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.