Asquith

by Roy Jenkins

  But neither during that circuit nor during the second, much shorter one2 3 did he make a firm move for a negotiated settlement along the lines of the Cabinet letter of February 6th, 1912. The fact that he neither did this, nor deployed the full force of the criminal law against those who sent seditious threats echoing from Belfast to Blenheim and back again has often been made the chief count against his peace-time leadership.

  Yet it is easy to see why he took no precipitate action. In politics he was never a restless man. The whole technique of his statesmanship was to watch events calmly until he saw an opportunity for effective intervention. “ A sudden curve developed of which I took immediate advantage,” was his typical description, previously quoted,4 of how he solved the Cabinet naval crisis of 1909. In Irish affairs, no such curve showed itself during 1912 and 1913. It was unlikely to do so. The Parliament Act procedure put a premium on delay. The first two circuits were dummy runs. Why should anyone settle until they saw what the disposition of the forces was likely to be when it came to the final confrontation?

  Independently of Asquith’s character, this was the position of both sides at this stage in the dispute. The Nationalists and many of the Liberal back-benchers would not countenance the division of Ireland until they were convinced that this was the only way to avoid civil war. There was no reason why they should. There was a great case, economic, administrative and mystical, for a united Ireland. Asquith himself felt the force of it. “ . . . Ireland is a nation, not two nations, but one nation,” he said in Dublin in July, 1912. But even had he not done so, and even if he could have persuaded all the Liberal back-benchers to fall easily into line, there would still have remained the problem of the Nationalists. For them to have abandoned any part of the country at the first whiff of braggadocio from Craigavon would have been political suicide. And with Redmond against him Asquith had no parliamentary majority. There was nothing discreditable in recognising this fact. So long as the Irish were in the Imperial Parliament their votes were as good as anybody else’s and they were fully entitled to every scrap of influence which they could extract from them.

  Of course Redmond in the last resort was most unlikely to put Asquith out. This would have meant a Unionist Government and the end of Home Rule of any sort for another decade. The real danger was not what Redmond might do, but the support which he would lose in Ireland as a result of the accommodations forced upon him. Throughout the Ulster crisis the Unionists and (less excusably) the King constantly spoke of Redmond as a rock of unreasonable recalcitrance. But the perspective of history leaves no room for doubt that, on the contrary, this agreeable and slightly weary parliamentarian was far too amenable to Asquith to be a true representative of feeling in his country.

  Even within his parliamentary group there were several tougher spirits, notably Devlin, who as an Ulsterman himself was particularly strong against exclusion. Still more important were the new forces in Ireland which were beginning to arise under the Irish Parliamentary party and which eventually cut it off from any real contact with its constituency. Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Fein, Patric Pearse’s Irish Republican Brotherhood and James Larkin’s Irish Citizen Army were all equally inimical, in the long run, to the constitutional leadership of Irish Nationalism and the acceptance of limited Home Rule. Asquith, in 1913 and 1914, saw their significance even less clearly than did Redmond. He continued to regard the Irish parliamentary leader as possessing a Parnell-like hold on the country. But can it possibly be held that Asquith would have shown greater statesmanship had he further undermined Redmond’s position by a more brutal and rapid extraction of concessions?

  The “ Agar-Robartes amendment ” is often regarded as a great missed opportunity. This was proposed in June, 1912, by the Liberal member for the St. Austell division of Cornwall and provided for the complete exclusion from the bill of the four clearly Protestant counties of Antrim, Armagh, Londonderry and Down. It involved permanent partition, and as such could not possibly have been accepted by the Nationalists. It was also opposed by the Government spokesmen. But had it been supported by them, it would not have satisfied the opposition. At all stages the Unionists insisted on the exclusion of the mixed counties of Tyrone and Fermanagh. At that stage they were demanding the exclusion of the whole of Ulster, including the Catholic counties of Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal.

  Still more important is the fact that no arrangement for exclusion, however extensive it had been, would in 1912 have destroyed the opposition to Home Rule. Half of the English Unionists were in reality much more interested in Dublin than in Belfast. They were merely “ playing the Orange card.” Even the other half, represented by Bonar Law, although genuinely concerned with Ulster, were still more concerned with smashing the Liberal Government. A victory without a fight would not have satisfied them. They would have swallowed the concession as though it were nothing and looked for a fresh battleground. The Nationalists would have been disaffected without the conciliation of the Unionists. There was no sign of a favourable “ curve ” developing, a prior condition for which had to be such a concentration of Unionist opposition upon the Ulster issue that, if it were removed, there could be no effective re-grouping of forces against other aspects of the bill. This did not occur until sometime in the course of 1913.

  It is therefore unlikely that Asquith would have achieved more by an earlier attempt at an Ulster settlement. Ought he then to have moved in the other direction and arrested those who were openly preaching sedition in Belfast? One difficulty here, not perhaps inspiring in principle but real in practice, was the position of the men involved. The Government could not move against any local firebrand without moving against Carson and Smith. And it would have been almost equally difficult to draw a line between them and Bonar Law; the Unionist leader never allowed himself to be outbid in sedition.

  To lock up the leaders of the opposition would have been a bold stroke for any government. For Asquith it would have been a fatal one. It would have undermined the whole position he was trying to maintain. The House of Commons was the one battleground on which the Liberals always won. It was therefore in their interests to pretend that it was the only one which counted. “ I tell you quite frankly that I do not believe in the prospect of civil war ” Asquith said at Dublin.

  When it came to the issue, he argued, British subjects would not stand against “ the supreme authority of the Imperial Parliament.” But the Unionists were tired of an arena in which they always lost. They were only too anxious to appeal to some other authority—to the Lords, to the King, to the streets of Belfast. During 1913 Bonar Law played with alternative ideas of a mass Unionist withdrawal from Parliament and of provoking such constant disorder as to bring its proceedings to a standstill. The arrest of himself or any other Unionist leaders would have given him the perfect excuse for one or other of these courses. Furthermore the effect upon the King and the army, both a little wobbly in any event, would have been catastrophic. Asquith’s stand was on the inviolability of the parliamentary system. To maintain this stand he had to pretend that the system was working normally, even if it was not—and this meant that, whatever they did, he could ot lock up his principal opponents.

  Asquith’s relative inactivity on Ireland during the sessions of 1912 and 1913 therefore had more to commend it than is commonly allowed. Additional action beyond the trundling of the Bill round its first two parliamentary circuits might easily have made matters worse. Furthermore, for a Government which appeared to be beset on all sides— Ireland, strikes, the Marconi scandal, the threatening international situation, the suffragettes—and which faced a constant series of parliamentary crises, a certain massive calmness on the part of its head was by no means a negligible asset. At one time the Speaker was threatening to resign; at another the air was thick with rumours that the King wanted to abdicate; and at most times Augustine Birrell the Chief Secretary, thought that he had better vacate the Irish Office. Had Asquith been a restless political genius he might have struck out at the pr
oblem, with a faint chance of solving it; but had he been a lesser man than he was he might easily have lost his nerve and begun himself to indulge in petulant and self-pitying resignation talk. Instead he remained calm, detached and mildly optimistic. When confronted with apparently insoluble crises he consoled himself with his “ fixed belief,” as he wrote to Miss Stanley, “ that in politics the expected rarely happens.”

  The King was less phlegmatic than Asquith. Throughout the spring and summer months of 1913 he received a spate of constitutional complaint and advice from Unionist leaders, elder statesmen and anonymous correspondents. “ The one man,” Sir Harold Nicolson comments, “ who . .. had never even alluded to the subject was the Prime Minister himself.”e All this made the King extremely agitated. On July 24th he saw Birrell and pointed out “ that apparently the Government were “ drifting ” and that with this “ drift ” his own position was becoming more and more difficult.’’-5 He then asked Stamford-ham6 to find out the views of the opposition leaders. As a result he received on July 31st a memorandum jointly composed by Bonar Law and Lansdowne. Armed with this, he retired to the royal yacht off Cowes, and wrote in his own hand a 400 word document for the Prime Minister. This he handed to Asquith at a specially arranged audience on August nth. It outlined all his fears about the effect of the Ulster situation upon the Crown and showed that Bonar Law’s harsh words of the previous summer had fixed themselves in his mind:

  Whatever I do I shall offend half the population.

  One alternative would certainly result in alienating the Ulster Protestants from me, and whatever happens the result must be detrimental to me personally and to the Crown in general.

  No Sovereign has ever been in such a position ... .g

  The King suggested an all-party conference to see whether a settlement by consent might be possible. Asquith took the memorandum away with him, having been asked to compose a considered reply. This he did during his Morayshire holiday, which started a few days later. It was in two parts. The first dealt with the general constitutional position of the Sovereign, and was a document of exceptional clarity and force.7 The right of the Crown to withhold its assent from a bill which had received parliamentary sanction had died early in the reign of Queen Anne, he stated. “ We have had, since that date, Sovereigns of marked individuality, of great authority, and of strong ideas (often, from time to time, opposed to the policy of the Ministry of the day) but none of them—not even George III, Queen Victoria or King Edward VII—have ever dreamt of reviving the ancient veto of the Crown.,,

  As for the right of the sovereign to dismiss his ministers, that perhaps still existed, but it was worth recalling what happened when it was last exercised.

  This was in 1834, when William IV (one of the least wise of British monarchs) called upon Lord Melbourne to resign. He took advantage (as we now know) of a hint improvidentially given by Lord Melbourne himself, but the proceedings were neither well-advised nor fortunate. The dissolution which followed left Sir R. Peel in a minority, and Lord Melbourne and his friends in a few months returned to power, which they held for the next six years. The authority of the Crown was disparaged, and Queen Victoria, during her long reign, was careful never to repeat the mistake of her predecessor.

  The Parliament Act had in no way changed the position. It dealt only with the relations between the two Houses. The only way for the Crown to keep clear of politics, Asquith sternly concluded, was for it to follow the constitutional precedents. Otherwise it would become “ the football of contending factions/’

  Asquith’s second memorandum dealt with his view of the Irish situation. When the Home Rule Bill became law there was “ the certainty of tumult and riot, and more than the possibility of bloodshed ” in Ulster. But to speak “ of what is likely to happen as Civil War,” was, in his opinion, “ a misuse of terms.” If, on the other hand, the Bill failed to become law, the prospect “ was much more grave.” It is not too much to say that Ireland would become ungovernable— unless by the application of forces and methods which would offend the conscience of Great Britain, and arouse the deepest resentment of all the self-governing Dominions of the Crown.” A general election before the Bill became law would settle nothing. If the Government won, the Ulster trouble would persist. If it lost, the problem of governing Ireland as a whole would become no easier. Furthermore, the acquiescence in the demand for an election at that stage would make a mockery of the purpose of the Parliament Act.

  Was there a prospect of settlement by conference? Only, Asquith thought, if there was “ some definite basis upon and from which its deliberations can proceed.” This basis must be the acceptance by the Unionists of the principle of Irish Home Rule. Once that was done he was ready to consider “ any reasonable suggestion ” for the problem of Ulster. But until it was done there was “ a chasm of principle ” which no conference could bridge. “ I fear that at present (it may be different nearer the time),” he added, “ no such basis can be found.” The King received these papers at Balmoral in two instalments, one in the second and one in the third week of September. He replied on the 22nd of the month with a 1500 word typewritten letter, which one may guess was a joint product of himself and Stamfordham. The tone was courteous, painstaking and worried. But the substance was highly argumentative. He set himself to contest most of Asquith’s points. He quoted both Bagehot and Erskine May to suggest that the Sovereign did have some residual right to dismiss his advisers or to dissolve Parliament on his own initiative. He suggested strongly that the Parliament Act did make a difference. He argued in favour of a general election before the Bill became law. And he showed clearly how deeply he was influenced by the Tory case against Home Rule as such:

  But is the demand for Home Rule for Ireland as earnest and as National today as it was, for instance, in the days of Parnell?

  Has not the Land Purchase Policy settled the agrarian trouble, which was the chief motive of the Home Rule agitation?

  I am assured by resident Landowners in the South and West of Ireland that their tenants, while ostensibly favourable to Home Rule, are no longer enthusiastic about it, and are, comparatively speaking, content and well-to-do.

  The hierarchy of the Church of Rome is indifferent and probably at heart would be glad not to come under the power of an Irish Parliament.h

  Worse still, he raised a new point not touched upon in Asquith’s memoranda. What would happen when there occurred the “ tumult and riot ” which Asquith himself had predicted?

  Do you propose to employ the Army to suppress such disorders? This is, to my mind, one of the most serious questions which the Government will have to decide. In doing so you will, I am sure, bear in mind that ours is a voluntary Army; and Soldiers are none the less Citizens; by birth, religion and environment they may have strong feelings on the Irish question.... Will it be wise, will it be fair to the Sovereign as head of the Army, to subject the discipline, and indeed the loyalty of his troops, to such a strain?i

  Altogether this was a formidable letter for a Prime Minister, at a time of mounting crisis, to receive from the Sovereign. Asquith replied on October ist. He reiterated one or two of his constitutional statements and commented rather sharply on the King’s point about the army: “There is, in my opinion, no sufficient ground for the fears—or hopes—expressed in some quarters, that the troops would fail to do their duty.”j Within a week he was due to go to Balmoral and he was holding some of his fire.

  Asquith’s three days at Balmoral was one of a series of political visits which the King had organised for that autumn. As Crewe, who was one of the first guests, put it to Asquith: “ He is. .. haunted . .. by the feeling that if he does not take off his coat and work for a settlement of some kind, and there is serious loss of life after the Bill passes, he will not only be held responsible by Opposition partisans, but will actually be so to some extent.”k 1 Later in the month Crewe was succeeded by Churchill as minister in attendance, and this visit overlapped with one by Bonar Law. The two visit
ors had a long talk together, which was reported by Churchill to Asquith and by Bonar Law to Lansdowne and Carson. There was no direct contradiction between these accounts, but Churchill’s implied a less cautious conversation than did Bonar Law’s. Law summed up his attitude by writing to Carson: “ The whole question as to the exclusion of Ulster really turns upon this—whether or not it would be regarded as a betrayal by the solid body of Unionists in the South and West.”* But Churchill spoke of “ the spirit of courage and goodwill ” with which Bonar Law had expressed his desire for a settlement; of his desire first for secret meetings between one or two on each side and then for a regular conference; and of the possibility that this might even lead to a revival of the old 1910 coalition scheme. As a result of this “ remarkable conversation ” Churchill was swept along by a wave of enthusiasm for a conference and for compromise. He reminded Asquith how he and Lloyd George had originally pressed the exclusion of Ulster upon the Cabinet and how “ Loreburn (had) repulsed us in the most bloodthirsty manner.”2

  1 Crewe also wrote that “ the King was sedulous, even in talking to me very intimately, to express no opinion against Home Rule; ‘ it might be a very good thing ’ and anyhow ‘ some form of it is evidently now necessary, as a majority in Parliament favours it (Asquith Papers, box 38, ff. 126-7).

  2 This was a thrust calculated to win Asquith’s sympathy. Loreburn (formerly Sir Robert Reid) had been Lord Chancellor when the Bill was being drafted. He had left the Government in June, 1912, and fifteen months later, with a typical elder statesman’s show of non-partisan wisdom, he had embarrassed and irritated his former colleagues by writing to The Times to propound exactly the solution which he had so strongly opposed from inside.