by Roy Jenkins
The machinery of government at home was creaking badly, but Asquith’s attempt in late September to set up a new, smaller, and more effective War Council was coldly received by his colleagues. Balfour, always adept at pointing out difficulties, had propounded the simple doctrine of despair that it was the personalities that were the trouble and that unless the leading ministers changed their characters, no administrative change would improve matters. Lloyd George brought this view into sharper focus by saying that nothing would work so long as Kitchener remained at the War Office. As a result the only change that was made was to give the Dardanelles Committee, with its membership of twelve, the name of War Council.
Kitchener’s own abilities, always exaggerated as most members of the Cabinet now believed, were obviously flagging. The system which he had created, by which he acted not only as Secretary of State but also as a generalissimo without a general staff, was clearly a failure. But his reputation with the public still persisted. He remained the greatest of all recruiting sergeants. If he were to go, all lingering hopes of raising enough men by voluntary service would go with him. The Prime Minister’s biggest political problem would become much more acute.
To all these troubles Asquith suddenly found that the most unusual one of ill-health had been added. On October 19th he became seriously unwell during the night. “ I have not spent a day in bed for almost untold years,” he wrote on the 19th, “ nor do I quite know what is the matter with me.” But Margot thought she did. “ I have had an agonising time,” she wrote to Lady Islington on October 26th. “ I never got such a fright in my life. I thought Henry was absolutely done. I think he thought so too.” The doctor’s diagnosis, she added, was that “ overwork, hot rooms and no sort of exercise had gripped his liver and driven bad blood all over him.” After the first attack he slept for thirty-six hours. A week later he was substantially well, and by the beginning of November he was back in full harness.
His convalescence was not a restful one. On October 19th came Carson’s resignation and a letter of general complaint from Walter Long. Feeling both amongst the public and in the House of Commons was bad, Long said: “ I have had many representations from quiet loyal men who only want to help to win the war. .. . They say they do not know how things stand or what we are doing.g On the following day Selborne wrote an equally critical letter, and Lord Robert Cecil, who had joined the Cabinet in July as second Foreign Office Minister, wrote to demand a War Council of three. “ If Queen Victoria was still alive I should suggest that the Crown be asked to nominate this Triumvirate, but as things are I think they would have to be elected by Parliament, or perhaps a H. of C. vote by ballot. I am perfectly certain that unless some step of this kind can be taken, the Ministry will be turned out. . . .h
More serious than this was the view which the Cabinet took at its meeting of October 21st. Crewe reported thus to the King (and in similar terms to Asquith):
This conversation (a criticism of Grey for offering Cyprus to Greece after consultation only with the Prime Minister and Kitchener1) led on without any pre-arranged scheme to a discussion of the conduct of war business and the working of the War Council.
1 This sounds a very drastic step to have been taken in such a way, but Grey may have been influenced (although the Unionist ministers would hardly have been mollified by this) by the exhaustive discussion of the issue which had taken place under the former Government in January, 1915. Lord Stamfordham, students of the 1957-9 crisis may care to note, had then written: “ The King desires me to express the earnest hope that the Government will, on further consideration, decide to support Sir E. Grey’s proposal and offer Cyprus to Greece on condition of her joining the Allies. . .. Financially Cyprus is I suppose a loss to this country. Strategically, H.M. understands that it has proved a failure: the harbours impracticable and ships obliged to He off six miles from the coast.” (Asquith Papers, box iv, f. 78).
Most of the Ministers took part in this and it was the unanimous view of the Cabinet that the present system is the opposite of effective only owing to the undue size of the Council.2 Lord Crewe who stated that it had been his personal intention in any case to press the necessity for change on the Prime Minister was instructed to convey to him the unanimous conviction of the Cabinet that a drastic change is imperatively necessary. He was asked not to name a particular number as representing the view of the Cabinet as on this detail opinion somewhat differed; but all were agreed that the body should be quite small and, as far as can be, non-departmental. Lord Crewe feels sure that after what Your Majesty stated in his audience on Wednesday that action of Your Majesty’s Ministers will be approved.i
This report, from one of Asquith’s most loyal colleagues, sounds remarkably as though the Cabinet, with the King privy to the arrangement, had seized the opportunity of the Prime Minister’s absence to hold a generally critical session and to present him with something near to a united ultimatum. It was most unfair, in view of the action Asquith had endeavoured to take in September and of the opposition he had then encountered, but the incident was nevertheless symptomatic of general discontent within the Government; and Crewe’s report cannot have made pleasant reading for a bed-ridden Prime Minister.
There were few compensating factors for him to contemplate. Politically, he was gravely worried that Kitchener might pronounce for conscription. If he did, the Derby scheme (a complicated compromise under which both married and unmarried men were encouraged to attest by a Government pledge that, unless all but a negligible quantity of single men came forward, either the married men would be released from their engagement or compulsion would be introduced for the single men) would be dead before it was under way.1 Bonar Law was threatening resignation unless a clean cut were made in the Dardanelles, and Lloyd George, his relations with the Prime Minister less close than at the formation of the Coalition, had become a centre of general discontent.
1 In an attempt to avoid this danger Asquith wrote Kitchener a most uncharacteristic letter of urgent appeal on October 17th. It was so utterly different both in style and substance from his normal measured periods and calm content that, were it not for knowledge of his illness and for Sir Philip Magnus’s testimony (.Kitchener, pp. 352-3) it would be difficult to believe that it came from his pen. “ I should like you to know,” one passage ran, “ that what is now going on is being engineered by men (Curzon and Lloyd George, and some others) whose real object is to oust you. They know well that I give no countenance to their projects, and consequently they have conceived the idea of using you against me. God knows that we should both of us be glad to be set free. But we cannot and ought not. So long as you and I stand together, we carry the whole country with us. Otherwise, the Deluge! Cannot you say that, while you aim at, and would like to obtain 70 divisions, the thing should be done gradually and with general consent"
Privately, Asquith was still suffering from the loss of Mrs. Montagu as a confidante. In addition, so far from being personally immune from the horrors of the war, as many people chose to assume, he was deeply exposed through the sons of his first marriage. They were all four in the army by this time, and only Cys, the youngest, relegated b} ill-, health to a home defence battalion, was in a position approaching permanent safety. Oc, an outstanding soldier, had been in Gallipoli since the beginning and had by then received one of his four wounds. Beb, an artillery officer, was already in France. Raymond, who had just transferred to the Grenadiers, was preparing for whatever specially hazardous role might be assigned to his battalion. There were few strategic decisions which did not involve Asquith in the possibility of family grief.
Then, half-way between politics and private affairs, there was the stream of personal vilification and misrepresentation to which he and his wife were at this time subjected. A left-wing Prime Minister, perhaps because Conservatives so resent his being there at all, is always more exposed than one of the right in this respect, but Asquith was peculiarly unlucky. Margot gave some examples in her Autobiography:
The D......ss of W..........and others continue spreading amazing lies about me and mine: they would be grotesque if they were not so vile. Elizabeth is in turn engaged to a German Admiral or a German General; Henry has shares in Krupps; I “ feed Prussian prisoners with every dainty and comestible,” and play lawn tennis with them at Donnington Hall—a place whose very whereabouts is unknown to me.
These private fabrications are not only circulated but believed, and, had it not been for my receiving ^1,000 for a libel action which I took in the Law Courts against the Globe Newspaper, the whole of our thoughtful Press would have published them. . . .
I am told by John Morley and other students of History that no greater campaign of calumny was ever conducted against one man than that which has been, and is being, conducted against my husband today.. . . Henry is as indifferent to the Press as St. Paul’s Cathedral is to midges, but I confess that I am not j
In addition to this generalised slander there was a specialized campaign which Lord Alfred Douglas conducted against the Asquiths during this period. It arose mainly out of the Asquiths’ (and in particular Margot’s) friendship with Robert Ross, Oscar Wilde’s literary executor. Douglas published such an extreme attack on Ross, accusing him of the most depraved homosexual practices, that he was prosecuted for criminal libel. In the course of the trial, which ended in a jury disagreement, it emerged that Ross was a frequent visitor at 10, Downing Street. After his discharge—there was no second trial— Douglas, assisted by T. W. H. Crosland, made continual public demands that Asquith should denounce Ross. Instead, the Prime Minister joined a mixed and distinguished group, including Shaw, Garvin, Wells, Lady Ottoline Morrell and Bishop Gore of Birmingham, to organise a testimonial to Ross. This drove Douglas to a paroxysm of anger.1
1 Later, in 1916, Douglas’s fury was further increased when Algernon Methuen, who was Wilde’s publisher and had recently been fined £10 at Bow Street for issuing D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, was given a baronetcy on Asquith’s recommendation.
He wrote fearful letters of denunciation to Asquith; he wrote to the King urging him to act against the Prime Minister; and he wrote to Churchill saying that he must take over the leadership of the Liberal Party. More tiresomely he published the most vicious satirical poems. The worst was entitled “ All’s Well With England,” the quality and tone of which can be judged from the following stanza:
Out there in Flanders all the trampled ground,
Is red with English blood. Our children pass
Through fire to Moloch. Who will count the loss,
Since here ‘at home’ sits Merry Margot, bound
With Lesbian fillets, while with front of brass,
‘Old Squiffy' hands the purse to Robert Ross.k
Asquith’s facade might be like St. Paul’s Cathedral, but he would have been less than human had he not reacted with some displeasure to these and other, less hysterical but equally malevolent pieces of calumny. They all added to his depression during that October illness.
Many men of sixty-three might in these circumstances have thrown in their hands, or at least gone into a permanent decline, shuffling off as much responsibility as possible. Asquith reacted in exactly the opposite way. On October 3 ist Lloyd George had written to him threatening to resign if Kitchener was not replaced at the War Office. On November ist, almost the first day of his return to full activity, Asquith suggested to Bonar Law that this problem might be solved by his becoming his own Secretary of State for War and combining it with the premiership as he had in the days after the incident at the Curragh. Law, overawed as usual in the presence of the Prime Minister, responded with some enthusiasm to the idea. He quickly changed his mind. On the following day he sent a letter to say that he could not possibly give his agreement, and covered his confusion by writing in bleakly ungracious terms: “ The criticism which is directed against the govt, and against yourself is chiefly based on this—that as Prime Minister you have not devoted yourself absolutely to co-ordinating all the moves of the war because so much of your time and energy has been devoted to control of the political machine.”l He ended, typically, with an excuse for not seeing Asquith to tell him this.
Asquith had to accept this veto, and his way seemed blocked. But he was determined to get his hands on the War Office for at least a period. He believed that he could quickly effect certain necessary changes and make a lasting improvement in its administrative machinery. Accordingly he persuaded Kitchener to go out to Gallipoli and report on the desirability of evacuation. The visit was to last at least a month and the Prime Minister was to deputise for him while he was away. “We avoid by this method of procedure the immediate supersession of K. as War Minister, while attaining the same result,” Asquith wrote to Lloyd George. “ And I suppose even B.L. would hardly object to such a plan.”m Kitchener left on the evening of November 4th, taking with him, with a suspicious peasant’s misplaced sense of cunning, his seals of office.
Asquith was wrong in one respect. Bonar Law did object, not to the War Office arrangements, but to the scheme which made them possible, to a decision on the evacuation of Gallipoli being postponed until Kitchener could present a report. At the Cabinet on November 4th he accepted the plan, but, once again, a night’s reflection changed his mind, and he wrote to Asquith on the following morning hinting at resignation and demanding another Cabinet to take an immediate decision on Gallipoli. Asquith was unusually irritated by this further sudden switch, and he replied sharply and firmly on the same day:
My dear Bonar Law,
Your letter of today is in effect a request that the Cabinet should at once reverse its unanimous decision of yesterday. There is, as far as I know, no ground for your statement that the whole Cabinet realise now that we must withdraw from the Dardanelles, or that we are seeking to “ postpone a disagreeable but inevitable decision.”
I will call a Cabinet for tomorrow morning so that you may have full opportunity for stating your view.
Yours sincerely,
H. H. Asquith n
At this special Saturday Cabinet Bonar Law found himself alone. There followed a perturbed week-end, during which, Lord Beaver-brook stated, Law believed that he had obtained a verbal promise from Asquith to support his demand for evacuation forthwith, independendy of anything that Kitchener might say.0 There is no confirmation of this amongst any of Asquith’s papers, and the letter which Law wrote on the Monday was one of withdrawal rather than of victory: “ In view of the discussion at the Cabinet on Saturday and of the general appeal made to me by yourself and supported by our colleagues I have determined to postpone the consideration of my position in relation to the Gallipoli policy until Lord Kitchener’s report has been received.p
This difficulty overcome, Asquith was able to proceed to the construction of the new, small War Council, which had been demanded by the Cabinet on October 21st, and to which he had given his formal agreement a week later. The new body was set up at the Cabinet of November nth. The members were Asquith, Balfour, Lloyd George, Bonar Law and McKenna. No mention was made of Kitchener. The agreement of the Cabinet to this list led to the resignation of Churchill, who would have been left with no duties other than the administration of the Duchy of Lancaster. He declined this opportunity of “ well-paid inactivity ” and departed, after a moderately friendly exchange of letters, to command a battalion at the Front.
Asquith’s next major step, after settling several matters of longstanding dispute between the War Office and the Ministry of Munitions, was to change the Commander-in-Chief in France. Few of those whose opinion counted were in much doubt that the time had come for French to go. The King thought so; Lloyd George thought so; Bonar Law thought so; Sir William Robertson (French’s own Chief of Staff) thought so; and Kitchener, cf course, had long been distrustful of his military competence. But the War Minister had been strangely reluctant to make a change. Asquith, although far more favourably disposed to French as a man than Kitchener had ever been—he still did not k
now about the part which the Field-Marshal had attempted to play in the events of May, 1915—was prepared to cut the knot.
He deliberately acted before Kitchener’s return. He did not discuss the issue widely, but took the full responsibility himself. On November 23 rd he entertained Sir Douglas Haig, the commander of the First Army, under French, to luncheon at Downing Street. On the following day he asked Lord Esher, who recommended himself for the task both as an old friend of French’s and as a professional go-between of several decades’ standing, to proceed to St. Omer, and put the decision to the Field Marshal as delicately as he could. At this stage French took the news reasonably well. He immediately came to London and wrote Asquith a letter full of good feeling.
A few days later new problems arose. French made difficulties about accepting an appointment as Commander-in-Chief of the Home Forces. Asquith, at a stage when his own mind was already fixed upon Haig, courteously but mistakenly asked French’s view about his successor. French recommended Robertson, and when this advice was ignored he became more resentful. However, he overcame his hesitations about his new post. On December 8th a formal offer was made to a far from surprised Haig. On December 18th he took over at St. Omer.
