Asquith (88 page)

1
_{But it was, in fact, a bad appointment. As Gladstone had been before him, and Lord Attlee was to be after him, Asquith was a natural conservative on most subjects outside politics. This was particularly so on anything touching both scholarship and his early life, and he led the Commission into producing an unadventurous report.}

2
_{The “ Bibescae ” were Elizabeth Asquith and her new Roumanian diplomat husband, Prince Antoine Bibesco; Soveral was the Portuguese Minister and a great Edwardian social figure; Birrell was Birrell; Sir Donald Maclean was leader, in Asquith’s absence, of the Liberal remnant in the House of Commons; and the Marchioness of Granby, who later became Duchess of Rutland, was the daughter of Margot’s brother Frank Tennant.}

3
_{The figures were: Asquith 14,736}

_{Biggar 11,902}

_{MacKean 3,795}

_{The poll was up by over 8,000 on the 1918 total.}

4
_{Margot gave a more dramatic account of this event. “ ... we had to have police protection after the declaration of the poll, and I was knocked on to the railway line at St. Enoch’s Station by the rush of my husband’s admirers seeing him off by the night train that took us to London. But it is surprising how excitement and happiness protect one, as after being pulled on to the platform by the willing porters I found instead of the bruises I had expected to see I had not received a single scratch.”
(More Memories
, pp. 246-7).}

5
He wrote this, rather incongruously, after recording that he had declined the Aga Khan’s invitation to take him to the Oaks but was just about to attend “ Col. Faber’s Derby dinner.”

7
_{As “ here ” was on this occasion not the Central Hotel, Glasgow, but Ferguslie Park, Paisley, which Asquith had previously described as “a typical millionaire villa with some Corots, a Sir Joshua, and a Hoppner intermixed with family photographs, and some sentimental Victorian mezzotints,” his strictures against “ some baronial retreat,” even though the irony was kindly, was hardly justified. Lady Bonham Carter (as she then was) added to the gaiety of this occasion by making the final speech and proclaiming, in response to obvious jokes about “ the Hon lying down with the lamb ”: “I can only say, for myself, that I have never seen Mr. Lloyd George look less voracious or my father more uneatable.”
(Memories and Refections,
n, p. 180).}

8
_{Strangely, Asquith’s personal relations with Haldane were closer after their definite political separation (which occurred in 1922) than they had been in the preceding decade. They exchanged fairly frequent letters, which were always warm but brief; Haldane read the proof of
The Genesis of the War;
and they enjoyed occasional luncheons or dinners in each other’s company.}

When Asquith held up the knife upon which MacDonald became impaled, he was perfectly aware that he might be doing more harm to himself than to the Labour Party. But he did not see what else he could do. He could not withdraw his amendment because the Prime Minister did not like it. He could not support the Government on the case they had put up. Once again the Maurice analogy was obvious: his sense of political tactics was overcome by his sense of parliamentary propriety.

The outlook which confronted him on the dissolution was dismal enough. At the age of 72, without any hope of a great national triumph, he had to journey to Paisley and fight his fourth campaign there within five years. One “ Midlothian ” might be stimulating for an old man, but four were another matter. Apart from anything else the personal expense was considerable. And on the wider Liberal financial front there were great difficulties about a 1924 election. Lloyd George had made it clear in August that, without a complete re-casting of the Abingdon Street organisation, he would not make as much money available from his personal fund as he had done in 1923. The honeymoon of Liberal re-union, never ecstatic, was over. This dispute about money was to persist throughout Asquith’s remaining period of Liberal leadership.

Asquith faced the Paisley contest with his usual equanimity. Margot thought he was exceptionally oratorically vigorous. “ I’ve never seen H. in such amazing form!” she wrote on October 25th. But his daughter Violet, who was a better judge in this field, thought that the campaign was the hardest of the four to flog into life: “ The Campbell case and the Russian Treaty were short commons on which to feed a hungry electorate for three weeks, and Father and I used to fling ourselves on the papers every morning in the wild hope of 
finding some utterance, by friend or foe, which might form a peg on which to hang one of the many speeches which had to be delivered before nightfall.”

The Paisley atmosphere was not pleasant. The “jungle tactics of Glasgow ” had spread there. Asquith had to put up with a good deal of noise. But he took it all very calmly. As his daughter recorded in her diary:

His patience was as impersonal as if he had been waiting for a shower of rain to pass. When a musical offensive began he might ask me with a sudden detached curiosity: “ What is that melancholy dirge they are crooning now? ” On my telling him it was the Red Flag he would evince mild interest, than lean back in his chair again with a sniff and a shrug and resume his own train of thought. When they had sung and shouted themselves hoarse he would rise and deliver with perfect calm the speech he had come there to make, quite untinged by any shade of indignation at the events which had delayed it.
^a

On the other hand the local voting prospect looked encouraging. Asquith was without a Conservative opponent. He had a straight fight with a new Labour candidate, a Glasgow solicitor named Rosslyn Mitchell. Margot, however, was sceptical of the advantage of Conservative withdrawal.

“Here it is of doubtful benefit,” she wrote to her old friend Lord Islington, “ as the Tories—the stupidest people in the world— are so angry they threaten to vote for our
very
powerful opponent. Mitchell is better dressed than Peter Flower, is highly educated and no more Labour than you, an orator wind-bag and dangerously courteous with a face like the actor John Hare, only handsomer. He may run us very close.”

Mitchell did more than that. He beat Asquith by 2,228 votes. When it was over he looked intensely depressed and said “ I’m so sorry, so terribly sorry this has happened.” Asquith merely grunted and seconded a vote of thanks to the returning officer. The next morning he and his family party had another railway departure from Glasgow, different but in its way no less memorable than that of 1920. Asquith’s daughter is again the chronicler:

We had a difficult send-off, at Glasgow, saying good-bye to faithful old supporters there, who came with tears and flowers.

As we steamed out of the station, I lay back feeling bruised from 
head to foot—and recoiling instinctively from the pile of newspapers that lay by my side—their head-lines stinging me like adders. I looked across at Father in an agony of solicitude (for I knew how the good-byes had moved him)—then meeting his calm gaze I realized suddenly that he had already made his peace with events. Groping wildly for a life-line that might draw me into smooth waters by his side, I asked in as steady a voice as possible: “ I suppose you haven’t by any chance got an old P. G. Wodehouse in your bag that you could lend me? ” A smile of instant response, mingled I thought with relief, lit up his face as he replied triumphantly: “ Being a provident man I have got in my bag, not one, but
four brand new
ones! ” My wounds were healed— for I knew that he was invulnerable.
^b

At Euston there were also cheering crowds of welcome. But they could not disguise the extent of the defeat either for Asquith or for the Liberal Party as a whole. It was reduced to 40 members, with Lloyd George the natural leader in the Commons. What could Asquith do? There could be no question of his going back to Paisley, in spite of the affecting singing of “ Will ye no’ come back again? ” to which he had been subjected in the Liberal Club the night before. Baldwin had a huge majority and was not likely to repeat the mistake of 1923. At seventy-two Asquith could hardly look forward to the next general election. Should he then seek a safe Liberal seat elsewhere? There were not many left, and in any case he was fastidious. “ I’d sooner go to hell than to Wales,” he told C. F. G. Masterman.

On November 4th, the King wrote and offered him another haven. Asquith’s absence from Westminster, the letter said, was “ a national loss.” On the other hand the King felt strongly that, after his long and eminent career, he should not be subjected to the strain and uncertainty of further electoral contests. “ For these reasons it would be a matter of the greatest satisfaction to me to confer upon you a Peerage.. .. If I could persuade you to (accept) this, it would give
me great pleasure.” 
^c 

The letter was most tactfully timed. It was sent on the day of the change of Prime Minister. The offer was therefore able to come from the King himself, without the intervention of any of Asquith’s successors. This consideration was appreciated by Asquith, and he was from the start greatly tempted by the offer. But there were pulls the other way. It was a wrench finally to abandon the House of Commons after so many years of service there. There were obvious difficulties, too, in trying to lead the Liberal Party from the Lords, while Lloyd George held sway in the Commons. Then there was the consideration that so much of his active life had been spent in battling against the Upper House; was there perhaps an element of bathos in ending up there after all this? The change of name was also a hurdle. To die, as he had so far lived, in the great commoner tradition of Mr. Pitt and Mr. Gladstone was not something to be lightly abandoned. Nor, at a time when high titles were still considered to require the backing of great fortunes, was he financially secure.

Asquith therefore delayed a decision. On November 6th he was due to leave with his son Oc for a tour of the Middle East and the Nile Valley. He asked the King if he could postpone an answer until his return in January. While he was away Asquith had plenty of time for thought. He spent much of the visit alone, including a week in the First Cataract Hotel at Assuan where he wrote 14,000 words of a new book
(Fifty Years of Parliament).
By the time of his return to England his mind was made up in favour of acceptance. On January, 20th, 1925, he wrote to the King:

I have ventured to take full advantage of your Majesty’s kind permission that I should delay a definite reply to the gracious offer of a Peerage, conveyed to me in November last, until I should have had time for mature and deliberate consideration.

The consideration involved, as your Majesty will understand, matters both personal and political of perhaps exceptional delicacy and difficulty. As a result, I now have the honour respectfully to submit my grateful acceptance of your Majesty’s proposal....

If it should be your Majesty’s pleasure, in accordance with precedent, to confer upon me the dignity of an Earl, I should propose to take the title of Oxford, which has fine traditions in our history, and which was given by Queen Anne to her Prime Minister, Robert Harley
^d

The King replied three days later: