Asquith by Roy Jenkins

Author:Roy Jenkins [Jenkins, Roy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Asquith
ISBN: 9781448211326
Google: MXUsAQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-04-21T23:00:00+00:00

When it came to the issue, he argued, British subjects would not stand against “ the supreme authority of the Imperial Parliament.” But the Unionists were tired of an arena in which they always lost. They were only too anxious to appeal to some other authority—to the Lords, to the King, to the streets of Belfast. During 1913 Bonar Law played with alternative ideas of a mass Unionist withdrawal from Parliament and of provoking such constant disorder as to bring its proceedings to a standstill. The arrest of himself or any other Unionist leaders would have given him the perfect excuse for one or other of these courses. Furthermore the effect upon the King and the army, both a little wobbly in any event, would have been catastrophic. Asquith’s stand was on the inviolability of the parliamentary system. To maintain this stand he had to pretend that the system was working normally, even if it was not—and this meant that, whatever they did, he could ot lock up his principal opponents.

Asquith’s relative inactivity on Ireland during the sessions of 1912 and 1913 therefore had more to commend it than is commonly allowed. Additional action beyond the trundling of the Bill round its first two parliamentary circuits might easily have made matters worse. Furthermore, for a Government which appeared to be beset on all sides— Ireland, strikes, the Marconi scandal, the threatening international situation, the suffragettes—and which faced a constant series of parliamentary crises, a certain massive calmness on the part of its head was by no means a negligible asset. At one time the Speaker was threatening to resign; at another the air was thick with rumours that the King wanted to abdicate; and at most times Augustine Birrell the Chief Secretary, thought that he had better vacate the Irish Office. Had Asquith been a restless political genius he might have struck out at the problem, with a faint chance of solving it; but had he been a lesser man than he was he might easily have lost his nerve and begun himself to indulge in petulant and self-pitying resignation talk. Instead he remained calm, detached and mildly optimistic. When confronted with apparently insoluble crises he consoled himself with his “ fixed belief,” as he wrote to Miss Stanley, “ that in politics the expected rarely happens.”

The King was less phlegmatic than Asquith. Throughout the spring and summer months of 1913 he received a spate of constitutional complaint and advice from Unionist leaders, elder statesmen and anonymous correspondents. “ The one man,” Sir Harold Nicolson comments, “ who . .. had never even alluded to the subject was the Prime Minister himself.”e All this made the King extremely agitated. On July 24th he saw Birrell and pointed out “ that apparently the Government were “ drifting ” and that with this “ drift ” his own position was becoming more and more difficult.’’-5 He then asked Stamford-ham6 to find out the views of the opposition leaders. As a result he received on July 31st a memorandum jointly composed by Bonar Law and Lansdowne.

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