H.H. Asquith, considered the founder of the British welfare state, was the prime minister of the United Kingdom who led the British Empire into the monumental debacle that was World War I. The son of a cloth merchant, Henry Herbert Asquith was born in Morley, Yorkshire and attended Balliol College, Oxford. After graduation, he became a barrister, and was called to the bar in 1876.
Asquith married Helen Kelsall Melland, the daughter of a Manchester physician, in 1877. By the early 1880s, he had become financially well-off from his law practice, enough so to consider politics. (Members of Parliament were not paid a real salary until the 1970s.) He was first elected to Parliament in 1886, standing as the Liberal candidate for East Fife.
His first wife gave him four sons and one daughter before dying from typhoid in 1891.He remarried in 1894, taking Margot Tennant, the daughter of Sir Charles Tennant, 1st Baronet, as his second wife. She bore several children, but only a son and daughter survived into adulthood.
H.H. Asquith was called Herbert by his family, but his second wife called him Henry, and those who called him by his Christian name made the switch. However, in public, he was styled only as H.H. Asquith.
The Oscar Wilde Affair
In 1892, H.H. Asquith became Home Secretary during William Gladstone’s last government. As Home Secretary, Asquith signed the arrest order for Oscar Wilde, who was eventually incarcerated for “lewd behavior.”
Oscar Wilde had conducted a homsexual affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, the son of the Marquess of Queensberry, the man who had codified the rules of boxing but was then better-known as an atheist who prostelytized for a secular society. The Marquess had become a pariah in high society after he was excluded from the House of Lords (where he had been a member from 1872 to 1880) for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the sovereign, as it was religious in nature. Queensberry had denounced Wilde publicly as a sodomite for seducing his son.
In March 1895, Oscar Wilde filed a lawsuit against the Marquess of Queensberry alleging criminal libel, charging the peer with defamation. After the trial began, details of Wilde’s consorting with homosexuals, including male prostitutes, came up during his testimony on the stand. The Marquess’ lawyers had hired detectives to probe into Wilde’s sex life, details of which were being opened up to the public as Wilde was on the stand. Following the case, the press had “exposed” the homosexual demi-monde of London.
Faced with public embarassment, as well as a situation opening him up to being charged under the country’s anti-sodomy laws, the author withdrew his lawsuit. The tide of public opinion had turned against Wilde. Male homosexuality had been proscribed under the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, which was passed the year after Wilde had married his wife. It was under that law that Wilde was arrested and successfully prosecuted for lewd indecency.
Oscar Wilde was incarcerated in 1895. The prison in which he eventually wound up for to serve the bulk of his term provided the millieu of his most famous poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He was released after two years, a broken man who died three years later at the age of 46.
One of the ironies of the case is that H.H. Asquith‘s own son, Antony Asquith, was a homosexual. Until homosexuality was decriminalized in 1967, gay Britons lived in fear of arrest as official persecution of gays had thrived after the Oscar Wilde prosecution.
Climbing the Greasy Pole
Three years after the Liberal Party went out of power in 1895, H.H. Asquith was offered the Liberal Party leadership, but he turned it down. After the Liberals’ landslide victory in the 1906 general election, Asquith became Chancellor of the Exchequer under Henry Campbell-Bannerman, in which post Asquith proved a stalwart proponent of free trade.
Campbell-Bannerman resigned the premiership due to illness in April 1908 and Asquith succeeded him in the post, becoming the first member of the professional middle class to serve as Prime Minister.
Constitutional Crisis
H.H. Asquith’s first government launched a guns and butter legislative program, building up the British Navy in an arms race with Germany while introducing social welfare programs. Asquith can be considered the father of the British welfare state, as his government introduced government pensions in 1908.
The welfare program was fiercely resisted by the Conservative Party (Tories), which provoked a constitutional crisis in in 1909, when the Tory majority in the House of Lords rejected the government’s “People’s Budget.” Traditionally, finance was the province of the Commons, and the Lords’ rejection of the bill and the resulting constitutional crisis forced a general election in January 1910.
Though the Liberals were returned to government with a majority, their numbers in the Commons were much reduced, and the crisis continued.
King Edward VII consented to filling the House of Lords with freshly-minted Liberal peers, who would override the Lords’ veto, if H.H. Asquith agreed to hold another general election, after which he would act if the impasse continued. However, Edward VII died in May 1910, before the second general election. Asquith had to use his considerable powers of persuasion to get Edward’s successor, George V, to agree to the plan.
The new King was hesitant about creating a slew of new Liberal peers, as packing the Lords would undermine the power of the hereditary aristocracy. Before the Demember 1910 general election (the last held for eight years), Asquith’s persuasion paid off, and George V agreed to pack the House of Lords. The Liberals won their second election of 1910, though the balance of power in the government rested with peers from Ireland, who demanded a Home Rule bill as the price of support for Asquith’s third government.
The Parliament Act 1911 circumscribed the legislative power of the House of Lords, as the upper chamber of Parliament was limited to delaying, but not defeating outright, any bill passed by the House of Commons. H.H. Asquith paid off the Irish block with the Third Irish Home Rule Bill, which achieved the Royal Assent in late 1914, though implementation of the law was suspended for the duration of World War I, which the UK had become involved in due to a spiderweb of treaties. The Irish question remained a tinderbox, and while civil war in Ireland over the fate of Ulster was averted in 1914 by the outbreak of the war in Europe, simmering tensions would lead to the Easter Rebellion of 1916, which would prove to be one for the factors of Asquith’s loss of power.
The Great War
The other factor in H.H. Asquith‘s loss of the prime ministership the Great War. In May 1915, the Cainet split over a scandal involving the dearth of munitions available at the front. Asquith ultimately was held responsible for the shortcomings in British war production.
The “Shell Crisis” underscored the need for the British economy to be put onto a war-time footing. Responding to the discord, Asquity formed a new government, creating a national coalition that included members of the Opposition. (Though an election should have been held in 1915, elections were suspended for the duration of the war.) David Lloyd George, the most dynamic of the Liberal ministers from the old cabinet, was made minister of munitions.
The new coalition government did nothing to bolster Asquith’s premiership. Both Liberals and Tories criticized his performance over the conduct of the war and assigned him some of the blame for the failed offensives at the Somme (in which Aquith’s eldest son Raymond died) and Gallipoli (which led to the resignation of Winston Churchill, then a Liberal MP, as First Sea Lord).
Asquith also was blamed for his handling of the armed Easter uprising of Irish Catholics in Dublin in April 1916 and the subsequent civil war. The Machiavellian Lloyd George undermined Asqutih by splitting the Liberal Party into pro- and anti-Asquith factions. The result was that H.H. Asquith resigned as prime minister on December 5, 1916, and was succeeded by Lloyd George.
Post-Premiership
After resigning as Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith continued in his post as Liberal Party leader, even after losing his seat in the 1918 elections. He returned to the House of Commons in a 1920 by-election and played a key role in helping the Labour Party form a minority in 1924, which gave Ramsay MacDonald his first, albeit short-lived, premiership.
The minority Labour government fell later in 1924, and in the subsequent election won by the Tories, Asquith lost his seat in the Commons. He was raised to the hereditary peerage as Viscount Asquith, of Morley in the West Riding of the County of York, and Earl of Oxford and Asquith in 1925. Asquith moved over to the House of Lords and finally resigned the Liberal Party leadership in 1926.
H.H. Asquith died in 1928. He had served longer than any other prime minister of the 20th Century, until Margaret Thatcher surpassed his time hin office in 1988.
Violet Bonham Carter( maiden name Violet Asquith), H.H. Asquith’s only daughter by his first wife, was a successful writer who was made a Life Peeress in her own right (she is the grandmother of the Oscar-nominated actress Helena Bonham Carter). His son Cyril became a Law Lord, and two other sons married well, one being the poet Herbert Asquith. His two children by Margot were Elizabeth (later Princess Antoine Bibesco), a writer, and Anthony Asquith, the well-regarded film director.
Reference:
- UK Parliament: H.H. Ascquith ukparliament.freebase.com/view/en/h_h_asquith
