Asquith

by Roy Jenkins

  In spite of these difficulties the lists were all complete by the date of the King’s return to England—April 16th,—and the exchange of seals of office proceeded in the normal way—at Buckingham Palace not at the Crillon. Easter came a few days later and Asquith went to Easton Grey, near Malmesbury, a most attractive house belonging to one of his wife’s sisters, for more than a week. While he was there Campbell-Bannerman died. Asquith’s first House of Commons duties as Prime Minister were therefore those of paying tribute to his former leader, which he did in notably warm and felicitous terms, and of moving yet another adjournment of the House.

  The transitional ceremonies were still not complete. On Wednesday, April 29th a Liberal Party meeting assembled in the Reform Club in order to endorse Asquith’s leadership. This was a purely formal proceeding. Those present included not only the Liberal peers and M.P.s, but also some representatives of the party organisation outside. The resolution which was put took the form of welcoming his premiership rather than of electing him leader. The way in which it was drafted, by the sometimes querulous but on this occasion perceptively generous hand of John Morley, gave particular pleasure to Asquith. It referred to “his strong sense in council, power in debate, and consummate mastery of all the habit and practice of public business.” It was of course carried unanimously.

  The same day also saw the first Cabinet meeting over which the new Prime Minister presided in his own right. A week later, the Asquiths moved from Cavendish Square to Downing Street. No. 10 was substantially larger than No. 11, but even so it did not arouse Margot’s enthusiasm. “ It is an inconvenient house with three poor staircases,” she wrote, “ and after living there a few weeks I made up my mind that owing to the impossibility of circulation I could only entertain my Liberal friends1 at dinner or at garden parties.”l The outside of the house she described as “ liver-coloured and squalid.” One of its disadvantages, she found, was that no taxi-driver ever knew where it was; they were more likely to go to Down Street, Piccadilly, than to Downing Street, Whitehall. Yet during the eight and a half years for which the Asquiths were tenants of No. 10 they identified themselves more closely with the house and gave it a more distinct social character than had been the case with any Prime Ministerial family for several decades past. Campbell-Bannerman's life there had been dominated by his own and his wife’s illnesses. Balfour was a bachelor, Rosebery was a widower, and Salisbury never moved from Arlington House. At least since the days of Gladstone’s first two Governments 10 Downing Street had not been occupied as it was by the Asquiths. And even then, the G.O.M’s preference for being entertained, rather than himself entertaining, had been well to the fore. But, throughout the Asquith regime and in spite of her ill-health, Margot filled the house with a series of bizarrely assorted luncheon and dinner parties. Her husband looked on, apparently with a detached tolerance, but in fact with a good deal of placid enjoyment.

  1 Why this did not apply to her non-Liberal friends is not clear.

  During that summer of 1908, a relatively calm one politically, Asquith settled down to a Prime Minister’s routine. He held Cabinets once a week, usually on a Wednesday morning, and after each meeting he wrote to the King, in his own hand, two or three page accounts of what had occurred. The copies of these letters, made by his principal private secretary, also in his own hand, constituted the only records available to the Government of the business transacted; there was neither a Cabinet secretariat nor Cabinet minutes. But the copy was not circulated to other members of the Cabinet. Nor were the records entirely satisfactory in other respects. In the first place they were biased, not to mislead the King, but to interest him. Foreign and military discussions were described at greater length than questions of domestic social policy. And any matters of specifically royal concern were given extra stress. A quarter of the letter on one occasion was taken up by an account of the Cabinet’s decision against increasing the reward offered for some missing Crown jewels. It is difficult to believe that the subject took an equal proportion of the time of the Cabinet meeting. The letters also suffer, as records, from Asquith’s bland economy of style and from his natural desire to give the King an impression of a united and decisive Cabinet. “ After much discussion the Estimates were in substance approved, ”m he wrote at the end of the year, after a particularly difficult and indecisive meeting on the naval building programme.

  Most other interchanges between Buckingham Palace and Downing Street took the form of correspondence between Lord Knollys and Vaughan Nash, the respective private secretaries. But this did not make them anodyne. The subject of honours was a fairly constant and accepted battleground between Sovereign and Prime Minister. Even in this field, however, the fact that real power lay in Downing Street was accepted without much question. The Palace mostly confined itself to peripheral sniping: to complaints about the length of the lists, particularly for knighthoods; to perhaps contradictory (and by no means always successful) attempts to insert a few royal nominees into them; and to open displays of innocent pleasure whenever something could be discovered against one of the Downing Street nominees. “ My dear Mr. Nash,” Knollys wrote on July 4th, 1908, “ the King desires me to say he hears that Mr.—, one of those recommended for a Knighthood but whose name was he believes withdrawn, is a Bankrupt hatter.”n

  There were also frequent royal complaints about the tone of the speeches of some ministers. Lloyd George and Churchill were by far the most regular offenders. And occasionally the King went so far as to rebuke the Prime Minister. “ The King deplores the attitude taken up by Mr. Asquith on the Woman’s Suffrage question,” Knollys wrote in an undated note. It can only have been the tactics of the Prime Minister which were here considered to be at fault, because his views on the issue differed little from those of the King.

  It would be a mistake to assume from these occasional sharp exchanges that relations between Asquith and the King were often strained. They were mostly smooth enough, although never very close. King Edward respected some of Asquith’s talents, but he did not feel greatly at ease in his company. He had found Campbell-Bannerman more to his taste. In part this was due to a simple question of compatibility of character. In part, too, it was because the King, as Sir Sidney Lee has pointed out, thought of Asquith as much more of a “ new man ” than Campbell-Bannerman. Neither of these Liberal leaders had been born into a ruling group. But Campbell-Bannerman had wealth, and this, in the King’s view, was the best substitute for lineage. Asquith’s polished intellectual equipment did not strike him as in any way a comparable attribute. Paradoxically, therefore, the man who is today often thought of as the “ last of the Romans,” the final example of the classical tradition in British statesmanship, was regarded by his sovereign as something of a political parvenu. This view helped to make King Edward’s relations with the Prime Minister stop well short of friendship, but it did not make them hostile. And if, for some other reason, friction occasionally rose, Lord Knollys, liberal, intelligent and warmly friendly towards Asquith, was deftly assiduous in smoothing it away. The unadorned, pungent way in which he could put the King’s views to the Prime Minister was a function of the fact that he did not, himself, always take them too seriously.

  Another aspect of Prime Ministerial routine with which Asquith concerned himself closely was that of ecclesiastical appointments. As a natural “ Athenaeum figure ” he would in any event have enjoyed following the careers of the upper clergy. And when he himself achieved the power largely to determine them he exercised it with interest and care, often exchanging two or more long letters a week with Randall Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, upon the subject. They discussed in detail not merely bishoprics, but deaneries and canonries, when these fell vacant and were Crown appointments. Davidson usually put his own order of preference firmly before Asquith, but he never assumed that his first choice would necessarily get the job, and he mostly submitted several names. He expected (even if he did not encourage) the Prime Minister to have some regard, at lea
st if there was equality in other qualifications, for politics in his appointments. Ecclesiastics who were firm Liberals (the Bishops of Hereford and Birmingham and the Dean of Norwich, for example) did not hesitate to point this out to the Prime Minister when writing him patronage letters. Nevertheless, Asquith’s first major appointment was firmly non-political. In the autumn of 1908 the Archbishopric of York fell vacant. He nominated Cosmo Lang, 43 years of age and at that time only suffragan Bishop of Stepney. By way of apology Asquith wrote to Dr. Percival of Hereford, the only bishop who had voted with the Government in the 1906 Education Bill controversy, and explained that he had passed him over solely on grounds of age. Percival, who was 74, wrote back in a friendly way, but expressing great disappointment that he was not to be translated after “ my 13 years in this Tory backwater.”

  The relative political calm which marked Asquith’s first summer as Prime Minister was not something which most Liberal supporters wished to last. They looked to the Government for a political initiative bold enough to reverse the disastrous flow of the by-election tide. The losses were of no significance from the point of view of the Government current majority, but were on a scale (seven seats changed hands during the year) to suggest that the Unionists might well win a general election. The session, up to the summer holidays, had not been entirely barren. The Old Age Pensions Bill was through, although not without a great deal of grumbling from the peers, and there seemed some prospect of obtaining an educational compromise in the autumn.1 But the Licensing Bill, after a weary passage through the House of Commons, seemed a certain candidate for slaughter when Parliament resumed in November. A controversial Liberal bill of limited popularity which was anathema to the brewers, was hardly likely to get much mercy from the peers. The legislative impotence of the Government would again be displayed. But the experience of the Old Age Pensions Bill suggested the possibility of the Government regaining its authority by means of financial initiative. The majority of the peers had made no attempt to conceal their hostility to this bill. They had carried a destructive amendment to it, but when the Commons firmly announced that a Lords’ amendment to a money bill was inadmissible, they had accepted this as sound if unwelcome constitutional doctrine. Social advance by means of money bills became the obvious course for the Liberal Government.

  1 In fact, this hope proved baseless. Asquith came very near to a provisional agreement with the Archbishop of Canterbury during the first three weeks of November, but Davidson had to draw back at the last moment because it became clear that he could not carry the other bishops with him.

  Haldane was one of the first to see this. He wrote to Asquith from Cloan on August 9th and succeeded in combining in about equal proportions the sweeping and the trivial:

  “We should boldly take our stand on the facts and proclaim a policy of taking, mainly by direct taxation, such toll from the increase and growth of this (national) wealth as will enable us to provide for (1) the increasing cost of Social reform; (2) National Defence; and also (3) to have a margin in aid of the Sinking Fund ”. . . .

  “ The import and manufacture of mineral waters,” he continued, “ supply a luxury. I do not see why, as alcohol ceases to be fashionable and these are increasingly consumed, they should not bear a tax which, in one shape or another, would give £2m.. . . Look at the consumption of Apollinaris on the one hand and of Soda Water on the other.. . .

  “ If there is anything in (my scheme),” he concluded, “ the condition of success is that you should direct operations yourself. No one else is competent to do it.” 0

  The last sentence probably owed as much to Haldane’s deep-seated distrust of Lloyd George as to his faith in the Prime Minister, real though that was. But in fact the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s mind was already beginning to turn in the same direction (towards more direct taxation, if not towards mineral waters) and it was he who, in the following spring, was to take the fiscal initiative which determined the course of politics for the next two years.

  Before that could happen the session of 1908 had to run its course, and the Licensing Bill, the last non-financial furrow in the barren legislative sand which the Government had ploughed since 1906, show itself as firmly blocked by the House of Lords as the others had been. In the meantime, during the recess, a sudden political squall, minor but violent, had blown up out of the temporarily calm atmosphere. As is sometimes the case with these unexpected storms it was an isolated incident having little to do with the general current of politics. But it involved the resignation of one minister and the diversion of the career of another; it touched on the relations between the King and his Cabinet; it provided the first test of how Asquith would deal with such a situation; and the events from which it arose have a certain curious interest of their own. For all these reasons it is worth some detail of treatment.

  During the latter part of August and early September a Eucharistic Congress took place in London. It was proposed by the Roman Catholic hierarchy that the conclusion of this, on Sunday, September 13 th, should be marked by a ceremonial public procession over an extended route. The Host was to be carried, and a great body of Roman Catholic dignitaries in full vestments were to attend it. Such an arrangement was undoubtedly contrary to the letter of the law. The Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 contained a prohibition of public observance of the ceremonies of the Church of Rome. But there was ground for believing that this part of the Act was in desuetude.

  In 1898 and in 1901 similar although smaller processions had taken place without official interference. The practical position appeared to be that the law was only enforced if a breach was likely to give rise to public disorder. Acting on this assumption, Cardinal Bourne, the Archbishop of Westminster, had approached Sir Edward Henry, the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police (himself a Roman Catholic) at the end of July, had informed him of the proposed procession, and obtained his sanction.

  Almost everyone who was to become concerned in the matter, except for the Roman Catholics prelates, then went on their holidays. By early September they were scattered over the remoter parts of the British Isles. Herbert Gladstone, the Home Secretary, was in the south of Scotland. Asquith was at Slains Castle in Aberdeenshire. Lord Ripon, the only Roman Catholic member of the Cabinet, was at Ripon Abbey in Yorkshire. The King was at Rufford Abbey in Nottinghamshire, where Lord Crewe was a fellow-guest. Sir Edward Henry was fishing in Ireland. The only man of relevant authority in London was Sir Edward Troup, permanent secretary to the Home Office. But this did not prevent the squall from developing.

  The procession, the scale of which may not have been fully disclosed to Henry in July, was widely advertised in the few weeks before it took place. Militant Protestants began a vigorous campaign of complaint. Some of them wrote to Asquith, and more of them wrote to King Edward. The King reacted strongly and urged the Home Secretary to ban the whole procession. Gladstone was uncertain whether he could do this and dilatory in his replies. Asa result the King began telegraphing to Asquith, complaining about the Home Secretary and asking the Prime Minister either to get Ripon to intervene with the Cardinal Archbishop or to put pressure on the Home Office. The royal state of mind was described in a letter which Crewe wrote to Asquith on September 12th: “ The King has taken this d........d procession greatly to heart, and asked me to say that he was ‘ greatly cut up about it ’—a rather curious phrase. . . . He has received dozens of letters from enraged Protestants, who compare him disadvantageously with his revered mother, now with God, and hint that his ultimate destination may be directed elsewhere.”p

  Asquith’s position was difficult, both on the merits of the issue and on the means by which it was proper for him to proceed. His own natural tolerance was fortified by no particular respect for the rites of the Roman church. . there is a good deal of quite respectable Protestant sentiment which is offended by this gang of foreign cardinals taking advantage of our hospitality to parade their idolatries through the streets of London: a thing without precedent since the days
of Bloody Mary,” he wrote to Crewe on September 1oth.q But he had no particular interest in offending the Catholics, most of whom were working class Irish immigrants and Liberal voters. On the other hand Nonconformists were still more important to the Liberal Party than were Catholics, and some of their leaders were already disaffected by the Government’s inability to give them educational relief. “You know the way (the Free Churchmen) have fought for Liberal principles for the last six years,” Dr. John Clifford wrote to Asquith only a few days later; “ but I fear many of them are losing heart. ”r

  Then there was the Prime Minister’s friendship with Herbert Gladstone, who had been his under-secretary in the government of 1892. He was one of the very few men who wrote to Asquith as “ My dear Henry.” Gladstone handled the crisis with a mixture of carelessness and indecision. He never went to London to consult with his own officials and the police. He failed to provide either Asquith or the King with a clear statement of the exact legal position. And he gave bewilderingly conflicting advice about the likelihood of the procession leading to public disorder. “ Police confident they can preserve order,” he telegraphed to Asquith on September 9th. “ Difficult to say we anticipate breach of the peace. Procession not in main thoroughfares. Troup against interference and on the whole I agree with him.” On the following day he telegraphed again: “ Further information this morning shows gravity of feelings. Nothing but overwhelming force of police will prevent serious disorder.” And on September 12th he was back on his first line of advice. “ Troup reports that police find no reason to fear riot,” he wrote, “ and thinks himself that the chance of serious disturbance is very small.”s