Information about Herbert Henry Asquith

The Rt Hon H. H. Asquith
H. H. Asquith
Monarch	Edward VII George V
Preceded by
Succeeded by
Political party	Liberal
Spouse	Helen Melland (desc.) Margot Tennant
Alma mater	Balliol College, Oxford
Religion	Congregationalist

Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith, KG, PC (12 September 1852 – 15 February 1928) served as the Liberal Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1908 to 1916. His premiership is notable for major social changes, for example the National Insurance and pensions. He was the Prime Minister during the first two years of World War I before he was replaced by David Lloyd George in 1916.

Before his term as Prime Minister he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1905 to 1908 and as Home Secretary from 1892 to 1895.

During his lifetime he was known as H. H. Asquith before his accession to the peerage and as Lord Oxford afterwards.

Biography

He was born in Morley, West Yorkshire to Joseph Dixon Asquith (February 10, 1825-March 29, 1860) and his wife Emily Willans (May 4, 1828-December 12, 1888). The Asquiths were a middle class family and members of the Congregational church. Joseph was a wool merchant and came to own his own wool mill.

Herbert was seven years old when his father died. Emily and her children moved to the house of her father William Willans, a wool-stapler of Huddersfield. Herbert received schooling there and was later sent to a Moravian boarding school at Fulneck, near Leeds.

In 1863, Herbert was sent to live with an uncle in London, where he entered the City of London School. He was educated there until 1870 and was mentored there by its headmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott.

In 1870, Asquith won a classical scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. In 1874, Asquith was awarded the Craven scholarship and became president of the Oxford Union. He graduated that year and soon was elected a fellow at Balliol. Meanwhile he entered Lincoln's Inn as a student barrister and for a year served a pupillage under Charles Bowen.

He was called to the bar in 1876 and became prosperous in the early 1880s from practising law.

Marriage

He married Helen Kelsall Melland, daughter of a Manchester doctor, in 1877 and they had four sons and one daughter before she died from typhoid fever in 1891. These children were Raymond, Herbert (1881-1947), Arthur Melland Asquith (1883–1939), Violet (1887-1969), and Cyril. Of these children, Violet and Cyril became Life Peers in their own right; Cyril becoming a Law Lord.

In 1894, he married Margot Tennant, a daughter of Sir Charles Tennant, 1st Bt. With his second wife Margot, he had two children, Elizabeth Charlotte Lucy (later Princess Antoine Bibesco) (1897-1945) and the film director Anthony (1902-1968).

All his children, except Anthony, married and left issue. His most well-known descendant today is the actress Helena Bonham Carter, a granddaughter of Violet.

Name

In his younger days he was called Herbert within the family, but his second wife called him Henry. However, in public he was invariably referred to only as H. H. Asquith. "There have been few major national figures whose Christian names were less well known to the public," writes his biographer, Roy Jenkins.

When raised to the peerage in 1925, he proposed to take the title "Earl of Oxford" for the city near which he lived and the university he had attended. Objections were raised, especially by descendants of Earls of Oxford of previous creations (titles by then extinct), and his title was given in the form Earl of Oxford and Asquith. In practice, however, he was known as Lord Oxford.

During Asquith's period as deputy to Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, "C. B." was known to request his presence in parliamentary debate by saying, "Send for the sledge-hammer," referring to Asquith's reliable command of facts and his ability to dominate verbal exchange.

Early career (1886-1908)

Elected to Parliament in 1886 as the Liberal representative for East Fife, in Scotland, he achieved his first significant post in 1892 when he became Home Secretary under Gladstone (and later under Rosebery). The Liberals went out of power for ten years from 1895, and he turned down an offer to lead the party in 1898.

The Liberal Party won a landslide victory in the 1906 general election, and Asquith became Chancellor of the Exchequer under Henry Campbell-Bannerman. He demonstrated his staunch support of free trade in this post. Campbell-Bannerman resigned due to illness in April 1908 and Asquith succeeded him as Prime Minister. The King, Edward VII, was holidaying in Biarritz, and refused to return to London, citing health grounds, although it is now known that he was enjoying the company of his mistress Alice Keppel. Asquith was forced to travel to Biarritz for the official "kissing of hands" of the Monarch, the only time a British Prime Minister has formally taken office on foreign soil.

Asquith's government (1908-1916)

The Asquith government became involved in an expensive naval arms race with the German Empire and began an extensive social welfare programme (See Liberal reforms), introducing government pensions in 1908. The social welfare programme proved controversial, and Asquith's government faced severe (and sometimes barely legal) resistance from the Conservative Party. This came to a head in 1909, when David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, produced a deliberately provocative "People's Budget". The Conservatives, determined to stop passage, used their majority in the House of Lords to reject the bill. The Lords did not traditionally interfere with finance bills and their actions thus provoked a constitutional crisis, forcing the country to a general election in January 1910.

The election resulted in a hung parliament, with the Liberals having two more seats than the Conservatives, but lacking an overall majority. The Liberals formed a minority government with the support of the Irish Nationalists.

The radical solution in this situation was to threaten to have King Edward VII pack the House of Lords with freshly-minted Liberal peers, who would override the Lords' veto. With the Conservatives remaining recalcitrant in spring of 1910, Asquith began contemplating such an option. King Edward VII agreed to do so, after another general election, but he avoided the whole situation by dying on 6 May 1910. His son, King George V, was reluctant to have his first act in office be the carrying out of such a drastic attack on the aristocracy and it required all of Asquith's considerable powers to convince him to make the promise. This the King finally did before the second election of 1910, in December.

The Liberals again won, though their majority in the Commons was now dependent on MPs from Ireland, who had their own price. Nonetheless, Asquith was able to curb the powers of the House of Lords through the Parliament Act 1911, which essentially broke the power of the House of Lords. The Lords could now delay, but not defeat outright, a bill passed by the Commons. The price of Irish support in this effort was the Third Irish Home Rule Bill, which Asquith delivered in legislation that was ultimately suspended owing to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Asquith's efforts over Irish Home Rule nearly provoked a civil war in Ireland over Ulster, only averted by the outbreak of a European war. Asquith declared war on the German Empire on August 4 1914 in response to the German invasion of Belgium, as the 1839 Treaty of London had committed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland to guard Belgium's neutrality in the event of invasion.

Asquith headed the Liberal government into the war. However following a Cabinet split on 25 May 1915, caused by the Shell Crisis, he became head of a new coalition government, bringing senior figures from the Opposition into the Cabinet. But his performance over the conduct of the war dissatisfied certain Liberals and the Conservative Party. Opponents partially blamed a series of political and military disasters (including the failed offensives at the 1915 Battle of Gallipoli and the 1916 Battle of the Somme) and the Easter Rising in Ireland (April 1916) on Asquith. Acting to displace the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George managed to split the Liberals and, on December 5, 1916, Asquith resigned. Lloyd George became head of the coalition two days later.

Later life (1916-1928)

Asquith remained leader of the Liberal Party after 1916 and even after losing his seat in the 1918 elections. He returned to the House of Commons in a 1920 by-election in Paisley. Asquith played a major role in putting the minority Labour government of 1924 into office, elevating Ramsay MacDonald to the Prime Ministership.

Raised to the peerage as Viscount Asquith of Morley in the West Riding of the County of York and Earl of Oxford and Asquith in 1925, Asquith retired to the House of Lords after losing his seat again in the 1924 election held after the fall of the Labour government. Lloyd George succeeded him as chairman of the Liberal Members of Parliament, but Asquith remained head of the party until 1926, when Lloyd George succeeded him in that position as well, healing the split in the Liberal Party.

In 1925 Asquith was nominated for the Chancellorship of the University of Oxford, but lost to Viscount Cave. On 6 November 1925 he was made a of Huddersfield

Asquith's death and descendants

Asquith died at his country home The Wharf, Sutton Courteney, Berkshire^[1] in 1928 and Margot in 1945. They are both buried at All Saints' Church, Sutton Courtenay, (now in Oxfordshire); Asquith having requested that there should be no public funeral.

Asquith's estate was probated at £9,345 on June 9, 1928, a modest amount for so prominent a man. He was however, not a rich man, and was relatively impoverished in the last years of his life.^[2]

Asquith had five children by his first wife Helen, and five by his second wife Margot, but only his elder five children and two of his five younger children survived birth and infancy.

His eldest son Raymond Asquith was killed at the Somme in 1916, and thus the peerage passed to Raymond's only son Julian, now 2nd Earl of Oxford and Asquith (born in 1916, only a few months before his grandfather's resignation as Prime Minister).

His only daughter by his first wife, Violet (later Violet Bonham-Carter), became a well-regarded writer and a life peeress (as Baroness Asquith of Yarnbury in her own right). His fourth son Sir Cyril, Baron Asquith of Bishopstone (1890-1954) became a Law Lord. His second and third sons married well, the poet Herbert Asquith (1881-1947) (who is often confused with his father) married the daughter of an Earl and Brigadier-General Arthur Asquith (1883-1939) married the daughter of a baron.

His two children by Margot were Elizabeth (later Princess Antoine Bibesco), a writer, and Anthony Asquith, a film-maker whose productions included The Browning Version and The Winslow Boy.

Among his living descendants are his great-granddaughter, the actress Helena Bonham Carter (b. 1966); and his great-grandson, Dominic Asquith, British Ambassador to Iraq since 2006. Another leading British actress, Anna Chancellor (b. 1965, probably best known for her role as Duckface, the Sloane Ranger bride jilted at the altar by Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral), is also a direct descendant, being Herbert Asquith's great-great-granddaughter on her mother's side.

Asquith's Governments

• First Asquith ministry (1908–1915)
• Second Asquith ministry (1915–1916)
• Liberal Government 1905-1915
• Coalition Government 1915-1916

Further reading

• H.H. Asquith, H.H.A.: Letters of the Earl of Oxford and Asquith to a Friend (2 vols) (Geoffrey Bles, 1933-4)
• H.H. Asquith, ed. Michael and Eleanor Brock, Letters to Venetia Stanley (Oxford University Press, 1982)
• Margot Asquith, Autobiography (2 vols) (Thornton Butterworth, 1920-2)
• Colin Clifford, The Asquiths (John Murray, 2002)
• Roy Jenkins, Asquith (Collins, 1964, revised edition 1978)
• Lord Oxford and Asquith, Fifty Years in Parliament (2 vols) (Cassell, 1926)
• Lord Oxford and Asquith, Memories and Recollections (2 vols) (Cassell, 1928)
• J.A. Spender and Cyril Asquith, Life of Lord Oxford and Asquith (2 vols) (Hutchinson, 1932)

External links

• Extended entry in the 1937 Dictionary of National Biography
• More about Herbert Henry Asquith on the Downing Street (official site of the British PM) website.
• Asquith biography from BBC History
• Asquith entry in Encyclopedia Britannica
• Herbert Asquith at Find-A-Grave

See also

• Asquith family for a partial list of his descendants

External links

Offices Held

Political offices
Preceded by Henry Matthews	Home Secretary 1892 – 1895	Succeeded by Sir Matthew Ridley
Preceded by Austen Chamberlain	Chancellor of the Exchequer 1905 – 1908	Succeeded by David Lloyd George
Preceded by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman	Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 1908 – 1916
	Leader of the House of Commons 1908 – 1916	Succeeded by Andrew Bonar Law
Preceded by John Edward Seely	Secretary of State for War 1914	Succeeded by The Earl Kitchener of Khartoum
Preceded by Andrew Bonar Law	Leader of the Opposition 1916 – 1918	Succeeded by Sir Donald Maclean
Preceded by Sir Donald Maclean	Leader of the Opposition 1920 – 1922	Succeeded by Ramsay MacDonald
Parliament of the United Kingdom (1801–present)
Preceded by John Boyd Kinnear	Member of Parliament for East Fife 1886 – 1918	Succeeded by Alexander Sprot
Preceded by John Mills McCallum	Member of Parliament for Paisley 1920 – 1924	Succeeded by Edward Rosslyn Mitchell
Party political offices
Preceded by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman	Leader of the British Liberal Party 1908 – 1926	Succeeded by David Lloyd George
Academic offices
Preceded by George Wyndham	Rector of the University of Glasgow 1905 – 1908	Succeeded by Baron Curzon of Kedleston
Preceded by Sir Frederick Treves	Rector of the University of Aberdeen 1908 – bef. 1914	Succeeded by Unknown
Peerage of the United Kingdom
New title	Earl of Oxford and Asquith 1925 – 1928	Succeeded by Julian Asquith

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