Free The Proud Tower by Barbara Tuchman

she queried Salisbury, who had to admit that her new Laureate’s first effusion was “unluckily to the taste of the galleries in the lower class of theatres who sing it with vehemence.” Salisbury never bothered to explain his choice of Austin beyond an off-hand remark once that “he wanted it”; but if the choice did not honor British poetry, it was a shrewd match of the British mood.
    The Englishman, as an American observer noticed, felt himself the best-governed citizen in the world even when in Opposition he believed the incumbents were ruining the country. The English form of government “is the thing above all others that he is proud of … and he has an unshakeable confidence in the personal integrity of statesmen.” Austin reflected that comfortable pride. In the radiant summer of Jubilee Year, 1897, a visitor found him in linen suit and panama hat, sitting in a high-backed wicker chair, on the lawn of his country home enjoying conversation with Lady Paget and Lady Windsor. They agreed that each person should tell what was his idea of heaven. Austin’s wish was noble. He desired to sit in a garden and receive a flow of telegrams announcing alternately a British victory by sea and a British victory by land.
    It was easy to make fun of Alfred Austin, with his small size, large pomposity and banal verse, and many did. Yet in his Jubilee wish there was something simple and devoted, an assurance, a complete and happy love and admiration for his country, a noncognizance of wrong, which expressed a mood and a condition which, like Lord Ribblesdale’s appearance, were to become beyond recapture.
    The House of Lords, now that the Conservatives had replaced the Liberals, could lean back comfortably and follow its natural bent, which was to do as little work as possible. In the last years of the Liberals it had roused itself to “stop the rot” induced by Radical legislation and had thrown out an Employers’ Liability Bill, a Parish Councils Bill designed to make local government councils more democratic, and finally the Home Rule Bill. In the last speech of his career on March 1, 1894, Gladstone had solemnly warned that differences of “fundamental tendency” between the two Houses had reached a point in the past year which required that some solution would have to be found for “this tremendous contrariety and incessant conflict upon matters of high principle and profound importance.” Proposals for reform of the Upper House to redress the imbalance when a Liberal Government was in power and thus remove the grounds of criticism had been many. But now that a state of happy harmony had succeeded conflict, the urgency relaxed, Gladstone’s warning was forgotten and the Lords could resume their customary quiescence.
    Out of 560 members, many “backwoods” peers, as they were called, never took their seats at all. Others appeared only at times of crisis and hardly more than fifty regularly attended the sessions. It was, said Lord Newton, “the most good-natured assembly that exists,” hearing out speakers who would not be listened to for five minutes in the Commons. Its debates were “always polite” and conducted with a restraint which seemed to show “detachment almost amounting to indifference.” Party animosity was concealed “under a veil of studied courtesy.” It was not a stimulating audience, especially to Liberals, whose leader, Lord Rosebery, complained that “every auditor gives the impression of profound weariness and boredom.”
    While Lord Salisbury was Prime Minister the House of Lords was entirely under his dominance, although its official ruler was the Lord Chancellor, who acted as Speaker. This office was now held by Lord Halsbury, born a commoner, by name Hardinge Giffard, a member of one of the oldest families in England. Its founder had fought at Hastings and was later created Earl of Buckingham by William Rufus. Although the title died out in the next generation, the family