Asquith Page 9

  1 The Queen sent for him on her own initiative, and would no doubt have done so in any event. But had the views of his fellow ministers been different he might have failed to form a Government.

  Asquith was one of the firmest of the “Roseberyites.” He was a friend, and was in close agreement with him on matters of foreign policy, though on home policy, he claimed, he sided as often as not with Harcourt. Asquith’s essential objection to Harcourt, like that of most of the other ministers, was based on temperament rather than policy. “ And yet, to tell the naked truth,” he wrote, “ he was an almost impossible colleague, and would have been a wholly impossible chief.Nevertheless, Asquith’s firmness of view did not make him as important an influence as is suggested by Harcourt’s biographer.1 It was Morley, co-lieutenant and close ally of Harcourt’s since the late ’eighties, who was the Brutus of the occasion, and who veered at the crucial moment toRosebery—although he was soon to veer back again. But not before the decision had been taken. The new Prime Minister kissed hands on March 4th, and was soon expressing his usual distaste for his new office.

  He made few Cabinet changes, saying that the Government’s hold on life was hardly such as to make them worth-while. The most notable was the promotion of Lord Kimberley to the Foreign Office, an event which began John Morley’s process of switching back to the anti-Rosebery camp. Harcourt became leader of the House of Commons as well as Chancellor of the Exchequer, after making certain conditions about access to Foreign Office information. Asquith remained Home Secretary.

  1 Gardiner, op cit., 11, p. 269, says that Asquith and Acland are said to be the only Commons members of the Cabinet who were against Harcourt.

  A NEW WIFE AND A DYING GOVERNMENT

  1894-5

  Asquith’s first important act under the new Government was to re-marry. This he did at St. George’s, Hanover Square, on Wednesday, May 10th, 1894. His second wife was Margot Tennant, the daughter of a rich, partially self-made Liberal baronet, who had established himself as a territorial figure in the Scottish Border country, and whose numerous children had erupted into social prominence with unusual force.

  This second wedding was very different from Asquith’s first, in Manchester, seventeen years previously. The Cabinet postponed its meeting in order not to clash with the ceremony. Apart from the bridegroom, three Prime Ministers, Gladstone representing the past, Rosebery the present, and Balfour the future, signed the register. The pavements from Grosvenor Square to Hanover Square, according to the memoirs of the bride, “ were blocked with excited and enthusiastic people.” Her old nurse was unsuccessfully offered first .£10 and then “ anything you like ” for a ticket of admission to the church by a gentleman with a gardenia. “ I must see Margot Tennant married,” he had said.a Haldane, as best man, struck an almost pedestrian note.

  Asquith had first met Miss Tennant, as has been mentioned, in 1891, a few months before the death of his first wife. She has left a vivid description of this first encounter:

  The dinner where I was introduced to my husband was in the House of Commons and I sat next to him.1 I was deeply impressed by his conversation and his clear Cromwellian face. I thought then, as I do now, that lie had a way of putting you not only at your ease but at your best when talking to him which is given to few men of note. He was different to the others and, although un-fashionably dressed, had so much personality that I made up my mind at once that this was the man who could help me and would understand everything.

  After dinner we all walked on the Terrace and I was flattered to find my new friend at my side. Lord Battersea chaffed me in his noisy and flamboyant manner, trying to separate us, but with tact and determination his frontal attack was resisted and my new friend and I retired to the darkest part of the Terrace where, leaning over the parapet, we gazed into the river and talked far into the night.

  Our host (Lord Battersea) and his party—thinking that I had gone home and that Mr. Asquith had returned to the House when the division bell rang—had disappeared; and when we finished our conversation the Terrace was deserted and the sky light.

  It never occurred to me that he was married, nor would that have affected me in any way. . . . Mr. Asquith and I met a few days later dining with Sir Algernon West ... . and after this we saw each other constantly.b

  1 She also wrote: “ I had never heard of him, which gives some indication of how much I was wasting my time.”

  By October, 1891 they had begun a regular exchange of long, frequent and intimate letters. And by the end of the year, Miss Tennant having left for a two months* visit to Egypt in early November, Asquith was writing to Cairo: “ You tell me not to stop loving you, as if you thought I had done or would or could do so. Tennyson speaks somewhere of the ‘ sin which practice bums into the blood,* and there are other things besides sins which are burnt into the blood, not to be washed out either by change or circumstance or acts of will. We have a trying time before us: at least I have: but before it begins I entreat you never to doubt that, locked and buried though it may be, your place is always sacred and always your own

  Nor was this letter out of keeping with at least one layer of Miss Tennant’s own feelings. After her much described first meeting with Asquith, she had said to her sister, Lady Ribblesdale: “ Asquith is the only kind of man that I could ever have married—all the others are so much waste paper! ” Lady Ribblesdale replied: “ He would never have proposed to you,” and Miss Tennant recorded that “ this remark of hers hurt me: and I pondered over it in my heart.”c But pondering in her heart did not mean that she quickly reached finality in her mind, and for nearly two and a half years after the autumn of 1891, despite the fact that she was already 27 at the beginning of her period of indecision, she havered between marriage and non-marriage.

  Asquith therefore passed his first, highly successful years as Home Secretary in a state of constant emotional stress. Despite a great deal of advice, notably from Rosebery and Randolph Churchill, about the unwisdom of the course he was proposing, he does not appear to have wavered in his desire to marry Margot Tennant. “ I can conceive of no future of which you are not the centre, and which is not given, without a shadow of doubt or a shiver of fear to you alone,” he wrote in the summer of 1892. Miss Tennant exhibited no similar constancy of purpose. The choice was perhaps a more difficult one for her. When she came to know Asquith she was a leading figure both in the Leicestershire hunting world and in that part of London society which prided itself upon its intellectual interest and adventurousness. She moved around the hunting counties displaying an unusual talent for borrowing horses and for reckless riding; and she moved around the country houses in which “ The Souls" 1— as she and her friends were known—used to congregate, playing pencil and paper games and indulging in an endless series of heart-searching conversations.

  1 “ The Souls ” like most coteries, had a membership which was slightly blurred at the edges; but amongst the central figures were Arthur Balfour, George Curzon, George Wyndham, Harry Cust, St. John Brodrick, Lord Pembroke, Lady Granby (later Duchess of Rutland), the Duchess of Sutherland, Lady Windsor (later Lady Plymouth) and Lady Brownlow. Miss Tennant, writing many years later, referred to the group, in terms which confirmed more than they denied: “ The Souls was a foolish name given by fashionable society to myself and my friends. . . Since those days there has been no group in society of equal distinction, loyalty, and influence. .. . None of us claimed any kind of superiority or practised any sort of exclusion.” (More Memories, p. 147).

  Wherever she went she became the centre of attention. Her forte, especially on a first meeting, was the unexpected, provocative remark. She told the Duke of Beaufort that his unique blue and buff hunting colours, although pretty for women, were unsporting for men; her reward was a portrait inscribed “Hark Halloa!”. She told Lord Randolph Churchill that he had “ resigned more out of temper than conviction,” and was repaid with an invitation to meet and sit next the Prince of Wales at a supper party, which she att
ended wearing what most of the women present thought was her nightgown. She told General Booth (of the Salvation Army) that he did not believe in • hell any more than she did, and then knelt with him, praying, on the floor of the railway compartment in which they were travelling. She hinted to Lord Tennyson that she thought he was dirty and got him to give her a long reading from “ Maud ” and “ The Princess.”

  Miss Tennant was spontaneous and stimulating in her approach with all sorts of people, but she liked particularly to know the great and famous, and if possible be more in their confidence than anyone else. When Randolph Churchill rashly asked her if she knew any politicians, “ I told him that with the exception of himself I knew them all intimately.” When Gladstone (during his brief, third premiership) came to luncheon with her parents in Grosvenor Square, her father’s eager anticipation of the visit made her “ afraid he might resent my wish to take Mr. Gladstone up to my room after lunch and talk to him alone.” But the resentment, if it existed, was overcome, and Gladstone was duly led away.

  It was not only politicians who formed her court. Her Autobiography contains an account of a knockout literary victory over Lady Londonderry. Before “ a circle of fashionable men and women ” an argument had developed about the merits of a new volume of essays by John Addington Symonds, Miss Tennant taking a view hostile to their style and content. Lady Londonderry was sufficiently nettled by this view (or perhaps by the manner in which it was expressed) to say eventually, “ I am afraid you have not read the book.”

  “ This annoyed me,” Miss Tennant’s account continued; “ I saw the company were enchanted with their spokeswoman, but I thought it unnecessarily rude and more than foolish. I looked at her calmly and said: ‘ I am afraid, Lady Londonderry, you have not read the preface. The book is dedicated to me ’.”d

  Presented with a stage, Miss Tennant always wished to be at its centre:

  “ At the time I was engaged to be married,” she recorded in a later volume of memoirs, “ my mother took me to Paris, and Monsieur Worth made me several beautiful dresses. Knowing that I was devoted to dancing, he devized a rainbow-coloured gauze gown reaching to the floor which he insisted upon giving to me. It was of immense width, but of such soft material that the gauze clung closely to my figure. He superintended every fitting, and when the dress was finished I asked that all the women who had worked upon it should come downstairs and that I would dance to them....

  “ When M. Worth returned to the fitting-room accompanied by the smiling sempstresses, he held his hands behind his back. Inspired by my beautiful dress and feeling in high spirits, I danced as I had never danced before, and was so busy manipulating the yards of stuff in my ample skirts that I noticed nobody. But when I sat down breathless and excited, I looked round and saw that the room was full of people, and Worth flung an enormous bouquet of artificial roses at my feet.”e

  Alongside her eagerness for attention, Margot Tennant possessed a remarkable ability not merely to shock but also to captivate and even inspire. Her success as a lion hunter owed at least as much to the co-operation of the lions as to her own intrepid determination. Gladstone would not have required much luring to her room in Grosvenor Square. He was always delighted to talk to her, and soon after his eightieth birthday he even wrote her a poem, although verse was not his happiest medium.1

  1 When Parliament ceases and comes the recess,

  And we seek in the country rest after distress,

  As a rule upon visitors place an embargo,

  But make an exception in favour of Margot.

  For she brings such a treasure of movement and life,

  Fun, spirit and stir, to folk weary with strife,

  Though young and though fair, who can hold such a cargo Of all the good qualities going as Margot ?

  Up hill and down dale, ’tis a capital name To blossom in friendship, to sparkle in fame;

  There’s but one objection can light upon Margot,

  Its likeness in rhyming, not meaning, to argot.

  Never mind, never mind, we will give it the slip,

  ’Tis not argot, the language, but Argo, the ship;

  And by sea or by land, I will swear you may far go,

  Before you can hit on a double for Margot.”

  Of the other Prime Ministers who attended her wedding, Rosebery was an old friend, but one whose affection had been temporarily dimmed by a press rumour, published in the autumn of 1891, that he was engaged to be married to her. Her enthusiasm for denying the rumour was not, in his view, as great as his own, or as it should have been—not particularly because she wished it to be true, • but because she thought a joke was none the worse for being a public one. But Balfour, perhaps because he never read the newspapers, was totally unaffected by a similar rumour about himself and Miss Tennant, and remained on close and easy terms with her for many years. He may have expressed his enthusiasm less effusively than Gladstone1 but there is no doubt that he admired her wit and valued her friendship. So, in a less intimate way, did Salisbury. Alfred Milner proposed marriage to her in 1892 and when his offer was refused, so his latest biographer informs us, became “ Asquith’s life-long, devoted enemy.”

  1 On one occasion Miss Tennant was foolish enough to suggest to him that he was sufficiently self-contained that he would not greatly mind if all his close women friends—Lady Elcho, Lady Desborough, one or two others, and herself—were all to die. “ I think I should mind if you all died on the same day,” he replied after a pause for reflection.

  Such a woman would probably have found it difficult to make up her mind about any marriage. This indeed had been the case before she met Asquith, and she had havered her way, fickle, demanding and difficult to please, through nearly ten London seasons, a host of minor suitors and a long-drawn-out, quarrelsome and mutually unsatisfactory love affair with Peter Flower, the younger brother of the Lord Battersea who had introduced her to Asquith. Flower was a great figure in the hunting field and on the race course, a man who combined striking good looks, physical recklessness and intellectual immaturity in about equal proportions. To Margot Tennant he appeared one-dimensional. For a person of her adventurousness Asquith undoubtedly offered an impressively broad avenue of escape from the circumscribed and febrile arena of her previous emotional experiences, and from the persistent sterility of this affair with Flower in particular. But marriage with Asquith posed big problems. “It is not possible,” the Master of Balliol (one of her most successfully captured lions) wrote to her, “ to be a leader of fashion and to do your duty to the five children.’’f

  Miss Tennant’s position was complicated by the fact that, as a leader of fashion, she was at least as self-made as was her father as a Border landlord. It was her own wit and daring, constantly and exhaustingly exercised, which gave her the prominent and coveted position which she occupied. She was the least securely established of any of the women Souls. Even without the problem of the five children, could she assimilate a husband who, however talented and successful and even socially malleable he might be, had shared nothing of her life and friends of the previous ten years? An added difficulty was the fact that, rich though her father had become, there was no question of limitless money being available for her. She had too many brothers and sisters. Her extravagance could have done with the support of a rich husband. It was likely to be a heavy burden upon Asquith’s ministerial salary or his earnings at the bar.

  On top of all this there was the sharp, almost violent difference in temperament between herself and her prospective husband. She wrote about it as a family difference between herself and her step-children, but it was quite as deep between herself and Asquith.

  “Tennants believed in appealing to the hearts of men,” she wrote, “ firing their imagination and penetrating and vivifying their inmost lives. They had a little loose love to give to the whole world. The Asquiths—without mental flurry and with perfect self-mastery—believed in the free application of intellect to every human emotion; no event could hav
e given heightened expression to their feelings. Shy, self-engaged, critical and controversial, nothing surprised them and nothing upset them. We were as zealous and vital as they were detached and as cocky and passionate as they were modest and emotionless. They rarely looked at you and never got up when anyone came into the room.

  If you had appeared downstairs in a ball-dress or a bathing-gown they would not have observed it and would certainly never have commented upon it if they had.. . . They were devoted to one another and never quarrelled. . . Perfectly self-contained, truthful and deliberate, I never saw them lose themselves in my life and I have hardly ever seen the saint or hero that excited their disinterested emotion. When I thought of the storms of revolt, the rage, the despair, the wild enthusiasms and reckless adventures of our nursery and schoolroom, I was stunned by the steadiness of the Asquith temper.”g

  There were therefore plenty of reasons why Margot Tennant might have hesitated over the marriage. And hesitate she certainly did, keeping Asquith for two years on a see-saw of alternating hope and despair. In the early summer of 1892 it seemed as though he might quickly succeed. Then in August, after the formation of the Government, he went for the first time to Glen, the Temiant home in Peeblesshire where she had lived most of her life. Here she not only took him to the grave of her sister who had died in 1886, and made him indulge in the almost unbelievably un-Asquithian behaviour of kneeling with her on the grass and praying together, but also sent him away “ very sad at heart,” with the “ candle of hope ” nearly blown out. Then it revived again before flickering once more after a Sunday at Balliol. “ I was rather depressed when I went to bed last night,” Asquith wrote in the following year “ and lay awake ... thinking of what you told me about your interview with the old Master.” This, however, appeared to be only a momentary flicker, for he concluded the paragraph: “ But our talk in the train this morning made me a different man.” A few months later he was once more cast down, and there was even a faint trace of exasperation in his letters: “ I daresay my feelings are made rather morbidly sensitive just now, and my mental vision where you are concerned is dislocated by the strong conviction I have that this is, for good or bad, a most critical time in both our lives. I dread more than I can tell having to go back (and for always) to where we were two months ago....” But a short time afterwards he was once again elated: “ And this afternoon as I sat on the Treasury Bench, answering question?, I got your telegram and read it furtively, and crammed it hastily into my trousers pocket, until I could get out of the House and read it over and over again in my little room.”