Asquith

by Roy Jenkins

  For a few days Asquith tried hard to dissuade Fisher from resignation. First, he had to track him down—his early morning resignation letter to Churchill announced that he was leaving immediately for Scotland—but in fact he had locked himself in a room in the Charing Cross Hotel. There Asquith had delivered to him a sharp letter ordering him, in the King’s name, to return at once to duty. This at least had the effect of bringing Fisher to Downing Street, and the Prime Minister tried upon him a combination of his own magisterial manner, Lloyd George’s cajolery and McKenna’s appeal to old friendship. None of these were of much effect, although Fisher did go back to the Admiralty for a few days. While there he composed various ultimata against Churchill, including a remarkable statement of the conditions on which he would stay and “ guarantee the successful termination of the war.” He would serve under neither Churchill nor Balfour nor indeed under any other First Lord unless the powers of the civilian were so restricted that he occupied “ the same position towards me as Mr. Temiant, M.P., does to Lord Kitchener (and very well he does it).” Fisher also demanded the dismissal of the rest of the Board of Admiralty.

  This document convinced Asquith that he was dealing with a megalomaniac, and he let him go without further remonstrance. By the time that he received it (May 19th) Fisher’s presence in office had ceased to be important. On the 17th, confronted with the threat of a vicious Tory attack in the House of Commons upon the whole administration of the Admiralty, which would have been most damaging both to the Government and to its hopes of enticing a wavering Italy into the war,1 Asquith had quickly agreed that a coalition was the only way out.

  1 Grey was away ill, and Asquith, in temporary charge of the Foreign Office, was closely engaged in these delicate negotiations.

  He laconically conveyed his decision to Stamfordham (for the King) that evening:

  After much reflection, & consultation today with Lloyd George and Bonar Law, I have come decidedly to the conclusion that, for the successful prosecution of the war, the Govt, must be reconstructed on a broad and non-party basis.g

  On the 19th Bonar Law formally signified his agreement. Such an arrangement meant that Churchill would have to leave the Admiralty. This was a clearly understood Tory condition for joining. Fisher could therefore be allowed to throw himself overboard.

  Asquith’s next task was the delicate one of the allocation of offices. It was one which he approached with distaste. Although he had always been a moderate in politics he hated, in a way that would have been incomprehensible to Lloyd George or Churchill, the idea of bringing Tories into his Cabinet. It was not so much the policies as the political manners of the opposition which he disliked. It was his old Liberal mandarin spirit coming out again. “To seem to welcome into the intimacy of the political household, strange alien, hitherto hostile figures,” he wrote, was “ a most intolerable task.”

  So was the sacrifice of old friends. The two most difficult acts of political butchery which he had to perform were the removal of Churchill from the Admiralty and the complete exclusion of Haldane. Both were laid down by the Conservatives, with an almost equal lack of justice and prescience, as conditiones sine qua non. Asquith reluctantly accepted them both. With Churchill he had a great deal of trouble. Between Mayr 17th and 21st he received six letters from the First Lord, pointing between them to violent alternations of mood. In the first of these letters Churchill appeared to accept the inevitability of his removal from the Admiralty, and asked for “ another military department ”—he was probably including Colonies in this category— but if that was not convenient, he asked for employment in the field. In the second letter (18th May) he said that he would accept Colonies if offered but pleaded to be allowed to stay on at the Admiralty. In the third (20th May) he told Asquith that Sir Arthur Wilson (whom he had quickly retired in 1911) would serve as First Sea Lord under him and under no-one else. “ This is the greatest compliment I have ever been paid,”h he added.

  Asquith replied firmly and at once to this letter. “ I have your letter,” he wrote. “ You must take it as settled you are not to remain at the Admiralty. I am sure you will try to take a large view of an unexampled situation. Everyone has to make sacrifices. . .i He hoped to offer him another post, but he could not for the moment say what.

  Churchill came back with a highly-charged six-page epistle on the following day (May 21st): It is not clinging to office or to this particular office or my own interest and advancement which moves me. I am clinging to my task and to my duty. ... I did not believe it was possible to endure such anxiety.... I can only look to you. ... You alone can do me justice and do justice to the military need.”j

  It was of no avail. The Tory leaders, to whom he also appealed, were inflexible, and Asquith had no room for manoeuvre on the issue. Perhaps because of a hard little note from Bonar Law, Churchill came, later that day, to accept the inevitable. He wrote again to Asquith with contrition and resignation: And then, still on the same day, he sent the sixth and last of this series of letters. He had tried hard to persuade Sir Arthur Wilson to serve under Balfour, but in vain.

  Wilson’s importance lay more in Churchill’s mind than in that of anyone else. Balfour became First Lord, Sir Henry Jackson became First Sea Lord, and Churchill, a seven-year phase of brilliant Cabinet success firmly behind him, retired into the semi-shadows with the sinecure post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. He had gone down fighting, although much the best letter on his behalf had been written, not by himself, but by his wife.

  “Winston may in your eyes and in those with whom he has to work have faults,” Clementine Churchill told Asquith, “ but he has the supreme quality which I venture to say very few of your present or future Cabinet possess—the power, the imagination, the deadliness, to fight Germany.”k

  Haldane put up no similar struggle. He went quietly, but he went with some bitterness against Asquith. The bitterness was more easily understandable than were Asquith’s actions. The Conservatives’ veto on Haldane was even firmer than that on Churchill; they would not serve in a Cabinet with him, and Grey, when he tried to intervene, found them quite unshakable 011 the point. It was a veto of pure prejudice. In Churchill’s case the Tories genuinely believed that he had failed at the Admiralty and that the progress of the war would be assisted by his replacement by one of their own men. There was no question of Haldane having failed as Lord Chancellor,1 or of its being of much importance to the war if he had. Nor did the Conservatives particularly want the post for themselves—it was in fact filled by the Liberal Solicitor-General, Stanley Buckmaster. They were against Haldane for reasons which the more intelligent of them must have known in their own minds were absolute nonsense—that he spoke German well, had visited the country many times, and had once said, in a purely philosophical sense, that it was his spiritual home; and the Harmsworth Press, on the basis of these straws, had mounted a vicious “ McCarthyite ” campaign against him. The force of this campaign and the difficulty of Asquith’s decision should not be underestimated. Had he insisted upon the retention of Haldane the whole coalition scheme might have collapsed and the country, at a most critical stage, been left in political confusion. Even so it was exactly the sort of issue on which Asquith might have been expected to be at his best, where his disdain of clamour, intolerance and prejudice should have given him a rock-like firmness. But he was not. He capitulated, sadly and self-critically, but relatively easily.

  Still more surprisingly, he failed to express to Haldane the deep regret which he undoubtedly felt. He wrote to Grey in the warmest terms about Haldane. He wrote to Crewe (who remained in the Government) to thank him for his help in the chapter which was closing. But to Haldane he neither wrote nor spoke. The intimacy between the two men, as was seen in chapter XVII had foundered on the jagged edge of divergent tastes, but Haldane remained Asquith’s oldest political ally, as the Prime Minister did not fail to point out to Grey. They had stood together in every battle for 30 years. Henceforward, as a result of the P
rime Minister’s silence, they stood a little apart. It was the most uncharacteristic fault of Asquith’s whole career.

  How can it be explained? How, indeed, can his whole attitude throughout these crisis days be explained? The unusual factor was not his passivity; that had long been a characteristic, and one which was sometimes a considerable source of strength. What was unusual was the speed with which he permitted solutions which were not his own to be pressed upon him. Churchill subsequently criticised him for not allowing a few days’ delay, accompanied by Italy’s entry into the war (which took place on May 23rd) to strengthen his own position. It was most unlike Asquith not to give this a chance to happen.

  What was still more unlike him was the note of self-pity, rendering him insensitive to the wounds of others, which crept into his correspondence. I11 conversation with Samuel, in letters to Churchill and to Redmond he stressed his own troubles, trials and sacrifices. He spoke as though having to reconstruct a government was the worst burden that could ever be imposed upon a man. But this was not the-only trouble that lay upon him at this time. Throughout the crisis he was preoccupied with private suffering.

  Towards the end of April and at the beginning of May there had been signs that his relationship with Miss Stanley was breaking up. The spate of correspondence continued unabated, but an uneven note of anxiety entered into it. On the 22nd he wrote: “You will tell me, won’t you, the real truth at once? However hard it may be to me.” Then, immediately on top of that “ wave of distress and uncertainty ” came the news of Rupert Brooke’s death on Lemnos, which, he said, caused him “ more pain than any (previous) loss in the war.” But on April 26th he clutched at a straw and his spirits revived: “ To see you again, 8c be with you, & hear your voice, and above all to feel everything is unchanged, has made a new creature of me. You are the best and richest of life-givers.”

  The respite was short-lived. For the week-end at the beginning of May he went to stay with Miss Stanley and her family at Alderley. While still there he wrote: “ I thought once or twice yesterday, for the first time in our intercourse, that I rather bored you.”

  Before he left there was another glint in the clouds, and he returned to London with better hope. But by midnight two days later (May 4th) he was again completely cast down and full of general self-doubt: “I walked almost the whole way back to Downing Street1 (nearly run over) ruminating over these things. I sometimes think that Northcliffe and his obscure crew may perhaps be right....”

  1 From Mansfield Street, near Oxford Circus.

  For the next few days he oscillated violently between deep gloom and short bursts of optimism. His letters, to a far greater extent than ever before, were concerned not with events but with states of mind and feeling. Miss Stanley was due to go as a nurse to a military hospital at Wimereux on Monday, May 10th, and this may have been one reason for the heightened atmosphere. But she did not go. She was struck down by a fever and took to her bed instead. Asquith visited her for ten minutes on the Monday evening and returned to Downing Street with another of her callers. He was in better spirits than on the occasion of his return six days before:

  “I walked back with the Assyrian [Edwin Montagu] from Mansfield Street,” he wrote later that night, “ and we had (as always) good conversation. I don’t honestly believe that, at this moment, there are two persons in the world (of opposite sexes) from whom I cd. more confidently count, whatever troubles or trials I had to encounter, for whole-hearted love and devotion than you and he: of course, in quite different ways & senses.”

  On the Tuesday Asquith wrote her two calm “ pattern of events ” letters and paid a brief call at Mansfield Street, but (not greatly to his surprise) was not allowed to see her. On the Wednesday (May 12th) she wrote and told him that she had decided to marry Edwin Montagu.

  The blow to Asquith was severe. He had long thought of her marriage as something which must one day occur. They had discussed it together and he had stressed that he must not be allowed to stand in its way, and had comforted himself with the wishful thought that her acquisition of a husband need make little difference to the intimacy with which they discussed events and individuals. But all this was very abstract. She had no active suitors, except for Montagu himself, who had proposed to her two years before and whom, as was well-known within the Asquith circle, she had then rejected with some horror. Apart from anything else, she would, unless Montagu was to lose his fortune, have had to change her religion and become a Jewess.1 Asquith subsequently had never thought seriously of him—the frequent object of their mocking but affectionate joint laughter, his former parliamentary private secretary and most loyal supporter, the man whom only two days before he had described as his most devoted male friend—in this context.

  1 In 1915 she took this obstacle in her stride.

  Probably he had never thought seriously of anyone, for once the news was broken to him all wishful thinking about continuing intimacy quickly went out of his mind. He never reproached Miss Stanley, not even for the suddenness of her action. He never reproached Montagu. “ I have just had a most characteristically noble and generous letter from E.S.M.”, he wrote on May 21st. “I love him.” But he made no attempt to conceal from either of them or from himself what a heavy blow he had received, and how great a change it must make.

  He wrote a three-line note to Miss Stanley on the Wednesday, and another on the Friday night, a few hours after Fisher’s resignation. Then, at the end of the following Monday morning, and just after his crucial interview with Bonar Law and Lloyd George, a “ most revealing and heart-rending reply ” came from her. Asquith wrote back at once: she alone in all the world could have helped him in the “ most hellish days ” that had just gone by. The question now was whether he should see her before she went away on the Thursday. He was excessively self-abnegatory about it. He was determined not to “ add to (her) perplexities or increase (her) suffering.” Over the next few days of his crisis with Churchill, his crisis with Haldane, he tormented himself with this problem. It was made worse by the postponement of her departure from London.

  Then, at last, a week later, he saw her for a brief half-hour and she was away.

  He next wrote to her from G.H.Q. in France, where he had gone for a short visit to the battlefront on June 3rd. He had recovered somewhat:

  I have made up my mind to try (with whatever I have left) to push this war through. Apart from that, “ tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse.”

  I have only one prayer—night & day, day & night—that you may be truly & perfectly happy.

  On July 24th the marriage took place. Asquith sent Miss Stanley two little silver boxes “ with all my love, and more wishes than words can frame for your complete and unbroken happiness.” During that autumn he wrote to her three or four times, but it was noticeable that all these letters were in reply to initiatives of hers. The last, before a gap of several years, was a note of thanks for a Christinas present.

  So this great epistolary friendship came to an end. Miss Stanley, the evidence suggests, deeply fond of Asquith and excited by his confidence though she was, had begun to find it a crushing and frightening emotional burden. This was probably one of her motives for escaping into a manage dc raison. It was a pity that she chose the moment that she did. Her sustenance of Asquith collapsed at a time when he was in peculiar need of it.

  1 Although Asquith thought that Haldane’s taking of the “ King’s Pledge ” (total abstinence for the duration of the war) in early April led to a notable diminution in his energy and buoyancy. As soon as he ceased to be a minister Haldane reverted to more normal habits. “ When you come to London let us meet as of yore one evening,” he wrote to Rosebery on June 9th. “ As I am no longer a servant of the Crown I have ceased to confine myself to soda-water.” (Heuston; Lives of the Lord Chancellors, 1885-1940, p. 225). Asquith himself never made the mistake of following the example which Lloyd George had persuaded the King to set.

  A TROUBLED GOVERNMENT

  1915r />
  The agreement of the party leaders to the formation of a Coalition Government was announced on Wednesday, May 19th, but it was not until a week later that the Cabinet list was ready for publication. During the latter part of this interval Asquith’s grip on events tightened considerably. He began to exert himself to achieve what he regarded as the most able and cohesive Cabinet for the carrying on of the war. This did not mean that he wanted it to be narrowly based. Once the relative intimacy of a Liberal Government had gone, he was in favour of the widest possible representation. He brought in Henderson from the Labour Party, and he tried hard, but unsuccessfully, to secure the adhesion of Redmond. But it did mean that he was reluctant to give high posts to Conservatives simply because of their position in that party’s hierarchy. In particular, he was loath to offer a crucial post to Bonar Law.