Asquith (14 page)

There were therefore plenty of reasons why Margot Tennant might have hesitated over the marriage. And hesitate she certainly did, keeping Asquith for two years on a see-saw of alternating hope and despair. In the early summer of 1892 it seemed as though he might
quickly succeed. Then in August, after the formation of the Government, he went for the first time to Glen, the Temiant home in Peeblesshire where she had lived most of her life. Here she not only took him to the grave of her sister who had died in 1886, and made him indulge in the almost unbelievably un-Asquithian behaviour of kneeling with her on the grass and praying together, but also sent him away “ very sad at heart,” with the “ candle of hope ” nearly blown out. Then it revived again before flickering once more after a Sunday at Balliol. “ I was rather depressed when I went to bed last night,” Asquith wrote in the following year “ and lay awake ... thinking of what you told me about your interview with the old Master.” This, however, appeared to be only a momentary flicker, for he concluded the paragraph: “ But our talk in the train this morning made me a different man.” A few months later he was once more cast down, and there was even a faint trace of exasperation in his letters: “ I daresay my feelings are made rather morbidly sensitive just now, and my mental vision where you are concerned is dislocated by the strong conviction I have that this is, for good or bad, a most critical time in both our lives. I dread more than I can tell having to go back (and for always) to where we were two months ago....” But a short time afterwards he was once again elated: “ And this afternoon as I sat on the Treasury Bench, answering question?, I got your telegram and read it furtively, and crammed it hastily into my trousers pocket, until I could get out of the House and read it over and over again in my little room.”

And so it went on until a short time before their marriage. The engagement when it was finally agreed upon and announced was a short one. Miss Tennant had at last suppressed her fears about the five children, and overcome the state of mind which she described as “ groping as I had been for years to find a character and intellect superior to my own, I did not feel equal to facing it when I found it.” And Asquith, for the moment, had undoubtedly achieved what he wanted. He had reversed the pattern followed by many men of being rather discontented with one woman, and then, when an opportunity for fresh choice presented itself, proceeding to marry someone who was as similar as possible to his first wife. Instead, he claimed complete happiness while his first marriage lasted, but followed this up by the early acquisition of a second wife who was in almost every respect the direct opposite of Helen Asquith. The marriage which he began in Hanover Square in his forty-second year and on a high tide of worldly
success was to be quite different, both emotionally and socially, from that which seventeen years before he had entered upon in Didsbury Parish Church.

His wedding gave the new Government one of its few hours of harmony. The Rosebery Cabinet was a singularly unhappy one in which to serve. Within eight days of its formation the Prime Minister made what Asquith described as his
faux pas
in the House of Lords and incensed the radical wing of the party and their Irish supporters by suggesting that Home Rule could not be achieved until a majority of the English members in the House of Commons were in its favour. This ‘ ‘ predominant partner ” approach was to provide the Unionists with one of their most convenient lines of defence over the next twenty years; and its enunciation by the head of a Liberal Government helped to provoke a radical revolt in the House of Commons on the following day. Labouchere moved an amendment to the address calling for the almost complete abolition of the House of Lords veto and carried it by a majority of two, the opposition abstaining. To be defeated on such an occasion was an unusual and humiliating experience for a Government. Resignation was avoided by the expedient of voting down the amended address and bringing in a new one in its place; but it was an inauspicious beginning.

Relations between Rosebery and Harcourt quickly deteriorated. Harcourt was busy preparing (with the help of Alfred Milner who was chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue) and then piloting through the House of Commons his famous
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death duties ” Budget. This measure—paradoxically the only notable achievement of the administration over which he presided—was distasteful to Rosebery. There is dispute as to how much opposition the Prime Minister offered in the Cabinet (" we spent dreary hours listening to H(arcourt) reading out typewritten discourses on the Budget,” he later recorded
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) but what is certain is that he wrote a hostile memorandum to Harcourt, who replied in uncompromising and even bitter terms,
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and that he made little attempt to present a united front to the Queen.

¹
_{The tone of the exchange may be gauged from a passage in which Harcourt, replying to a suggestion ofRosebery’s that the whole landowning class would be alienated from the Liberal Party, wrote: " If it be so, the Liberal Party will share the fate of another party which was founded 1,894 years ago, of which it was written that it was 4 hard for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom.’ I think it is highly probable that there are many young men who will go away sorrowful because they have great possessions.”}

“With regard to the Budget, it is practically passed,” he wrote to her on July 13 th, “and it would be impossible now to make any change in its provisions. Lord Rosebery is himself inclined to take a somewhat gloomy view of its effect on the class to which he himself belongs.”
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Henceforward the Prime Minister and the leader of the House of Commons were barely on speaking terms. They communicated only by means of papers circulated in red despatch boxes or by cold exchanges across the Cabinet table. This rupture extended to policy. There were in effect two Governments. Harcourt occupied himself with his Budget (with which interference from the House of Lords w^ s still regarded as unthinkable), with the new issue of local option (in licensing), and with a constant nagging watch upon Lord Kimberley, designed to exorcise any trace of a “ forward policy ” from the Foreign Office. When Rosebery threw the question of the relations between the two Houses into the centre of politics, Harcourt stood consciously (and unnaturally) aloof from the whole issue, and when Lord Spencer wrote to remonstrate with him, he replied, blandly but surprisingly, “As you know I am not a supporter of the present Government.”
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Asquith, although a natural “Roseberyite,” wrote that “on the merits of most of the points at issue I was disposed to side with Harcourt.” But this feeling about the merits was more than balanced by his conviction that Harcourt’s personal behaviour was intolerable. “ His lack of any sense of proportion,” he wrote, “ his incapacity for self-restraint, and his perverse delight in inflaming and embittering every controversy, made co-operation with him always difficult and often impossible. Cabinet life under such conditions was a weariness both to the flesh and to the spirit.”
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Like a number of other ministers Asquith tried to get on with his departmental work and avoid being too much embroiled in the quarrel. Rosebery always wrote to him on terms of close friendship and even complicity (“ 67 ton guns are from time to time being discharged from a certain fortress in the New
Forest
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at the devoted Kimberley. ... I did wish you had been in Mount Street on Saturday. I received orders from the C. of E. on the subject of poor M.
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on Friday afternoon . . .”) and Asquith fully reciprocated this friendliness. But he was more concerned at this stage with completing his successful tenure of the Home Office than with taking sides and attempting to drive the Liberal Party in one direction or the other.

¹
_{Harcourt built a house called Mai wood, near Lyndhurst, in 1883. It was designed in what was sometimes called the “ parliamentary style ” and bore a strong resemblance to Highbury which Joseph Chamberlain had built a few years earlier. At the end of his life Harcourt inherited (from his nephew) the old family mansion of Nuneham, near Oxford, and died there. But he always greatly preferred Malwood.}

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_{Arnold Morley, the Postmaster General.}

During the fifteen months between the retirement of Gladstone and the fall of the Government three aspects of Asquith’s work attracted most attention. The first was a thankless attempt to bring the Welsh Disestablishment Bill to a stage at which it was ready for slaughter by the House of Lords. The bill had been introduced and then abandoned because of the Home Rule Bill in 1893, and the procedure was repeated, still more perfunctorily on this occasion, in the short session of 1894, when Harcourt’s Budget swallowed up most of the available time. In 1895, however, it was given a higher priority, and itself became the main consumer of parliamentary days. But it made very slow progress. Asquith had to deal not only with determined opposition and obstruction from the Unionists, but also with sporadic cross-fire from Welsh Liberals who thought the Government was not going far enough. Lloyd George, who had been first elected in 1891 and whose political interest in those days was primarily sectarian, was prominent and extreme amongst these. It was Asquith’s first contact with him.

It was also Asquith’s first experience of trying to push a big, controversial bill, inch by inch, through the House of Commons. As could have been foreseen, he discharged this duty with skill and urbanity, but he did not enjoy the manoeuvring which it involved and he did not warm during the process to the Welsh nonconformists whose interests he was serving. The frequent and long-winded deputations from Welsh members he found even more trying than the almost endless sittings in the House, and a certain antipathy towards the Welsh temperament, which in later life (even before 1916) he
never made much effort to conceal, may well have begun with his troubles over the Disestablishment Bill. After twelve nights in committee and remarkably little progress, “ it was with a sigh of relief,” Asquith wrote, “ that, when the Government was defeated on another issue, I laid down my thankless task.”
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Asquith was simultaneously occupied with a less sterile legislative task. This was a Factories and Workshops Bill, which rounded off one of the most constructive aspects of his work at the Home Office. Within a few months of his appointment he had carried through a substantial strengthening of the Factory Inspectorate, including the notable innovation of appointing the first women inspectors. A year later he again increased the establishment of this division of his department and appointed another two women, the first two having already proved themselves successful. In addition he set up six committees to enquire into some of the most notorious “ dangerous trades ” of the period, such as chemicals, pottery and paint, and generally gave a higher priority, in respect both of his own attention and of the allocation of the most talented civil servants, to the industrial side of the Home Office’s work than had hitherto been the practice.

The Factories Bill, which he introduced in March, 1895, contained a mixed bag of provisions. A necessary minimum of space for each person employed was laid down. New rules for the reporting and investigation of accidents were made and a new standard of protection against moving machinery was ordered. Fire escapes for all industrial premises were stipulated. Restrictions were placed on overtime working, and docks and laundries were brought for the first time within the scope of factory legislation. Although a complicated and far-ranging measure it was not regarded as controversial in a strict party sense. The committee stage was taken not on the floor of the House of Commons, but in what was then called the Grand Committee on Trade. As a result the progress of the Factories Bill was not blocked by the Welsh Church Bill. Even so, it was still in committee when the Government resigned on June 24th. The new Government agreed to assist its passage, however, and on July 6th, the day before the dissolution, it went through all stages in the House of Lords and received the royal assent.

Asquith’s most notable foray into general politics during this period was in the debate on the address at the beginning of the 1895 session. In addition to dealing with an amendment affecting the Home Office he
also replied to a much wider-ranging one moved by Chamberlain which accused the Government of wasting the time of the House by putting before it measures which were known to have no chance of passing into law. Instead of “ filling up the cup ” with grievances against the House of Lords, Chamberlain argued, the Government should proceed to lay before Parliament any constitutional proposals which it had in mind. The object of the amendment was to expose the split between Rosebery and Harcourt on House of Lords reform, but for Chamberlain, with his past support of Welsh disestablishment and his past attacks on the peers, it was rash ground to choose.

Asquith used the opportunity presented by this unusual lowering of Chamberlain’s parliamentary guard to hammer him mercilessly. “ Now, Sir,” he concluded, “ I should be glad to know, and the House would be glad to know.. .. what my right honourable friend
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thinks has happened to the cup which was nearly full in 1885 (when Chamberlain had himself originated the phrase), and how he explains that in his view the House of Lords, which, as he told the electors then, had ‘ sheltered every abuse and protected every privilege for nearly a century ’ has become, as he apparently thinks it has, the last refuge of popular liberty? ”
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“Asquith’s speech last night was a splendid success,” Harcourt wrote to his son with one of the bursts of generous enthusiasm which compensated for much of his tiresomeness. “ He knocked Joe into a cocked hat. Even the Tories admit that the latter was nowhere. ... I don’t think I have ever heard a speech which created so great an effect in the House.
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