Asquith

by Roy Jenkins

  The blow to Asquith was a heavy one. Of the four sons of his first marriage Raymond was not the closest to him. Nor was he academically pre-eminent. But he was the most generally gifted. He had immense gaiety; he was a symbol of the talent of a generation; and he was most like what Asquith himself, in his occasional moods of romantic impatience with what he sometimes regarded as his own pedestrian qualities and success, would have liked to be. “ Whatever pride I had in the past,” he wrote on September 20th, “ and whatever hope I had for the far future—by much the largest part of both was invested in him. Now all that is gone. It will take me a few days more to get back to my bearings.”m

  In fact it took him much longer. Throughout the autumn he remained, for most people, withdrawn and difficult to approach. He missed several Cabinets, and on October 11th he was writing:

  This has been a great blow to me and I am much shaken by it— there is or ought to be every kind of consolation and I have numberless letters from all parts of the world and all sorts and conditions of people. But I don’t know that it all helps one very much. ... Today I braced myself up to propose a vote of credit in the House of Commons; a trying and difficult speech, especially the latter part of it. I got on better than I expected as everyone was very kind and sympathetic.n

  This special public kindness was inevitably short-lived. The Times and the Daily Mail, Lord Northcliffe’s twin scourges for the mortification of the Prime Minister, continued their attacks almost without respite. Asquith preserved his equanimity by taking little notice of what they said. He was never much of a newspaper reader, preferring always to have hard covers between his hands, and it is doubtful if he even looked at them at all regularly. But much of the rest of the country did. In an age of mass-literacy, before broadcasting, and with a House of Commons disorganised by coalition and too far removed from election to be effectively representative, Northcliffe exercised an influence greater than that of any newspaper proprietor before or since. Between them his two organs gave him a dominant grip on both ends of the London newspaper market. And their constant, unanswered denunciations of Asquith, while they may have provoked him less than they would have provoked most other men, did much to undermine his position.

  Within the Government new quarrels had erupted after the August lull. In late September Lloyd George had given his so-called “ knock-out blow ” interview to an American newspaperman. In this interview he discounted entirely any possibility of a negotiated settlement. Britain would fight on to “a decisive finish,” however long the time, however great the sacrifice. His purpose was to warn off President Wilson who was thought to be contemplating a peace initiative. Several members of the Cabinet, including the Foreign Secretary, believed the interview to be ill-judged and unnecessarily intransigent. Grey wrote a letter of remonstrance, but Lloyd George replied jauntily: “You will find that it will work out all right. I know that American politician. He has no international conscience. He thinks of nothing but the ticket....” 0 1 This was the beginning of a dispute which was to boil up again in November.

  1 This passage was expurgated from Lloyd George’s War Memoirs, although he published the rest of the correspondence.

  Lloyd George was a principal participant in most quarrels at this time. He allowed a bitter argument between Balfour and Curzon about the use of aeroplanes to pass over his head, but he was central to every other major dispute. In mid-October he exchanged wounding letters with Robertson over the C.I.G.S’s refusal to divert troops from the Western Front to Salonika. In the same week he was in the thick of an argument about the working of the Military Service Act. Car-son, an increasingly effective leader of the dissidents in the House of Commons, was waging a campaign, with wide newspaper support, to press more men into service. Lloyd George echoed this point of view in a speech on October 12th. Bonar Law commented a few weeks later that the Secretary of State for War was “ at the same time the right hand man to the Prime Minister and to the leader of the Opposition. But from where were the extra men to be pressed? Montagu threatened to resign if more were taken away from munitions. The Cabinet (for once) was nearly unanimous that conscription could not be applied to Ireland, although it noted sadly that recruiting there, and amongst the Irish in Australia, had come to an almost complete standstill. This was one price of the failure of the June and July negotiations. But neither the Press nor Carson accepted the facts which circumscribed the Government.

  Eventually a sop was found. Asquith wrote to the King on November 6th: “ The Cabinet resolved (the Prime Minister dissenting) to introduce a Bill to compel the enlistment of unnaturalised aliens of allied countries (mostly Russian Jews) giving them at the same time an option to emigrate to some other country.”q

  By this time the situation had been exacerbated by the final collapse, after 400,000 British casualties and very small territorial gains, of the Somme offensive; by the imminent surrender of Roumania; and by the increasing menace of shipping losses to U-boats.

  The War Council attempted to deal with these and other lesser problems by meetings of mounting frequency. It had swollen to a membership of nine regular members—Asquith, McKenna, Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Balfour, Grey, Crewe, Curzon and Austen Chamberlain—with Runciman and Montagu as additional frequent participants, and Robertson, Henry Jackson and Hankey always present in their professional capacities. Day after day, in the early part of November, it would meet at 11.30 and adjourn at 1.15 or 1.30 with many of the agenda issues unresolved. “ These have been really dreadful War Committees,” Hankey wrote.

  It was not that the chairmanship was bad. It was rather that the lack of trust between members was so great, and the external pressures so demoralising, that agreement had become impossible. On November 1st Asquith spoke almost casually of there being “ some six resignations looming.” On November 8th a further element of instability was introduced into the Unionist side of the Coalition by the humiliation of Bonar Law in the House of Commons. In a debate on the somewhat peripheral issue of the disposal of enemy property in Nigeria, for which as Colonial Secretary Law was departmentally responsible, Carson had attacked him with the utmost ferocity. In the division which followed the Government was sustained mainly by Liberal votes. 65 Unionists voted with Carson, 73 with Bonar Law, and 148 were either absent or abstained. The minority was made up not only of Unionists, and not only of those who felt strongly about the pattern of ownership in Lagos, but of a general alliance of malcontents.1 Churchill, who, against Asquith’s advice, had returned from the front to politics in the spring of 1916, was with them; and Lloyd George, who had been dining with Carson that same evening, did not vote.

  Into this atmosphere of mutual mistrust and recrimination there was inserted the naked light of the Lansdowne memorandum. It was ironical that such an explosive document should have been provided by such an unflamboyant character. He wrote it in response to a general invitation from Asquith that members of the Cabinet should circulate their views about the prospects for the next phase of the war and the terms upon which the country might be willing to conclude peace.

  1 One of Carson’s supporters met F. E. Smith in the lobby and told him that Law had been saved by the votes of “ the paid members.” “ We will cross off the votes of the members who are paid,” Smith said, “ if you cross off those who want to be paid.” (Blake: The Unknown Prime Minister, p. 299).

  It was an eminently sensible time for general stocktaking and Lansdowne discharged his part of the task faithfully. His document was long, cogent, and extremely pessimistic. With his usual quiet ruthlessness he refused to leave any question unasked:

  We are slowly but surely killing off the best of the male population of these islands. . . . The financial burden which we have already accumulated is almost incalculable. . . . All this it is no doubt our duty to bear, but only if it can be shown that the sacrifice will have its reward. If it is to be made in vain, if the additional year or two years or three years finds us still unable to dictate terms, the war with its nam
eless horrors will have been needlessly prolonged, and the responsibility of those who needlessly prolong such a war is not less than that of those who needlessly provoke it. . . . Many of us must of late have asked ourselves how the war is ever to be brought to an end. ... it seems as if the prospect of a knock-out ” was, to say the least of it remote. ... Is it not true that unless the apprehensions which I have sketched can be shown ... to be groundless, we ought at any rate not to discourage any movement, no matter where originating, in favour of an interchange of views as to the possibility of a settlement ?r

  This memorandum was circulated on November 13 th. Its conclusions did not represent Asquith’s view. He believed, and had expressed in a speech at the Guildhall four days before, that the moment for peace overtures had not come and that the war must be fought on, probably for a long time to come. But he also thought, as did Grey and most of the other Liberals in the Cabinet, that Lansdowne was perfectly within his rights, and might indeed be performing a public service by raising the questions which he did. This view was not taken by Lloyd George or Bonar Law within the Government, or by Carson or Northcliffe outside. The memorandum almost immediately became public property. Cabinet security at this time was appallingly bad. A few months before action had been threatened against any newspaper which published the details of Cabinet disputes. But no one thought it worthwhile to try and stop the leaks at source —a different situation from that of two and a half years earlier when Asquith had circulated his magisterial rebuke to his colleagues.

  Hostile critics outside used the memorandum as a stick with which to beat most of the Government, and Asquith in particular. The Cabinet, it was suggested, was hopelessly divided, not merely about the conduct of the war, but about whether it should continue to be fought at all. Lansdowne’s views were fathered upon Asquith and Grey. Clearly he was acting as their stalking horse. The whole incident, coming at a time of dissension and dismay, was made into a further piece of evidence of the Prime Minister’s lukewarmness about the national effort which he was trying to direct.

  On the day after the memorandum was circulated Asquith went to Paris for a major Allied conference. The end of the 1916 Western offensives, accompanied by the crushing defeat of Roumania and growing signs of Russian exhaustion, made high-level re-appraisal urgently necessary. Asquith was accompanied by Lloyd George, Hankey and Bonham Carter, as well as by Robertson and General Sir Frederick Maurice, who with Haig, were to attend a parallel but separate military conference at Chantilly. Before their departure there had been dispute (but not of an acrimonious nature) about a Lloyd George draft for the Prime Minister’s opening speech at the conference. This was in many ways a curiously similar document to Lansdowne’s memorandum. The analysis was almost equally pessimistic and largely parallel, but the conclusions were different. Asquith insisted on toning it down. He cut out some of the pessimism and most of the offensive references to the Allied generals. In spite of this, and of all the other tensions within the curiously assorted group of travelling companions, it was, Hankey noted, “ an extraordinarily harmonious and almost hilarious party which travelled that day to Paris.” A shadow, he thought, came over them all as the train passed the “ great war cemetery at Etaples, already terribly full,” and Asquith’s thoughts turned to Raymond. But within a few minutes a bad joke of Robertson’s had restored the atmosphere.s

  In Paris the proceedings were not equally cheerful. Briand, harried by Clemenceau (then in opposition) was in an unreceptive mood, and the real decisions (in favour of making 1917 a repeat performance of 1916) were made by the generals at Chantilly. Lloyd George became increasingly discontented. On the evening of the third and last day he recorded that when the British delegates had returned to the Hôtel Crillon and the Prime Minister had “ retired to his usual rest before dinner,”2 he and Hankey went for a walk together. Lloyd George said he wanted to resign, but his companion argued against this course. Then, as they were passing the Vendome Column, Hankey paused and said:

  You ought to insist on a small War Committee being set up for the day-to-day conduct of the War, with full powers. It must be independent of the Cabinet. It must keep in close touch with the P.M., but the Committee ought to be in continuous session, and the P.M., as Head of the Government, could not manage that.. . . The Chairman must be a man of unimpaired energy and great driving power.t

  Lloyd George was greatly attracted by the idea, even though they both agreed that it was important that Asquith should continue as Prime Minister. He tells us that he immediately telegraphed to Sir Max Ailken (later Lord Beaverbrook), asking him to arrange a meeting with Bonar Law for the following evening, so that the proposition might be put before the Unionist leader.

  The next day they all travelled back to London. At Boulogne the Prime Minister, Hankey noted, “ was recognised on the quayside. .. by a number of British soldiers and given quite an ovation. This looked as if the attacks on him by the halfpenny Press had had less effect than might have been expected, at any rate so far as the Army was concerned.”u

  But soldiers on the quayside at Boulogne did not choose British governments—nor would Asquith have wished them to do so. He never went abroad again as a minister.

  1 This is the occasion on which Bonar Law, via Lord Beaverbrook and Mr. Robert Blake, claimed to have found Asquith “ engaged in a rubber of bridge with three ladies.” (see p. 289/1, supra).

  2 This was typical of Lloyd George’s desire to see Asquith as a tired old man, and in sharp contrast with Hankey’s description, three evenings previously, of his late-night work being interrupted by “ the Prime Minister coming in from the Embassy at about midnight in a very talkative and communicative mood, and telling us a lot of interesting information he had picked up from Briand.” In fact, Asquith never rested before dinner. He merely liked, in a way that was incomprehensible to Lloyd George, to get away from conversation and to devote himself to private reading and writing.

  A PALACE REVOLUTION I

  1916

  The idea of a small War Committee with himself as chairman was not in fact implanted in Lloyd George’s mind by Hankey during their walk through the Place Vendome. The colonel’s views merely gave useful support to a plan which he had already formulated, and on behalf of which, before leaving London, he had commissioned Sir Max Aitken to enlist the support of Bonar Law. In this task Aitken had, at that stage, achieved only a very limited success. He had talked at length to Law on the night of Tuesday, November 14th, but he had found him “ desperately ‘ sticky “ The root cause of the trouble,” Aitken wrote, “ was that Bonar Law had formed the opinion that in matters of office and power Lloyd George was a self-seeker and a man who considered no interests except his own.”a

  There was another consideration in Law’s mind. He had become obsessed by Carson’s increasing hold upon the Unionist Party. This was the significance of the Nigerian debate. It had convinced Law that, unless drastic changes were made, he could not long continue to control his own party. This, for him, would have been a disaster. His modesty and his sense of limited loyalty made him see himself as essentially a representative figure. In this respect he was like Henderson, and unlike Balfour and Curzon, who were quite content to operate as independent “ statesmen,” believing that their views required attention without regard to whether they were held by anyone else. Law did not therefore feel able to dismiss Lloyd George’s overtures out of hand, particularly when he was told that the Secretary of State for War was operating in close alliance with the dreaded Carson.

  At any rate Aitken made sufficient progress for him to feel justified in sending Lloyd George a telegram telling him that he should come home quickly and see Law. Lloyd George’s own telegram from Paris appears to have been a reply to this, rather than an initiative of his own.

  When he got back to London, however, Lloyd George discovered that Bonar Law would not dine with him alone on the Friday night. Law merely sent him an invitation to make a third at a party with Sir Henry Wilson. This invi
tation, on Aitken’s advice, Lloyd George refused. He retired to Walton Heath, and dined with his family. Law was clearly not rushing into an alliance.

  On the next day Law saw Asquith and informed him, contrary to the expectations of Aitken and their author, of Lloyd George’s plans. Asquith reacted calmly to this information, which was probably not new to him, but expressed scepticism as to whether Lloyd George would regard the chairmanship of such a War Committee as more than a stage on his road to complete power. He also queried the value of bringing in Carson as one of its members, on the ground that when the latter was in the Government he had not formed a very high opinion of his “ constructive abilities ”—a view with which, within six months, both Bonar Law and Lloyd George were more than ready to agree.

  As had often been the case in the past, Bonar Law found it difficult to disagree with Asquith in his presence, or for a little time afterwards. But he allowed Aitken to arrange, for the Monday evening (November 20th) the first meeting of “ the Triumvirate ”—Lloyd George, Carson and himself. This took place at the Hyde Park Hotel, and Aitken, the catalyst and the chronicler of this alliance, was also present.1

  1 Lord Beaverbrook (as Sir Max Aitken became within a month) was very close to Bonar Law at the time, and was present at almost all his meetings with Lloyd George and Carson, although not at those with the other Unionist ministers or with Asquith. His account of what went on (given in Volume Two of Politicians and the War, first published in 1932) is detailed, dramatic, and invaluable to any study of the period. But it is self-confessedly partisan. It is a view of the battle seen, not from a hovering aeroplane, but by a deeply committed man operating in the far from calm atmosphere of one of the combatant headquarters. Nevertheless Lord Beaverbrook, for the sake of completing his picture, also tried to describe what went on in the other camps—in 10, Downing Street and amongst the Unionist ministers, notably Curzon, Chamberlain and Cecil, who were operating independently of Bonar Law. Inevitably his information was less authoritative here than when he was dealing with what he himself saw. Yet, so completely has his account come to dominate the field, that his views of when and why Asquith or Curzon or Chamberlain acted as they did are now widely accepted as indisputable facts. Innumerable books on the subject, including almost all of those published within the last ten years, lean heavily, with or without attribution, upon Lord Beaverbrook’s version. Even J. A. Spender, in the relevant chapter of Asquith’s official biography, used a great number of Beaverbrook’s facts, (mis-transmitting at least one of them), while controverting many of his opinions. It is therefore often the case that, at first sight, a statement appears to be overwhelmingly confirmed from about six different sources; but on closer examination the six “ sources ” all turn out to be subsidiaries of the central Beaverbrook fount. This does not matter so long as the original “ fact ” was within Lord Beaverbrook’s field of highly reliable knowledge. It matters greatly if it began life only as a surmise. Unfortunately there is no source on the Asquith side of the battle which is remotely as clear or gushing as the Beaverbrook one. There we have to gather together a few drops from a variety of sporadic trickles, checking them carefully against each other.