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Of all Cabinet ministers in the nineteenth century, one-fifth had been called to the Bar. This astonishing statistic comes from a recent biography charting the rise and fall of Herbert Henry Asquith. V Markham Lester’s Last of the Romans (Lexington Books, 2019) is the newest volume about the Prime Minister who led Britain through the convulsions of the Edwardian era – the People’s Budget, the House of Lords crisis, threatened civil war in Northern Ireland, votes for women, and the First World War.
No doubt Professor Lester’s thesis will enjoy a wide and sympathetic audience amongst members of the Bar. He contends that the key to Asquith’s greatness was ‘his unshakeable belief in the virtues of rational thought, eloquence, and self-control’, acquired as a classicist and barrister.
Asquith was a precocious child. He developed an appetite for debate at the City of London School, from which flowed his interest in the law. In a letter to his mother, the boy described a trial he had attended at the Court of Queen’s Bench, presided over by the Lord Chief Justice. (Remarkably, the thirteen-year-old planned to return the next day to hear the judge’s summing-up.)
Balliol followed, then Lincoln’s Inn. Pupillage (then typically two years) cost around one hundred guineas per annum. Initially, his practice was ‘small, intermittent, and […] neither productive nor promising’. Of this time he later wrote: ‘I went by the train to the Temple, and sat and worked and dreamed in my chambers, and listened with feverish expectation for a knock on the door, hoping it might be a client with a brief.’ Giving lectures; churning out articles for the Spectator; starting (and abandoning) a treatise on mercantile law: such activities sustained Asquith financially.
Then came a breakthrough. He joined the chambers of the Treasury Devil. Soon Asquith was swamped with instructions: to defend an MP charged with unlawful assembly in Trafalgar Square; to represent the Great Western Railway (a case ‘devoid of human interest’); to write memoranda on the Bradlaugh case and the Corrupt Practices Act 1883; to prosecute Emile Zola’s publisher for obscenity (thus spending his holidays ‘in a diligent quest for the most objectionable passages’). Barristers’ achievements are often writ in water, but Lester does an admirable job of reconstructing Asquith’s early career. (Students of English contract law might, however, raise an eyebrow at his inclusion of Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball as one of the ‘more mundane lawsuits’ in which the future Prime Minister was involved.) Asquith took silk in 1890.
Lester persuasively shows that the habits Asquith acquired in these years shaped his entire life. He was startlingly industrious. His disciplined intellect could grapple with complex matters of fact or law, and seize upon their essence. However, he ‘always viewed the law as merely a convenient occupation to make possible the career he sought as a politician,’ and in 1886, he was elected Member of Parliament for East Fife.
At first, Asquith’s legal background seemed to threaten his prospects for political advancement. Beatrice Webb thought his ‘hard-headed cold capacity seem[ed] to be given, not to politics, but to his legal cases.’ Political gossips thought he would become a law officer, which Asquith dreaded: ‘Though much interested in the law, I was more interested in politics.’ (Later, he declined the Lord Chancellorship.)
However, Asquith’s training as a barrister gave him one crucial advantage. He was a speaker of great cogency and force. Mastery of his brief; legal knowledge; command of all the evidence; his education in logic and rhetoric: these traits made Asquith a formidable parliamentary debater. In one marvellous passage, a Liberal journalist described his oratory:
‘The sentences of his orderly speech march into action like disciplined units, marshalled and drilled. He creates the impression of visible overthrow.’
Small wonder the Liberal leader Henry Campbell-Bannerman would request Asquith’s presence in the House of Commons with the words, ‘Send for the sledge-hammer.’ At the age of thirty-nine, lacking any ministerial experience and having served as an MP for just six years, he joined the Cabinet as Home Secretary.
Once out of power, Asquith resumed his legal career and became one of the highest-paid barristers in England. The Liberals returned to office in 1905. Asquith became Chancellor of the Exchequer, forcing him to refuse a 10,000-guinea brief to represent the ex-Khedive of Egypt in a land dispute. If he felt any regret, it was soon dissolved.
Asquith became Prime Minister on Campbell-Bannerman’s death in 1908. Great crises began at once to stalk his ministry. Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, introduced a ‘People’s Budget’ with a series of incendiary speeches. The House of Lords, defying constitutional convention, threw it out. When Asquith advised the King to create hundreds of new peers to flood the Lords, the former barrister was well-equipped to counsel on its constitutional propriety. Lester again: ‘He could advise the monarch with the sure authority of one who had made an almost scholarly study of the issues.’
Over the Lords crisis loomed the long shadow of Ireland. Unionists feared that the Parliament Bill would make Home Rule inevitable. But the Liberal Government, deprived of its famous majority, relied upon Irish Nationalist MPs who demanded self-determination. His Home Rule Bill, introduced in 1911, promised self-government for Ireland on the condition that the Westminster Parliament remained supreme. He piloted it through the Commons himself in what Lester describes as ‘one of his most lawyer-like performances, lucidly enumerating all the provisions’ – an achievement that most modern politicians would be hard-pressed to match.
Less impressive was his dilatory response to campaigns for women’s suffrage. While Lester rightly observes that ‘Asquith’s opposition seems to run counter to his overall liberal tendencies’, he rather appears to explain it away with reference to his ‘Victorian sense of decorum and chivalry’.
Asquith’s legal background had given him a breathtaking clarity of thought. So when the world crisis broke in July 1914, he exhibited a sureness of touch remarkable for a PM who largely delegated international affairs to his Foreign Secretary. Particularly striking is a document in which he enumerated six points he thought crucial to understanding the incoming conflict. As Lester puts it, the document ‘reveal[s] his clear-headedness about the issues and interests involved at this moment of extreme crisis.’ Such lucidity meant that when he addressed the House of Commons, he could outline the case for war with just five minutes’ preparation. Hostilities against Germany began. Asquith became a wartime premier.
While events moved at a frenzied pace, Asquith’s performance was magnificent. The government had stated that no expeditionary force would be sent to France – but just four days later, the Cabinet effectively approved it. Routed at Mons, the BEF fell back two hundred miles, its collapse so total that when the Prime Minister rose to address London’s Guildhall the German army was within lunging distance of Paris. Above the crash of these great forces stood Asquith – massive, serene, unconquerable.
But maneuver yielded to stalemate. Asquith’s composure and wise judgement seemed inexplicable to those who demanded furious action to break the hideous deadlock. ‘Military commanders,’ writes Lester, ‘appreciated that Asquith with his legal training and experience always distinguished between the military decisions of the High Command and the political decisions of the cabinet.’ Quite whether the war-weary public appreciated this distinction is another matter. Although his tranquility did mean that he could keep step with the population in introducing conscription, his virtues became limitations.
Opponents sensed he was no longer up to the job. In December 1916, a re-organisation of the War Cabinet was proposed by Lloyd George, Bonar Law, and Aitken. Even in putting forward his objections to the new scheme, the Prime Minister remained ‘frank and lawyer-like’. It would not do. Together, they hurled Asquith from power.
Professor Lester’s book offers a lesson for would-be barrister-politicians – namely, the same qualities that accelerated Asquith’s ascent (both legal and political) also hastened his downfall. Years of practice at the Bar gave Asquith many gifts of character: industry, steadiness, patience, and rhetorical and intellectual firepower. These equipped him well for domestic upheavals and constitutional crises. His sterling qualities remained constant, but modern warfare cruelly found them wanting.
Pictured above: Herbert Henry Asquith (1852-1928), Prime Minister 1908-1916: The Century Edition of Cassell's History of England (1905).
James Smith is a Bar Course scholar at Gray’s Inn. He holds an LLM from University College London, and an LLB from Warwick.
Of all Cabinet ministers in the nineteenth century, one-fifth had been called to the Bar. This astonishing statistic comes from a recent biography charting the rise and fall of Herbert Henry Asquith. V Markham Lester’s Last of the Romans (Lexington Books, 2019) is the newest volume about the Prime Minister who led Britain through the convulsions of the Edwardian era – the People’s Budget, the House of Lords crisis, threatened civil war in Northern Ireland, votes for women, and the First World War.
No doubt Professor Lester’s thesis will enjoy a wide and sympathetic audience amongst members of the Bar. He contends that the key to Asquith’s greatness was ‘his unshakeable belief in the virtues of rational thought, eloquence, and self-control’, acquired as a classicist and barrister.
Asquith was a precocious child. He developed an appetite for debate at the City of London School, from which flowed his interest in the law. In a letter to his mother, the boy described a trial he had attended at the Court of Queen’s Bench, presided over by the Lord Chief Justice. (Remarkably, the thirteen-year-old planned to return the next day to hear the judge’s summing-up.)
Balliol followed, then Lincoln’s Inn. Pupillage (then typically two years) cost around one hundred guineas per annum. Initially, his practice was ‘small, intermittent, and […] neither productive nor promising’. Of this time he later wrote: ‘I went by the train to the Temple, and sat and worked and dreamed in my chambers, and listened with feverish expectation for a knock on the door, hoping it might be a client with a brief.’ Giving lectures; churning out articles for the Spectator; starting (and abandoning) a treatise on mercantile law: such activities sustained Asquith financially.
Then came a breakthrough. He joined the chambers of the Treasury Devil. Soon Asquith was swamped with instructions: to defend an MP charged with unlawful assembly in Trafalgar Square; to represent the Great Western Railway (a case ‘devoid of human interest’); to write memoranda on the Bradlaugh case and the Corrupt Practices Act 1883; to prosecute Emile Zola’s publisher for obscenity (thus spending his holidays ‘in a diligent quest for the most objectionable passages’). Barristers’ achievements are often writ in water, but Lester does an admirable job of reconstructing Asquith’s early career. (Students of English contract law might, however, raise an eyebrow at his inclusion of Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball as one of the ‘more mundane lawsuits’ in which the future Prime Minister was involved.) Asquith took silk in 1890.
Lester persuasively shows that the habits Asquith acquired in these years shaped his entire life. He was startlingly industrious. His disciplined intellect could grapple with complex matters of fact or law, and seize upon their essence. However, he ‘always viewed the law as merely a convenient occupation to make possible the career he sought as a politician,’ and in 1886, he was elected Member of Parliament for East Fife.
At first, Asquith’s legal background seemed to threaten his prospects for political advancement. Beatrice Webb thought his ‘hard-headed cold capacity seem[ed] to be given, not to politics, but to his legal cases.’ Political gossips thought he would become a law officer, which Asquith dreaded: ‘Though much interested in the law, I was more interested in politics.’ (Later, he declined the Lord Chancellorship.)
However, Asquith’s training as a barrister gave him one crucial advantage. He was a speaker of great cogency and force. Mastery of his brief; legal knowledge; command of all the evidence; his education in logic and rhetoric: these traits made Asquith a formidable parliamentary debater. In one marvellous passage, a Liberal journalist described his oratory:
‘The sentences of his orderly speech march into action like disciplined units, marshalled and drilled. He creates the impression of visible overthrow.’
Small wonder the Liberal leader Henry Campbell-Bannerman would request Asquith’s presence in the House of Commons with the words, ‘Send for the sledge-hammer.’ At the age of thirty-nine, lacking any ministerial experience and having served as an MP for just six years, he joined the Cabinet as Home Secretary.
Once out of power, Asquith resumed his legal career and became one of the highest-paid barristers in England. The Liberals returned to office in 1905. Asquith became Chancellor of the Exchequer, forcing him to refuse a 10,000-guinea brief to represent the ex-Khedive of Egypt in a land dispute. If he felt any regret, it was soon dissolved.
Asquith became Prime Minister on Campbell-Bannerman’s death in 1908. Great crises began at once to stalk his ministry. Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, introduced a ‘People’s Budget’ with a series of incendiary speeches. The House of Lords, defying constitutional convention, threw it out. When Asquith advised the King to create hundreds of new peers to flood the Lords, the former barrister was well-equipped to counsel on its constitutional propriety. Lester again: ‘He could advise the monarch with the sure authority of one who had made an almost scholarly study of the issues.’
Over the Lords crisis loomed the long shadow of Ireland. Unionists feared that the Parliament Bill would make Home Rule inevitable. But the Liberal Government, deprived of its famous majority, relied upon Irish Nationalist MPs who demanded self-determination. His Home Rule Bill, introduced in 1911, promised self-government for Ireland on the condition that the Westminster Parliament remained supreme. He piloted it through the Commons himself in what Lester describes as ‘one of his most lawyer-like performances, lucidly enumerating all the provisions’ – an achievement that most modern politicians would be hard-pressed to match.
Less impressive was his dilatory response to campaigns for women’s suffrage. While Lester rightly observes that ‘Asquith’s opposition seems to run counter to his overall liberal tendencies’, he rather appears to explain it away with reference to his ‘Victorian sense of decorum and chivalry’.
Asquith’s legal background had given him a breathtaking clarity of thought. So when the world crisis broke in July 1914, he exhibited a sureness of touch remarkable for a PM who largely delegated international affairs to his Foreign Secretary. Particularly striking is a document in which he enumerated six points he thought crucial to understanding the incoming conflict. As Lester puts it, the document ‘reveal[s] his clear-headedness about the issues and interests involved at this moment of extreme crisis.’ Such lucidity meant that when he addressed the House of Commons, he could outline the case for war with just five minutes’ preparation. Hostilities against Germany began. Asquith became a wartime premier.
While events moved at a frenzied pace, Asquith’s performance was magnificent. The government had stated that no expeditionary force would be sent to France – but just four days later, the Cabinet effectively approved it. Routed at Mons, the BEF fell back two hundred miles, its collapse so total that when the Prime Minister rose to address London’s Guildhall the German army was within lunging distance of Paris. Above the crash of these great forces stood Asquith – massive, serene, unconquerable.
But maneuver yielded to stalemate. Asquith’s composure and wise judgement seemed inexplicable to those who demanded furious action to break the hideous deadlock. ‘Military commanders,’ writes Lester, ‘appreciated that Asquith with his legal training and experience always distinguished between the military decisions of the High Command and the political decisions of the cabinet.’ Quite whether the war-weary public appreciated this distinction is another matter. Although his tranquility did mean that he could keep step with the population in introducing conscription, his virtues became limitations.
Opponents sensed he was no longer up to the job. In December 1916, a re-organisation of the War Cabinet was proposed by Lloyd George, Bonar Law, and Aitken. Even in putting forward his objections to the new scheme, the Prime Minister remained ‘frank and lawyer-like’. It would not do. Together, they hurled Asquith from power.
Professor Lester’s book offers a lesson for would-be barrister-politicians – namely, the same qualities that accelerated Asquith’s ascent (both legal and political) also hastened his downfall. Years of practice at the Bar gave Asquith many gifts of character: industry, steadiness, patience, and rhetorical and intellectual firepower. These equipped him well for domestic upheavals and constitutional crises. His sterling qualities remained constant, but modern warfare cruelly found them wanting.
Pictured above: Herbert Henry Asquith (1852-1928), Prime Minister 1908-1916: The Century Edition of Cassell's History of England (1905).
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