Resignation of Asquith

On 5 December 1916, at about 7 p.m., the British Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith drove to King George V and tendered his resignation. He stepped down when it became clear that he could not go on governing without David Lloyd George and the Conservatives. The day before, he had obtained the King’s consent to reconstruct the government, so that all ministers placed their offices at his disposal. At that point he was counting on regaining the initiative this way, not on leaving. The British war chronology gives 4 December as the date of the Prime Minister’s resignation. So ended more than eight and a half years in office, the longest unbroken premiership since the 1820s, and a crisis lasting less than a week that historians still argue about today.

A government that could not keep up

Since May 1915 Asquith had led a coalition government of Liberals, Conservatives and Labour. The war was managed on the Cabinet’s behalf by the War Committee, but over time it grew larger, and its decisions often came back for discussion in the Cabinet of more than twenty members anyway. The Prime Minister was a superb parliamentarian and good at reconciling quarrelling ministers, but more and more politicians and officials felt that he lacked the energy a leader in a great war needed. His style of government was summed up maliciously in words he had once used himself: “wait and see”.

The autumn of 1916 gave the critics plenty of ammunition. The Somme offensive had cost the British Army, by its own figures, about 420,000 killed, wounded and missing, without bringing a breakthrough. Romania, which had entered the war on the Entente side in August, was collapsing under the blows of the Central Powers. German submarines were sinking more and more ships, and food prices were rising. Asquith himself was also crushed by personal tragedy: in September his eldest son Raymond had been killed on the Somme.

In November the mood in London worsened further. On 8 November the House of Commons debated the sale of confiscated German firms in Nigeria. The matter was minor, but Edward Carson, leader of the Ulster Unionists and since the autumn of 1915 one of the government’s sharpest critics, turned it into an attack on the Colonial Secretary and Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law. The government won the vote by 231 to 117, but a large part of the Conservative MPs voted with Carson. Law understood that he was losing control of his own party. A few days later members of the Cabinet received a memorandum by Lord Lansdowne, a Conservative minister without portfolio, dated 13 November, which did not rule out a compromise peace with Germany. The Prime Minister’s opponents took it that Lansdowne was expressing Asquith’s own views.

Lloyd George, Law and Carson

On 20 November Lloyd George, then Secretary of State for War, Bonar Law and Carson met at the Hyde Park Hotel. The meeting was arranged by Law’s friend, the Canadian millionaire and MP Max Aitken, later Lord Beaverbrook, who afterwards described the whole crisis in his book “Politicians and the War”, colourful but partisan. The three politicians agreed that the war should be directed by a small council of no more than five members, with full executive power and Lloyd George as chairman. Asquith would remain Prime Minister, but day-to-day war decisions would pass into other hands. Law and Lloyd George wanted to keep Asquith in office; Aitken and Carson, like the influential owner of “The Times” and the “Daily Mail”, Lord Northcliffe (Alfred Harmsworth), preferred to be rid of him.

On 25 November Law presented the Prime Minister with a draft of such a council. Asquith refused: in his view it would undermine his colleagues’ confidence and his own authority. On 30 November Law discussed the matter for the first time with the leading Conservative ministers, Austen Chamberlain, Lord Curzon and Lord Robert Cecil. All three were highly critical of Lloyd George’s plan.

The proposal of 1 December

On 1 December Lloyd George came to the Prime Minister with a new proposal. The war was to be directed by a committee of three: the War Secretary, the First Lord of the Admiralty and a third member without portfolio. One of them, by implication Lloyd George himself, would chair it, while the Prime Minister would retain “supreme control”. Asquith replied the same day. He did not reject the scheme outright, but demanded that he himself chair the committee, which Lloyd George could not accept. The next day Lloyd George sent the Prime Minister’s letter on to Law with a note saying that the life of the country now depended on Law’s resolute action. According to later findings by historians, Lloyd George was meeting Northcliffe every day at this time, although he denied it in his memoirs.

Sunday 3 December

On Sunday 3 December the newspaper “Reynolds’s News”, owned by a close associate of Lloyd George, described his demands and wrote that if they were not met he would resign and appeal to public opinion. The same morning the Conservative ministers met at Law’s house. They resolved that the government could not go on in its existing form and that the Prime Minister should tender the resignation of the whole Cabinet, and that if he did not, they would resign themselves. What exactly they meant is still unclear today. Aitken later claimed that the aim was to get rid of Lloyd George, but most historians believe that the Conservatives rather wanted to strengthen his position, because they did not believe Asquith would win the war.

Law took the resolution to Downing Street, to which Asquith had returned, breaking off a weekend by the sea in Kent. He conveyed its content vaguely, however, and did not show the Prime Minister the document itself. Asquith concluded that he had to come to terms with Lloyd George and reconstruct the government to calm the Conservatives. In the afternoon the two of them, and then Law as well, reached a compromise very close to the proposal of 1 December. Lloyd George would run the war committee, while the Prime Minister would have daily oversight of its work and a right of veto. In the evening Downing Street announced that the Prime Minister intended to reconstruct the government. The crisis seemed to have been averted.

The article in “The Times”

On the morning of Monday 4 December the announcement appeared in the newspapers along with a wave of criticism of the Prime Minister. Most wounding was the leading article in “The Times”. It contained details of the Sunday agreement, including the names of the proposed committee members, and mocked Asquith, who had supposedly agreed to his own humiliation and would henceforth be Prime Minister “in name only”. It was written by the editor, Geoffrey Dawson, with help from Carson. Asquith was certain that the information came from Lloyd George. Lloyd George denied it and wrote back to the Prime Minister that he could not restrain Northcliffe and that he accepted the arrangement “in letter and in spirit”. It is still not known for certain who was the source of the leak.

Asquith, however, decided on confrontation. That same day he saw the King and obtained consent to reconstruct the Cabinet, which gave him a free hand with all the ministers. In the evening he consulted his closest colleagues in the Liberal Party, among them the Chancellor of the Exchequer Reginald McKenna, who unanimously advised against concessions to Lloyd George. Late that evening he wrote to the War Secretary that the war committee must be chaired by the Prime Minister. The Sunday compromise had collapsed.

The Prime Minister’s last day

On 5 December Lloyd George replied that since all delay is fatal in war, he placed his office at the Prime Minister’s disposal. Asquith had expected this. What surprised him was a letter from the First Lord of the Admiralty, Arthur Balfour, laid up with illness and until then standing aside. Balfour wrote that Lloyd George’s plan deserved a trial, and that he himself did not intend to cling to the Admiralty if the new committee did not want him there. Some historians regard this letter as the real turning point of the crisis.

At 3 p.m. the Prime Minister received Chamberlain, Curzon and Cecil. The three Conservatives declared that they would not join a government without Law and Lloyd George, because such a Cabinet would have no prospect of stability. Asked whether they would serve under Lloyd George, they replied that they would, if he could form a stable government. When Balfour, in a further letter, refused to change his decision, the Liberal ministers concluded that there was no other way out. The Home Secretary, Herbert Samuel, noted that without Lloyd George and the Unionists the government could not carry on and should not even give the impression of trying.

In the evening Asquith drove to Buckingham Palace and gave up office. Later that evening, at dinner in Downing Street, he was, according to his daughter-in-law’s account, cheerful and joked that he would go to Hawaii. His circle was convinced that within a fortnight he would return to power stronger, because no one else would be able to form a government. That same evening the King entrusted the task of forming a Cabinet to Bonar Law, who came to Asquith to ask whether he would agree to serve in it. The answer was discouraging, if not an outright refusal.

Why he fell

Asquith himself later spoke of a “well-organised conspiracy”, and for decades his supporters blamed Lloyd George and the Northcliffe press. The role of the newspapers was indeed great: during the wartime party truce, real politics was conducted in their columns, and Asquith, who despised Northcliffe, disregarded the press. Modern historians, however, also stress the Prime Minister’s own mistakes. First he agreed to a compromise, then he broke it off; he misjudged the Conservatives, especially Balfour; and he was convinced that he was indispensable and that his Liberals would follow him whatever happened. Meanwhile, among Liberal MPs a growing group was ready to support Lloyd George, assiduously gathered by his ally Christopher Addison. Winston Churchill, then out of government, later wrote that a resolute Asquith fighting with all his strength would easily have won, but the whole misfortune was that there was no such Asquith.

Many Britons and Allies greeted the Prime Minister’s fall with relief, hoping for a more energetic conduct of the war. The crisis took two more days to resolve. On 6 December Bonar Law, faced with Asquith’s refusal, gave up the task, and the King entrusted it to Lloyd George. Asquith’s resignation also began a split in the Liberal Party, which never regained its former position.