Asquith admitted “a slight weakness55 for the companionship of clever and attractive women” and found relief in their society. At dinner parties, on weekends at country houses, the Prime Minister would often be found flirting, holding hands, and playing bridge late at night with young women charmed to be noticed by the most influential political figure in the land. Margot refrained from objection and even declared that Henry needed his “little harem”56 to take his mind from his work.
In 1912, at sixty, Asquith fell in love, perhaps more completely than he ever had been with Helen Melland or Margot Tennant, with Venetia Stanley, twenty-six. Venetia, the youngest daughter of Lord Sheffield, a Liberal nobleman, and a first cousin of Clementine Churchill, was a contemporary and close friend of Asquith’s daughter Violet; she was a frequent guest at 10 Downing Street. Venetia was tall, with dark eyes and a strong nose and face; a young male friend described her as “a splendid, virginal, comradely57 creature” with “a masculine intellect.” She was widely read and vaguely eccentric; she kept as pets a bear cub, a penguin, and a fox. In 1910 and 1911, Asquith wrote occasionally to Venetia, unburdening himself of some of the cares of daily life. In February 1912, she accompanied him and Violet on a Sicilian holiday. Later that spring, on a Sunday morning, he and Venetia were sitting in the dining room of a country house “talking and laughing58 just in our old accustomed terms... Suddenly,” he wrote in notes for a never-published autobiography, “in a single instant without premonition on my part or any challenge on hers, the scales dropped from my eyes; the familiar features and smile and gestures and words assumed an absolutely new perspective; what had been completely hidden from me was in a flash half-revealed, and I dimly felt, hardly knowing, not at all understanding it, that I had come to a turning point in my life.”
Over the next three years, the Prime Minister wrote 560 letters—over 300,000 words—to Venetia Stanley.fn3 Most of the letters were on paper emblazoned “10 Downing Street,” although they were written from many different places. By 1914, the letters began “My darling,” “My own darling,” or “My own most beloved.” He declared his love and need, and begged for a sign that she returned his passion: “You have given me,59 and continue to give me, the supreme happiness of my life.” “Without you, I must often have failed, and more than once gone down. You have sustained and enriched every day of my life.” He also wrote about literature and politics, gossiped about society, and described in intimate detail meetings of the Cabinet and War Council.
By July 1914, Asquith’s love for Venetia dominated his thoughts; he signed one letter: “Your lover—for all time.”60 During the deadlock over Ulster and the crisis preceding the war, he wrote to her two or three times a day, sometimes during Cabinet meetings, sometimes while sitting on the front bench of the House of Commons. On Fridays, he took her for drives in his chauffeured car. Occasionally, in the early evening, he would call on her at her parents’ London house. There seems to have been no physical intimacy; Asquith described in 1915 what Venetia meant to him:
“Darling—shall I tell you61 what you have been and are to me? First, outwardly and physically unapproachable and unique. Then, in temperament and character, often baffling and elusive, but always more interesting and attractive and compelling than any woman I have ever seen or known. In solid intellect, and real insight into all situations, great or small, incomparably first. And above all, and beyond all, in the intimacy of perfect confidence and understanding, for two years past, the pole star and lode-star of my life.”
Asquith’s obsession did not escape notice. Lady Sheffield, Venetia’s mother, worried about her daughter’s involvement with the married Prime Minister and had planned in August 1914 to send Venetia on a lengthy Mediterranean tour; war intervened. Margot knew about Venetia. Although, years later, she wrote, “No woman should expect62 to be the only woman in her husband’s life,” at the time she was deeply wounded. Venetia, she said, was “a woman without refinement63 or any imagination whatever.” As for her husband: “I’m far too fond64 of H. to show him how ill and miserable it makes me.” “Oh,” she cried, “if only Venetia would marry.”65
In the middle of May 1915, the relationship ended abruptly when Venetia told Asquith that she had accepted the proposal of Edwin Montagu, one of the Prime Minister’s former private secretaries. Montagu had proposed to Venetia in 1912 and been turned down. Early in 1915, she changed her mind. Even so, she continued to write to Asquith for three months until, at Montagu’s insistence, she admitted the truth. Venetia renounced Asquith reluctantly. “Why can’t I marry you66 and yet go on making him happy?” she pleaded with Montagu. “But neither of you think that fun and I suppose my suggesting it or thinking it possible shows to you how peculiar I am emotionally.” Once her decision was made, she looked back on the three years that had ended and said, “I know quite well67 that if it hadn’t been me it would have been someone else or a series of others.”
fn1 Until he was forty, Asquith was known to his family and friends as Herbert. His second wife, Margot Tennant, called him Henry. Throughout his life, Asquith always referred to himself as H. H. Asquith, even signing letters to his mother in this fashion when he was nine.
fn2 It was an odd arrangement: The King of England, incognito as Duke of Lancaster, appointing a prime minister in a foreign hotel. The Times characterized it as “an inconvenient and dangerous39 departure from precedent.”
fn3 Asquith’s letters to Venetia were discovered by her daughter after her death in 1948. Venetia’s letters to Asquith have never been found.
Chapter 31
Sir Edward Grey and Liberal Foreign Policy
Sir Edward Grey was a country man. He regarded the Foreign Office, where he spent eleven years as Foreign Secretary, as a dungeon from which he escaped on weekends to the sunlit glades of the New Forest or to the waters of a Hampshire trout stream. At his desk, he worked with devotion but without joy; he preferred talking about the majesty of Handel or the beauty of Wordsworth to talking about the balance of power or the Triple Alliance. He left Britain only once during his term of office, and spoke only a few phrases of primitive French, but he was the greatest British Foreign Secretary of the century.
Grey was the junior conspirator of the Relugas Compact trio. He was born in 1862, ten years after Asquith, six years after Haldane. His roots were at Fallodon, the family estate in Northumberland near the Scottish border, within sight of the North Sea. His grandfather, Sir George Grey, was a country baronet who spent forty years in the House of Commons and served as Home Secretary in the Liberal Cabinets of Lord John Russell and Viscount Palmerston. Grey’s father was a retired colonel who fought in the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny and then continued for fifteen years as one of the Prince of Wales’ rotating equerries. During one period of attendance on the Prince, Colonel Grey suddenly died of pneumonia at Sandringham. He left his wife with seven children; Edward, twelve, was the eldest. Sir George Grey promptly retired from Parliament and assumed a paternal role with his fatherless grandchildren.
At fourteen, Edward Grey went to Winchester. He was marked by his skill at Greek and Latin and by his desire to be alone. He was an exceptional tennis player and cricketer, but preferred to wander off to the river Itchen, which flowed past the school playing fields. There, the distant schoolboy shouts were erased by the babble of the water and Grey lost himself casting his fly between the reeds. From Winchester, Grey went to Balliol, where he led a life “of pure pleasure1... it led to nothing but left no scars, nothing to be regretted or effaced.” When he was twenty, his grandfather died, leaving him the baronetcy, the Fallodon estate of two thousand acres, and responsibility for his mother and younger brothers and sisters. He still did no work and in 1884 was sent down by Jowett. “Sir Edward Grey,”2 wrote the Master of Balliol, “having been repeatedly admonished for idleness, and having shown himself entirely ignorant of the work set him during the vacation, was sent down.” Grey returned to Fallodon, where, left to himself, he began to read the
books he had ignored at Oxford. At the end of the term, he returned to Balliol, took his examinations, and won an undistinguished degree.fn1
Eighteen months after leaving the university, Grey married a Northumberland squire’s daughter, Dorothy Widdrington, whom he had met at a shooting party. She, like Grey, was a proud, interior person, uneasy in society. Her mind was subtle and worked rapidly; she judged questions on their merits “in the clear, cold light3 of reason.” She was as disdainful of cant as she was of trivia. “Her downright question ‘Why?’ often startled and almost terrified a careless talker.” Grey, whose stern exterior belied an inner gentleness, depended on Dorothy. A few weeks before their marriage, he wrote to her: “I believe, however busy,4 however active, however flustered a man may be with the battle of life, he is always looking for some place where he may lay his inner heart, his soft and tender nature, in safety; else there is danger that he may lose it altogether or find it injured in the rough struggle. Such a place he finds in a woman, and when he really loves, he confides it all to her freely without reserve.” They had no children and were content; each wrote to the other every day they were apart.
In November 1886, a month after his marriage, Grey, twenty-three, won a seat in the House of Commons, defeating a Percy from the clan which had been lords of Northumberland since the Middle Ages. Soon after Grey’s arrival in Parliament, Gladstone split the Liberal Party over Home Rule. During the next six years of opposition, Grey met Asquith and Haldane and formed lasting friendships and a lifelong political alliance.
In 1892, Gladstone returned to Downing Street for the fourth and last time. Grey was selected by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Rosebery, as Parliamentary Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs. He had no previous experience, training, or special interest in foreign affairs, but, in the parliamentary system, expertise is supplied, not by the politicians who move in and out of senior government offices, but by the permanent civil servants who function at a level just below. Grey had no say in the making of policy; his assignment—Rosebery was in the House of Lords—was to explain and defend the government’s policy in the Commons. The House soon noticed that when Grey spoke it was with precision and authority. The most important of his statements was made on March 28, 1895. Rumors had reached London that France was preparing an expedition across Africa to the headwaters of the Nile. Great Britain claimed predominance over this region for Egypt and herself. “I cannot think it possible5 these rumors deserve credence,” Grey told the House, “because the advance of a French expedition under secret instructions right from the other side of Africa into a territory over which our claims have been known for so long, would not be merely an inconsistent and unexpected act, but it must be perfectly well-known to the French Government that it would be an unfriendly act, and would be so viewed by England.” Joseph Chamberlain immediately rose from the Opposition Bench to declare that what Grey had said was “the fullest and clearest statement6 of the policy of the Government with regard to this subject that we have yet had from a responsible Minister.” In fact, Grey’s statement—which came to be known in diplomatic history as the “Grey Declaration”—had not been approved by the Cabinet. The morning after, it was the subject of a lively debate at 10 Downing Street. Lord Rosebery, then Prime Minister, eventually won endorsement of Grey’s position against the opposition of ministers who felt that Britain had no business on the Upper Nile, or, indeed, in Egypt.
In 1895, Lord Rosebery’s government fell over the question of the supply of cordite and the Liberal Party stepped aside for another ten years of Unionist rule. Grey was not unhappy to leave office. “There was no pleasure for me7 in the House of Commons work,” he wrote. “I could express clearly to others what I had previously made clear to my own mind, but beyond that there was no natural gift for speaking.” Grey remained in Parliament between 1895 and 1906, but, out of office, he was able to devote more time to private life.
The appeal of a peaceful life, primarily a life spent amidst nature, was at war with political ambition in both Edward and Dorothy Grey. In 1893, when Grey was Under Secretary at the Foreign Office, Dorothy explored the subject for three hours with Haldane. At the end, Haldane went away saying, “I understand at last.8 You must not stay in politics. It is hurting your lives. It is bad.” Dorothy immediately wrote to Edward at the House of Commons: “I... said that if we went on9 crushing our natural sympathies we should probably end by destroying our married life, because the basis and atmosphere of its beauty would be taken away and it would die.... He [Haldane] said he had felt in himself how much your unhappiness in office made it difficult to talk to you or be intimate, and that he had been feeling there was no spring or heart in either of us.... We talked for a long time, he arguing in favor of giving up politics and I against it, and I believe he had the best of it. I was quite touched by him; we must be nice to our Haldane. He thinks now that it would be quite reasonable if you resigned at once, though I told him we had no idea of that.” Haldane stuck to his view only a few months. Before long, he was writing to Dorothy: “The one blow10 that I should feel a heavy and even a crushing one would be that Edward should leave politics. For me it would rob the outlook of much of its hope and meaning. I think his presence is of the... [greatest] importance to the Liberal Party. And how much I believe in that Liberal Party and in the work we have to do, you know.” The issue was to perplex Grey all his life: on the one hand, he believed that the best life possible lay in contemplation of God’s world of nature; on the other, his stern sense, stemming from a Whig ancestry, of duty to party and country, forbade him the naturalist’s life he craved.
They found a solution in compromise. From the moment they arrived in London, Edward and Dorothy Grey agreed that town life was “intensely distasteful.”11 Needing a refuge, and finding Northumberland and Fallodon too distant for weekends, Grey recalled the rippling, trout-filled waters of the river Itchin flowing past the playing fields of Winchester. He and Dorothy acquired half an acre of meadow sloping down to the stream and built a small weekend cottage of brick and wood. Buried in roses, it became a haven and sanctuary. Nothing was allowed to intrude; politics were banished and weekend invitations refused. “The cottage became dearer12 to us than Fallodon itself,” Grey wrote. “It was something special and sacred, outside the normal stream of life.” There were no servants; a village woman came across the fields on weekends to clean and cook. This style of life met Grey’s definition of luxury: “that of having everything13 that we did want and nothing that we did not want.”
In London during the spring and summer, Grey and his wife waited eagerly for Saturday mornings. On Saturdays, they rose by alarm clock, left their house on Grosvenor Road at five-thirty A.M., walked across Lambeth Bridge, and took a six o’clock train from Waterloo Station. By eight A.M. they were having breakfast in their cottage. On midsummer Saturdays, Grey fished from ten until two, and then again from seven until nine in the evening, when the river faded into dusk. He described these days as “an earthly paradise.”14
“The angler is by the river15 not later than ten o’clock: the stream is lively but quiet, and here and there the surface is broken by the recurring swirl of a swaying reed; but no life disturbs it.... Not a bird skims the surface of the water, not a fly is to be seen, not a sign of a living creature under it. But the fresh light air is like a caress, the warm sun shines interrupted only by the occasional passage of small, white clouds, the water meadows are bright with buttercups, and the woods and hedges that are on their borders are white with hawthorne blossoms or lit by the candelabra of horse-chestnut flower. Birds of many sorts, most notably blackbirds, are singing, and the angler in his hour of waiting has such entertainment as seems more than imperfect man can deserve or comprehend. Presently—it may be soon or not till after an hour or more—flies begin to appear on the surface of the water, the rise of a trout is seen; in a short time all is life and agitation. Trout are rising everywhere, some audibly, some without a sound; flies are hatching out all over the riv
er, sitting or skipping in little flights on the water or rising into the air; a moving network of birds, swifts, swallows, and martins is on the river; a rush of bird life and the swish of the wings of the swifts is heard as they pass and repass up and down the stream; and the angler, no longer inert, is on his knees in the midst of it all, at convenient distance from a rising trout, one arm in constant action and the rod and line making a busy sound in the air as he dries and casts his fly. Now for two hours or more his life is energy, expectation, anxiety, resource and effort....”
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