The pageant of Parliament, vol. 1 of 2

CHAPTER XVI
PENSIONS FOR MINISTERS

1

It appears to be widely supposed that Ministers of the Crown receive pensions on retirement. The position is that a Minister of the Crown may obtain a pension if he has held office for four or five years. But he is not entitled to it as a right on account of his service. He must apply for it to the First Lord of the Treasury, and make a declaration that his private income or resources are inadequate to the maintenance of the social position proper to one who has been a Minister of the Crown. Only two Members of the Government receive pensions automatically on retiring from office, the Lord Chancellor of England, whose pension is £5,000, and the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, whose pension is £4,000 a year. These two pensions are payable as a matter of course, however brief may have been the period of service. Nor is there any limitation to the number of such pensions that may be paid at the same time. At the close of the World War in 1918 there were living four ex-Lord Chancellors of England—Lord Halsbury, Lord Loreburn, Lord Haldane, and Lord Buckmaster—all of whom are paid the £5,000 a year, and a fifth, Lord Finlay, who, it was understood, waived his right to the retiring allowance.

The other political pensions are, as I have said, conditional. Johnson felt it necessary to define the English use of the word “pension” as: “Pay given to a State hireling for treason to his country.” Johnson, however, afterwards did something to make this form of royal bounty respectable by himself accepting £300 a year from George III. Undoubtedly in the corrupt stage of political life during the eighteenth century there were numerous pensions and sinecure offices for Ministers who were needy, or simply greedy. A Committee of the House of Commons reported in 1802 that for twenty years previous a sum of £115,000 had been annually spent on pensions. But as political morality developed with the progress of the nineteenth century, or as the tax-payer grew impatient of his increasing burdens, this system of growing rich or repairing broken fortunes at the public expense gradually came to an end. The granting of political pensions was for the first time regulated by an Act passed by the Reform Government of Earl Grey in 1834—the “4 and 5 William V, c. 24,” which is described as an Act, “to alter, amend, and consolidate the laws for regulating pensions, compensations, and allowances to be made to persons in respect of their having held civil offices of his Majesty’s service.”

The statute which now governs the granting of pensions to ex-Ministers is the Political Offices Pension Act, 1869. It was Gladstone, then in the first year of office as Prime Minister, who brought in the measure. The only serious opposition to it came from Henry Fawcett (afterwards Postmaster-General in Gladstone’s second Administration), who thought that no Minister should be entitled to a political pension unless he had been obliged to give up his profession or business on taking office, and found it impossible to resume it on retirement. Gladstone explained that his scheme was no more than a necessary amendment of the Act of 1834, which authorized pensions varying from £800 to £2,000, according to length of service and the emoluments received, and after a short discussion, with one division—94 to 15—the Bill was passed.

Three classes of pensions for ex-Ministers were thus created:

The period of service may be continuous, or at different times, and in different offices of the same class. “No new pension shall be granted in any class while four pensions in that class are subsisting,” says that Act; “nor shall more than one pension be granted in the same year.”

The Political Offices Pensions Act, 1869, embodies the following section of the Act of 1834:

2

It is not generally known that Benjamin Disraeli was a pensioner under the Act of 1834. There is but an obscure and passing reference to it in Buckle’s Life of Lord Beaconsfield. Lord Derby granted him a first-class pension in June, 1859. Disraeli was the only Prime Minister of modern times who received a political pension. He was in receipt of it when he died as Lord Beaconsfield in April, 1881. The pension was, of course, suspended while he was in office as Chancellor of the Exchequer or First Lord of the Treasury (including his two terms as Prime Minister), but the total amount drawn by him in pensions, between 1859 and 1881, was £26,456 6s. 7d. Other distinguished pensioners under the Act of 1834 were Spencer Walpole, three times Home Secretary, who from May, 1867, until his death in May, 1898, received in the aggregate a sum of £62,032 19s. 4d.; Sir George Grey, four times Home Secretary, who from 1857 to 1882 drew £39,070 2s. 6d.; and Thomas Milner Gibson, President of the Board of Trade, who was paid £35,275 1s. 3d. between 1866 and 1884.

The first beneficiary under the Act of 1869 was Charles Pelham Villiers, the associate of Cobden and Bright in the agitation for Free Trade. He entered Parliament for Wolverhampton in 1835, and sat for the same constituency until his death in 1898 at the great age of ninety-six. For some years at the end of his long career as a member of Parliament he was Father of the House of Commons. Villiers has a place among the few public men who have had statues erected to them in their lifetime. He was so honoured by Wolverhampton ten years before his death. Villiers held office in two Liberal Administrations, having been Judge Advocate-General for six years, and for the same period President of the Poor Law Board, an office long since merged in the Local Government Board, now the Ministry of Health.

Villiers was awarded a second-class pension of £1,200 by Gladstone on August 19, 1869, a few days after the Political Offices Pensions Act became law. Although this amount was reduced to £450 a year until January 5, 1874, as Villiers had also a pension of £750 from the Suitors’ Fee Fund of the Court of Chancery—is there not quite a touch of eighteenth-century sinecure in this?—Villiers received altogether, under the Act of 1869, the large sum of £30,810 12s. 8d., and was drawing the pension at his death in 1898. It may be said that no man better earned a pension than Villiers. His record of public service is unparalleled in the annals of the House of Commons. But on the proving of his will it was found that he had been a very wealthy man. He left, in fact, a fortune of £250,000.

Gladstone, subsequently to the award of the pension to Villiers, made a rule by which every ex-Minister to whom he, as First Lord of the Treasury, granted a pension was required not only to make the statutory declaration that he was unable to maintain his social station, but was also obliged to engage to surrender the pension should he come into a private fortune, or obtain a highly paid appointment. Villiers, it seems, had an accession of fortune, but evidently he did not consider that the new engagement applied to him, as he had not signed it.

As these pensions are paid, not out of monies voted by Parliament, but directly out of the Consolidated Fund, like the salaries and retiring allowances of the Judges, they cannot be raised as a subject of debate in the House of Commons. Attention, however, was drawn by means of questions to Villiers’ case, and subsequently to the case of Viscount Cross, who died in March, 1914, leaving a personal estate of the value of £72,299, after having drawn a second-class pension of £2,000 for over twenty years, which amounted in the aggregate to £40,760. It appeared that Lord Cross, like Villiers, did not sign the declaration to surrender his pension in the event of an improvement in his pecuniary circumstances. As Lord Beaconsfield left £84,000 at his death, his case differs only in one respect from those of Villiers and Cross—he had been twice Prime Minister of England.

3

The First Lord of the Treasury is restricted by precedent to granting these political pensions only to ex-Ministers of his own Party. In 1883 an application was made to Gladstone for a pension for a Conservative ex-Minister. It was refused on the ground “that no political pension has been granted by any Minister during the last fifty years, except to one with whom he stood on terms of general confidence and co-operation.” The Prime Minister went on to say, “the examination of private circumstances, such as I consider the Act to require, is, for its nature, difficult and invidious; but the examination of competing cases in the ex-official corps is a function that could not be discharged with the necessary combination of free responsible action and of exemption from offence and suspicion.” Gladstone therefore declined to “create a precedent of deviation from a course undeviatingly pursued by my predecessors of all Parties.” Lord Morley, who gives this letter in his Life of Gladstone, observes in a note: “Mr. Gladstone had suffered an unpleasant experience in another case of the relations brought about by the refusal of a political pension, after inquiry as to the accuracy of the necessary statement as to the applicant’s need of it.”

We are told also in the same work that Gladstone, in his last term of office, came to hold strongly the view that these political pensions, which he himself created, should be abolished. Lord Morley says he was only deterred from trying to carry out his views by the reminder from younger Ministers, not themselves applicants, nor ever likely to be, that it would hardly be a gracious thing to cut off benefactions at a time when the bestowal of them was passing away from him, though he had used them freely while they were within his power.

4

I do not think it can be maintained that the salaries of Ministers are more than fair remuneration, considering the weighty and absorbing duties and responsibilities of the offices, and also the difficulty of attaining to them and the uncertainty of their tenure.[5] It is far from being an easy matter to become a Minister of the Crown. The posts are few, and the competition among the many aspirants to them is very keen. Most Members of Parliament never reach it, even though they may have had long and brilliant careers in public life. Fox, who was forty years in Parliament—having entered the House of Commons when he was nineteen, and retained his seat until his death at the age of fifty-nine—held Cabinet office for only about eighteen months. In 1782 he was Secretary of State for three months in the Rockingham Administration; in 1783 he filled the same office for nine months during his coalition with Lord North, who was the joint Secretary of State, with the Duke of Portland, as Premier, nominally rather than effectually at the head of affairs. Then followed twenty-three years of Opposition during the long and brilliant ascendancy of William Pitt. In January 1806 Pitt died, and in the Grenville Government which followed Fox returned to office for the third time as Secretary of State. Once more his tenure of the office was brief. After eight months it was brought to an end by his premature death in September, 1806. Fox was a rake, and, being a younger son, naturally was always in debt. But he never mourned for the spoils of office, so that he could the more freely indulge in his tastes as a man of pleasure. He desired office that he might embody his political ideas in Acts of Parliament. He moved his famous resolution for the abolition of the slave trade in June 1806; his health had broken down, and conscious that the end was near at hand, he declared that after forty years of public life he should retire, feeling that he had done his duty, if he carried his motion. The motion was carried by a majority of 99—114 voting for it, and only 15 against. It was practically his last appearance in the House. A few days later disease compelled him to retire.

On the other hand, William Pitt, as a Minister, was the spoiled darling of fortune. In 1782, at the age of twenty-three, he was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the Shelburne Administration. He was out of office for the nine months in 1783, during which Fox and North were in power. But in December of that year, on the dismissal of the Coalition Government, he became First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Prime Minister, and he was not yet twenty-five. He held these offices for the unbroken term of seventeen years. As First Lord of the Treasury he had £5,000 a year, and £5,398 a year as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He had, besides, the official residence in Downing Street. The Clerkship of the Pells, a sinecure office worth £3,000 a year, fell vacant on Pitt’s accession to power; and in that age of jobs it was deemed a remarkable instance of disinterestedness that, instead of taking the place himself, and thus acquiring an independence for life, he gave it to a friend. But on the death of Lord North in 1792, George III appointed him to the sinecure office of Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, with a salary of £4,000—reduced by payments to subordinates to £3,080—and the seaside residence of Walmer Castle. For eight years, therefore, he had £10,398 per annum, and for another nine years, £13,478 per annum, from the State. Yet on his resignation in 1801—owing to the refusal of the King to sanction the emancipation of the Catholics, without which Pitt regarded the Union with Ireland which he had just carried as incomplete—he was in debt to the amount of £45,000. As his official salaries were stopped—though, of course, he retained the £4,000 a year as Lord Warden—he was in danger of being thrown into prison as a debtor. The merchants of London offered him a free gift of £100,000, and the King tendered him £30,000 from his Privy Purse, so that he might extricate himself from his unpleasant predicament. He declined both offers. He, however, accepted from fourteen personal friends and political supporters £11,700 as a loan, by which he was enabled to discharge the most pressing of his creditors. In May 1804 he returned to power as First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Prime Minister, and again drew the double salaries of £10,398 until he died, in office, on January 23, 1806. His debts were paid by Parliament. They amounted to the enormous sum of £40,000, exclusive of the £11,700 advanced to him in 1801 by his friends, who now declined repayment.

What was the explanation of Pitt’s indebtedness? His private life seems to have been remarkably pure. His one dissipation was an extra bottle of port. He was a bachelor. A man of cold and shy manners, he had few friends—his nose, as Romney said, was turned up to all mankind—he mixed little in society, and he was not given to hospitality. Yet with £13,478 a year, and town and seaside houses, “free of coal, candles and taxes”—to quote the official phrase of the time—in each of which he maintained but a plain and inexpensive establishment, he died at the early age of forty-seven, owing £51,700. The only explanation of the mystery that has been advanced is that, so absorbed was Pitt in public life, and so indifferent was he to money, he neglected his private affairs and was robbed by his servants. It was an hereditary weakness, perhaps. His father, the first Earl of Chatham, of whose private life Lord Chesterfield wrote, “It was stained by no vices, nor sullied by any meanness,” died in debt to the extent of £20,000, which Parliament paid, as well as settling an annuity of £4,000 a year on his successors in the earldom.

“Dispensing for near twenty years the favours of the Crown,” says Canning in the epitaph he wrote of William Pitt, “he lived without ostentation, and he died poor.” Further than this it is now impossible to carry the story of the material result to himself of Pitt’s official career. But these happy words are of general application as a tribute to the devotion, honesty, and self-sacrifice of the Ministers of the Crown. There is no instance of a Prime Minister who grew rich in office. Spencer Perceval, who was assassinated in the Lobby of the House of Commons, on May 11, 1812, left his family so ill-provided for that Parliament had to come to their assistance. As is usual in such cases, Parliament acted handsomely. It made a grant of £50,000 to the family, and voted to the widow a pension of £2,000 a year, which on her death was to be continued to the eldest son and increased to £3,000.

5

When Lord John Russell was Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury he publicly declared that no man without a private fortune could hope to fill any of the high offices of the State with freedom from pecuniary worries. “For my part,” he said, “I never had a debt in my life until I was First Lord of the Treasury.” A Minister was obliged largely to increase his personal expenditure in order to meet the social calls of his office. He must live in a better style as a Member of the Government than as a Member of the Opposition. A large house, servants, and carriages were essential to the adequate fulfilling of his social obligations as a Minister. “If I recollect aright,” said Lord John Russell to the Select Committee on Official Salaries in 1850, “when Monsieur de Tercy went from France to endeavour to make peace with the Dutch Government, he was very much struck, on calling upon the Grand Pensionary, to find the door opened by a servant-maid, and he thought it showed very great republican sympathy; and no doubt it was very becoming. But I think that if Lord Palmerston had only a housemaid to open the door, and Foreign Ministers called there, everybody would say that he was very mean and unfit for his situation.” Palmerston was, at the time, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and, being a wealthy man, was noted for his lavish hospitality. In fact, the £5,000 a year which the head of the Foreign Office is paid does not always cover the cost of living, and the social entertainments which he has annually to give. In addition to maintaining a position of great dignity in a becoming manner, he is expected regularly to entertain at his own expense the members of the various foreign diplomatic missions in London. Lord Rosebery has said that when he was Foreign Secretary in 1893 he spent half of his year’s salary upon two receptions at the Foreign Office.

Gladstone, like Lord John Russell, lived well in office and simply in opposition. On his appointment as Prime Minister for the first time in 1868 he took a house in that region of the rich and fashionable, Carlton House Terrace. After his defeat in the General Election of 1875 he wrote to his wife saying that they must retrench their expenditure. “The truth is,” he said, “that innocently and from special causes we have on the whole been housed better than according to our circumstances. All along Carlton House Terrace, I think, you would not find anyone with less than £20,000 a year, and most of them with much more.” His official salary was but £5,000, and when it was stopped he retired to Harley street. During his two other terms of office as Prime Minister he inhabited the official house in Downing Street. Gladstone had a passion for public economy. He even grudged the spending of a small sum of money to make bright with flowers the little garden at the back of No. 10 Downing Street, so eager was his desire to limit the demands on the National Exchequer. But he always considered that he had well earned his allowance as Minister. Mr. John Bright, it seems, had a compunctious visiting of shame every time that the quarterly cheque for his official salary arrived, and once he disclosed his feelings to Gladstone. “There I don’t agree with you, Bright,” said Gladstone. “I’d rather take my official money than anything I receive from land, for I know I have earned every penny of it.”

The emoluments of office were an important consideration to some of the greatest men in political history. Burke, Pitt, Sheridan, Perceval and Canning had no hereditary fortunes, and if there were not adequate salaries attached to office they could not have given their great abilities to the services of the country in government and administration. Edmund Burke, whose movement for economic reform in the conduct of State affairs led to the abolition of many political sinecures, insisted, nevertheless, that reasonable emoluments should be paid to Ministers. He said:

Moreover, if the salaries of office were meagre, statesmanship would become entirely an appendage of wealth. In former times most of the highest offices of the Government were filled by territorial magnates, Whig or Tory—members of aristocratic families with ample private means as well as great traditions of public service. To these men, possessed of personal fortunes of £15,000, £20,000 or £40,000 a year, the salaries of office may have been regarded as unconsidered trifles. And yet, strangely enough, in the seventeenth century, when rich noblemen, their relatives and dependants were at the head of affairs, the political seems to have been quite a lucrative profession, for a Minister often held his majority in the House of Commons together, not so much by principles, as by places and pensions.

But the old custom of confining the highest of the offices of State exclusively to men of hereditary position and wealth and leisure came to an end by the middle of the nineteenth century. The tendency to open the arena of statesmanship to all members of the Party in power of proved ability and distinction, but irrespective of birth or rank or fortune, was strikingly shown in the Administration which Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman formed in 1905, when John Burns, a manual worker from an engineering shipyard, was made President of the Local Government Board and a Cabinet Minister; and as this tendency is bound to become wider and wider still as time progresses, the salaries of Ministers must be at least sufficient to provide a livelihood in order to attract to the service of the State men well equipped for it in intellectual ability, and experience in affairs, but without private means.

The fact, however, remains that the emoluments of office are not the allurement of the public service, and they never can be in any conceivable circumstances under the Party system, and the frequent changes of Government which it involves. Those who make politics a calling are very few in number. As a rule, men do not enter upon a political career with the object of making fortunes as statesmen, or even of securing a livelihood, in the way that men study medicine to become doctors, or law to become barristers. The uncertainty of attaining office and, in the event of success, the precariousness and brevity of its tenure will always make statesmanship the most unreliable of callings in the eyes of those bent on having a good balance at their bankers. The emoluments of office are really not so much salaries as prizes.

If two able young men of equal mental endowment were to set out on the same day to make their way in the world, one going into commerce or the professions, and the other into politics, it is almost a certainty that when the time came for retirement the man who had selected a professional or business avocation, and was successful, would be ten times as wealthy, at the very least, as the man who gave himself to the service of the State, even though he had attained to the most renowned and exalted office of Prime Minister. Members of Parliament are, as a rule, engaged in commercial and professional occupations, and they follow politics as a concurrent career. The few who show a special aptitude for leadership and office ultimately reach the Treasury Bench, but they hold on, nevertheless, to the established and secure positions on which they continue to depend for their bread-and-butter.

6

“Spoils of Office!” The phrase was long since emptied entirely of its eighteenth-century suggestion of “grab,” and remembering the public rage for economy, which is likely to endure for ever and ever on account of national necessities, it may be accepted that “spoils,” in the sense of pecuniary rewards, will less and less attach to service of the State. The responsibility and distinction of governing the country will, happily, always be attractive, and it will always bring the chance of gaining the greatest of most alluring “spoil” of all—that of doing something to maintain the renown of the country for honour and the prosperity and happiness of its people.

“This won’t do. You have taken the Queen’s shilling.” So said Disraeli to a Member of his Administration who was absent without due cause from a division in the House of Commons. It is not often that a Minister has to be reprimanded by his chief for want of devotion either to his Party or to the State. Happy country! Men of the highest class in ability and integrity are ever ready to take its burdens upon their shoulders. It does not, of course, follow that honest and disinterested men are always the best of politicians. Personal integrity and intellectual ability are, indeed, some assurance of wisdom in the guidance of the State. But they are not an infallible guarantee. If they were, there would never be a need for a change of Government. It has happened, now and then, that the principles of an Administration were large and lofty enough almost to bring the nation to ruin. But this much is true—that if Ministers cling to office in times of Party stress and conflict, it is not because of its emoluments. It is, in the main, because of a real concern for the welfare of the Commonwealth. They are convinced that the administration of public affairs in the light of their Party principles is essential to the salvation of the country. That and, fearing they would be beaten at the polls, the human weakness, “to keep the other fellows out.”