Move over Downton: Margot and the Asquiths’ marital soap opera

You might be forgiven for thinking that there is no need for yet another book about Margot Asquith. Her War Diary was published only a few months ago: surely we have had enough about this woman, extraordinary though she was.

Anne de Courcy’s new book shows that this is not the case at all. Instead of using Margot’s voluminous diaries to illustrate the politics of the Asquith government, as most writers have done, she writes the story from Margot’s point of view. The result is a gripping read.

When the rising Liberal politician Herbert Henry Asquith married Margot Tennant in 1894 he was a 42-year-old widower and she was 30. He had begged her to marry him — ‘Upon my knees’ — and he wrote sadly to a friend that he knew that Margot would never return his passion. Margot’s decision to marry Asquith was entirely pragmatic. She didn’t fancy him at all, but she thought he had an interesting career ahead of him. At first she couldn’t bear him to touch her, but soon she fell in love with him.

Margot was a celebrity with a vivid social life, and she introduced her glamorous friends to the brainy, professional Asquiths. (Of Asquith’s first, middle-class wife Margot had crushingly remarked: ‘She lives in Hampstead and has no clothes.’) Margot was generous with her money, but Asquith’s five children didn’t welcome their new stepmother.

The most difficult of the stepchildren was Violet, the only daughter, who adored her father and bitterly resented Margot. Violet had slept in a bed in her father’s room since her mother died when she was four, and de Courcy says their relationship was ‘near incestuous’. Margot complained that in 19 years of marriage she had been alone with her husband for only three weeks.