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:
First-class pensions of £2,000 for four years’ service in an office
of not less than £5,000 a year.
Second-class pensions of £1,200 for five years’ service in an
office of less than £5,000 a year and not less than £2,000 a year.
Third-class pensions of £800 for five years’ service in an office
of less than £2,000 and more than £1,000 a year.
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:
And whereas the principle of the regulations for granting
allowances of this nature is and ought to be founded on a
consideration not only of the services performed by the individual
to the State, but of the inadequacy of his private fortune to
maintain his station in life; be it therefore enacted that from
and after the passing of this Act, whenever any person shall seek
to obtain one of the pensions before mentioned his application for
that purpose shall be made in writing to the Commissioners of his
Majesty’s Treasury, to which he shall subscribe his name, and which
shall contain not only a statement of the services performed by him
and the grounds on which such pension is claimed, but a specific
declaration that the amount of his income from other sources is
so limited as to bring him within the intent and meaning of this
Act and the principle hereinabove declared, and without such
declaration no pension as hereinbefore provided or authorized shall
be granted.
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:
I will even go so far as to affirm that if men were willing to
serve in such situations without salary, they ought not to be
permitted to do it. Ordinary service must be secured by the motives
to ordinary integrity. I do not hesitate to say that the State
which lays its foundation in rare and heroic virtues will be sure
to have its superstructure in the basest profligacy and corruption.
An honourable and fair profit is the best security against avarice
and rapacity, as in all things else a lawful and regulated
enjoyment is the best security against debauchery and excess.
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.”