In England, however, the Conservatives were less concerned with the growth of Irish Catholic power than they were about the loss of their own. As an historian of Unionism, Patrick Buckland has written: ‘Unionists, furious with frustration at their continued exclusion from power, were thus willing to adopt almost any means to defeat the Liberals and return to office’. The Orange Card had played its part in ensuring almost unbroken Tory rule between 1886 and the end of 1905. However the Party lost power between 1892 and 1895, again in 1906, and more importantly, in 1911. The following year, on 11 April, 1912, Prime Minister Asquith, a convinced Home Ruler, and like Gladstone, dependent on the Irish MPs, moved the third and this time what seemed to be an inevitably successful Home Rule Bill in the House of Commons. The Bill was rejected twice by the House of Lords but on its third circuit it was passed by the House of Commons on 25 May, 1914 by a majority of seventy-seven votes. In normal circumstances the measure would then have received the royal assent and passed into law. But where Ireland was concerned the abnormal had become the norm to the Tories. They resorted to extra-parliamentary methods and brought the Orange Card into play once more. Once again Ulster was told that she would be right to fight.
In April 1912, three days before Asquith introduced the first reading of the Home Rule Bill, the Conservative leader Bonar Law had presided over what was described as ‘the wedding of Protestant Ulster with the Conservative and Unionist Party’ at a demonstration in Balmoral, a suburb of Belfast. Prayers were said by the Primate of All Ireland and the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the presence of seventy English, Scottish and Welsh MPs, while overhead flapped a Union Jack measuring some 48 feet by 25 feet, said to be the largest ever woven. Bonar Law recalled the successful defiance of the Protestants who withstood the Catholic Siege of Derry during the Williamite campaign, saying:10
Once again you hold the pass, the pass for the Empire. You are a besieged city. The timid have left you; your Lundys have betrayed you; but you have closed your gates. The Government have erected by their Parliament Act a boom against you to shut you off from the help of the British people. You will burst that boom. That help will come, and when the crisis is over, men will say to you in words not unlike those used by Pitt – you have saved yourselves by your exertions, and you will save the Empire by your example.
Those words spoken on Easter Tuesday 1912 were to have a significant bearing on what would befall Dublin at a subsequent Easter in 1916. The Conservative Party leader followed up his Balmoral utterances the following July, the month in which Orange fervour traditionally reaches its perfervid peak. Speaking at Blenheim on 24 July, he delivered what Asquith described as a ‘reckless rodomontade, a declaration of war against Constitutional Government’ and a ‘furnishing forth the complete grammar of anarchy’:
We regard the Government as a revolutionary committee which has seized upon despotic power by fraud. In our opposition to them we shall not be guided by the considerations or bound by the restraints which would influence us in an ordinary constitutional struggle. We shall take the means, whatever means seem to us most effective, to deprive them of the despotic power which they have usurped and compel them to appeal to the people whom they have deceived. They may, perhaps they will, carry their Home Rule Bill through the House of Commons and I repeat here that there are things stronger than parliamentary majorities…Before I occupied the position which I now fill in the party I said that, in my belief, if an attempt were made to deprive these men of their birthright – as part of a corrupt parliamentary bargain – they would be justified in resisting such an attempt by all means in their power, including force [author’s emphasis]. I said it then, and I repeat now with a full sense of the responsibility which attaches to my position, that, in my opinion, if such an attempt is made, I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I should not be prepared to support them, and in which, in my belief, they would not be supported by the overwhelming majority of the British people.
The leaders of the ‘lengths of resistance’ to which Ulster was prepared to go were Edward Carson, a former Crown prosecutor, Unionist MP for Trinity College, Dublin and leader of the Irish Unionist MPs at Westminster, and his lieutenant James Craig, MP for East Down, appropriately enough in the Irish context, a millionaire whiskey distiller. By 1912 Carson’s forensic prowess had brought him success at the English Bar after a career in Ireland largely built on the premise that the term ‘Irish Catholic Nationalist’ was the long version of the word ‘defendant’. Arthur Balfour once wrote:11
I made Carson and he made me. I’ve told you how no one had courage. Everyone right up to the top was trembling…Carson had nerve, however. I sent him all over the place, getting convictions, we worked together.
Now, having based his career on upholding the wishes of British governments, Carson turned his talents to flouting them. His activities included the preparations for a provisional government to rule ‘Ulster’, gun-running and the announcement to the world on 19 September, 1912 of the Ulster Covenant inspired by the Old Scottish Covenant.12 The symbolism of the Dan Winter cottage was heightened by Orange apologists who argued that the announcement of the Covenant was necessary because it provided an opportunity not to promote civil disorder but to impose discipline. The summer, and in particular the marching month of July, had been punctuated by several outbursts of disorder. Five days before the launching of the Covenant, a football match between Catholic Celtic and the Protestant Linfield became a battleground in which such aids as knives and revolvers were vigorously employed to enhance the enjoyment of the beautiful game. It was against this background that Carson read the Covenant from the steps of Craig’s family seat, Craigavon. It said:
Being convinced in our consciences that Home Rule would be disastrous to the material well-being of Ulster as well as the whole of Ireland, subversive of our civil and religious freedom, destructive of our citizenship, and perilous to the unity of the Empire, we, whose names are underwritten, men of Ulster, loyal subjects of His Gracious Majesty King George V, humbly relying on the God whom our fathers in days of stress and trial confidently trusted, do hereby pledge ourselves in solemn covenant throughout this our time of threatened calamity to stand by one another in defending for ourselves and our children our cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom, and in using all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland. And in the event of such a parliament being forced upon us we further solemnly and mutually pledge ourselves to refuse to recognise its authority. In sure confidence that God will defend the right we hereto subscribe our names. And further, we individually declare that we have not already signed this covenant. God save the King.
The Covenant was signed by a total of 471,414 people, including civil servants, soldiers and police in uniform. Carson boasted afterwards that the Government ‘dared not touch one of them’. By way of putting muscle behind those signatures, the Orangemen also began making open military preparations. A Protestant Volunteer Force, formed from the signatories of the Covenant, which sprang up in the wake of the Covenant’s signing, displayed the Orangeman’s penchant for keeping within the law while taking steps to break it. Carson took advantage of provision of the law whereby if the signatures of two Justices of the Peace were obtained for the area under their jurisdiction, drilling and other militaristic preparations could take place ‘provided that the object was to render citizens more efficient for the purpose of maintaining the Constitution of the United Kingdom as established’.
Throughout this uproar the Crimes Act which the Piggot forgery case helped to facilitate was still in operation and could have been invoked as vigorously as it was against Nationalists. But this was not done. During September 1913, for example, a great series of Unionist parades and meetings took place throughout the north-east. Carson announced that a government would be set up which would take over the control of the province on the day that the Home Rule
Act became law. ‘I am told it will be illegal,’ he declared openly at Newry on the 7th, and went on:
Of course it will. Drilling is illegal…the Volunteers are illegal and the Government know they are illegal, and the Government dare not interfere with them… Don’t be afraid of illegalities.
On 24 September, the Ulster Unionist Council, without the formality of any election, resolved itself into the ‘Central Authority of the Provisional Government of Ulster’. Sir Edward Carson became chairman of the Central Authority and the members included Captain Craig, the Duke of Abercorn and the Marquis of Londonderry. A legal assessor was appointed – the Right Hon. James Campbell, KC, MP; various committees were appointed and a military council was set up. Carson said of his policy that he did not ‘care two pence whether it was treason or not’.
He did not have to care. The Ulster Volunteers could rely on far greater support than local magistrates. Wild and swirling Tory utterances filled the air. At Ballyclare in County Antrim (on 20 September, 1913) F. E. Smith, KC, Conservative Member for a Liverpool constituency, later to be made an Attorney General of England and the Earl of Birkenhead, declared on behalf of the Conservatives that the moment Home Rule was made law: ‘we will say to our followers in England, “to your tents, O Israel!’”. They would be ready, he averred, ‘to risk the collapse of the whole body politic to prevent this monstrous crime’. The Duchess of Somerset also declared herself amongst the Israelites. She wrote to Carson in January 1914:
This is to assure you of our unfailing support and to implore you to take all care of yourself – so as to save Ireland…
The day that the first shot is fired in Ireland – I shall have my complete ambulance started and ready – 2 medical men, 2 surgeons, 6 trained nurses, and 32 orderlies – I have also undertaken to house 100 women and children from Ulster – The Duke and I will both come over to give all the help we can…
This little letter is just a note of encouragement for I know how depressed you must be at times but in such a noble cause! It is worth while and it’s the weakness of our rulers at the present time who have helped the Traitors and little Englishmen to bring their evil doings to this impasse…
The country will follow you now and we shall all help you to see this thing through and this vile government will go out and perhaps a reign of peace will come…
The duchess was not alone. Support also came from Bonar Law, who apart from his experience in Ulster as a son of the manse during his father’s time as a minister, was heavily influenced by Lord and, particularly, Lady Londonderry, who acted as his London political hostess. The Carsonite camp also included figures such as Lord Milner, Waldorf Astor, Lord Rothschild, Lord Ivy, the Duke of Bedford, Sir Edward Elgar and Rudyard Kipling. Milner, the former High Commissioner for South Africa, wrote to Carson on 9 December, 1913:
…there must very soon, certainly in less than a year, be what would be technically a ‘rebellion’ in Ulster. It would be a disaster of the first magnitude if that ‘rebellion’, which would really be the uprising of unshakeable principle and devoted patriotism – of loyalty to the Empire and the flag – were to fail. But it must fail unless we can paralyse the arm which might be raised to strike you.
In the event, this sort of thinking would help to provoke not an Orange rebellion in Belfast but a green one in Dublin. The imperialists saw nothing incongruous in their fomenting of ‘loyal Protestant’ rebellion as opposed to the treacherous Catholic variety, as Kipling made clear in a poem for the Unionists which appeared in the Morning Post:13
The blood our fathers spilt
Our love our toils our pains,
Are counted us for guilt,
And only bind our chains.
Before an Empire’s eyes,
The traitor claims his price.
What need of further lies?
We are the sacrifice.
We know the war prepared
On every peaceful home,
We know the hells declared
For such as serve not Rome –
The terror, threats, and dread
In market, hearth, and field –
We know, when all is said,
We perish if we yield.
Believe, we dare not boast,
Believe, we do not fear –
We stand to pay the cost
In all that men hold dear.
What answer from the North?
One law, one land, one throne.
If England drive us forth
We shall not fall alone.
As Asquith commented, Bonar Law had introduced a new style of rancour and an anarchical grammar into British politics. He and the other Unionist spokespersons also introduced two factors which remain with us to this day.
One of these is the custom of referring to the six industrialised and Unionist-dominated counties of northeastern Ireland as ‘Ulster’, whereas the term properly applies to the historic province of Ulster that includes the counties of Donegal (the most northerly county), Cavan and Monaghan. The second factor is the concept of partition. This was first proposed on 11 June, 1912 by a Liberal Unionist, T. C. R. Agar-Robartes, an MP for a Cornish constituency. He put forward an amendment to the Home Rule Bill proposing that four of the north-eastern counties, Antrim, Armagh, Down and Derry, be excluded from the Bill. This was purely a tactical manoeuvre, known to be unacceptable to the Irish Parliamentary Party, and was put forward as a parliamentary figleaf in an attempt to make the Unionists appear reasonable and open to compromise. Nine years later, however, it would form the basis of the compromise which yielded the Irish Treaty, the two states of modern Ireland and more than eighty years of sporadic violence.
The irony of the situation was that the atmosphere of threat and defiance of parliamentary democracy was not unwelcome to the people it was ultimately directed at, the leaders of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who would ultimately stage the 1916 revolution. These men were neither enamoured of Home Rule, nor of the ameliorative legislation which had been enacted. To them these were mere crumbs from the rich man’s political table. They aspired not to an Ireland with a degree of autonomy under the Crown, but to a free, independent Republic fashioned on the principles of Wolfe Tone. Theirs was not a large constituency until Carson and the Conservatives changed the picture. A highly placed member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, Piaras Beaslai, who helped to plan and to participate in the Rising, penned the following description of how the Nationalist revolutionaries viewed Carson’s eruption on to the political stage:14
In an Ireland doped into an unlimited patience, and credulity, an unlimited confidence in its Party Leaders, and in the British Liberal government, and a confident expectation of Home Rule, came Sir Edward Carson to save the situation for the physical force party. He, more than any man, is responsible for the events which have created the Irish Free State. He defied law, appealed to force; he preached the doctrines which led to the founding of the Irish Volunteers – and the amazed Irish people, with their pathetic faith in the infallibility of their Party leaders, and the honesty of the British Government, saw that Government recoil before the bluff of the ‘Ulster Volunteers’. They found threats of physical resistance by a minority accepted as a successful argument against justice to a majority. They found that the rifles and parading of the ‘Ulster Volunteers’ were jeopardising the long-expected Home Rule Act. Here was the opportunity of the IRB [the Irish Republican Brotherhood].
At first sight the Ireland and in particular the Dublin of which Beaslai wrote did not appear to provide much opportunity for the IRB. At the time of the 1916 Rising, the actual form of government in Ireland was carried out by what was known as the Executive which controlled the army, the police and the civil service. There was a Lord Lieutenant, a Chief Secretary and an Under Secretary. The first two of the three were politicians, the third a civil servant. At the time of the Rising, the long-serving Chief Secretary, Augustine Birrell, was a member of the Cabinet. But the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Wimborne,
who was allegedly responsible for the government, was not. Wimborne might propose, but Birrell disposed. The Under Secretary was Sir Matthew Nathan, an able and vastly experienced administrator. Were he given to premonitions, a shudder might well have convulsed him as he addressed his first task in Ireland. It was to arrange for a transfer to the colonies of a police officer, Assistant Commissioner Harrell, who was made the scapegoat for the Bachelors Walk incident we will encounter later. Nathan himself would be made a scapegoat over another far greater incident to which Bachelors Walk was a contributory factor – the 1916 Rising.
In fact the Ireland of the time could hardly have been administered by ten Matthew Nathans. From the outside, looking at the opulence of the Vice-regal Lodge and Dublin Castle, and the confidence of the splendidly accoutred British officers, the place seemed safe, snobbish and secure, as depicted, for instance, in the pages of A Drama in Muslin by George Moore.
Piaras Beaslai, even after the Rising, would write that Dublin was a hot bed of Loyalism and that the IRB could make no headway against Birrell’s softly, softly policy. Birrell read widely in Irish history and worked assiduously to make Home Rule possible. He contemplated neither Partition nor a cave-in to the Carsonites. He put through fifty-five Bills dealing with Ireland on subjects as diverse as housing, land and the creation of a national university. He actively tried to increase the role of Irish Catholics in their own country, and for this inevitably became a figure of execration for the Orangemen. On the other hand, the IRB viewed Birrell’s policy as merely being a variant on the long-standing British governmental policy of rewarding:
1916- the Easter Rising Page 3