Asquith Read Free

spent his mathematics hours composing Greek verses, his chemistry hours in making “ irreverent jests ” and his German hours in diverting the master from the teaching of such an unimportant language. h This being the bent of his mind—and given the fact that he was never intellectually very tolerant—it was an advantage to him that he spent his schooldays in the crowded heart of the capital rather than in some cloistered academic grove. In the latter surroundings he might have grown up a classical pedant with little comprehension of the mid-nineteenth century world around him. In London, “ generally taking a little stroll in Cheapside after lunch, but (getting) awfully knocked about during it,” as he expressed it in a letter to his mother, such detachment was much more difficult. And Asquith’s interest in everything touching the conduct of public affairs was always strong. He went frequently to the House of Commons and heard some of the great parliamentary reform debates of the midsixties. He wrote meticulous accounts of them to his mother, and even practised some amateur analysis of the division lists. He went also to meetings of the City Court of Common Council at Guildhall and, more frequently, to the Law Courts. Here his early sense of fastidious discrimination was exercised to the full.

“I have just returned from the Court of Queen’s Bench where the Lord Chief Justice 1 is presiding,” he wrote to his mother at the age of twelve. “ One of the Counsel had just made a very agitated address to the jury, and at its conclusion a witness was put into the box whose evidence, being that of an illiterate man on an uninteresting subject, I did not care to hear. The man in question was a foreman or something of that kind of a shipping or dock company. I want to hear the Chief Justice sum up, and so I shall go to the Court again on the conclusion of this.” i

1 Sir Alexander Cockburn.

    Asquith’s intellectual superiority did nothing to detract from the firmness of his radicalism. He disapproved strongly of Robert Lowe’s position on the franchise; he went to the Crystal Palace to attend a demonstration of welcome to Garibaldi; he spent part of a Founder’s Day holiday attending a Reform League meeting in support of Irish Church disestablishment—having spent the other part of it listening to a lecture on Christianity and progress at the Congregational Union; and he noted with approval that when he heard Archdeacon Wordsworth preach “ a regular defence of the Irish Church ” in Westminster Abbey, many of the congregation walked out in the middle. “ Poor Dean Stanley sitting opposite the pulpit had the pleasure of being cursed in his own Abbey,” j he added. The mystical aspects of religion never meant much to Asquith, 1 but at this stage of his life, and indeed for many years afterwards, he was a great listener to sermons. But so he was to almost any form of oratory. The presentation of ideas, perhaps more than their formulation, constantly exercised his mind.
    Nevertheless the impact upon Asquith of the London of the ’sixties was not all associated with oratory or the higher arts of government. Walking up Ludgate Hill to school one morning in 1864 he came upon the bodies of five murderers, hanging with white caps over their head, outside Newgate. Half an hour before they had been publicly executed, and their corpses were still available for inspection. On another, less macabre occasion he inspected, in a Fleet Street booth, the “ fattest lady in the world.” And towards the end of his schooldays he began, with a great sense of daring, to go to plays. Forty-seven years later, after driving past “ the rather squalid little house ” in Liverpool Road where he had lodged, he recorded in a letter his memory of this departure:

1 Although in later life he came to enjoy the liturgy and prayers of the Church of England.

    “ I remember vividly the guilty sense of adventure with which I slipped out