The Asquith correspondence
Stanley and Asquith initially became acquainted through her childhood friendship with his daughter, Violet Asquith. Asquith admitted that he had 'a slight weakness for the companionship of clever and attractive women'. By 1907, when Stanley was 20, she was enrolled in what his wife, Margot, banteringly called his 'little harem'.
Stanley's special relationship with the Prime Minister and his family may date from December 1909, when Violet Asquith's admirer, Archibald "Archie" Ian Gordon, died as a result of a motoring accident, and Stanley, by now Violet's closest woman friend, proved how effective she could be in the role of comforter.
The earliest of Asquith's extant letters to her were written in September 1910 and in the second general election of that year she went with Violet to some of his election meetings. At this time Stanley was just one of several women who received Asquith's letters. He enjoyed writing letters to women in high society.
In 1912 Asquith and Edwin Montagu, a Liberal MP who was one of Asquith's protégés, went to Sicily on holiday. Asquith had persuaded Stanley to leave a skiing trip in Switzerland to come with Violet to join him and Montagu in Sicily. Their arrival was slightly delayed owing to Violet having had tonsillitis.
Letter-writing was one of Asquith's recreations. Asquith was an extremely assiduous correspondent. He wrote almost entirely to his women friends, mostly personal letters of no great political interest. He sought from his correspondence 'not counsel', 'but comfort, communication and relief'. He told a cabinet colleague in 1912 that 'he knew how to write to people in accordance with the prospect of letters being retained or destroyed; and he wrote accordingly'. The letters written to Stanley from March 1914 to May 1915 are the exception to this. Although Asquith knew that they were being kept he filled them with personal, political and military secrets of every kind, and they include constant appeals for Stanley's counsel. They constitute the most remarkable self-revelation ever given by a British Prime Minister.
After 1912 his letters to Stanley became more frequent, and he contrived to meet her when she was in London. Although, unlike the earlier Venetia Stanley (1600–1633), she had few pretensions to beauty, she was bright, intelligent, sympathetic, classically educated, well-read and fond of fun.
Stanley seems to have written to Asquith almost as often, but Asquith apparently destroyed Stanley's letters. More than 560 of Asquith's letters to Stanley, running to some 300,000 words have survived. Almost all were written between January 1912 and May 1915. The correspondence started with a 'faint trickle' in 1910 and 1911, became 'substantially more' in 1912, there were about 50 in 1913, mostly of substantial length, and by 1914 they became 'a flood'. From July 1914 Asquith wrote at least once a day.
Stanley and Asquith also saw each other quite often. On most Friday afternoons, when they were both in London, they would find time to go for a motor drive, seated behind a chauffeur in his recently acquired Napier, they would sometimes meet at luncheon or dinner or evening parties, and occasionally Asquith would pay an early evening call on her at her parents’ house in Mansfield Street. Asquith would stay once or twice a year at one of Lord Sheffield’s residences.
In early 1914 he was writing about three times a week, and by the end of March 1914 he was discussing the problems of the premiership with her. He looked back to the Curragh incident in that month as one during which she had been his regular 'counsellor'. Asquith later reminded Stanley of the stage ". . . when we began to talk not only of persons and books but of . . . my interests, politics, etc., and I began to acquire the habit, first of taking you into confidence, and then of consulting and relying on your judgment".
There has been some debate as to whether the affair was sexually consummated or not. Brock & Brock, editors of H.H. Asquith: Letters to Venetia Stanley (1982) maintain it is almost certain that Asquith never became Venetia's lover in the physical sense; and it is unlikely that he even wished for this. The romantic ardour which he sustained is not easy to envisage in our age of 'permissiveness' and post-Freudian introspection. By the middle of 1914 he was deeply in love. He was becoming dependent on Venetia and the signs are that this had begun to alarm her. When he stayed for Whitsun at the other Stanley estate, Penrhos, near Holyhead, his chances of resolving the Home Rule crisis were fading and she saved him, in his own later words, 'from something very like despair'; but before he left she seems to have warned him that he could not long remain the only man in her life.
Violet Asquith supported this view, commenting in 1964 "it cannot be true. Venetia was so plain"; although at the time Lady Diana Manners thought differently. She was apparently invited to replace Venetia, but did not respond.
