United Kingdom

David Lloyd George, 1908.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

In the course of the struggle over the Parliament bill, strong, even violent, feelings had been roused among lords who had seldom bothered hitherto to attend their house. Their intransigence provided a keynote to four years of equally fierce struggle on many other issues in the country, with different sectional groups turning to noisy direct action. The Liberals remained in power, carrying important new legislation, but they faced so much opposition from extremists, who cared little about either conventional political behaviour or the rule of law, that these years have been called by the American historian George Dangerfield “the strange death of Liberal England.” The most important legislation was once more associated with Lloyd George—the National Insurance Act of 1911, which Parliament accepted without difficulty but which was the subject of much hostile criticism in the press and was bitterly opposed by doctors and duchesses. Nor did it win unanimous support from labour. The parliamentary Labour Party itself mattered less during these years, however, than extra-parliamentary trade union protests, some of them violent in character—“a great upsurge of elemental forces.” There was a wave of strikes in 1911 and 1912, some of them tinged with syndicalist ideology, all of them asserting, in difficult economic circumstances for the workingman, claims that had seldom been made before. Old-fashioned trade unionists were almost as unpopular with the rank and file as they were with capitalists. In June 1914, less than two months before the outbreak of World War I, a “triple alliance” of transport workers, miners, and railwaymen was formed to buttress labour solidarity. In parallel to labour agitation, the suffragists, fighting for women’s rights, resorted to militant tactics that not only embarrassed Asquith’s government but tested the whole local and national machinery for maintaining order. The Women’s Social and Political Union, founded in 1903, was prepared to encourage illegal acts, including bombing and arson, which led to sharp police retaliation, severe sentences, harsh and controversial treatment in prison, and even martyrdom.

The issue that created the greatest difficulties, however, was one of the oldest: Ireland. In April 1912, armed with the new powers of the Parliament Act, Asquith introduced a new Home Rule bill. Conservative opposition to it was reinforced on this occasion by a popular Protestant movement in Ulster, and the new Conservative leader, Andrew Bonar Law, who had replaced Balfour in 1911, gave his covert support to army mutineers in Ulster. No compromises were acceptable, and the struggle to settle the fate of Ireland was still in full spate when war broke out in August 1914. Most ominously for the Liberals, the Irish Home Rule supporters at Westminster were losing ground in southern Ireland, where in 1913 a militant working-class movement entered into close alliance with the nationalist forces of Sinn Féin. Ireland was obviously on the brink of civil war.

The international crisis

The seeds of international war, sown long before 1900, were nourished between the resignation of Salisbury in 1902 and August 1914. Two intricate systems of agreements and alliances—the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy and the Triple Entente of France, Russia, and Britain—faced each other in 1914. Both were backed by a military and naval apparatus (Britain had been building a large fleet, and Richard Haldane had been reforming the army), and both could appeal to half-informed or uninformed public opinion. The result was that a war that was to break the continuities of history started as a popular war.

The Liberal government under Asquith faced a number of diplomatic crises from 1908 onward. Throughout a period of recurring tension, its foreign minister, Sir Edward Grey, often making decisions that were not discussed by the cabinet as a whole, strengthened the understanding with France that had been initiated by his Conservative predecessor in 1903. An alliance had already been signed with Japan in 1902, and in 1907 agreements were reached with Russia. Meanwhile, naval rivalry with Germany familiarized Britons with the notion that, if war came, it would be with Germany. The 1914 crisis began in the Balkans, where the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated in June 1914. Soon Austria (backed by Germany) and Russia (supported by France) faced off. The British cabinet was divided, but, after the Germans invaded Belgium on August 4, thereby violating a neutrality that Britain was committed by treaty to support, Britain and Germany went to war. Asa Briggs Patrick Joyce

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