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pushed it through. Many Liberals, including of COUl'Se the leading banking
and financial authorities, thought it extravagant.
It
was in part financed
out of inheritance taxes, which to the Tories (and the King) sounded like
Red revolution.
This extraordinary society was presided over, for the last decade of
its existence, by Gladstone'·s former Home Secretary, Herbert Henry
Asquith: a dignified lawyer with the rumpled clothes and benevolent
expression of an elderly college president. Asquith had risen in the
world (his father was a minor textile manufacturer) and taken as his
second wife the brilliant and extravagant Margot Tennant, a former
member of the exclusive social coterie nicknamed "the Souls" (they
included the Tory leader Arthur James Balfour and various aristocrats
with mildly intellectual aspirations). The marriage could have served as
a symbol, though in point of fact Margot Asquith became a fervent
Liberal---on occasion rather more fervent than her phlegmatic husband.
The Liberal Party had lost most of the old Whig families in
1886,
whan
Gladstone split Liberalism over Irish Home Rule (a measure which
affected the large landowners ) , but it still attracted recruits from the
aristocracy and was strongly represented in the House of Lords. By
way of Gladstone's immediate successor, Lord Rosebery, it also served as
a link - between the solid middle-class lawyers and bankers-Asquith,
Haldane, McKenna and the rest-and the Imperial bureaucracy which
ran India and Africa. Thus was Liberal Imperialism born.
In
1900
Asquith sided with the Tory Government against the Boer Republics.
So
did Edward Grey, in later years his Foreign Secretary and the man
principally responsible for Britain's entry into the war against Germany
in 1914. Lloyd George defended the Boers, at some cost to his popularity,
and thus established a reputation as a Radical. This came in useful in
1914 when he sided with Asquith, Grey, Churchill and the others in the
Liberal Cabinet who decided to treat the German march through Belgium
as a
casus belli.
Most of these facts can be pieced together from Mr. Roy Jenkins'
biography of the protagonist, though the reader uninstructed in the
complexities of British parliamentary government may need some fortitude
along the way. Mr. Jenkins, who in October, 1964, joined the Labour
Government in the key post of Aviation Minister, is in some ways the
ideal biographer of Asquith. Not only does he know a great deal-almost
too much-about his subject: he is temperamentally attuned to Ed–
wardian Liberalism, to a degree which renders a bit puzzling his own
political career as a Socialist (of the GaitskelIian stripe, it is true).
There is a further puzzle: Mr. Jenkins is reputedly a fervent "European,"
