At first sight, this is an odd approach, for the Brocks never stop pointing out how ignorant she was, how crass, how deformed by snobbery (she insisted on Asquith shedding the last traces of his Yorkshire accent). Nor do they claim that she possessed an instinctive judgment to make up for her lack of formal education (she spent most of her youth on the hunting field, where she acquired her distinctive broken nose). She has no idea that Britain’s army is only a third the size of Germany’s, she thinks the war will be over in a year, then when it isn’t, she bets Kitchener that it will be over in another six months. Like her husband, she fiercely opposes conscription, then admits she was wrong. In April 1916, she offers the bizarre reflection: ‘I wonder if we have not got too big an army.’ She sees no political future for Winston Churchill with his ‘noisy mind’ and childish egotism, and doubts whether Lloyd George will ever become prime minister (three months before he topples her husband). In fact, she starts a new volume of the diary at the end of July 1916 by claiming that ‘Henry’s position in the country and in the cabinet is stronger than it has ever been.’
Despite or partly because of all her defects, the diaries never cease to entertain, and they turn out to be remarkably enlightening too, if not always in the advertised way. Margot Tennant had always possessed the self-confidence and judgmental sweep of someone born to great wealth and social prominence. Her family were pioneers of chemical bleaching. The Tennant plant outside Glasgow was the largest chemical works in the world at the time, and its towering chimney was a famous landmark, known as Tennant’s Stalk. Until her marriage at the age of thirty to the widowed Herbert Henry Asquith, she was proudest of her role as leader of the Souls. She thought that, for all their academic brilliance, Asquith’s children by his first wife, Helen, were poor successors to her own coterie:
The clever group of nowadays is very inferior to my clever group called ‘Souls’. They are sexless and soulless, and so disloyal that they only hang together by a thread of mutual love of gossip and common capacity to say bright things, read bright and blasphemous novels, modern and very moderate poems (which crop up like weeds every day); and an unimpulsive, uninspired, dry desire to go against authority under the name of anti-cant.
Margot was a goose, but she was a hissing goose. While her judgments may not always be acute, they are almost always sharp. Of Mary Curzon, for example: ‘The latter a very good type of decorative West End furniture – beautiful, silly, idle, and wonderfully, amazingly dull; always saying she is a fool and never minding it; never getting accustomed to her beauty, therefore never really interested in anything and with little or no power of admiration.’ Mrs Asquith’s arrogance is often staggering. She treats being the prime minister’s wife as a sort of high constitutional office. When the Zeppelins raid London, she sends for the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police to give her a personal report. When the government is under fire in the newspapers, she instructs the director of the government press bureau to make plans for suspending The Times and the Daily Mail. Her loathing of the reptiles rivals that of a later Downing Street consort, Denis Thatcher. ‘I hate all journalists – it’s a vile profession. Nothing is sacred; even corpses are copy.’
Her social energy and curiosity are so beguiling that at times one regrets the editors’ exclusive focus on the war and begins to wish that they had listened to Margot’s musing that it is possible that her ‘children and great-grandchildren . . . would rather read about the war in proper books, and hear from me of the kind of clothes and manners, foods and amusements of society than the perpetual political crises’.
Anne de Courcy’s Margot at War is lighter in tone and lacks scholarly pretensions or apparatus. But it conveys Margot’s milieu with a nice touch and takes time away from this enclosed self-regarding world to give us vivid and sharp vignettes of the harder times being experienced by other classes. De Courcy too records very well Margot’s tortured jealousy, not only of her husband’s dalliance with Venetia Stanley but of his daughter Violet’s almost incestuous passion for her father. Not that Margot had any real grounds for complaint. She had, after all, been flirting with Asquith while Helen was still alive. He wrote to her: ‘You have made me a different man and brought back into my life the feeling of spring time’ – just the sort of stuff he wrote Venetia twenty years later. Margot quickly came to believe that Helen was ‘no wife for him. She lives in Hampstead, and has no clothes.’
Yet Margot is anything but smug about herself. ‘Hurting people’s feelings seems to be my prevailing vice . . . I am haunted by what Mama always said: “Dear Margot! She never improves.”’ She knows why she annoys people so much: ‘Irritability, plus a very keen tongue, gets on other people’s nerves, I find, and bores them . . . It is really nerves and a devouring energy: I have several skins too few.’ She was quite aware of how mocking her stepchildren were behind her back.
Nor has she any illusions about her fellow Edwardians. Her diatribe against the modern age in December 1914 anticipates almost everything that George Dangerfield was to describe two decades later in The Strange Death of Liberal England:
There are a great many very rotten people in the London or England of today. This war has caught us at our worst. The Church never had less influence than it has today. Art is down – meaningless, grotesque pictures (cubists, Futurists, etc); invertebrate, washy, pretentious music (Debussy etc). Law is set at defiance – suffragettes, Carson’s army (lives threatened, churches and gardens burned, pictures in galleries torn; the gentry of Ireland, the Court and the West End encouraging, advertising, promoting and expecting ‘civil war’); the army cajoled, and here and there bribed, Field Marshals signing covenants against the King’s Government, Generals asking for guarantees (Gough in the Curragh row). Politicians losing all sight of truth and courtesy, hurling the foulest charges against their enemy and using the ugliest language; cutting, forgetting and trying to oust all their oldest friends; and Society so flippant, callous, idle and blasphemous as to ultimately arouse in the Denis dénouement a storm of indignation and letters of protest from complete outsiders.
It is significant that the comble of this catalogue should be the callous behaviour of the river party that had left Denis Anson to drown. The party had included Lady Diana Manners (later to marry Duff Cooper) and Margot’s stepson and daughter-in-law, Raymond and Katharine Asquith. Two years later, when Violet and her husband ‘Bongie’ Bonham Carter were laughing about Lloyd George’s behaviour, Margot was reminded of ‘that same laughter that rung down the river the night of the pleasure-party steamer when Denis Anson was drowned (the spectators went to bed and the opera while their friend’s body was floating and unfound)’.
To the ferocity of her opinions, Margot added an unquestionable courage. She lost no time in going out to Belgium in December 1914, and gives as good a description as any war correspondent of what she saw:
The Belgian trenches look very amateur to my unaccustomed eye. They are like rabbit hutches . . . The whole country for miles around inundated with sea water and the roads where they are not pavé are swamps of clinging nasty mud on each side. The only dry fields are full of the holes of German shells like a solitaire board . . . the houses are all smashed – avalanches of brick and window frames standing up in the walls like dolls’ houses – no inhabitants, but soldiers smoking or cooking in the open doorways of less ruined houses. Every church – and some beautiful – littered with bits of bombs and debris of broken stained glass and twisted lead ribbons – tops of tombs, heads of stone saints, all pell mell in the grass of the cemeteries . . . The Ypres cemetery will haunt me till I die. No hospital full of wounded ever gave me such an insight into war as that damp crowded quiet churchyard. Most of the names scrawled in pencil on bits of wood were English; where the names had been washed off their little forage caps hung on a stick . . . A Tommy was digging a grave. Two English officers with their caps in their hands were looking at a grave, just covered.
By contrast, despite her pleas and those of the C-i
n-C, Sir John French, it was not until the end of May 1915 that Asquith himself visited the Front – one more indication of how wrong his wife was when she claimed that ‘Henry was born for this war.’
The Brocks repeatedly tug our attention to Asquith’s hopeless incapacity as a war leader. He failed to set up a War Council until three months had passed, nor did he set up any sort of secretariat for reporting the decisions of cabinet. He resisted conscription until forced to give in by a public and parliamentary outcry. He resisted coalition too, dreading the prospect of working with the coarse and mannerless Tories almost as much as he dreaded the war itself. Even when coalition too was forced on him, he did all he could to keep the Tory leader, Bonar Law, off the War Council, sharing every bit of Margot’s disdain for Northern businessmen although they both came from that background.
Worst of all, though he was famous for his mastery of the House of Commons and his subtle and unflappable chairmanship in cabinet, he was utterly lacking in drive. Even his adoring daughter Violet was obliged to concede in October 1915 that ‘I have felt sometimes lately as if his clutch hadn’t got in – as if the full force of his mind was not in it and driving it forwards.’ (Is this the first recorded use of the clutch metaphor?) The unaltered tenor of Asquith’s life during the war brings to mind Hilaire Belloc’s quatrain on the Liberal election triumph of 1906:
The accursed power which stands on Privilege
(And goes with Women, and Champagne, and Bridge)
Broke – and Democracy resumed her reign:
(Which goes with Bridge, and Women and Champagne).
As the casualty lists lengthened, so did the card games and the PM’s drives through the Thames Valley with one of his ‘little harem’, hands entwined under the rug, or worse. The Brocks, who also edited Asquith’s letters to Venetia, describe their tone as that ‘of courtly rather than carnal love’, an amitié amoureuse. The letters seem rather more erotically charged than that. It would be amazing if a man of Asquith’s appetites had not insisted on physical liberties, at least up to the limit of prudence. He was, after all, a notorious groper, not safe in taxis or anywhere else. Anne de Courcy points out that of the 243 letters he wrote Venetia in 1914, more than half were sent after the outbreak of war. Asquith spills out his heart and military secrets in equal measure. What still seems shocking is how many were written during cabinet meetings, the most notorious being that of 13 January 1915, written during the all-day meeting of the War Council at which Churchill revealed his plans for a naval attack on the Dardanelles.
The duty to amuse oneself did not slacken with the approach of war. When Sir Edward Grey went to Number 10 with Haldane and Crewe bringing news of the German declaration of war on Russia, ‘he found the PM and ladies playing bridge – and Lord Crewe said it was like playing on top of a coffin. They waited till they had finished – about an hour.’ The same code applied on the Tory side. When some MPs went to haul Bonar Law back to London from a Thameside weekend party in order to denounce the government for its failure to support France, they had to sit on a grassy bank and wait until the Tory leader had finished his set of tennis.
Then, there was the drink. Margot denounces F. E. Smith for drinking too much, ‘which is always ruinous to anyone’. She cannot have been unaware that her husband was lightly pickled a lot of the time and on a couple of occasions too soused to wind up a debate in the Commons. Not for nothing did George Robey, the Prime Minister of Mirth, warble: ‘Mr Asquith says in a manner sweet and calm, / Another little drink won’t do us any harm.’ Churchill certainly matched Asquith glass for glass, but it is seldom recorded that he was incapable. Drink only made his speech more belligerent and oracular; Old Squiff became incoherent. This was an indolent, pleasure-loving elite, a clique of easy-going procrastinators. Asquith’s famous ‘wait and see’ might be taken out of context, but it expressed an essential truth about him. When war came he was genuinely grief-stricken, like almost everyone else, and until the last few days had hoped to keep Britain out of it, again like almost everyone else. For it is clear that, though the British public soon rallied to the cause, the vast majority, contrary to the old myth, contemplated the prospect of war with deep foreboding. The supposed upbeat view, that it would all be over by Christmas, where voiced at all, was mostly to keep people’s spirits up.
There was one notable exception to this universal gloom. Churchill wrote to his wife on 28 July: ‘everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse. I am interested, geared-up and happy.’ Lloyd George recalled that when he and Asquith were sitting in desperate silence in the cabinet room waiting for the British ultimatum to Germany to expire, the double doors were flung open, and in bustled Churchill to tell them that he was about to send telegrams to every British warship informing them that war had been declared and that they were to act accordingly: ‘You could see he was a really happy man. I wondered if this was the state of mind to be in at the opening of such a fearful war as this.’ Churchill’s joie de vivre was undiminished as the slaughter intensified.
Then, as later, he was anxious not to be thought a warmonger. But his actions could not be erased from the record. It was the First Sea Lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg, acting on the wide discretion Churchill had given him, who had on 26 July ordered the fleet not to disperse after its exercises off Portland; and it was Churchill and Battenberg’s orders (not brought before cabinet) on 28 July to take up war stations, followed by full mobilization on 1 August.
Not surprisingly, those historians who believe that the blame for the war should be spread among all the Great Powers have Churchill as their Exhibit A for Britain. ‘The truth is that Churchill succumbed to a temptation to frogmarch events,’ Douglas Newton declares in The Darkest Days. Newton’s close-focus examination of events in Britain over the week leading up to war has an overt polemical intent: ‘This book is meant to unsettle. It attacks the comforting consensus.’ It is a myth that war was irresistible. The larger truth of the tragedy of 1914 is that the economic, political and diplomatic systems across Europe were defective, and all the Great Powers shared in these systemic defects – the New Imperialism, Social Darwinism, economic nationalism, ethnically conscious chauvinism, a creeping militarism that looted national treasuries, weak international institutions and a new popular press that debased political culture and poisoned the popular mind. The whole system was rotten, and ‘the blunders of the German elite’ can’t be made to shoulder all the blame.
In The Sleepwalkers, Christopher Clark deploys on a grander scale and over a much longer timeframe essentially the same argument. ‘The protagonists of 1914,’ he writes at the end, ‘were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world.’ What was Britain’s share in this collective catalepsy? Newton points out that in the run-up to the war Asquith’s cabinet had a majority opposed to intervention and that when war broke out, four of its members resigned (there might have been more if Asquith had not exercised all his manipulative charms to keep the cabinet together). Nowhere else in Europe were there any such resignations. This neutralist mood was widely echoed by the public at large and by many newspapers.
Newton argues that Asquith and Grey had supplied the first fatal link in the chain by their secret naval collaboration with France, which firmed up the Entente Cordiale and was taken by the French as an implicit commitment to come to their aid. All this encouraged the pugnacious Poincaré to bolster France’s alliance with Russia. Accordingly, the Germans had some reason to feel ‘encircled’ and to conclude that a ‘preventive war’ was the only option if they hoped to remain a great power, let alone become a greater one. A similar argument is to be found in Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War (1998), where he offers a relatively benign counterfactual alternative: if the First World War had never been fought, the worst consequence would have been something like a First Cold War, in which the five Great Powers continued to maintain large military establishments, but without imped
ing their own sustained economic growth. Alternatively, if a war had been fought, but without Britain and America, the victorious Germans might have created a version of the European Union, eight decades ahead of schedule. What the Pan-Germans dreamed of, in those hectic years before 1914, was a stiller Führer of Mitteleuropa – an Angela Merkel before her time.
These are beguiling scenarios, but they in their turn deserve a little interrogation. Suppose, to start with, that Churchill had let the British fleet disperse and the German navy had nipped in and steamed up the Channel to support an invasion of Belgium and Northern France. Would the First Lord not have been found guilty of feckless negligence? Suppose that Grey had refused to make anything concrete out of the Entente, not even a few joint naval exercises with the French, and had thereby encouraged the Germans to think that Britain would stay neutral in any Franco-German war. Why would that have deterred the German High Command from planning a war on two fronts? Suppose Prince Lichnowsky had secured from Grey the guarantee he sought on Saturday, 1 August: that Britain would undertake to remain neutral if Germany gave a promise not to violate Belgian neutrality. This was the conversation reported by Grey to the British ambassador in Berlin in the famous Document 123, which non-interventionists such as Bertrand Russell made much of when it was first published and which is still made much of today. Grey refused to give any such promise: ‘I could only say that we must keep our hands free.’
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