Asquith

by Roy Jenkins

  On the Friday Lloyd George followed up the interview by writing a perhaps purposely obscure letter :

  My dear Prime Minister,

  I have given a good deal of consideration to your kind offer of the War Secretaryship and I have come to the conclusion that I should be rendering a greater service to the country in this emergency by not accepting it. As I told you at our interview I thought then I should be of greater use in another sphere. I am still of that opinion. There is another—an insuperable—difficulty. I have taken a strong line in the Cabinet on the question of enfranchisement of our soldiers. I feel they have a right to a voice in choosing the Government that sends them to face peril and death. Were I now to accept a new office in the Government it would fetter up my action when the Cabinet comes to decide that great issue, as they must soon. It is better therefore from your point of view as well as mine that you should give no further thought to my appointment as War Minister. I thank you all the same for the offer.

  Yours sincerely,

  D. Lloyd George e

  Obviously Lloyd George was playing hard to get. He could hardly have expected his “ insuperable difficulty ” of soldiers’ votes at some hypothetical general election to be taken seriously. But how hard was he prepared to play? On the same day he wrote another, much longer letter to Asquith. This was also a letter of resignation, but it gave his real reasons for wanting to go. There was no mention in it of soldiers’ enfranchisement. Instead there were strong attacks on the generals, a demand for much greater powers for a civilian Secretary of State for War, and general criticism of the whole direction of the war “ which we are undoubtedly losing.” Only the importance of his munitions task, which was now discharged, had prevented him from “long ago (joining) Carson with whom I have been in the main in complete sympathy in his criticisms of the conduct of the war.” f

  There was another difference between this letter and the first one. This one was never sent. Lloyd George, influenced by Reading, Law and Carson, thought better of it. What effect it would have had on Asquith it is difficult to say. At this stage, contrary to the view of the “ Beaverbrook historians,” he was probably genuinely in favour of Lloyd George having the War Office. Right through from 1908 he had never hesitated to give him big, difficult, worth-while assignments. That same Friday evening he argued strongly to Stamfordham that Lloyd George was one of the only three remaining “ Englishmen ”1 with a reputation abroad (the others were Grey and himself). With Kitchener gone, Lloyd George’s presence at the War Office would have a good effect upon the Allies. But Asquith did not believe that tearing up the Robertson agreement was remotely practicable—or indeed

  1 Lloyd George might not have liked the word.

  Even without this he was finding enough difficulty in persuading the generals (backed by the Palace) to look with grudging favour upon Lloyd George.

  Their view, and that of the King, was that much the best solution was for Asquith to take the job himself. Lord French had been to see him on the Thursday and “ on behalf of the whole Army . .. begged him ” to do this. Stamfordham wrote that the whole Army Council wanted it. This solution had its attractions for Asquith. He always enjoyed exercising his deft quality of effortless administration upon a department, and he was particularly fond of the War Office, of which he had again been in charge since Kitchener’s death. But he realised that there might be political objections.

  On the Monday (June 20th) he became aware of a new difficulty. Not more than four Secretaries of State could, by law, be in the House of Commons. Grey, Samuel, Bonar Law and Austen Chamberlain already made up the complement. “ So that rules out the Gnat (Lloyd George) and the P.M.,” was the assumption of Lady Scott, with whom he discussed the matter. This set him to work upon the political jigsaw, another activity which he always enjoyed. Perhaps Law could be asked to give up Colonies—it does not sound as though Asquith was very intimidated by him at the time, although a non-departmental office was no doubt to be offered in exchange—and Harcourt moved there with a peerage. Perhaps “ a figurehead, say Derby ” could be brought in, and “ the work (left) to carry on as it does very well at present.g

  This is the first Asquith mention of Derby in this connection, and not a very flattering one. But that peer, whose public reputation, largely without foundation, was so great that he was sometimes spoken of as a possible Prime Minister, was singularly accommodating. He wanted very much to be Secretary of State,1 but he was prepared to serve as under-secretary, preferably in support of Asquith or Bonar Law, but of Lloyd George if need be.

  1 “I should like the office—like it very much—but I can’t bring myself to ask for it,” he wrote to his brother-in-law on June 23rd. “ If however you could do anything to get my claim considered, the P.M. need have no fear of my loyalty. . . .” (Randolph Churchill: Lord Derby, p. 212). This letter is completely incompatible with the view that he was throughout “ Asquith’s candidate ” for the job.

  This made it easier for Asquith to get the generals to accept Lloyd George. Derby would give them confidence and act as a commodious cushion between them and the new Secretary of State. Two further changes eased Lloyd George’s appointment. The first was Asquith’s discovery that Grey would be glad to lessen his burdens by becoming a peer. The second was that Lloyd George himself tacitly withdrew his conditions about the amendment of the Robertson agreement. It was he and not Asquith who capitulated on this point. Between June 24th and 26th he exchanged inconclusive but barbed letters with the C.I.G.S. They were an inauspicious augury for the future, but they changed little for the present. Lloyd George accepted the office on virtually the same terms that Kitchener had latterly held it. It was all settled by June 28th.

  When Margot Asquith heard of the new appointment, she wrote in her diary: “ We are out: it can only be a question of time now when we shall have to leave Downing Street.”h Her husband did not take an equally dramatic view. He saw the outcome rather as a more or less satisfactory solution which he had managed to find for another wearisome problem.

  After this War Office arrangement the remainder of the summer of 1916 unfolded itself without much encouragement. There was some light but also a great deal of heavy, lowering cloud. The Russians made sweeping progress in their offensive against the Austrians north of the Roumanian frontier. It was their outstanding success of the war. But on the Somme the British casualties mounted to unprecedented heights, without any corresponding gains. In the first twenty-four hours of this offensive there were 20,000 dead and 40,000 wounded. Within three weeks the casualties had risen to 120,000. At this stage there came the disappointment of the Irish failure. And in the shadow of it, in Han-key’s view, Asquith committed his greatest parliamentary blunder of the war. He agreed to Commissions of Inquiry into the Dardanelles expedition and the Mesopotamian failure which had culminated in the surrender of Kut in April. The trouble had started on June 14th, when Bonar Law had promised, with little consultation, to lay the Gallipoli papers before the House of Commons. The departments concerned protested violently. Such publication, they held, would have disastrous military and diplomatic consequences. As a result, after six weeks’ disputation by the War Council and the Cabinet, it was decided that the promise must be rescinded. Asquith announced this to the House on July 18th. His statement was badly received on all sides, and he and the Cabinet felt forced, two days later, to offer the sop of secret Commissions of Inquiry with published reports.

  “Certain it is,” Hankey wrote, “ that the Coalition never recovered from (this) decision. For the last five months of its existence the function of the Supreme Command was carried out under the shadow of these inquests .... A good deal of mutual suspicion was engendered. Such homogeneity as the Government had possessed gradually weakened.. . . Before long .. . the power of decision in difficult questions was affected.”i1

  1 Hankey was perhaps a little jaundiced by the fact that, between July 24th and September 27th, he had to spend 174 hours of his “ free ” time prepar
ing the Government case for the Dardanelles Commission. He lost his August holiday (which would have been his first since 1913) but felt partially compensated by Asquith’s assurance that the result of his work was “the greatest State paper he had ever read”; Curzon’s letter of congratulation, accompanied by the offer of a week-end party to meet the Queen of the Belgians, he found less of a recompense. (The Supreme Command,

  n, p- 523).

  On the other hand, Hankey, before this diversion, was a considerable partisan of the British system of Supreme Command as it had evolved under Asquith. His retrospective judgment was that it was certainly superior to the German system. The November, 1915, arrangements were a great advance on anything which had gone before: “ The machinery of the War Committee was at this time (the first eight months of 1916) working smoothly. An Agenda paper was issued before each meeting. Full records were as before kept in manuscript. The conclusions after being approved and initialled by the Prime Minister—in this matter Asquith was prompt and punctilious—were circulated to the Cabinet whose members were thus kept fully abreast of what was going on.”

  Hankey’s conclusion was that, “ with a loyal and united team,” this system might have been adapted to meet the requirements of the latter part of the war. “ But, with a Government composed of members of opposite political parties who had never been able entirely to forget their differences and in an atmosphere poisoned by the Dardanelles and Mesopotamia Commissions, this proved impossible even under so patient and experienced a leader as Asquith.” (ibid., 11, pp. 543-4).

  The consequences of this “ blunder ” took time to make themselves felt. August was a calm month politically, although the Battle of the Somme ground on. Plans for the Speaker’s Conference on electoral reform were put in hand. There were financial difficulties with the French, and Asquith had to pay a hurried visit to Calais on the 23rd.

  Early in the month the Italians gained an expensive but real victory and occupied Gorizia. Late in the month the Roumanians entered the War on the Allied side, and there were false hopes that this might change the whole Balkan balance; within three months they were smashed and the Germans were outside Bucharest. The French went over to the offensive before Verdun, but continued to bleed themselves white.

  In the last week of August Asquith escaped for a few days to the Wharf. Then, at the beginning of September, he went with Hankey, whom he described at about this time as “ the most useful man in Europe—he has never been wrong,” on a visit to the front. They were both greatly interested in the plans for the first employment of the tanks or “ caterpillars,” which, stemming from Churchill’s original directive of March, 1915, were now ready for service in small numbers. Hankey pressed the two principal staff officers at G.H.Q. not to fritter away the shock of their first use in limited attacks over the unfavourable (because heavily shell-scarred) terrain of the Somme. They should be kept for a new offensive over less weary ground. Asquith, he said, urged the same point of view upon Haig.1

  1Asquith stayed at a G.H.Q. house during this visit. After dinner the first evening Haig wrote in his diary: “ Mr. A. and I had a long talk after dinner.....He seems fully determined to fight on till Germany is vanquished”. After the second evening he wrote to his wife: “You would have been amused at the Prime Minister last night. He did himself fairly well—not more than most gentlemen used to drink when I was a boy, but in this abstemious age it is noticeable if an extra glass or two is taken by anyone! The P.M. seemed to like our old brandy. He had a couple of glasses (big sherry glass size) before I left the table at 9.30, and apparently he had several more before I saw him again. By that time his legs were unsteady, but his head was quite clear, and he was able to read a map and discuss the situation with me. Indeed he was most charming and quite alert in mind.” (The Private Papers of Douglas Haig, p. 164)

  Haig’s picture fits in well with other accounts of Asquith’s dining habits. For the last ten or fifteen years of his life, at least, he was a fairly heavy drinker. Occasionally this made him look a little unsteady (even in the House of Commons) late at night. But no one ever suggested that his mind lost its precision or that there was any faltering in his command over what he did or did not want to say.

  The visit was also notable for a meeting between Asquith and his eldest son, and for the close experience of the Somme battlefield which it gave to the Prime Minister. Hankey described how, on September 6th, a “ glorious hot day,” they motored up from G.H.Q., through the ruined town of Albert, to the three-storied dug-out headquarters of the 7th Division, which was in action at the time:

  Near Fricourt we met Raymond Asquith, the Prime Minister’s eldest son, who was waiting at a cross-roads, having ridden over on horseback to meet us. As we jolted up the broken shell-smitten road ... I heard the curious whizz of a large howitzer shell. . . .

  As we came through the “street” at Fricourt—as a matter of fact there was literally not one stone left on another—another shell came and burst not more than a hundred yards away. We got out of our cars and hurried to a “ dug-out.” Just as we arrived a third shell greeted us and landed not fifty yards away—but I am not sure that it burst. We had to wait some considerable time in the “ dugout ” until the shell shower had passed over..... The Prime Minister was as usual quite composed, but I thought his hand was trembling rather, and no wonder.j

  Asquith’s comment on his meeting with his son was that he found him looking “ so radiantly strong and confident that I came away from France with an easier mind.”^ On the next day he and Hankey motored to Crecy, where they had a chance encounter with Edwin Montagu, who had succeeded Lloyd George as Minister of Munitions; and Asquith derived considerable and typical amusement from Montagu’s ignorance of the fact that they were on ground which had seen an earlier battle.

  The next big push on the Somme came on September 15th. The advice which Asquith and Hankey had given to Haig and his staff officers was then ignored. The tanks were frittered away. “ This priceless conception,” as Churchill wrote, “ . . . was revealed to the Germans for the mere petty purpose of taking a few ruined villages.” But that day brought far worse news for Asquith than that. In the first wave of the attack Raymond Asquith was killed.

  The news reached London two days later. Margot Asquith has described how it arrived at the Wharf:

  On Sunday, September the 17th, we were entertaining a week-end party. . . . While we were playing tennis in the afternoon my husband went for a drive with my cousin, Nan Tennant. He looked well, and had been delighted with his visit to the front. . . .

  As it was my little son’s last Sunday before going back to Winchester I told him he might run across from the Barn in his pyjamas after dinner and sit with us while the men were in the dining-room.

  While we were playing games, Clouder, our servant... came in to say that I was wanted.

  I left the room, and the moment I took up the telephone I said to myself, “ Raymond is killed.”

  With the receiver in my hand, I asked what it was, and if the news was bad.

  Our secretary, Davies, answered, “Terrible, terrible news. Raymond was shot dead on the 15th. Haig writes full of sympathy, but no details. The Guards were in and he was shot leading his men the moment he had gone over the parapet.”

  I put back the receiver and sat down. I heard Elizabeth’s delicious laugh, and a hum of talk and smell of cigars came down the passage from the dining-room.

  I went back into the sitting-room.

  “Raymond is dead,” I said, “he was shot leading his men over the top on Friday.”

  Puffin got up from his game and hanging his head took my hand; Elizabeth burst into tears.... Maud Tree and Florry Bridges suggested I should put off telling Henry the terrible news as he was happy. I walked away with the two children and rang the bell: “ Tell the Prime Minister to come and speak to me,” I said to the servant.

  Leaving the children, I paused at the end of the dining-room passage; Henry opened the door and we stood
facing each other. He saw my thin wet face, and while he put his arm round me I said:

  “ Terrible, terrible news.”

  At this he stopped me and said:

  “ I know ... I’ve known it... Raymond is dead.”

  He put his hands over his face and we walked into an empty room and sat down in silence.l