The July Crisis

Abstract

‘The spring and summer of 1914 were marked in Europe by an exceptional tranquillity,’ Winston Churchill recalled in The World Crisis.¹ Even the arch-pessimist, Arthur Nicolson, admitted that ‘Since I have been at the Foreign Office, I have not seen such calm waters.’² In June, the Admiralty sent four battle cruisers to Kronstadt and four battleships to Kiel; Grey was considering a visit to a German occulist and Tyrrell was planning on a meeting with the Wilhelmstrasse heads during the summer. It was just as well that the European scene was calm. The Liberal Cabinet was totally preoccupied with the Ulster crisis and a new Home Rule Bill. There was growing dissatisfaction, particularly on the left, with Asquith’s ‘wait and see’ approach and his apparent timidity before the demands of the Ulstermen. The Manchester Guardian’s lobby correspondent wrote his editor: ‘The Liberal party in the house with one or two honourable exceptions is at present engaged in trying to save its own skin.’³ Lloyd George warned, at the Mansion House banquet on 17 July, that the troubles in Ireland and the impending Triple Alliance strike would create the gravest situation ‘with which any Government in this country has had to deal for centuries’.⁴