OXFORD AND ASQUITH, HERBERT HENRY ASQUITH, 1st EARL OF (1852-1928), born at Morley, Yorks., on Sept. 12, 1852. His origins were Liberal, Nonconformist and middle class in character. Joseph Dixon Asquith, his father, owned a cloth manufacturing business in Morley, and his mother was the daughter of William Willans, a Huddersfield merchant. His father died while he, his brother (who afterwards became a master at Clifton), and his sister were children, and the two boys were left in the care of an uncle in London, where they went to the City of London school, then under the able head mastership of Dr. Abbott. Upon him the future prime minister made a deep impression, and to him Asquith in after life was accustomed to express a great debt of gratitude. He won a Balliol scholarship, and at Oxford he took a Craven university scholarship and firsts in "Mods" and "Greats," became president of the Union and a fellow of his college.
Adopting the bar as a profession, he first attracted public notice by his defence of Cunninghame Graham and John Burns for their part in the riot in Trafalgar square, but it was the Parnell Commission, in 1889, in which he acted as junior to Sir Charles Russell, that established his legal reputation, his deadly cross-examination of the manager of The Times giving the first indication of the dramatic issue of the trial. His success at the bar was assured, and in the next year he took silk, but the law was only a stepping-stone to the political career that from boy hood he had always had in view. He had entered parliament as member for East Fife in 1886, and on the formation of the Gladstone Government in 1892 he was appointed home secretary. He had just previously sustained a heavy domestic blow by the death of his wife, Helen, the daughter of a Manchester surgeon, whom he had married in 1877 and by whom he had four sons and one daughter. In office, Asquith's great parliamentary gifts were at once apparent, and his administration of the Home Office was made memorable by the appointment of the first women inspectors, improvements in the administration of the Factory Acts, the stiffening of the machinery, and the passing of the Employers' Liability bill, which was rejected by the Lords, and of a Factory bill which became law. He was bitterly and most
unjustly attacked in connection with the shooting of two miners by soldiers who were called in to deal with a strike at the Feather stone colliery. He did not summon the soldiers, and appointed a commission immediately to enquire into the affair, but the legend that he was personally responsible pursued him, and for years his platform appearances were always greeted with cries of "Featherstone." In 1894, while still at the Home Office, Asquith married a second time, his bride being the brilliant Miss Margaret ("Mar got") Tennant, one of the daughters of the wealthy iron-master, Sir Charles Tennant. She was a prominent member of the most exclusive society circle, and the marriage very definitely changed the current of Asquith's social life, and in some measure affected his political relationships. The period was one of great disruption within the Liberal Party. The feud between the Rosebery and Harcourt groups was at its height, and after the fall of the Liberal Government in 1895, the conflict with the Boer republics divided the party into two hostile camps, the Liberal Imperialists, led by Lord Rosebery, and the pro-Boers led by Campbell Bannerman. Asquith, who had returned to the bar, associated himself with the Rosebery group, which endorsed the Chamber lain policy. In this he was influenced, no doubt, by his confidence in Sir Alfred Milner, who had been his friend from his Balliol days, and who had become the instrument of British policy in South Africa. When the Boer controversy culminated in war, it seemed that the quarrel between the Roseberyite and Camp bell-Bannerman factions must result in permanent separation, and the formation of the Liberal League, of which Lord Rosebery was president and Asquith vice-president, apparently put recon ciliation out of the question.