by Roy Jenkins
At the end of 1869 Asquith won a Classical Scholarship at Balliol. At that time only two were awarded each year, and as the reputation of the college was already very high it would have been a great achievement for any boy, and was particularly so for one from a relatively unknown school which had never previously gained a Balliol scholarship. He was captain of the school at the time, and was riding confidently and even a little complacently upon a high tide of early success. In his academic work his contempt for what he regarded as inferior disciplines outside the main stream of traditional learning had the paradoxical effect of making him rigidly specialised. A contemporary recorded that “ he had little interest in any subject except Classics and English,” and that he spent his mathematics hours composing Greek verses, his chemistry hours in making “ irreverent jests ” and his German hours in diverting the master from the teaching of such an unimportant language.h This being the bent of his mind—and given the fact that he was never intellectually very tolerant—it was an advantage to him that he spent his schooldays in the crowded heart of the capital rather than in some cloistered academic grove. In the latter surroundings he might have grown up a classical pedant with little comprehension of the mid-nineteenth century world around him. In London, “ generally taking a little stroll in Cheapside after lunch, but (getting) awfully knocked about during it,” as he expressed it in a letter to his mother, such detachment was much more difficult. And Asquith’s interest in everything touching the conduct of public affairs was always strong. He went frequently to the House of Commons and heard some of the great parliamentary reform debates of the midsixties. He wrote meticulous accounts of them to his mother, and even practised some amateur analysis of the division lists. He went also to meetings of the City Court of Common Council at Guildhall and, more frequently, to the Law Courts. Here his early sense of fastidious discrimination was exercised to the full.
“I have just returned from the Court of Queen’s Bench where the Lord Chief Justice1 is presiding,” he wrote to his mother at the age of twelve. “ One of the Counsel had just made a very agitated address to the jury, and at its conclusion a witness was put into the box whose evidence, being that of an illiterate man on an uninteresting subject, I did not care to hear. The man in question was a foreman or something of that kind of a shipping or dock company. I want to hear the Chief Justice sum up, and so I shall go to the Court again on the conclusion of this.”i
1 Sir Alexander Cockburn.
Asquith’s intellectual superiority did nothing to detract from the firmness of his radicalism. He disapproved strongly of Robert Lowe’s position on the franchise; he went to the Crystal Palace to attend a demonstration of welcome to Garibaldi; he spent part of a Founder’s Day holiday attending a Reform League meeting in support of Irish Church disestablishment—having spent the other part of it listening to a lecture on Christianity and progress at the Congregational Union; and he noted with approval that when he heard Archdeacon Wordsworth preach “ a regular defence of the Irish Church ” in Westminster Abbey, many of the congregation walked out in the middle. “ Poor Dean Stanley sitting opposite the pulpit had the pleasure of being cursed in his own Abbey,”j he added. The mystical aspects of religion never meant much to Asquith,1 but at this stage of his life, and indeed for many years afterwards, he was a great listener to sermons. But so he was to almost any form of oratory. The presentation of ideas, perhaps more than their formulation, constantly exercised his mind.
Nevertheless the impact upon Asquith of the London of the ’sixties was not all associated with oratory or the higher arts of government. Walking up Ludgate Hill to school one morning in 1864 he came upon the bodies of five murderers, hanging with white caps over their head, outside Newgate. Half an hour before they had been publicly executed, and their corpses were still available for inspection. On another, less macabre occasion he inspected, in a Fleet Street booth, the “ fattest lady in the world.” And towards the end of his schooldays he began, with a great sense of daring, to go to plays. Forty-seven years later, after driving past “ the rather squalid little house ” in Liverpool Road where he had lodged, he recorded in a letter his memory of this departure:
1 Although in later life he came to enjoy the liturgy and prayers of the Church of England.
“ I remember vividly the guilty sense of adventure with which I slipped out early one evening to pay my first visit to the theatre, and the care which I took to cover my tracks on my return. We had been brought up to regard the theatre as one of the devil’s most damnable haunts; I am sure my mother had never entered one in her life, and her scruples were fully shared by the old Puritan couple—a Dispensary Doctor and his wife—with whom I lodged. I must have been quite 16 when I took the plunge; the play was a now forgotten one of Robertson’s called “ Dreams,” and the heroine’s part was taken by Miss Madge Robertson— now Mrs. Kendal—whom I regarded with true moon-calf devotion. Ce nest que le premier pas ani coute, and after a time I became an habitual play-goer, i.e, by careful economy I saved up in the course of a fortnight the 2/- needed for a seat in the pit, and in order to secure a place in the front row I have often stood outside the door for one or even two hours.”k
In another letter, two days’ later, he reverted to the impression made upon him by Miss Robertson. “ I believe that Mrs. Kendal... was the first woman I at all idealised,” he wrote: “ she was not really beautiful, but had a most alluring voice, and to a callow novice in the pit seemed almost more than human. But of course she was as remote as a star from one’s daily life.”l
The end of Asquith’s schooldays meant the temporary end of his life in London. The summer of 1870 was the transition period. In July, a few days after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, he was delivering his already quoted address at his last City of London Founder’s Day, and receiving all the acclamation due to an unusually successful boy at the pinnacle of his school career. In October, when the French Empire had fallen and German troops had invested a Republican Paris, he went to Oxford.
It was not only Asquith’s first term as a Balliol undergraduate. It was also Benjamin Jowett’s first term as Master of the college. Jowett, the most famous of Victorian Oxford figures, had been balked of this ambition sixteen years earlier when Dr. Scott had been elected over his head. This defeat was the beginning for Jowett of nearly decade of chagrin, controversy and bitterness, but it led to no such diminution of energy as had afflicted his almost equally notable contemporary, Mark Pattison, in similar circumstances.1 By 1864 Jowett had established his supremacy in Balliol and had far more influence upon the affairs of the college than his rival in the Master’s Lodging. His election (on September 7th, 1870) was such a foregone conclusion that the occasion for it—Scott’s appointment to the Deanery of Rochester—arose directly out of a plot between Gladstone and Robert Lowe the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to make a vacancy for him.
1 Pattison was defeated for the Rectorship of Lincoln in 1851.
Asquith, who was later to be regarded as the epitome of the Balliol man, therefore arrived at the college at the beginning of its most renowned Mastership. But the conjunction of events was not as significant as it looks. Balliol’s period of distinction began long before Jowett became Master and almost equally long before his influence became predominant. The change from an old foundation with undistinguished buildings and a Scottish connection into a great forcing house of late nineteenth and early twentieth century politicians, administrators, ecclesiastics and men of letters began with Bishop Parsons, who was elected in 1798. It continued apace under “ the Old Master,” Henry Jenkyns, whose reign lasted from 1819 to 1854. This undistinguished High Church Tory, notable principally for his small white pony, was an improbable figure to preside over a great period of reform and rehabilitation, yet somehow or other he allowed it to happen under him.
“ No College in Oxford,” H. W. C. Davis was able to write of this period several decades later, “ has parted with the old tradition to the same extent as Balliol
. ”m And he went on to explain that he meant by this that Balliol had anticipated of its own free will most of the reforms which were imposed upon the rest of the University, first by the Royal Commission of 1854, and then by that of 1877. By its attitude to religious tests, to married tutors, to open scholarships, and above all, perhaps, by its eagerness to pull down its old buildings, the college showed its resolute modernity. Its intellectual climate was eclectic, humanist, and a little worldly. It held that men were greater than theories and that action was of more value than contemplation. This approach, as a prelude to the great position which Balliol men were to occupy in the world in the latter part of the century, began to produce outstanding academic results from the ’thirties onwards. Between 1837 and 1896, when there were approximately twenty colleges in the University, Balliol won thirty-four of the sixty Ireland Scholarships—the most coveted classical award.
The pre-eminence of Balliol therefore began well before Jo wett had made his mark. Furthermore, his elevation to the Mastership reduced rather than increased the influence which he might have had upon Asquith. Asquith read his freshman’s essays to him, received his weekly battels in his presence, and met him also at occasional breakfast parties or even upon that great nineteenth century Oxford institution —an intellectual walk. But he was never his pupil. And even if he had been, it is doubtful if Jowett’s influence upon Asquith would have been as great as upon many other young men. In the first place Asquith was never open to wide masculine intellectual influence. His mind and his ambitions, from a very early age, were too firmly and securely set for that. And partly for this reason there was probably never great natural sympathy between the two men. Jowett, perhaps with a touch of snobbery, preferred those whose natural talent was in danger of being obscured by a frivolous or faineant overlayer, which he could strip off or at least render innocuous. At a later stage he was more interested in Margot Tennant, Asquith’s second wife, than he ever was in Asquith himself; and he got more satisfaction out of his relations with Lord Lansdowne, who told Miss Tennant, “ had it not been for him, I would have done little with my life,”n than out of those with Asquith. For Asquith needed no one to make him do a great deal with his life. And he expressed his own feelings towards Jowett, at a time when the latter was thought to be dying,1 with a notable detachment and coolness :
“ I am afraid poor old Jowett is dying,” he wrote in a private letter of October 26th, 1891. “ It seems but the other day that my wife and I were staying with him. We had a very pleasant party: not too large and well assorted. ... It is already difficult to conceive of the Oxford in which, partly by sympathy and partly by antagonism, he was formed. . . . Jowett, in his day, did probably more than any other single man to let some fresh air into the exhausted atmosphere of the common rooms, and to widen the intellectual horizon of the place. In my time he was already looked upon, by the more advanced spirits, as an extinct volcano, and even a bit of a reactionary. . . . He never at any time (I should think) had anything definite to teach....o
1 In fact he survived for another two years.
The Balliol volcano of Asquith’s day who was in no danger of extinction was T. H. Green. This austere, reserved philosopher had come up to Balliol as a Commoner from Rugby in 1858. He had no great gift either of classical scholarship or of lucidity of expression, but after his First in Greats and his election to a fellowship in 1862, and then to a tutorship in 1866, he made his own brand of neo-Hegelian thought the dominant intellectual influence, certainly in Balliol and perhaps in the University as a whole. He had great personal influence and gathered a strong band of disciples around him. Although he worked amicably with the Master his teaching was the beginning of a revolt against Jowett’s method. He had neither the eclecticism nor the intellectual grace of the Master, and he taught his young men what he wanted them to believe. He died young, but his values and outlook, handed down first through his pupil and biographer, R. L. Nettleship, and then through many others, persisted in Balliol almost to the present day.
Asquith was close to Green. He was taught by him, and he approved of his politics (unlike those of Jowett, about which he was often inclined to complain), for Green was both an active and an ardent Liberal, and served for a time as a member of the Oxford City Council. Yet Asquith was never fully under his influence. This was partly again due to his natural resistance to such a process, and partly to his lack of interest in speculative thought. He summed it all up quite neatly fifty years later, expressing at once his respect for Green’s personality and intellect and his own innate distrust of any philosophical schema: Between 1870 and 1880 Green was undoubtedly the greatest personal force in the real life of Oxford. For myself, though I owe more than I can say to Green’s gymnastics, both intellectual and moral, I never “ worshipped at the Temple’s inner shrine.” My own opinions on these high matters have never been more than those of an interested amateur, and are of no importance to anyone but myself.
Asquith’s “ interested amateurishness,” did not apply to his general work at Oxford. From the day when he arrived in Balliol in October, 1870, and established himself in rooms at the top of Staircase IV he worked with a steady and proficient ease which brought results of almost unbroken excellence. He achieved a clear First in Honour Moderations in the spring of 1872 and was proxime acccssit for the Hertford Scholarship that same year. In 1873 he was also proxime for the Ireland, with Henry Broadbent, a notable scholar who was later Librarian of Eton, the winner. That in itself would have been a reason more for congratulation than for disappointment, but when he again achieved the same position in the following year, with the margin then so narrow that the examiners took the unusual step of awarding him a special consolation prize, his proxime position looked a little too much of a habit. In the summer term of 1874 he was the only Balliol man to get a First in Greats and he added to this the achievement of being bracketed with Broadbent as the winner of the Craven Scholarship. In the autumn of that year he was elected, with Andrew Bradley, the Shakespearian scholar, to a prize fellowship of Balliol.
Asquith’s academic successes, which were striking without being sensational—a quarter of a century later his eldest son, Raymond, was to repeat them with the addition of the elusive Ireland and an All Souls fellowship—were achieved on the basis of a moderate and controlled amount of work. They were the product neither of erratic genius nor of excessively concentrated plodding. They left him plenty of time for other activities, and even in his last term before Greats he spent several hours a day sailing on the Thames near Godstow, and also went over to Woodstock to speak for St.John Brodrick against Lord Randolph Churchill. But his main occupation outside his work, as might have been foretold from his schoolday interests, was the Oxford Union. He made his maiden speech there early in his first term, and from then onwards he spoke in almost every political debate, mostly putting forward the orthodox advanced Liberal point of view with his own peculiar combination of lucidity, force and precision. Herbert Warren, later President of Magdalen, who knew him well, believed that he spoke as effectively at the Union as he ever did. He occupied most of the important offices of the Society. As Treasurer he was a notable innovator, introducing smoking and the provision of afternoon tea into the Society’s rooms. He justified these new arrangements on the slightly sententious ground that they would encourage undergraduates to do an hour’s daily reading outside their subject, and offered the novels of Trollope as an example of what he regarded as suitable material. In spite of these reforms, he did not succeed easily to the Presidency of the Union. He was defeated at his first attempt, and did not get the chair until the final term of his last year. For most undergraduates this would have been a burden in his Schools term, but Asquith took it all in his stride.
His social life at Oxford was only moderately active. In his second term his elder brother, retarded by ill-health, joined him at Balliol, and they lived together in a single set of rooms, a most unusual arrangement at the time and one which suggests an attachment to
the familiar (and to economy) rather than a great branching out. But he had a fairly wide range of friends and acquaintances both in his own college and outside. Li Balliol his main associates were Alfred Milner, Andrew Bradley, Herbert Warren, Charles Gore (later Bishop, first of Birmingham and then of Oxford), A. R. Cluer (later a County Court judge), Thomas Raleigh (later a notable Indian civil servant), and W. P. Ker, Churton Collins and W. H. Mallock (all of whom achieved some distinction as literary critics). Outside the college his principal friends were Herbert Paul of Corpus, who became an outstanding journalist and sat for a short time in the House of Commons as Liberal member for Edinburgh, and Henry Broadbent, already mentioned as a scholar. They were all men of considerable intellectual worth, and some of them, notably Milner, Bradley and Gore, were to achieve positions of commanding influence. But they were in no sense a group of jeunesse doree. They were not a glittering set within the University, who spread fashions and started legends, as did the young men with whom Raymond Asquith was to mingle a generation later. They provided Asquith with a group of moderately close friends (although with none of them did real intimacy—if it ever existed—persist throughout his life), against which agreeable background he could achieve his university triumphs, but they did not launch him into the world of nineteenth century power or social distinction.
