Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd

Asquith by Roy JenkinsReview by: F. S. L. LyonsIrish Historical Studies, Vol. 15, No. 57 (Mar., 1966), pp. 106-109Published by: Irish Historical Studies Publications LtdStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30005756 .

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io6 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

reached' (p. 223). Other negotiators later had the same experience with Lloyd George.

Dr Morgan is always conscious of the parallels between Wales and Ireland in this period. It was the disestablishment of the Irish Church which brought Welsh disestablishment to the fore as a political issue, and provided arguments for both sides in the long campaign. The problem of land tenure in Wales had similarities to that in Ireland, and there were demands for a measure for Wales like Gladstone's second Irish Land Act. T. E. Ellis expressed warm, if somewhat vague, sympathy with Irish aspirations, and Michael Davitt spoke on the same platform as the young Lloyd George in I885. But the author's conclusion is that the analogy with Ireland was fundamentally misleading. 'In Wales', he writes, 'unlike Ireland, the squirearchy was anglicised but not alien.

. Welsh landlords and clergy were too deeply integrated into the Welsh community to be the subject of boycotting.... The ideal of Wales was to be recognized as a part of the British political and social structure; the ideal of Ireland was to be severed from it' (pp. 304-5). Moreover, the Welsh party in the house of commons never achieved the discipline and independence of Parnell's Irish party. Even the sympathy of the Welsh for Ireland was in doubt: Rendel's view of how to fight the election of 1886 in Wales was that 'we must go to the country on the Gladstone ticket, say as little as we can about Ireland and as much about church and land' (p. 72). The true contrast with Ireland may best be seen in a comment of Dr Morgan's about the situation in 1914: 'The status of the Welsh nation was long since secure, with the univer- sity, the National Museum, and the National Library as its tangible symbols . . .' (p. 274). This was a far cry from Irish nationalism.

Finally, there are two points on which questions are left in the reader's mind. Firstly, Dr Morgan describes the collapse of liberal party organisation in Wales at the turn of the century and afterwards, without fully explaining it. Was it merely the effect of a surfeit of electoral victories? Was there a similar collapse in England? Secondly, Welsh conservatism always had a large vote and remained a significant element in Welsh society. Dr Morgan commends its adaptability in a short passage in his 'Epilogue'. Does it not deserve fuller consideration than there is space for in this book, whose main attention is necessarily elsewhere?

P. M. H. BELL

ASQUITH. By Roy Jenkins. Pp. 572. London: Collins. 1964. 45s.

EACH generation, it seems, has now to rewrite biography as well as history for itself. The eminent Victorians, at all events, are being re-assessed at a great rate and so far they seem to have come off much better than they did at Lytton Strachey's hands. Mr Roy Jenkins, with his admirable study of Sir Charles Dilke, had already proved himself a notable resur- rectionist and he has certainly added to his reputation with this new life of Asquith. Basing his work mainly on the Asquith Papers now in the Bodleian Library, and using also a number of private letters - especially

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REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES IO7

those to Venetia Stanley, later Mrs Edwin Montagu - he has given us a much more vivid and immediate portrait of the prime minister-- and it is the prime minister who occupies most of this book - than it was possible to get from the biography by J. A. Spender and Cyril Asquith, which appeared too soon after Asquith's death, and was too bowed down by filial piety, to be as valuable as it ought to have been. Mr Jenkins writes extremely well and, what is even more to the point, he has direct experience of politics. While writing his book, it is true, he had not achieved ministerial status and it is possible that if he were now to re-write some of his own chapters, he would allow rather more for human error and the consequential necessity for improvisation, but, as an M.P. of some standing, he has at his command an intimate knowledge of the house of commons and of how the party system works, and his book does nothing to diminish the old argument that the best political historian is he who has some personal acquaintance with the business of government.

This biography was written under the eagle eye of Lady Violet Bonham Carter (Lady Asquith, as she now is), and it says a great deal for Mr Jenkins, and, indeed for her, that though, as he writes, it 'grew into something she did not entirely like', and though she registered from time to time 'a strong protest', Mr Jenkins was able to stick to his guns. His interpretation of Asquith is his own interpretation - it wears neither an Asquithian nor a liberal gloss. But this does not prevent it from bringing out in bold relief the not inconsiderable qualities of its subject. On the contrary, Mr Jenkins gives full prominence to Asquith's massive intelligence, to his ability to master complex details with almost con- temptuous ease, and to his power to expound his policies in the house of commons. He gives many examples, also, of Asquith's talent for holding together his cabinet of powerful and often contentious person- alities, of his tolerance, and of his patience. He leaves us in no doubt that in the scholarship boy who rose so effortlessly to the highest office there were combined many of the best virtues both of Jowett's Balliol and of Victorian liberalism.

Yet Mr Jenkins is not blinded by these virtues. He makes it perfectly clear, indeed, that it was precisely Asquith's background and qualities which placed him at a serious, and in the end fatal, disadvantage in the kind of world which confronted him at the apex of his power. The strength of reason, the sanctity of law, the necessity for tolerance and patience - these were words and phrases which came to mean less and less in the critical years of Asquith's career, between go90 and 1916. And though Mr Jenkins's narrative engages our sympathy for Asquith's various cruel dilemmas in these years, many questions about his policy and attitudes still remain. One may agree that it was his tragedy to have to deal with men like Carson and Bonar Law and Lloyd George, but nothing in this meticulous account of Asquith's dramatic fall from power suggests that he ever fully realised - until perhaps just near the end-- what a jungle British politics had become. What the account unfortunately does suggest is that Asquith was not a man to go tiger- shooting with in that jungle.

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Io8 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

For Irish historians, of course, the most poignant instance of this will always be Asquith's mishandling of the final stages of the home rule crisis. Mr Jenkins deals very fairly with this and is certainly right to remind us that it ought to be set against the backcloth of an imminent world war and that, for English ministers, Ireland was often a tiresome intrusion upon time that was urgently needed for other matters vital to the whole existence of the empire. Yet, in a sense, nothing was more vital to the whole existence of the empire than that the Irish question should be solved, and solved in a constitutional and democratic fashion. The deliberate defiance of constitutional modes of action which Carson and Bonar Law embarked upon from 1912 onwards had, as is well known, incalculable consequences, and it must still be the chief burden of reproach against Asquith that he did not grasp this nettle firmly. Granted that the difficulties were immense, that the loyalty of the army was suspect, that the weight of the crown and of most sections of 'society' was behind a policy of appeasement, it is still difficult to resist the con- clusion that in dealing with this threat to civilised government and to the whole structure of parliamentary democracy, Asquith was totally inadequate, and inadequate, ironically enough, because he still clung to principles and methods which his opponents had long since discarded. If Carson remains one of the great enigmas of modern British politics, perhaps the fault is largely Asquith's.

If Asquith showed to such disadvantage before 1914, he was more vulnerable than ever after the war had started. Ruthlessness, adminis- trative efficiency, a flair for dramatic gestures and vote-catching propa- ganda- these were the attributes which counted increasingly and in which Asquith was - unrepentantly - deficient. From the moment the coalition was formed his fate as prime minister was almost certainly sealed. The story of the palace revolution which finally overthrew him, and which left behind it such grievous wounds (some of them not yet closed) has often been told before, though told, as Mr Jenkins rightly points out, largely on the basis of Lord Beaverbrook's Politicians and the war, a source which can scarcely be taken as a model of objectivity. From the Asquith Papers Mr Jenkins has been able to fill in many details of this sordid episode which had previously been obscure, but he does not really alter one's fundamental conviction that Asquith was a necessary sacrifice, and that Lloyd George, whatever his many and manifest vices, was nevertheless the man to win the war.

A word should be said in conclusion about Mr Jenkin's use of sources. The fact that he relies so heavily upon the Asquith Papers, without much reference to other collections, does make his book rather one-sided. It has to be admitted, however, that in general he uses the Asquith Papers to excellent effect and I have noticed only one important error in transcription. On page 399 he refers to 28 June 1916 as a day of cabinet crisis over Ireland. It was indeed a day of crisis, for in the course of it the coalition nearly dissolved on the issue of Lloyd George's abortive proposals to settle the Irish question after the Easter rising-- but, as Asquith's own memorandum records, the day was June 27, not 28. And in this context, it is perhaps worth remarking that Mr Jenkins

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REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 109g

has succeeded in writing at length about the Irish question without apparently once referring to Denis Gwynn's Life of John Redmond which prints in extenso most of the communications that passed between the Irish leader and the British prime minister. This leads one to feel that further exploration might have given a little more depth to Mr Jenkins's scholarship. But this should not be allowed to detract too much from his achievement. He has written an admirably constructed and finely balanced book which, as a narrative of political life in England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is of absorbing interest and a constant delight to read.

F. S. L. LYONS

THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF POLITICAL SCIENCE. By Maurice Cowling. Pp. vii, 2 4. Cambridge: University Press. 1963. 25s.

MILL AND LIBERALISM. By Maurice Cowling. Pp. xvii, i6I. Canm- bridge: University Press. 1963. 25s.

MR MAURICE COWLING emerged suddenly in 1963 as a formidable hunter of political scientists. He came armed with a double-barrelled shot-gun and these books, The nature and limits of political science and Mill and liberalism, have made a noisy 'left and right'. In their very different ways, they expound a single and (since, so far as I know, he has few followers) singular view.

The nature and limits of political science 'is designed to suggest ways in which political studies can be rescued from the confusion into which they have fallen in England in the last sixty years. . . . It stresses the truth (which arrogance masquerading as altruism and dogmatic certainty disguised as open-mindedness have in too many places obscured too long) that an essential preliminary to serious political explanation is to abandon the belief that those who write but do not rule would be rather better at ruling (if they had the chance) than those who do '.

Mr Cowling's thesis is that political science ought to be an ' academic' activity. He holds that it can be fruitful only when those who engage in it eschew the temptation to issue prescriptions intended to influence the pattern of the activities they are discussing.

. . if one may properly speak of political science at all, it is only in the sense in which historians as well as chemists, philosophers as well as physicists are prac- titioners of sciences - in the sense in which, by providing bodies of explanation of the areas in which they work, they extend the range of understanding of the civilization of which they are a part. Authority in these matters is confined to explanation of the subject-matter: anything that scholars do beyond, they do, as it were, for profit or relaxation.

In his view, indeed, it is only permissible to engage in it in suitably academic surroundings. Television dons and professors of political science who seek mass audiences or the ear of statesmen are not only betraying their profession but are engaging in an activity in which professionally

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