I.

Introduction

Asquith, Herbert Henry, 1st Earl of Oxford (1852-1928), British statesman, Prime Minister of Great Britain and Ireland (1908-1916), who led Edwardian Britain through the first part of World War I.

II.

Early Career

Asquith was born in Morley, Yorkshire, on September 12, 1852. He was educated at the City of London School and after graduating from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1874 and entering Lincoln’s Inn, he practised law, having been called to the bar in 1876. He was elected to Parliament as Liberal member for East Fife in 1886. He attained national prominence as junior defence counsel for the Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell, when the latter was under investigation by Parliament in 1888, and in 1892 he became home secretary under Prime Minister William Gladstone. Out of office from 1895 to 1905, tensions in the Liberal Party surfaced over the conduct of the South African War: Asquith, unlike many of his colleagues, supported the imperial policy of the government. However, he joined the new Liberal government as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and in 1908 he succeeded Henry Campbell-Bannerman as prime minister.

III.

Constitutional Change and Domestic Disharmony

Asquith's tenure in office was marked by a series of domestic and international crises. The first began in 1909, when the House of Lords rejected the “People’s Budget” introduced by Asquith’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, causing Asquith to embark on a campaign to abolish the veto power of the unelected upper chamber. After a lengthy struggle he succeeded in his aim with the passage of the Parliament Act in 1911, after two general elections and after successfully persuading George V to threaten to create as many as 250 new Liberal peers if the Lords would not pass the legislation. The legislation also reduced the length of time between general elections from seven to five years, and introduced payment for Members of Parliament.

Asquith then set about plans to accomplish another Liberal objective—the enactment of home rule for Ireland. Controversy over this issue divided the country for the next three years. Confronted by threats of armed rebellion by home-rule opponents in Ulster and open encouragement of these threats by British Conservatives, Asquith temporized throughout 1913 and well into 1914, during which time the pressure continued to build. A violent solution was averted only by the outbreak of World War I, and even then the threat remained, as demonstrated by the Easter Rising in 1916. Similarly, Asquith vacillated over the issue of votes for women: in the 1910 general election he had promised legislation, but his failure to deliver meant his house became a target of the window-breaking campaign of the suffragette movement. The immediate pre-war years were also marked by increased disquiet in industrial relations, with over 70 million days lost to strike action between 1911 and 1914.

IV.

War Leader

A firm believer in the necessity of supporting France against Germany, Asquith nevertheless carefully waited to declare war until public indignation was aroused by Germany's violation of Belgian neutrality. As the war dragged on, however, successive military reverses and acute shortages of munitions made his government the object of increasing criticism by Conservatives and Liberals alike. In May 1915, Asquith yielded to demands for a coalition government, but prosecution of the war continued to drift, with the failure of the Gallipoli campaign, and, a year later, the catastrophic losses at the Battle of the Somme. Finally, in December 1916, the opposition movement forced him to resign in favour of Lloyd George, who had become war secretary in 1915, irrevocably splitting the Liberal Party.

Asquith remained in Parliament as leader of a rump of Liberals, losing his seat in 1918 but returning to the Commons in 1922, and he never held office again. He was raised to the peerage in 1925 as the Earl of Oxford, and died in Sutton Courtenay, Berkshire, on February 15, 1928.