H.H. Asquith, considered the founder of the British state, was the prime minister of Britain who led the British Empire to the monumental defeat that led to World War I. The son of a cloth merchant, he was born Henry Herbert Asquith. in Morley, Yorkshire, and attended Balliol College, Oxon. After graduation he became a lawyer and was called to the bar in 1876.
Asquith married Helen Kelsall Melland, the daughter of a Manchester doctor, in 1877. From the early 1880s he married his , sufficient to consider the public interest.” (Members of Parliament were not paid a real salary until 1970.) He was first elected to Parliament in 1886, standing as a Liberal candidate for East Fife.
His first wife bore him four sons and one daughter before she died of typhoid in 1891. He married in 1894, Margot Tennant, daughter of Lord Charles Tennant, 1st Baronet, as his second wife. She gave birth to several children, but only a son and a daughter survived to adulthood.
H.H. Asquith‘s family called him Herbert, but his second wife called him Henry, and those who called him Christian made the transition. But in public only H.H. Asquith was called.
The Oscar Wilde Things
In 1892, H.H. Asquith became Home Secretary in the last government of William Gladstone. As Home Secretary, Asquith signed an order for the arrest of Oscar Wilde, who was eventually imprisoned for “indecent crimes”.
Oscar Wilde had a homosexual affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, the son of the Marquis of Queensberry, the man who made the rules of the castle but better known then he was like an atheist who had prostrated himself for secular society. The Marquess became a pariah in large society after being excluded from the House of Lords (where he had been a member from 1872 to 1880), refusing to swear allegiance to the prince, which was in the nature of religion. Queensberry had publicly denounced Wilde as a sodomist for seducing her son.
In March 1895, Oscar Wilde filed a libel suit against the Marquis of Queensberry, allegedly for defamation. After the trial began, details of Wilde’s dealings with males, including male prostitutes, were made in his testimony for the state. Marquis’ lawyers hired detectives to investigate the Wild life sex, details of which were made public. as Wilde stands. After the incident, the press had “exposed” London’s homosexual demi-monde.
Faced with public embarrassment, and the situation opening him up to being charged under the country’s anti-sodomy laws, the author withdrew his case. The tide of public opinion had turned against Wilde. Homosexuality was outlawed under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which was the year after Wilde had married. . Wilde was caught by law and successfully accused of indecency.
Oscar Wilde was imprisoned in 1895. The prison in which he was finally wounded to serve the bulk of his term provided thousands of A Famous Poem, Gaol Reading Poem< /i>. Released after two years, a broken man who died three years later at the age of 46.
One of the H.H. Specifically, Anthony Asquith Asquith’s son was a homosexual. Until homosexuality was decriminalized in 1967, gay Britons lived in fear of arrest as official persecution of gays intensified after the prosecution of Oscar Wilde.
Climb the fattest pole
Three years after the Liberal Party came out of power in 1895, H.H. Asquith was offered the leadership of the Liberal Party, but turned it down. After the victory of the Land Liberals in the 1906 general election, Asquith became Chancellor of the Exchequer under Henry Campbell-Bannerman, in which Asquith proved to be a champion of free trade.
Campbell-Bannerman resigned prematurely due to ill health in April 1908 and was succeeded in the post by Asquith, the first member of the professional middle class to serve as prime minister.
Constitutional Crisis
H.H. Asquith was the first government to introduce guns and butter into the legislative program, building up the British Navy in an arms race with Germany introducing social programs. Asquith can be considered the father of the British state, as his government introduced government pensions in 1908.
The welfare program by the Conservative Party (Tories), which provoked a constitutional crisis in 1909, was bitterly opposed, when the Tory majority in the House of Lords rejected the “People’s Budget” government. Traditionally, finance was the province of the Commons, and the rejection of the Lord’s Bill and the resulting constitutional crisis forced a general election in January 1910.
Although the Liberals were returned to government with a majority, their numbers in the Commons were reduced, and the crisis continued.
King Edward VII granted the newly signed liberal nobles to fill the house of lords, who would intercede for the lords if H.H. Asquith agreed to have another general election, after which, if he had continued, he would do so. However, Edward VII died in May 1910, before the second general election. Asquith had great persuasion to get Edward’s successor, George V, to agree to the plan.
The new king hesitated to create new Liberal nobles, since they would undermine the power of the hereditary aristocracy by packing the lords. Before the December 1910 general election (the last held for eight years), Asquith’s conviction was resolved, and George V convened a meeting of the Lords. The Liberals won their second election in 1910, although the equality of power in the government rested with peers from Ireland, who demanded a bill from Home Rule as the price of support for Asquith’s third government.
The Parliament Act 1911 limited the legislative power to the Houses of Parliament, as was the upper house of Parliament. to procrastinate, but not to procrastinate, any motion passed by the general court. H.H. Asquith solved the Irish scandal with the third Home Rule Bill, which was obtained by the King late in 1914, although the law’s implementation for the time World War I, which had the UK involved in a spider alliance. The Irish question remained a tinderbox, and while civil war in Ireland the fate of Ulster was averted in 1914. during the uprising of the war in Europe, the tensions flared up leading to the Easter Rebellion of 1916, which would be one of the factors of Asquith’s loss of power.
The Great War
The other part in H.H. Asquith‘s loss of the first ministry of the Great War. In May 1915, Cainet was split into a block due to the fortifications available at the front. Asquith was ultimately held responsible for the failures in British war production.
“The Shell Crisis” explored the need for the British economy to be put on war footing. In response to the disagreements, Asquity formed a new government, creating a national coalition that included members of the Opposition. (Although an election was held in 1915, the election was suspended for the duration of the war.) David Lloyd George, a dynamic Liberal minister from the old cabinet, became defense minister.
The new coalition government did nothing to confirm Asquith’s presidency. Both the Liberals and the Tories criticized his role in the conduct of the war, giving him some of the blame for the attacks at the Somme (in which Raymond Aquith’s eldest son died) and Gallipoli (which led to Winston Churchill’s resignation, attributed to him by the Liberal IIP, as the Lord’s First Sea).
Asquith has also been criticized for his treatment of the armed Easter Rising of Irish Catholics in Dublin in April 1916, and the subsequent civil war. Machiavellian Lloyd George undermined Asquith by splitting the Liberal Party into anti-Asquith factions. So it happened that that H.H. Asquith resigned as Prime Minister on 5 December 1916, and was succeeded by Lloyd George.
Post-Award
After the Prime Minister resigned, H.H. Asquith remained in his post as Leader of the Liberal Party, even after losing his seat in the 1918 election. He returned to the House of Commons in 1920 by election and played a key role in helping the Labor Party win a minority in 1924, which gave Ramsay MacDonald his first, albeit brief, premiership.
A minority Labor Government subsequently fell in 1924, and in the subsequent election won by the Tories, Asquith lost his seat in the Commons. Asquith was raised to the hereditary rank of Viscount Asquith, Morley in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and Earl of Oxford and Asquith in 1825. Asquith moved to the House of Lords, and eventually resigned as leader of the Liberal Party in 1926.
H.H. Asquith died in 1928, having served longer than any other prime minister of the 20th century until Margaret Thatcher ended his term in office in 1988.
Violet Bonham Carter (maiden Violet Asquith), H.H. Asquith’s only daughter from his first wife, she was a successful author who became a life in her own right (her grandmother is Oscar-nominated actress Helena Bonham Carter). His son Cyril became Lord’s Law, and two other sons married well, one being the poet Herbert Asquith. His two children from Margot were Elizabeth (later Princess Antoine Bibesco), a writer, and Anthony Asquith, the director of a well-regarded film.
Report:
- UK Parliament: H.H. Asquith ukparliament.freebase.com/view/en/h_h_asquith
