by Jan Morris
So as the Clydevalley tied up at Larne that night, the Ulster Movement stood ready to split Ireland and bewilder the Empire—for its leaders maintained that compulsory Home Rule for all Irishmen was a threat to that venerable abstraction, the imperial trust.
3
There was nothing haphazard to it. It was intricate and calculating. Its political chief was the formidable King’s Counsel Sir Edward Carson, leader of the Irish Unionist Party in the House of Commons. Carson was not an Empire man: he was an Irishman, born in Dublin, a lawyer, and his concern was habitually concentrated, in the lawyers’ way, on small intense issues. He was a heavy-weight with a narrow imagination, a Rhodes without an Africa, whose harsh and resonant brogue could be terrifying, and comforting, and even inspiring, but never poetic. Carson was Protestant of course, and his particular kind of rhetoric, ominously flamboyant, exactly suited the passions of the Ulster Protestants, whose dour manners masked such impetuous beliefs. Carson was a large man, but vulnerable—a worrier, a hypochondriac, a man of second thoughts and hidden doubts: but none of it showed, his imposing unsmiling figure gave confidence to any Protestant assembly, and as long before they had called the enigmatic Parnell the Uncrowned King of Ireland, so now they called this very British sort of Irishman ‘King Carson’.
Beneath Carson’s aegis an army of resistance awaited the outcome of the third Home Rule Bill, laboriously passing through its successive Parliamentary stages. The Ulster Volunteer Force was no raggle-taggle army of idealists. It was as professional and thorough as Carson himself. Its organizers were mostly men of the Ulster gentry, retired soldiers very often, who believed passionately in the unity of the British Empire. Its financiers were the businessmen of Belfast. Its patrons included great Ulster grandees like Lord Londonderry and Lord Dunleath. It had no uniforms and was armed with no better weapons than sporting rifles, shot-guns or even dummy rifles (supplied on demand, 1/8d in pitch pine, 1/6d in spruce): but its organization was sophisticated, and its activities were ubiquitous. Every village in Ulster had its members, and the police knew all about it from the start, loopholes in the law making it theoretically legal. When Carson visited Portadown in 1912, he was escorted through the streets in an open carriage by cavalrymen with bamboo lances, field guns made of wood, infantry with wooden rifles and pipers in neo-military dress.
By 1914 some 50,000 men, aged seventeen to sixty-five, had enlisted in this force. No military sanctions kept them there, but so proud and resolute was the Ulster spirit that the mere threat of expulsion from the ranks was enough to maintain discipline. The army was organized conventionally in divisions, regiments, platoons, and all military services were represented. There was an astute intelligence unit. There were supply and medical branches, artillery, signallers and despatch riders, three squadrons of cavalry. Half the car-owners of Ulster had pledged their vehicles to the transport branch, and there was a register of farmers willing to lend horses and wagons. The force had its own postal service and its own devoted corps of nurses. It had large secret stores of food. It had chaplains. It had a pension scheme for the wounded. It had a headquarters (the Old Town Hall, Belfast), a slogan (‘For God and Ulster’), a flag (the Red Hand of Ulster).1
Above all it had a Manifesto. In September, 1912, Carson, consulting Scottish precedents, presented to the people of Ulster a declaration of intent, in the form of a pledge. It was called the Ulster Covenant, it was paraded at meetings throughout Ireland, and nearly half a million Ulster men and women put their signatures to it, some of them in their own blood. This is what 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 to our civil and religious freedoms, destructive of our citizenship, and perilous to the unity of the Empire, we whose names are undersigned, 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 recognize its authority. In sure confidence that God will defend the right we hereto subscribe our names…. God save the King.’
This declaration, with its archaic echoes, its undertones of pendantry, its Olde English script, was a recognizably imperialist document, but then Ulster had always been an imperialist place. Half the generals of the British Army, it sometimes seemed, were Ulstermen, and all over the Empire Irish Protestants flew the Union Jack above the Orange Lodge. In many ways the UVF was a truly imperial army. Some of its senior commanders were retired Indian Army men—they sometimes used Hindustani as a code, as in previous imperial crises the British had used schoolboy Greek. Many more had seen service in the Empire, and absorbed its styles and methods. The force commander, Sir George Richardson, was the grandson of an East India Company soldier, the son of an Indian Army officer, and he himself, besides fighting in many a frontier skirmish, had commanded the cavalry brigade which stormed the Temple of Heaven at Peking in 1900. His chief of staff was an Indian Army colonel, his commander in Antrim was a retired general of the Royal Marines, his supply chief had been the youngest officer on the British General Staff, until he resigned in sympathy with the Ulster cause. One of the most active officers of the force was Patterson of Tsavo, whom we have already met leading his Zionist mulemen into action at Gallipoli.
Across the water, too, many men of Empire pledged their support. Bonar Law, the Canadian-born leader of the Conservative opposition, was a son of the manse, and an implacable opponent of Home Rule. He had been described as being ‘as unimaginative as a ledger’, but in the Ulster cause he was almost recklessly outspoken. ‘I can conceive of no length of resistance to which Ulster men might go’, he once said, ‘in which I would not be prepared to support them.’ There were things more important than Parliamentary majorities: if the Home Rule Bill went through the King himself should use the Royal Veto, never brought into action since the days of Queen Anne. Lord Milner was just as fervent. He devised a British Covenant, a kind of rider to Carson’s, which was signed by nearly two million people, and he presided over a magazine called The Covenanter, whose motto was ‘Put your trust in God and keep your powder dry’: if the Government tried to coerce Ulster, he wrote in it, ‘we may hope to paralyse the arm which is uplifted to strike.’1
Lord Roberts had nominated the commander of the Volunteer Force, and might have taken on the job himself if he were not eighty-two years old. The Chief of Military Operations at the War Office, General Sir Henry Wilson, was an Ulsterman, and had signed the Covenant. Other eminent supporters included Lord Rothschild the banker, Edward Elgar, Starr Jameson of the Jameson Raid, and Rudyard Kipling, who gave £30,000 to the cause, and printed a poem about it in the ultra-Conservative Morning Post (a pointed change from his usual outlet, The Times, which supported Home Rule):
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.
When in March 1914 officers at the Curragh, the British military base outside Dublin, were asked for an assurance that they would be ready to deal with the Ulstermen by force, fifty-eight of them, including their commanding general, threatened to resign rather than march against the Ulster Volunteers. The King himself had doubts about coercing Ulster—‘Will it be wise,’ he asked, ‘will it be fair to the Sovereign as head of the Army, to subject the discipline and indeed
the loyalty of his troops to such a strain?’—and the proposed operations were cancelled. Bonar Law was highly gratified, and assured the Ulster Unionists that they were holding the pass not just for Ulster, but for the British Empire—‘You will save the Empire by your example.’
4
This was the inflammatory situation, then, into which the Clydevalley sailed that April night. Her arrival at Larne had been the conclusion of a complex and hazardous operation. The guns, acquired by cloak-and-dagger, had been shipped from Hamburg first in a lighter, then in a Norwegian steamer, the Fanny. When the ship was inspected by Danish officials as it passed through the Kattegat, her master decided to run for it, and, leaving his papers behind, slipped moorings in the night and sailed into the North Sea. Next day the story was in every newspaper in Europe, and everybody guessed that the Fanny’s arms were bound for Ulster.
They changed the appearance of the ship, they changed her name first to Bethia, then to Doreen, for days they steamed here and there, evading patrols and pilot boats—to Yarmouth on the east coast of England, to Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel, to Tuskar Rock off Rosslare in the Irish Sea: and there on the night of April 19 they met at last the innocuous old Clydevalley, and transhipped the guns at sea—the ships lashed together with one set of navigation lights, as the crates passed from one to the other.
At Larne all was ready for them. Every member of the Motor Car Corps had received a warning instruction: ‘Sir, in accordance with your kind agreement to place a motor-car at the disposal of the Provisional Government in a case of necessity, it is absolutely necessary that your car should arrive at Larne on the night of Friday/Saturday 24th/25th instant… for a very secret and important duty.’ Larne was virtually commandeered. A regiment of volunteers was assembled in the demesne of the Dowager Lady Smiley, at Drumalis House; another, under Lord Massereene and Ferrard, formed a cordon on the hills above, blocking every road into the town. Telephones were cut. Food was prepared for 300 men. Down at the docks the arrangements were supervised by the chairman of the harbour company, and the local Volunteers, nearly all dockers, stood by to unload the ship. It was raining slightly.
As night fell the first of the cars and lorries approached Larne, in slow convoys down the narrow lanes, until watchers in the town could see the flashes of their headlights all over the hills, and hear the distant throbbing of their engines. All the lights in the harbour were switched on; at eleven o’clock the Clydevalley slipped into harbour and made fast. The arrangements went perfectly. Methodically the dockers worked there in the rain, and one by one the cars made off into the darkness with their loads of guns, and the cranes swung in the arc-lights, and the nurses in the harbour buildings kept their tea-urns on the boil. Lady Smiley looked out approvingly from her tall windows at Drumalis, young Lord Massereene inspected his check-points through the night, and the Catholic citizens of Larne, like the police, tactfully kept to their beds.
By 2.30 a.m. the last of the cars was away, and the guns were on their way across Ulster. Clydevalley had done her job. The army of Ulster had weapons, and Home Rule could never be imposed upon the Irish Protestants without a civil war.1
5
In the south a very different populace reacted to these events. The solid Protestants of the north were vehement in rejecting Home Rule: the volatile Catholics of the south awaited it more phlegmatically. The worst of the Irish miseries were over now, the famines, the evictions, the laws which condemned Catholics to permanent helotry, and the Conservative policy of ‘killing Home Rule by kindness’ seemed to many observers to have worked. The patriot cause had lost much of its fire since the great days of Parnell, and most Irish Catholics were not actively anti-British. The Irish Nationalist Party at Westminster was led by moderate Home Rulers, Irish volunteers still filled the ranks of the British Army, and it was generally assumed that Home Rule was on the way.
The Crown’s chief representatives in Dublin were anything but bullies, and Augustine Birrell in particular, the Chief Secretary, seemed to personify the very spirit of conciliation. A charming fellow of literary tastes, the son of a Methodist minister, he loved the company of Irishmen, believed the best of them, and was a popular guest at the homes of the Dublin intelligentsia, where Gaelic art and literature were all the rage. Birrell’s ambition was to be the last Chief Secretary of Ireland, and he admitted that the plays at the Abbey Theatre, where W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge were in their glory, meant far more to him than security reports from the Royal Irish Constabulary. There really seemed a chance that all the centuries of bitterness would be peaceably concluded. The days of the old rebellious mobs, singing their wild ballads, brandishing their knobkerries, cheered on by poteen whiskey and led by passionate demagogues—the high old days of Irish fury seemed long ago and half forgotten.
But as Gladstone had warned Parliament long before, Irish nationalism was not a passing mood, but an inextinguishable passion. Beneath the placid surface of things, as always the Irish revolutionaries were at work. Their motives and attitudes varied. Some were simply patriots, some social revolutionaries. Some did not believe that Home Rule would ever really come, some thought it inadequate anyway. Some hoped violence would not be necessary; some thought it inevitable; some wanted it for its own sake, believing that the shedding of blood, in sacrifice or in sacrament, was necessary for the cleansing of the Irish soul, and the fulfilment of true liberty.
The defiance of Ulster came as a shock to moderate Catholics, and foreseeing that Protestant resistance might prevent Home Rule and wreck the cherished unity of Ireland, thousands of Irishmen joined their own private armies and nationalist organizations, the Gaelic League, the League of Women, the Gaelic Athletic Association. Boys of patriotic families were recruited into Fianna na h’Eireann, ‘the Fianna Boys’. Socialists and Marxists had their own Citizen Army, founded by the powerful trade unionist James Larkin and trained by Captain Jack White, ex-Gordon Highlander and son of Field Marshal Sir George White, the defender of Ladysmith in the Boer War.1
Much the largest organization was the Irish Volunteer Force, formed in 1913 in direct emulation of the Ulster volunteers. Its 10,000 men wore grey-green uniforms with peaked caps, and drilled openly enough in parks and squares across Ireland. It too had its agents and sympathizers everywhere, in every police station, in every Government office, and especially in every post office, giving it an excellent intelligence system. It was, though, quite unlike the tight-lipped and splendidly organized militia of the north. There were no retired generals to command it, no traditions of Empire to sustain it, few great demesnes to offer it parade grounds, munition stores or refuges. It was a ramshackle, amateurish, thoroughly Irish affair, all at odds. Its commander was a lecturer in Gaelic literature, and it numbered in its ranks many teachers, not a few poets, cranks, eccentrics and folk-enthusiasts of all kinds, together with a mass of simple Irishmen who joined it out of guileless patriotism.
Authority, having turned a blind eye to the Ulster Volunteer Force, could hardly suppress the Irish volunteers. The last thing Birrell wanted was to antagonize the Irish public on the eve of their emancipation, but balancing security with benevolence was a difficult problem for him—one horn of the dilemma, it was said, was as sharp as the other.1 At least the movement had no arms. The Irish patriots had many friends abroad, powerful bodies of Irish exiles in America and Australia, enemies of Britain everywhere: the Irish had been the most consistent of all the Empire’s opponents, and wherever there were dissidents of Empire, or critics of the imperial philosophies, they had their supporters. But though there was always money available, weapons there were not. The Volunteers continued to drill with broomsticks and wooden rifles, and they looked with envy and chagrin upon the exploit of the Clydevalley.
6
Two remarkable members of the old Ascendancy, in particular, believed that Ireland must be ready to fight for her independence. The first was Sir Roger Casement, one of the saddest figures of the whole imperial story. Like many anothe
r patriot of Catholic Ireland, he was a Protestant, the son of a British Army officer. His devotion to the Irish cause was not inherited, nor exactly personal, nor even basically political: it was imaginative, aesthetic perhaps. An instinctive and often muddled supporter of underdogs, wherever they were, Casement identified himself with the oppressed not out of reason but out of sensuality. He was a very sensual man, tall, distinguished, rather quixotic, melancholy, whose urges were homosexual, and whose life seemed to lead him unerringly down dark and terrible paths. He had great beauty. He looked beautiful, he spoke beautifully, and there was beauty to the sense of tragedy that attended him, first to last.
Casement had become well known as a member of the British consular service in West Africa. A report he made about conditions on the rubber estates of the Belgian Congo horrified the British public with its revelations of cruelty, and later he repeated the performance after a visit to the rubber estates of Peru. His reputation stood high in England. He was knighted in 1911, retired in 1913, and went home to Ireland apparently full of honour, achievement and duty satisfied. There in his late forties he became possessed by the enchantment of the island—‘bewitched’, so a contemporary wrote, ‘by the beauty of his own country’—and devoted himself to its causes as to a late love affair.
But he was a tortured soul. His frustrated longing for lasting affection, his considerable vanity, his half-incoherent poetic impulses, his Celtic love of the theatrical, all made him restless and dissatisfied. Immersing himself ever more distractedly into Irish history and culture (though failing to master the Irish language), Casement became one of the most extreme of patriots, and reached the conclusion that in the coming world war, which he thought inevitable, it might be better for the Irish to side with Germany, and so achieve freedom by treason. Why not? They had no quarrel with the Germans, they were no closer in race or religion to the English than they were to Prussians or Bavarians, and it was unlikely that a victorious Germany would wish to repeat the melancholy history of Ireland by occupying the island herself. When, in April 1914, the news of the Clydevalley coup reached him, Casement decided that his duty lay in enlisting German sympathies for the Irish cause. As the last months of peace passed, and Europe mobilized for war, he steeled himself to treason, and prepared secretly to go to Germany, via New York, to conclude an alliance with the King’s enemies.