Asquith Read online

  From November, 1891, indeed, he was active in all respects—legal, political and social. He still avoided much speaking in the House of Commons, although on April 27th, 1892 he took his first parliamentary stand on an issue about which he was long to remain almost passionately committed—that of opposition to women’s suffrage.1 But he was busy in every other way. He was building up his practice, sometimes by activities like going to Oldham to earn fifty guineas by advising the Corporation on their rights and liabilities in connection with a new sewerage scheme, and more occasionally (for his practice was always a fairly humdrum one) by appearing in a notable cause celebre like the Berkeley peerage case. He was conferring and corresponding with Morley and Rosebery and Harcourt, and sometimes with Gladstone himself. And his engagement books were full of dinner and week-end commitments—at Taplow Court with the Grenfells, at Easton Grey near Malmesbury with the Graham Smiths (a sister and brother-in-law of Margot Tennant), at Mells Park near Frome with the Horners, and at a number of other houses.

  Parliament was dissolved on June 29th, and the results mostly came in during the second week of July. East Fife was one of the early returns, and Asquith was re-elected with a majority reduced by 82. “ I had a hardish fight at the end,” he wrote to Mrs. Homer, “ the Kirk, who is a vigorous old lady, scratching and kicking at me like a muscular virago.” By Sunday, July 10th, he was back in London, having spent Friday night in Glasgow, where Margot Tennant’s brother was a candidate, and Saturday in Arran, visiting his wife’s grave in the little churchyard at Lamlash.

  Despite his slightly disappointing result, Asquith was more fortunate than Gladstone, who in Midlothian found that an 1886 majority of more than 4,000 had melted away to one of 690. The overall result was 273 Liberals, 81 Nationalists and one Labour member against 269 Conservatives and 46 Liberal Unionists. The majority for Home Rule was a slightly ramshackle one of 45. It was less than had been hoped for but it was enough to make a change of government almost certain.

  1 Apart from speaking, he joined with nineteen other members in sending out an all-party whip against the private member’s bill which was before the House. The most notable of the other signatories were Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, Joseph Chamberlain, Henry Chaplin, Lord Randolph Churchill, George Curzon, Sir William Harcourt, Sir Henry James, Henry Labouchere and A. J. Mundella. Haldane and Grey were equally committed on the other side.

  Nevertheless Lord Salisbury did not resign at once but waited to meet Parliament. This meant several weeks of uncertainty and rumourmongering. “ We live here at present under very demoralising conditions" Asquith wrote on July 25th. “ First there was the daily ebb and flow of the election returns, and now that we have got into power (after a fashion) our whole world is engaged in constructing imaginary ministries.. . . The town is pretty full again and there is a kind of Indian summer of a season but the atmosphere is heavy with politics. Nothing is too absurd to be said and believed, as e.g. that Mr. G. has had a fit (or is going to take a peerage) or that Rosebery has gone off in a yacht to the North Pole.”

  Lord Salisbury’s decision not to resign also meant that there had to be an amendment to the address around which the anti-Govern-ment forces could coalesce, an 1892 equivalent of Jesse Collings’s 1886 “ three acres and a cow ” motion. The view was that such an amendment should be moved from the back benches, and Gladstone fixed on Asquith as the most suitable person to perform this task; Thomas Burt, the Northumberland miners’ leader who had been in the House since 1868, was to be the seconder.

  Asquith received Gladstone’s formal invitation on August 2nd. Unusually, he was at the Old Bailey conducting a criminal case when the letter came, but he appears to have been aware of his selection beforehand and to have assumed that it carried with it the near certainty of a seat in the new Cabinet. He wrote to Mrs. Horner on August 1 st:

  “ I suppose, as you say, I ought to feel satisfied and happy. When I was a boy I used to think that to get into the Cabinet before one was 40 was, for an Englishman who had to start on the level of the crowd, the highest height of achievement. I shall not be 40 until September so the odds arc (between you and me) that I shall have the chance, at any rate, of bringing off this dream of young ambition. . . . Still I have not, as I know I am never likely to have, what I really want. . . Do you know those fine lines in M. Arnold’s ‘ Buried Life ’ how

  From the soul's subterranean depths upborne

  Come airs and floating echoes that convey

  A melancholy into all our day.

  ‘ Is the man going mad? ’ I hear you ask. Certainly this is not a proper state of reflection for a ‘ successful politician ’ who has been chosen to turn out a Government and who is supposed (by the newspapers) to be jostling vigorously in the scramble for ‘ high office ’....”

  What is surprising about this letter is not Asquith’s layer of melancholy (which did not prevent his accepting the task with alacrity and discharging it with dexterity) but his assumption, well-founded though it proved, that the moving of this amendment carried with it a place in the Cabinet. Certainly the precedent of 1886 did not suggest this. All that poor Collings got then was a rather grudging offer of the parliamentary secretaryship to the Local Government Board and a suggestion by Gladstone—which was one of the reasons for the estrangement of Chamberlain—that he should take a cut in the salary. Nor was Asquith at all inclined by nature to be a man who counted his chickens before they were hatched. Yet it is difficult to see on what his confidence could have been based. Admittedly there had been encouraging conversations with Morley during the preceding year, and he had even sought and received Balfour’s advice, very much in accordance with his own predictions, that he should hold out for a political and not a law office. But all this, even encouragement from one so close to the fount of power as Morley, was not the same as a firm offer from the Prime Minister himself, who had been recorded in Rosebery’s diary for May 28th as being “ averse to giving Asquith Cabinet office.Gladstone indeed was always loath to break what he called the “ old rule ” of not putting men into the Cabinet until they had first served in junior office, and this had helped to confine Dilke (although not Chamberlain) to an under-secretaryship in 1880, despite the fact that he had previously enjoyed with Harcourt conversations very similar to those of Asquith with Morley.

  Asquith, however, was more fortunate. On August 8th, in the last speech which he was ever to make from a back bench of the House of Commons, he moved his amendment of no confidence, and three days later saw it duly carried by a majority of 40. Salisbury then resigned at once, and the Queen, having taken the exceptional step of announcing in the Court Circular that she had received his resignation “ with great regret,” reluctantly gave her commission to Gladstone on August 13 th. On the following afternoon, a Sunday, Asquith was in Brooks’s Club when one of the Prime Minister’s secretaries arrived and handed him a letter:

  SECRET

  Hawarden Castle,

  Chester 1 C(arlton) G(ardens),

  Aug. 14. 92

  My dear Asquith

  I have the pleasure of writing to propose that you should allow me to submit your name to Her Majesty for the office of Home Secretary.

  I have understood that you are willing to quit your practice at the bar and in consequence I find myself able to offer this just and I think signal tribute to your character abilities and eloquence.

  Believe me

  Very faithfully yours

  W. E. Gladstonee

  Although he has written that he was determined not to enter the Government unless it contained “ a strong infusion of new blood ” Asquith apparently rested on his conversations with Morley and showed no hesitancy at this stage. “ I replied at once, gratefully accepting the Prime Minister’s proposal. . .”, he wrote. And, indeed, from the point of view of the inclusion of his friends, the new Government was a satisfactory one to him. Acland was Vice-President of the Council. Edward Grey was under-secretary at the Foreign Office and Sydney Buxton un
der-secretary at the Colonial Office. Tom Ellis was Deputy Whip. Rosebery had been offered the Foreign Secretaryship, although his acceptance could not be secured until August 15 th,1 and Morley was to be Chief Secretary for Ireland. Of Asquith’s close associates, only Haldane was left out.

  1 “ So be it—R,” was the apparently self-abnegatory telegram which he then sent to Gladstone after an interview with the Prince of Wales. Secure in the knowledge that the Queen would make great difficulties if he were not at the Foreign Office, Rosebery had been peculiarly unforthcoming, even by his own standards. But the Queen was not alone in thinking his presence essential. “ Without you the new Government would be ridiculous, with you it is only impossible,” was the comment of Harcourt, who had rather truculently accepted the Exchequer. Within two years he was probably wishing that the Government had been a ridiculous one.

  The Queen was at Osborne, and the new ministers went there on August 18th to receive the seals of office. Crossing in the steamer from Portsmouth they passed another boat carrying the outgoing Conservative ministers to the mainland, and hats were raised in silent salute. Silence, indeed, was the main feature of the whole day’s proceedings, for the new Privy Councillors (Asquith, Acland, Bryce and Henry Fowler) were sworn in and they and the old ones then received their seals without the Queen saying a word to any of them. Four of the senior ministers—Rosebery, Spencer, Kimberley and Harcourt—were later given audiences, but to judge from Harcourt’s experience, these did not constitute a very notable breach in her taciturnity.1 Asquith returned to London without any conversational contact, but the Queen thought him “ an intelligent, rather good-looking man.” A week or so later he was again summoned to Osborne, this time to dine and sleep, and to be given an opportunity to make more of a personal impression. He took it successfully and the Queen recorded in her journal that she “ had a conversation with Mr. Asquith whom I thought pleasant, straightforward and sensible.” She added, in a typical royal attempt to attach familiar bearings to a new face: “ He is a very clever lawyer, who was with Sir H. James.

  1 “ When he went in to have his audience the Queen said, ‘ How do you do, Sir William, I hope you are well? ’ W.V.H. replied and added,# I hope, Madam, you will feel that our desire is to make matters as easy and as little troublesome to you as we can possibly do.’ She bowed, but said nothing and then asked, ‘ How is Lady Harcourt ? Terrible weather is it not ? and so oppressive? ’ And that was all! ” (Gardiner, op nf.ii, p. 185).

  Asquith’s achievement in becoming a member of this Cabinet— and in a post which was his first choice—was a formidable one. He was younger than any of his colleagues, he was without inherited wealth or influence, he had been in the House of Commons only six years, and he had addressed it on little more than a dozen occasions. Nor is there any doubt that the achievement gave him great and understandable satisfaction. His occasional bouts of melancholy, of sadness for the death of his wife, and of yearning for some fulfilment that never was on land or sea, were doubtless completely genuine. But they existed alongside a strong desire for worldly success and for the ability to exercise the powers which he knew he possessed. “ Do you remember,” he wrote to Mrs. Horner two months after he had taken office, “ . . . the Theban, somewhere in Herodotus, who says. . . that of all human troubles the most hateful is to feel that you have the capacity of power and yet you have no field to exercise it. That was for years my case and no one who has not been through it can know the chilly, paralysing, deadening depression of hope deferred and energy wasted and vitality run to seed. I sometimes think it is the most tragic thing in life.”

  Tragic or not, it was an affliction which was not for many years again to worry Asquith. He had achieved a major political position at an early age. With his older colleagues he spent the autumn of 1892 preparing for the first parliamentary session of the new Government, which did not begin until February of the following year.

  MR. GLADSTONE’S HOME SECRETARY

  1892-4

  Asquith was a successful Home Secretary—“ the best of the century ” is the unqualified judgment of Gladstone’s latest biographera—in an unsuccessful Government. His success came partly from his skill as a parliamentary orator. He had always been good in this respect, but the practice which office imposed made him better. By the end of the Parliament he was the one minister who could be depended upon never to make a bad speech, and he often went further and achieved a devastating debating force. He never had the emotional range of Gladstone or the electrifying effect of Randolph Churchill at his best, but he had a consistent power of pungent, almost unanswerable argument.

  As a departmental chief, in addition to his obvious quality of quick comprehension, he was cool and decisive. He had an intellectual self-confidence which left him in little doubt about the rightness of his own decisions. His energies were devoted not to re-considering his actions but to demonstrating their wisdom, sometimes in an unconciliatory way. On top of this he had a moderate, but not excessive, taste for innovation. He liked to move, but in well-tried directions. He was not a man for producing a stream of imaginative ideas, some of them as bad as others were good. There was never a danger of his being swept off his feet by some attractive but reckless plan. All in all he was an almost perfect minister from the civil servant’s point of view, and was recognised as such by the two successive permanent under-secretaries who served him at the Home Office. But he was also much more than this. He was respected by his colleagues for his counsel in Cabinet and for the strength which he gave to the Government in the House; and he inspired confidence amongst uncommitted opinion in the country.

  One of his first administrative decisions concerned the right of public meeting in Trafalgar Square—a subject with a good deal of explosive political force behind it. After the troubles of 1887 (which had led to Asquith’s defence of Cunninghame-Graham at the Old Bailey), Henry Matthews, Home Secretary in the outgoing Government, had authorised the Commissioners of Metropolitan Police to issue an order banning all meetings in the Square. There was doubt about the legal validity of the order, but it was accepted without challenge for the time being, despite the grumbling of the Liberal opposition and the resentment of left-wing opinion in London. This opinion, radical as well as socialist, looked to the new Government to put the matter right without delay. Within two days of Asquith’s taking office, the matter had been raised in the Press and he had received a polite but firm letter from William Saunders, the radical M.P. for Streatham, stressing the importance which “ the advanced electors of London ” attached to a quick settlement of the matter. It also became known that, in any event, the Metropolitan Radical Association proposed to hold a meeting in November and, if necessary, to test the ban in the courts.

  Lushington, the permanent under-secretary at the Home Office, wrote a memorandum in favour of maintaining the status quo, which, as the Lord Chancellor pointed out, was “ not much use as no-one knew whether it could be maintained”; the Queen caused her secretary to write agitatedly asking what were Asquith’s intentions; and Harcourt, whom Asquith consulted as a former Home Secretary, wrote from Derby, where he was engaged in a “ vexatious contest ” for his re-election, suggesting that in certain circumstances Mr. Gladstone had best be consulted. This was bad advice, for Gladstone’s reply was likely to be uninterested, cloudy, and tinged with annoyance j that the new Home Secretary could not make his own decisions without !

  disturbing the Prime Minister’s Irish brooding. Wisely, Asquith did | not take it. Instead he set W. H. Eldridge, a barrister whom he trusted and knew to have good trades union contacts, to find out whether a compromise solution might be acceptable to the labour leaders, and if so, exactly what form it might take. Such an approach ! Asquith believed to be necessary both because there was a genuine conflict between the unrestricted right of meeting and the interests of local shop-keepers, ’bus and cab-drivers, etc., and because he was anxious to establish for himself and the Government a reputation for responsibility and fir
mness which would not be helped by an unconditional removal of the ban.

  Eldridge’s report was favourable. A limited right of meeting would be accepted by all the interested parties except for the Social Democratic Federation, and they could be ignored because they were “ only really Mr. Hyndman.” Asquith therefore proceeded along these lines and worked out a solution by which meetings could be held in daylight on Saturday afternoons, Sundays and bank holidays, provided that the police were given previous notice and their regulations as to the approach route of any procession were accepted. When a deputation from the Metropolitan Radical Federation waited upon him on October 19th he announced this solution to them, not as a tentative offer but as a firm decision, and immediately afterwards gave it general publicity. It was accepted both by the deputation and by general London opinion, and has stood until the present day.