House of Lords

The House of Lords is the upper, unelected house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. During the war it was made up above all of hereditary peers, alongside the bishops of the Church of England and the law lords, who also formed the country’s highest court of appeal. The Lords could now only delay bills, but their House remained a platform for ministers, generals and critics of the government.

The House after 1911

The dispute over David Lloyd George’s “People’s Budget” was ended by the Parliament Act of 1911. It took away the Lords’ veto over bills passed by the House of Commons: they could hold up money bills for a month at most and other bills for two years. The exception was bills extending the life of Parliament beyond five years, and these were exactly what Parliament passed during the war. Thanks to the 1911 Act, in September 1914, despite Conservative opposition, the Irish Home Rule Act reached the statute book, although its operation was suspended until the end of the war.

The Lords in wartime

War legislation passed through the House quickly. On 8 August 1914 the Lords passed the Defence of the Realm Act in a single sitting, without a committee stage. They passed the Munitions of War Act in the same way in July 1915, and in January 1916 conscription, passed by MPs, went through its second reading without even a division.

Members of the government spoke from its benches. On 25 August 1914 Lord Kitchener, the new Secretary of State for War, addressed the House for the first time. He assured it that as a soldier he belonged to no party, and that he held his post on the same terms as the volunteers: for the war, or for three years if it lasted longer than three years. In July 1916 Edward Grey moved to the House, and from December the Lords were led by George Curzon, a member of the War Cabinet. John Jellicoe, dismissed from the Admiralty at the end of 1917, agreed to accept a peerage partly in order to have a platform in the House.

On 25 April 1916 the Lords met in secret session, something the Marquess of Salisbury called unprecedented in the House’s long history, to hear confidential figures on the men needed by the Army and the Navy. The motion was moved for the government by the Marquess of Crewe, and Salisbury, while not opposing it, protested that the reporters’ gallery had been closed before the House had had a chance to agree. In January 1918 the House decided on votes for women. Curzon, an opponent of the reform, abstained, and an amendment striking out women’s suffrage was rejected by 134 votes to 71.

The Lansdowne letter

The loudest wartime controversy was caused by Lord Lansdowne, a former Foreign Secretary and leader of the Conservative peers in 1903–1916. As early as November 1916, as a minister without portfolio, he had asked in a memorandum whether, given the losses, it was worth counting on complete victory. On 29 November 1917, after The Times had refused to print it, the Daily Telegraph published his letter. Lansdowne wrote that Britain would not lose the war, but that prolonging it would ruin the civilised world, and he proposed defining the war aims so as to make negotiations with Germany possible.

Bonar Law and most of the press condemned the letter, and the generals dismissed its arguments. The Liberal Manchester Guardian and Daily News welcomed it, its author received many letters of support from readers, and President Woodrow Wilson was reportedly impressed too. Lansdowne defended his views in further letters and in speeches in the House of Lords. The House itself came through the war in its old form, mostly hereditary. The promised reform never came, and an act of 1949 shortened still further the time for which the Lords could hold up a bill, to one year.