A Fabulous Very Personal Original Handwritten and Signed Letter from Future Prime Minister Herbert Asquith to Ottoline Morrell. The letter goes into rich detail about Ottoline future marriage to Philip Morrell and how Asquith felt at the time. Dated 1903. Noted in pencil by Ottoline that the letter came from Asquith. The letter reads Mo, although your rather fabricated silence ought perhaps to help make me suspicious- I was not at all prepared for the news which came in your little note this morning. In view of the last occasion when I had a real talk with you (just before Xmas) I came that such an event was improbable, but no one knows another well enough to gauge the strength and direction of these unseen tides. You ask for my blessing and you know that you have it, now and always, and now forever? at all times from a full heart, from friendship and affection ---- been away my worst precious possessions. They will still be mine, will they not? I suspect that I have been ---? and do so little for you. And at the same time, I rejoice that the problem of your life, which we have so often debated is now likely to solve itself and that you will be in perplexity where and how to employ the rich nature which love has given you. May he help you to make the worst and best of it in that blessed companionship of the rights and interests of heart and life which I pray may now be yours! You loving friend Let me know how soon I can see you. Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith 1852 – 1928, was a British statesman and Liberal politician who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1908 to 1916. He was the last prime minister from the Liberal Party to command a majority government. Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Morrell 1873 – 1938 was an English aristocrat and society hostess. Her patronage was influential in artistic and intellectual circles, where she befriended writers including Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, and artists including Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington and Gilbert Spencer. In 1897, she met Herbert Henry Asquith, a leading figure in the Liberal Party, later prime minister (in 1908) and married to Margot Asquith . Their friendship was deep, mutual, and lasting, and it may be assumed they were intimate at some time during their early relations. Ottoline left Oxford in December 1899 or January 1900 and returned to London, where she and Asquith renewed their relationship. Whether it evolved into an affair is not clear, but Ottoline was flattered that "a man of the world would pay court to her." Size is 180mm x 115mm. Condition is good. Folding creases.