by Roy Jenkins
The vital witness on this point was C. J. Macdonald, then the manager of the paper—Buckle was editor. Asquith has described in his own words what happened when the examination-in-chief of this witness was complete:
It would of course naturally have fallen to Russell to cross-examine him; and I was never more surprised in my life than when, just as the court rose for lunch, he turned to me and said: “ I am tired: you must take charge of this fellow.” I protested, but in vain, and I was left to the critical task of conducting the cross-examination: a task all the more formidable because my leader, the greatest cross-examiner at the English Bar, sat there throughout and listened. I got on to what proved to be an effective and even a destructive line of attack, and in the course of a couple of hours or so made the largest step in advance that I ever took in my forensic career. Russell, who throughout had not interrupted by suggestion or otherwise, was unmeasured in his appreciation of every successful point, and when I finished almost overwhelmed me with the generosity of his praises and his congratulation. It was a moment that will never fade from my memory ..k
What Asquith had established in the course of this cross-examination, apart from his own reputation as an advocate, was that Macdonald had undertaken no investigation of the authenticity of the letters, and had behaved throughout with a credulity which would have been childlike had it not been criminally negligent. Roskill wrote that Asquith “ often said that Macdonald was the easiest witness he had ever demolished, for his prejudices had literally obscured an honest, if limited, understanding ; but easy or not there can be no doubt that
Asquith’s interrogation of him, unprepared though it was, was conducted with a mounting and deadly precision.
The crisis of the enquiry over, Russell and Asquith abandoned regular attendance at its now dreary proceedings. Asquith for the first time in his career, found himself flooded with briefs. Less than a year later, again prompted by Haldane, who was taking the same step himself, he decided to apply for silk, and was admitted as a Queen’s Counsel in February, 1890, at the age of 37.
As a silk Asquith was an immediate and considerable success. Some barristers build up large practices as juniors which they fail to maintain when they are called within the bar. With him the reverse was the case. The few months after the Macdonald cross-examination apart, he was much busier as a Queen’s Counsel than he ever had been as a junior—and his fees were of course much larger. His income rose to about -£5,000 a year.
He was also in the happy position that the occasion which had made his legal reputation had in addition improved his political standing. In the days of the “ union of hearts ” it was a great advantage within his party for a Liberal M.P. to have played a leading part in unmasking the anti-Irish machinations of The Times. And the prospects of the party itself had been improved by Parnell’s vindication. The by-election results were encouraging, and up to the summer of 1890 the chances of a great Home Rule majority, whenever the dissolution came, looked strong. So were Asquith’s prospects of a major post in the Government which would give effect to the policy. He was indulging in no foolish day-dreaming when he told Roskill, one evening about this time, that he would not accept a judgeship, but wished to be Home Secretary.
1 It was not then as great a disadvantage in the circumstances to be an Englishman as it would be today, when English members for Scottish seats are very rare birds indeed. Apart from Asquith himself, John Morley, Augustine Birrell and Winston Churchill, to cite only Liberal politicians of the first prominence, all sat for Scottish constituencies during the next twenty-five years. Birrell sat for the other part of the County of Fife, and on one occasion in about 1900 when he and Asquith and Haldane had climbed to the top of a hill near the Firth of Forth which commanded a wide view over both Fife and East Lothian, he turned to the others and exclaimed: “ What a grateful thought that there is not an acre in this vast and varied landscape which is not represented at Westminster by a London barrister! ” (Memories and Reflections, 1, p. 105.)
A WIDER STAGE
1890-92
This untroubled prospect and calm advance of all the aspects of Asquith’s life did not continue without interruption. The autumns of 1890 and 1891 each brought upheaval, the one public and the other private. In November, 1890, the O’Shea divorce suit, in which Parnell was cited as co-respondent, was heard. Parnell’s easy assurances that nothing damaging against him would emerge proved unfounded. Gladstone declined to act as a censor of morals—such a role would have hem inappropriate as he had known about Parnell’s relationship with Mrs. O’Shea since the early ’eighties—but he was forced by Nonconformist opinion to make it known to the Irish that Parnell’s continued leadership would make his own position impossible. The “ union of hearts ” was then dissolved in the bitter wranglings of Committee Room Fifteen. The Nationalists split into 26 “ Pamellites ” and 44 “ anti-Parnellites.” The cohesion of the Home Rule forces was greatly damaged, and so were the prospects of the Liberal Party at the following general election. The tide of by-election successes ceased to flow, and the chances of a decisive majority faded. By Christmas Morley reported that never in his life had he seen Gladstone so depressed.a
This change in the outlook affected Gladstone far more than it did Asquith. The latter was not an old man and he was rarely accused of being in a hurry. Nor, firmly “ Parnellite ” though he was 1 did he suffer from an Irish obsession. A setback, both to Home Rule and to his party’s immediate prospects, did not greatly affect the assumptions on which his life was based.
1 After Parnell’s death Asquith wrote: “ I still regard him—measured by his opportunities and his achievements—as one of the half-dozen great men of action of this century. Napoleon stands by himself. ... But the only other of this age that I would rank higher than Parnell are Abraham Lincoln, Bismarck, and (perhaps) Cavour.” (Letter to Margot Tennant, written in October, 1891). And he consistently took the view that, had he been an Irishman, he would have been with John Redmond in supporting Parnell, and not with Justin Macarthy in opposing him.
The second upheaval, occurring in September, 1891, was of a quite different order. On August 13 th of that year he took his wife and children to Lamlash in the Isle of Arran for a Scottish holiday. A week later his second son fell ill with influenza. Two days after this Helen Asquith was infected. It was assumed that her illness was the same as her son’s. In consequence five days elapsed before a doctor was called in. His diagnosis was not influenza but typhoid. The son recovered but the mother did not. After three weeks of fluctuating illness she died on Friday, September nth. On the Monday she was buried in the local churchyard. On the Wednesday Asquith returned to Hampstead with his five children, the oldest of them twelve and the youngest eighteen months. Apart from a bare record of events the only comment which he commited to the brief diary which he kept at the time was “ infelix atque infaustum iter” written in the margin against the date of the departure for Lamlash.
Such austere classicism of expression now suggests a certain want of feeling. But there is no reason to suspect this. A Roman reserve was always natural to Asquith. He fought against any expression of his stronger feelings. He even failed to convey them to Raymond, then nearly thirteen, and a certain persistent constraint in the relationship between father and son set in as a result. But of course the feelings existed. No one could fail to have been deeply affected by the drama of his wife’s illness on the lonely Scottish island, culminating in the removal of the mother of his five young children. But neither the circumstances nor the consequences were necessary to enhance the tragedy. He was bound to his wife by nearly twenty years of unforced intimacy, and he never spoke of her, either before or after her death except in terms of affection and admiration. At the same time there is inevitably the suspicion that a certain incompatibility, if not of temperament at least of way of life, had developed between them by 1891. The frankest available account of their latter day relationship is contained in a letter which he wrote to Mrs. Ho
rner (later Raymond Asquith’s mother-in-law) on the first anniversary of his wife’s death. Mrs. Horner had never known her and Asquith began with a series of moving and convincing tributes to her sweetness and generosity of character.1 Then he continued with an account of her attitude to his expanding horizons:
She cared little for society, shrank from every kind of publicity and self-advertisement, hardly knew what ambition meant. She was more wrapped up in her children than any woman I have ever known. To me she was always perfect, loyal, sympathetic, devoted; not without pride in such successes as I had; but not the least anxious for me to “ get on,” never sanguine or confident, and as a rule inclined to take a less hopeful view of things. I used sometimes to reproach her with her “ pessimism.” What has happened to me lately would have given her little real pleasure; indeed, I doubt whether, if she had been here, I would have taken such a step. She was the gentlest and best of companions, a restricting rather than a stimulating influence, and knowing myself as I do I have often wondered that we walked so evenly together. I was only eighteen when I fell in love with her, and we married when we were little more than boy and girl. In the cant phrase our marriage was a “ great success ”; from first to last it was never clouded by any kind of sorrow or dissension; and when the sun went down it was in an unclouded sky.
1 These were quoted in ch. n. (see page 30 supra.)
Could such an unclouded relationship have persisted indefinitely, in view of Asquith’s thrusting ambition on the one hand, and his wife’s complete lack of interest in worldly success on the other? His view, expressed in the letter, that had she lived he might not have accepted Cabinet office in the following year may perhaps be dismissed as permissibly exaggerated. But what is certain is that in the twelve months or so before her death both his pattern of existence and his outlook on life were changing sharply. The main change in the pattern was his movement into a wider social sphere. At first this took the form merely of his attendance at a large number of House of Commons dinner parties, and of a growing intimacy with some Conservative members who were both socially and politically prominent—Randolph Churchill, Arthur Balfour, Alfred Lyttelton, George Curzon, St. John Brodrick. A little later the invitations which he received and accepted were for private house dinner parties or for Saturdays to Mondays in
the country, and came not from politicians, Conservative or Liberal, but from fashionable hostesses—Mrs. Grenfell (later Lady Desborough), Lady Ribblesdale, and Mrs. Horner herself.
The change in his outlook was in part a reflection of these new opportunities and in part a natural mellowing. The rather austere young Hampstead lawyer was giving way to the successful, early-middle-aged politician. The man who had spoken of Bright’s incorruptibility in terms so slighting of almost every other political figure was changing into someone who could refer to himself with pride as belonging to “ the laxer of the two schools ” so far as social relations between politicians of different parties were concerned. The undergraduate who had become engaged to almost the first girl he had ever met was beginning to discover a wide circle of women friends. And with this discovery went a rather excessive reaction against “ political ” conversation which was to remain with him for the rest of his life. In the ’seventies and early ’eighties his main pleasure was political discussion, but in July, 1892, he could write to Mrs. Homer: “ Yesterday I lunched with J. Morley, but our talk was of elections and majorities and savoured too much of the shop to be worth reporting.” The point of Haldane’s somewhat loaded remark that “ in his earlier political days (Asquith) was a very serious person ” was beginning to make itself felt—although it must be said that Haldane’s own social evolution in the ’nineties followed very much the same course.
Helen Asquith was always a reluctant participant in these new activities. Margot Tennant, whom Asquith had first met in the spring of 1891 and who was later to be his second wife, subsequently wrote of this subject in terms which perfectly illustrated the point even if they were hardly a tribute to her own tact:
“ I found out from something he (Asquith) said to me that he was married and lived at Hampstead and that his days were divided between 1, Paper Buildings and the House of Commons.. . . When I discovered that he was married, I asked him to bring his wife to dinner, which he did, and directly I saw her I said:
“ ‘I do hope, Mrs. Asquith, you have not minded your husband dining here without you, but I rather gathered Hampstead was too far away for him to get back to you from the House of Commons. You must always let me know and come with him whenever it suits you’.”b
Miss Tennant recorded further encounters with Helen Asquith:
“ I was anxious that she should care for me and know my friends,” she wrote, “ but after a week-end spent at Taplow with Lord and Lady Desborough, where everyone liked her, she told me that though she had enjoyed her visit she did not think that she would ever care for the sort of society that I loved, and was happier in the circle of her home and family. When I said that she had married a man who was certain to attain the highest political distinction, she replied that that was not what she coveted for him. Driving back from Hampstead where we had been alone together I wondered if my ambition for the success of her husband, and other men, was wrong. She came several times to see me in Grosvenor Square and took me to hear her husband in the Law Courts, where he and Lord Russell of Killowen were engaged on the famous case of the baccarat scandal. We were accompanied by her son Raymond, and in a desire to amuse this lovely little boy I remember that I fluttered my pocket handkerchief on to the heads of those sitting below us from the gallery.”c
A growing difference of tastes between Asquith and his first wife cannot therefore be doubted. Had she lived some conflict must have developed between his social proclivities and her preference for the old, quiet Hampstead life. No doubt the strength of his attachment to her and the calmness of her character would have made the conflict containable. But it would have been there.
Helen Asquith’s death altered all this. At a time when the external features of his life were already changing rapidly, Asquith was left to find a new domestic framework as well. He was emotionally bereft, but he was also, unwillingly, free. The old pattern of his life was broken in nearly all its aspects. The new one was to bear little relationship to it. The transition was not without its difficulties.
With the problem of the children Asquith had the immediate help of his wife’s sister, Josephine Armitage, who was at Lamlash (as was his own brother) when the death occurred. But Mrs. Armitage had a family of her own at Altrincham, in Cheshire, and was not therefore available for long. “ My chief care for the moment,” he wrote to Mrs. Horner on September 22nd, “is to find someone who can take charge of my house and my little children . . .” His rapidly expanding and largely uncommitted income at least meant that he had no problem of money, and was able to employ housekeepers, nannies and nursery maids on a lavish scale. On this basis he went back to Maresfield Gardens, and Raymond and Herbert, after a week or so, returned to their private school at Lambrook. Towards the end of 1892 he finally abandoned Hampstead, and moved himself into an apartment at 127, Mount Street, only a few doors away from his old rooms as a law student, and the children to Surrey. First he rented, on George Meredith’s recommendation, a rather pretty house on Box Hill, near Dorking. Meredith was a near neighbour there, and Asquith used to call on him during most of his week-end visits to the children. When this house ceased to be available Asquith moved the children to the less attractive surroundings of a redbrick villa near Redhill. There he continued to visit them frequently, usually spending an evening and a night away from London. These arrangements lasted until his second marriage in 1894, by which time Raymond and Herbert were at Winchester, and Arthur at Lambrook.
For a few weeks after his return from Arran Asquith was disabled by a combination of grief and domestic responsibility from playing much part in politics. Apart from the pressure of household arrangements, most of his time was o
ccupied by letter-writing and by reading; he read four Balzac novels, Moltke’s Franco-German War, Rose’s Ignatius Loyola, and Bishop Wordsworth’s Reminiscences. He missed that autumn’s meeting of the National Liberal Federation at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where Gladstone went on October 2nd, rather unenthusiastically to proclaim the general radical programme, which was subsequently known by the name of that city.1 None of the lieutenants, influenced partly no doubt by the decline in the electoral prospect, were much more enthusiastic than their leader, and Asquith wrote of “ a sawdust programme ” supported only by “ a rattle of Harcourtian fireworks.” But whatever the quality of the programme, which ranged from Welsh church disestablishment to triennial parliaments and the payment of members, it was the one on which the increasingly imminent election had to be fought, and during the months of preparation for the contest Asquith was again active at meetings throughout the country.
1 His want of enthusiasm apparently led to no great restraint of presentation. Sir Philip Magnus wrote: “ It was noticed at Newcastle that while he was attacking the House of Lords, his arms were raised higher and higher, as though they sought to invoke the wrath of Heaven, while his knees sagged lower and lower, until it seemed as though they must end by touching the boards. The performance was not one over which he would have wished his biographer to linger, and he did not linger long over it himself.” (Gladstone, p. 396).
