Dreadnought, Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War

by Robert K. Massie

  In March 1907, shortly before the opening of the Second Hague Peace Conference, the Prime Minister published an article in a Liberal weekly, the Nation urging that disarmament be given a chance. Britain, he asserted, was attempting to reduce expenditure and armaments and would go further if other nations would follow suit. In this area, the Liberals faced a domestic political dilemma: how- after years of demanding decreases in defense spending, after pledging to the voters that once in power they would reduce the army and navy Estimates-were they to pay for certain army and navy policies adopted by Balfour's government? Fisher had been called in to remake the navy; ships had been scrapped and fleets redistributed.

  The Dreadnought had been designed, laid down, and launched and would be commissioned by the King even before the meeting of the first Liberal Parliament; this work could not simply be halted. The decision was to trim here and there and insist on efficiency. One dreadnought was dropped from the 1906 Naval Estimates; Fisher declared that three rather than four was acceptable. Haldane attacked the army with the same zeal for reform and efficiency. His promise, when he became Secretary of War, was to cut £3 million from the Army Estimates while simultaneously creating a more effective weapon. To the amazement of Campbell-Bannerman, who fully expected "Master Haldane" to fall on his face at the War Office, Haldane carried out his pledge. He reorganized the army into two forces, a professional Regular Army Expeditionary Force of six divisions and 160,000 men, and a second-line Territorial Army to be raised in the counties, organized into fourteen divisions, and held as reserve to back up the Expeditionary Force. C.B. was delighted by the manner in which Haldane defended his policies in the Commons against Unionists-Balfour, most skillfully-who attempted to point out flaws and inconsistencies in the planned army reforms.

  The greatest triumph of Campbell-Bannerman's brief occupancy of 10 Downing Street was his political reconciliation in South Africa. Since the beginning of the Boer War, through years of abuse, he had preached the same message. To him, the war seemed a wound which could be healed only by understanding and generosity on the part of the British government. As Prime Minister, he was ready to effect his belief. He proposed granting self-government to the Boer republics and then bringing them into a federation of self-governing states as a Union of South Africa. C.B.'s suggestion that Britain hand back to the defeated Boers the powers of government it had stripped from them in a war which had cost thirty thousand lives and £250 million raised desperate Unionist opposition. Backed by his huge majority, however, the Prime Minister granted self-government to the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. He did so by letters patent, which needed the approval only of the House of Commons and not of the Lords. In 1909, eighteen months after C.B.'s death, the South Africa Act, establishing the Union, passed both houses of Parliament. Louis Botha, the Boer general who became the first Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, expressed his gratitude to Asquith, Campbell-Bannerman's successor, adding, "My greatest regret is that one noble figure is missing-Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. For what he has done in South Africa alone, the British Empire should always keep him in grateful memory." To a journalist, Botha explained: " 'Three words made peace and union in South Africa: "methods of barbarism." '… [Botha] went on to speak of the tremendous impression… made upon men fighting a losing battle… by the fact that the leader of one of the great English parties had had the courage to say this thing, and to brave the obloquy which it brought upon him. So far from encouraging them to a hopeless resistance, it touched their hearts and made them think seriously of the possibility of reconciliation."

  In the spring of 1906, C.B. seemed at the summit of his career. In fact, his private life was filled with anguish and exhaustion. His wife, his comrade and advisor of forty-six years, was dying. Charlotte Campbell had always had mixed feelings about her husband's political career. She was ambitious for him and fiercely defensive when he was attacked. "Henry is a good man," she declared, "how good no one knows but myself." But ambition mingled with resentment of the amount of time his career took him away from her. She disliked the minutiae of politics and rarely was seen in the House Gallery even when her husband was speaking. Her possessiveness grew stronger as she succumbed to a painful nervous disease. Increasingly, Campbell-Bannerman was forced to choose between his public duties and care for his wife. Away from her, he was troubled by the knowledge that she was at home, lying on a bed or a chaise longue, her eyes fixed on the clock, counting the minutes until he returned. More and more, as leader of the opposition, then Prime Minister, he would fail to return to the House after dinner, sending a note that his wife's health required him to be with her.

  In 1902, Lady Campbell-Bannerman, whose weight was over 250 pounds, suffered a stroke which left her partially paralyzed. The move into 10 Downing Street in January 1906 was a trial, but she managed to give a large party for her husband on the eve of the opening of Parliament. Unable to stand, she sat propped up for two hours, making herself agreeable to a crowd of guests. Through the spring and summer, her health deteriorated. She disliked professional nurses and would take food and medicine only from her husband's hands. Whenever she called, he rose and sat with her, through the night if necessary. One night that summer, his own worsening health compelled him to spend an entire night apart. "How strange to have spent a whole night in bed," he wrote. "It has not happened to me for six months." In the mornings, he fell asleep over his government papers.

  In August 1906, they decided to risk the journey to Marienbad. They traveled slowly, in easy stages, arriving on the thirteenth. Lady Campbell-Bannerman was exhausted but happy. The King came on August 16, accompanied by the beau monde and a swarm of journalists. For two weeks, the Prime Minister was obliged to attend upon the sovereign at lunches, dinners, and teas, always hurrying back to bring news and gossip to his invalid. When she worsened, the Prime Minister began taking meals in a sitting room next to her bedroom. The door was ajar and, in the course of a meal, she called two or three times. Each time, he sprang up and hurried to her side. August 30 was a blazing summer afternoon, silent in the heat except for the clicking of horses' hooves in the street below and the sound of labored breathing from the dying woman. At five o'clock she died.

  The King, sitting on the balcony of his own hotel suite, took a pen and wrote: "I know how great your mutual devotion was and what a blank the departed one will leave in your home. Still, I feel sure that you can now only wish that your beloved wife may be at peace and rest, and free from all further suffering and pain."

  Campbell-Bannerman carried on for less than two years. In public, he tried to be cheerful, but a friend, seeing him talking and laughing with his guests, would go upstairs later to find the Prime Minister with his head in his hands, sobbing. His own body was spent. On November 13, Campbell-Bannerman collapsed in Bristol. His doctors commanded six weeks of complete rest and the Prime Minister decided to go to Biarritz. On the way, he suffered another heart attack in Paris and was forced to pause while his doctor came from London. Moving to Biarritz, he remained until mid-January, when he returned to London. There, a friend reported that he "seemed to have recovered all his old buoyancy and energy." On February 12, 1908, Campbell-Bannerman made his last speech in the House of Commons. That night, he was stricken again and taken to his bedroom at Number 10. He did not leave this room until his death ten weeks later. The King, the Queen, and the Prince of Wales visited him as he sat by the window in Downing Street. Leaving for a royal gathering in Copenhagen, the King asked to be kept constantly informed of the Prime Minister's condition. "Don't telegraph to 'The King,' " the monarch instructed. "There will be so many kings about. Telegraph to 'King Edward.' "

  For two months, the Cabinet marked time, postponing important decisions and looking increasingly to Asquith, the designated heir. On March 27, the Prime Minister sent for the Chancellor to tell him that he meant to resign. "You are a wonderful colleague," he said to Asquith, "so loyal, so disinterested, so able. You are the greatest gentleman I h
ave ever met." His parting words were optimistic: "This is not the last of me. We will meet again, Asquith." On April 1, the Prime Minister sent his resignation to the King in Biarritz. On April 3, the King accepted. Campbell-Bannerman died on the morning of April 22, 1908.

  CHAPTER 30 The Asquiths, Henry and Margot

  Herbert Henry Asquith's beginnings were more modest than those of any prime minister before him. He was born in 1852, the son of a wool merchant in a Yorkshire village. When Herbert* was eight, his father twisted an intestine in a village cricket game and, a few hours later, died. From the age of twelve, Asquith lived as a paying boarder with families in London so that he could attend a better school. As a student, he excelled. "[The school] simply… put the ladder before him and up he went," said his headmaster. At seventeen, Asquith won a Classical Scholarship to Balliol. His arrival coincided with Benjamin Jowett's first term as master of the college and Jowett, who had a keen eye for potential, kept Asquith under close scrutiny. Asquith devoted himself to the Oxford Union. He spoke in almost every political debate, became president, and changed the society's rules so that smoking was permitted and afternoon tea served. In spite of this distraction, Asquith

  *Until he was forty, Asquith was known to his family and friends as Herbert. His second wife, Margot Tennant, called him Henry. Throughout his life, Asquith always referred to himself as H. H. Asquith, even signing letters to his mother in this fashion when he was nine.

  in 1874 was the only Balliol man to take First Class Honors in Classics.

  Asquith could have remained at Oxford as a don, but this was not his ambition. He moved to London and began to prepare for the bar. Without money and with no social connections, Asquith plunged into marriage at twenty-five and quickly became a father. To supplement his meager earnings from the law, he regularly wrote for the Liberal weeklies, The Spectator and The Economist. He wrote lead articles, mostly on politics, but could move into other arenas-economics, literature, social customs-without losing facility.

  One night in 1881, at a dinner at Lincoln's Inn, Asquith sat next to another young barrister, also a moderate Liberal with political ambition. Richard Burdon Haldane, a Scot four years younger than Asquith, who became Asquith's closest friend and strongest political ally, had studied in Germany, where he had acquired fluency in the language and a strong taste for German philosophy. Haldane had the private money that Asquith lacked. The two dined together at a restaurant two or three times a week; afterwards Asquith returned to his family. Haldane often came home with Asquith and was a favorite with his wife and children. Haldane admired his friend's strengths and noted his weaknesses. Asquith, said Haldane, had "the best intellectual apparatus, understanding and judgement that I ever saw in any man," but he was better at explaining than creating. "Asquith did not originate much," Haldane continued. "He was not a man of imagination, but when we had worked anything out we always chose him to state it for us-a thing he did to perfection." On one point, Asquith was consistently clear: "We were both rising at the Bar, but to Asquith eminence in the law at no time presented any attraction," Haldane recalled. "From the beginning, he meant to be Prime Minister."

  It was Haldane who first persuaded Asquith to run for Parliament. Haldane himself had been elected to the House of Commons in 1885 and the following year urged his friend to seek election from the Scottish constituency of East Fife. Asquith was elected by a narrow margin and continued to represent these electors for thirty-two years. When he gave his maiden speech in March 1887, members on both sides were struck by his self-confidence, authority, and eloquence. "His diction was even then faultless," said an admiring Haldane. Mr. Gladstone was less impressed; when asked whether he thought young Asquith's oratory would carry him to political greatness, the Liberal leader shook his head. "Too forensic," he said. Nevertheless, five years later, when Gladstone embarked on his fourth and last Cabinet, he named Asquith, at forty, to be Home Secretary. On August 18, 1892, the new ministers went to Osborne House to receive the seals of office from the Queen. Crossing the Solent from Portsmouth, the incoming Liberal ministers passed another boat carrying the outgoing Unionist ministers back to Portsmouth; both groups raised their hats in silent salute. On that occasion, Queen Victoria did not speak to the new Home Secretary, but recorded in her diary that he seemed "an intelligent, rather good-looking man." Soon after, Asquith was summoned back to Osborne for dinner and overnight, and this time the Queen noted that she had "had a conversation with Mr. Asquith whom I thought pleasant, straight-forward and sensible."

  Asquith's ascent to the Cabinet had been accompanied by years of domestic tranquillity. At eighteen, he fell in love at the seashore with a fifteen-year-old girl, Helen Melland, the daughter of a successful Manchester physician. They wrote to each other regularly, and, four years later, while he was still at Balliol, secretly became engaged. In 1877, when he was twenty-five and she twenty-two, they married. Asquith's earnings as a barrister and her small income from her father permitted the purchase of a white-walled house, set in a garden in Hampstead, which remained their home for fourteen years. Helen Melland was a tall, brown-haired, attractive woman. "A beautiful and simple spirit," remembered Haldane. "No one would have called her clever or 'intellectual,' " said her husband. "What gave her her rare quality was her character." She was "selfless and unworldly… warm… and generous." At one point, still struggling at the bar, he expressed his love by spending £300 to buy her a diamond necklace.

  Helen Asquith was happy with life in Hampstead. Five children arrived over nine years and while her husband worked over his legal briefs and went to the House of Commons-sometimes dining with friends and returning home late-she supervised his home and family. As the years passed, he changed; she did not. Asquith's career brought him onto the fringes of society. Invitations arrived; he was pleased, Helen dismayed. At first, Asquith was not socially adept; it was noticed that, on going in to dinner, he offered his arm to his own wife. He corrected these flaws, developing an appreciation for fine wines and a talent for small talk with titled ladies. His wife had no such appreciation or talent. Society, curious about the new couple, commented on his ambition and her reluctance. In a word, Helen was seen as holding her husband back.

  One observer of the Asquith marriage was the tempestuous, extravagantly social Margot Tennant, a member of the Souls and a passionate admirer of Arthur Balfour's. "When I discovered that he [Asquith] was married," Margot later wrote, "I asked him to bring his wife to dinner, which he did, and directly I saw her I said: 'I do hope, Mrs. Asquith, you have not minded your husband dining here without you, but I rather gathered Hampstead was too far away for him to get back to you from the House of Commons. You must always let me know and come with him whenever it suits you.'

  "… She was so different from me that I had a longing for her approval. She was gentle, pretty and unambitious, and spoke to me of her home and children with a love and interest that seemed to exclude her from a life of political aggrandizement which was what from early days had captured my imagination…

  "I was anxious that she should… know my friends, but after a week-end spent at Taplow with Lord and Lady Desborough [Margot Tennant's sister and brother-in-law] where everyone liked her, she told me that though she had enjoyed her visit she did not think that she would ever care for the sort of society that I loved, and was happier in the circle of her home and family. When I said that she had married a man who was certain to attain the highest political distinction, she replied that that was not what she coveted for him. Driving back from Hampstead where we had been alone together, I wondered if my ambition for the success of her husband… was wrong."

  Margot Tennant's friendship with Helen Asquith was brief. In September 1891, while on vacation in Scotland, Helen Asquith contracted typhoid fever. She died within three weeks. Asquith returned to Hampstead with five motherless children. The eldest, Raymond, was twelve; the youngest was eighteen months old.

  Before his first wife died, Asquith felt an attraction fo
r Margot Tennant. In her memoirs, she described the scene of their first encounter: "The dinner where I was introduced to my husband was in the House of Commons and I sat next to him. I was deeply impressed by his conversation and his clear Cromwellian face. He was different from the others and, although abominably dressed, had so much personality that I made up my mind at once that here was a man who could help me and would understand everything. It never crossed my brain that he was married, nor would that have mattered…

  "After dinner we all walked on the Terrace and I was flattered to find my new friend by my side… [We] 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 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.

  "We met a few days later dining with Sir Algernon West… and after this we saw each other constantly."

  Margot already had made up her mind. After the first night on the Terrace she told 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." Only a month after Helen's death, Asquith and Margot began to write long and intimate letters. "You tell me not to stop loving you as if you thought I had done or would or could do so," Asquith wrote.

  Margot Tennant was the daughter of Sir Charles Tennant, a wealthy Lowland Scottish baronet, whose three daughters had stormed London society. Margot, the most articulate and provocative, also had a reputation as a horsewoman. She was not beautiful; her own word portrait of herself serves best: "Small, rapid, nervous, restless, her eyes close together, a hawky nose, short upper lip, large, bony, prominent chin… conversation graphic and exaggerated… highest vitality, great self-confidence… warm-hearted, fond of people, animals, books, sport, music, exercise… intellectually self-made, ambitious, independent and self-willed… fond of admiration from both men and women and able to give it… Loves old people because she never feels they are old…"