Dreadnought

by Robert K. Massie

  Margot Tennant’s friendship with Helen Asquith was brief. In September 1891, while on vacation in Scotland, Helen Asquith contracted typhoid fever. She died within three weeks. Asquith returned to Hampstead with five motherless children. The eldest, Raymond, was twelve; the youngest was eighteen months old.

  Before his first wife died, Asquith felt an attraction for Margot Tennant. In her memoirs, she described the scene of their first encounter: “The dinner where I was introduced13 to my husband was in the House of Commons and I sat next to him. I was deeply impressed by his conversation and his clear Cromwellian face. He was different from the others and, although abominably dressed, had so much personality that I made up my mind at once that here was a man who could help me and would understand everything. It never crossed my brain that he was married, nor would that have mattered....

  “After dinner we all walked on the Terrace and I was flattered to find my new friend by my side.... [We] retired to the darkest part of the Terrace, where, leaning over the parapet, we gazed into the river and talked far into the night.

  “Our host and his party—thinking that I had gone home and that Mr. Asquith had returned to the House when the division bell rang—had disappeared; and when we finished our conversation the Terrace was deserted and the sky light.

  “We met a few days later dining with Sir Algernon West... and after this we saw each other constantly.”

  Margot already had made up her mind. After the first night on the Terrace she told her sister Lady Ribblesdale: “Asquith is the only kind of man14 that I could ever have married—all the others are so much waste paper.” Only a month after Helen’s death, Asquith and Margot began to write long and intimate letters. “You tell me not to stop15 loving you as if you thought I had done or would or could do so,” Asquith wrote.

  Margot Tennant was the daughter of Sir Charles Tennant, a wealthy Lowland Scottish baronet, whose three daughters had stormed London society. Margot, the most articulate and provocative, also had a reputation as a horsewoman. She was not beautiful; her own word portrait of herself serves best: “Small, rapid, nervous,16 restless, her eyes close together, a hawky nose, short upper lip, large, bony, prominent chin... conversation graphic and exaggerated... highest vitality, great self-confidence... warm-hearted, fond of people, animals, books, sport, music, exercise... intellectually self-made, ambitious, independent and self-willed... fond of admiration from both men and women and able to give it... Loves old people because she never feels they are old....”

  Many of Margot’s happiest moments were on horseback. “I ride better than most people,”17 she announced, “and have spent or wasted more time on it than any woman of intellect ought to.” Across the rural counties of England, she cleared fences and hedges, helping to kill as many as three foxes a day. The pleasure was not without cost: “I have broken both collar-bones,18 all my ribs and my kneecap, gashed my nose and had five concussions of the brain,” she declared. Once, astride a horse while waiting for her father in front of his house on Grosvenor Square, an impatient Margot rode up the front steps into the front hall, where the animal’s legs gave way on the marble floor. Horse and rider collapsed—both, this time, unhurt.

  In society, Margot Tennant was equally impulsive. Sitting next to Randolph Churchill at dinner, she told the former Chancellor, “I am afraid you resigned19 more out of temper than conviction, Lord Randolph.” “Confound your cheek!” said the astonished Churchill. “What do you know about me and my convictions?” Nevertheless, provoked, he went on: “I hate Salisbury. He jumped at my resignation like a dog at a bone.” By the end of the evening, Margot had conquered Lord Randolph. He invited her to a supper for the Prince of Wales. Determined to shock, she arrived in a white muslin dress with a transparent chemise. “Do look at Miss Tennant!”20 tittered the other women. “She is in her nightgown!” Margot overheard and, when the Prince arrived, immediately told him what was being said. The Prince asked her to sit next to him at supper.

  Margot Tennant’s intelligence was quick, perfect for word games and brittle repartee. At eighty, Gladstone wrote her a poem and left her father in the drawing room to come to her bedroom for a talk. Tennyson read his poems to her. Skilled at verbal jousting, she was ruthless with fashionable women who challenged her. Lady Londonderry once thought to unseat Margot by saying to her before an audience, “I am afraid you have not read21 the book.” “I am afraid, Lady Londonderry, you have not read the preface,” replied Margot. “The book is dedicated to me.”

  It was not easy for Margot to decide whom to marry. When she met Asquith she was twenty-seven; ten London seasons had passed and she still was not ready to choose. She idolized Arthur Balfour and at one point there were rumors that Balfour and Margot were engaged. Balfour disposed of them quickly. “I hear you are going to marry22 Margot Tennant,” a friend said to him. “No, that is not so,” Balfour replied. “I rather think of having a career of my own.” Margot’s most serious suitor appealed to the outdoor side of her nature. Peter Flower, a younger brother of Lord Battersea, was handsome and charming, a famous amateur boxer, and one of the best horsemen in England. They met when he rushed to her side after she fell from a horse. Margot wrote to Peter every day for nine years and finally agreed to an engagement. “I will marry you, Peter,23 if you get some serious occupation,” she said. “But I won’t marry an idle man.” Peter Flower could not reform. He continued to gamble and waste money until, eventually, to avoid his creditors, he sold his horses and moved to India.

  Asquith was different. And yet she kept him waiting for two years while she made up her mind. He continued his pursuit. He kneeled with her and prayed at the grave of her sister Laura, who had died in childbirth. To a note she sent him in the House of Commons, he replied, “This afternoon as I sat24 on the Treasury Bench answering questions, I got your telegram and read it furtively, and crammed it hastily into my trousers pocket, until I could get out of the House and read it over and over again in my little room.”

  When it came, the news that the brilliant Liberal Home Secretary was going to marry the vivid Margot Tennant amused and alarmed London society. His friends worried that marrying so frivolous a person as Margot would ruin his career; her friends were concerned that taking on a man who disliked hunting and outdoor games, and who had five children, would extinguish Margot’s spirit. Margot herself had turned the idea over and over: “I was filled with profound misgivings25 when I realized that the man whose friendship was what I valued most on earth wanted to marry me. Groping as I had been for years to find a character and intellect superior to my own, I did not feel equal to facing it when I found it.... I realised the natural prejudice that all children since the beginning of the world must have against stepmothers....” Jowett, Margot’s friend as well as Asquith’s, had warned her that she would have to change. He saw her, he had written to her, as a young woman who “wastes her time26 and her gifts scampering from one country house to another... she has made a great position, though slippery and dangerous.” Specifically, he warned, “It is not possible27 to be a leader of fashion and to do your duty to the five children.”

  Margot decided that Jowett was wrong and her own misgivings unfounded. She married Asquith on May 10, 1894, at St. George’s Church in Hanover Square. The first meeting of the Rosebery Cabinet was postponed in order not to clash with the ceremony. Haldane served as best man, and four prime ministers, past, present, and future, were on hand: Gladstone, Rosebery, Balfour, and Asquith himself. The family moved into a comfortable house at 20 Cavendish Square, which, except for the eight years in Downing Street, they occupied for a quarter of a century. As Margot had calculated, it was Asquith’s life, not hers, that changed. Fourteen servants at Cavendish Street were kept busy with luncheon and dinner parties. The Asquiths were guests at dinners, summer balls, and weekend house parties. Asquith fitted in smoothly and seemed to enjoy himself. He balked only at riding and hunting. Soon after his marriage to Margot, he went deer hunting for the first and only time
. “I fired two shots28 and killed two stags,” he wrote. “Content with this proof of my prowess, I put by my rifle and have never used it since. I believe I still hold the record among deer stalkers of never having fired a shot without killing my quarry.”

  When the Rosebery Cabinet left office, beginning the long decade of Salisbury-Balfour Unionist rule, Asquith went back to the bar, mixing law with service in the House of Commons. Cavendish Square and the social pace which Margot set required money, and Asquith brought in between £5,000 and £10,000 a year.

  As a former Cabinet Minister and Privy Councillor, he outranked most of the judges before whom he appeared and he could afford a touch of irreverence. “Supposing I were to give29 you an area marked by meridians of longitude. Would that constitute a place, Mr. Asquith?” asked Mr. Justice Wright. “That, my Lord,” Asquith shot back, “would be merely a matter of degree.”

  Asquith disapproved of the Jameson Raid. “An adventure more childishly conceived30 or more clumsily executed it is impossible to imagine,” he said. When the captured raiders were brought to London for trial, he condemned their reception: “Having done by their blundering folly31 as great a disservice as it is possible to render... to the best interests of the Empire, [they] were, on their arrival in England, acclaimed and fêted by a section of London society as the worthy successors of Drake and Raleigh.” Curiously, two members of that section of London society were Mr. and Mrs. Asquith. “Dr. Jim32 had personal magnetism and could do what he liked with my sex,” Margot confessed. “My husband and I33 met the Doctor first—a week or ten days before his trial and sentence—at Georgina Lady Dudley’s house; and the night before he went to prison he dined with us alone at Cavendish Square.” In these early years, Margot proved Jowett wrong by establishing a good relationship with Asquith’s five children, particularly Raymond. She lost her own first baby in May 1895 and, eventually, two others. Two children, Elizabeth, born in 1897, and Anthony, born in 1902, survived.

  During ten years in opposition, Asquith’s political reputation continued to grow. In 1898, when Lord Rosebery resigned the party leadership and Sir William Harcourt declined to accept it, there remained only Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith. Asquith had youth and energy, and was far more effective as a speaker, but ruled himself out because he was poor. Margot did not give up so easily. She wrote to Arthur Balfour, asking him to persuade her wealthy father to make Asquith independent of the bar. Balfour, although he was leader of the Unionist Party in the Commons, agreed and wrote to Sir Charles Tennant that the greatest position in the Liberal Party was within his son-in-law’s reach, but that Asquith could not compete without jeopardizing Margot’s comfort. “No man can lead34 either the Opposition or the House of Commons if he is tied by a profession. A party may not give much but it claims everything,” Balfour urged. Sir Charles refused. He was a dedicated Liberal and believed in seniority and precedence. Campbell-Bannerman was sixteen years older than Asquith, had served longer in the Cabinet, and was entitled to the leadership. He, Tennant, would do nothing to obstruct this natural succession. Asquith accepted C.B.’s leadership until they were separated by the Boer War. Even then, he maintained politeness and respect. During the “war to the knife—and fork”35 over C.B.’s “methods of barbarism” speech, Asquith said publicly, “There is nothing in the world36 so uncongenial to me as to enter on any kind of public disputation with an old friend and colleague by whose side I have often fought in the past and by whose side I hope to fight again in the future.” Even Asquith’s part in the Relugas Compact was excused (the more easily, no doubt, because C.B. triumphed).

  As Chancellor of the Exchequer in Campbell-Bannerman’s Cabinet, Asquith introduced two budgets and powerfully supported his chief in parliamentary warfare. (Asquith once described one of his own speeches as one “to which I can fairly say37 no answer was possible.”) C.B.’s command, on occasions when Balfour was shredding a Liberal argument in debate, was “Go and bring the sledgehammer.”38 Thus summoned, Asquith appeared in the House to reply.

  In March 1908, when the King was leaving for Biarritz, the Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, was dying at 10 Downing Street. Before he left, King Edward told Asquith that if anything happened to C.B., he meant to send for the Chancellor. On April 1, the Prime Minister sent a letter of resignation to the King; on April 4 the sovereign wrote to Asquith, asking him to form a government and to come to Biarritz to kiss hands. The following day, this news was across London and sixty reporters waited outside the house on Cavendish Square. Asquith remained secluded until the night of the sixth, when, after dinner, he left his house in secret, drove to Charing Cross Station, and took the nine o’clock boat train to Paris. Traveling alone, wearing a thick overcoat and a cap pulled down over his eyes, he eluded pursuit. In Biarritz, he put on a frock coat and called on the King who, in deference to his doctors, had taken a ground-floor suite at the Hôtel du Palais to avoid the strain of climbing stairs. In King Edward’s reception room, Asquith accepted the commission as Prime Minister, kissed the monarch’s hand,fn2 and went to lunch in the next room. King Edward spoke genially to Asquith between bouts of bronchial coughing. That night, the new Prime Minister returned through driving rain to dine with the King and his vacation companions, Sir Ernest Cassel and Alice Keppel.

  In Biarritz, Asquith gave the King the names of his new Cabinet. Most of Campbell-Bannerman’s Cabinet would remain, but he would promote Lloyd George to Chancellor of the Exchequer. The resulting vacancy at the Board of Trade would be filled by thirty-four-year-old Winston Churchill. Lord Tweedmouth, increasingly erratic at the Admiralty, would be replaced by the efficient Reginald McKenna, the son of a London civil servant. The most significant of these changes was the promotion of Lloyd George to the number two position in the Liberal government. Originally, Asquith, having prepared but not yet introduced his third budget, had planned to continue as Chancellor in addition to serving as Premier, as Gladstone had done. He changed his mind in order to give the Cabinet political balance. With Asquith as Prime Minister, Grey as Foreign Secretary, and Haldane at the War Office, the Cabinet had lost the balance between Liberal Imperialists and Radical pacifists which C.B.’s position as Prime Minister had provided. The Radicals now feared that the imperialist wing of the party could act as it liked. To calm these fears, Asquith established Lloyd George, the ablest of the Radicals, at his side.

  Asquith, during his eight years of Premiership, was determined to maintain a balance, to go down the center, not to stray to right or left. He always warmly supported Grey and Haldane, who remained his closest friends in the Cabinet, permitting Grey almost absolute authority over British foreign policy. But in Cabinet meetings, in the Commons, and on the stump, he was Everyman’s leader. It was said of Asquith that he had no party within his own government. It was not that Asquith did not know his own mind. “Asquith was a man who knew40 where he stood on every question of life and affairs... scholarship, politics, law, philosophy and religion,” wrote Churchill. “When the need required it, his mind opened and shut smoothly and exactly, like the breech of a gun... once he had heard the whole matter thrashed out, the conclusion came with a snap; and each conclusion, so far as lay with him, was final.” Nor did Asquith shy from the ruthlessness required of those in power. “The first essential41 for a Prime Minister is to be a good butcher,” Asquith said to Churchill when he offered Cabinet office to the younger man in 1908. “There are several who must be pole-axed now,” he added. Time was a favorite instrument of Asquith’s government. “The Right Honorable Gentleman must wait42 and see,” was his frequent retort in Parliament. In Cabinet, where the gravity of an issue could lead to the resignation of important ministers or even the breakup of the government, Asquith ruled by postponement. “What we have heard today43 leaves much food for thought,” he would say at the end of a meeting. “Let us all reflect before we meet again how we can bring ourselves together.” He conducted Cabinet meetings as a chairman of the board, seeking consensus and effec
tiveness. “In Cabinet, he was44 markedly silent,” Churchill said. “Indeed, he never spoke a word... if he could get his way without it. He sat, like the great Judge he was, hearing with trained patience the case deployed on every side, now and then interjecting a question or brief comment... which gave matters a turn towards the goal he wished to reach.”

  As a young man in the 1870s and 1880s, Asquith’s recreation had lain in political discussion. Haldane, who had known the Asquith of Helen Melland and Hampstead, mildly disapproved of the change effected after his friend married Margot. “In his earlier days,45 Asquith was a very serious person,” Haldane noted. “By degrees, particularly after his second marriage, he went more and more into society and was somewhat diverted from the sterner mode of life with which he and I were familiar.” By the time he was Prime Minister, Asquith made absolute distinction between work and play. “He disliked ‘talking shop’46 out of business hours,” Churchill said. “With Asquith, either the Court was open or it was shut. If it was shut, there was no use knocking on the door.... When work was done, he played... he delighted in feminine society; he was always interested to meet a new and charming personality. Women of every age were eager to be taken in to dinner by him. They were fascinated by his gaiety and wit, and by his evident interest in all their doings.”

  In 1908, when he became Prime Minister, Asquith was fifty-six, Margot forty-four. Over the years, a distance had appeared between them. Childbirth was difficult and dangerous for her and she spent months recovering. “For many years47 after my first confinement, I was a delicate woman,” she wrote. She suffered severe insomnia. “No one who has not experienced48... real sleeplessness can imagine what this means,” she said. “Insomnia is akin to insanity.” Her last surviving child, Anthony, was born in 1902, but she lost another at birth in 1907. In 1908, “when my husband became Prime Minister,49 I went to St. Paul’s Cathdral and prayed that I might die rather than hamper his life as an invalid.” The vivacious and indefatigable Margot, the brilliant conversationalist of the Souls who had kept the young Home Secretary up until dawn on the terrace of the House of Commons, did not enjoy the subordinate role of a politician’s—even a prime minister’s—wife. When, in her presence, he repeated old stories for new audiences, she was visibly bored. “I am horribly impatient50 and it is only by strong self-control that I ever listen at all,” she admitted in 1905. She offered advice to everyone, requested or not. “Margot I find rather trying51 as a visitor,” said Pamela McKenna. “She criticizes everything incessantly... and always in the unkindest way.” She departed from gatherings “leaving a wake52 of injured and weeping people.” Ironically, as Asquith turned away from political discussion as recreation, Margot found it increasingly fascinating. He came home from his desk or the House of Commons to a political gadfly. “I have sometimes walked up and down53 that room till I felt as though I was going mad,” he told his daughter Violet, describing his home life. “When one needed rest, to have a thing like the Morning Post leader flung at one—all the obvious reasons for and against more controversially put even than by one’s colleagues.” Violet’s sympathetic reaction to her father’s complaints strained her own relationship with Margot. In 1909, Asquith wrote to Margot, “It is a grief to me54 that the two women I care for most should be on terms of chronic misunderstanding.”