by Roy Jenkins
The first turning point in his legal career came in 1883. Until then he was short of money, under-employed, and full of surplus intellectual energy. The first shortage, as has already been indicated, led to no great privation. His way of life in Hampstead may have been simple but it was not such as to cut him off from social contacts with those he then knew or wanted to know. Nor did it preclude regular visits to the theatre and fairly frequent journeys abroad, sometimes with and sometimes without his wife. With his wife he went mostly to Germany and Switzerland, but with male companions, often at Easter time, he used to go further south, to Provence, to the Riviera and to Tuscany. His friends were almost all the old ones of Oxford days, although Mark Napier, the son of a diplomat peer and another occupant of the chambers in Fig-Tree Court, became a close one and a frequent visitor to Hampstead.
Then, in 1881, Asquith’s intimacy with Haldane began. This was a friendship of great importance which lasted throughout the middle years of his life. R. B. Haldane, at this stage, was a rather clumsy young Scotsman of twenty-five. He came of nonconformist stock like Asquith himself, but his family were much more firmly established in the upper ranks of the middle class, and he had the advantage of some private money. Instead of going to Oxford (the Anglican influence of which was feared by his father) he had studied at Edinburgh, Gottingen and Dresden and had acquired in the course of these wanderings a strong and persistent taste for rather cloudy metaphysics. This was alien to the bent of Asquith’s own mind, which was always more lucid and less speculative than Haldane’s. But there were many other things which bound them together. Haldane had come to London in 1877 and had gone to the Chancery bar. Although his first success came a little earlier than Asquith’s (he was earning ^1,000 a year by 1883), when they first met he was almost equally briefless. They both shared a deep interest in politics, and an attachment to the moderate left of the Liberal Party. Here Asquith’s interest was perhaps the greater, for Haldane, who stated bluntly in his Autobiography that Asquith “ from the beginning ... meant to be Prime Minister,” was probably more concerned with the law for its own sake and not merely as a stepping stone to politics. For neither was he as well endowed as Asquith. His diction was even cloudier than his metaphysics, and as he himself freely admitted he had “ no attractive presence ” and “ a bad voice.” Despite these deficiencies, and the fact that he was four years younger, he was at this time a little further ahead than Asquith, not only in the law but also in politics.
He was the first secretary of the Eighty Club, which took its name from the year of Gladstone’s second accession to power. It was originally composed of a group of young Liberals with radical and mildly imperialist leanings who had begun meeting under the leadership of Albert (later 4th Earl) Grey, the grandson of the Reform Bill Prime Minister, but who later found him too erratic and seceded to found the club on their own. It was not only a dining club, which entertained guests ranging from George Meredith to Charles Parnell, but also an organisation providing speakers for meetings in the country. Asquith became a member about a year after its foundation, having recently met Haldane at dinner in Lincoln’s Inn. A few months afterwards Haldane, “ most uncharacteristically ” as Asquith put it, fell ill and went to stay with his new friend in Hampstead for a long period of semi-convalescence. This visit established their intimacy. Thereafter for many years they dined together several times a week, travelled abroad in each other’s company, consulted together on every political issue, and on many legal ones too. The friendship was the closest which Asquith ever developed with any man.
Haldane was also a great favourite with Asquith’s family. His exuberance and generosity of spirit, aided rather than hindered by physical characteristics which tended always to make him a faint figure of fun, produced strong private charm of a kind which was as accessible to children as to adults. Lady Violet Bonham Carter, in an
article which she contributed to The Times on the centenary of his birth2* has testified to its effect upon herself and her brothers. She also told of an occasion—a striking example of surplus intellectual energy— when Haldane got a rare brief (concerning the alleged infestation of some property by rats), and both he and her father, who had not received one of his own for months, sat up for nearly a whole night at Hampstead, preparing every possible ramification of the case.
Behind this exuberance of Haldane’s there was a deep intellectual curiosity and seriousness of purpose. At this stage he found these characteristics matched by Asquith’s own, although as the form in which he recorded this indicates, he came to believe that there was later a change in Asquith. “ He had as fine an intellectual apparatus, in the way of grasp and understanding,” Haldane wrote, “ as I ever saw in any man. In his earlier political days he was a very serious person. I remember once passing along the Horse Guards with him. He touched my arm and pointed to the figure of John Bright walking in front of us. ‘ There,’ he said, ‘ is the only man in public life who has risen to eminence without being corrupted by London Society
There was intended to be a dark hint for the future in Haldane’s recollection of this remark, but at the time at which it was made, if there was any corruption of Asquith taking place it was Haldane himself, as much as anyone, who was doing it. It was he rather than Asquith who had a gourmet’s taste and was already becoming a large buyer of fine clarets and champagnes. It was he too who had the greater knowledge of Europe and of the political and even the social world at home.
Asquith began to catch up only after the improvement of his legal prospects in 1883. This occurred as a result of the appointment, after an interval, of R. S. Wright to Bowen’s old job as Junior Counsel to the Treasury. Wright, although he did not know him well, immediately asked Asquith to become his “ devil.” The offer was enthusiastically accepted, and Asquith moved from the ungrateful chambers in Fig Tree Court to join Wright at 1, Paper Buildings, where he remained until his final retirement from the bar in 1905.
Wright was like Bowen in being a Balliol man, a classicist, a favourite of Jowett’s—who died in his house—and in proceeding subsequently straight from the junior bar to the bench. But he was unlike him in being a plodding, eccentric introvert rather than a cap-tain-of-the-school figure with splendid all-round gifts. He was not much in court, and his normal routine was to sit all day in his chambers with a tall hat on his head and a briar pipe in his mouth, working almost continuously from six in the morning until nine at night, except for breakfast and dinner visits to the Reform Club.
There is no evidence that Asquith ever achieved any real friendship with Wright, but the connection was nevertheless immensely valuable to him. It gave Asquith a political as well as a legal entree. Wright worked closely to the Attorney-General, Sir Henry James, to whom he owed his own appointment,1 and this agreeable, urbane and pleasure-loving Whig, who was Gladstone’s favourite law officer, soon recognised Asquith’s quality and established with him an ease of relationship which was possible for neither of them with the intermediate Wright.
One of Asquith’s first tasks for the Attorney was almost perfectly suited to his abilities and his interests. By 1883 the Bradlaugh case had dragged on for three years, destroying the effectiveness of the Parliament and draining away a sizeable proportion both of the energy and the authority of the Prime Minister. Gladstone had decided to try to end the matter by passing an Affirmation Bill, and he asked James for a memorandum on the legal and constitutional significance of the parliamentary oath. By a protracted process of devolution Asquith was asked to prepare this. The result, after much effort on his part, was a highly authoritative survey, written in his own peculiar combination of lucid and architectonic English. James was delighted to be able to produce (with suitable acknowledgment) such an impressive product of someone else’s labour,2 and the Prime Minister who admired lucidity in others and an architectonic style in every one, was fully satisfied. Thereafter Asquith had the confidence of James and the notice of Gladstone—whose memory was soon afterwards fortifie
d by hearing him speak at a dinner of the Eighty Club.
For a year or two these new connections brought Asquith more in the way of political opportunities and legal promise than of real rewards. In 1884 he wrote and had published by the Liberal Central Association a short guide for election agents to the Corrupt Practices Act which placed the first limit on the expenses of candidates and which James had just piloted through the House of Commons. By 1885, however, he was beginning to secure some briefs of his own. These came mainly from solicitors who used regularly to instruct Wright, and had got to know Asquith in this way; but as these solicitors included firms who acted for several of the big railway companies— which at that time were both prosperous and litigious—they offered a connection of great potential value. Then, when the general election of December, 1885, produced its usual crop of disputed returns, Asquith found that his corrupt practices manual was yielding more than royalties and that he was retained in almost all cases as junior counsel for the Liberal candidate. By the spring of 1886, at the age of 33, and with ten years’ standing as a barrister, he was at last able to earn a moderate income and occupy most of his time by professional work.
1 James no doubt thought that there would be advantages in securing an assistant whose qualities were so nearly the opposite of his own. Wright continued to work with James after he had ceased to be Attorney-General, and in 1886, fortified by Sir Charles Russell, the foremost advocate of the day, who had succeeded as Attorney and was later to be Lord Chief Justice of England, they proceeded jointly to give Sir Charles Dilke some of the worst professional advice that any man can ever have received.
2 He kept the manuscript and—a characteristic gesture—gave it as a wedding present to Asquith’s second wife.
A SURE THRUST TO FAME
1886-90
Asquith gave himself no opportunity to consolidate this long-awaited and modest legal success. In July, 1886, within a few months of the briefs and fees beginning to arrive, he became a Member of Parliament.
The connection between politics and the law was then much more intimate than it is today. Almost every leader of the bar sought and achieved a period in the House of Commons as an essential step in his career. This applied not only to men like Sir William Harcourt, Sir Henry James or Sir Hardinge Gifford (later Lord Halsbury), who had strong views on matters of policy and who attached as much or greater importance to political as to legal advancement. It applied also to those whose interest was primarily legal, to men like Sir Charles Russell (the prototype of a fashionable advocate), Sir Richard Webster and Sir Horace Davey. This was partly because the road to legal preferment then lay much more directly through politics. There were vast fees to be earned by the law officers; the Lord Chancellorship was a highly coveted position; the office of Lord Chief Justice was known as “the Attorney-General’s pillow” (both Russell and Webster laid their heads upon it); and a high proportion of appeal and puisne judges were men who had sat for a short time in the House of Commons and had been appointed during one of their party’s periods of office.
Parliament was therefore regarded as a natural place for an established barrister to go. But it was also regarded as a presumptuous and dangerous one for a junior with an insecure position—particularly if he had no private fortune. It fitted in with and was likely to improve the practice of a sought-after Queen’s Counsel. It could more easily damage that of a little known member of the outer bar, whose one strength ought to be that of complete availability. In fact, Asquith’s
experience ran contrary to the accepted rule and he probably improved his earning power by going into the House of Commons. But it was difficult for him to foresee this, and by his action in 1886 he ran a big risk of losing what he had built up in the previous three years.
He did so at the insistent prompting of Haldane, who, without a family and a little more secure at the bar, had already taken the same step a few months earlier. He had been elected for the East Lothian or Haddington division at the general election of December, 1885. This election was the first to be fought under the extended franchise in the counties, which had been introduced in 1884, and the new distribution of seats, which became law in the spring of the following year. It was delayed for some months to allow the latter measure to come into operation. The second Gladstone Government had been defeated on the Budget in June and had made way for a minority administration under Lord Salisbury. This Conservative Government held office during six months of complicated manoeuvre and realignment on the Irish question, the net result of which was that Parnell delivered much of the Nationalist vote in the large English towns to the Conservatives, and Gladstone became committed to Home Rule.
Partly as a consequence of this short-lived Irish flirtation with Lord Salisbury, the Liberal majority was much smaller than had been expected. And it was by no means clear how much of it would accept Gladstone's conversion to Home Rule. What was certain was that there was a majority in the new House of Commons for other aspects of the Liberal programme. When Jesse Collings moved his “ three acres and a cow ” amendment to the address at the end of January, the Conservative Government was heavily defeated, and Gladstone became Prime Minister for the third time. The Whig opponents of Home Rule, represented by Hartington, Goschen and Henry James, refused to serve. The Radical Unionists (to give them a title they had not then assumed) doubtfully accepted office, although Gladstone committed the major mistake of not giving their leader, Joseph Chamberlain, an office from which he would have been reluctant to resign. In March, when the details of the Home Rule Bill were before the Cabinet, both he and G. O. Trevelyan left the Government. The prospects of the bill were further weakened at the end of May when John Bright declared his opposition. On June 8th, 1886, the second reading was defeated by 343 to 313. 93 members who had been elected as Liberals voted against the Government, and Gladstone advised an immediate dissolution of the six-month-old Parliament.
These were the circumstances in which Asquith fought his first election. One of the dissident 93 was Boyd Kinnear, the member for East Fife. He was a local laird, a writer of some note, and a radical; he had followed Chamberlain rather than Hartington into the division lobby against the Prime Minister. But this fact did not propitiate the local Liberal Association, who were firmly Gladstonian. They passed a vote of no confidence in Boyd Kinnear and called for a new candidate. They needed one in a hurry, and Haldane, established as member for the neighbouring county and with family connections extending over most of the eastern half of the Scottish Lowlands, was able to put forward Asquith’s name. The East Fife Association met on June 26th and decided by a large majority to offer him the nomination. The invitation was received and accepted on the following day, a Saturday. Polling was then only ten days away, and the strictest Sabbatarianism was necessary upon two of them. There has not often been more of a shot-gun marriage between a member and his constituency.
East Fife was then a peculiarly isolated part of Eastern Scotland. Although its southern flank comes within ten miles of the centre of Edinburgh, the Forth Bridge had not been built, and access was only by ferry. On the north, the Tay Bridge, leading to Dundee, which had collapsed while a train was crossing on a stormy night in 1881, had not been replaced. Within the constituency the only effective means of transport was by horse-drawn carriage, which did little to ease the problems of a candidate who had to attempt a whirlwind campaign. There was no central town, for St. Andrews and Cupar, although geographically included, were electorally distinct in the separate constituency of St. Andrews Burghs. Most of the population—engaged in fishing, farming, a little mining and the dying industry of hand-loom weaving—lived in scattered townships and villages. Ladybank and Auchtermuchty were the biggest of them.
The tradition of the constituency was firmly Liberal. The undivided county had not returned a Tory since 1832, and Boyd Kinnear in the new East division had obtained a big majority in 1885. In the 1886 election he stood again, although this time of course as a Liberal Unionist and, in
accordance with the agreement made between Salisbury and the Liberal Unionist leaders, without Conservative opposition. Asquith’s task was to secure a sufficient majority of regular Liberal voters to outweigh the Conservatives who came to the aid of Kinnear.
This was by no means an insuperable one, for many Tories, whatever their leaders might say, were reluctant to vote for a man who only six months before had fought under the dangerously radical banners which Chamberlain was then fashioning for his supporters. And in his wooing of the Liberal electors Asquith had the advantages of the Scottish prestige of Gladstone, who was campaigning only a few miles away in Midlothian; of the natural allegiance of the constituency; and of his own unusual gifts of speech and argument. At this election the first two were probably the more powerful, for in the time available he could address only a few scattered meetings, and some of these were as hostile at the end as they had been at the beginning. The liabilities he had to overcome were those of being an unknown, “ carpetbagging ” Englishman1. But the advantages more than outweighed them and he was returned by the modest majority of 2,862 to 2,487. Thereafter, until 1918, his majorities were fluctuating and mostly small, but never disappeared.