Asquith

by Roy Jenkins

  There can now be no certainty on the point one way or another. But had Asquith known the full facts it seems unlikely (although not impossible; he always allowed his ministers a wide latitude of judgment) that he would not have remonstrated strongly against the narrowly accurate but misleading denials of 11th October. He might not have been in time to prevent them, for he was ill at the time, and he might have preserved the public front, for this was always his instinct when ministers made mistakes, but it is difficult to believe that he would not have commented sharply in private correspondence. And why, if the Prime Minister had been fully informed all along, should the issue of resignation have arisen at all in January ?

  Six weeks after the final Marconi debate in the House of Commons, Isaacs wrote to Asquith again suggesting resignation. This time it was because publicity was being given to his having falsified his age, thirty-four years earlier, in order to secure membership (most unfortunately for himself as it turned out) of the London Stock Exchange. Asquith’s reply was clear, succinct, and perhaps a little weary. “Certainly not,” he wrote. Two months after this he appointed Isaacs Lord Chief Justice, and by so doing provoked Kipling’s poem Gehazi, one of the most vitriolic in the English language. It would have been much easier both for the Prime Minister and for Isaacs if the appointment could have been postponed. But Alverstone, the incumbent Chief Justice, was determined to resign. Once he had done so, Asquith did not hesitate about appointing Isaacs. The Attorney-General traditionally enjoyed the reversion to this office. Isaacs was an Attorney of outstanding legal quality. To have denied him the job in these circumstances would have undermined his position almost as much as allowing the House of Commons to carry the Conservative motion which had been proposed against him and Lloyd George in the previous June. Asquith had used his authority to defeat this, and he did not weaken in the autumn. Lloyd George and Isaacs were both lucky in the Prime Minister under whom they made their errors of judgment.

  A PRIME MINISTER’S ROUTINE

  1912-14

  Apart from the ill-fated Franchise Bill, the long session of 1912-13 was occupied with the Government’s two remaining major legislative commitments. The third Home Rule Bill was introduced by Asquith on April nth, 1912, and completed a laborious passage through the Commons on January 16th, 1913. A fortnight later it was summarily rejected in the House of Lords by a vote of 326 to 69. The Welsh Church Disestablishment Bill moved along a roughly parallel course. Clearly neither measure could pass into law without the protection of the Parliament Act and the three laps of the parliamentary circuit which this involved.

  The Home Rule Bill was eventually to produce a crisis still more acute than the battle with the peers, and a threat of violence still more menacing than anything the suffragettes could command or industrial unrest might unleash. The positions which made this crisis inevitable were taken up by the Unionist leaders (and by their Ulster supporters) between July and September, 1912. Nevertheless, the period in the middle of the Home Rule Bill’s slow progress towards the statute book was one of relative political calm. This was particularly true of the short session of 1913, which lasted only from March to August, and which was almost entirely occupied with a second passage of the two rejected bills. The Commons had discussed them before. They knew they would have to discuss them again. However threatening the prospect, the intermediate stage of the process was inevitably one of longueur. The Cabinet, as Asquith’s letters to the King clearly show, was more than usually concerned with routine matters during these months. If, during the whole of his long premiership there was any period of lull, it lay in this short session and the months on either side of it: from December, 1912 to January or February, 1914.

  Asquith’s capacity for the swift and almost effordess transaction of business was always such that he never worked excessively long hours, although he was often subjected to the strain of constantly recurring crises and restricted to short snatches of holiday. But during these thirteen or fourteen months, his life took on a somewhat more leisurely pattern. It was a pattern, moreover, which can be reconstructed in unusual detail.

  Throughout his last three or four decades Asquith’s personal life was unusually dominated by two characteristics. The first was an ability to express intimate thoughts more easily on paper than in conversation. His published works do not show him as a master of English prose. His speeches, mostly underprepared, have a far greater claim to distinction than his books, some of which were equally underprepared, but which suffered in addition from his repugnance to the true role of the autobiographer. He had no desire to tell the world what really happened, and he was insufficiently interested in himself. As a result his four volumes of memoirs are less revealing than those of almost any other major politician. But in private letters, provided the recipient aroused his interest, he was entirely different. He wrote easily, casually, economically, and as a relaxation. If he had a spare half-hour between important meetings, or even during one of them, it was no effort for him to write a quick five-hundred-word comment on his recent doings.

  The second characteristic was that he preferred writing to women rather than to men. (To a slightly lesser extent—he was a great dining-club attender—this was also his conversational preference.) His business letters were generally brief. Except for occasional congratulatory or commemorative notes, he carried on no social correspondence with male friends. Even in the ’nineties he rarely wrote to Grey, or Haldane, or Rosebery, unless there was some pressing issue to be discussed. But to a few women he wrote—and wrote copiously —without immediate cause. In the early ’nineties he did so to Lady Homer, with whom he was not in love; a little later he did so to Margot, with whom he was; and in the last decade of his life he wrote to Mrs. Harrisson, a series of letters which were later to be edited by Desmond MacCarthy into two volumes of published correspondence. Lady Scott, the widow of the explorer and Miss Lillian Tennant, one of his wife’s nieces, were others who received his epistolatory attention.

  In 1910, he began the first faint trickle of what was later to become a flood of letters to Venetia Stanley. Miss Stanley was the youngest daughter of Lord Sheffield (or, as members of his family have sometimes chosen to be known, Lord Stanley of Alderley), who was the possessor both of an old barony and of firm Liberal views. Asquith had known her for several years before the correspondence began. Miss Stanley was an exact contemporary and close friend of his daughter Violet. As such she was a constant visitor to Downing Street. At first there was no indication that she aroused Asquith’s particular interest. Even when the letters began they were of no great significance. But then, in February 1912, Miss Stanley accompanied Asquith, his daughter, and Edwin Montagu on a Sicilian holiday. Thereafter the letters became much more frequent. During the remainder of that year Asquith wrote her seventeen substantial letters and nine notes.1

  1 There are no records of letters from Miss Stanley to Asquith. No doubt they were victims of his belief that most papers are better destroyed. But the evidence suggests that she wrote almost, but not quite, as frequently as he did.

  At this stage Miss Stanley was 25—a young woman of high intelligence and strong personality. She remained unmarried for another three years, and then, with a sudden swoop, married one of the most intimate of Asquith’s political associates. During this period she was the recipient of a mounting spate of letters. In 1913 Asquith sent her about fifty letters. Then, during the early months of 1914 and on into the early part of the war, the interchange became still more intensive. From July of that year he rarely wrote less than once a day and sometimes more often. This vast epistolary output, as it had become by 1914, would for most men with anything like Asquith’s responsibilities have been an impossible additional burden. For him this was not so. The writing of the letters was both a solace and a relaxation, interfering with his duties no more than did Lloyd George’s hymnsinging or Churchill’s late-night conversation.

  In addition, of course, he often saw Miss Stanley. On most Friday aftern
oons, when they were both in London, he used to find time to go for a motor drive with her—a fairly stately progress, seated behind a chauffeur in his recently-acquired Napier, to Richmond or Roehampton or Hampstead. They would sometimes meet at luncheon or dinner or evening parties, and occasionally Asquith would pay an early evening call on her at her parents’ house in Mansfield Street. Then Asquith would stay once or twice a year at one of Lord Sheffield’s country houses, Penrhos, near Holyhead in Anglesey, or Alderley in Cheshire. And there would perhaps be another three or four week-ends when Miss Stanley would stay with the Asquiths. It was in the letters, however, that the relationship found its most regular and perhaps its most important expression. As a result their existence provides a remarkably close picture of his daily movements, of his immediate reaction to events, and of his uncensored opinion of those with whom he had to deal. For the three years beginning in mid-1912 they are far more informative about Asquith’s life than any other source.

  First, they show the geographical distribution of his time, how often he was able to be away from London, and where he went on these occasions. This is what happened between December, 1912 and the outbreak of the war. For Christmas of that year he went to Easton Grey, near Malmesbury, the house of his wife’s sister, Mrs. Graham Smith. He left there on Boxing Day and motored, with his daughter Elizabeth—“ an endless motor drive ... in pouring rain ”1 to Lympne Castle, near Folkestone, to stay with another Tennant relation. After a few days at Lympne, Margot Asquith, who was not well, left for the South of France, and Asquith, with a day in London on the way, went to his own newly-acquired house at Sutton Courtney for the New Year. This house, the Wharf, a rambling and unpretentious collection of buildings on the river near Oxford, was to play a great part in the remainder of Asquith’s life. Archerfield, the East Lothian house, had been given up after the long recess of 1911; and during that summer and the early part of the next one the Asquiths had spent a number of week-ends at Frank Lawson’s house Ewelme Down, near Wallingford, and from there they had decided to acquier a North Berkshire house of their own. They moved into the Wharf in July, 1912.

  After his New Year visit there in 1913 Asquith went on to Alderley on January 3rd for a three-day week-end as the guest of Lord Sheffield. From January 6th onwards he was back in London, but he went away for each Saturday and Sunday during that month, twice to Easton Grey and once to Sandwich—where he golfed with two of his sons. Margot did not return from France until January 26th. Then, on the 28th, accompanied by his daughter Violet and his son Cyril, he went to his constituency and addressed “ a really fine meeting at Leven without a single incident.” Next day he spoke again at Dundee, and then, with Churchill, boarded the Admiralty yacht in the Tay and spent four days (including a storm-bound 24 hours) cruising south to Chatham. The next Saturday and Sunday he was at Sandwich again, and after that he spent almost every week-end up to and beyond Easter at the Wharf. His normal routine on these occasions was to leave London a little after noon on the Saturday, lunch at Skindles’ hotel at Maidenhead, golf at Huntercombe, and motor on to Sutton Courtney in the early evening. On the Sunday he sometimes played golf again, but a more regular commitment was the entertainment of a large party of luncheon guests. Early on the Monday morning he would motor back to London.

  On Friday, May nth, the Whitsun holiday being early that year, he left for Venice by train. The next evening he again joined the Admiralty yacht, and with a larger party—both the Churchills, Margot, Violet, Edward Marsh and Masterton-Smith (another member of Churchill’s staff)—set off on a three-week cruise to Dalmatia, Greece and Malta. It was an almost ideal holiday for Asquith. It enabled him to play bridge at night, to read a great deal at all hours, and to indulge his taste for minute classical scholarship.

  “As you can imagine,” he wrote off the coast of Albania, “it is a journey which affords endless opportunities for the conscientious student of Baedeker, and after nearly a week’s experience I can assure you that you need not fear the rivalry of any of my present trip-fellows. Eddie and Masterton are both good at the Classical side, but neither of them has any notion of the unimportant things which it is right and fruitful to remember. Winston is, of course, quite hopeless: his most salient remark as we wandered thro' Diocletian’s Palace at Spolato was: ‘ I should like to bombard the swine.’1 Margot and Violet, as you know, do not excel in this branch of research, & Clemmie is very patchy.”

  1 But who were “ the swine? ”

  Throughout the voyage the Prime Minister viewed Churchill with a mixture of amusement, admiration and mild apprehension. In the same letter from Albania he wrote: “ It was with great difficulty that I prevented Winston from going himself to Scutari ”—where an international naval action was forcing the Montenegrins to withdraw from their conquest—“ to witness (if not preside over) the surrender of the town. I did not want another Sidney Street in Albania.” And then from Malta he reported: “ Winston never set foot on shore at Syracuse, but dictated in his cabin a treatise (which I am about to read) on the world’s supplies of oil.”

  Asquith returned to London on May 31st. During June, July and the early part of August he spent most week-ends at the Wharf. On August 19th, he went north to Morayshire, where the family had rented a house called Hopeman Lodge. “ I am agreeably surprised with this place,” he wrote. “ It is small and has practically no garden, but the house is quite comfortable, possessing no less than 4 bathrooms, and we look almost straight down into the sea, and across the Firth to the Caithness mountains, and have no neighbours. The sunset view is really very fine.” He stayed there until September 26th. Lossiemouth was only a few miles away, and on this holiday he was able to substitute Ramsay MacDonald for Arthur Balfour as an occasional golfing companion. “ Violet rather lost her heart to the brindle-haired Labour leader,” he recorded after one of these encounters.

  From Hopeman Asquith went to Arran to stay for three days with Percy Illingworth, who had replaced the Master of Elibank as Liberal Chief Whip. There he was collected by Churchill with the Admiralty yacht, and spent the inside of a week cruising round the north of Scotland. The party on board included the Secretary of State for War (Seely), Mrs. Churchill, and the wife of Winston’s younger brother, Lady Gwendoline Churchill. One evening when they were anchored off Cromarty Sir Archibald Sinclair came to dinner on board and Asquith was unusually captivated by the charm of “ one of the ‘ nicest ’ young men I have met for a long time.” “ He is only 23,” he added, “ owns 100,000 acres or thereabouts, is in the 2nd Life Guards, and when in London flies every morning before breakfast. In addition he has good looks and manners, a slight but attractive stammer, and wears a kilt of a sober but striking pattern.” The very model of a future Liberal leader, he might have added.

  After leaving the yacht Asquith stayed the week-end of October 4th-5th with Jack Tennant at Edenglassie in Aberdeenshire, and then went to Balmoral for three days of duty. From October 10th to 20th he was back in London, although he escaped to the Wharf for one of the intervening Sundays. He then went to Scotland again, first for a brief renewal of the Hopeman holiday, where the party included Miss Stanley as well as his daughter Violet and his new private secretary, Maurice Bonham Carter,1 and then for a one-day constituency visit and speech. The Hopeman party moved complete to East Fife.

  1 1880-1960. Asquith’s secretary from 1910 to 1916. In December, 1915 he married Violet Asquith.

  Before the end of the month Asquith was back in Downing Street, and from then until a few days before Christmas he left London only for short but regular week-ends at the Wharf. On Saturday, December 20th, he went with Margot and several children to Easton Grey, and remained there, apart from a Tuesday visit to London, until the morning of Boxing Day. That night “ the whole family ” went to see Charley's Aunt, and on the following morning they separated. Margot took their son Puffin to Antibes, and Asquith motored with their daughter Elizabeth for another visit to Lympne Castle. After three days there he went to Alderley
and stayed with the Stanleys over the New Year of 1914. On Friday, January 2nd, he returned to London with Edwin Montagu, “ perched,” as he put it, for a few hours writing letters at Montagu’s house in Queen Anne’s Gate, and then motored once more “ in twilight and silence ” to Lympne, where he remained for another week-end.

  The week beginning January 5th he spent in London and the Saturday and Sunday at the end of it at Easton Grey. Then on Tuesday, January 13th, with his niece Laura Lovat as a travelling companion, he set off to visit Margot at Antibes. He found Lady Lovat “ an agreeable and amusing partner” in what “was (technically) a very bad journey: a peculiarly ‘ dirty ’ Channel crossing, the train held up by snow between Lyons and Marseilles (an unheard of thing), arrival here three hours late, and not a ray of sun to illuminate the Riviera in its unwonted garment of white.” In this weather the four-day visit hardly justified the two twenty-four hour journeys. It was too wet for golf, but the family went to the cinema in Cannes and there were some remarkable evening activities in the Hôtel du Cap: