Asquith (8 page)

In addition the group soon began to develop imperialist leanings. They were as opposed to Little Englandism abroad as they were to a purely negative Liberalism at home. In Haldane’s case, and to some extent in Asquith’s too, this sprang from the nature of their legal practices. They were much involved in arguing Colonial appeals before the Privy Council. This gave them a close interest in the systems of government and practices of life in what Dilke had called Greater Britain; and it divided them sharply from Morley, who was every bit as much of a Little Englander as Harcourt. It also made them draw closer to Lord Rosebery, who was their other favourite guest at the Savoy Hotel or National Liberal Club dinners, and who had been an active participant in the affairs of the Imperial Federation League since soon after its inception in 1885. In 1889 Asquith joined the League, and provoked some further displeasure. “ Spencer was very angry about Asquith joining the Imperial League,” Harcourt wrote, “ and said he was greatly disappointed in him.”
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Haldane and Asquith also organised a series of dinners which, while still rigidly masculine, were less austerely political in purpose than those of the Articles Club. These took place annually at the Blue Posts inn, off Cork Street, and the normal practice was for the two hosts to invite four prominent politicians, and four other men who were eminent for other reasons. Rosebery recorded in his diary for an evening in 1889: “Dined with Asquith and Haldane at the Blue Posts. Sate (sic) next A. Balfour. Took John Morley on to the
National Liberal Club Reception.”
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Other politicians who attended included Chamberlain, Randolph Churchill, Grey and Carson. Amongst the non-politicians were Bowen, Burne-Jones, Alfred Lyall and Russell Lowell. These dinners continued until 1892. They indicated both that the hosts had a parliamentary position which enabled them to command the attendance of important guests and that they were anxious to enlarge their social circle. In Asquith’s case, in particular, there was room for this. Throughout the late ’eighties he continued to live quietly in Hampstead, although in 1887 he moved to a larger, more modern, less attractive house at 27, Maresfield Gardens, off Fitzjohn’s Avenue. He was a figure of note in the House of Commons, but he moved in no general society. Almost the only women he knew were the wives of his Oxford and legal friends, a restriction made greater by the fact that so many of these friends were bachelors.

Asquith’s practice at the bar, as already indicated, benefited rather than suffered from his election to Parliament. But it took no bound forward during his first few years in the House. Since his call he had been a member of the North-Eastern circuit, which was centred on Leeds and which he had chosen, there being no obvious alternative, on the slender ground of his old Yorkshire connection. He had always been a half-hearted circuit-goer, for he had no taste for the criminal and jury work which it involved; and, particularly after his election, his practice was almost entirely in London and on the civil side. Much of his work was in the appellate courts. It was an unexciting, moderate sized, high quality practice. In 1888 he began to take pupils, and one of the first, John Roskill, later a judge, recorded that “ before he took Silk in 1890 he was not in a very large practice and often gave his pupils Wright’s papers as well as his own.” Roskill added that “ his clients were of the best.”^ They yielded him .£1,500 or -£2,000 a year.

Most of Asquith’s legal (as opposed to his political) work at this time brought him no public notice of any sort. There were occasional exceptions arising out of his rare forays to the Central Criminal Court. In 1889 he unsuccessfully defended Cunninghame Graham, the Scottish laird and Labour M.P., who, with John Bums, was charged with unlawful assembly as a result of the events of “ Bloody Sunday ” in Trafalgar Square; and in the following year—a rather less liberal cause—he successfully prosecuted Vizetelly, the English publisher of Zola’s novels, for the offence of obscene libel.

His next major advance came suddenly and dramatically in February, 1889, when he was junior counsel to Sir Charles Russell before the Parnell Commission of Enquiry. As long previously as April 18th, 1887,
The Times
had published a facsimile print of a letter dated 1882 and apparently signed by Charles Stewart Parnell, in which the Irish leader expressed his approval for the Phoenix Park murder of Frederick Burke, the permanent under-secretary in the Dublin Castle administration. Although this was damaging to the Nationalist cause, Parnell contented himself at the time with a House of Commons announcement that the letter was a forgery and did not take up the challenge of the editor of
The Times
to test the matter in a libel action. In July, 1888, F. H. O’Donnell, who had been an Irish member of the previous Parliament and who was also implicated in the charges made by
The Times
, took such an action. In the course of the case, which O’Donnell lost without the London jury troubling to leave the box, further letters which were still more damaging to Parnell were read out. His reaction to these was still (and probably wisely) to avoid the English law courts, but to make a personal statement in the House of Commons demanding that a Select Committee be set up. The Government countered with the quite different offer of a Commission of three judges (all of them known Unionists) charged with enquiring not merely into the alleged forgeries but into all the accusations against the Nationalist Party made by
The Times
—in other words, into almost the whole recent course of Irish history. This procedure, as strongly opposed by the Liberals as by the Nationalists, had eventually to be accepted. The Attorney-General, free then to engage in private practice as well as official duties, was briefed by
The Times.
Parnell countered with Russell and Asquith. The selection of Asquith was made more on political than on legal grounds and was influenced by the strong speech against the composition and terms of reference of the Commission which he had made in the House.

The work of the Commission was above all else a marathon. It began sitting on September 18th, 1888 and took evidence on 128 days. The crux of the matter, the question of the forged letters, was not reached until the sixth month. It then took Russell only two days to demolish Pigott, the purveyor of the letters to
The Times
. With his cross-examination still incomplete, Piggott fled to Paris, leaving behind him two confessions which were in many respects discrepant but which were agreed in admitting that all the letters purporting to
be from Parnell were forgeries. A week later he shot himself in a Madrid hotel.

Parnell’s vindication was complete. For a short time he became almost a popular hero with the British public. The city of Edinburgh made him a freeman; the Liberal Party gave him a standing ovation in the House of Commons; and even
The Times
formally withdrew all the charges which were based upon the letters. Although the Commission was to drag on for another year, only one point of major interest remained to be elucidated. This was how a newspaper of the standing of
The Times
had ever come to accept and publish documents of such outstanding importance from so obviously tainted a source.

The vital witness on this point was C. J. Macdonald, then the manager of the paper—Buckle was editor. Asquith has described in his own words what happened when the examination-in-chief of this witness was complete:

It would of course naturally have fallen to Russell to cross-examine him; and I was never more surprised in my life than when, just as the court rose for lunch, he turned to me and said: “ I am tired: you must take charge of this fellow.” I protested, but in vain, and I was left to the critical task of conducting the cross-examination: a task all the more formidable because my leader, the greatest cross-examiner at the English Bar, sat there throughout and listened. I got on to what proved to be an effective and even a destructive line of attack, and in the course of a couple of hours or so made the largest step in advance that I ever took in my forensic career. Russell, who throughout had not interrupted by suggestion or otherwise, was unmeasured in his appreciation of every successful point, and when I finished almost overwhelmed me with the generosity of his praises and his congratulation. It was a moment that will never fade from my memory ..
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What Asquith had established in the course of this cross-examination, apart from his own reputation as an advocate, was that Macdonald had undertaken no investigation of the authenticity of the letters, and had behaved throughout with a credulity which would have been childlike had it not been criminally negligent. Roskill wrote that Asquith “ often said that Macdonald was the easiest witness he had ever demolished, for his prejudices had literally obscured an honest, if limited, understanding ; but easy or not there can be no doubt that

Asquith’s interrogation of him, unprepared though it was, was conducted with a mounting and deadly precision.

The crisis of the enquiry over, Russell and Asquith abandoned regular attendance at its now dreary proceedings. Asquith for the first time in his career, found himself flooded with briefs. Less than a year later, again prompted by Haldane, who was taking the same step himself, he decided to apply for silk, and was admitted as a Queen’s Counsel in February, 1890, at the age of 37.

As a silk Asquith was an immediate and considerable success. Some barristers build up large practices as juniors which they fail to maintain when they are called within the bar. With him the reverse was the case. The few months after the Macdonald cross-examination apart, he was much busier as a Queen’s Counsel than he ever had been as a junior—and his fees were of course much larger. His income rose to about -£5,000 a year.

He was also in the happy position that the occasion which had made his legal reputation had in addition improved his political standing. In the days of the “ union of hearts ” it was a great advantage within his party for a Liberal M.P. to have played a leading part in unmasking the anti-Irish machinations of
The Times.
And the prospects of the party itself had been improved by Parnell’s vindication. The by-election results were encouraging, and up to the summer of 1890 the chances of a great Home Rule majority, whenever the dissolution came, looked strong. So were Asquith’s prospects of a major post in the Government which would give effect to the policy. He was indulging in no foolish day-dreaming when he told Roskill, one evening about this time, that he would not accept a judgeship, but wished to be Home Secretary.

1
_{It was not then as great a disadvantage in the circumstances to be an Englishman as it would be today, when English members for Scottish seats are very rare birds indeed. Apart from Asquith himself, John Morley, Augustine Birrell and Winston Churchill, to cite only Liberal politicians of the first prominence, all sat for Scottish constituencies during the next twenty-five years. Birrell sat for the other part of the County of Fife, and on one occasion in about 1900 when he and Asquith and Haldane had climbed to the top of a hill near the Firth of Forth which commanded a wide view over both Fife and East Lothian, he turned to the others and exclaimed: “ What a grateful thought that there is not an acre in this vast and varied landscape which is not represented at Westminster by a London barrister! ”
(Memories and Reflections
, 1, p. 105.)}