H.H. Asquith, 1st earl of Oxford and Asquith

H.H. Asquith, 1st earl of Oxford and Asquith (born September 12, 1852, Morley, Yorkshire, England—died February 15, 1928, Sutton Courtenay, Berkshire) was a Liberal prime minister of Great Britain (1908–16), who was responsible for the Parliament Act of 1911, limiting the power of the House of Lords, and who led Britain during the first two years of World War I.

Asquith was the second son of Joseph Asquith, a small businessman in the wool trade and an ardent Congregationalist, who died in 1860. Asquith was educated at the City of London School from 1863 to 1870, when he won a classical scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford. At Balliol he obtained the highest academic honours, and he became a fellow of his college in 1874. Deciding upon a legal career, he entered Lincoln’s Inn and was called to the bar in 1876. The following year he married Helen Melland, daughter of a Manchester doctor. His early days at the bar were difficult, but from about 1883 onward he became highly successful.

A keen Liberal, Asquith entered the House of Commons for East Fife in 1886 and remained its member for 32 years. He commanded the attention of the House from the first, concentrating particularly upon the Irish question. In 1888 he achieved celebrity as junior counsel for the Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell, when Parnell was accused, before a parliamentary commission, of condoning political murder. In 1892 Prime Minister William Gladstone made Asquith home secretary. Before that, in 1891, his wife had died of typhoid fever, leaving him with a family of young children. Less than three years later he astounded the social and political world by marrying Margot Tennant, who was 12 years younger and the centre of social and intellectual circles far removed from those in which Asquith and his first wife had moved.

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His three years as home secretary, though in general an unhappy period for the Liberals, established Asquith’s reputation as an administrator and a debater. By 1895 he had become one of the leading figures of his party. Defeated at the polls, the party spent the next 11 years in opposition. Asquith earned during this time a large income at the bar, but the lack of any private means obliged him to refuse the party leadership when it was offered to him in 1898, and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman succeeded instead. Asquith did not see eye to eye with the new leader on all questions of foreign and imperial policy. Their divergence became open and public during the South African War (1899–1902), when Asquith, along with Lord Rosebery, Sir Edward Grey, and R.B. Haldane, formed the Liberal League to advocate an imperial policy in support of the government’s expansionism. The conflict was temporarily healed after the end of the war, and, following the Liberals’ victory at the polls in 1906, Asquith served as chancellor of the Exchequer under Campbell-Bannerman.

Early in April 1908 Campbell-Bannerman resigned and died some days later. Asquith, generally regarded as his inevitable successor, became prime minister and was to hold the office for nearly nine years. He appointed David Lloyd George to the Exchequer and made Winston Churchill president of the Board of Trade. The chief problem confronting him at home was the opposition of the House of Lords to Liberal reforms, and the consequent danger of a rebellion from the frustrated radicals in his own party; abroad there was a growing naval competition with Germany. When Lloyd George endeavoured to raise money for naval increases and social services in his “radical budget” of 1909, the budget was vetoed by the House of Lords.

At this stage Asquith took over the conduct of a constitutional struggle. In 1910 he announced a plan to limit the powers of the House of Lords and, after two general elections, persuaded King George V to threaten to create enough new pro-reform peers to swamp the opposition in that chamber. The resulting Parliament Act, passed in August 1911, ended the Lords’ veto power over financial legislation passed by the House of Commons.

The three years between this episode and the outbreak of World War I were extremely harassing for Asquith. Abroad, the international situation deteriorated rapidly; at home, controversy was caused by charges of corruption in his government, the disestablishment of the Anglican church in Wales (1914), and the conflict between Home Rulers and Unionists in Ireland, which nearly led to civil war in 1914. Asquith’s policies did little to improve the situation in Ireland.

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Though convinced that a German victory over France would be disastrous to the British Empire, Asquith delayed Britain’s entry into World War I until public opinion had been aroused by the German attack on Belgium. In war, he trusted his military experts and in general favoured the view that victory could be won only on the Western Front.

In May 1915 Asquith had to reconstruct his cabinet on a coalition basis, admitting Unionists as well as Liberals, and appointing Lloyd George minister of munitions. The coalition was not successful under his leadership. The Dardanelles expedition failed, and there was no sign of a breakthrough on the Western Front. At the end of 1915 Asquith substituted Sir Douglas Haig for Sir John French as British commander in chief in France and appointed Sir William Robertson as the new chief of the imperial general staff. But 1916 was an even unhappier year: the Easter Rising in Dublin caused a grave domestic crisis, and the Battle of the Somme resulted in terrible British losses on the Western Front. After a protracted struggle, conscription was belatedly introduced. But there was a general aura of dissatisfaction by the autumn, and Asquith was assailed by a strident press campaign. In December he resigned and was replaced by Lloyd George. He never held office again, though he remained leader of the Liberal Party until 1926. In this capacity he often opposed the policies of his successor.

Asquith accepted a peerage as earl of Oxford and Asquith in 1925 and was created a knight of the garter shortly afterward. In the last years of his life he was relatively impoverished and wrote a number of books to make money, the best known being The Genesis of the War (1923), Fifty Years of Parliament (1926), and Memories and Reflections (1928).

Asquith was a competent statesman, but not a great one. He had no original or innovating genius and lacked the sense of the dramatic needed to convince Britain that it was in good hands in a time of national crisis.