John Vincent on the letters of a family man
Truth will out: so even will respectability, Lloyd George's best-kept secret. For long the English, a mystic and irrational people given to romantic exaggeration, have seen our one and only Welsh statesman (since Henry VII) as something demonic: as Baldwin's 'dynamic force,' as Keynes's 'goat-footed bard rooted in nothing,' or more crudely as 'the Goat,' the 'inspiration of immortal post-prandial song. Only Offa's Dyke stood between the chaste rites of Westminster and the Welsh national vices of opportunism and lubricity. Some writers on Lloyd George feel their pulses race as they painfully examine that central topic, the rustic Welsh practice of bundling: others rely on the embittered testimony of his eldest son, which rests among other things on the assumption that married children know what their fathers are up to.
There were only two women in Lloyd George's life. He married both: and his fidelity (after the manner of an active man) to his wife was exceeded only by his later fidelity to his mistress. Emotionally, at any rate, he was a one-woman man, and this of course over a very long timespan in each case. The one public scandal of his career, that of 1897, was based on false accusation: the rest is largely a matter of gossip, usually politically motivated. Lloyd George did not adopt the confident hedonism of the age of Edward VII and H. G. Wells, for two very good reasons: it would have cost too much, and he was working too hard, a provincial missing his wife's cooking — "I was never more unhappy by your absence — cold coffee, cold grape nuts and eternal ham help to make you much more popular." In his first cabinet, the premier was tipsy and fumbling, two ministers were ruined for homosexual offences, and Rufus Isaacs was well on the way to becoming the first ship's boy to be hammered on the Stock Exchange and then leave £400,000. These metropolitan standards Lloyd George did not adopt, preferring to remain a provincial good deed in a naughty world.
His close relations with his wife are shown by the fact that over 2,000 of his letters to her survive, thanks to her tender care, to form the only major collection of his personal correspondence now available. Lloyd George did not love paperwork and this selection* by the leading his torian of modern Wales helps us to understand its author, both as man and politican, far better than the family letters of most politicians can. It is a major addition to our knowledge of Lloyd George, especially as regards his earlier career before 1908. It throws little light on the crisis of 1908-11, except one line of exultation in 1909 over Tory folly: "The Lord hath delivered them into our hands." On a visit to Balmoral in 1911, 'he reacted violently against its sickening " Toryism " and what he felt was royal hostility: however, he thought George V a "jolly chap," then continued in Welsh, "but thank God there's not much in his head. They're 'simple, very, very ordinary people, and perhaps on the whole that's how it should be."
There is rather more on August 1914, including an important letter after the outbreak of war showing Lloyd George still thinking of the war only as a means of carrying out a peace policy: "I am dead against carrying on a war of conquest to crush Germany for the benefit of Russia. Beat the German Junker but no war on the German people, etc. I am not going to sacrifice my nice boy for that purpose." On the coalition of May 1915, there is rather more again, including a hilariously affectionate letter from Asquith acknowledging Lloyd George's "devotion, your unselfishness, your powers of resource, what is '(after all) the best of all things your self-forgetfulness," a missive on which Lloyd George commented, " He doesn't know that I refused the premiership from the Tories." The letters for March 1918 portray particularly well his near-despair over the war (and show the perversity of Irish Republicans in being absolutely quiet at that critical Easter). In 1924, but not before, he gives us some insight into Liberaltactics, imperturbably dismissing Ramsey MacDonald as "just a fussy Baldwin," before starting a new theme in 1926 when he has fourteen professors to stay. From all this, one may gather that the marriage which engendered such correspondence was closer, more affectionate, and more political than has been suspected: even in 1921, Margaret made no less than sixty speeches for him at one by-election. Even in 1924, after twelve years' liaison with his secretary, he wrote: "Believe me, old darling, I am at bottom as fond of you as ever . . ." and joked about how much worse off she would have been with Asquith or Birkenhead, with their double weaknesses.
The myth of Mrs Lloyd George, the pathetically deserted wife, can hardly survive the publication of these letters. Lloyd George, indeed, claimed in 1895 that if hauled up on the Day of Judgement, he would ask to be tried as a husband, thinking he "'would fare pretty well if we had to stand or fall by bur merits or demerits as husbands." Some of his notes from London smack too obviously of "having to work late at the office ": others more credibly genuine appeals to make the marriage work. His letters before marriage were sharply Napoleonic (" My supreme idea is to get on. To this idea I shall sacrifice everything . . . I must not forget that I have a purpose in life "); later they become uxorious (" So very keenly did I feel the absence of my genial Maggie's welcoming face that I could not help bursting into tears "). Indeed, he submitted his speeches "to the criticism of my good angel at Criccieth." The problem was where to live.
The details of which spouse lived where are not all that clear in this edition, but Margaret's refusal to leave Wales permanently and live in London was the key to the situation. Far from being pathetic, she was as uncompromising in pursuit of the life she wanted to lead as was her husband, and as individual in her refusal to do the 'right thing ': which was no doubt what drew them together in the first place. On the surface she can be dismissed as a homely body, a president of the local Ladies' Lifeboat Guild and a pillar of the chapel, left behind by her brilliant husband. In reality, it was because she was remarkable that she was able to treat her own life, wishes, family, and self-pity, as being as important as those of her husband. True, she did move into 11 Downing Street in 1908, which is why the flow of letters then dries up, unfortunately for the historian, but her heart was in Wales, (Her bringing up of the children as professional Welshwomen and professional puritans cannily enhanced the career prospects of Megan and Gwilym. Lloyd George moved to Kensington in 1892: in 1897 he implored her to join him in a suburban home, "Ealing for choice. There the air is quite as good as anything you can get in Wales." But no proposal could tempt a wife averse even to short visits to London. "You know very well,"• Lloyd George had said in 1896, "that the pressure to bring us together invariably comes from me." This geographical separation, which had nothing to do with Lloyd George's animal propensities, broke up the family far more than anything else. "Reflect whether you have not rather neglected your husband," he wrote gloomily. "I have more than once gone without breakfast. I have scores of times come home in the dead of night to a cold, dark and comfortless flat without a soul to greet me. I am not of a nature either physically or morally that I ought to have been left like this . . . You have been a good mother, you have not . . . always been a good wife . . My soul as well as my body has been committed to your charge and in many respects I am as helpless as a child."
And so, without a definite break, with continuing affection, with real intimacy of mind as regards political manoeuvre and impressions of people, they drifted apart, and his letters start coming from addresses worlds away from Criccieth (or Limehouse): in 1912 the people's tribune was resting at Marienbad, unaccompanied by his wife, He continued to feel close to her intellectually, as to a minor press lord, he had relished an equality in his marriage that he never could have had with a more compliant woman, and he paid that full price for it. "Why," he sighed ";the poor Boer women had often to trek on waggons through sun and rain . . . I am not as hard as that. But the concentration camp on ' Wandsworth Common does need your presence."
It is always interesting to know what politicians live on. Mrs Lloyd George was a good wife for her husband in the early years because she was a cheap one. Where the money was coming from before 1906 is a mystery, for even in 1908 an indulgent premier offered him support from party funds, which he indignantly refused. (" Tom Ellis did it and he was their doormat") In 1912, while Chancellor, he made £567 on an obscure Argentine railway deal,' and in the 1890s he got involved in abortive Patagonian goldmines. Otherwise neither the letters nor their editor tell U.S anything about their author's finances.
The letters are much more informative about Lloyd George's effort to get state money for his constituency, a side of politics that he took very seriously. The war leader of 1918 learned his •trade of making things happen by pushing through the arrangements for Criccieth pier, PwIlheli harbour, and Carnarvon waterworks. The other, more personal face of Welsh local politics, which occupies a great deal of the book, is a singularly disagreeable record of squabbling, of lasting friendships that do not last, and of decisive campaigns which leave all as before. Too many clever young Welshmen were competing for a niche in too small a country. Lloyd George might enjoy Boer victories over "the English" (not 'over us ') but his real ruthlessness was reserved for his fellow Welsh radicals. He might, despite supposed public enmity, accept the hospitality of Grey at Falloden, so that the latter with his usual integrity could discuss how to knife his party leader: it took twenty years before he was on terms with his rival boss in South Wales, D. A. Thomas.
The young Lloyd George did not hate the Tories (except of course in working hours and on the platform): he hated respectability and the chapels, "the utter hollowness of what is known as respectable Christianity," the " canting hypocrites" of the chapel deacons, "the mitre" of the Confession of Faith and "the other prim orthodoxies," the " canting methodistical psalm-singers whom I revile," the true "orthodox gloom," the "suffocating malodorous chapel listening to some superstitions I had heard thousands of times before," and "the whole d—d pack of puritans." This was partly a stick to beat his wife with, given her chapel and Women's Institute loyalties: "Drop that infernal Methodism which is the curse of your better nature " — but it also reflects a true Carlylean moral horror of the bourgeois sectarianism whose spokesman in politics he found it necessary to be. Only in some odd ways did he lend countenance to religion. He was "an intense believer in the goodness" of the last Welsh religious revival (he wrote while on holiday in Naples in 1904). "One of the few religious dogmas of our creed I believe in is fraternity with which you may couple equality," he wrote, defending himself against his wife's charge of having spoken to a fishmonger's daughter. Much more strangely, he saw his beloved and very beautiful daughter's death from appendicitis in December 1907, at seventeen, as "the greatest blessing that has befallen us, and through us multitudes whom God has sent me to give a helping hand out of misery and worry a myriad worse than ours." What this means no one can tell, but it is a passage without parallel elsewhere in the 'letters and, in circumstances where sincerity must be suspected, it suggests some extraordinary inner consciousness during the period of the great struggles. Through these letters we see, not only more of the early Lloyd George than before, but also the demonic element released from the Protestant ethic by the collapse of the Nonconformist conscience.
Professor Vincent is head of the Department of History at the University of Bristol
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