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Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith, KG, PC (12 September 1852 – 15 February 1928) served as the Liberal Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1908 to 1916. During his lifetime he was known as H. H. Asquith before his accession to the peerage and as Lord Oxford afterwards.
Name In his younger days he was called Herbert within the family, but his second wife called him Henry. However, in public he was invariably referred to only as H. H. Asquith. "There have been few major national figures whose Christian names were less well known to the public," writes his biographer, Roy Jenkins. When raised to the peerage in 1925, he proposed to take the title "Earl of Oxford" for the city near which he lived and the university he had attended. Objections were raised, especially by descendants of Earls of Oxford of previous creations (titles by then extinct), and his title was given in the form Earl of Oxford and Asquith. In practice, however, he was known as Lord Oxford. During Asquith's period as deputy to Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, "C. B." was known to request his presence in parliamentary debate by saying, "Send for the sledge-hammer," referring to Asquith's reliable command of facts and his ability to dominate verbal exchange. Family and early life He was born in Morley, West Yorkshire to Joseph Dixon Asquith (February 10, 1825-March 29, 1860) and his wife Emily Willans (May 4, 1828-December 12, 1888). The Asquiths were a middle class family and members of the Congregational church. Joseph was a wool merchant and came to own his own wool mill. Herbert was eight years old when his father died. Emily and her children moved to the house of her father William Willans, a wool-stapler of Huddersfield. Herbert received schooling there and was later sent to a Moravian boarding school at Fulneck, near Leeds. In 1863, Herbert was sent to live with an uncle in London, where he entered the City of London School. He was educated there until 1870 and was mentored there by its headmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott. In 1870, Asquith won a classical scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. In 1874, Asquith was awarded the Craven scholarship and became president of the Oxford Union. He graduated that year and soon was elected a fellow at Balliol. Meanwhile he entered Lincoln's Inn as a student barrister and for a year served a pupillage under Charles Bowen. He was called to the bar in 1876 and became prosperous in the early 1880s from practising law. Marriage He married Helen Kelsall Melland, daughter of a Manchester doctor, in 1877 and they had four sons and one daughter before she died from typhoid fever in 1891. These children were Raymond, Herbert (1881-1947), Arthur Melland Asquith (1883–1939), Violet, and Cyril. In 1894, he married Margot Tennant, the daughter of Charles Clow Tennant. With Margot he had two children, Elizabeth Charlotte Lucy (later Princess Bibesco) (1897-1945) and Anthony. Early career (1886-1908) Elected to Parliament in 1886 as the Liberal representative for Fife East, in Scotland, he achieved his first significant post in 1892 when he became Home Secretary under Gladstone (and later under Rosebery). The Liberals went out of power for ten years from 1895, and he turned down an offer to lead the party in 1898. The Liberal Party won a landslide victory in the 1906 general election, and Asquith became Chancellor of the Exchequer under Henry Campbell-Bannerman. He demonstrated his staunch support of free trade in this post. Campbell-Bannerman resigned due to illness in April 1908 and Asquith succeeded him as Prime Minister. Asquiths government (1908-1916)
After his resignation (1916-1928) Asquith remained leader of the Liberal Party after 1916 and even after losing his seat in the 1918 elections. He returned to the House of Commons in a 1920 by-election in Paisley. Asquith played a major role in putting the minority Labour government of 1924 into office, elevating Ramsay MacDonald to the Prime Ministership. Raised to the peerage as Viscount Asquith of Morley in the West Riding of the County of York and Earl of Oxford and Asquith in 1925, Asquith retired to the House of Lords after losing his seat again in the 1924 election held after the fall of the Labour government. Lloyd George succeeded him as chairman of the Liberal Members of Parliament, but Asquith remained head of the party until 1926, when Lloyd George succeeded him in that position as well, healing the split in the Liberal Party. Asquiths death and descendants Asquith died in 1928 and Margot in 1945. They are both buried at All Saints' Church, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire. His only daughter by his first wife, Violet (later Violet Bonham-Carter), became a well-regarded writer and a life peeress (as Baroness Asquith of Yarnbury in her own right). His eldest son Raymond Asquith was killed at the Somme in 1916, and thus his peerage passed to his only son Julian, now 2nd Earl of Oxford and Asquith (born in 1916, only a few months before his father's death). His fourth son Sir Cyril, Baron Asquith of Bishopstone (1890-1954) became a Law Lord, and his second and third sons married well, the poet Herbert Asquith) (1881-1947) (who is often confused with his father) and Brigadier-General Arthur Asquith (1883-1939). His two children by Margot were Elizabeth (later Princess Antoine Bibesco), a writer, and Anthony Asquith, a film-maker whose productions included The Browning Version and The Winslow Boy. Also among his descendants is his great-grand daughter, the actress Helena Bonham Carter. Asquith's estate was probated at £9,345 on June 9, 1928, a modest amount for so prominent a man. First Government, April 1908 & May 1915 Changes Second Government, May 1915 & December 1916 Changes Miscellaneous Asquith was one of a select group of historical persons who are numerologically interesting because their birth date and their death date are numerical anagrams of each other. 12 September 1852 = 12.9.1852; 15 February 1928 = 15.2.1928. These both contain the group of numbers 1122589. Other people who have a similar pattern in their dates are the soprano Tatiana Troyanos, the pianist Geoffrey Parsons, and the actor Victor Jory. Further reading Offices Held | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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