Asquith (43 page)

This further consideration took place on November 15th, and Asquith wrote of “ a prolonged and animated discussion ”:

Sir E. Grey made it clear that at no stage of our intercourse with France since January 1906 had we either by diplomatic or military engagements compromised our freedom of decision and action in the event of war between France and Germany. On the other hand there was a prevailing feeling in the Cabinet that there was a danger that communications of the kind referred to might give rise to expectations, and that they should not, if they related to the possibility of concerted action, be entered into or carried on without the sanction of the Cabinet.

In the result, at the suggestion of the Prime Minister, unanimous approval was given to the two following propositions:

(1) That no communications should take place between the General Staff here and the Staffs of other countries which can, directly or indirectly, commit this country to military or naval intervention.

(2) That such communications, if they relate to concerted action by land or sea, should not be entered into without the previous approval of the Cabinet
.
⁰

This outcome cannot have been welcome to Grey. First, he regarded at least one of the propositions as unduly restrictive, although he did not press his opposition. Upon their original draft (which was in Asquith’s hand), Grey wrote, “ I think the last paragraph is a little tight but he subsequently crossed out this comment. Secondly, it is difficult to believe that the form taken by the Cabinet discussions did not amount to a mild rebuke for what the Foreign Secretary had done. But reluctant minister although Grey always claimed to be, this produced no suggestion of resignation. Nor did it lead to any diminution of Asquith’s confidence in him. A fortnight later the Prime Minister was writing to Crewe in unusually effusive terms about a speech of the Foreign Secretary’s. He spoke of “ a tremendous day,” “ a great performance,” and “the effect which (Grey) alone is capable of producing in the House of Commons.”

The Cabinet may have been unrealistic in pretending that there ever could be staff conversations without some indirect commitment. But if there was deceit, it was self-deceit. From November, 1911 onwards the basic facts of what was taking place were in the possession of every minister. In the spring of 1912 there were further requests from the French for naval co-operation. These were reported to the Cabinet and led to an exhaustive discussion, spread over four meetings, on the whole disposition of the British fleet. And in November of that year, when the Anglo-French understanding was committed to writing in the form of an exchange of letters between Grey and Cambon, the draft of Grey’s letter was submitted to, and amended by, the Cabinet. Morley in particular, who after 1914 complained that he had been kept in ignorance throughout, was fully informed, both as the instigator of the vital Cabinet discussions in 1911, and as a member of the Committee of Imperial Defence.

The third threat of violence which hung over England in 1911 came from the suffragettes. “ Militancy ” had begun as long before as October, 1905, when Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney succeeded in wrecking a meeting which Grey was addressing in Manchester.
¹

¹
_{The occasion on which this first attack took place was curiously symbolic of the irrational choice of targets which was to become a growing characteristic of the movement. Grey was in opposition at the time; he
was a determined supporter of female suffrage; and a victory for the party whose case he was endeavouring to advocate would result in a House of Commons far more favourable to the women’s cause than that which then existed.}

In the early years of the Liberal Government it grew gradually, and the methods employed became progressively more violent. In September, 1909 the permanent secretary to the Home Office sent Herbert Gladstone a Metropolitan Police report that women were practising pistol shooting at an address in Tottenham Court Road, “ The annexed report,” he commented, “ seems to me to show that there is now definite ground for fearing the possibility of the P.M’s being fired at by one of the pickets at the entrance of the House (of Commons). He added, however, that he was against the pickets being removed as the police were confident that they could get a woman before she “ damaged ” the Prime Minister. Gladstone was nervous, but Asquith unhesitatingly pronounced against removal.

In fact the Prime Minister was never shot at, but numerous other assaults upon him were attempted. He emerged unharmed from them all, although others sometimes suffered on his behalf. Lord Wear dale, when mistaken for him, was whipped at Euston. Augustine Birrell, when accompanying him in Whitehall, had his knee-cap damaged. And Redmond, sitting in the same carriage in Dublin, was wounded in the ear by a hatchet. At other times the intimidation was less vicarious. The Downing Street windows were occasionally smashed; and Asquith himself was often hectored and sometimes hustled by militant women. What he particularly disliked about the hectoring was that it tended to occur at evening parties and contrasted sharply with the form which he believed conversation between the sexes should take on such occasions.
¹

1
_{On one of them, an India Office reception in June, 1912, Margot is reputed to have boxed the ears of an importunate lady in a pink dress.}

The hustling took a still more disagreeable form. On the golf hnks at Lossiemouth some militants tried to tear off his clothes, and were frustrated only by the presence and intervention of his daughter Violet. Thereafter a repetition of this form of attack was one of his principal fears, even when something more vicious was attempted. In November, 1913 when motoring to Stirling to unveil the Campbell-Bannerman memorial he was held up by women lying across the road. As the car slowed down others emerged from behind
the hedgerows on either side of the road, jumping on the running-boards, and proceeded to belabour him over the head with dog whips. His top hat provided a surprisingly adequate degree of protection.

All this and the other dramatic manifestations of the time—the slashing of the Rokeby Venus, Miss Wilding Davison’s death fall in front of the King’s horse at the 1913 Derby, the burning of pillar boxes, the destruction by acid of golf course greens—had no favourable effect upon Asquith. He found the whole performance both distasteful and mystifying. As Mr.Roger Fulford has written:

The idea of converting a human being’s reason by parades, marches and fighting the police was incomprehensible to him. The more the women marched, the less his reason marched with them. Therefore the work of the militants strengthened his opposition to the vote. The women pursued him with much shrill invective— some of which was not without its effect in damaging his standing in the country—but he remained like a rock, which by reason of its natural formation, repels the froth and fury swirling round it.
^q

In part Asquith’s attitude to the suffrage question was due to a failure of imagination. He simply could not understand why anyone, man or woman, should get so excited about the matter. It should be settled, not on the basis of abstract right, but by the practical test of whether or not a change would be likely to improve the system of government. He therefore always wanted to play the issue down. He was an effective controversialist on the subject, but, unlike some of the other anti-suffragists—Lewis Harcourt amongst the Liberals or F. E. Smith amongst the Tories—not a happy one. He would much rather that the subject had never been raised, and like other leaders confronted with a subject on which they did not wish to lead, he tried unsuccessfully to take the passion out of an essentially passionate controversy.

“There are very few issues in politics,” he told the House of Commons in May, 1913, “ upon which more exaggerated language is used both upon the one side and upon the other. I am sometimes tempted to think, as one listens to the arguments of supporters of woman suffrage, that there is nothing to be said for it, and I sometimes am tempted to think, when I listen to the arguments of the opponents of woman suffrage, that there is nothing to be said against it.”
^r

Asquith’s position on the suffrage question even if not happy, was both pivotal and bizarre. It was pivotal because there were only two effective obstacles to female enfranchisement before 1914. The first was the excesses of militancy; and the second was the person of the Prime Minister, stubbornly unconvinced and occupying a commanding position in the House of Commons. It was bizarre because it placed him in opposition to a majority of his own Cabinet, to a majority of the Liberal parliamentary party, and to Balfour, whose own attitude placed him in turn in opposition to the majority of the Unionist party. Asquith was not alone in the Cabinet, however. Apart from Harcourt, already mentioned, John Burns and Herbert Samuel were strongly opposed to the women’s case. But on the other side, although varying greatly in the degree of their enthusiasm, was a formidable array which included Grey, Lloyd George, Haldane, Churchill, Birrell, Runciman and McKenna.

In these circumstances there was naturally some pressure from within the Cabinet for Government time to be given for private members’ women’s suffrage bills. But these bills, partly to win Conservative support and partly to give a general impression of moderation, almost all proposed a strictly limited female enfranchisement. Both from an age and a property point of view the women’s vote would be more restricted than the men’s. Lloyd George and Churchill were quick to see that measures along these lines would merely result in adding a substantial preponderance of Tory voters to the registers. They both went into the division lobby against the so-called Conciliation Bill in the summer of 1910. The suffragist forces in the Cabinet (like those outside) were therefore far from united on questions of tactics, and Asquith had at first little difficulty in holding the position. By May, 1911, the pressure had grown stronger, and Asquith had to report to the King that a clear majority of the Cabinet was in favour of giving facilities to a bill. Eventually it was agreed that in the following (1912) session a week of Government time should be made available for a committee stage; but in that year the bill, which had been successful at this stage in both 1910 and 1911, failed by a narrow margin to secure a second reading.

The Cabinet then proposed that the women’s claim should be dealt with by the offer of a place in a major Reform Bill which the Government was about to promote. This bill was designed to abolish plural voting and extend the male franchise from to 10 million
voters. The Cabinet offer, announced by the Prime Minister in July,
1912, was that the House of Commons should have the opportunity, on a free vote, to amend the bill so as to put women on the same new voting basis as men. For symbolic reasons the offer was unattractive to the leaders of the women’s movement. They wanted a bill of their own, a specific recognition of their claim to equality. But from a practical point of view the offer had great advantages. It disposed of the doubts of Lloyd George and many other Liberals. It meant that the amendment, if accepted, would be incorporated in the body of a bill which would have the full force of the Government behind it. There need be no fear that it would founder at a later stage for want of parliamentary time; and if the House of Lords proved recalcitrant, as was more than likely, it could expect the protection of the Parliament Act.

The amendment was to come up for discussion in late January,
1913,towards the end of a session which started in February, 1912 and continued for more than thirteen months. On January 22nd the Cabinet prepared for the debate by making an “ agreement to differ ” and deciding that, whatever the result, no question of ministerial resignations would arise.

The Cabinet met again two days later—in very different circumstances. Speaker Lowther had in the meantime destroyed the assumption on which the Government—and the public—had been acting for the previous six months. He had decided that if the women’s suffrage amendment were to be carried it would so change the bill as to make it necessary for it to be withdrawn and re-introduced. In other words it could not be carried that session. This was an almost unprecedented parliamentary
dégringolade
.

“This is a totally new view of the matter,” Asquith wrote to the King, “ which appears to have occurred for the first time to the Speaker himself only two or three days ago, and is in flat contradiction of the assumptions upon which all parties in the House hitherto treated the bill. In Mr. Asquith’s opinion, which is shared by some of the best authorities on procedure, the Speaker’s judgment is entirely wrong and impossible to reconcile with what took place in the case of previous Franchise Bills in 1867 and
1884”
^s

Complaints against the Speaker, however well justified they might be, were of little use. There was no possibility of an effective appeal against his ruling, and the only thing the Cabinet could do was to agree, unanimously, that it would be a breach of faith to the suffragists to proceed with the Government bill without the women’s amendment being voted upon and that they must therefore drop it. Facilities would be given, early in the next session, for a private member’s bill dealing with female enfranchisement. The whole incident was a bad blow to the Government’s intentions and prestige. But Asquith was a sufficiently committed anti-suffragist to find consolation in the new situation. “ The Speaker’s
coup d'etat
has bowled over the Women for this session—a great relief,”
^t
he wrote in a private letter on January 27th.