Asquith (15 page)

¹
_{As he rather surprisingly still called Chamberlain.}

The Government had a good debating spring, for both Harcourt himself and Henry Fowler, the new Secretary of State for India, achieved successes almost as notable as Asquith’s, the former with a denunciation of bimetallism and the latter with a defence of the Indian cotton duties. Unpromising though the subjects sound, these achievements raised the stock of the Government, and Harcourt was able to write triumphantly to the Chief Whip of “ our insolent foes (going) chapfallen to eat their addled Easter eggs.”

The triumphs did not long continue. The Government had very small majorities on many of the Welsh Church divisions in May and early June. But defeat came, in a thin House (Asquith like many others was paired), on the unexpected issue of a motion to reduce Campbell-Bannerman’s salary because of deficiencies in the supply of cordite.

Had the Cabinet wished to fight back and get the House to reverse this decision they could no doubt have done so. Alternatively they could have asked for a dissolution. But after a four hour discussion ministers decided against either move. Divided on so many other issues, Rosebery and Harcourt were united in agreeing that, for a weak Government, they had run their course, and that it was time to go. Asquith did not originally agree with them—only Ripon and Tweedmouth did—but like the rest of the Cabinet he came into line. Rosebery resigned that evening and left it to Salisbury, for whom the Queen immediately sent, to arrange for the dissolution of Parliament. Asquith handed over his seals to Sir Matthew Ridley with the secure knowledge that he had scored an outstanding success during his thirty-four months of office.

The election of 1895 was a disaster for the Liberals. There was no unity of policy. Morley fought on Home Rule. Harcourt fought on local option. And Rosebery, insofar as he fought at all, did so on the House of Lords. His interventions on this or any other issue took place before the dissolution of Parliament. Once the campaign had properly begun, the convention that peers should not interfere in elections coalesced with his distaste for much of his party to make him give the widest possible berth to the scene of the contests. He hired a yacht and sailed round the North of Scotland, calling occasionally at remote fishing ports to receive, with mixed feelings, news of the mounting disasters.

Asquith had a hard campaign, fought without his wife who was ill in London, but his result—a majority increased from 294 to 716 —was much better than the general run of Liberal performance. This was not primarily due to his record as a minister or to his effectiveness as a campaigner. The Scottish lowlands as a whole, which had failed to swing to the Liberals in 1892, compensated by refusing to swing against them in 1895. Campbell-Bannerman, the only other member of the late Cabinet with a constituency in this area, also improved his majority. But in England the Liberal toll was severe. Harcourt was beaten at Derby and Morley at Newcastle-on-Tyne. Harcourt’s reverse occurred sufficiently early in the staggered election of those days for him to switch rapidly to West Monmouthshire, where local option was more popular, and secure his return there without any break in parliamentary service. But Morley remained out until the late autumn when he too retired to a haven in the Celtic fringe— Montrose Burghs.

Rosebery brought himself to write a short note of regret to Harcourt after the Derby result, but his real feelings were better expressed
in a letter which he wrote to Asquith on July 22nd. After commiserating with him on the “ insolent set made at you in the way of heckling,” and congratulating him on his “ admirable temper and composure,” he added: “ I think it would do one of our defeated colleagues infinite good to stand for East Fife. My only interest has been in individual elections like yours, for the general catastrophe was under the circumstances certain and inevitable. We may indeed congratulate ourselves that we are not more completely pulverised.”

Even so, the defeat was bad enough. The Liberals were reduced from 274 to 177. Lord Salisbury’s majority was 152, and the new Government, the first in which the Liberal Unionist leaders accepted office, showed every sign of being a long-lived one.

This meant that Asquith had to make major dispositions in his pattern of life. His political prospects had greatly advanced during the lifetime of the Liberal Government. In a party rent by faction he was the only man of note of whom no-one spoke ill. This was not because he was a weak figure without a clear-cut position. His moderate Roseberyite views were well known, but many of those who did not accept them nevertheless thought that the best hope for the future of the Liberal Party lay with him. “You need not mind any of the quarrels,” Sir William Harcourt said to Margot Asquith . . . “ your man is the man of the future.”
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Mr. Gladstone believed much the same; so did Lord Spencer; and so, more predictably, did Lord Rosebery.

From 1895 onwards Asquith believed that, without some unforeseen ill chance, he would one day be leader of the Liberal Party. But he was in no great hurry to hasten that day, partly because he was by nature a patient man, and partly because he would have suffered considerable personal inconvenience from becoming leader early in a long period of opposition. It would have involved devoting all his time to a salary-less occupation, and this he could not afford. His second marriage brought him £5,000 a year, but it also brought him a pattern of expenditure which precluded full-time politics unless his party were in office and he was paid another £5,000 a year as a minister.

In the autumn of 1894 he had taken a lease on 20, Cavendish Square, and this remained his London house, with the exception of the years in Downing Street, until 1920. It was a spacious and comfortable house, but inconvenient to run—all the food had to be
brought from a mews kitchen across the courtyard at the back,—and upon the scale at which it was maintained, extremely expensive. There were normally fourteen servants in the house, including a butler and two footmen, who were occupied with a continuous round of luncheon and dinner parties. In addition to the fourteen there were a coachman and boy in the stable. Until the Wharf, near Abingdon, was acquired nearly twenty years later, the Asquiths had no regular house out of London, so that expense at least was spared. But they usually took a house in Scotland for the later summer and early autumn; and Mrs. Asquith’s resumption of hunting soon after their marriage led to considerable expenditure which ended only when she finally sold her horses in 1906.

Even without the new lavishness which came with his second marriage, Asquith would have remained dependent on his professional earnings. He had five children—four of them boys—to educate, and after the age of about forty any return to the austerity of his early Hampstead days would have been most unwelcome to him. His marriage to Margot meant that his total family expenditure was much higher; but even had this not taken place he would still have had to return to the bar. He could never have afforded to be a full time politician in opposition. In 1888, well before the death of his first wife, he had told his pupil John Roskill that, if he achieved his immediate ambition of becoming Home Secretary in the next Government, his firm plan, when he was again in opposition, was to return to practice. At that time, no doubt, he could not foresee how near and how quickly he would approach the leadership, but his declaration of intention was important because it then involved a sharp break with tradition. No former Cabinet Minister had ever previously appeared in a supplicatory role before judges. The distinction was a fine one, for former law officers had frequently done this. In 1886, for example, Sir Henry James and Sir Charles Russell, each a former Attorney-General, had both appeared in the Dilke case. But neither had served in the Cabinet, nor did any law officer until 1912, when Asquith himself included Sir Rufus Isaacs, then Attorney-General. They were not therefore Privy Councillors, for this political honour was then granted sufficiently sparingly that it was in effect confined to the Cabinet.
¹
And
the point of the loose convention which Asquith was preparing to break was that, as a Privy Councillor, he would be of higher rank than most of the judges before whom he was likely to appear, and that this might be damaging both to his own dignity and even to the whole established system of precedence. In fact, when he broke the convention relatively little notice was taken and no dire consequences followed, either for himself or anyone else. Since then there has never been any question of the right of lawyers to return to practice from the Cabinet, although the numbers who have wished to do so have been surprisingly small; Simon in the ’twenties and Shawcross in the ’fifties have been the most notable examples.

¹
_{There were occasional exceptions. When Chamberlain unavailingly tried to persuade Dilke to accept the Irish Office without the Cabinet in 1882 he argued that “ it carried with it the Privy Council ” and he was probably
speaking with Gladstone’s authority, although G. O. Trevelyan, who accepted the job after Dilke’s refusal, did not get the honour. And in 1856, a still more pertinent exception, Palmerston made Stuart Wortley, who had already acquired a Privy Councillorship, his Solicitor General. In 1902, Haldane, a member of the Chancery Bar, who had never held office although he was a more prominent member of Parliament than most of those who had, was made a right honourable in the Coronation honours. But this was after Asquith’s break with tradition.}

In the autumn of 1895 Asquith therefore returned to 1,Paper Buildings and began his final period of practice, which was to last a solid decade. He had lost some ground as a result of his absence and new leaders had established themselves. Russell had become Lord Chief Justice, and Carson and Edward Clarke had succeeded as the most formidable jury advocates. More significantly from Asquith’s point of view, Haldane and C. A. Cripps (later Lord Parmoor) had taken the leading places in appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and cases before the Railway Commission. This was the type of work on which, together with House of Lords appeals, Asquith’s practice became increasingly concentrated.

After a short interval he achieved a position roughly equal to that of Cripps and Haldane. But he never rose above this. His jury appeal, in spite of his political success, remained woefully deficient. He never became a fashionable advocate, and he appeared in few cases which attracted much public interest. One of the exceptions was
Powell v. Kempton Park Racecourse Company
, and here he was engaged, during the several stages of a long-drawn-out battle, in arguing the abstruse proposition that an unroofed enclosure adjoining a race-course was a
“place kept and used for betting” within the meaning of the Act of 1853, rather than in any dramatic destruction of witnesses or deployment of evidence. He never again spent as widely-publicised a day in court as that on which he had dissected Macdonald of
The Times
before the Parnell Commission in 1888. Asa result his legal work was notably lacking in that aura of anecdote which surrounded the careers of Russell or Carson, or F. E. Smith or Marshall-Hall, or even Haldane —if only because of the last-named’s verbal convolutions.

From the layman’s point of view, Asquith’s practice was, quite simply, a dull one, efficiently but undramatically conducted, without an undue expenditure of effort, and probably not of absorbing interest even to Asquith himself. But it yielded an income which, over the decade from 1895, fluctuated between £5,000 and £10,000 a year. He was never poorer, and sometimes much better off, than when in office. As a mark of success as a barrister his earnings may be considered high without being sensational; but they might have been markedly higher had he not been devoting a substantial part of his energies to politics.

Even upon politics, however, Asquith’s expenditure of effort in the years after 1895 was in no way prodigal. Although he now had the concentrated front bench responsibilities associated with being one of the only six members of the late Cabinet left in the Commons, he returned so far as possible to the pattern of parliamentary attendance which he had followed between 1886 and 1892. In the session of 1896 he spoke eighteen times, but voted in only 124 divisions out of 419. In 1897 he spoke on 28 occasions, and voted once more in 124 divisions —out of a total 375. Many of his House of Commons speeches were on major occasions, and he supplemented them, as in the previous period, by occasional well-chosen platform engagements in the country. Nevertheless, his parliamentary economy did not pass without some comment, although this mostly took the form of regret that he was not more available rather than of a feeling that anyone who was so occupied outside was of little use to the Liberal Party. “ But I do find that Grey is hopeful,” Arthur Acland wrote to Asquith on January 20th, 1899 in a letter which began by complaining about the laziness of Harcourt’s leadership, “ and that you and he may do a good bit (in the H. of C.) if you have time to spare from law and society, and he from his country pursuits... .”
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