Asquith

by Roy Jenkins

  5 Both Harcourt and Morley wrote in their public exchange as though some challenge to Harcourt’s leadership had been likely to emerge at this meeting; but as in the outcome a proposal at the meeting that Harcourt should be asked to reconsider his decision was not pressed on the ground that it would interfere with the prerogatives of the parliamentary party, this does not seem very plausible.

  LIBERAL IMPERIALISM AND THE BOER WAR

  1899-1902

  The issue which destroyed this delicate, new-found sense of Liberal unity, and sent Asquith temporarily back into the arms of Rosebery was the war in South Africa. The Boer ultimatum, which precipitated its outbreak, was delivered on October 9th, 1899 and fighting began three days later. This was no storm out of a clear sky. South Africa had been in a state of sustained crisis since the previous February; and in June, Chamberlain, in what he regarded as a most critical speech in Birmingham, had made the country face the possibility of war and had talked of how, “ having undertaken this business (the protection of the ‘ Uitlanders ’ in the Transvaal) we will see it through. ”a

  At this preliminary stage, however, and even to some extent throughout the first phase of the war itself, the Liberal differences were containable. Although Chamberlain made a correct prognosis when he wrote in July that if it came to war “ the Government could rely upon the vast majority of its own supporters and a minority of the opposition,” Asquith and the other potential members of this minority showed no desire to commit themselves in advance; and this was in spite of the fact that Milner, still writing voluminously to Asquith, was far more in favour of forcing the issue than was Chamberlain. On June 20th the Colonial Secretary had invited Campbell-Bannerman to a private interview and had tried—unsuccessfully—to get his support for a show of force, presenting this not as a prelude to war but as a substitute for it. The only result was that on June 28th the Liberal leader publicly reaffirmed the opposition to military preparations which he had announced eleven days before.

  There was no indication at this stage that Asquith disagreed with his chief. On September 2nd he went out of his way to express to his constituents his disapproval of “irresponsible clamours which we hear from familiar quarters for war.” He saw no problem which could not be solved by " firm and prudent diplomacy"; and while Campbell-Bannerman might not have given as much stress to the firmness as to the prudence, they were still in reasonably close step with one another.1

  1 After this meeting, which he described as having taken place “ in a small upper room in Leven in the presence of about 100 females, with a small sprinkling of the other sex,” Asquith wrote to express the hope that Campbell-Bannerman would agree with his speech. But he added: “ It would be a mistake to suppose that our people—as a whole—are at all strongly pro-Boer. I talked to one or two representative Liberals before I spoke—Free Church ministers and such—and was rather surprised to find how anti-Kruger and bellicose was their frame of mind.” (Campbell-Bannerman Papers, 41210, 171-4).

  The decisive event for Asquith was the Boer ultimatum. “ From it,” his official biographers say, “ ... he ‘ dated as the Mohammedans do from the Hegira"b And as he himself put it nearly two years later: “We (the Liberal Imperialists) held and still hold that war was neither intended nor desired by the Government and the people of Great Britain, but that it was forced upon us without adequate reason, entirely against our will.”c It was in many ways an odd event to treat as an absolute determinant of attitude, especially by one who regarded Chamberlain’s diplomacy as indefensible, for it merely anticipated a British ultimatum which had been approved by the Cabinet on September 29th, and was in the process of delivery by the extraordinarily dilatory method of mail steamer. But this was not fully known at the time, and for the moment Asquith’s view about the outbreak of hostilities did not separate him from Campbell-Bannerman.1

  1 During the period leading up to hostilities, and the first few days after their outbreak, what separated Campbell-Bannerman from his colleagues, much more than any difference of political outlook, was the English Channel. As was his usual habit he had been at Marienbad since the beginning of August, but was persuaded with great difficulty by Herbert Gladstone (assisted by Asquith) to cut short his holiday and start for England about September 24th. Owing to the state of Lady Campbell-Bannerman’s health, he explained, he then travelled back by the shortest stages heard of since the development of railways. One day’s journey took him only from Frankfurt to Mainz. When he got to Brussels he read a several days’ old copy of The Times and decided that the situation had improved sufficiently for him to stay there. He got to London on October 3rd, but went back to Paris on the 7th to fetch his wife. He was still there when war broke out, and was then delayed at Calais by a Channel storm on October 13 th. As a result the Shadow Cabinet could not meet until October 14th, two days after fighting had begun and five days after the Boer ultimatum. The whole episode illustrated the truth of his description of himself, in his leadership acceptance speech as of “ an easy-going disposition"

  The Liberal leader, in his first speech after the recall of Parliament on October 17th, spoke of the Boers as having “ committed an aggression which it was the plain duty of us all to resist,” and joined with Asquith in abstaining on an unofficial Liberal amendment to the address (moved by Philip Stanhope) censuring the Government’s conduct of the negotiations.

  Nevertheless, even at this stage, Campbell-Bannerman’s underlying attitude to the problem of South Africa was not the same as Asquith’s. Bannerman claimed that he was “ anti-Joe, but never pro-Kruger,” and his behaviour throughout made the claim a perfectly reasonable one. Even so, his relatively simple character and nonmetropolitan outlook made him much less impatient of the slow and wily stubbornness of “ Oom Paul ” than was Asquith, with his smoothworking Balliol intellect. Furthermore, if Campbell-Bannerman did feel any hostility towards Kruger it was more than balanced by his distrust of Milner. He believed him to be an opinionated and dangerous man of doubtful judgment. He was nervous of his close relations with Asquith, and he scoffed at what he called the religio Milneriatia, a spiritual disease to which he believed Liberal intellectuals, and especially Liberal Balliol intellectuals, to be highly susceptible.

  Campbell-Bannerman’s abstention on the Stanhope amendment was therefore dictated more by a desire to avoid difficulties with his colleagues than by any firm conviction that it was a mistaken motion. As a manoeuvre for holding together the Liberal Party his inaction was manifestly a failure. It may have left him united with Asquith, Fowler, Grey and Haldane, but it separated him from 135 Liberal members (of a total of 186) who went into the lobby with Stanhope For a man resolved to lead from the centre—or indeed for any leader—this was obviously a dangerous situation.

  Rosebery made matters worse by two provocative speeches at the end of the month, in one of which he seemed to lay the blame for the war more on Gladstone (for his Majuba Hill policy in 1882) than on Chamberlain. The result of all this was that Campbell-Bannerman decided he had gone too far towards propitiating the Liberal Imperialists. He accordingly began a slow movement back towards a more anti-war position. A new note was discernible in his speeches in Manchester on November 8th and in Birmingham on November 24th. “ I felt sure that he would have to drop down on our side and he has done it,” Morley wrote to Harcourt. “ C-B has cut the painter of the dinghy in which Rosebery, Grey and Fowler1 may drift off by themselves,” was Harcourt’s commentd

  1 Asquith still remained remarkably free from criticism.

  Campbell-Bannerman’s new tack took him towards the arms of these two sulking Achilles whose resignations less than a year before had opened the way to his leadership. But Harcourt could never sulk for long. He was full of political energy during the autumn of 1899 and eager to capture Campbell-Bannerman for the anti-war cause. Morley—much more of a natural sulker—remained more difficult to propitiate. “Remember,” he said to Asquith when they were washing their hands in the Athenaeum one day l
ater in the war, “ that in this matter, I am not, and never have been, a follower of C-B.”e

  It was not merely towards Harcourt and Morley that Campbell-Bannerman was taken by his shift of position. On the extreme “ Little England ” (or perhaps “ Little Wales ”) wing of the party Lloyd George was already mounting his campaign of virulent opposition to the war which was to endanger his seat, his law practice and even his life, but which was also to launch him as a national figure. For him there was no question of holding a delicate balance between the intransigence of Kruger and the impatience of Milner. He saw the Boers as a God-fearing, liberty-loving people, a sort of South African equivalent of the radical hill-farmers of Wales, whose independence was threatened by the greed of the Rand financiers and the arrogance of Chamberlain’s colonial policy. By one of the great ironies of history he made his reputation as a man of the left by this starry-eyed championing of a community now almost universally regarded as the most reactionary in the whole world.

  Of more immediate importance to Campbell-Bannerman than the activities of Lloyd George and the few who went the whole way with him were the views of established Liberal parliamentary figures. The majority of these were unsympathetic to the Liberal Imperialists. In this category were Bryce, the fourth of the remaining “ ex-Cabs ”, Sir Robert Reid, who had been Attorney-General at the end of the last government, and a large part of the solid centre of the party in the House of Commons, men who were individually undistinguished but important to any leader’s authority. In the House of Lords also there were few “Roseberyites.” The handful of Whig peers who had not become Unionists in 1886 mostly remained faithful to the full Gladstonian tradition. The three most notable members of the front opposition bench—Spencer, Kimberley and Ripon—were all at least as anti-war as Campbell-Bannerman.

  Outside Parliament the position was rather different. Rosebery still had a powerful hold not only on uncommitted opinion but also on many of those who were active in the Liberal Party machine. His vain and perverse character contained a streak of almost magical attraction, both private and public, which is impossible to recapture from his writings or the records of his behaviour, but the existence of which cannot be doubted. “ I sometimes think that the reason why Rosebery attracts so much attention,” Grey wrote, “ is that the genius in him lifts him up so that he is conspicuous in the crowd, a head taller than it. . . . It’s as if God dangled him amongst us by an invisible thread.”^ On his carefully-spaced public appearances people were always eager to see him—not unnaturally if he appeared before them in such a remarkable way. When he spoke at Glasgow in 1902, a crowd of 5,000 were in the hall; but 32,000 had applied for tickets.

  Nor was Rosebery the sole strength of the Imperialists. Asquith principally, but Grey and Haldane to a substantial extent too, commanded great respect within as well as outside the party. There was no clear split between a moderate mass of Liberal voters and an extreme group of party activists. None of the leading Liberal Imperialists seem to have had the slightest difficulty in convincing their constituency associations of the rightness of their point of view. Indeed they implied (but perhaps this is always a favourite gambit for members with loyal associations) that they might have been under some pressure had they gone the other way.

  Campbell-Bannerman himself provided some support for this view by recording, after a short visit to Dunfermline in his own constituency in early December, 1899, that “ for the moment there is a coldness.”

  To some extent the Imperialists may have been helped by the Liberal press, which was broadly on their side. The exceptions were the Manchester Guardian and, somewhat more marginally, the evening Westminster Gazette. But the Daily News, which amongst London dailies counted as the official Liberal organ, was under the editorship of E. T. Cook and was violently pro-Milner. And so too, after November, 1899, was the Daily Chronicle. In that month H. W. Massingham, the pro-Boer editor, was dismissed and most of his editorial staff went with him. Thereafter it too followed what may be loosely called an Asquithian policy.

  As a result the anti-imperialist wing of the party began to look around for a way of redressing the balance. They thought of starting a new national morning newspaper but decided that the cost— estimated at £250,000—was prohibitive. Then, at the beginning of 1901, they succeeded in effecting a palace revolution within the Daily News. George Cadbury, the Quaker Birmingham chocolate-maker was brought in, and the “ cocoa-press,” which lasted in some form for the next fifty-nine years, was born. Cook and his Imperialist staff were dismissed, just as Massingham and his lieutenants of the Daily Chronicle had been dismissed fifteen months earlier, and this paper, in the words of Halévy, then became “ Puritan as well as Radical.” Party schism produced an uncertain climate for Liberal journalists.

  The balance which Campbell-Bannerman tried to strike was an almost impossible one. Whatever he said or did he was certain to offend an important and apparently indispensable section of his sadly debilitated party. During the autumn of 1899 and the early part 1900 he had very little room for manoeuvre. The war went so badly for England that only mad dogs like Lloyd George ventured out into the winter chill. But in the early spring Lord Roberts began to reverse the tide of Boer victories. In March Ladysmith was relieved and Bloemfontein occupied. In May a similar pattern was followed with Mafeking and Johannesburg. The victories made the political situation in Britain more fluid and increased Campbell-Bannerman’s difficulties. “ I follow with languid interest,” Harcourt wrote with unconvincing cynicism in June, “ the triumph of our arms and the dissolution of our Party.”g

  In July the Liberals approached an apotheosis of disorganisation. Sir Wilfred Lawson moved a “ pro-Boer ” amendment to a Government motion and was supported in the division lobby by Bryce, Morley, Reid, Labouchère, Lloyd George and 25 others. Grey spoke strongly the other way and took a total of 40, including Asquith, Fowler and Haldane, into the Government lobby with him. Campbell-Bannerman with only 34 followers could do nothing more inspiring than to abstain. His leadership appeared to be reduced to a nullity.

  This Liberal disarray, combined with the mistaken belief that the war was already won, prompted the Government to decide upon a dissolution of Parliament on September 17th and an election in early October. Chamberlain was the decisive figure both in pressing for the election and in conducting it when it came. His campaign showed some signs of megalomania and an unflagging determination to capitalise in his favour every ounce of patriotic feeling. He relentlessly damned all sections of the opposition, making no attempt to distinguish between those who had supported the war and those who had not. One of his chief objects, Garvin has informed us, “ was to break the Liberal Imperialists,” whom he regarded as a menace to the true imperialist vote A He was instinctively hostile to a centre position in politics, something which he himself had determinedly leapfrogged in his violent transition from left to right.

  Chamberlain accordingly proclaimed, and made the principal slogan of the election, “ that a seat lost by the Government is a seat gained by the Boers,” and worried very little when a careless telegraphist caused it to be published in a still harsher form.1 The only exception that he made, even privately, was Grey. (“ The election) has been fought with the greatest malignity by the baser sort on the other side,” he wrote with splendid self-righteousness to his wife on October 14th, “ and their disgraceful proceedings have only been repudiated by one single man, that is Sir Edward Grey. They are a bad lot. . . . ”1

  Asquith he lumped with the rest, and given his standards of judgment, he was right, for the ex-Home Secretary was particularly scathing in exposing Chamberlain’s own electioneering methods.

  This was the first “ Khaki election.” It was viciously fought, but compared with its successor in 1918 it was notably unsuccessful in swinging a great body of votes to the Government side. The most that it did was to prevent the swing away which might otherwise have occurred and which was then regarded as the natural pattern of events. But t
he state of the Liberal Party might easily have achieved that, without any “ patriotic ” appeal working in the other direction. At the general election of 1895 the Unionist majority was 152. Between then and 1900 it was reduced by by-election losses—all of them occurring before the outbreak of the war—to 130. As a result of the Khaki election it was increased to 134. This gave the Unionists a firm hold on the new House of Commons. Their share of the popular vote was less impressive. They secured only 2,400,000 as against the Liberals’ 2,100,000. As was pointed out at the time, the “ Boers ” had polled surprisingly well.

  The fact that they had all been equally subject to the rasp of Chamberlain’s tongue might have been expected to bind the different Liberal factions together. But in politics defeat is usually divisive. Each faction blames the other for what has gone wrong. The Imperialists obviously believed that the Liberal Party might have done better had the centre and left not opened themselves to Chamberlain’s “ unpatriotic ” charges—however unjustifiable they thought his electioneering methods to be. Asquith could support this belief by pointing to the fact that in East Fife his majority had risen from 716 to 1,431, while in the Stirling Burghs, only about 30 miles away, Campbell-Bannerman fell back from 1,127 to 630. Asquith, his official biographers tell us, took his own result as signifying constituency “ approval of the line that he had hitherto taken on the war,” while Campbell-Bannerman, we learn from the equivalent source, could only treat his “ as a set-back which he frankly confessed was a complete surprise to him,” but might have something to do with a turnover of the Roman Catholic vote on the schools question.