Asquith

by Roy Jenkins

  This was for two reasons. First, he had no respect for either the ability or the character of Law. (A few months before he had come across Bolingbroke’s remark about Bishop Warburton: “ Sir, I never wrestle with a chimney-sweep”; and had commented: “A good saying, which I sometimes call to mind when I am confronting Bonar Law.”) Second, his whole instinct was against allowing the new Government to become a two-headed monster. Unlike Lloyd George after him he did not wish to turn the leader of the Unionist Party into a specially trusted (and specially burdened) lieutenant. A Coalition there had to be, but it was to be as much like a normal party Government as possible, with no unusual position for the leader of the minority party. All ministers should have their direct lines to the head of the Government, which would in practice function with varying frequency and clarity according to his view of their position and abilities, but there should be no subsidiary exchange. This system, which Asquith operated for the next nineteen months, did not turn out to be a recipe for political stability.

  In accordance with it, Asquith pushed up those Conservatives whom he liked or trusted, and pushed down Law. He was happy to give Balfour (who, as a member first of the Committee of Imperial Defence and then of the War Council, had been almost in the Government since the outbreak of war) the key post at the Admiralty, although this was not an appointment which particularly commended itself to the new First Lord’s Unionist colleagues. He gave Curzon high precedence if not much work as Lord Privy Seal, and he was generous about admitting Carson, as Attorney-General, to the Cabinet, despite complaints from Redmond. He was determined to keep Grey at the Foreign Office, and, after a momentary hesitation on May 17th, Kitchener at the War Office. This left two posts of first-rate importance, the one— the Exchequer—carrying great traditional prestige—and the other— the new Ministry of Munitions—offering the greatest challenge. Lloyd George obviously had to have one of them. Asquith believed it right to prevent Bonar Law having the other; and in this blocking aim he was surprisingly successful.

  Lloyd George accepted Munitions. This in itself was a relief to Asquith, and he wrote in glowing terms to the new minister to thank him for his “ self-forgetfulness.” But it made the exclusion of Bonar Law still more difficult. The Exchequer was a more obviously suitable post for him than the Ministry of Munitions. Asquith then toyed (as in 1908) with a plan for reverting to Gladstone’s 1880 arrangement (but how different were the circumstances) and doubling the Treasury with the Premiership. This was coldly received on all sides.1 Asquith therefore decided on a simple show of strength against Law. But, as he and the Unionist leader were always uncomfortable in each other’s company, he used Lloyd George as an intermediary.

  1 It was a strangely perverse idea. Apart from the impossible burden which would have been thrown upon Asquith himself, it would have exacerbated rather than eased the political problem with which he was trying to deal. The difficulty in forming a Coalition is to find jobs for men rather than vice versa.

  “ On the morning of Tuesday, 25 May,” Asquith recorded in a pencilled memorandum, “ I commissioned Ll. George to see B. Law, & to point out

  (1) the resentment of our party at the exclusion of Haldane

  (2) their resentment at the inclusion of Carson

  (3) the impossibility from a party point of view of both Admiralty and War Office being in Tory hands 1

  (4) the impossibility of having a Tariff Reformer at the Exchequer.

  This was intended to prevent B. Law taking either the office of

  Munitions or the Exer.

  Later in the day the Tory leaders in substance accepted the position,

  Ll.G. going to Munitions and McKenna to Exchequer.” a

  This was a remarkable capitulation on Law’s part. McKenna had no particular claim on the Exchequer—his wife wrote Asquith a letter of almost amazed gratitude—and, after Haldane and Churchill, he was the Liberal whom the Conservatives would most like to have excluded completely. Instead they accepted his promotion without even the compensation of securing his former place at the Home Office for one of their own men. Walter Long, who wrote to Asquith asking in precise and pressing terms for this post, was given the Presidency of the Local Government Board. Simon was promoted to be Home Secretary. And Law him self became Colonial Secretary, by no means a convenient position from which to co-ordinate the Unionist forces in the Government.

  Why did he allow this to happen? Part of the reason probably lay in the criminal prosecution which was pending against William Jacks and Company. This was the firm in which Bonar Law had pursued an active business career until 1901. His brother was still a fully participating partner. He himself habitually lent the company any loose money which he had available. The charge against the business was that, in the early days of the war, it had traded with the enemy. During May it looked as though John Law would be one of the accused. In fact, when the case came on in Edinburgh in June, he was left out. But two other partners were found guilty and sentenced to brief terms of imprisonment.

  No one seriously thought that Bonar Law had himself behaved improperly. But in view of the attitude which both he and his party had taken, first about the Marconi affair and then towards Haldane, he could hardly expect to escape all of the backwash.1 Asquith’s comment when he heard of the matter in February was fairly typical of Liberal feeling: “It will be one of the ironies of fortune (after what we innocently suffered over Marconi) if B.L. (equally innocent) were to encounter a like injustice.” Innocent though he might be, the incident hardly made mid-May the ideal time for Law to demand either the Exchequer, with its Inland Revenue function, or the Ministry of Munitions, with its intimate supervisory functions over a large number of industrial firms.

  1 What, it may fairly be asked, would the Unionists have said had some family firm of Haldane’s been involved in this way?

  The final shape of the Cabinet gave twelve posts to Liberals, eight to Unionists, one to Labour, and one to Kitchener. The real preponderance of the Liberals was greater than this; only Balfour and Kitchener impaired their monopoly of key positions. Apart from Haldane, Asquith had to drop from the Cabinet seven previous members: Samuel, Pease, Emmott, Lucas, Hobhouse, Beauchamp and Montagu. He found lesser jobs for five of them, and re-promoted Montagu in a little over a year.

  The new Cabinet came together for the first time on May 27th, and settled down to a routine of much more frequent meetings than had been the recent habit of the old. Until the beginning of August at least two and sometimes three meetings a week was the pattern. The old War Council had disappeared, but was to some extent replaced by a new Dardanelles Committee of eleven members. Five of them were Unionists. As the summer wore on this Committee, under the guidance of its secretary, Colonel Hankey, began increasingly to concern itself with general military matters. In August Carson was added to the list of members. Kitchener, after the change of Government, had suggested a new War Council, to be composed only of the Prime Minister, Balfour and himself, with Hankey as secretary. But this was impracticable. The Unionists would never have agreed to delegate real authority to a body on which their only representative was Balfour, whom they regarded as implicated in the mistakes of the previous Government.

  In June the uneasy Coalition began to face a new problem—that of compulsory military service—which was to be with it, often in an acute form, for much of the remainder of its life. At this stage all that was proposed and agreed to was a Registration Bill, but some members of the Cabinet—notably Lloyd George, Curzon, Austen Chamberlain and Churchill—saw it as paving the way to conscription. So, probably, did the King, who wrote somewhat disingenuously to Asquith on the 23 rd of the month:

  I fear recruiting for the Army is by no means as brisk as it was a fortnight ago. I earnestly trust that the Cabinet will agree without delay to registration being carried out as no one could object to that. I trust we shall not be obliged to come to compulsion; but I am interested to see it has been advocated in the H. of C. this evening by one
of your late whips who has been at the front for ten months! ! ! b

  This was clear notice of the direction in which the King would endeavour to push the Government. But his influence was minor compared with the appalling rate at which men were consumed in France. So long as the Government permitted the generals to engage in frontal attacks on heavily fortified positions, with the frightful losses which were inevitably involved, they left themselves no ultimate alternative to conscription. Asquith saw this, but, supported by Kitchener, he wished to approach the decision in the most gradual way possible. Kitchener’s reasons were associated with the traditions of War Office administration and his own prestige as “ a great poster.” Asquith’s were largely political. Despite the cross currents within the Cabinet, back-bench opinion on the issue divided sharply on party lines; and the Liberals’ allies, the Labour Party and the Irish Nationalists, found compulsory service even more repugnant than they did themselves. Early in August Runciman, the President of the Board of Trade, told Asquith that all the trades union leaders were “ hotly against compulsion in any form and will use the whole force of their organisation to fight it inch by inch.” Later the same month Asquith recorded what his own Chief Whip had told him:

  Gulland, whom I saw this morning for the first time for weeks, tells me that he gets letters from Liberal chairmen, etc., all over the country denouncing Lloyd George as a lost soul, and some of them predicting that conscription would bring us to the verge, or over the verge of revolution. I have had several interviews with colleagues—Harcourt, Simon, etc.,—all strong in the same sense.c

  Whatever Asquith’s supporters at home might say, military developments during August tilted the argument still further in favour of compulsion. At the end of the first week came the failure of the landings at Suvla Bay on the Gallipoli Peninsula. A third precarious bridgehead was established, but contrary to the most confident expectations, General Hamilton, badly served by an elderly but inexperienced corps commander, failed to break through to the high ground which dominated the Narrows. Asquith described this as the worst disappointment of the war. It destroyed the hope of victory by strategic adventure rather than by stubborn slaughter.

  Then, on August 20th, after a four-day conference with Joffre and French, Kitchener told the Cabinet that he had been forced to agree to a new Allied offensive in the west. Asquith wrote to the King:

  General Joffre is quite determined both on political and military grounds (the main element in the former being the situation in Russia) to take the offensive without delay and on a considerable scale. Sir J. French has agreed with him as to the urgency of such a step from a military point of view. Lord Kitchener while far from sanguine that any substantial military advantage will be achieved is strongly of the opinion that we cannot, without serious and perhaps fatal injury to the alliance, refuse the co-operation which General Joffre invites and expects. The drawbacks and even dangers of the proposed operation were pointed cut with great force by Mr. Churchill and other members of the Cabinet, including the Prime Minister and Lord Lansdowne, and Lord Kitchener himself expressed his concurrence in some at any rate of their apprehensions. But after much consideration the Cabinet adopted Lord Kitchener’s view and the necessary steps will be taken.d

  The “ necessary steps ” led, for the British, to the Battle of Loos and for the French to the great offensives at Souchez towards Vimy Ridge, and in Champagne. All the assaults were launched on September 25th, and they were effectively over by the early days of October. The gains were negligible, but the casualties were immense. The British lost 60,000 and the French 150,000. Although the Champagne offensive was kept going in some form until November 8th, the campaigns of 1915 were substantially at an end. Throughout the whole year the front had nowhere moved by more than three miles and the gains, such as they were, were mainly in the Germans’ favour. But their casualties were barely two-fifths of those of the Allies.

  All this was at least half foreseen by the Cabinet at its gloomy, resigned meeting on August 20th. Certainly the likely manpower consequences of the proposed offensive were in Asquith’s mind. He faced them only because he saw no other way of avoiding a fatal rupture with the French. But he was perfectly aware that, apart from the appalling human loss, the offensive would force forward the conscription issue in a way that might well lead to the destruction of the Government. It was to be another nine months before the problem was finally disposed of—by the adoption of general compulsion from the age of 18 to 41—and during this period Asquith, advancing slowly and patiently towards the almost inevitable conclusion, managed the component parts of his pre-1915 majority with consummate skill. He lost Sir John Simon from the Government in January, 1916, but he circumnavigated the threatened resignations of Grey, Runciman and McKenna; and, against all the likely odds, he retained the services of Henderson and the Labour junior ministers. He never put himself in the position of being dependent upon Tory votes to carry the policies of the Government through Parliament.

  The reverse side of the coin was that he managed his relations with the Unionists on the issue a great deal less skilfully. His old fault of underestimating Bonar Law and overestimating Balfour and Curzon was well to the fore. On August 11th it was decided to set up a special Cabinet Committee on manpower. Bonar Law was absent from that meeting of the Cabinet, but he wrote to Asquith on the following day to express great surprise that “ as the leader of our Party in the House of Commons ” he had been excluded without consultation. Asquith returned a bland reply which made matters a good deal worse. Law’s name had been on the original list, he explained, but when he had discussed this with Curzon they had both thought it rather too long, and had agreed that Law and Simon should be struck off.

  Asquith would however now be delighted if Law would serve. But at this stage Law would not. He returned a sulky answer and persisted in his refusal when Asquith tried again.e

  The barrier which separated the two men is neatly illustrated by the fact that in this, as in other exchanges between them, all Law’s letters began with a stiff “ Dear Mr. Asquith,” and all Asquith’s with a gracious “ My dear Bonar Law.” It was as much Law’s fault as it was Asquith’s. If he had behaved like an equal the Prime Minister would have been more likely to treat him as one. Instead, despite his supposed tenacity of character, Law showed every sign at this stage of being frightened of Asquith. He avoided interviews with him whenever he could, and when they did occur he often agreed to something which he had. subsequently to retract by letter. He gave little enough cause for respect but Asquith might have been a wiser Coalition Prime Minister if he had responded to the barrier of incomprehension by deliberately according a special consideration to the leader of the Unionist Party.

  He did the reverse of this. Having snubbed Law in August, he proceeded in September to attempt an elaborate bridge-building exercise with Balfour. On the 18th of that month Asquith wrote a long and “ most secret ” letter about compulsory service to the First Lord of the Admiralty:

  My mind has been inclining to the view that a joint intervention on your part and mine may be necessary, or at any rate highly expedient. . . .

  It is now indisputable that any attempt at the moment to establish compulsion, either military or industrial, would encounter the practically united and passionately vehement opposition of organised Labour. The speech of J. H. Thomas, who is the ablest man and one of the most successful peace-makers among the Trade Union leaders, is very significant.... I need say nothing about the Irish, except that the whole Nationalist party, including the O’Brienites, would fight against the change with all their resources. I come lastly (for I purposely say nothing about the Unionists) to my own, the Liberal Party. I have received during the last few days from the most trusted and representative men of the rank and file a number of apparently spontaneous communications. and all in the sense of resolute and dogged opposition. It is no exaggeration to say that, at this moment, the two most unpopular and distrusted men in the party are Ll. Geor
ge and W. Churchill. ... I sincerely believe that, great as is my personal authority (I can say so without undue vanity) if I were to announce myself tomorrow a reluctant but whole-hearted convert to Compulsion, I should still have to face the hostility of some of the best, and in the country some of the most powerful elements of the Liberal Party. ... I should be glad to know how far these (general considerations) commend them to your judgment. I have come to think that it is only by our joint efforts that a bridge can be constructed over a yawning and perilous chasm f

  This curiously inconclusive letter—what solution was the joint intervention to propound?—was sent to the wrong man. Balfour had neither the authority to impose a policy upon the Unionist Party nor the desire to embroil himself in a problem which was not his own. He was never a man for courageous interference, and there is no record that he returned any substantial answer to the Prime Minister.

  By the middle of October Asquith’s personal and political fortunes appeared to have reached a nadir—but it was in fact a false bottom. The offensive in France had subsided into obvious failure. Sir John French had clearly outlived his usefulness as a commander. The memory of the Suvla Bay disappointment was still fresh, and Gallipoli faced the Government with the problem of large forces clinging almost without hope to three precarious beachheads. From there it was unlikely that they could be evacuated without heavy casualties, a serious loss of prestige throughout the East, and bitter quarrels at home. The French who at one moment in September had surprised everyone by offering large reinforcements for this theatre, had subsequently insisted on an expedition to Salonika, in which Asquith had no faith at all. They were supported in this plan, and in subsequent demands for a strengthening of the Salonika force, by important members of the British Cabinet, notably Lloyd George and Carson. On October 12th Carson announced that, in view of the inadequacy of our support for Serbia and his general dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war, he proposed to resign. On October 19th, with the need for immediate conscription brought in as an additional reason, his resignation was made public.