Asquith

by Roy Jenkins

  On the following Monday, when Asquith took his seat, there was a great crowd all the way from Cavendish Square to Westminster, and they gave him “ a tumultuous but most enthusiastic procession.” A band of medical students in Parliament Square added their own tribute by annexing his new top hat and doing one hundred pounds’ worth of damage to his motor car. But he found this much more agreeable than the “ stony silence ” with which the unfamiliar occupants of the familiar benches greeted him within.

  A few days later, when his daughter Violet, guest of honour at a National Liberal Club luncheon, delivered what still reads as one of the best speeches of its sort ever made, she painted the contrast:

  One last scene—the closing scene of the drama of Paisley. Let us remember it together, for you have shared it with me—the sight of those great cheering crowds that thronged Whitehall and Parliament Square the day he took his seat. When I went in out of the noise, into the silence of the House—the House in which I had seen him lead great armies to great triumphs; when I saw that little gallant handful of men which is all his following now, and heard their thin cheer raised, for a moment I felt—is this all, are these all he has behind him? But then I remembered the great voice of the crowd—it rang in my ears; and I knew that this, this was the voice of England—not the drilled cheers of those conscript ranks on the Coalition benches. And I knew that our small force that day was like the little gallant garrison of a beleaguered city that hears for the first time the great shout of the relieving forces—“ Hold on, hold out; we are coming.” And they are f

  1 The nearest approach to an exception was a warm letter from Lord Cave, who had been Home Secretary from 1916-19. This was ironical, for later, in 1925 (see page 511 infra) Cave was to be the agent for the delivery of one of the last and most severely felt blows against Asquith.

  But they never did. Paisley was a false dawn, both for Asquith and the Liberal Party. At best it was the equivalent of some late winter daybreak on the fringes of the Arctic Circle. For a time the light grew gradually a little stronger. After a few years the Coalition crumbled. In the period of political confusion which followed the Liberal Party achieved an uncomfortable reunion and gained a little in influence. Asquith won two more elections at Paisley and even had something approaching a worth-while party to lead. But, compared with the “ great armies ” and “ great triumphs ” of pre-war days, it was very small stuff. The post-war Liberal day never achieved more than a grey and short-lived light. By 1924 it was dusk again. By 1926, for Asquith at least, it was political night.

  Fortunately, on that exhilarating March afternoon in 1920, he could not foresee all this. Otherwise, even his massive reserves of self-assured fortitude would hardly have been enough to enable him to begin the long and unrewarding parliamentary battle against the Coalition. Unrewarding it certainly was. “ You have given the best proof since the G.O.M. took up Home Rule in 1886 that courage has not vanished from political life,”^ Bryce wrote to him. Asquith in 1920 was ten years younger than Gladstone at this turning-point, but the ground was still less promising and he fell further short of success.

  It was not for want of trying. After his election for Paisley he spoke in the House of Commons far more frequently than ever previously when not a minister. He did the same in the country, stumping up and down from Portsmouth to Manchester and Cardiff to Newcastle in a way that he had never done before. As a result, when the Chief Whip delivered a report in June, 1921 on speaking activity, Asquith came out top of the list—“ a complete refutation,” as he rather defensively noted, “ of the silly legend that I have lost ‘ grip and keenness

  Until the settlement of 1921 it was mainly Ireland which engaged his attention. He kept up a constant pressure against the Government. But he felt that it was an ineffective pressure. The House was deaf to his appeals. “ I took some pains with my speech,” he wrote after his first major effort on this subject, “ and said all that I intended. Five years ago it would have been rapturously applauded, but this House is the most impossible place, and though they crowd in and listen attentively there is practically no response.h

  He did not mind the isolation. His inner resources were proof against that. “ Now that Ll.G. calls me a lunatic and Carson calls me a traitor I begin to feel sure that I must be on the right lines,”* he wrote in October, 1920. But he hated the waste of ineffective action. He had no taste for speech-making for its own sake. “ Squandering himself like a fountain spraying into desert sand,” was his description of Coleridge, than whom “ there is no more tragic figure in literature j and free from self-pity though he was, he might have thought that the words had some application to himself.

  Even his own supporters were sometimes hesitant. “ And if one tries to strike a bold true note,” he wrote on October 24th 1920, “ half one’s friends shiver and cower, and implore one not to get in front of the band: in other words, to renounce both the duties and the risks of leadership.”k

  Asquith represented a strand of distinguished opinion in the country. “You have stood for what is fine in the soul of this country in the greatest months of her history,” John Masefield wrote to him after the Paisley election, “ and my wife and I send you our heartiest congratulations that you are now to bring back fineness and sanity to the councils of this heaving time.”* The weakness of the strand was that it had more distinction than width, and that some of those within it felt more nostalgia than hope. Yet Asquith tried as hard as he could, both to broaden his basis of support and to think of the future as well as the past. Over the summer of 1921 he held a series of “ conclaves ” designed to promote a new basis for an alternative Government. First he tried to get Grey committed to a return to active politics. On June 29th he wrote:

  E. Grey came to see me this morning by appointment. After some preliminaries I said to him that in my opinion the policy of the Coalition brought us both at home and abroad to a dangerous and almost desperate pass: that there was every ground for thinking that this was not only the growing but the dominant feeling of the country: that the success of anti-waste candidates at the by-elections was a crude expression of that feeling; and that everything pointed to a general desire for a strong alternative government to which it could rally. At present there was no such government in sight. In my judgment it could only be provided by the Liberal Party re-inforced by such men as Lord R. Cecil, and perhaps with an infusion of moderate Labour. But (I told him) the first essential was his avowed and open co-operation, both in a declaration of general policy and the ultimate responsibilities if and when the country should decide on a change.”m

  Asquith said he had only delayed approaching Grey before because of worries about his health. Grey said this was all right apart from his eyes. He could not read papers or do the work of an office. Asquith said that did not matter: he could be Lord President of the Council, lead the House of Lords, and speak outside. Then they discussed policy. Grey was “ particularly strong on Ireland.” They agreed that if the current negotiations broke down British troops must be withdrawn, and the Irish left to govern themselves. It was to be the Indian policy of 1947. The League of Nations must be made a “ reality instead of a sham on a shelf.” Grey said that “ he had coquetted before the war with the nationalisation of industries, but experience of government controls had completely converted him.” Co-partnership and profit-sharing was therefore to be the policy here. For unemployment (then mounting rapidly) they did not have a remedy (who did?), but agreed (it would have been difficult not to) that it “ required close consideration.”

  So far, so good. A wider “ conclave,” composed of Asquith, Grey, Cecil, Crewe, Runciman and Maclean met at Asquith’s house on July 5 th. Then the difficulties began to arise. Cecil made it clear that he would not become a Liberal or join a Government which was merely the Liberal Party in disguise. This meant that he wanted Grey and not Asquith to be Prime Minister, for he considered Asquith more committed in a party sense. Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland, who, at a later stage, became
the only other Tory to join in the discussions, took the same view. Cecil wanted the campaign to start with a manifesto signed only by himself and Grey, which Asquith and Crewe, as official Liberal leaders, would subsequently support.

  Asquith himself made no difficulty about these suggestions that he should take second place. Perhaps he did not take them very seriously, for, as was apparent from their conversation on June 29th, Grey was in reality quite incapable of carrying the burden of the Premiership.

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  Asquith was, moreover, desperately anxious to secure the co-operation of Grey, and, to a lesser extent, that of Cecil. There were others in the “ conclave,” however, who quickly showed ruffled feathers at the proposed supplanting of the Liberal hierarchy. Donald Maclean, according to Asquith’s note of the meeting “ said that R.C(ecil)’s plan was wholly impracticable. It would take the life and heart out of the Liberal rank and file, who would protest that they were being asked to join another Coalition.n Runciman and Crewe spoke in a similar sense.

  This basic difficulty was never overcome, although there were various ingenious attempts to circumnavigate it. It was suggested that there should be no initial manifesto, but that Asquith would begin by writing publicly to Grey, who would reply more fully and equally publicly. Then Cecil would declare his support for the exchange. Steel-Maitland, however, would not have this. It would still look too much like “ a domestic Liberal affair.”

  At this stage Grey turned cold. He had always been a difficult bird to catch, and advancing years accentuated the characteristic. He arrived (late) for the fourth meeting of the “ conclave,” having missed the third because he was “ feeding his squirrels... in Northumberland,” and immediately threw everything into confusion by announcing that “ with the state of his eyesight it would be wrong for him to undertake any ‘ definite political obligations.’ Candidates might come forward on the strength of his emergence who would feel that they had been misled in the event of his (probable) return to retirement.”

  When this scruple was over-ruled by the others he changed his tack. “ He then declared that his real motive for coming out was the Irish business—reprisals, etc: this was now in abeyance and perhaps on the road to settlement.”0 It all sounded fairly hopeless; indeed it is difficult not to catch the faint aroma of emigre meetings rising from all these “conclaves.” But Asquith would not accept defeat. Eventually it was agreed that, while the exchange of letters should be abandoned, Grey would “ open the business ” by speaking in his old constituency early in October.

  The meeting took place, but nothing very much came of it. Nevertheless the idea of a new centre-left grouping was, with difficulty, kept alive. In January, 1922, Asquith reported that Scott of the Manchester Guardian was strongly in favour of such a plan. It was proving difficult to embrace “ moderate Labour,” however, and Scott regarded their inclusion as essential. Geoffrey Howard, the Liberal Chief Whip, was deputed to explain to him “ the efforts we had made and were making to get an electoral arrangement, and how they were, time after time, frustrated by the inability of the Labour leaders here to exercise authority over their local branches and ‘ deliver the goods’p

  By this time the Coalition was nearing its end. It collapsed in October, 1922. Its fall owed almost everything to growing Conservative distrust of Lloyd George, brought to a head by the stubborn adventurousness of his policy in Asia Minor, and almost nothing to the opposition which Asquith had been able to mount against him. Over the summer of that year Asquith’s interest in politics was lower than at any time since his return to the House of Commons. He felt that he had done his best, and failed. He was also increasingly worried about money. In the spring of 1920 he had been forced to abandon Cavendish Square and to move to a cheaper but still commodious London house at 44, Bedford Square in Bloomsbury. Cheaper though it was, this was a house of considerable architectural distinction, which had previously belonged to Lady Ottoline Morrell and was used to spectacular if unorthodox entertaining. Then Margot had written the first volume of her Autobiography, and this, serialised in the Sunday Times and selling well both in England and the United States, had produced some welcome relief—as well as alienating a number of friends.1 By 1922 the second volume was in an advanced state of preparation, and she followed up the success of the first by an American lecture tour, which it was hoped would be profitable.2

  1 Curzon was perhaps the most extreme case. “ After reading my Autobiography,” Margot wrote later, “ in spite of meeting him on many occasions, to my unending regret George Curzon never spoke to me, and the day he invited me to dine with him to put an end to our quarrels was the day on which he died.” (More Memories, p. 205).

  2 In fact the tour produced more vicissitudes than profit. Both the nature of these and the high gearing of the tour can be guessed from some comments of Asquith’s written on March 21st: “ Some letters of Margot’s ... arrived this morning. She had had rather a fiasco at Pittsburgh: thanks to the reporters having published a lying statement that she had said that the ‘ American female is a painted plaything,’ a large Club of women cancelled their seats, and she had an audience of 12,000 instead of 15,000.. . . She was going on South and West to places like Cincinnati and St. Louis: terrible distances.” (Letters from Lord Oxford to a Friend, 11, p. 1). Asquith was the last English statesman of note never to visit America.

  Even so the financial pressure was again heavy upon Asquith. He began to think and write more about literary earnings, his own and those of other people:

  Someone said (at a dinner of “ The Club ”) that the author of If Winter Comes had netted here and in America at least £50,000: which I don’t believe, but if it was half as much, it is a wonderful achievement for a writer of unsuccessful novels. (June 14th, 1922).

  I am rather exhausted, for I have just finished my 1,500 words of the John Bull article, and dictated them to a young woman who came from the office. (June 15th, 1922).

  I see that Ll.G. is reported to be selling his memoirs for a fabulous sum. (August 13, 1922).

  Out of the proceeds of his book he (Churchill) has bought a modest country house and 80 acres of land in Kent.. . . He has sold 10,000 copies of his first volume at 305. and hopes to reap a second harvest by a cheap edition at 105. (April 25 th, 1923).

  I wish I could find a way to make a little money.5 (June 5 th,1923).

  I got back to a late lunch today, am now about to grapple (for a reasonable fee) with Winston’s book. (November 6th, 1923).q

  During the summer recess of 1922 Asquith himself was hard at work on a book—The Genesis of the War. This was a serious essay in diplomatic history; he delved deep into the sources and initiated a wide international correspondence, although he was less painstaking with the actual writing. It was far too impersonal a record to compete for sales with Margot, or Churchill, or Lloyd George. Asquith wrote it for money, but he was unwilling and unable to stoop for a lucrative coiquest. “ I had a visit this morning from Mr. Flower, the literary editor of Cassells,” he wrote on November 21st, “ who came to talk about my book. He evidently thinks it is going to be too meticulous and elaborate. I gave him no encouragement, and said that I must do it in my own way—or not at all. In the end he acquiesced and went courteously away. I suppose publishers have always been the same.. . . ”r Then, on the day after publication, in September, 1923, he noted resignedly: “ The reviews, so far as I have seen any, are not unfriendly, tho’ they are evidently disappointed that I have been so sparing of the tittle-tattle.”s However, he immediately started to edit a collection of his earlier writings, some of them going back to the ’seventies, which were published in 1924 under the title of Studies and Sketches.

  In the autumn of 1922, while Asquith was completing the Genesis of the War, the political situation was suddenly transformed. The Carlton Club revolt of October 19th led to the majority of Conservatives withdrawing their support from the Coalition. Lloyd George had no alternative but to resign immediately. Bonar Law, who had retired
from the Coalition eighteen months before because of ill-health, became Prime Minister at the head of an undistinguished Conservative Government. In Birkenhead’s words “ the second eleven ” had taken over. He and Balfour and Austen Chamberlain remained in the pavilion. The Cabinet’s leading figures were the accommodating Curzon as Foreign Secretary and Baldwin, whom Asquith had described as “ the nicest fellow in the (previous) Government ” as Chancellor of the Exchequer.1 “ A clever lawyer called Pig,” as Derby and Devonshire had reputedly referred to Sir Douglas Hogg, provided the Government with its main debating strength.t

  1 McKenna, out of politics since 1918, was offered the job, but declined it on the ground that, failing an independent Tory majority, he wished to promote a coalition between Bonar Law and Asquith.

  Bonar Law at once dissolved Parliament and presented this team to the country under the watch-word of tranquillity. Lloyd George fought with his usual gyratory energy and a very small band of adherents. “ We are asked to choose,” announced Asquith’s daughter, in one of the few remarkable phrases of a rather flat election, “ between one man suffering from Sleeping Sickness and another from St. Vitus’s Dance.”

  In Paisley, however, the choice was once again between Asquith and the persevering Biggar. It was made in Asquith’s favour, but only by a margin much narrower than in the 1920 by-election. He was in by 316.

  “I went to the counting at Paisley shortly before midnight on Wednesday,” he wrote two days later (November 17th), “ and watched the process until about 1.30 a.m. when the result was declared. We had been assured that all was more than safe, so that I was not a little surprised to find when I arrived that it was beginning to look like a neck-and-neck affair. I had quite an exciting hour while the numbers fluctuated up and down, keeping on the whole almost even: indeed it was not until the last quarter of an hour that we forged ahead, and proceeded to win (as the racing people say) 4 cleverly.’ I polled more votes than I did three years ago, and the drop in the majority was entirely due to the enormous addition to the Labour vote, owing to the 5,000 unemployed in Paisley (of whom there were none in 1920) and the sullen anti-bourgeois feeling which is swelling like a tidal wave over the whole of the West of Scotland .... The general result does not greatly surprise me. The suicide of the Coalition before the election took much of the punch out of the fight, and left the country divided between Tranquillity and Socialism.”u 1