The Relugas Compact was the plot hatched in 1905 by British Liberal Party politicians H. H. Asquith, Sir Edward Grey, and R. B. Haldane to force the prospective prime minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, to give up the leadership of the party in the House of Commons. The Compact is significant because it represents a new way of doing party political business at the highest level. In an era when aristocratic power was still taken for granted, the manoeuvring for the highest office in the land represented for the first time distinct political philosophies vying for control of one of the major parties. Learning from an association with Tories Salisbury and Balfour at Hatfield, the Liberal Imperialists stole a march on their rivals to take a step nearer modernisation. Moreover, they brought with them junior ministers such as Sidney Buxton and Henry Fowler, making it look like a take over from the Gladstonian Radicals, of whom the ageing Prime Minister was the last.
Background
The name Relugas Compact comes from the meeting between three friends, the Liberal Imperialists Asquith, Grey, and Haldane in September 1905. Asquith had taken a country house in Glen of Rothes in Moray. Grey had a fishing lodge at the village of Relugas about 15 miles away where they met to discuss the political situation. It was here they concluded their plan to kick Campbell-Bannerman upstairs to the Lords and render him at best “a dummy prime minister” while Asquith would hold the real power as Leader in the Commons. They also indulged in making the next Liberal Cabinet in their own image. As Haldane put it in his autobiography, “What we thus resolved on we used afterwards at times to speak of among ourselves as the ‘Relugas Compact’.
Political background
By the autumn of 1905 it was clear that the Conservative government of Prime Minister Arthur Balfour was weary of office and deeply unpopular. Even the government itself had more or less given up any hope it could win the next election, and it seemed inevitable that the first Liberal administration for ten years would soon be formed. Against this rosy backdrop, Asquith, Grey, and Haldane agreed that they would refuse to serve in the Cabinet under Campbell-Bannerman’s leadership unless he agreed to be made a peer, who would sit in the House of Lords, and so give up his seat in the Commons. One probable aim of the Relugas plotters was to obtain a senior role in the Cabinet for Liberal former Prime Minister Lord Rosebery, perhaps even as prime minister again or as foreign secretary. However this objective is disputed, and it does not appear that Rosebery was ever informed by the Relugas three that they had reached their compact, let alone what the details were. The main objectives of the plotters were to secure Cabinet places for Asquith as Leader of the Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer, with Grey as Foreign Secretary or Colonial Secretary, and Haldane as Lord Chancellor.
Liberal Imperialists and the Liberal League
Asquith, Grey, Haldane, and Rosebery were leading members of the Liberal Imperialists, a centrist faction within the Liberal Party in the late Victorian era and the Edwardian period. The Liberal Imperialists were in favour of a more positive attitude towards the development of the British Empire and Imperialism, ending the primacy of the party’s commitment to Irish Home Rule. In domestic affairs they advocated the concept of ‘national efficiency'. This policy was never definitively set out, but the implication in the speeches of its leading lights was that the Liberal Party in government should take action to improve the social conditions, the education, and the welfare of the population, as well as to reform aspects of the administration of government so as to maintain British economic, industrial and military competitiveness.