Asquith

by Roy Jenkins

  In fact the Prime Minister was never shot at, but numerous other assaults upon him were attempted. He emerged unharmed from them all, although others sometimes suffered on his behalf. Lord Wear dale, when mistaken for him, was whipped at Euston. Augustine Birrell, when accompanying him in Whitehall, had his knee-cap damaged. And Redmond, sitting in the same carriage in Dublin, was wounded in the ear by a hatchet. At other times the intimidation was less vicarious. The Downing Street windows were occasionally smashed; and Asquith himself was often hectored and sometimes hustled by militant women. What he particularly disliked about the hectoring was that it tended to occur at evening parties and contrasted sharply with the form which he believed conversation between the sexes should take on such occasions. 1

  1On one of them, an India Office reception in June, 1912, Margot is reputed to have boxed the ears of an importunate lady in a pink dress.

  The hustling took a still more disagreeable form. On the golf hnks at Lossiemouth some militants tried to tear off his clothes, and were frustrated only by the presence and intervention of his daughter Violet. Thereafter a repetition of this form of attack was one of his principal fears, even when something more vicious was attempted. In November, 1913 when motoring to Stirling to unveil the Campbell-Bannerman memorial he was held up by women lying across the road. As the car slowed down others emerged from behind the hedgerows on either side of the road, jumping on the running-boards, and proceeded to belabour him over the head with dog whips. His top hat provided a surprisingly adequate degree of protection.

  All this and the other dramatic manifestations of the time—the slashing of the Rokeby Venus, Miss Wilding Davison’s death fall in front of the King’s horse at the 1913 Derby, the burning of pillar boxes, the destruction by acid of golf course greens—had no favourable effect upon Asquith. He found the whole performance both distasteful and mystifying. As Mr.Roger Fulford has written:

  The idea of converting a human being’s reason by parades, marches and fighting the police was incomprehensible to him. The more the women marched, the less his reason marched with them. Therefore the work of the militants strengthened his opposition to the vote. The women pursued him with much shrill invective— some of which was not without its effect in damaging his standing in the country—but he remained like a rock, which by reason of its natural formation, repels the froth and fury swirling round it.q

  In part Asquith’s attitude to the suffrage question was due to a failure of imagination. He simply could not understand why anyone, man or woman, should get so excited about the matter. It should be settled, not on the basis of abstract right, but by the practical test of whether or not a change would be likely to improve the system of government. He therefore always wanted to play the issue down. He was an effective controversialist on the subject, but, unlike some of the other anti-suffragists—Lewis Harcourt amongst the Liberals or F. E. Smith amongst the Tories—not a happy one. He would much rather that the subject had never been raised, and like other leaders confronted with a subject on which they did not wish to lead, he tried unsuccessfully to take the passion out of an essentially passionate controversy.

  “There are very few issues in politics,” he told the House of Commons in May, 1913, “ upon which more exaggerated language is used both upon the one side and upon the other. I am sometimes tempted to think, as one listens to the arguments of supporters of woman suffrage, that there is nothing to be said for it, and I sometimes am tempted to think, when I listen to the arguments of the opponents of woman suffrage, that there is nothing to be said against it.”r

  Asquith’s position on the suffrage question even if not happy, was both pivotal and bizarre. It was pivotal because there were only two effective obstacles to female enfranchisement before 1914. The first was the excesses of militancy; and the second was the person of the Prime Minister, stubbornly unconvinced and occupying a commanding position in the House of Commons. It was bizarre because it placed him in opposition to a majority of his own Cabinet, to a majority of the Liberal parliamentary party, and to Balfour, whose own attitude placed him in turn in opposition to the majority of the Unionist party. Asquith was not alone in the Cabinet, however. Apart from Harcourt, already mentioned, John Burns and Herbert Samuel were strongly opposed to the women’s case. But on the other side, although varying greatly in the degree of their enthusiasm, was a formidable array which included Grey, Lloyd George, Haldane, Churchill, Birrell, Runciman and McKenna.

  In these circumstances there was naturally some pressure from within the Cabinet for Government time to be given for private members’ women’s suffrage bills. But these bills, partly to win Conservative support and partly to give a general impression of moderation, almost all proposed a strictly limited female enfranchisement. Both from an age and a property point of view the women’s vote would be more restricted than the men’s. Lloyd George and Churchill were quick to see that measures along these lines would merely result in adding a substantial preponderance of Tory voters to the registers. They both went into the division lobby against the so-called Conciliation Bill in the summer of 1910. The suffragist forces in the Cabinet (like those outside) were therefore far from united on questions of tactics, and Asquith had at first little difficulty in holding the position. By May, 1911, the pressure had grown stronger, and Asquith had to report to the King that a clear majority of the Cabinet was in favour of giving facilities to a bill. Eventually it was agreed that in the following (1912) session a week of Government time should be made available for a committee stage; but in that year the bill, which had been successful at this stage in both 1910 and 1911, failed by a narrow margin to secure a second reading.

  The Cabinet then proposed that the women’s claim should be dealt with by the offer of a place in a major Reform Bill which the Government was about to promote. This bill was designed to abolish plural voting and extend the male franchise from to 10 million voters. The Cabinet offer, announced by the Prime Minister in July, 1912, was that the House of Commons should have the opportunity, on a free vote, to amend the bill so as to put women on the same new voting basis as men. For symbolic reasons the offer was unattractive to the leaders of the women’s movement. They wanted a bill of their own, a specific recognition of their claim to equality. But from a practical point of view the offer had great advantages. It disposed of the doubts of Lloyd George and many other Liberals. It meant that the amendment, if accepted, would be incorporated in the body of a bill which would have the full force of the Government behind it. There need be no fear that it would founder at a later stage for want of parliamentary time; and if the House of Lords proved recalcitrant, as was more than likely, it could expect the protection of the Parliament Act.

  The amendment was to come up for discussion in late January, 1913,towards the end of a session which started in February, 1912 and continued for more than thirteen months. On January 22nd the Cabinet prepared for the debate by making an “ agreement to differ ” and deciding that, whatever the result, no question of ministerial resignations would arise.

  The Cabinet met again two days later—in very different circumstances. Speaker Lowther had in the meantime destroyed the assumption on which the Government—and the public—had been acting for the previous six months. He had decided that if the women’s suffrage amendment were to be carried it would so change the bill as to make it necessary for it to be withdrawn and re-introduced. In other words it could not be carried that session. This was an almost unprecedented parliamentary dégringolade.

  “This is a totally new view of the matter,” Asquith wrote to the King, “ which appears to have occurred for the first time to the Speaker himself only two or three days ago, and is in flat contradiction of the assumptions upon which all parties in the House hitherto treated the bill. In Mr. Asquith’s opinion, which is shared by some of the best authorities on procedure, the Speaker’s judgment is entirely wrong and impossible to reconcile with what took place in the case of previous Franchise Bills in 1867 and 1884�
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  Complaints against the Speaker, however well justified they might be, were of little use. There was no possibility of an effective appeal against his ruling, and the only thing the Cabinet could do was to agree, unanimously, that it would be a breach of faith to the suffragists to proceed with the Government bill without the women’s amendment being voted upon and that they must therefore drop it. Facilities would be given, early in the next session, for a private member’s bill dealing with female enfranchisement. The whole incident was a bad blow to the Government’s intentions and prestige. But Asquith was a sufficiently committed anti-suffragist to find consolation in the new situation. “ The Speaker’s coup d'etat has bowled over the Women for this session—a great relief,”t he wrote in a private letter on January 27th.

  The private member’s bill came up for second reading on May 6th, and the House was presented with the diverting spectacle of the principal speaker in its favour being the Foreign Secretary and the principal speaker in opposition the Prime Minister. The one spoke immediately after the other. Asquith, assisted by the mounting tide of feminist illegality, was more persuasive than Grey. The bill was lost by 268 to 221, and that, parliamentarily, was the end of the matter for a time. Outside the law-breaking and the arson continued, but against growing public hostility and at the price of increasing dissension within the suffragette movement itself.

  During 1912 and 1913 the troubles of the Government were increased, and its authority for dealing with them temporarily diminished, by the eruption of the Marconi scandal. Four ministers were in some form involved: Lloyd George; Rufus Isaacs, the Attorney-General; Herbert Samuel, the Postmaster-General; and the Master of Elibank, the Chief Whip. The Master had left the Government, the House of Commons, and the country (for the improbable destination of Bogota) before the scandal boiled over, but the share transactions which involved him had been made while he was still Patronage Secretary. Some of them, indeed, were not on his own account but for Liberal Party funds. Samuel, on the other hand, had dealt in no shares. The suggestion against him was that, as head of the Post Office, he had given the Marconi Company an improperly favourable contract (concluded in March, 1912) for the erection of a chain of wireless telegraphy stations throughout the Empire because its managing director was the brother of the Attorney-General. There was never the semblance of a case against Samuel, and the pretence of one was only sustained in order that the anti-Semitic overtones of the affair might be exploited to the full. To bring together one Samuel and a couple of Isaacs in a skein of transactions bordering on the world of high finance was an irresistible attraction for Belloc and Cecil Chesterton.

  The real case was against Lloyd George and Rufus Isaacs. They both indulged in share transactions which, while not remotely dishonest, were certainly unwise for men in their positions, the one with his special financial responsibility, the other with his special legal responsibility. In April, 1912, Isaacs bought 10,000 shares in the American Marconi Company from a third brother who had himself obtained them from the brother who was managing director of the English company. One thousand of these he immediately sold to Lloyd George (and another thousand to the Master of Elibank). There followed a complicated series of sales and re-purchases. Eventually all three ministers lost money on their speculations, although at certain stages they realised substantial capital profits. What was more important than the net outcome, however, was the fact that they dealt in these volatile shares with the purpose (even if incompetently exercised) of making short-term Stock Exchange profits.

  There was no trace of corruption in their behaviour. The contract had been concluded (although not approved by the House of Commons) before they entered the field. They used no special knowledge; they exercised no improper influence. And the American company, in which alone they dealt, stood to make no gain from any contract entered into by the English company. The English company was a shareholder in its sister, but not vice versa. Nevertheless there was a certain irrational sympathy of movement between the prices of the shares of the two concerns. This apart, however, the American shares, as those concerned quickly realised, were most unsuitable material for ministerial dealings.

  During the summer of 1912 there were a spate of rumours and libellous statements about ministers and their relationship to the contract. As a result it was decided, in October, to set up a House of Commons select committee to investigate. Lloyd George and Isaacs in the course of the debate on the appointment of the committee intervened to deny in precise terms that they had ever had any interest, direct or indirect, in the English Marconi Company. They did not inform the House of their dealings in the American shares. This fact only came to light in the Law Courts months later when Isaacs and Samuel took a libel action against the French newspaper Le Matin and the Attorney-General empowered his counsel (Sir Edward Carson, strangely enough; F. E. Smith was appearing for Samuel) to make the disclosure. The belated nature of this disclosure was one of the main counts against Lloyd George and Isaacs when the report of the select committee (which divided on strict party lines) was debated in June, 1913. If they believed in the innocence of their own behaviour, why had they not been more frank with the House in the previous October ?

  Asquith was not closely involved in these matters. None of the ministers involved were his intimate friends (Isaacs was the closest to being one). But as head of the Government his advice was occasionally sought by his colleagues, and it fell to him, at the end of the affair, both to decide whether any resignations were called for, and to lay down a guide to ministers, in the conduct of their private financial affairs, which has kept its validity until the present day.

  Asquith was at once unsympathetic and tolerant towards the peccant ministers. Without a trace of hypocrisy, he could not for a moment have imagined himself behaving as they had done. Although on the whole an economic as well as a political liberal, he felt an instinctive distaste for the process of money-making. At the same time he was never harsh towards human frailty. Few Prime Ministers have had less ambition to be a Savonarola within their cabinets. He greatly disliked the whole business and regarded it as “the most difficult and painful personal incident” of his public life. But he regarded much of the clamour as malicious and uncalled for and he refused to do anything which might fortify it. As one result he advised Isaacs (possibly unwisely) against taking an earlier libel action. This was in August, 1912, and the paper then complained of was Cecil Chesterton’s Eye-Witness. Asquith gave his advice from Scotland in characteristically unruffled terms:

  “I suspect (it) . . . has a very meagre circulation. I notice only one page of advertisements and that occupied by books of Belloc’s publishers. Prosecution would secure it notoriety, which might yield subscribers. We have broken weather, and but for Winston there would be nothing in the newspapers.”u

  Another result of this attitude was that Asquith firmly repulsed the tentative offers of resignation which Lloyd George and Isaacs made in the following January. He later told the King that this was immediately after they had told him of their dealings in the American shares, conduct which he described as “lamentable” and “so difficult to defend.” v Nevertheless, once he had refused the resignations, he was committed to this intractable defence and he discharged it in the June debate with great force and considerable success:

  “Their honour, both their private and their public honour,” he told the House, “is at this moment absolutely unstained. They have, as this Committee has shown by its unanimous verdict, abused no public trust. They retain, I can say with full assurance, the complete confidence of their colleagues and of their political associates.”

  In private he was, not unnaturally, a little more critical. “I think the idol’s wings are a bit clipped,” he said to Masterman one day on the front bench, when they were listening to Lloyd George addressing the House. “A bit clipped,” he repeated with a typical shrug of his shoulders. But in public he gave Lloyd George, already thrusting hard behind him, a support as complete as it
was necessary.

  Mrs. Donaldson’s recent penetrating study of the case,1 however, suggests that Asquith, while undoubtedly firm and loyal, was also a little disingenuous in pretending that he was kept in ignorance of the American transactions for much longer than was in fact the case. To the King, as has been seen, he fixed January, 1913, as the time when Lloyd George and Isaacs “confessed” to him. And writing many years later in Memories and Reflections, he implied (although he did not state) that he was unaware of the American transactions at least until after the debate of 11th October, 1912. Samuel’s Memoirs, however, state that the author informed the Prime Minister about the American purchases in or soon after June, 1912, and that Asquith showed that he had assimilated the information to the extent of commenting that “our colleagues could not have done a more foolish thing.” w If this was so, it is suggested, Asquith must bear some part of the blame for not forcing Lloyd George and Isaacs to make a full disclosure on 11th October.

  1 The Marconi Scandal by Frances Donaldson (1962).

  Was it so? Samuel, despite attributing to Asquith such an uncharacteristic phrase as “our colleagues” was a reliable witness, and his testimony is to some extent supported by the Master of Elibank. On the other hand, the only reference to the Marconi case in a voluminous private correspondence which Asquith was conducting at the time1 is in a letter dated 7th January, 1913. In this correspondence there was no question of Asquith writing “for the record.” He recounted events as they occurred, and this January letter fits in with the date which he gave to the King three months later, and is more consistent than not with his having just heard for the first time of the American transactions. “I am bothered with various things,” he wrote, “-the latest being certain follies wh. Rufus Isaacs and Ll. George have committed in regard to Marconi shares.”