do I understand,” said the Speaker sternly to Mr. Lloyd George, “that you refuse to clear the House?”
Mr. Lloyd George was quite unshaken by all this awful panoply of parliamentary terrorism.
“That is so, sir,” said he; “as a protest, I declined to go out.”
Then came the turn of that valiant and faithful soul—the Fidus Achates of our Æneas—Mr. Herbert Lewis. Did he too—so quiet and dutiful—refuse to go out?
“I regard this Bill, sir, as legalised robbery,” he said with a sudden outburst of honest vehemence.
After that there was nothing more to be said. The sacrilegious word had been spoken, and it was time for the high-priests of the temple to act. So the Leader of the House moved the suspension of these wicked men—the House voted the suspension by 209 to 58—and the Speaker called on them to withdraw. Mr. Lloyd George cheerfully rose to obey.
“For how long, sir?” he asked the Speaker, with the spirit of a schoolboy making sure of his holiday.
“For a week,” said the Speaker; and they all withdrew.[[39]]
But the week was to be well used. The rebel went off immediately into Wales and was received with acclamation. The grey veterans of the Welsh Party in the House had shaken their heads. But the Welsh people knew better. They realised the value of a dramatic protest.
There were others who knew better even in the House of Commons. Sir William Harcourt, always a great parliamentary leader, recognised in a moment that there was stuff in this new fighter. “My little Welsh attorney,” he said to me once, “is worth the pack of them.”
“My audience is the country”—that was still the clue to all “Mr. Lloyd George’s parliamentary actions. He and Mr. Herbert Lewis “stumped” through Wales, rousing the people. That week’s holiday bade fair to cost the Government dear.
The English people were not far behind the Welsh in their applause. He was now fighting a battle in which not Wales only but the whole country was concerned. Invitations to speak showered in from all over England.
It is, indeed, from this period (1896-7) that we must date a very important and vital development in Mr. Lloyd George’s career. The guerilla warfare which he opened in this year was carried on by him over the Voluntary Schools Bill of 1897 and the Tithes Bill of 1899. But from a “guerilla” he was gradually developing into a leader of Parliament. Instead of his following the Front Bench, it was the Front Bench that began to follow him!
For it was a moment of deplorable strife and weakness in the Liberal leadership. Lord Rosebery had resigned over Armenia in 1896, and both Sir William Harcourt and Mr. Morley resigned over Fashoda in 1898. The throne was constantly being vacated; and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who succeeded to the purple, seemed at that time only a “stop-gap,” with Mr. Asquith as the real and only successor.
The country was weary of these personal issues; and they turned with refreshment to the little warrior below the gangway who, at any rate, seemed to care for the cause more than for himself. During those years it was he who checked the Tory ascendancy; and it was largely owing to his vigour and vehemence that in 1897-8 the tide began to turn in the country and the by-elections began to go against the Government—a landslide that was only stopped by the outbreak of the South African War in 1899.
In 1896-7, then, came the critical new departure in the career of Mr. Lloyd George. Up to 1895 he had seemed to be a Welsh Nationalist, pure and simple—that and nothing more. It looked then, indeed, as if he might become the Parnell of Wales—a Parnell of a different kind both in speech and character, but like him in his sole devotion to a national cause—a Parnell in the sense of a leader of a national revolt.
Mr. Lloyd George gave to Wales the opening call. But Wales was not ready for such a complete break with the old order. She was too deeply committed by sympathy and conviction, both political and religious, to the British Liberal allegiance. The feud was healed.
The Welsh Party in the House flinched from electing the rebel as their Chairman. So they left England to share his services. They allowed him the freedom of a wider and more splendid career. They refused to adopt his policy of an independent Welsh Party; so they threw him into a larger contest.[[40]]
He still continued, after 1895, to push the Welsh National cause—he has never ceased to push it. In the new House his enthusiasm was directed to “Home Rule all Round”; but he found few supporters.
He began more and more to merge the cause of Wales in the larger cause of Britain. He began to believe that the Nonconformists of Britain were in much the same case as the Nonconformists of Wales. Thus from being a Welsh Nationalist only he became a Nationalist on a larger scale—a Nationalist of Britain.
Wales practically gave him to England.
[37] 194 votes as against 196 in 1892, when he defeated Sir John Puleston, the popular Tory champion.
[38] October 1894.
[39] These details are based on contemporary impressions and verified from Hansard.
[40] At a Welsh Party meeting on May 19th, 1899, an “independence” resolution moved by Mr. Lloyd George was definitely shelved.