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Great Contemporaries: Asquith: The Last Victorian Liberal (1)
- By RAYMOND A. CALLAHAN
- | February 17, 2023
- Category: Explore Great Contemporaries
Herbert Henry Asquith (1842-1928)
The Last Victorian Liberal1 is little remembered today—and when he is, it is mostly for the role he played in Winston Churchill’s career. Asquith became prime minister in 1908. Churchill had only “crossed the floor” to the Liberals four years before and was serving as Under Secretary for the Colonies. Asquith promoted him to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. He quickly climbed higher, becoming Home Secretary in 1910 and First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911.
Churchill directed the Royal Navy’s mobilization in 1914 and oversaw its operations for 15 months of battle. In 1915, an expedition with which he became intimately identified caused his undoing: the attack on the Dardanelles and Gallipoli, intended to knock out Turkey, Germany’s weakest ally. In the political crisis that followed, Asquith formed a coalition government with his Conservative opponents. His new partners, who had never forgiven his change of allegiance, demanded Churchill’s dismissal from the Admiralty.
Churchill was momentarily crushed, yet remained resilient and magnanimous. In his book Great Contemporaries, published nine years after Asquith’s death, he offered this lapidary assessment: “Mr. Asquith was probably one of the greatest peacetime prime ministers we have ever had.”2 His judgment, given by someone who had every reason to be critical, offers good reason to revisit Asquith and his times.
The Liberal Victorians
Asquith was born in 1852 in Leeds, one of the great cities of England’s industrial north. Leeds rose as a center for wool manufacturing, and later became a major producer of heavy machinery. Asquith’s father was a prosperous seed merchant, though the family experienced difficulties after his early death. The son’s upbringing and education were as a member of the middle class, which was the bedrock of the Victorian Liberal Party.
Liberals were cautiously reformist, ameliorative rather than revolutionary, and heavily Nonconformist (i.e., not Anglican, the faith of the ruling establishment). Asquith might well have become a businessman like his father, but at his London secondary school he excelled at Classics, which opened a new world for him. He won a Classics scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. Balliol’s influence soon eclipsed that of both Leeds and his City of London School.
Under its powerful headmaster, Benjamin Jowett, Balliol was one of the most important higher education institutions in Britain. Jowett wanted Balliol to train enlightened administrators for Britain’s ever-expanding empire. Balliol would strive to install what Asquith himself described as a “tranquil consciousness of effortless superiority.”3 Such a persona did not always appeal to those not acclimated to Balliol’s rarified air.
Asquith flourished at Oxford, notably in the Oxford Union debating society (a nursery for future politicians). He took a First Class degree and collected a Balliol fellowship that would provide support as he began to make his way in London’s legal and political worlds. After becoming a barrister, he was noticed by senior Liberal figures. Almost inevitably, the polished Balliol classicist entered Parliament in the general election of 1886.
Gladstone’s zenith and fall
Asquith joined Liberal ranks during a major realignment of British politics. The mid-Victorian Liberal Party was dominated by the towering figure of William Gladstone. It was an amalgam of the old Whig party led by great titled landowners and those of the business and professional middle class like Asquith.
At that time Gladstone embraced Irish Home Rule (i.e., self-government within the Empire, a political evolution pioneered by Canada). This fractured the Liberals. Many of the old Whig land-owning families held Irish acreage. Seceding from the Liberals, they became Tory allies (styling themselves “Liberal Unionists”), then melted into Conservative ranks. This in turn put the opposition Tories in office, and left a time bomb embedded in British politics. The Conservatives were committed to maintaining union with Ireland, especially the security of Protestant-dominated Ulster. What would happen if the Liberals returned to power and tried again to inaugurate Home Rule?
In the 1892 General Election, Gladstone did return to office and introduced a Home Rule bill. He elevated Asquith from the back benches to the Cabinet as Home Secretary. But the Liberals were a minority government, sustained by the votes of Irish members. Meanwhile, the Tories and Liberal Unionists dominated the House of Lords. Home Rule passed the Commons but was buried by the Lords, 419 to 41. Asquith likewise failed in his attempt to pass a Workmen’s Compensation bill. Gladstone retired in 1894. The Liberal government fell the following year, and the party began another period in opposition.
Rising in opposition
Despite failing to pass any landmark bills, Asquith burnished his reputation as both a parliamentarian and an administrator. The last Gladstone government, however, highlighted a problem central to his future. The party was committed to Home Rule and—continuing its reformist tradition—improving the condition of the British working class. Squarely in the path of both stood the House of Lords. Unelected, the Lords had a huge Conservative majority, strengthened by the addition of Liberal Unionists. If the Liberals were again to be an effective governing party, this obstacle had to be overcome.
Following Gladstone, Liberal leadership passed first to Lord Rosebery and then to Sir William Harcourt, neither of whom were very effectual. Finally it fell to a rich Scottish businessman, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, shrewd but far from dynamic. Asquith meanwhile concentrated on his increasingly lucrative law practice and experienced a dramatic transformation in his private life.
His first wife had died in 1891. In 1894 he married Margot Tennant, daughter of a wealthy Scottish businessman who was also a Liberal MP. Asquith had met her before his first wife’s death. He pursued her intensely for several years before she agreed to marry him. Intelligent and assertive, Margot was “one of the most dynamic… prime ministerial spouses ever to move into Downing Street.” Her two volumes of colorful memoirs have been invaluable to historians of her husband’s career.4
Liberal opportunity
The Conservatives, firmly in control again by 1895, did what the Liberals had done with Home Rule. They embraced a divided policy that fractured the party and opened the way for their opposition to revive.
Tensions had been rising for years between Britain and the two small white-settled Boer republics in South Africa. They finally spilled over into open war in 1899. After a disastrous opening, which saw numerous, deeply embarrassing defeats, Britain’s sheer military might turned the tide. The Boer field armies were beaten and the Boer republics, the Orange Free State and Transvaal, were occupied. In a moment of seeming victory, the Tory government of Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury, went to the country. They handily won the “Khaki election,” but their triumph was short-lived.
The Boer armies might be gone and their capitals secure in British hands, but their resistance lived on. Their armies had comprised local “commandos,” militia-style groups who chose their own officers. They were characterized by mobility, cohesion, and a high level of support from the scattered rural population. The commandos continued, supplied by locals with recruits, supplies, and intelligence. The British army suddenly found itself facing a countrywide insurgency for which it had no recent experience.
Combatting insurgents
The one contingent of the Empire’s military forces that had experience with insurgency was the Indian Army. But Indians had been deliberately excluded from the South African war lest the use of non-white soldiers stiffen Boer resistance. Lacking appropriate doctrine, tactics, and experience, the British commander in South Africa, General Sir Herbert Kitchener (an imperial icon since his reconquest of the Sudan in 1898) improvised. The result, although effective, was brutal and deeply divisive in Britain.
Kitchener struck at the commandos’ local support. Thirty thousand Boer farms were burnt, civilians herded into “concentration” camps. They were staffed by inexperienced personnel, often ill-supplied, and badly equipped. Jammed with people who had previously lived isolated rural lives, they soon produced epidemic diseases. Boer civilian deaths amounted to about 28,000.
Kitchener laced the countryside with 3,700 miles of barbed wire and 8,000 blockhouses, backed by 50,000 troops. With their civilian supports cut off, the Boer commanders surrendered. In May 1902 they signed surprisingly generous peace terms. Kitchener’s tactics had worked, but the cost was great and lasting. The impact on British politics was galvanic. In London, young Winston Churchill stoutly criticized Kitchener’s measures.
Resurgence and challenge
Asquith and the Liberals formed the core criticism. Their leader, Campbell-Bannerman, deplored the government’s “methods of barbarism.” The postwar British administration tried to speed up South African recovery by importing Chinese contract labor, rigidly controlled. This gave the Liberals had another powerful issue: “Chinese slavery.” Finally, the Tory Party stumbled, divided over an issue as fraught as Home Rule: Free Trade.
For over a half century, Britain had been a Free Trade nation. But its industrial lead faltered in the face of German and American competition. Leading the movement for “Tariff Reform” (i.e., abandonment of Free Trade) was the dynamic Joseph Chamberlain.
A wealthy manufacturing millionaire from Birmingham in central England, the “Great Joe” had entered politics as a Liberal but had broken with Gladstone over Irish Home Rule. Transitioning via Liberal Unionism to the Tories, he ardently supported “Empire Free Trade,” fixing tariffs on goods originating elsewhere. This detonated a demolition charge under his party.
Free Trade was an article of faith to Tories like Churchill, then just embarked on his remarkable career. The prime minister, Arthur Balfour, had succeeded his uncle, Lord Salisbury. He was highly intelligent but rather languid and detached: a fellow MP later remarked, “He saw a great deal of life from afar.” Balfour himself famously quipped, “Nothing matters very much.” But Free Trade mattered a great deal.
The Liberal landslide
By 1906 the Tories were played out, burdened by Boer War controversies, riven over Tariff Reform, and led by the laconic Balfour. In the January-February election they suffered a stunning defeat. The Liberals returned with a margin of 350 seats in the House of Commons. The aging Campbell-Bannerman (whom many hoped would take a peerage and make way for someone more vigorous, like Asquith) formed a government. He shrewdly made Asquith Chancellor of the Exchequer, traditionally an office second only to the premiership. Asquith would spend the next 11 years, some of the most tumultuous of modern British history, in Downing Street.
The Liberals took office with a long agenda. They had to address the increasingly visible and clamant social problems created by industrialization, urbanization, and population growth. The parlous conditions in which the British working class lived had been highlighted by detailed studies conducted in the 1880s and 1890s by Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree. This was underscored by the high rejection rate among volunteers during the Boer War. (And British Army doctors were not terribly choosey.)
Liberals, Labour, and Lords
The Liberals, wishing to keep their majority, faced a challenge: many of the working class did not meet the property qualification to vote. But a growing number, mostly skilled workers, did—and their sympathies were Liberal. The Trade Unions had been been growing, and their officials met the voting criteria. Supported by union funds (MPs were not paid until 1911), they won seats as Liberals. The Labour Party was founded in 1900, and won 29 seats in 1906. It did not take a genius to realize that Labour would only grow more significant.
To hold its working class voters and keep the Labour Party on its side, Campbell-Bannerman’s government had to deliver on promises. The Liberals crafted 22 bills, mostly targeted at working class issues. Asquith, as Chancellor, began work on what ultimately became the 1908 Old Age Pensions Act, designed to prevent indigence or the loathed poor house. It was the first plank in the social security structure that Clement Attlee’s Labour government would complete 40 years later.
Almost immediately, the Liberals hit a wall: the unelected House of Lords, with its 400-seat inbuilt Tory majority. The Lords exercised an absolute veto over bills passed by the House of Commons. The only exception was finance—the budget originated in the House of Commons and the Lords had not rejected it in two centuries. But all other bills were fair game. Like Salisbury in the 1880s, the Tories used the Lords’ veto to block Liberal legislation—a very dangerous tactic.
Campbell-Bannerman’s answer was to “fill the cup.” If the Liberals kept serving up bills and the Lords kept vetoing them, public opinion would turn against the Lords. Or so he hoped.
Asquith, Churchill and Lloyd George
Asquith and others had joined several intrigues aimed at pushing Campbell-Bannerman into retirement. The Prime Minister survived until his health failed. On 1 April 1908, after multiple heart attacks, he resigned. H.H. Asquith was the obvious heir. He left for Biarritz, France, where King Edward VII was on holiday. Receiving the King’s commission to form a government, he returned to London to work through eight years of growing crises. No prime minister had encountered so many challenges since William Pitt the Younger had confronted Napoleon.
Asquith reshaped the Cabinet. David Lloyd George, a Welsh solicitor, became Chancellor of the Exchequer. A Non-Conformist like Asquith, he was a major figure in the more radical wing of the party. Winston Churchill, only a Liberal for four years, entered the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. These two intelligent, ambitious future prime ministers provided much of the firepower and nearly all the color in the Asquith government. It reflects well on Asquith’s self-assurance that he successfully managed both of them for so long.
Asquith as Prime Minister
Asquith always maintained an appearance of calm. He allowed his cabinet colleagues a great deal of leeway, but reserved the final word on any policy for himself. Although critics found him detached, this approach served him well over the next few years.
The most immediate problem was the continuous obstinacy of the House of Lords. Campbell Bannerman’s “filling the cup” had produced no results. Lloyd George needed new revenue streams to finance the old-age pension schemes Asquith had devised. Moreover, the Anglo-German naval race was on—and it was expensive. A dominant navy was a necessity for Britain. For Germany, as Churchill later said, it was a mere luxury. But dreadnought battleships were costly, and many were needed to match Germany’s building program.
“That dreadful little man”
The Lords rejected bill after bill without, apparently, arousing public ire. Brilliant and devious, Lloyd George found the answer: he baited the Lords into doing something clearly unconstitutional.
Lloyd George enraged the Lords by raising taxes on land and levying a “supertax” on income over £5,000 (about $750,000 today). This was aimed squarely at the Lords, most of whom owned broad acres which often yielded huge rents. It was a root-and-branch assault on the peerage. Churchill, born in Blenheim Palace as the grandson of a duke, became the Welshman’s unlikely ally. His cousin, the Duke of Marlborough, forbade Lloyd George’s name at Blenheim, referring to him as “that dreadful little man.” Churchill himself was denounced by many Tories as a traitor to his class. One Duke cancelled his one-guinea ($7.40 today) subscription to the local football club. Another reduced his charitable donation to a London hospital. A third threatened to sack the workers on his estate.
Undeterred, Asquith extracted from a reluctant Edward VII a commitment to use his prerogative powers to create enough Liberal peers to reverse the Tory majority in the House of Lords—but only, the King stipulated, after a general election had been won by the Liberals on this issue. In November 1909 the Lords rejected the Budget. In January 1910 the election produced a virtual tie: 275 Liberals, 273 Conservatives. But Asquith still held a commanding majority, supported by 40 Labour members and 82 Irish Nationalists. Suddenly, the Lords lost interest in the Budget, which then passed without a murmur.
Pressing on
Asquith, however, had no intention of stopping there. He now focused on a Parliament Act to limit the Lords’ absolute veto: any measure that passed three successive sessions of the Commons became law. This satisfied the Labour members, whose numbers had increased.
Dwarfing all other issues was the reemergence of Irish nationalism. John Redmond, the Irish Party leader, made his continuing support of the Liberals contingent on the introduction of a new Home Rule bill. The Tories were now fighting, not to save Dukes from penury, but to block Irish self-government.
Edward VII died suddenly in May 1910. Asquith dully convinced the new King, George V, to promise to appoint enough peers to pass the Parliament Act. Like his father, the King made that contingent on a general election. In December, the voters, wearying perhaps of the whole business, left the main parties tied with almost the same result as the past January.
1911 was a year of furious political strife, when campaigners for women’s suffrage became more militant and trade unions more strike-prone. Asquith never lost his nerve (although he began to drink more heavily). A list of 249 new peers was prepared. His determination to push ahead led to the disintegration of the Tories. Balfour and Lord Lansdowne, Tory Leader in the Lords, lost control of their followers. Balfour decided he needed a vacation abroad. In the Lords, hard-liners like the 92-year-old Lord Halsbury, determined to “die in the last ditch.”
Victory—and more struggle
Finally, a group of moderate Tory peers led by Lord Curzon, a former Viceroy of India, acknowledged the inevitable and voted with the Liberals. The Parliament Bill passed. Asquith’s steadiness had won him a victory often underestimated today. The end of hereditary aristocratic privilege was essential to the further modernization and democratization of British political life. But Asquith had no time to enjoy his victory; looming ahead was the Third Home Rule Bill. This promised to produce a greater crisis than any tax-averse Duke could ever dream.5
As the fight over the Parliament Bill reached its climax, minds at Westminster were already turning to Irish Home Rule. Under Salisbury and Balfour, the Tories had relied on the Lords to block Home Rule. But the Lords were now toothless, or at least hobbled, and Ulster remained defiantly unionist. “Ulster will fight; Ulster will be right” was the battle cry of Lord Randolph Churchill in Salisbury’s time. But in 1911 Salisbury was in the grave, while Balfour, after losing three elections in a row, was a forlorn Tory leader.
Balfour’s replacement, Andrew Bonar Law, was a very different kind of man. Born in Canada of Ulster Scots stock, he had made a fortune in industry and entered Conservative politics. His commitment to protect Protestant Ulster from “Rome Rule” was absolute. Even before Asquith’s government introduced the Third Home Rule Bill, Ulster was organizing to resist, led by Edward Carson, a Dublin Protestant lawyer, and James Craig, a wealthy Ulster businessman. (Craig’s father, a millionaire whisky distiller, left him with a £100,000 legacy.) For the next three years the triumvirate of Law, Carson, and Craig kept Ulster’s future at the center of British politics, constantly raising the pressure, temperature, and stakes.
At the precipice
Law and Carson led the Conservative opposition in Parliament, while Craig organized the paramilitary Ulster Volunteers. At first, they drilled with wooden weapons, then with rifles smuggled from Germany. Trained by former British Army officers, the army soon looked like a serious military force. In response, John Redmond organized the republican Irish Volunteers. Clashes occurred between British soldiers and civilians. In Dublin, several died in the rising tensions.
A round table conference of party leaders at Buckingham Palace failed to find a compromise. Asquith was faced with a dilemma, having to deliver on his promises in the face of fearful opposition. The inexorable Parliament Act meant that Home Rule would become law no later than September 1914. What would happen then? Would British soldiers fight against their Ulster countrymen? Would southern Ireland explode?
“The muddy byways of Fermanagh and Tyrone”
Suddenly, a yet graver event occurred. Churchill himself gives the best account of the abrupt end of the 1914 Home Rule crisis. It came on Friday, 24 July:
The discussion turned principally upon the boundaries of Fermanagh and Tyrone. To this pass had the Irish factions in their insensate warfare been able to drive their respective British champions. Upon the disposition of these clusters of humble parishes turned at that moment the political future of Great Britain…. the Cabinet was about to separate, when the quiet grave tones of [Foreign Minister] Sir Edward Grey’s voice were heard reading a document which had just been brought to him from the Foreign Office. It was the Austrian note to Serbia.
He had been reading or speaking for several minutes before I could disengage my mind from the tedious and bewildering debate which had just closed. We were all very tired, but gradually as the phrases and sentences followed one another, impressions of a wholly different character began to form in my mind.
This note was clearly an ultimatum; but it was an ultimatum such as had never been penned in modern times. As the reading proceeded it seemed absolutely impossible that any State in the world could accept it, or that any acceptance, however abject, would satisfy the aggressor. The parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone faded back into the mists and squalls of Ireland, and a strange light began immediately, but by perceptible gradations, to fall and grow upon the map of Europe.6
Within two weeks, Europe was at war. Asquith and the Liberal Party were facing an utterly unprecedented situation that would ultimately prove fatal to both.
Endnotes and further reading
1 For background on Asquith’s career, Sir Robert Ensor’s classic England 1870-1914, originally published in 1936, is still worth consulting. Peter Clarke’s Hope and Glory: Britain 1900-2000, 2nd ed. (London: 2004) updates Ensor’s concluding chapters. A.J.P. Taylor’s brilliant English History 1914-1945 (Oxford, 1965) covers Asquith’s decline and fall.
2 Winston S. Churchill, Great Contemporaries (1937; London: Leo Cooper, 1990), 93-94. Readers should seek out the annotated ISI edition, 2012.
3 Quoted in Stephen Bates, Asquith (London: Haus, 2006), 11.
4 Bates, Asquith, 25. Margot Asquith’s Autobiography (1920) was republished in London, 1968. See also Michael and Eleanor Brock, eds., Margot Asquith’s Great War Diary 1914-1916: The View from Downing Street (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)
5 Among those who might have become peers in 1911 were the novelist Thomas Hardy and J.M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan.
6 Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, vol. 1, 1911-1914 (London, Thornton Butterworth, 1923), 192-93. The series of prewar crises, over the Lords, Home Rule, women’s suffrage, and labor strife, are brilliantly covered in George Dangerfield’s classic The Strange Death of Liberal England, first published in 1935 and still in print. Dangerfield argued that only the First World War saved the United Kingdom from a civil war. It found little favor with professional historians, but seems more plausible now than in 1935.
The author
Dr. Callahan is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Delaware and a leading scholar of the Indian Army in the two World Wars. He taught at the University for 38 years and was director of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program, where an annual student prize bears his name. Among his books are Churchill and His Generals (2007) and Churchill: Retreat from Empire (1997).