Asquith (58 page)

The clock on the mantelpiece hammered out the hour, and when the last beat of midnight struck
¹
it was as silent as dawn.

¹
_{The ultimatum in fact expired at 11.0 p.m. (midnight in Berlin), but arithmetical accuracy was never Margot’s strongest characteristic.}

We were at War.

I left to go to bed, and, as I was pausing at the foot of the staircase, I saw Winston Churchill with a happy face striding towards the double doors of the Cabinet room.
^a

The group that he found within was less happy.

When the war started Asquith was nearly sixty-two. He had been Prime Minister for six and a quarter years, which was already a longer period of office than all but two of his predecessors of the previous century. He had become the “ natural ” head of the Government, with his own well-established routine of authority, and it required an effort of imagination on the part of his colleagues, his opponents, the electorate, and even himself, to visualise anyone else in his place.

He did not make the mistake of regarding himself as indispensable. Indeed, one more than usually adventurous motor journey, a few months later, set his mind contemplating how short-lived would be the reaction to his sudden removal.

“As we drove up this morning in the motor (it is about 80 miles),” he wrote, “ we had two or three very narrow shaves of collision & disaster. And after each, I said to myself—suppose it had gone wrong, and I had (as Browning says) ‘ended my cares' what would have been the consequence?

Lots of stuff in the Press—a ‘ nine days ’ wonder in the country: violent speculation as to who was to succeed me—E. Grey, Ll. George, Crewe & co; many obituary notices; and after a week or 10 days (at the outside) the world going on as tho’ nothing had happened:... a few ripples, even, if you like, a bit of a splash in the pool—but little or nothing more.

Of the men with whom I have been most closely associated, I think that those who wd. (for a time) feel it most are, oddly enough Haldane, McKenna & the Assyrian (Montagu): a strange trinity; of my own family Violet, Oc & perhaps Puffin; and
among women I am inclined to think Viola
¹
(tho’ I am not at all sure about this).”
²

¹
_{Parsons, born Tree.}

²
_{This was all written “ after midnight.” Next morning Asquith added the comment “ a stupid letter!” but he did not refrain from sending it.}

Although Asquith was never vain or foolish enough to think that the world, or even a small part of it, would stop without him, he rarely doubted his authority over his colleagues or the permanence of his command.
³
When Montagu on one occasion (in March, 1915) assured him that if there were any question of his resigning “ the
whole
Cabinet, including Ll.G. and Winston, would go with (him), & make any alternative impossible,” Asquith implicitly believed the assurance. And when, later in the same month, he had to compose a bitter quarrel between Lloyd George and McKenna, he thought (and rightly, it appeared at the time) that the best way to do so was to remind them that he had been Prime Minister for nearly seven years but that if “ anyone among you has even the faintest doubt or suspicion about me, I will gladly (for what have I to gain or lose?) abandon this chair, & never sit in it again.” “ Their mutual anger dissolved like a frost under a sudden thaw,” Asquith recorded; “and they both with a united voice exclaimed: ‘ The day you leave that chair, the rest of us disappear, never to return.’ And I am sure they meant it.”

This, however, was an uncharacteristic incident, for there can rarely have been a Prime Minister who talked, or thought, less about resigning than did Asquith. There was no sulkiness in his character, and unlike Gladstone, he did not take easily to the weapon of the false resignation. Nor did he ever seriously look forward to a life of ease and retirement. He sometimes found his duties burdensome. He longed for the war to be over, and for the unfamiliar and distasteful problems which it brought with it to be removed from his agenda. But his wish then was to return to a life of normal government and not one of well-earned rest. In all the vast outpouring of letters which he sent to Miss Stanley during the first nine months of the war, in his seventh year of supreme responsibility, there were hardly more than
three or four references to the possibility of retirement. He was full of vague romantic yearnings for a more satisfying inner life, but so far as the outer framework was concerned he did not pretend to discontent. He was happier as Prime Minister than he had ever been before. He suspected that anything afterwards was likely to be anticlimax; and he was too honest to suggest otherwise.

³
_{Nevertheless he recorded on November 3rd, 1914: “My dreams continue .... There was another, of which I have only a dim memory, in which (with the concurrence of all my colleagues) I was supplanted by Herbert Samuel—as Prince Hal says ‘ a Jew, an Ebrew Jew .’ Do you think that is going to be my fate? ”}

This was not because he had an exaggerated view of his own political talents. At one stage during these months, exercising his extraordinary taste for relaxation with pen and paper, he constructed, in a moment of
ennui
with the world around him and in a typically classical mould, a little play about his own qualities and limitations.
¹
The picture which emerged, he hastened defensively to add, was not himself as he really was, but as “ a fairly intelligent observer ” might see him:

¹
_{The date was March, 1915.}

Scene
—
the infernal tribunal

On the Bench
—
rhadamanthus

At the Bar
—
self-released shade

Rhad. (loquitur):
So here you are, my friend—before your time.

I am rarely surprised, but your premature appearance gives me a slight & welcome shock of something approaching to astonishment.

You, of all people!
Que Diable!

Let me (in self-justification) dwell for a moment on the improbabilities of the case—which is nearly unique, even in my infernal experience.

You were, in the world above, almost a classical example of
Luck.
You were endowed at birth with brains above the average. You had, further, some qualities of temperament which are exceptionally useful for mundane success—energy under the guise of lethargy; a faculty for working quickly, which is more effective in the long run than plodding perseverance; patience (which is one of the rarest of human qualities); a temperate but persistent ambition; a clear mind, a certain quality and lucidity of speech; intellectual, but not moral, irritability; a natural tendency to understand & appreciate the opponent’s point of view: and, as time went on, & your nature matured, a growing sense of proportion, which had its effect both upon friends and foes, and
which, coupled with detachment from any temptation to intrigue, and, in regard to material interests & profits, an unaffected indifference, secured for you the substantial advantage of personality and authority.

The really great men of the world are the geniuses & the saints. You belonged to neither category. Your intellectual equipment (well cultivated and trained) still left you far short of the one; your spiritual limitations, and your endowment of the “ Old Adam,” left you still shorter of the other.

Nevertheless, with all these curtailments & shortcomings, you were what is called in the slang vocabulary of your time a “ good get out.”

The same
Luck
helped you in external tilings—in unforeseen opportunities, in the disappearance of possible competitors, in the special political conditions of your time: above all (at a most critical & fateful moment in your career) in the sudden outbreak of the Great War.

Everything was going well for you; the Fates, often malignant, or at least perverse, seemed to be conspiring to help you. I had almost given up hope, for years to come, of seeing you here at my bar: and yet, by your own choice,
here you are.

The Shade
(interrupting): There is a modicum of truth, and a good deal of plausibility, in your rather prolix allocution. But, so far, you have not got near the essential and dominating fact.

Rhad:
You mean, I suppose, that I have omitted any reference to the softer and more emotional side of your not very complex nature. Very well. I agree that, in this respect, you rather took in your contemporaries. The world in which you lived regarded you as hard, calculating, insensitive. In almost all the popular “ appreciations ” which as a conspicuous personage, you provoked, you were depicted as shy, reserved, unforthcoming, coldblooded. Even those who saw more clearly did not credit you with more than a certain capacity for the enjoyment of comfort and luxury, with a moderate fondness for social pleasures, and (perhaps) a slight weakness for the companionship of clever and attractive women. As I am the embodiment & Minister of strict Justice, I will go a step further. You hated and eschewed domestic dissension, and your sons & daughters were genuinely fond of you. So, in a sense, were your colleagues and political followers. At first
they looked rather askance at your leadership, with wistful retrospective glances at the much-lamented shade of the defunct C.B. It is odd, but true, that in the course of time—apart from old friends like Haldane, E. Grey, & Crewe—you gained the loyal attachment of men so diverse as Lloyd George & Winston Churchill, as Illingworth, McKenna & Montagu. Some people, sadly wanting in perspective, went so far as to call you “ chivalrous”; it would be nearer the truth to say that you had, or acquired, a rather specialised faculty of insight & manipulation in dealing with diversities of character and temperament. But the conclusion, by whatever road it is reached, is the same: that you ought not to have left them in the lurch.

The Shade:
“ Tired with all these, for restful Death I cried.”

Rhad:
Pooh! You know very well that that was not the reason for your precipitate appearance here. You had excellent health, a good digestion, an adequate capacity for sleep, unabated authority in your Cabinet, big events to confront & provide for. No man ever had less temptation to violate the “ canon fixed by the Everlasting against self-slaughter.”

The Shade:
Not bad! I could have made the same speech, without preparation, in the House of Commons. Its only defect is that it ignores the central reality of my life.

Rhad:
What was that?

The Shade:
It is something beyond the ken of your damned tribunal. Give me my sentence, and call up the next Ghost.

(Curtain)

A few days later Asquith completed his joke by constructing an imaginary sentence which was passed upon him by the infernal judge. It was an interesting revelation of the fate which he would have regarded as worse than death:

The sentence of the Court upon you is that you go back to the World whence you came.. . . There you are to be born again in a new body, with the bare average of faculties and brains, and are to live up to the allotted span a toilsome monotonous existence—an inconsidered item in the dim millions of mankind. You will not even be a madman or a criminal. You will have no big moments, no exceptional chances, no “ roses & raptures.” You and your environment will be equally homespun and humdrum.

Poetry, art, politics, the living interests and ideals of your country and your age, will be to you a sealed book. You will not even have the curiosity to try & break the seal. From birth to death you will be surrounded by, imprisoned in, contented with, the commonplace.

Thus does Infernal Justice redress the balance of the Upper World, and secure an equal lot for the Sons of Men.

It was dull obscurity, therefore, rather than excessive burdens which Asquith feared. There rarely can have been a man who had less desire to return to the life of his childhood. “ You shall go back to Morley and shall live there the rest of your days without contact with the great world outside ” would not be an unfair parody of the worst fate which he could envisage. If, in occasional moments of depression, he thought of release, he did so in terms of sudden death rather than of calm retirement. In spite of his “ guise of lethargy ” he rather despised those who liked living at half-pressure. “ Anything would be better than to
rust
,” he wrote in October, 1914.