Is it to be part of the policy and programme of this party that, if returned to power, it will introduce into the House of Commons a bill for Irish Home Rule? The answer, in my judgement, is No. A reconciliation of Ireland to the Empire and the relief of the imperial parliament from unnecessary burdens can only be attained by methods which will carry with them … the sanction and sympathy of British opinion. To recognise facts like these is not apostasy, it is common sense.19
For a time, objections to Home Rule and reservations about Campbell-Bannerman’s leadership of the Liberal Party were both obscured by the Unionist government’s suicidal inclination to prove that, despite its apparently unassailable majority in the House of Commons, it was too divided to serve out the full Parliament. There were damaging divisions in the Cabinet about the way in which the Chancellor (Ritchie) had chosen to pay for the war, the Education Bill which reorganised the management of elementary and secondary schools throughout England and Wales and, above all, tariff reform – more accurately described as the introduction of protection in place of free trade. One night in May 1903, after the Chancellor had defied the protectionists by repealing the corn duty which had been imposed during the war. Campbell-Bannerman announced when he arrived home, ‘Wonderful news today. It is only a matter of time when we shall sweep them aside.’20 His optimism was entirely justified, though few people would have shared his view at the time. A couple of months earlier he had almost been swept aside by his own party.
Asquith – motivated either by personal ambition or by public spirit – had first announced his considered judgement that the Liberal Party should never again take office if its House of Commons majority depended on the support of the Irish Nationalist Party. Then he accepted the vice presidency of the Liberal League – the Liberal Imperial Council by another name – under the presidency of Lord Rosebery. It was argued by Asquith’s Liberal detractors that he was using his opposition to Home Rule to guarantee that he became leader. His supporters insisted that he already knew that the succession was his and that he was motivated only by a determination to prevent yet another Liberal government from being destroyed by its preoccupation with Ireland. Asquith’s undoubted impatience to assume first the leadership of his party and eventually the premiership was accentuated by the always mischievous Lord Rosebery who – supported by Haldane and Grey – committed himself to doing all he could to replace Campbell-Bannerman.
In Ireland, nationalists were revising their history rather than realigning or revitalising their forces. Arthur Griffith had written a number of articles in the United Irishman which urged Irishmen to emulate the behaviour of those Hungarian patriots who, by emphasising their cultural differences with Vienna and boycotting the Imperial Parliament, had at least won the concession of equal status for their country within the double monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Nobody had been very impressed. In November 1905, just as Arthur Balfour was leaving office, the First National Convention of the Gaelic League met under the slogan ‘Sinn Fein’ – the title of the newspaper which was to become the name of a political party. It marked a new emphasis on self-reliance. Consistent with the policy of ‘Ourselves Alone’, the Convention resisted what it described as the insult of the Westminster government’s offer to devolve some items of administration from London to Dublin.
The new Liberal government – conscious that its cautious attitude towards Home Rule had helped win the election – did nothing to convince the Nationalists that its Devolution Bill was worth having. The Council which it offered to create (a name normally associated with local government) was to have 106 members – 82 elected and the rest appointed by government. It was to have no law-making or tax-raising powers, and its duties were limited to performance of the administrative tasks previously discharged by eight of the forty-five departments within the Irish Office. But the way in which ministers spoke of the proposals did more to prejudice Irish opinion against them than the limited nature of the proposals themselves.
Augustine Birrell, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, introduced the Bill with a speech that concentrated almost exclusively on its limited scope and boasted that it did not contain ‘a touch or a trace, a hint or a suggestion of any new legislative power or authority’. At first Redmond and the parliamentary Nationalists welcomed the proposals as better than nothing. Popular opinion was so antagonistic that they retracted their support and announced their intention to vote against the Bill in the Commons. Devolution, as distinct from Home Rule, was dead. But the inadequacy of the government’s proposals and the feebleness of the parliamentarians’ response had reawakened old passions where the battle for Ireland was to be fought and won – on the streets.
The Irish Nationalist Members of Parliament had begun to recognise the danger that the battle for Home Rule would be taken out of their hands. They took it in turn to reassure each other that there was nothing to worry about. Dillon wrote to Redmond, ‘This Sinn Fein business is a very serious matter, and it has been spreading pretty rapidly for the last year.’ But then he added a cheerful postscript. ‘If the [Irish National] party and the movement keep on the right lines, it will not become very formidable because it has no one with any brains to lead it.’21 Perhaps he was right in 1906, but intellectual reinforcements were on their way. And the army which marched behind the green banner was already led with burning passion. Westminster and Whitehall were not equipped to understand MacBride, Gonne, Yeats, Gore-Booth, Casement and the other romantics who kept Irish hopes alive – with a little financial help from John Devoy’s Clan-na-Gael in America – while Home Rule lay fallow in the imperial Parliament.
Help, when it came four years later, was in the unlikely form of the English electorate. When Campbell-Bannerman resigned because of his fast deteriorating health, he was replaced by Asquith, who had been Rosebery’s first lieutenant on the Liberal Imperial Council. Asquith needed the Irish Nationalists. When, in 1909, the House of Lords had rejected Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’, Asquith determined to secure the allegiance of the minor parties in Parliament. On 10 December 1909 he had promised a Liberal rally in the Albert Hall, ‘a policy which, while explicitly safeguarding the supremacy and indefectible authority of the Imperial Parliament, will set up in Ireland a system of full self-government in regard to purely Irish affairs’. The two general elections of 1910 confirmed how wise that decision was. In the second – called to clarify the uncertainties which followed the first – the Liberals and Unionists each won two hundred and seventy-two seats. The balance of power was held by eighty-two Irish Nationalists and forty-two Labour Members.
Asquith kept his word but, once again, the crucial influence on Ireland’s future was exerted by Ireland itself – not through the ‘democratic process’ of the Imperial Parliament but by the direct threat of force. The Prime Minister clearly believed that the future of the province would be decided by the Commons and Lords – as it had been decided in Gladstone’s day. He had not made proper allowance for the Unionists, whose resistance to Irish autonomy was at least as fierce as the Nationalists’ support for separation, but better organised and more adequately financed. And Unionist rebels, unlike their Nationalist adversaries, enjoyed the support of a large part of the English Establishment. When changing circumstances put them on the wrong side of the law, the treason of ‘loyalists’ was either ignored or excused.
The Home Rule Bill of 1912 was, in a very real sense, the Irish Nationalists’ reward for supporting the government during the constitutional crisis which ended with the Parliament Bill and the reduction of the House of Lords’ powers. But, since it took almost two years for gratitude to be translated into legislation, ‘Loyalists’ were able to prepare their resistance even before the details of the proposed settlement were announced. The ‘Orange Lodges’ – part social, part political and wholly bigoted in their view of Catholics and Catholicism – were always at their strongest when Home Rule was on the agenda of the Imperial Parliament. Even in 1904 – when the worst they had ha
d to fear was limited devolution – two Ulster Unionist MPs had announced that the prospect of even so modest a measure provided ‘an opportune moment to revive on a war footing the active work of the various Ulster Defence Associations’.22 The Ulster Unionist Council – established in 1905 and guaranteeing ‘consistent and continuous action’ – regarded the Home Rule promise that Asquith had made in the Albert Hall before the first 1910 election as sufficient justification for escalating its state of readiness. By the time that the election came, Walter Long, the leader of the Ulster Unionists, had abandoned his seat in Dublin South for a more convenient London constituency. The Unionists chose as his successor Sir Edward Carson, the Member of Parliament for Dublin University. Before the second 1910 election the Council had set up an armaments fund.23
Carson, although a liberal in matters of domestic policy, was a Unionist zealot. Robert Kee in The Green Flag, his monumental study of Irish history, quotes Carson’s two statements of principle – ‘It is only for Ireland that I am in politics’ and ‘It is only for the sake of the Union that I am in politics.’ Kee suggests that Carson regarded the two explanations of his motives as self-evidently the same. From the very beginning of his leadership, he assumed that Home Rule must be resisted and could only be defeated by what amounted to rebellion. In January 1911, in London on parliamentary business, he told Lady Londonderry, ‘I wish I could be in Ulster to know whether men are desperately in earnest and prepared to make great sacrifices.’24 He wrote to James Craig, the Member of Parliament for East Down and whiskey millionaire who was to become his co-conspirator, in even more apocalyptic language. ‘What I am very anxious about is to satisfy myself that people over there really mean to resist. I am not for a mere game of bluff and unless men are ready to make great sacrifices, which they clearly understand, the talk of resistance is no use.’25
Craig was equally intransigent in his opposition to the 1912 Home Rule Bill. But while Carson felt an obligation to Ireland as a whole, Craig’s concern was for Ulster. Carson and Craig formed so formidable a partnership that, even before the Home Rule Bill was debated, the government had prepared the route of its retreat. Faced with the prospect of open rebellion, the Cabinet considered ‘at great length and from a number of diverse points of view’ how best to meet the threat. One possibility was partition. Asquith’s report to the King does not suggest that the discussion on that subject had been easy or that ministers were in unanimous agreement with the eventual conclusion. The best that could be said of the meeting was ‘at the end the Cabinet acquiesced’ to what began with a bold reassertion of established policy. The Home Rule Bill ‘should apply to the whole of Ireland’. But after that initial show of strength, ministers ‘held themselves free to make such changes to the Bill as fresh evidence of facts or the pressure of British opinion may render expedient’.26 Carson and Craig were not the men to miss such an obvious opportunity. If the Cabinet’s mind could be changed, they would change it.
Craig organised the first great anti-Home Rule demonstration in his own house, Craigavon, on 23 September 1911. The Bill, which was still being drafted, was not to be debated in Parliament for another six months – but almost fifty thousand Orangemen, some of whom had marched to Craigavon in military formation, heard Carson’s declaration of war.
I now enter into a compact with you and, with the help of God, you and I joined together will defeat the most nefarious conspiracy that has ever been hatched against a free people … We must be prepared, in the event of a Home Rule Bill passing, with such measures as will carry on for ourselves the government of those districts of which we have control … We must be prepared, … the moment [that] Home Rule passes, ourselves to become responsible for the Protestant Province of Ulster.27
During Easter week 1912, two days before the Home Rule Bill was introduced into the House of Commons, an even bigger demonstration was held on the agricultural showground in Balmoral, a prosperous Belfast suburb. One hundred thousand men and women assembled under the largest Union Flag ever made. Carson and Craig spoke with their confidence renewed. Andrew Bonar Law – the new Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition – joined them on the platform to fulfil his promise that, when the Orangemen refused to accept the will of Parliament, ‘they would not be wanting help from across the water’. All the Unionist rebels had another reason to rejoice. Field Marshal, the Earl Roberts of Kandahar, KG, VC, had visited the province a couple of weeks earlier and told Carson, ‘I hope something will come of it.’28 His good wishes had been taken to be more than a platitude. ‘Bobs’ would, they believed, speak up for them to the generals. Their hopes were reinforced during the debate on the Second Reading of the Home Rule Bill, when Sir J. B. Lonsdale (the Member of Parliament for mid-Armagh) cried out across the chamber, ‘Try it. Call out the British Army to compel Ulster and see what happens.’
Even the Ulster Unionists had been slow to recognise that the British Army might be called upon to put down an armed rebellion which spread across all Ulster. At the Craigavon rally ‘it had been noticed that a contingent of Craigmen from Tyrone … displayed a greater degree of smartness and precision, both in their marching and in their turn-out generally. Upon enquiry, it transpired that these men had, for some time, been learning the elements of military drill.’29 Surprise in Belfast was matched by astonishment in London.
The men who opposed Home Rule believed, with a sincere passion, that the government’s conduct justified what, in different circumstances, they would have called high treason. The constitution – always a concept so vague that it could be called in aid of every attempt to hold back change – had been violated. That section of society which did not believe that a democratic mandate should override its prejudices and vested interests claimed that the House of Commons had become what later generations called ‘an elective dictatorship’. What was more, as Bonar Law told one of the Unionist rallies, the Liberals had ‘sold themselves’ to the Nationalist MPs in order to command the majority necessary to keep Mr Asquith in Downing Street. ‘Under such circumstances … to try to force the circumstances upon you … would not be by government at all … It would be tyranny naked and unashamed and not the less because the tyrants have usurped their power not by force but by fraud.’
Bonar Law’s description of the government’s conduct legitimised his party’s treason. In the fight against tyranny, every sort of weapon could be used with a clear conscience. Earl Roberts drafted a letter for publication (but never published because it was overtaken by events) which explained that the normal rules of military discipline do not apply during a civil war!30 Bonar Law’s approach to the King was less bizarre but a constitutional outrage of even greater proportions. There was, the Leader of the Opposition said, no obligation for His Majesty to sign the Home Rule Bill into law because the Liberals’ Parliament Bill had reduced the power of the House of Lords. ‘They may say that your assent is a purely formal act and the prerogative of veto dead. That is true as long as there is a buffer between you and the House of Commons. But they have destroyed that buffer and it is no longer true.’31
The Unionists reinforced their consciences with the argument that Edwardian England had remedied almost all of Ireland’s material grievances. The Irish Land Purchase Act of 1903, supported by Nationalists no less than by ‘loyalists’, ‘did solid good to Ireland by speedily bringing about nearly everywhere … a system of out and out peasant proprietorship’.32 In 1909 Cardinal Newman’s dream of a ‘Catholic Oxford on the banks of the Liffey’ was at last recognised by the creation of Dublin University. But the Unionists were no more capable of understanding the Catholics’ emotional need for the self-respect that comes with self-government than the Cabinet was of appreciating the strength of Protestant determination to maintain the Union.
John Redmond and the other parliamentary Nationalists were themselves out of touch with Irish opinion. That is the only explanation for their acceptance of a bill which was explicit in entrenching the supremacy of the imperial Parliament
‘beyond the reach of challenge’. The Irish legislative – and the executive which was to be formed within it – was to receive powers which were limited to purely domestic government. Foreign affairs, defence and most taxes remained at Westminster, as did control of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Sinn Fein announced its implacable opposition to the Bill on the day it was published, but the parallel antagonism of their natural enemies did nothing to placate the Orangemen who followed Carson and Craig. On 28 September 1912 the ‘Solemn League and Covenant to Resist Home Rule’ was inaugurated in Belfast Town Hall. Carson signed first, signifying his refusal, whatever Parliament might decide, to recognise Home Rule. Within a week, 218,206 other names had been added to the Covenant. Some were signed in blood. Only men were invited to reaffirm their loyalty to King and country, but 228,991 women signed a petition signifying support for the men who would fight to maintain the Union. And, just to prove that Protestant Ulster was in deadly earnest, the Belfast shipyards shut down for the day.
The Ulster men were not the ‘asses’ which the Liberals, by their derisive allusion to ‘the brayings of civil war’, had hoped them to be. Craig and Carson were adjusting their position. Realism required their forces to be concentrated on a battle they might win. Craig set out the new strategy in language which sounded almost emollient: ‘We all know … the vast majority of our fellow countrymen in the South and West of Ireland will have Home Rule if the Bill becomes law and we shall have no power to stop it. All we propose to do is to prevent Home Rule becoming law in our part of the country.’
In the House of Commons on New Year’s Day 1913 Edward Carson moved an amendment to the Home Rule Bill which would have allowed Ulster to remain within the Union. Asquith briefly sounded sympathetic, but the Nationalists would not have partition at any price. And the government, still sceptical about the size and strength of the Orange threat, came down, temporarily, on the side of the Ireland – undivided and in domestic policies free – that was at least a modified version of the Gaelic dream.
The Edwardians Page 22