‘Time's Strange Revenges’: Coalition and the India Office, November 1916 – July 1917

Like most Conservatives, by the spring of 1915 Chamberlain was gravely concerned by the Asquith government's conduct of the war. He was also convinced that the situation demanded a radical response. During the May 1915 crisis he played a significant role both in stiffening Law's resolve to join a coalition and in converting those like Carson and Cecil who doubted the wisdom of such a course: a position he defended with the argument that ‘the responsibility of refusing is even greater than that of accepting, and in fact we have no choice’. In the ministerial reshuffle which followed, he lobbied strenuously on behalf of Milner and was prepared to ‘make any personal sacrifice … to secure his inclusion’. Characteristically, however, Chamberlain took no part in the manoeuvring for office personally and declared himself content to ‘go anywhere where I can be useful’. In the event, Milner was excluded and Chamberlain received the India Office. Even with the benefit of a close relationship with the experienced Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, the burdens of this new department soon proved formidable. Chamberlain had no knowledge of India and its problems beyond his brief chairmanship of a Commission on Indian Finance two years before. Moreover, by 1915 India was deeply involved in the Imperial war effort and Chamberlain inherited a campaign in Mesopotamia with the realization that formal constitutional control from London would inevitably be much diluted during wartime. In his first letter to the Viceroy he had thus urged ‘a rigorous concentration of effort on the essential points of the struggle’ because there was ‘always a danger that the General on the spot will see his own needs and opportunities so strongly that they will not take their proper place in the perspective of the whole scheme of the war’. Unfortunately this proved to be an all too prescient apprehension.