Asquith

by Roy Jenkins

  Throughout Scotland the policy to which Asquith had committed himself (in his election address he said he was an “ advanced Liberal ” and an uncompromising Home Ruler) did reasonably well, but in England there was a heavy swing against Gladstone. The overall results gave 316 seats to the Conservatives and 78 to the Liberal Unionists, as against 191 to the Gladstonians and 85 to the Irish Nationalists. Lord Salisbury, who succeeded immediately as Prime Minister, had a large majority if the Liberal Unionists voted with him and a small one if they abstained. If they voted against him he would have been out, but in a Parliament dominated by Irish questions there was little danger of their doing so. Nevertheless they were not part of the Government and their leaders continued to sit on the front opposition bench.

  Asquith’s first Parliament therefore presented the bizarre spectacle of Chamberlain and Hartington, two of the firmest upholders of the Government’s policy on the main issue of the day, sitting alongside the leader of the opposition, and often attacking him bitterly from the same despatch box at which he had just spoken.1 Opposite, for a short time, sat Lord Randolph Churchill, who at 37 had forced his way to the leadership of the House, but who lasted barely six months before his precipitate resignation from the Government. He was succeeded as leader by W. H. Smith and as Chancellor of the Exchequer by Goschen, the first of the Liberal Unionists to serve under Salisbury. As the Parliament wore on, Arthur Balfour, who was appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1887, became an increasingly dominant member of the Government. He amazed the Irish by the ruthlessness of his policy and the House by the tenacity of his debating; his sobriquet changed from Pretty Fanny to Bloody Balfour.

  1 Asquith described the exact allocation of seats in the following terms: “ Mr. Gladstone sat opposite the box in the leader’s place, with Sir W. Harcourt or Mr. John Morley on his left to act as a kind of buffer. Occupying the seats nearest the gangway were the Liberal Unionist chiefs—Lord Hartington, Mr. Chamberlain, Sir Henry James, Mr. Heneage. On the other side of Mr. Gladstone were the old colleagues who had remained faithful to him.,, (Memories and Reflections, 1, p. 117).

  Asquith succeeded from the first in making the maximum of impact upon the parliamentary scene with the expenditure of the minimum of effort. Surprisingly, his background of achievement, relatively much less great in 1886 than it had been in 1876, did him far more good in Parliament than it had done him in his early years at the bar. The House of Commons, always tritely said to be contemptuous of outside reputations, showed that it did not mind provided the fame was not genuine. For Asquith did not really have an outside reputation in 1886. But the House treated him from the first as though he did. The point is neatly put by his official biographers, “ It was often said of Asquith,” they wrote, “ .. . that he was never a member of the rank and file. From the start he assumed the manner of a front bencher and the House accepted him at his own valuation.”a

  He made no speech until he had been a member for nearly nine months. The occasion he then chose was a full-dress debate on a motion to give precedence over all other business to an Irish Crimes Bill. It was Balfour’s first major debate as Chief Secretary. Asquith delivered his maiden speech to a full House late on the third night, March 24th, 1887. It made a profound impression. Haldane refers to it in his Autobiography as “a brilliant maiden speech (which) turned towards him the attention of the public as well as the Liberal leaders in the House.b Immediately afterwards Asquith wrote to his wife:

  House of Commons,

  24 March 1887

  My dearest love,

  I must just send you a line to say that I took the plunge tonight about 10.30 before a good house, and spoke for about half an hour. I was listened to very well & everyone says it was a great success. Joe Chamberlain who followed was very polite and complimentary—In haste

  Ever yr. own husband,

  Herbert

  Read now, the speech is remarkable more for the note of authority which crept into the phrasing than for the argument, powerful and sustained though that was. Asquith succeeded in assuming—and this is perhaps the main characteristic of a front-bench style—that the interest of a statement lay in the fact that he was making it, and not merely in its own inherent wisdom. His words were obviously carefully prepared, which was not often the case with his later speeches, even on major issues. Both qualities are illustrated by the following passage:

  As to the prevalence of crime, having regard to these admitted facts, I say deliberately that this is a manufactured crisis. We know by experience how a case for coercion is made out. The panicmongers of the press—gentlemen to whom every political combination is a conspiracy, and to whom every patriot is a rebel—were the first in the field. They have been most effectively assisted on the present occasion on the other side of the Channel, by the purveyors of loyal fiction and patriotic hysterics, wholesale, retail and for exportation. The truth, whatever truth there is in the stories, is deliberately distorted and exaggerated. Atrocities are fabricated to meet the requirements of the market with punctuality and despatch; and when the home supply fails, the imagination of the inventive journalist wings its flight across the Atlantic and he sets to work to piece together the stale gossip of the drinking saloons in New York and Chicago, and ekes it out with cuttings from obscure organs of the dynamite press.c

  This successful beginning led to no unleashing of Asquith’s parliamentary tongue. He continued throughout the Parliament to speak only two or three times a year,1 mainly on Irish questions, although occasionally on other ingredients of “ advanced Liberalism ”—the payment of Members of Parliament or the removal of a religious qualification for the Lord Chancellorship, both of England and of Ireland. But he never did any parliamentary drudgery, and Harcourt in 1890 wrote to Morley complaining of “ Asquith who will never do a day’s work for us in the House.”d Even with Harcourt, however, who was a great complainer, there is no evidence that this fastidiousness ever did him any real harm. He spoke in the country rather more often than he did in the House (this indeed was what provoked Harcourt, who had disliked one of his platform pronouncements), and he was skilful in choosing his occasions so as to produce a considerable impact.

  1 Rather oddly, in the circumstances, he recalls in the chapter in his memoirs entitled Parliamentary Novitiate, Charles James Fox’s advice that the way to become a good House of Commons speaker was to speak every night on every subject. (Memories and Reflections, 1, p. no). But this was in relation to Balfour. Presumably he thought, quite rightly, that he himself needed neither advice nor the practice.

  One of his first and most striking successes of this sort was at the Nottingham meeting of the National Liberal Federation in October, 1887. The issue within the party at the time was the possibility of Liberal reunion, and Asquith came out firmly against making too many concessions to the dissidents. “ It was a very good thing to do what they could to recover the lost sheep. Henry IV had said that Paris was worth a Mass. But they might pay too high a price even for the capitulation of Birmingham.”e And he went on, speaking in the presence of Gladstone, to pay a tribute to him which showed that, when necessary, he could indulge fully in the art of rhetorical peroration. “ (His) presence at our head,” Asquith said, “ is worth a hundred battalions. To the youngest it is an inspiration, to the oldest an example, to one and all a living lesson of devotion, hopefulness and vitality.

  Let us rejoice that one survivor of the heroic age of English politics has entered on the last struggle of a life spent on the battlefields of freedom; and let us, lesser men of a later day, be proud that in such an enterprise and under such omens we are permitted to obey his summons and follow when he leads. ”f The applause was naturally tumultuous, but the more critical minds were also impressed. “ Eloquent and powerful,” was Morley’s comment.

  In Parliament at this time Asquith worked closely with a group of five or six near contemporaries. These included Haldane, Edward Grey and Arthur Acland, who had all come into the House in 1885, and Tom
Ellis and Sydney Buxton, who had arrived at the same time as Asquith. Although Asquith was by no means the senior, either in age or in parliamentary experience, it was under his leadership, Haldane testifies, that the group drew together. Its members shared a common outlook on most questions of the day, and tried to fill in some of the gaps in Liberal policy which resulted from Gladstone’s pre-occupation with Ireland. Occasionally this brought them into mild conflict with the leadership. Haldane and Grey, in particular, were inclined to pursue a very independent course in the division lobbies, but Asquith was usually more cautious, partly, Haldane rather felinely suggested, because “ he had fewer views of his own than most of us.”g However, he abstained from voting in support of the Opposition’s attack on the Attorney-General in March 1889 for his activities as advocate for The Times before the Parnell Enquiry,1 and, together with the other Liberal lawyers who had done the same, incurred another portion of Harcourt’s wrath. “ These are the gentlemen,” the latter wrote, “ who call out for ‘ more vigour.’ The truth is, what they like is to stand by with their hands in their pockets and order the front bench to do all the fighting and then abuse them for their pains.”

  1 See infra, pp. 48-50. Asquith may have been influenced by his own involvement in the case (although on the other side), as well as by professional solidarity.

  With Harcourt the group never had very close or easy relations. He was too much of a Parliamentary “ bruiser,” always more interested in tactics than in ideas, for their tastes. But with Morley, whose more intimate contact with Gladstone gave him much of the status of first lieutenant, they felt a greater affinity. In many ways, indeed, they looked to him as their political mentor, and he was a frequent guest at the dinners which (rather obscurely calling themselves the “ Articles Club ”) they began to hold in 1888, sometimes at the Savoy Hotel and sometimes at the National Liberal Club. “ We young Liberals looked up to him with deep respect,” Haldane wrote.

  This respect helped to keep the group from getting too far out of touch with the official leadership of the party. But in many ways the affinity upon which the group thought it to be based was a false one. Morley had the glamour of a great literary reputation and the intellectual attraction of a subtle and cultivated mind. But his political outlook was basically different from that of the group. They were social reformers. Haldane, Acland and Ellis were all deeply interested in education; Buxton, who sat for Poplar, was much concerned with sweated labour and housing; and Asquith shared the interests of his friends. On all these matters Morley’s outlook was strictly Gladstonian. His concern with what his chief rather incredulously and distastefully described as “ construction ” was always minimal.

  In addition the group soon began to develop imperialist leanings. They were as opposed to Little Englandism abroad as they were to a purely negative Liberalism at home. In Haldane’s case, and to some extent in Asquith’s too, this sprang from the nature of their legal practices. They were much involved in arguing Colonial appeals before the Privy Council. This gave them a close interest in the systems of government and practices of life in what Dilke had called Greater Britain; and it divided them sharply from Morley, who was every bit as much of a Little Englander as Harcourt. It also made them draw closer to Lord Rosebery, who was their other favourite guest at the Savoy Hotel or National Liberal Club dinners, and who had been an active participant in the affairs of the Imperial Federation League since soon after its inception in 1885. In 1889 Asquith joined the League, and provoked some further displeasure. “ Spencer was very angry about Asquith joining the Imperial League,” Harcourt wrote, “ and said he was greatly disappointed in him.”h

  Haldane and Asquith also organised a series of dinners which, while still rigidly masculine, were less austerely political in purpose than those of the Articles Club. These took place annually at the Blue Posts inn, off Cork Street, and the normal practice was for the two hosts to invite four prominent politicians, and four other men who were eminent for other reasons. Rosebery recorded in his diary for an evening in 1889: “Dined with Asquith and Haldane at the Blue Posts. Sate (sic) next A. Balfour. Took John Morley on to the National Liberal Club Reception.”i Other politicians who attended included Chamberlain, Randolph Churchill, Grey and Carson. Amongst the non-politicians were Bowen, Burne-Jones, Alfred Lyall and Russell Lowell. These dinners continued until 1892. They indicated both that the hosts had a parliamentary position which enabled them to command the attendance of important guests and that they were anxious to enlarge their social circle. In Asquith’s case, in particular, there was room for this. Throughout the late ’eighties he continued to live quietly in Hampstead, although in 1887 he moved to a larger, more modern, less attractive house at 27, Maresfield Gardens, off Fitzjohn’s Avenue. He was a figure of note in the House of Commons, but he moved in no general society. Almost the only women he knew were the wives of his Oxford and legal friends, a restriction made greater by the fact that so many of these friends were bachelors.

  Asquith’s practice at the bar, as already indicated, benefited rather than suffered from his election to Parliament. But it took no bound forward during his first few years in the House. Since his call he had been a member of the North-Eastern circuit, which was centred on Leeds and which he had chosen, there being no obvious alternative, on the slender ground of his old Yorkshire connection. He had always been a half-hearted circuit-goer, for he had no taste for the criminal and jury work which it involved; and, particularly after his election, his practice was almost entirely in London and on the civil side. Much of his work was in the appellate courts. It was an unexciting, moderate sized, high quality practice. In 1888 he began to take pupils, and one of the first, John Roskill, later a judge, recorded that “ before he took Silk in 1890 he was not in a very large practice and often gave his pupils Wright’s papers as well as his own.” Roskill added that “ his clients were of the best.”^ They yielded him .£1,500 or -£2,000 a year.

  Most of Asquith’s legal (as opposed to his political) work at this time brought him no public notice of any sort. There were occasional exceptions arising out of his rare forays to the Central Criminal Court. In 1889 he unsuccessfully defended Cunninghame Graham, the Scottish laird and Labour M.P., who, with John Bums, was charged with unlawful assembly as a result of the events of “ Bloody Sunday ” in Trafalgar Square; and in the following year—a rather less liberal cause—he successfully prosecuted Vizetelly, the English publisher of Zola’s novels, for the offence of obscene libel.

  His next major advance came suddenly and dramatically in February, 1889, when he was junior counsel to Sir Charles Russell before the Parnell Commission of Enquiry. As long previously as April 18th, 1887, The Times had published a facsimile print of a letter dated 1882 and apparently signed by Charles Stewart Parnell, in which the Irish leader expressed his approval for the Phoenix Park murder of Frederick Burke, the permanent under-secretary in the Dublin Castle administration. Although this was damaging to the Nationalist cause, Parnell contented himself at the time with a House of Commons announcement that the letter was a forgery and did not take up the challenge of the editor of The Times to test the matter in a libel action. In July, 1888, F. H. O’Donnell, who had been an Irish member of the previous Parliament and who was also implicated in the charges made by The Times, took such an action. In the course of the case, which O’Donnell lost without the London jury troubling to leave the box, further letters which were still more damaging to Parnell were read out. His reaction to these was still (and probably wisely) to avoid the English law courts, but to make a personal statement in the House of Commons demanding that a Select Committee be set up. The Government countered with the quite different offer of a Commission of three judges (all of them known Unionists) charged with enquiring not merely into the alleged forgeries but into all the accusations against the Nationalist Party made by The Times—in other words, into almost the whole recent course of Irish history. This procedure, as strongly opposed by the Liberals as by the Na
tionalists, had eventually to be accepted. The Attorney-General, free then to engage in private practice as well as official duties, was briefed by The Times. Parnell countered with Russell and Asquith. The selection of Asquith was made more on political than on legal grounds and was influenced by the strong speech against the composition and terms of reference of the Commission which he had made in the House.

  The work of the Commission was above all else a marathon. It began sitting on September 18th, 1888 and took evidence on 128 days. The crux of the matter, the question of the forged letters, was not reached until the sixth month. It then took Russell only two days to demolish Pigott, the purveyor of the letters to The Times. With his cross-examination still incomplete, Piggott fled to Paris, leaving behind him two confessions which were in many respects discrepant but which were agreed in admitting that all the letters purporting to be from Parnell were forgeries. A week later he shot himself in a Madrid hotel.

  Parnell’s vindication was complete. For a short time he became almost a popular hero with the British public. The city of Edinburgh made him a freeman; the Liberal Party gave him a standing ovation in the House of Commons; and even The Times formally withdrew all the charges which were based upon the letters. Although the Commission was to drag on for another year, only one point of major interest remained to be elucidated. This was how a newspaper of the standing of The Times had ever come to accept and publish documents of such outstanding importance from so obviously tainted a source.