Asquith (32 page)

Even so, the letter ended on a somewhat rancid note. The Cabinet list had been prematurely published in the
Daily Chronicle
, and it was suggested, from within the Cabinet, that Lloyd George was responsible. Churchill was asked by Asquith to raise the matter with the new Chancellor. He did so and reported at midnight on the Friday that Lloyd George “ denied it utterly.” In his letter to Asquith of the following day Lloyd George repeated the denial angrily and demanded to know which of his colleagues had made this “ amiable suggestion.” “ Men whose promotion is not sustained by birth or other favouring conditions,” he continued, “ are always liable to be assailed with unkind suspicions of this sort. I would ask it therefore as a favour that you should not entertain them without satisfying yourself that they have some basis of truth.”
ⁱ

Some of the other changes were grudgingly accepted by those involved. Elgin retired reluctantly from the Colonial Office and refused to become a Marquess. He was replaced by Crewe, who took on the leadership of the House of Lords from Ripon, but gave up the Presidency of the Council. Tweedmouth was offered this in place of the Admiralty, and at first wrote a sulky refusal, complaining that Asquith did not trust him and that he ought to have resigned long before rather than allow his estimates to be cut; but he eventually accepted. Reginald McKenna became First Lord of the Admiralty", the King stipulating that, this being so, Fisher should remain First Sea Lord. He apparently suspected, quite falsely, that McKenna would show himself an excessive naval economist.

Morley remained as Secretary of State for India but removed to the House of Lords with a viscounty. “ I suppose ... I have a claim from seniority of service for your place at the Exchequer,” he had rather disturbingly opened to Asquith a short time before; “ but I don’t know that I have any special aptitude for it under present prospects,” he had more encouragingly continued.-? Some of the junior candidates for office created more difficulties. The most importunate of all was Asquith’s former pupil from the summer of 1874, when he had acted as a tutor in Lord Portsmouth’s household. This boy had now become Lord Portsmouth himself and had served as under-secretary for war in the previous Government. He first wrote asking for Cabinet rank, and when Asquith, who had enjoyed exceptional opportunities of judging his mental capacity, responded by dropping him from the Government altogether, Portsmouth began a series of protests which continued throughout the summer. He did not move the Prime Minister but he succeeded in getting his successor (H. T. Baker, later Warden of Winchester) blackballed at Brooks’s.

The parliamentary secretary to the Admiralty wrote asking to remain in office with a peerage, but he too disappeared from the Government. And Charles Trevelyan, whose father, G. O. Trevelyan protested in terms which were rather blatantly nepotic for the head of such a radical family,
¹
never got into it. Nor was there any advancement for J. A. Pease, who begged to be promoted after “ eleven years’ work as a whip,” and pronounced himself ready, in an almost classical phrase for a suppliant, to respond to a telegram “ in about six hours at any time to talk things over with you.” Almost the only man who got anything by asking for it was Charles Masterman, who stipulated that he would not be parliamentary secretary to the Local Government
Board unless the department was substantially reorganised; and Asquith agreed that this should be done.

¹
_{“Since our party came in,” he wrote to Asquith on April 15th, “ full recognition has been given to the past services of those who in old days served the country and the cause, by the employment of their sons and relatives who are worthy of a chance in the career of administration. Now that several younger men have been placed in office, while my son is left out,}

_{I must protest, once for all, that I feel the exception made in our case very deeply.”
(Asquith Papers,
xi, ff. 100-1)}
.

183

Amongst the spate of requests which Asquith received at this time, Augustine Birrell's acceptance of an invitation to stay in the same job, written from the Irish Office on April nth, stands out as a solitary example of a letter built round a joke (even if not a very good one) rather than a demand: “ I am sorry you have overlooked my
claims upon the Chancellorship of the - Duchy! But am
content to remain on here—where at all events you are are never dull”
^k

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 friends
¹
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 least 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.”