Asquith (4 page)

His social life at Oxford was only moderately active. In his second term his elder brother, retarded by ill-health, joined him at Balliol, and they lived together in a single set of rooms, a most unusual arrangement at the time and one which suggests an attachment to the familiar (and to economy) rather than a great branching out. But he had a fairly wide range of friends and acquaintances both in his own college and outside. Li Balliol his main associates were Alfred Milner, Andrew Bradley, Herbert Warren, Charles Gore (later Bishop, first of Birmingham and then of Oxford), A. R. Cluer (later a County Court judge), Thomas Raleigh (later a notable Indian civil servant), and W. P. Ker, Churton Collins and W. H. Mallock (all of whom achieved some distinction as literary critics). Outside the college his principal friends were Herbert Paul of Corpus, who became an outstanding journalist and sat for a short time in the House of Commons as Liberal member for Edinburgh, and Henry Broadbent, already mentioned as a scholar. They were all men of considerable intellectual worth, and some of
them, notably Milner, Bradley and Gore, were to achieve positions of commanding influence. But they were in no sense a group of
jeunesse doree.
They were not a glittering set within the University, who spread fashions and started legends, as did the young men with whom Raymond Asquith was to mingle a generation later. They provided Asquith with a group of moderately close friends (although with none of them did real intimacy—if it ever existed—persist throughout his life), against which agreeable background he could achieve his university triumphs, but they did not launch him into the world of nineteenth century power or social distinction.

His first taste of this came immediately after he ceased to be an undergraduate, when he spent the summer and early autumn of 1874 coaching the son of the Earl of Portsmouth, and moving between his two country houses, Hurstbourne Park in Hampshire and Eggesford in Devon. “ I thus obtained a glimpse of a kind of life which was new to me,”
^q
he recorded. At Lord Portsmouth’s he met politicians like Lord Carnarvon, who was then Colonial Secretary, and fashionable men of letters like Lord Houghton.

This interlude over he returned to Balliol and spent the first year of his fellowship in residence. But he did not continue this habit. He wished to be a lawyer and not a don, because the law was the accepted door, for young men without position, into the world of power and politics. This meant London and not Oxford. For the remaining six years of his fellowship it was merely a small but useful source of income to him. He left Oxford finally at the end of the summer term of 1875, and although he retained for the University a deep and almost romantic attachment, unusual in one whose later life was to be so strikingly successful, he never lived again within the city.

1
_{The Moravians, a highly disciplined Protestant sect with a strong missionary bent, trace their origin back to 1457 when a group of peasants in the Kingdom of Bohemia retired to a remote Moravian village, and there established a
Unitas Fratrum.
After 1620 they were forced underground in Bohemia, and only attracted the name Moravian when groups of them began to emigrate early in the eighteenth century. They first came to Yorkshire in 1742. The boarding school at Fulneck existed from 1801 to
1884}

After leaving Balliol in June, 1875, Asquith spent six weeks as a member of a reading party at St. Andrews. Most of his close Oxford associates were there, and the expedition later came to assume for him the glow of a long-remembered Indian summer to his university life. But it also contained some seeds of the future. It was his first visit to Scotland and it took him, by chance, into the heart of the constituency which he was to represent in the House of Commons for thirty-two years. All around him, during this long vacation, lay the rolling countryside of East Fife and the electors who, with their children, were to be faithful to him throughout the long years of his mounting success—but not afterwards.

Even nearer at hand were the links of the Royal and Ancient St. Andrews Golfing Society, and Asquith there made his first acquaintance with the only non-sedentary game which was ever to arouse his interest. It was a useful acquaintanceship, for although golf was then so little developed that he and his modest-living student companions were able to hire the services of the British open champion to carry their clubs, the game was to become an almost essential accompaniment to Edwardian politics. In the heyday of Asquith’s career, there was hardly a politician of note who did not seek his relaxation (and in some cases attempt to transact a part of his business) upon a golf links. Balfour was at least as addicted to the game as was Asquith himself, and Lloyd George even built himself a house alongside one of the best-known Surrey courses.

The Scottish holiday over, Asquith went to London and moved into rooms at the imposing address of 90 Mount Street, Mayfair. He had been eating his dinners in Lincoln’s Inn for his last few years at Oxford, and he came to London for nine months’ work in chambers
before his call to the bar. He had been accepted as a pupil by Charles Bowen, one of the most distinguished of nineteenth-century legal minds, and he began work with him in the last days of October. Bowen, apart from being the son of a country parson and a Rugbeian, had a similar background to Asquith’s own. He had been a scholar and fellow of Balliol and President of the Union. He had won all the University prizes and was Jowett’s favourite pupil. Unlike Asquith, however, he was a notable athlete with poor health. He once exhibited the former prowess by the curiously unmodern feat of jumping a cow as it stood in a field, and the latter weakness led to frequent periods of long convalescence and an early death before the age of sixty. But by that time he had been successively a
puisne
judge for three years, a lord justice of appeal for eleven, and a law lord for one. He was also a notable wit, although many of his verses and recorded remarks now seem to suffer from the contrived facetiousness which came only too easily to Victorian classicists in their lighter moments.

When he accepted Asquith, Bowen had recently made his reputation in the interminable case of the Tichborne Claimant, and was Junior Counsel to the Treasury, or “ Attorney-General’s devil.” He also had a large general practice, and was at the height of his success as an advocate; three years later, at the age of forty-four, he went straight from the junior bar to the bench. A short period as a pupil therefore gave Asquith a little experience of almost all branches of Common Law work. It also gave him a modified admiration for this perfect example of a Balliol man of the previous generation. His admiration was modified because Bowen’s supremely refined intelligence was not muscular enough for his own taste; and because he was irritated by the latter’s inability to delegate work—a capacity which was always highly developed in Asquith himself—and which resulted in most of the pupils’ drafts being completely re-written by Bowen. Despite this, and despite his removal to another set of chambers immediately after his call to the bar in June, 1876, Asquith remained on terms of close acquaintanceship with Bowen. Sixteen years later, as Home Secretary, he gave the judge his last public appointment.

The chambers in which Asquith established himself were at 6, Fig Tree Court. The other occupants were two almost equally junior men who had also been pupils of Bowen’s. In these surroundings he spent seven extremely lean years. The tide of success which had flowed strongly from his last years at school to his acceptance in chambers as distinguished as Bowen’s, suddenly ceased to run. He was without legal connections, there was no one in the chambers from whom work might filter down to him, and he had no money of his own. Placed as he was, indeed, the whole venture of going to the bar, rather than remaining at Oxford or seeking some public service employment, was a hazardous gamble. And it was a gamble which brought no early winnings. For at least five years after his call, his professional earnings were negligible. His reaction was not to withdraw disappointedly or even, as might have been expected from Jowett’s view of him as above all a determinedly ambitious young man
¹
, to meet setback with caution. On the contrary, he doubled his stake. In August, 1877 he got married.

¹
_{“ Asquith will get on ; he is so direct,” had been the Master of Balliol’s summing up (Spender and Asquith,
Life of Lord Oxford and Asquith,
j,
p.
35).}

His wife was Helen Melland, the daughter of a Manchester doctor. Asquith had known her since 1870, when he was eighteen and she only fifteen. They had met at St. Leonards-on-Sea, while Asquith was staying with his mother and she with some neighbouring cousins. Throughout his time at Oxford occasional vacation meetings on the South Coast were supplemented by a growing correspondence. She was Asquith’s first love, and for many years his only one. “ The first
real
one,” he wrote later, after referring to Ills already mentioned non-real, schoolboy attachment to Madge Robertson, “ .. . was Helen who afterwards became my wife. I showed the same constancy which has since been practised by my sons, and waited from about 18 to 25 (hardly ever seeing her in the interval).”
^a
During 1874 they became secretly engaged, and in the autumn of 1876 Asquith went to Manchester to try to turn this clandestine arrangement into an open one. Dr. Melland, a well-established physician of commanding presence who survived to the age of 98, responded to Asquith’s approach with a combination of courtesy and caution. But two months later he gave his consent by letter. “ Although I have not had any opportunity of becoming better acquainted with you personally,” he wrote, “ I have been able to make certain enquiries which have satisfied me that I may give my consent to your becoming engaged to my daughter. I have the fullest conviction that your industry and ability will procure for you in due time that success in your profession which has attended you in your past career.
^b
If the standard was to
be “ industry and ability,” it would have required a very exacting father-in-law to fault Asquith.

Miss Melland’s position and fortune were not such that there could have been any question of a man with Asquith’s ambitions marrying her for worldly reasons. But she was not so penniless that the change of circumstances meant any reduction in his standard of living. With her income of a few hundred pounds a year, with the money from his Balliol fellowship still continuing, and with chance earnings from lecturing and journalism, which he began increasingly to seek, they were able to move at once into a spacious, white-walled, early nineteenth century house in what was then John Street, and is now Keats Grove, Hampstead. Here, surrounded by a large garden and looking across the street to John Keats’s old house, they lived what Asquith’s official biographers insist was a simple, but agreeable and placid married life.

Placidity, indeed, was constantly stressed by Asquith himself as the keynote both of his wife’s character and of the satisfaction which he derived from the marriage. This is a recurring theme of his writing about the relationship his wife wanted not only after and during the marriage, but even before it took place. “ I am more than ever convinced,” he wrote to his mother in January, 1877, “ that H’s health and happiness depend upon a speedy marriage and the chance of a quiet home, where she can be properly looked after and cared for.”
^c
But he was equally insistent that “ a quiet home ” and a simple unpretentious domesticity was what he, too, required. Yet an element of doubt remains as to whether Asquith, even at this stage in his career, did not secretly hanker after a more tense relationship and a more dramatic way of life. There was always in his character a surprising but strong streak of recklessness. It made him go to the bar instead of seeking a safer occupation. It made him marry before he had an assured income. It was later to make him enter Parliament before he had an established practice. And it made him, in the early ’eighties, when his briefs were still rare, spend nearly .£300 (equivalent to at least .£1200 today) on a diamond necklace for his wife. It must, from everything that is known of her character and pattern of life, have been almost the last thing that she wanted.