Asquith

by Roy Jenkins

  THE LAST PHASE

  1924-8

  When Asquith held up the knife upon which MacDonald became impaled, he was perfectly aware that he might be doing more harm to himself than to the Labour Party. But he did not see what else he could do. He could not withdraw his amendment because the Prime Minister did not like it. He could not support the Government on the case they had put up. Once again the Maurice analogy was obvious: his sense of political tactics was overcome by his sense of parliamentary propriety.

  The outlook which confronted him on the dissolution was dismal enough. At the age of 72, without any hope of a great national triumph, he had to journey to Paisley and fight his fourth campaign there within five years. One “ Midlothian ” might be stimulating for an old man, but four were another matter. Apart from anything else the personal expense was considerable. And on the wider Liberal financial front there were great difficulties about a 1924 election. Lloyd George had made it clear in August that, without a complete re-casting of the Abingdon Street organisation, he would not make as much money available from his personal fund as he had done in 1923. The honeymoon of Liberal re-union, never ecstatic, was over. This dispute about money was to persist throughout Asquith’s remaining period of Liberal leadership.

  Asquith faced the Paisley contest with his usual equanimity. Margot thought he was exceptionally oratorically vigorous. “ I’ve never seen H. in such amazing form!” she wrote on October 25th. But his daughter Violet, who was a better judge in this field, thought that the campaign was the hardest of the four to flog into life: “ The Campbell case and the Russian Treaty were short commons on which to feed a hungry electorate for three weeks, and Father and I used to fling ourselves on the papers every morning in the wild hope of finding some utterance, by friend or foe, which might form a peg on which to hang one of the many speeches which had to be delivered before nightfall.”

  The Paisley atmosphere was not pleasant. The “jungle tactics of Glasgow ” had spread there. Asquith had to put up with a good deal of noise. But he took it all very calmly. As his daughter recorded in her diary:

  His patience was as impersonal as if he had been waiting for a shower of rain to pass. When a musical offensive began he might ask me with a sudden detached curiosity: “ What is that melancholy dirge they are crooning now? ” On my telling him it was the Red Flag he would evince mild interest, than lean back in his chair again with a sniff and a shrug and resume his own train of thought. When they had sung and shouted themselves hoarse he would rise and deliver with perfect calm the speech he had come there to make, quite untinged by any shade of indignation at the events which had delayed it.a

  On the other hand the local voting prospect looked encouraging. Asquith was without a Conservative opponent. He had a straight fight with a new Labour candidate, a Glasgow solicitor named Rosslyn Mitchell. Margot, however, was sceptical of the advantage of Conservative withdrawal.

  “Here it is of doubtful benefit,” she wrote to her old friend Lord Islington, “ as the Tories—the stupidest people in the world— are so angry they threaten to vote for our very powerful opponent. Mitchell is better dressed than Peter Flower, is highly educated and no more Labour than you, an orator wind-bag and dangerously courteous with a face like the actor John Hare, only handsomer. He may run us very close.”

  Mitchell did more than that. He beat Asquith by 2,228 votes. When it was over he looked intensely depressed and said “ I’m so sorry, so terribly sorry this has happened.” Asquith merely grunted and seconded a vote of thanks to the returning officer. The next morning he and his family party had another railway departure from Glasgow, different but in its way no less memorable than that of 1920. Asquith’s daughter is again the chronicler:

  We had a difficult send-off, at Glasgow, saying good-bye to faithful old supporters there, who came with tears and flowers.

  As we steamed out of the station, I lay back feeling bruised from head to foot—and recoiling instinctively from the pile of newspapers that lay by my side—their head-lines stinging me like adders. I looked across at Father in an agony of solicitude (for I knew how the good-byes had moved him)—then meeting his calm gaze I realized suddenly that he had already made his peace with events. Groping wildly for a life-line that might draw me into smooth waters by his side, I asked in as steady a voice as possible: “ I suppose you haven’t by any chance got an old P. G. Wodehouse in your bag that you could lend me? ” A smile of instant response, mingled I thought with relief, lit up his face as he replied triumphantly: “ Being a provident man I have got in my bag, not one, but four brand new ones! ” My wounds were healed— for I knew that he was invulnerable.b

  At Euston there were also cheering crowds of welcome. But they could not disguise the extent of the defeat either for Asquith or for the Liberal Party as a whole. It was reduced to 40 members, with Lloyd George the natural leader in the Commons. What could Asquith do? There could be no question of his going back to Paisley, in spite of the affecting singing of “ Will ye no’ come back again? ” to which he had been subjected in the Liberal Club the night before. Baldwin had a huge majority and was not likely to repeat the mistake of 1923. At seventy-two Asquith could hardly look forward to the next general election. Should he then seek a safe Liberal seat elsewhere? There were not many left, and in any case he was fastidious. “ I’d sooner go to hell than to Wales,” he told C. F. G. Masterman.

  On November 4th, the King wrote and offered him another haven. Asquith’s absence from Westminster, the letter said, was “ a national loss.” On the other hand the King felt strongly that, after his long and eminent career, he should not be subjected to the strain and uncertainty of further electoral contests. “ For these reasons it would be a matter of the greatest satisfaction to me to confer upon you a Peerage.. .. If I could persuade you to (accept) this, it would give me great pleasure.” c

  The letter was most tactfully timed. It was sent on the day of the change of Prime Minister. The offer was therefore able to come from the King himself, without the intervention of any of Asquith’s successors. This consideration was appreciated by Asquith, and he was from the start greatly tempted by the offer. But there were pulls the other way. It was a wrench finally to abandon the House of Commons after so many years of service there. There were obvious difficulties, too, in trying to lead the Liberal Party from the Lords, while Lloyd George held sway in the Commons. Then there was the consideration that so much of his active life had been spent in battling against the Upper House; was there perhaps an element of bathos in ending up there after all this? The change of name was also a hurdle. To die, as he had so far lived, in the great commoner tradition of Mr. Pitt and Mr. Gladstone was not something to be lightly abandoned. Nor, at a time when high titles were still considered to require the backing of great fortunes, was he financially secure.

  Asquith therefore delayed a decision. On November 6th he was due to leave with his son Oc for a tour of the Middle East and the Nile Valley. He asked the King if he could postpone an answer until his return in January. While he was away Asquith had plenty of time for thought. He spent much of the visit alone, including a week in the First Cataract Hotel at Assuan where he wrote 14,000 words of a new book (Fifty Years of Parliament). By the time of his return to England his mind was made up in favour of acceptance. On January, 20th, 1925, he wrote to the King:

  I have ventured to take full advantage of your Majesty’s kind permission that I should delay a definite reply to the gracious offer of a Peerage, conveyed to me in November last, until I should have had time for mature and deliberate consideration.

  The consideration involved, as your Majesty will understand, matters both personal and political of perhaps exceptional delicacy and difficulty. As a result, I now have the honour respectfully to submit my grateful acceptance of your Majesty’s proposal....

  If it should be your Majesty’s pleasure, in accordance with precedent, to confer upon me the dignity of an Earl, I should propose to take the title of Oxford
, which has fine traditions in our history, and which was given by Queen Anne to her Prime Minister, Robert Harleyd

  The King replied three days later:

  It is with great satisfaction that I have received your letter of the 20th inst., accepting in, if I may say so, such charming terms, the offer of a Peerage... Your Peerage will of course be an Earldom, and subject to the necessary references to the College of Arms which will at once be made, I shall be very glad that the historic title of Earl of Oxford should now be restored in your favour. I have informed the Prime Minister e

  The tide of Oxford was, of course, somewhat "grand.” It might almost have been a royal one, in the category of Cambridge or Gloucester or York. Even apart from the University significance, it was a more imposing territorial designation than that chosen by any ennobled Prime Minister, or indeed by any politician, except for Lord Norwich (formerly Duff Cooper), in the past hundred years. Yet Asquith had a very good claim to it. He was the most distinguished Oxonian then alive and he had epitomised the methods and style of his University—or at least of a leading college within it. In addition, he had lived for much of the preceding fifteen years within striking distance of the city, and was a familiar figure in its streets and at its tables.

  Many recognised this, and wrote with pleasure of his choice. The Bishop of Durham (Henson) stated: "There is no living statesman who has a better right to have his name thus closely bound to his University.” Maurice Baring wrote: "Many congratulations. It is a nice Shakespearean title.” The Master of Balliol (Lindsay), announced his pleasure 44 that the College has at least some share in your title.” Lytton Strachey described it as "singularly suitable”; Max Beerbohm wrote to say how glad he was that it had been chosen; and Dean Inge apologised for not having written before "to congratulate you on your accession to the grandest of all English titles.” Gilbert Murray mingled congratulation with regret, but at the passing of Asquith’s commoner status and not at the new name:

  My dear Mr. Asquith: I must write to you once more in the old name that I have learnt to love and honour and which I associate with so much kindness to myself. The new title is splendid; better than one could have expected. I hardly know why the change should make one sad.

  The Bishop of Oxford (Burge) was so little worried by having to share his territorial name in the House of Lords that he wrote an enthusiastic letter beginning "My Lord Chieftain”; and Lord Shaw of Dunfermline, a former Scottish law officer, went one better with "My dear and revered Chief." f

  Elsewhere, however, there were some mutterings and raised eyebrows. Such titles as Oxford, it was suggested, were not for radical leaders, however eminent, particularly if they were of non-patrician origin.

  "It is like a suburban villa calling itself Versailles,” the present Lady Salisbury, then a very young woman, took it upon herself to inform the new peer. Asquith found her letter funny rather than wounding and himself spread the story around.

  Others suggested that the King ought to stop it. But the King, as has been seen, was in favour. The most sustained hostility came from some descendants of the Earls of Oxford of the second creation— Asquith’s was the third creation. J. R. H. Harley wrote from Herefordshire to ask Asquith not to take the title, and when he received no reply, wrote again in more offensive terms:

  Sir,

  I am sorry that you have not thought fit to answer my letter of the 27th ult. In writing to you as head of the Harley family and living at the home of the late Earls of Oxford, I should have thought that my letter would have had some consideration from you. However, I see that you have decided to ignore all requests. Perhaps you consider old traditions and sentiments to be of no account in these days.

  Yours faithfully,

  J. R. H. Harley 9

  He still got no reply. Perhaps it was the syntax as much as the substance which made Asquith loath to supply one. Then came a similar letter from a Lady Duplin, who was also a Harley connection, but the effect of this was diminished by her cousin writing on the following day and begging Asquith to take no notice of “ a lot of rubbish.”

  The College of Heralds, however, supported the Harley interest to the extent of insisting on the clumsier double title of Oxford and Asquith. This would not have been Asquith’s own choice, for he disliked complicated names.1 His peerage was gazetted on February 10th and his status was changed “ for better or for worse, but at any rate for good and all.” Not taking his new rank too seriously, Asquith noted that his butler, Clouder, “ did his best to live up to the occasion, and his first ‘ My Lord ’ had an unmistakable tinge of delicate courtliness.”h On February 17th, sponsored by Balfour and Beauchamp, he took his seat in the House of Lords.

  Asquith became a moderately frequent attender and speaker in his new chamber: the demands were not heavy, for it sat only two days a week at the time. But, unlike some more recent political ennoblements, he never developed any respect for its deliberative quality. “The standard of speaking there is deplorably low,” he wrote on March 26th: “ men like — and — and — would hardly be listened to in an average County Council. They mumble away a lot of spineless and disconnected platitudes.”i And again on June 30th: “It is an impossible audience: as Lowe said fifty years ago, it is like ‘ speaking by torchlight to corpses in a charnel-house j

  In his first six weeks he thought that he listened to only one good speech, and that was “ poor Curzon’s last ” on March 4th. A fortnight later Curzon was dead, and Asquith made his own maiden speech during an afternoon of tributes. It was appropriate, moving and effective, as might have been expected. Even had bitterness still been there, Asquith would have allowed no trace of it to show on an occasion like this. But in fact it had long since disappeared. Curzon was an old friend, and Asquith, never a man for rancour, felt sadness at his going and a sense of his own increasing isolation.

  “ Poor George Curzon died quietly at 5 this morning,” he wrote,

  “ after a fortnight of pain and constant restlessness. It is exactly a fortnight since I heard him speak in the House of Lords, apparently in full vigour, excellent form and high spirits. He was seven years younger than I am, and I have known him ever since I examined him, as a schoolboy at Eton, very nearly fifty years ago. We entered the House of Commons in the same election in 1886. It makes one feel, as Browning says in the Toccata, ‘ chilly and grown old k

  A few months before a much younger and closer friend of previous days had gone. In November, 1924, Edwin Montagu had died at the age of forty-five. A few days later Venetia Montagu wrote to Asquith —the first letter to pass between them for nearly ten years:

  My dearest Mr. Asquith,

  We found this letter for you amongst Edwin’s papers, written,

  I think, just before he went to India. I know it is not necessary for me to tell you how deeply he loved you and what a real and lasting grief your political separation was. He always used to say that tho’ he was still absorbingly interested in his work after he left you, it was no longer any fun.

  I feel I am terribly lucky to have had 9½ such happy years and that I was able, owing to my very unimaginative and unapprehensive frame of mind, to help him sometimes to cast off those great fears and glooms which used to torture him. Do you remember how we used to laugh at him in Sicily?

  Thank you for all you did for him to make his life happy. He was always grateful to you.

  All my love,

  Venetia l

  Then she wrote again, when Asquith was in Egypt:

  My darling Mr. Asquith,

  Edwin asked me to give you something of his and I finally thought you might like this Hamlet which I’d given him a long time ago. I’ve never thanked you for your divine letter, you know how dumb and inarticulate I am, but you do realise I hope how glad I was to get it. I hope I may see you sometime when you get back.

  Much love always,

  Venetia m

  Thereafter there was an occasional interchange, both of letters and of visits.

  The
early months of 1925 were a time of accumulating evening honours for Asquith. In May, following his earldom, he accepted the Garter from Baldwin. And in June, with a typical combination of good sense and easy gratitude, he accepted the robes—free:

  I have just had a noble offer from Lady Breadalbane—a widow—

  —who proposes to give me her late husband’s (he was a K.G.) Garter robes as a present. I shall jump at this, as it will save me a lot of money.n

  Then the process faltered. Curzon’s death created a vacancy, not only in the Lord Presidency of the Council, which Balfour filled, but in the Chancellorship of the University of Oxford. Asquith was an obviously suitable candidate for this office, and there was immediately a move for his nomination. He would have greatly valued the honour, more than any which had come his way since 1908. He therefore accepted with alacrity, but with no misplaced optimism. “ The plot thickens around the Oxford Chancellorship,” he wrote at an early stage, “ and as it seems more than probable that the Tories will run a candidate . . . we will have an interesting contest, though with our friends the country clergy in full blast, the result is a foregone conclusion.”0