Background
Herbert Asquith was born at Croft House, Morley, Lincolnshire, on September 12, 1852, the son of a nonconformist wool spinner and weaver.
Herbert Asquith was born at Croft House, Morley, Lincolnshire, on September 12, 1852, the son of a nonconformist wool spinner and weaver.
Mr. Asquith went to Balliol College, Oxford in 1870 as almost the first scholar to come from outside the ranks of the great public schools and thereafter pursued a career in law, until his election to the House of Commons as Liberal member from East Fife in 1886. Six years later, Prime Minister William Gladstone appointed Asquith home secretary, but the Liberals were defeated in 1895 and Asquith was out of office for nearly eleven years. He broke with the Liberal leader, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, over the South African War at the turn of the century; as a Liberal imperialist, Asquith objected to Campbell-Bannerman's denunciation of British farm burnings and concentration camps as "methods of barbarism."
Only after the general election of January 1906, when the Liberal party was finally returned to power, did Asquith accept the post of chancellor of the Exchequer. In April 1908, the deteriorating health of Campbell-Bannerman elevated Asquith to the nation's highest office, and he took with him David Lloyd George as chancellor of the Exchequer and Winston S. Churchill as president of the Board of Trade. Asquith's nine-year rule was to be the longest in nearly a century of British politics.
Asquith's government immediately faced a financial crisis, which quickly evolved into a constitutional question. Lloyd George's 1908 budget levied a new land tax to pay for both social programs and naval expansion. When the House of Lords rejected the budget in November, it openly challenged the 250-year-old assumption that the power of the purse belonged to the Commons. Although the Lords passed the budget in April 1910, Asquith, anxious over a projected third home rule bill for Ireland, introduced a scheme whereby a bill which had been passed in the Commons three times would, after a waiting period of two years, automatically become law even if the Lords rejected it down the line. In April 1912, the prime minister introduced his home rule bill promising to establish a Dublin parliament; this measure brought him the opposition not only of the Lords, but also of the Ulster Protestants, led by Sir Edward Carson.
Neither a conference of party leaders at Buckingham Palace in July 1914 nor a threat to create as many new Liberal peers as were necessary to pass the measure in the Lords could calm the political storm. In March 1914, the army camp at the Curragh had actually decided to accept dismissal rather than coerce Ulster into accepting home rule, a mutiny that forced Asquith to take over as secretary for war.
The German thrust through Belgium ended the Irish question and united the British behind Asquith on August 4, 1914, and the prime minister's appointment of Lord H. H. Kitchener as secretary of state for war was a master stroke designed to allay Conservative criticism. By December 1914, Asquith had realized that the war would not be "over before Christmas," and he turned to the more imaginative Lloyd George and Churchill, both of whom denounced the attritional tactics employed in France and called instead for a "more imaginative strategy.” Specifically, in February 1915, the prime minister accepted the proposal that the navy force the Dardanelles and take Constantinople; when this failed, Asquith, still refusing to convene the War Council, agreed that the armies under Sir Ian Hamilton storm the Gallipoli Peninsula. The failure of both services to accomplish their goals at the Straits - compounded by an acute shortage of shells in France - brought about the fall of the Liberal government in May 1915.
The coalition government that succeeded it was headed by Asquith and included Andrew Bonar Law of the Conservatives and Arthur Henderson of Labour; not included were Winston Churchill and Admiral Sir John Fisher both of whom were out of favor after the Dardanelles debacle.
The coalition government was not a great success. Conscription of a sort was finally forced upon Asquith as was the replacement of Sir John French by Sir Douglas Haig as field commander in France. In October 1915, the French compelled the prime minister to support yet another “side show," this one at Salonika and two months later the British at last gave up on the Dardanelles campaign. The slaughter in France did not add to Asquith's standing at home. In April 1916, the prime minister delineated his war aims program, calling specifically for the "destruction of the military domination of Prussia," a perfectly nebulous phrase, and for a constitutional change in Berlin. But Asquith was losing the reins of power and becoming a passive spectator in the war that he had helped unleash. His lack of imagination, his inability to provide new ideas, his conciliation, his “wait-and-see" attitude, and his wooden personality were resented by a country whose youth was being led to the slaughter at the Somme for no apparent reason.
In November and December, the Conservatives Bonar Law and Edward Carson joined with Lord Beaverbrook to champion the cause of the fiery Welshman, Lloyd George, who, on December 7, succeeded Asquith as prime minister. Herbert Asquith was then suddenly and unexpectedly cast into the role of leader of the opposition, and he carried out his functions with only the most moderate criticism. Above all, he feared that a general election at that time would destroy the Liberal party as the country would undoubtedly rally around the national government. His fears were well founded: in the general election of December 1918, Asquith was defeated in East Fife, which he had held for thirty-two years. In 1920, he returned to the Commons in a by-election in Paisley, and two years later he was instrumental in helping Labour form its first major government which lasted barely eight months. In a subsequent election he was defeated at Paisley and opted to end a parliamentary career that spanned nearly four decades.
In 1925 Asquith entered the House of Lords as earl of Oxford and Asquith, but further feuds with Lloyd George forced him the following year to resign as leader of the Liberals. He died at The Wharf, Sutton Courteney, Berkshire, on February 15, 1928. He made it well known that he desired no public funeral, although he was widely eulogized as "the last of the Romans." Churchill said of him that "in war he had not those qualities of resource and energy, of prevision and assiduous management, which ought to reside in the executive".