H. H. Asquith

Prime minister of the United Kingdom (1908-1916)

• Born: September 12, 1852
• Birthplace: Morley, Yorkshire, England
• Died: February 15, 1928
• Place of death: The Wharf, Sutton Courtney, Berkshire, England

As prime minister, Asquith steered the British government through a period of acute crisis that saw passage of major social reform legislation, legal alteration of the constitutional relationship between the two houses of Parliament, severe differences between parties regarding the future position of Ireland within the United Kingdom, and British entry into World War I.

Early Life

H. H. Asquith (AS-kwihth) was the second son of Joseph Dixon Asquith and Emily Willans Asquith. The security of Asquith’s middle-class youth was affected by his father’s death when he was eight and by his mother’s always precarious health. Sent with his elder brother to live in London, he was educated at the City of London School. Having gained a classical scholarship, he entered Balliol College, Oxford, in 1870. He obtained first-class degrees in both Classical Mods (1872) and Greats (1874) and was awarded the Craven Scholarship. He became president of the Oxford Union during his last term. He was elected a fellow of Balliol in 1874. In 1876, he was called to the bar, but his interest in the law was always to be secondary to his commitment to politics. Asquith’s success at the bar was not assured until 1888, when he served with distinction as junior counsel for Charles Stuart Parnell in clearing his name of charges that were brought in The Times of London. Asquith became a Queen’s Counsel in 1890.

In 1877, Asquith and Helen Melland, the daughter of a Manchester physician, were married. The union produced four sons and a daughter. Asquith’s first wife died in 1891, leaving him with five children to rear. In 1894, he was married to Emma Alice Margaret “Margot” Tennant, the daughter of a wealthy Liberal businessman. They had five children, but only one son and one daughter survived infancy. Margot Asquith was a notable figure in her own right; her notorious outspokenness was not always helpful to her husband’s political career, but her numerous connections and lavish hospitality were.

Life’s Work

In 1886, Asquith was elected to Parliament for the Scottish seat of East Fife as a supporter of William Ewart Gladstone’s policy of granting home rule to Ireland. In the 1893 general election, Asquith was returned for East Fife, and Gladstone invited him to enter the cabinet as Home Secretary. Asquith was just short of his fortieth birthday. It was a brilliant start, and Gladstone’s confidence was sustained by Asquith’s solid record in office. The prime minister, however, continued to pursue Irish home rule as his main, and ultimately unachieved, goal. Asquith’s early enthusiasm for this cause dimmed as he perceived that the issue was too narrow to garner the support of the whole Liberal Party, and he regretted the opportunities lost for constructive legislation as home rule consumed parliamentary time and the government’s energies. When Gladstone resigned in 1894 and was succeeded by Lord Rosebery, Asquith was not unhappy, but Rosebery’s imperialist policies further divided the Liberal Party, which gave up office in 1895.

Asquith had made his mark in the brief Liberal government. His ease in debate, the clarity of his presentations, and his fine speaking voice all were assets. Of medium height, he was solidly built, and in his later years was somewhat overweight. His fine forehead, prominent nose, and even features were in time crowned by white hair that gave him a dignified appearance appropriate to the high station he would achieve. A decade would pass, however, before the Liberals and Asquith would return to political office.

In 1899, the Liberal members of Parliament chose Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman as party leader. The Boer War (1899-1902) worked to exacerbate divisions in the Liberal Party and to separate its new leader from Asquith, who publicly objected to Campbell-Bannerman’s description of British actions in South Africa as “methods of barbarism.” When it became likely in 1905 that the Conservatives would soon surrender office, Asquith was among those “Liberal Imperialists” who were reluctant to see Campbell-Bannerman become prime minister without first reaching terms with him. Yet when Campbell-Bannerman offered Asquith the chancellorship of the Exchequer and thus the virtual succession to the premiership, Asquith quickly accepted.

Asquith soon achieved recognition as the new government’s most effective speaker. In cabinet, Asquith’s judicious turn of mind and shrewd political judgment reinforced his claims as Campbell-Bannerman’s heir apparent. He also proved to be a highly capable Chancellor of the Exchequer, who in his 1907 budget distinguished for the first time between rates of taxation on earned and unearned incomes, a feature that has remained a part of the British tax system. Asquith’s 1908 budget was the first to make provision for old-age pensions. Both budgets give grounds for viewing Asquith as one of the founders of the modern British welfare state.

Campbell-Bannerman, whose health was failing rapidly, tendered his resignation in early April, 1908, to the king, who sent for Asquith to form a new government as prime minister. At age fifty-five, at the peak of his powers and generally regarded as the best and obvious choice for the premiership, Asquith took up the position he would hold for eight years and eight months of almost uninterrupted crisis. He made relatively few changes in the cabinet he inherited. Notably, David Lloyd George became Chancellor of the Exchequer and Winston Churchill entered the cabinet as president of the Board of Trade in succession to Lloyd George.

The general election of 1906 had given the Liberal Party, with its Labour and Irish Nationalist allies, a huge majority in the House of Commons. The hereditary House of Lords, however, remained overwhelmingly Conservative in composition, and regularly rejected important Liberal bills that had passed the representative house by large majorities. Constitutional crisis between the two houses finally came over the 1909 budget, which sought new revenues for naval armaments and social programs by levying new taxes, notably on land values. The Lords summarily rejected the budget, thus challenging the Commons’ traditional power of the purse.

The government went to the people in January, 1910, in what was essentially a referendum on which house would have the last word on finance. The voters returned 275 Liberals, along with forty Labour and eighty-two Irish, to give the government a good working majority over the 273 Conservatives elected. While this decided the matter of the budget, which now went through the Lords without a division, it left the Liberals dependent on their allies for their majority. Both Labour and Irish had a price for their support, with the latter calling on the government to redeem the standing Liberal pledge to give Ireland home rule.

The immediate issue, however, was constitutional: Would the government insist on legislation limiting the veto power of the House of Lords? Asquith was determined that the power of the Lords should be legally circumscribed, and that if the House of Lords refused to accept this, the king would have to solve the constitutional impasse by creating enough new peers to carry such legislation through the upper house. The king consented to do so, subject to the voters’ sustaining the government and its policy in another election, held in December, 1910, and slightly increased the government’s majority.

The bill the Lords were now asked to accept denied them any veto over financial legislation and left them a two-year suspensory veto on all other legislation. In return for an increase in its powers, the House of Commons was made more representative of the will of the people by shortening the statutory length of a parliament from seven to five years. If the House of Lords refused these proposals, it would face a flood tide of new peers. The Lords escaped this fate by passing the Parliament Act in August, 1911. Asquith’s determination had given the cause of representative democracy its most important victory in twentieth century Great Britain over the dead hand of the past and the power of the privileged few. The price, however, had been high: Party disputes had acquired a rancorous edge, the Liberals had lost their independent majority in the Commons, and the government now had to bring in an Irish home rule bill.

Although the Lords used their suspensory veto to delay its passage from 1912 to 1914, a home rule bill became law in the latter year. Home rule had aroused determined opposition in Protestant Ulster, which did not wish to be subordinated to a Roman Catholic Dublin parliament. When Ulsterites threatened armed resistance, it appeared to some army officers stationed at the Curragh camp in Ireland that they might be called on to impose home rule on a resisting Ulster. They indicated in March, 1914, that they would rather leave the service than do that. When an improper reassurance was given them by the war secretary, Asquith himself took over the office, which he still occupied when war broke out in July. On Great Britain’s entry into World War I, Asquith appointed the nonpolitical soldier Lord Kitchener to the post.

Asquith’s government was strained to its capacity to cope with a conflict whose scope and duration appeared open-ended. Crisis came in May, 1915, when the government was accused of inadequate provision of artillery shells to the army, and when the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir John Fisher, resigned because of differences with his political chief, the First Lord of the Admiralty, over naval resources for the campaign at the Dardanelles. Churchill, who had been First Lord since 1911, was deeply committed to this campaign to gain the straits and Gallipoli Peninsula as steps to securing Constantinople and driving Turkey out of the war.

The Conservative leadership, who had observed a party truce since the outbreak of war, informed Asquith that they must share responsibility for war policy or be free to criticize that policy. Accordingly, Asquith formed a coalition government, bringing in the Tories and excluding Churchill and Richard B. Haldane, both strongly disliked by the Conservatives. A Labour Party representative was also included in the government, while Lloyd George became head of a new ministry of munitions. When Lord Kitchener died in the summer of 1916, Lloyd George became the new secretary of state for war.

Asquith’s coalition government was never a happy one, and Lloyd George, supported by many Tories, believed that Asquith himself was insufficiently vigorous to lead Great Britain to victory. After some bitter infighting, in December, 1916, Asquith resigned and Lloyd George succeeded him as prime minister. The price of an activist prime minister was conflict between the premier and military leadership. This led to General Sir Frederick Maurice charging in May, 1918, that the government had incorrectly stated the number of troops it had furnished to the army in France in early 1918, prior to the German spring offensive. When Asquith called for a select committee to investigate the general’s charges, the government treated the issue as a vote of confidence, which it won handily, although about a hundred Liberals voted with Asquith.

When victory came in November, 1918, the Lloyd George coalition government went to the people for a renewed mandate. The prime minister and the Tory Party leader, Bonar Law, issued a letter of endorsement to their supporters, which did not include most of those Liberals who had voted with Asquith in the Maurice debate. Asquith disdainfully called the coalition leaders’ letter of endorsement a “coupon,” a name that has stuck to the 1918 election. The voters, however, overwhelmingly supported the government, and only about twenty-five independent or Asquithian Liberals were returned to the new parliament. Asquith was not among them, having been defeated in East Fife after thirty-two years. He reentered the Commons for Paisley, Scotland, early in 1920.

Asquith’s last significant action in the House of Commons came after the 1923 general election, in which the voters rejected a Conservative Party platform that included tariffs and made the Labour Party second in representation, with 191 seats to the Tories’ 258 seats. The 158 Liberals, led by Asquith, gave their support to Labour, which thus formed a government for the first time in British history. This did not benefit the Liberals, who were reduced to forty seats following the 1924 general election, and Asquith was defeated at Paisley. He accepted a peerage as earl of Oxford and Asquith in 1925; the same year he was made a Knight of the Garter. He resigned as leader of the Liberal Party in October, 1926, after prolonged disagreements with Lloyd George over party matters. Asquith died on February 15, 1928, and was buried in Sutton Courtney, Berkshire.

Significance

Asquith’s finest achievement was the Parliament Act of 1911, which remains a landmark on Great Britain’s path to full representative democracy. Although Asquith’s liberalism was broad enough to encompass a considerable role for state action, he was sensitive to the rank-and-file Liberal conviction that the state should intrude minimally on the individual. This principle was sorely tested in World War I, and once a coalition government was formed in May, 1915, the key issue facing Asquith was that of conscription. As military service, with its risk of death or maiming, is the ultimate requirement the state can demand of the citizen, many Liberals deeply opposed it, while Tories increasingly demanded it. For too long, Asquith juggled the issues; to many observers, it seemed that he was seeking more to preserve balance within the government than to win the war.

Asquith’s penchant for trying to finesse divisive issues was fortified by a growing self-indulgence. At one stage in the war, a sympathetic but acute observer commented,

It was very typical of him that in the middle of this tremendous crisis he should go away for the week-end. Typical both of his qualities and of his defects; of his extraordinary composure and of his easy going habits.

When he had exhausted all expedients, Asquith carried through conscription in May, 1916, but he had forfeited the sympathy of the Liberal faithful without appeasing his critics, who believed that winning the war required decisive people and stern measures. The test of total war thus damaged the high reputation that Asquith had won in peace.

Bibliography

Asquith, Emma Alice Margaret. Autobiography. 2 vols. London: Thornton Butterworth, 1920, 1922. An entertaining autobiography, although lacking in dispassionate judgment and objectivity.

Asquith, Herbert Henry. Letters to Venetia Stanley. Selected and edited by Michael Brock and Eleanor Brock. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Between January, 1912, and May, 1915, Asquith wrote some 560 letters to a woman thirty years his junior; the correspondence ended abruptly when she informed him that she intended to marry a man who was one of his own government ministers. In these letters, the prime minister generously revealed both his feelings and state secrets, thus providing a remarkable insight into his life during its most strenuous years.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Memories and Reflections, 1852-1927. 2 vols. London: Cassell, 1928. While Asquith disclaimed that he was writing autobiography, these volumes were surely intended to leave to posterity his view of events and his image of himself.

Clifford, Colin. The Asquiths. London: John Murray, 2002. Recounts the lives of Asquith and his four children, describing how the family was adversely affected by World War I. While Asquith struggled to direct the conflict, his three sons bravely fought in the trenches.

Jenkins, Roy. Asquith, Portrait of a Man and an Era. London: Collins, 1978. Himself a distinguished Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jenkins brings to his account the insights of a practicing politician. The 1978 edition contains passages suppressed in the original 1964 edition in deference to the feelings of Lady Violet Bonham Carter, daughter of Asquith, guardian of his memory, and herself an active politician and member of Parliament.

Koss, Stephen. Asquith. London: A. Lane, 1976. Generally regarded as the best biography of Asquith, it is critical without being unfair, and assesses his strengths and weaknesses with sensitivity and thoughtfulness.

Lloyd, Trevor Owen. Empire to Welfare State: English History, 1906-1976. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. The early chapters of this distinguished survey present a good picture of the course of English history during Asquith’s most active years and provide the context for his life’s work.

Packer, Ian. Liberal Government and Politics, 1905-1915. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. An analysis of British Liberalism during the early years of the twentieth century, describing the major concerns of Liberals and how the party fashioned its domestic and foreign policies. Concludes with a section on Asquith’s government and World War I.

Spender, John A., and Cyril Asquith. The Life of Herbert Henry Asquith, Lord Oxford and Asquith. 2 vols. London: Hutchinson, 1932. Written by a distinguished Liberal publicist and one of Asquith’s sons, these volumes present the official view of Asquith as one of the presiding deities within the shrine of political Liberalism.