by Roy Jenkins
Asquith’s other contemporary in the Cabinet—and his oldest friend of the lot—was Haldane. But during these immediate pre-war years social relations with him were slight. Throughout 1913 and the first seven months of 1914 there is no record of Haldane visiting the Wharf, or attending any meal in Downing Street, or securing (or even attempting to secure) Asquith for a meal at his own house in Queen Anne’s Gate—only four doors away from the much visited Montagu residence. And on May 13, 1914, Asquith wrote:
“ Tonight we are giving a wedding dinner (20th anniversary) mostly to old habitués of Cavendish Square in its earliest days. Haldane excused himself on account of the death of a step-brother who had just passed away in the Shetlands at the ripe age of 80! ”
There was one other Cabinet colleague of great note—Lloyd George. By virtue of his official residence at 11, Downing Street, he was the Prime Minister’s nearest neighbour. But their social relations were not as close as their houses. They never met casually at one of the Liberal houses where Asquith was a frequent guest. In part this was because they had a different circle of friends. This was particularly so outside politics. Lloyd George had no knowledge of, or interest in, the smart cultivated world of Margot’s luncheons and of the jeunesse dore whom the Asquith children (particularly Raymond) brought into their father’s life. The Parsons, the Horners, the Listers, Diana Manners, would all have been very shadowy figures to him.
Even in politics the circles did not much overlap. Lloyd George was never on remotely intimate terms with Grey or Crewe or Haldane, and there was a deep mutual antipathy between him and McKenna. But he knew Churchill well,1 and Montagu too, at least after February 1914, when “ the Assyrian ” became Financial Secretary to the Treasury. Yet he was never invited to Admiralty House or Queen Anne’s Gate when Asquith was to be present.
1 Asquith wrote in March, 1914 of an evening when Morley, Birrell, Lloyd George and Churchill dined together, and “ Winston in a rather maudlin mood said to Ll.G: ‘ A wonderful thing our friendship! For 10 years there has hardly been a day when we haven’t had half an hour’s talk together ’.” Birrell commented that they must both be awfully bored by that time.
Asquith himself assumed there was a certain restraint over their social relations. “ I am going to dine with Lloyd George (a very unusual adventure),” he wrote to Miss Stanley on March 2, 1914, “ to talk ‘ shop ’ with one or two choice colleagues (none I fear of your particular favourites).” Yet it was not in fact a particularly unusual adventure. He dined with Lloyd George on two other occasions in the next ten weeks, and the Chancellor lunched at No. 10 (with Edward Marsh and Lady Crewe) between the first and the second of these dinners. The restraint seems to have been more imaginary than real, with Asquith exchanging meals with Lloyd George more frequently than with either Crewe or Haldane; and in the whole of this part of his voluminous correspondence with Miss Stanley the Chancellor (frequently if distantly mentioned) attracted less than his fair share of astringent remarks.2
One social divide between Asquith and Lloyd George was that the Chancellor did not play bridge. Asquith’s comments on his enjoyment, or otherwise, of various evening engagements show how fond he was of this game.3 4 If there was no bridge he was a little inclined to sulk. It was one of his complaints about royal evenings. “ We didn’t play Bridge and I left fairly early this morning,” he somewhat inconsequently wrote after his Windsor evening in February, 1914. And three months later, during his stay with the Court at the Aldershot Royal Pavilion, he recorded: “We had a lot of generals to dinner, but the evening was dull—no Bridge—& everybody went early to bed.”
Yet to say he was an addict would be to use too strong a word. He rarely allowed one pursuit to interfere with his enjoyment of another. The chief impression of his private life which emerges from these years is of his extraordinary ability to fit in the widest possible range of activities. He even went to the opera, which he considerably disliked, two or three times a year. “ I spent about 2 hours at the Opera . . . and tried to get some pleasure out of Boris, not with any very successful result I fear,” he wrote on July 16th, 1914.s “ There was a crowded house of fashionable people and others who seemed to be of a contrary opinion,” he added.
Mostly, however, his time was more sensibly spent. He transacted his official business with great speed, but without any suggestion of neglect, and he left himself plenty of time for his family and his friends, for a wider but by no means undiscriminating social life, for golf and bridge, for general reading, and for private letter writing. As Prime Minister he probably lived a more agreeable life than he had ever done before, but his satisfactions were by no means exclusively those of power.
1 Although he complained on this occasion, Asquith was in general a most enthusiastic motorist—although always as a passenger. He usually preferred to do journeys of 100 miles or so by road, and he made no effort to avoid them—frequently going this distance for a 24-hour stay. Even when in the country he often liked to motor somewhere else, particularly if the weather was bad, and female companions were available. “It poured continuously for 48 hours, and we were reduced to motoring to Sir Sympne’s (a private description of Sir John Simon) at Fritwell,” he wrote after a wet week-end in early 1914. And three weeks later, after having the Churchills to stay, he wrote: “ The weather was vile and we could not golf—only trundle about at a snail’s pace (in deference to Clemmie’s fears) in a shut-up motor.”
2 Nor were Lloyd George’s occasional letters to Asquith in any way unfriendly. On December 28th, 1912 he wrote on the subject of a possible dissolution of Parliament, and after suggesting June, 1913, as a favourable month, concluded: “ Wishing you as brilliant a New Year as the present has proved itself to be.” (Asquith Papers, box xiii, ff. no 1).
3 Although, even in peace-time, strictly as an after-dinner pursuit (except perhaps for an occasional wet Sunday afternoon at the Wharf), readers of Mr. Robert Blake’s The Unknown Prime Minister may care to note.
4 Three years later he wrote of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas as being “ almost the only form of music that has ever given me real pleasure.” (Letters from Lord Oxford to a Friend, 1, p. 19).
THE IRISH IMBROGLIO I
1912-13
When drafting the third Home Rule Bill the Cabinet had one question of great difficulty to settle. Was the precedent of the two Gladstonian bills to be followed, and the whole of Ireland to be treated as a single unit? Or was Ulster, or at least a part of Ulster, to be excluded? Anything short of the first solution would be most unwelcome to the Nationalists. The degree of devolution they were offered was in itself mild enough. The Dublin parliament was to be so circumscribed in its powers as to be closer to a “ glorified county council ” than to a sovereign assembly.
Nevertheless its prospective powers were sufficient to provoke the Ulster Protestants to a paroxysm of hostility. In February, 1910, Sir Edward Carson, a Southern Irishman of Italian origin who sat for Dublin University and combined great personal charm, hypochondriacal neurasthenia, a huge law practice, and a strong taste for melodrama, had become leader of the Ulster Unionists. His choice as chief of the narrow, charmless, dour bigots of Belfast was almost as bizarre as that of Parnell, a generation before, as head of the Nationalists. And he was almost equally effective. In September, 1911, he responded to the new Home Rule prospect which had been opened up by the passage of the Parliament Act with the most extreme threat of resistance. “We must be prepared... the morning Home Rule is passed,” he told a large audience at Craigavon, “ ourselves to become responsible for the government of the Protestant Province of Ulster.”
There were prominent members of the Cabinet who could not be insensitive to the Ulster problem. Churchill, never lacking in filial piety, was unlikely to forget that his father had responded to the first Home Rule Bill by announcing that “ Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right.”1 And Lloyd George, closely in touch with the leaders of the Free Churches, knew the political dangers of forcing
unwilling Protestants under Catholic rule. The fact that Home Rule could be presented as “Rome Rule ” was a much greater liability to the pre-1914 Liberals than it would be to any party in the Britain of today.
1 The moral force, but not the electoral effectiveness, of Lord Randolph’s slogan was however somwhat reduced when it became known (on the publication of his son's biography in 1906) that he had written a contemporary letter to James Fitzgibbon saying: "I decided some time ago that if the G. O. M. went for Home Rule the Organge card would be the one to play. Please God it may turn out the ace of trumps and not the two."
There was no likelihood of the Conservatives failing to exploit this—or any other promising line of attack. To many of them (although Bonar Law was a notable exception) the plight of the northern Protestants made little instinctive appeal. Balfour, and the whole Cecil connection, found the Ulstermen deeply antipathetic. Lord Hugh Cecil’s one attempt to address an Orange rally was a dismal failure. Balfour himself avoided all such distasteful enterprises. His knowledge of Ireland was greater than that of any other Prime Minister of the last hundred years, but his interest was in trying to preserve the Union as a whole and not in salvaging an Ulster corner from the wreck. Lansdowne held the same views in a still more accentuated form. He was a Kerry landlord, and no concessions for Antrim or Armagh could ever have changed his attitude towards Home Rule. But they all quickly recognised that “ the Orange Card ” was the one to play. And they were prepared to play it with the utmost ruthlessness. The Conservatives of those days were sick with office hunger. Three successive electoral defeats had severely shaken their self-confidence. The lesser men amongst them became consumed by a mixture of hatred and jealousy for the long-lived Liberal Government. The intellectual blandness which was a characteristic of Asquith’s leadership—and one copied from him by some of the other ministers—they found peculiarly irritating. The Liberals had established themselves as the natural mandarins of Whitehall, and the Conservatives had become the lesser-known, inexperienced men. When would it end? From the perspective of today it is easy to look back on the last pre-Great War years as the obvious swan song of the old Liberal Party. At the time it was much less obvious that the swan was going to die.
The epoch-barrier of August, 1914 could not be foreseen. If the next general election could be taken in the Liberals’ own time, per-slogan was however somewhat reduced when it became known (on the publication of his son’s biography in 1906) that he had written a contemporary letter to James Fitzgibbon saying: “ I decided some time ago that if the G.O.M. went for Home Rule the Orange Card would be the one to play. Please God it may turn out the ace of trumps and not the two.” perhaps in the spring of 1915, with a successful Irish settlement behind them, who could be sure that they would not win again? Then the Unionists would assume the appearance of a permanent opposition. This was an eventuality which had to be prevented at all costs. Bonar Law’s leadership between 1912 and 1914 was in part an expression of an almost “ poor white ” sense of inferiority,1 and in part based upon a deliberate tactic of using the Ulster issue to force the Government out of office. “ I am afraid I shall have to show myself very vicious, Mr. Asquith, this session,” Law said as they walked together in procession to the House of Lords to listen to the King’s Speech in February, 1912. “ I hope you will understand,” he added, with the simplicity which was one of his few engaging characteristics.
“ I had no hesitation in reassuring him on that point,” Asquith recorded,a and by so doing gave a good example of his bland style. But did he really understand just how “ vicious ” Bonar Law and the other Unionists were prepared to be, not only in 1912, but in 1913 and 1914 as well? Did he realise the extent to which the Ulster struggle, unlike that over the veto of the Lords, was to be carried on outside the parliamentary arena?
In one sense it might seem that the Government had prepared themselves well for trouble. They decided to present the Home Rule Bill in a form which would be acceptable to the Nationalists, but to leave a line of retreat if Ulster proved adamant. After a crucial Cabinet meeting on February 6th, Asquith reported to the King that a discussion had taken place as to whether the Ulster counties with large Protestant majorities should be allowed to contract out of the Bill: The subject was debated at great length and from a number of diverse points of view. In the end the Cabinet acquiesced in the conclusions suggested by Lord Crewe and strongly recommended by the Prime Minister, viz:
(a) that the Bill as introduced should apply to the whole of Ireland;
(b) that the Irish leaders should from the first be given clearly to understand that the Government held themselves free to make such changes in the Bill as fresh evidence of facts, or the pressure of British opinion, may render expedient;
(c) that if, in the light of such evidence or indication of public opinion, it becomes clear as the Bill proceeds that some special treatment must be provided for the Ulster counties, the Government will be ready to recognise the necessity either by amendment of the Bill, or by not pressing it on under the provisions of the Parliament Act. In the meantime, careful and confidential inquiry is to be made as to the real extent and character of the Ulster resistance.b
The nature of the Government’s “ confidential inquiry ” in Ulster has never been revealed, but all the public evidence which emerged from that province (or at least the north-east corner of it) pointed to a highly-organised but deep-rooted resistance. The English Unionists stoked up the agitation and made unprecedented offers of illegal support. F. E. Smith, who had been quite willing to throw over Ulster in the 1910 coalition negotiations, suddenly discovered that a birthday on the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, combined with his affiliations in Liverpool politics, made him an honorary Orangeman. He became Carson’s principal henchman in Belfast. In September, 1912, he watched him, as the first of 471,444, so it was claimed, sign the “ Solemn Covenant ” in which the signatories individually pledged themselves never to recognise the authority of a Dublin Parliament; and in the following year he acted as his “ galloper ” at a review of 7,000 Ulster Volunteers. Throughout the agitation these two leaders of the English bar, both of whom were later to be Law Officers under Asquith, vied with each other in the calculated extremity of their language.
They could not go too far for the Orangemen. There was never any sign that the merchants, manufacturers and ministers of religion of Belfast and the surrounding counties, or their followers, ever found these English lawyers too extreme and irresponsible for their taste. Ulster may have been “ a business community, desiring rest,” as Carson once put it to Asquith. But the Orangemen were fanatics before they were businessmen. Nor were Carson and Smith ever in much danger of going too far for Bonar Law. The new leader’s golden rule was to be as unlike Balfour as possible. He never attempted to steer a course inside that of his more extreme followers. He looked always, at this stage, to his reputation inside and not outside the Unionist Party. As a result he fully kept his promise to be “ very vicious ” that session. He denounced the Government for being as corrupt as it was revolutionary. He talked of its Irish policy as being ‘ a conspiracy as treacherous as ever has been formed against the life of a great nation.” He accused Asquith, across the table of the House of Commons, of not even having any convictions to sell, and at Edinburgh of a crime against the Crown greater “ than has ever been committed by any minister who had ever held power.”
From behind the sad eyes of Bonar Law the tide of quiet violence poured out. Its first high-water mark came at Blenheim on July 29th, 1912. There, before a gathering of 15,000 Unionist stalwarts, who were also addressed by Carson and Smith, he announced:
I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I should not be prepared to support them, and in which, in my belief, they would not be supported by the overwhelming majority of the British people.c
Nor was there any length to which Bonar Law was not prepared to go to get the Government out. One night in May, after dinner
at Buckingham Palace, he told the King:
Your only chance is that they (the Government) should resign within two years. If they don’t, you must either accept the Home Rule Bill, or dismiss your Ministers and choose others who will support you in vetoing it: and in either case, half your subjects will think you have acted against them. . . . They may say that your Assent is a purely formal act and the prerogative of veto is dead. That was true as long as there was a buffer1 between you and the House of Commons, but they have destroyed this buffer and it is true no longer.d
During the first parliamentary circuit2 of the Home Rule Bill, therefore, Asquith was not without warning that a crisis of unprecedented difficulty was building up over Ulster.
1 By this he meant the pre-Parliament Act House of Lords.
2 This lasted from April nth, 1912 to January 30th, 1913. A laborious committee stage occupied much of the summer and autumn. Then, on January 16th, the House of Commons gave the bill a third reading by a majority of 109. A fortnight later it was thrown out on second reading by the Lords by a vote of 326 to 69. In this and in the two subsequent sessions the Welsh Church Disestablishment Bill followed an almost exactly parallel course.
