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Precipice
Robert Harris
Random House
The two lovers would meet every week for an after-hours drive in a chauffeured automobile whose curtained interior guaranteed them privacy. He was in his 60s, she was young enough to be his daughter. He wrote letters to her incessantly — sometimes two or three a day — and they reveal a man besotted.
But here’s the catch. This was all happening on the threshold of the First World War. The elderly lover was the Liberal prime mister of Great Britain — Herbert Henry Asquith. The object of his affection was 26-year-old Venetia Stanley, a child of the aristocracy and young woman of intelligence and determination. So did Asquith’s infatuation in any way alter the course of history?
That’s a question that novelist Robert Harris kept asking himself during the writing of Precipice, a thriller that immediately shot to the top of the bestseller lists when it was initially published in the United Kingdom. What is clear is that Stanley was not only an obsession for Asquith but also a dangerous distraction — and the evidence is there in the aging prime minister’s fevered letters to her. It’s from them, for example, that we learn of Asquith’s determination at a time of crisis to flee London and spend time with her in North Wales.
“It’s absolutely extraordinary, isn’t it?” Harris says. “Here he is, looking at railway timetables less than a week before war breaks out. It’s quite astonishing that he could do that. I think it just shows you that our statesmen had no idea what they were getting into in 1914.”
In today’s climate of tight security protection for major political figures, Asquith’s freedom to do what he wanted seems unimaginable. But that’s how it was. The prime minister could take a stroll along the embankment or board a train without anyone really taking notice. “There was no bodyguard. He didn’t even take a private secretary.” The thought still leaves Harris incredulous. “When the whole country is being mobilized, he can slink off on a Friday through to Monday. It’s quite an extraordinary situation to be out of touch that long from the central government — and all because of an obsession for this young woman.”
The novel is not only a riveting account of an intense but blighted love affair. It also explains with unusual clarity why the 1914 assassination of an Austrian archduke led to a catastrophic European conflict. The novel’s supporting cast of real-life players — including Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George — are necessary components in the story Harris tells. For him, writing about Asquith and Venetia opened a window to wider issues that he could not disregard.
“When I started to write the book I found that I could clear away a lot of the fog of war,” he says. “I felt for the first time that I fully understood what was happening in 1914 and 1915.”
Harris is on the phone from his home in rural England, taking a breather after a major European book tour as well as a massive publicity campaign on behalf of Conclave, the hit movie version of his best-selling novel about power politics within the Vatican.
“I think it’s a brilliant film, and I’m immensely proud to have provided the source material for it,” the 67-year-old writer says. Harris, an ex-journalist turned best selling novelist, has a fascination for how systems work and what happens to them under stress. That fascination is a driving force in Conclave, as it is in Precipice.
This new novel may be a fictional recreation, but it’s anchored in the reality of Prime Minister Asquith’s letters to Venetia Stanley. Venetia’s replies were destroyed, but the Asquith side of the correspondence, provided solid clues to the nature and content of her responses which in this book are products of Harris’s own imagination.
When an early selection of Asquith’s letters was published a few decades ago, Harris was willing to accept a “consensus” that the affair was no more than a “platonic diversion.” Later access to the full body of letters changed his mind.
“Once I set myself the task of composing her replies and began working out from his letters where the two of them were when written and the daily details of it all, the whole thing shot into much larger focus. You begin to see for the first time how much of a preoccupation she was for Asquith, how much of an obsession.”
The novel even hints that this obsession contributed to the allies’ disastrous Gallipoli campaign, a pet project of Winston Churchill who at that time was First Lord Of The Admiralty.
“The evidence is inescapable from Asquith’s own letter,” Harris says. “During the crucial meeting when Churchill first proposed the idea, Asquith spent the best part of hall an hour in correspondence with Venetia. So I think we can say that if Asquith had been paying more attention, he might have examined Churchill’s ideas more forensically and concluded they had not been properly thought through.”
Asquith’s letters weren’t just expressions of lovesick rapture. They were also notoriously indiscreet about top-secret meetings and the inner workings of government. When they met, Asquith thought nothing of showing her confidential dispatches and soliciting her opinions on government policy.
“Up until 1914, he was the dominant political personality in Britain,” Harris says. “He was so intellectually able and such a powerful debater that he could control a government that included people like Churchill and Lloyd George. He was a significant figure but was overwhelmed by the First World War, as many others were. So I think he increasingly sought refuge in Venetia’s company and advice.”
Harris feels sympathy for Asquith but he doesn’t subscribe to the view of some commentators that there was nothing physical in his relationship with Venetia.
“He wrote her 560 letters — and she kept them all. She must have written more than 300, and he read them all. I think the notion that there wasn’t a physical element to the romance is absurd when one gets to examine all the evidence.
“First of all, we know that Asquith was notorious for making advances to young women. Secondly Venetia also had a lot of affairs with married men, including Lord Beaverbrook, in later life.
“Asquith is a Victorian gentleman. He’s not going to write in detail about a physical relationship, but the hints are there. The temperament was there. The opportunity was there. I think it’s naive to pretend there was not a sexual element to it.”
Harris was determined to write about Asquith — in many ways a “decent man” — with compassion.
” It would have been easy to have written a sort of me too book about a young woman and a much older predatory man. But I don’t think that would have been historically accurate, I think Vanessa was a formidable character and not without power herself. So there was something tragically doomed about his love for her. His in a way was the tragedy of a man brought down by his own folly. I wanted to convey that.”