Asquith

by Roy Jenkins

  Asquith took no trouble to secure his own position or to add to his personal reputation. When things were going well with his Government he would be careful to see that any colleague got credit, if he (the colleague) were entitled to it, without regard to whether any credit were given or left for himself. On the other hand, if things were going badly he was ready to stand in front and accept all responsibility: a colleague who got into trouble was sure that the Prime Minister would stand by him. y

  “ These qualities,” Grey added, “ are happily not unique. . . . ”

  They are sufficiently rare to explain why, at least until 1915, Asquith was above all a great head of a Cabinet.

  1 Sir Winston Churchill (Great Contemporaries, p. 249) has described how Balfour passed from one Cabinet to another, from the Prime Minister who was his champion to the Prime Minister who had been his most most severe critic, “ like a powerful graceful cat walking delicately and unsoiled across a rather muddy street.”

  THE LAST OF THE ROMANS

  1917-19

  Asquith spent his first Christmas out of office in the Isle of Wight, at a house lent by his former War Minister, Seely, and then saw in the New Year of 1917 at the Wharf, with Margot and “ a few intimates.” This was close to the pattern of any of the preceding six years, but there was no familiar press of events as soon as the holidays were over. “ It is a novel sensation for me to be master of my own time all day long,”a he wrote on January 2nd.

  He was neither bored nor unoccupied. His intellectual resources were too manifold for that. He had been reading “ Shakespeare s England and Stow’s Survey of London with some dips into Heraldry and browsing in The Ship of Footes—written by an old monk called Barclay just on the eve of the Reformation.” b But, more than most Prime Ministers who have just ceased to hold office, he had no clear political role. He had not retired: he did not feel ready for this, and he was still head of the Liberal Party. As such he was nominally leader of the opposition. When the House of Commons met again, he sat opposite the left-hand despatch box, asked the business questions, and spoke second on ceremonial occasions. But who comprised the opposition, and where did Asquith want to lead them?

  There was no doubt about the former Liberal ministers who sat alongside him on the front bench. Some of them were much more aggressively disposed to the new Government than he was himself. The attitude of the Liberal back-benchers was less clear. Although they had given Asquith his unanimous vote of confidence at the National Liberal Club meeting, at least 126 of them, according to Christopher Addison, one of Lloyd George’s few Liberal ministers, had agreed to support the new Coalition. Asquith himself did not intend to oppose it. It never for a moment occurred to him that Lloyd George, having obtained power, could or should be overturned without the opportunity to give his new system of government a run for its money. The country was in the midst of a desperate struggle. Political activity in the constituencies, largely by Asquith’s own wish, was at a standstill. In these circumstances any normal opposition role would have been both dangerous and ineffective. It would also have been distasteful to Asquith. He interpreted his commitment to help keep opinion steady and frustrate the spread of opposition to the war in much more than a purely formal way. He felt a heavy, continuing responsibility for the decision of August 4th, 1914, and he was genuinely nervous of damaging national unity.

  Even had he felt otherwise, he would at this stage have found little room for manoeuvre. His motives would have been too open to misinterpretation. The charge of personal jealousy would have been raised against him, with the newspapers ensuring that it echoed around the country with the utmost shrillness. The Press lords remained curiously unappeased by his fall. They showed no magnanimity in victory, and continued to lay the blame for anything that went wrong at his door. As a result, the danger was, not that Asquith might be tempted to be too hostile to the new Government, but that his utility as even a gently probing critic was seriously undermined. Ironically, the only other Prime Minister of the century who, leaving office with his physical powers unimpaired, was to find himself equally bereft of a role, was Lloyd George. The process of Liberal self-destruction had begun.

  For the moment, however, the sound of the blows was muffled. At the beginning of February Asquith paid a post-resignation visit to his constituency—his first for a very long time. His speech there, at Ladybank on February 2nd, was more restrained than illuminating. Its keynote was the need for “ wise and united concentration of all resources on the war,” and he gave no new information about the events which had led to the fall of his Government. Nor did he express any views about its successor.

  This Scottish visit over, he settled down to a new and leisurely regime. In mid-February he was writing: “ . . . this week I have been two days at the House of Commons, and attended a funeral service and wedding, finishing up this morning by a visit to McEvoy’s studio. ”c 1 At this stage the Asquiths, without a London house of their own, were temporarily living at Forbes House, Belgravia. By March they had succeeded in dislodging the tenants from 20, Cavendish Square and re-installed themselves there.

  1 Ambrose McEvoy (1878-1927)’ was currently painting Asquith’s daughter Elizabeth.

  Asquith was then able to begin a relatively happy period of getting his books “ into something like decent order.” He went no more to Walmer, but the Wharf continued (and in due course expanded, for one or two adjacent houses had been acquired), and became increasingly the centre of his life. Travel was sometimes a problem, as wartime restrictions increased, but in November 1917 he obtained a special white badge from Walter Long,1 and was able to motor freely wherever he liked.

  1 Why Long, who was then Colonial Secretary, should have been approached for this purpose is by no means clear. Perhaps Asquith found him the least distasteful member of the new Government with whom to deal.

  It was not therefore a question, as Asquith had suggested in his mock-serious letter of December 6th, of living “ under Violet’s roof.” Nor were they quite reduced to “ Cys’s salary.” Nevertheless the Asquiths were, and remained for the rest of their lives, a good deal better off for roofs than for salaries—or any other form of income. They were far from penniless, of course. But Margot’s extravagance required substantial under-pinning. “ I hope you will get a lovely London house and spend all the money you can as life is short,” she wrote to a friend a few years later. “ People who worry about money are never worth much. I shall certainly die beyond my means...” And Asquith himself liked a generous establishment. There was the large motor car with its chauffeur. There was Clouder, the familiar butler, who admittedly doubled between London and the country, but who was supported by a full complement of indoor servants. There was the constant flow of hospitality. And there was the retinue of secretaries and relations with which he habitually did his political travelling.

  Asquith could therefore have done very well with some additional income. Later he wrote hard in an attempt to fill part of the need, but this phase did not really begin until the ’twenties. All that he worked on during the last years of the war was a small volume of Occasional Addresses—non-political speeches which he had delivered over the previous quarter century—and this neither took much time nor produced much money.

  The temptations of an official salary were acute. In May of 1917 soundings were made to see whether he might accept the Lord Chancellorship, which then carried the highest of all—-£10,000 a year and a pension of £5,000. His former Chief Whip, Murray of Elibank, and the Lord Chief Justice, Reading, were used by Lloyd George as intermediaries. Asquith never really thought that he could accept, but he went so far as to consult Crewe. The latter wrote, on May 31st, that in his view Asquith was quite right to refuse: “You are in fact invited to turn yourself into Bonar Law, which is absurd d. Asquith was glad to concur. He never felt that he would be at home in a Lloyd George Government, and he would have been loath to~enter any Cabinet without the Liberal ministers who had resigned with him. Furthermor
e, he believed it his duty to preserve his independence for the peace settlement and for the sake of the Liberal Party. It did not then occur to him that a general election before the time of that settlement would smash the party almost beyond recognition.

  During the remainder of 1917 and early 1918 Asquith kept up a moderate level of political activity. He paid a visit to the Western Front as the guest of Haig. He maintained contact with the leaders of the Irish party. He spoke quite often in the House of Commons. He declared his support,fatalistically for women’s suffrage, far-sightedly for proportional representation, and enthusiastically for President Wilson’s idea of a League of Nations. He made occasional speeches in the country, at Liverpool in October, 1917, at Birmingham two months later, and at Manchester in September, 1918.1 He delivered a carefully-prepared and widely circulated Romanes lecture at Oxford entitled On the Victorian Age. But, until the late spring of 1918, he delivered no challenge to the Government. His speeches were cautious, and he never entered the division lobby against Lloyd George.

  1 The Birmingham speech, at a large meeting in the Town Hall, with an overflow to follow, was the most notable of these. He demanded a “ clean peace ” and gave his own gloss and modified approval to the famous (or notorious) Lansdowme letter, which had appeared in the Daily Telegraph a few days before.

  Then came the Maurice debate. On May 7th, Major-General Sir Frederick Maurice wrote a letter to several newspapers. Maurice, the son of Charles Kingsley’s Christian Socialist friend and the father of the economist Joan Robinson, was not a typical soldier. His letter contained a series of challenges to the accuracy of ministerial statements. The most important of these was directed at the Prime Minister. The military background to the challenge was that the Germans, during March and April, had launched two sledgehammer blows—the first instalments of their all-out drive for victory before the Americans arrived—against the British sector of the Western Front. Both the attacks were eventually contained, but not before the biggest advances since 1914 had been made, Amiens and Hazebrouck had been threatened, and morale at home had been badly shaken. In addition, another staggering wave of casualties had been suffered, and Haig had been driven to the limit of his reserves. But why were his reserves so low? Why were some of his divisions “ skeletonised ” even before the attacks began?

  The suspicion was that Lloyd George, as a counter to Haig’s fondness for bloody offensives (Passchendaele had been the culmination of the previous autumn’s slaughter) deliberately kept him short of troops. The Commander-in-Chief, according to the Prime Minister’s plan, would have to save casualties by remaining on the defensive throughout 1918. In the outcome, however, the plan had greatly increased them, and nearly lost the war as well. This was the result of Lloyd George’s upstart conviction that he knew better than the soldiers. So, at least, some of the criticism ran. Lloyd George replied by denying the premiss. “ Notwithstanding the heavy casualties in 1917,” he told the House of Commons on April 9th, “ the army in France was considerably stronger on 1st January, 1918, than on 1st January, 1917.”

  General Maurice, who was Director of Military Operations at the War Office until late April (when he was removed by the C.I.G.S. Sir Henry Wilson), wrote to denounce this statement. “ (It) implies,” he said, “ that Sir Douglas Haig’s fighting strength on the eve of the great battle which began on 21st March had not been diminished. That is not correct.” He also denied the accuracy of a statement by Bonar Law about the circumstances in which a recent extension of the British line had been agreed upon, and of another by the Prime Minister relating to troop strength in the Middle East. He referred to Law’s statement as “ the latest of a series of mis-statements which have been made recently in the House of Commons by the present Government.” He used the phrase “ that is not correct ” as a reiterative chorus after each of Lloyd George’s claims. He passed to a justification of his own action. The falseness of these statements was appreciated by a large number of soldiers and “ this knowledge is breeding such distrust of the Government as can only end by impairing the splendid morale of our troops.”

  “ I have therefore decided,” he ended, “ fully realising the consequences to myself, that my duty as a citizen must over-ride my duty as a soldier, and I ask you to publish this letter, in the hope that Parliament may see fit to order an investigation into the statements I have made.”e

  The letter was a heavy challenge to the Government. It was also a clear breach of military discipline, as Maurice himself admitted by implication. But was it in addition, as Lloyd George insisted in his War Memoirs, part of a general Asquithian plot “ to blow up the Government ”? The evidence is against this. Maurice was well-known to Asquith, who held him in high regard, and the general no doubt looked to the former Prime Minister to press the matter in Parliament. But he had not consulted him beforehand, although he had very nearly done so. The first that Asquith heard was when he received the following letter from Maurice on the morning of publication :

  20, Kensington Park Gardens,

  6. 5. 1918

  Dear Mr. Asquith,

  I have today sent to the press a letter which will, I hope, appear in tomorrow’s papers. When I asked you to see me last Thursday, I had intended to consult you about this letter, but on second thoughts I came to the conclusion that, if I consulted you, it would be tantamount to asking you to take responsibility for the letter, and that I alone must take that responsibility. I ask you to believe that in writing the letter I have been guided solely by what I hold to be the public interest.

  Believe me,

  Yours sincerely,

  F. Maurice f

  Even without prior consultation, Asquith acted rapidly. That afternoon he asked a private notice question of Bonar Law (as leader of the House). Law replied that the Government proposed to ask two judges to act as “ a court of honour ” and to enquire into the alleged mis-statements. During supplementary questions the idea of a judicial enquiry came under heavy fire, and not only from Asquith. Another Liberal, George Lambert, first put forward the alternative demand for a select committee of the House of Commons. Carson, who had once again resigned from the Government, made several menacing interventions about the need for Cabinet and (perhaps more significantly) ex-Cabinet ministers to be absolved from their oaths of secrecy when appearing before the enquiry. Asquith demanded a debate before a decision. Law countered by offering to let Asquith nominate the two judges. Asquith refused to be mollified by this and persisted in his demand that the issue must be debated before the court of enquiry was set up.

  As soon as he left the chamber Bonar Law found that his offer was as ill-received by some of his colleagues in the Government as by the Asquithians and Carson. Churchill1 argued vehemently against a judicial enquiry on grounds of high principle, and carried the Prime Minister with him. A minister, he said, should never ask judges to enquire into his own integrity.g In view of this sudden movement of opinion it was fortunate for the Government that Asquith had not immediately accepted Law’s offer.

  1 He had joined Lloyd George’s Government as Minister of Munitions in July 1917.

  The debate came on two days later. Asquith moved that a select committee of the House of Commons be set up. His speech was brief and restrained, but uncertain and therefore unconvincing in tone. He disclaimed any desire to censure the Government. He had believed that they might accept his motion. Drawing with some effect upon his experience of the Parnell Commission, he pronounced against the method of judicial enquiry. But when an interrupter suggested that the Marconi select committee provided an equally unsatisfactory precedent for this method, he returned no adequate answer. He was also put out when he asked the rhetorical question: “What is the alternative (to the select committee)? ” and received from a somewhat jingoistic miners’ member, the reply of “ Get on with the war.”1

  1 The member was Charles Stanton (Keir Hardie’s incongruous successor at Merthyr Tydfil), and Lloyd George, no doubt a partial witness, said that the
interjection was received with one of the biggest cheers he had ever heard in the House of Commons.

  At the conclusion of his speech Asquith drew from Bonar Law the typically stark argument that a select committee could never be impartial because there was no member of the House who was not “ either friendly (to) or opposed to the Government.” After expressing his dismay at hearing such unparliamentary statements from the leader of the House, but without any attempt to weave his own points into a final crescendo of argument, Asquith sat down. There was no sense of a great parliamentary occasion about his speech. He had chosen a minor key, and had played it without his usual sureness of touch.

  Lloyd George, who followed, struck a different note. He spoke for 1¼ hours, nearly twice as long as Asquith, but the pace of his speech was much faster. He was determined to escape from the judicial enquiry offer, to force the issue there and then, to refute and discredit Maurice, to accuse Asquith of having been party to a fractious plot to bring down the Government, and to secure an overwhelming vote of vindication from the House of Commons. He succeeded in all these objectives. He not only destroyed the demand for a select committee. He also laid down the principle, which prevailed for the rest of the war, that House of Commons criticism of the Government’s military leadership was equivalent to disloyal sabotage of the national effort. His speech was a great parliamentary tour de force.