Herbert Henry Asquith was born at Morley, Yorkshire, on September 12, 1852. 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. He practiced law after graduating from the Balliol College, Oxford 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. He was elected to Parliament as a Liberal in 1886. He attended national prominence as junior defense attorney for the Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell, when the latter was under investigation by Parliament in 1888, and in 1892 he became home secretary under Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone. At the turn of the century, Herbert H Asquith was considered one of the rising young stars of the Liberal party. 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 at the centre of social and intellectual circles far removed from those in which Asquith and his first wife had moved.
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 governments 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 endeavored 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 lead to civil war in 1914. Asquith’s policies did little to improve the situation in Ireland.
Asquith’s government was responsible for introducing a series of social reforms between 1914 and 1918 including Old Age Pensions, National Health Insurance and National Unemployment Insurance. It was also a period of great conflict with a dispute with the House of Lords over the Peoples Budget, the activities of the suffragettes and the threat of civil war in Ireland over the government’s Home Rule proposals. Asquith’s tenure in office was marked by a series of domestic and international crises. The first began in 1909, when the House of Lords rejected the government budget, causing Asquith to embark on a campaign to abolish the veto power of Britain’s nonelective upper house. He then set about plans to accomplish another Liberal objective- the enactment of home rule for Ireland. Controversy over this issue divided the country for the next three years. Confronted by threats of armed rebellion by home-rule opponents in Ulster and open encouragement of these threats by British Conservatives, Asquith temporized throughout 1913 and well into1914, during which time the pressure continued to build. A violent solution was averted only by the outbreak of World War I.
A firm believer in the necessity of supporting France against Germany, Asquith nevertheless carefully waited to declare war until public indignation was aroused by Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality. When war was declared Asquith appointed Lord Kitchner as war minister. This was a popular decision but the people became disillusioned when they realized that the war would not be won quickly. As the war dragged on, however, successive military reserves and acute shortages of munitions made his government the object of increasing criticism by Conservatives and Liberals alike. On May 14th, 1915, The Times published a report claiming that the British Army was seriously short of high explosive shells. Asquith’s Liberal government was severely criticized and the cabinet was forced to resign.
Asquith attempted to make policy-making more efficient by forming a five-man war council. With the failure of the Somme Offensive in the summer of 1916, Asquith became very unpopular with the British people. Depressed by his failure to bring the war to an end and the death of his eldest son, Raymond, while fighting on the Western Front. Members of the cabinet also had doubts about Asquith’s leadership and in December 1916, David Lloyd George became Britain’s new Prime Minister. Asquith lost his parliamentary seat in the December 1916 election. He returned to the House of Commons in 1920 and by 1923 had retained his leadership of the Liberal Party. Granted the title, Earl of Oxford, in 1923, Asquith died two years later at the age of seventy-six.
SHORT QUESTION:
What skills have I learnt?
The skills I learnt were:
(1) How to use Windows 98 and Microsoft Word.
(2) How to find information in the local and school library and on the Internet.
(3) How to write an historical essay to L.C. honours standard.
1. Cassar, G H. (1994) Asquith as War Leader. Hambledon Press, London.
2. Jenkins, R. (1978) Asquith. Collins. London.
3. Koss, S. (1976) Asquith. St. Martins Press , New York.
4. Spender, J.A. (1932) Life of Henry Asquith, Lord Oxford and Asquith. Hutchinson, London
This book was the best book I read in 1999, a year in which I read 50 books, 15 fiction and 35 non-fiction. Asquith was born in Yorkshire on Sept 12, 1852, and the account of his life up to 1916 could not be better done. He of course fell on personal bad time after he ceased being Prime Minster when Lloyd George replaced him, and the rest of his life is dismal. He died Feb. 15, 1928. This is a great book, one I have treasured in my memory in all the years since I read it.