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Andrew Bonar Law and the fall of the Asquith coalition: The December 1916 Cabinet crisis
Canadian Journal of History, Aug 1997 by R J Q Adams
By the close of 1916, after more than two years of bloody conflict - seventeen months into the lifespan of the curious coalition government led by Herbert Henry Asquith - Great Britain was still eye-deep in the most terrible war in her history. In that December a political upheaval would cast up a quite different coalition, a once-popular leader would be toppled forever and a great political party shattered.
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This brief essay will examine the role in the 1916 cabinet crisis of Unionist party leader Andrew Bonar Law, whose role among the principal players in this drama is the least understood and most underestimated. It has been many years since his career has enjoyed the full attention of a biographer;1 and, if anything, it has been made increasingly ambiguous by the efforts of three generations of hard-working historians.2 The Bonar Law of 1916 has been seen by contemporaries and later interpreters variously as "obsessed" with ambition,3 yet "uncertain and indecisive";4 he was "inert,"5 overly self-effacing,6 and even without courage in the final crisis.7 One sometimes wonders if they could possibly have been talking about the same man.
Bonar Law had guided his party through turbulent times since becoming leader in December 1911.(8) Though often with little help from his most senior colleagues, he had held the allegiance of the party rank and file - and held it still as the nation sank into the mire of the Great War. By May 1915, with victory further away than ever, Bonar Law and his frustrated colleagues threw in with the Liberals to form a coalition. His hope was to effect an improved and more energetic direction of the war but also to stabilize a restive House of Commons and stave off a return to divisive partisan politics. The Unionist leader sacrificed his own ambitions and took the Colonial Office - a political backwater in wartime, and unworthy of his status as chief of the largest party in the House. The resulting government was a vehicle for certain improvements in war-making - it provided a platform for the creation of the Ministry of Munitions, the advent of limited conscription and the abandonment of the disastrous Dardanelles campaign. It did not prove, however, to be the engine to win the war for which Bonar Law and his colleagues hoped.
1916 proved to be a great year for catastrophe: defeat in the Near East, a brutal political struggle over general military conscription and the death at sea of the War Secretary - the popular war hero, Lord Kitchener - though his succession by the Lloyd George could be considered nothing but an improvement. The Easter Rebellion in Ireland in April reopened the most painful political wound of the immediate prewar years. An ultimately fruitless search for settlement by energetic Lloyd George succeeded only in driving Irish Nationalists of virtually all stripes into one camp. Worse for Bonar Law was the fact that this failure renewed the division within the Unionist party between Home Rule compromisers (including himself) and anti-Home Rule die-hards.
The summer and early autumn witnessed Sir Douglas Haig's first great offensive of the war, with horrifying results on the Somme. These days reminded many Unionists that the Asquith coalition was no closer to winning the war than was its simon-pure Liberal predecessor? Such tensions strained Tory unity, and only Tory unity kept the coalition in place and Bonar Law at the head of his party - and staved off the horror of a divisive wartime election. There was never a question in his mind that national survival took precedence over party, but such sacrifice did not make his life any easier.
By the autumn, Bonar Law's political burden increased as Unionist frustration was reflected in the rapid rise in back-bench party esteem - at the expense of their official leaders - of the magnetic figure of the Irish Unionist, Sir Edward Carson. Once Bonar Law's closest ally in the prewar struggle against Home Rule, Carson was a brilliant lawyer, an electrifying orator, and a brutal opponent. An indifferent executive during his few years in high office, he always displayed the dangerous gift of all great litigators: he was an incomparable critic of other men's works. No team player, he had served in the coalition only five months and then returned to an unofficial opposition. Carson was the chairman and the darling of the Unionist War Committee, the informal but powerful back-bench "ginger group" formed in January.10 Following his resignation from the cabinet in October, Carson remained on amiable personal terms with Bonar Law, but the Unionist leader knew that so long as success eluded the coalition, Unionist frustration would orbit the charismatic Carson.11
Despite the energetic efforts of Lords Beaverbrook and Blake, most historians have been satisfied to assign to Bonar Law at best a secondary role in the December crisis.12 What the evidence indicates is that by late autumn 1916, many Unionists and their fellow travellers were disgruntled with the progress of the war and with the person of Asquith, whom they despised.13 In this volatile atmosphere Bonar Law became convinced to take a hand in recasting the governance of the country. The political drama began in earnest on the evening of 8 November, when a minor bill to offer for sale captured German assets in Nigeria to the highest non-German bidder unhinged the House of Commons.
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