I Signed My Death Warrant

by Ryle T. Dwyer

  that I myself pointed out on a previous occasion that the North would be forced economically to come in. I assented but I said the position was so serious owing to certain recent actions that for my part I was anxious to secure a definite reply from Craig and his colleagues, and that I was as agreeable to a reply rejecting as accepting. In view of the former we would save Tyrone and Fermanagh, parts of Derry, Armagh and Down by the Boundary Commission, and thus avoid such things as the raid on the Tyrone County Council and the ejection of the staff. Another such incident would, in my view, inevitably lead to a conflict, and this conflict, in the nature of things (assuming for instance that some of the Anglo-Northern police were killed or wounded) would inevitably spread throughout Ireland. Mr Lloyd George expressed a view that this might be put to Craig, and if so the safeguards would be a matter for working out between ourselves and Craig afterwards.

  The prime minister was willing to consider objections to the financial, trade and defence clauses of the British draft treaty. He also offered to consider a new oath, if the Irish delegation accepted the clauses concerning Dominion Status.

  ‘Finally,’ Collins concluded his report, ‘the conversation developed into a statement by Mr Lloyd George to the effect that were Clauses 1 and 2 accepted he would be in a position to hold up any action until we had, if we desired to do so, submitted the matter to Dáil Éireann and the country. I left it at that saying that unless I sent word to the contrary some members of the delegation would meet him at 2 o’clock.’ Arrangements were then made for members of the two delegations to meet that afternoon.

  16 - ‘I may have signed my actual death-warrant’

  ‘Griffith now came to me and emphasised a point which cer­tainly carried considerable weight with me,’ Barton recalled. ‘We had broken off negotiations on the connection with the Crown and Empire whereas it was definitely Cabinet policy to break on the Ulster question if we had to break at all. He made an urgent appeal to me to go again to Downing St. with him and Collins in order to learn how much nearer we could get to agreement on other points and to endeavour to shift the breakdown of negotiations from the Crown back to Ulster.’

  ‘This was I knew the policy of our Cabinet,’ Barton explained. ‘I told Griffith that as regarded Ireland’s inclusion under the British Crown my conscience would not permit me to trifle with the oath of allegiance I had taken. Griffith agreed and stated that he would not try to induce any man to violate a conscientious scruple but that if I went back again we would do our best to change the break from the Crown to Ulster and if we failed in that would get the acceptance or refusal of their terms referred back to the Dáil. I agreed to return on this understanding.’

  Collins read his report of his private meeting with Lloyd George to the rest of the Irish delegation back at Hans Place, and Griffith, Collins and Barton then went to 10 Downing Street to meet with the prime minister, Chamberlain, Birkenhead and Churchill. From the outset Griffith tried to concentrate on the Ulster question by demanding that the Irish delegation should know whether Craig would accept or reject Irish unity. The British replied that Griffith was going back on his previous promise not to let them down on the Boundary Commission proposal.

  ‘Collins said,’ according to Barton, ‘that for us to agree to any conditions defining the future relations of Great Britain and Ireland prior to Craig’s giving his assent to the unity of Ireland was impossible, that to do so would be to surrender our whole fighting position. That every document we ever sent them had stated that any proposals for the association of Ireland with the British commonwealth of Nations was conditional upon the unity of Ireland. That, unless Craig accepted inclusion under the all-Ireland Parliament, the unity of Ireland was not assured and that if he refused inclusion we should be left in the position of having surrendered our position without having even secured the essential unity of Ireland.’

  Lloyd George became excited and accused the Irish of trying to use the Ulster question to break off the talks when the real difficulty was the opposition in Dublin to membership of the British commonwealth. He accused Griffith of going back on the promise of not repudiating the Boundary Commission proposal, and he produced the explanatory memorandum that Griffith had approved in November.

  ‘What is this letter?’ Barton whispered to Collins.

  ‘I don’t know what the hell it is.’

  ‘Do you mean to tell me, Mr Collins that you never learnt of this document from Mr Griffith?’ Lloyd George asked.

  The memorandum outlining the Boundary Commission proposal was then passed across the table to Collins and Barton. Both were seeing it for the first time. Collins said nothing.

  ‘I have fulfilled my part of the bargain,’ the prime minister declared. ‘I took the risk of breaking my party. You in Ireland often bring against us in England the charge of breach of faith. Now it is for you to show that Irishmen know how to keep faith.’

  ‘I said I would not let you down on that, and I won’t,’ Griffith replied. He no longer felt able to break on the Ulster question, and he did not wish to break on the Crown, so he had little room to manoeuvre. ‘I was determined not to break on the Crown as I told you at the Cabinet,’ Griffith explained in his report to de Valera, ‘the decision of peace or war had to be made.’

  ‘I said, provided we came to an agreement on other points, I would accept inclusion in the Empire on the basis of the Free State,’ Griffith continued. The discussion changed to other subjects, and the British accepted the oath introduced by Collins that morning with only some minor verbal changes. They also offered other concessions such as dropping the stipulation that the British would ‘exclusively’ have the right to defend the seas around Ireland. The Irish could have vessels for both fishery protection and to combat smuggling, and the British conceded that defence provisions of the agreement would be reviewed in five years ‘with a view to the undertaking by Ireland of a share in her own coastal defence’. Lloyd George also offered, as a final sweetener, to drop the British demand for free trade between the two countries, if the Irish delegation would agree to the rest of the proposals.

  Griffith said he would sign the agreement. ‘They asked me whether I spoke for myself or for the delegation,’ Griffith wrote. ‘I said I spoke for myself.’

  ‘Do I understand, Mr Griffith, that though everyone else refuses, you will nevertheless agree to sign?’ Lloyd George asked

  ‘Yes, that is so, Mr Prime Minister.’

  Collins and Barton remained silent.

  ‘That is not enough,’ Lloyd George said, sensing that he had the Irish delegation at his mercy. ‘If we sign, we shall sign as a delegation and stake the life of the Government on our signature. Is the Irish delegation prepared to do the same?’

  At this point Lloyd George knew that Barton was the one he had to convinced. He therefore turned to Barton.

  ‘He particularly addressed himself to me,’ Barton reported, ‘and said very solemnly that those who were not for peace must take the full responsibility for the war that would imme­diately follow refusal by any delegate to sign the Articles of Agreement.’

  ‘I have to communicate with Sir James Craig tonight,’ Lloyd George said dramatically as he raised two envelopes. ‘Here are the alternative letters which I have prepared, one enclosing the Articles of Agreement reached by His Majesty’s government and yourselves, and the other saying that the Sinn Féin representatives refused the oath of allegiance and refused to come within the Empire. If I send this letter, it is war – and war within three days! Which letter am I to send? Whichever letter you choose travels by special train to Holyhead, and by destroyer to Belfast.

  ‘The train is waiting with steam up at Euston. Mr Shakespeare is ready. If he is to reach Sir James Craig in time we must have you answer by ten p.m. tonight. You can have until then, but no longer to decide whether you will give peace or war to your country.’

  ‘Neither Collins nor I made any reply,’ Barton noted. They and Griffith withdrew to consider the next
move.

  ‘Michael Collins rose looking as though he was going to shoot someone’, Churchill recalled. ‘I have never seen so much pain and suffering in restraint.’

  As Collins left he was accosted by newsmen, who were aware that the deadline to inform Craig was approaching. They asked if the Irish delegation would be returning later that evening.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Collins replied.

  ‘Has the conference finished?’

  ‘I don’t know that either.’

  Barton said it was eight-thirty when they left Downing Street. ‘It was after eight-thirty when I heard the cars at the door of Cadogan Gardens,’ Kathleen McKenna recalled. ‘Collins, followed by his fateful men, rushed through the hall and dashed up the stairs.

  ‘After a short time,’ she continued, ‘Broy came pounding down the stairs to my office. He said that Michael Collins was prepared to sign the Treaty that night, and that I should go to Hans Place where probably there might be need of my services. Broy said he would accompany me.’

  On the way she became conscious of a menacing atmosphere. ‘We were conscious that figures were loitering everywhere in the shadows,’ Kathleen recalled. ‘Three or four of them stepped out unexpectedly before us and without uttering a syllable blocked us. One flashed an electric torch in Broy’s face and by its light I saw they had pistols. They scrutinised Broy thoroughly, passing the torch over his head, face and body then silently sunk away.’

  Collins arrived shortly afterwards at Hans Place with Tobin, Dolan, and Charlie Russell, one of the pilots ready to fly Collins back to Ireland in case the talks broke down precipitately. ‘They said the vicinity was bristling with Scotland Yard men,’ McKenna noted.

  There is some confusion about what Collins did when he arrived at Hans Place. ‘Mick was impatient to find that the others were not down in the hall,’ according to McKenna. He stalked nervously up and down the dinning-room, then went to the end of it where there was a kind of buffet.’ He sent somebody upstairs to say that he was below, but he did not go upstairs himself. She thought this might be because he had made up his mind about signing and did not want anyone to influence him to do otherwise.

  ‘Instead he walked, like a wild beast in a cage, up and down the room, morose, silent and sullen, then plumped down on an ordinary dinning-room chair – not an arm-chair – that happened to be in the centre of the room in exact line with that part of the stairs down which those who were to join him would have to come,’ McKenna added. ‘With his attaché, and thrown over it his old grey-brown dust-coat, hanging down in one hand and almost touching he carpet, and his other hand holding on his knee his felt hat, he fell into a profound sleep.’

  ‘As I gazed at him my heart ached with anguish at the thought of what this man’s mental torture must be,’ she con­tinued. ‘I realised full all the weight of responsibility placed by events beyond his control upon his young, generous shoulders.’ She said that she was the only one that witnessed that scene.

  Nobody else ever mentioned that Collins did not attend the meeting of the delegation. In his diary Childers noted that Collins said virtually nothing during the delegation’s discussion, but there was the unmistakable impression that he was present at the meeting. Barton was quite definite in his notes that Collins was at the meeting.

  At the outset ‘Collins stated his willingness to sign and the ground slipt away from under my feet,’ according to Barton. ‘I had never even considered such a contingency.’ The ultimatum was crucial in the ensuing discussion.

  Geoffrey Shakespeare, who was waiting to take the letter to Craig, later wrote that he ‘never understood why the Irish accepted the ultimatum at its face value. Why did they not call the bluff?’

  Lloyd George was undoubtedly bluffing when he insisted that all the members of the Irish delegation had to sign the agreement. Collins must have known this.

  First of all the prime minister had told Griffith and him the previous week that he planned to present Britain’s final terms to Craig at the same time as they would be given to the Irish delegation. The British were apparently going to follow the same procedure used with the Versailles Treaty in 1919. It was given to the German delegation and published some weeks before it was actually signed. It was only to facilitate Griffith and Collins that the British handed over the draft treaty the previous Friday. Consequently they must have known that Lloyd George’s schedule simply called for the British to send Craig a copy of their final terms by the next day – not necessarily a signed agreement.

  Moreover, Lloyd George told Collins that morning that he would allow the draft treaty to be referred to the Dáil be­fore signing, if the Irish delegation were prepared to recom­mend Dominion Status. In Griffith’s case the ultimatum was insignificant because he had agreed to sign the Treaty before the ultimatum was issued, and it would have been out of character for Collins to desert him at that point. He had already agreed that the two of them were in the negotiations together to the bitter end. But he did not tell Barton that the threat of immediate and terrible war was probably a bluff. Instead, he went along with the bluff in order to ensure that all of the delegation signed, as this would make it easier to get the agreement accepted in Dublin.

  Without Barton’s vote, for instance, Collins realised there would be little chance of the cabinet accepting the Treaty, because de Valera, Brugha and Stack were likely to oppose it. If Barton joined them, then the majority of the cabinet would be opposed to the British terms and the Dáil would probably not be given any more say than it had with the July proposals, which were formally rejected in the name of Dáil Éireann before it even convened to discuss them.

  Having been entrusted by the Dáil with the responsibility of negotiating an acceptable settlement, Griffith and Collins saw it as their duty to sign when they were convinced the terms would be acceptable not only to a majority of the Dáil but also a majority of the Irish people. Moreover, they thought an unwinnable war would inevitably follow the collapse of the conference.

  ‘If Lloyd George did not wage immediate and terrible war upon rejection of his proffered terms he would appeal over our heads to the country with an offer of Dominion Home Rule along similar lines,’ Griffith argued. ‘The reception of that settlement was likely to expose the weakness of the really national elements and perhaps to reveal a persistent yearning for peace.’

  ‘Unquestionably, the alternative to the Treaty, sooner or later was war,’ Collins later wrote. ‘To me it would have been a criminal act to refuse to allow the Irish nation to give its opinion as to whether it would accept this settlement or resume hostilities.’

  Some notes drawn up by Collins during the latter stages of the London conference give a clear insight into his thinking. ‘I am never of the opinion that the majority of the Irish people will be against such a treaty as we have in mind,’ he observed. ‘It is a question of greater influence – de Valera will command, I think a large part of what was formerly the Volunteer Organ­i­sation.’ Believing that there would be opposition in Dublin from ‘those who have in mind personal ambitions under pretence of patriotism,’ Collins still thought that fifty-five to sixty per cent ‘of all concerned’ would support the Treaty.

  Geoffrey Shakespeare realised the demand for the Irish del­egates to sign that night was part of a bluff, but this did not mean that he thought they could have won further concessions, as has been inferred. ‘Lloyd George was not bluffing in refusing further concessions,’ Shakespeare wrote. ‘He had gone to the limit, and there was nothing more to offer.’ The prime minister was afraid, however, that if the ‘Irish delegates went back without signing or expressing an opinion, the atmosphere in Dub­lin would have influenced them and the Treaty would have been lost.’ Hence he issued the ultimatum.

  That evening Shakespeare dined with Lloyd George. ‘Either they sign now or negotiations are off,’ the prime minister told him. ‘If there is a break we will put into Ireland a large force and restore order. I told them as much and it is now up to th
em to choose between peace and war.’

  Referring the final terms back to the cabinet in Dublin be­fore signing was not at issue. Griffith, Collins and Barton were satisfied they had fulfilled their instructions in referring the draft treaty to the cabinet that weekend. None of them thought they had any further obligation to consult the cabinet in Dublin. They had been given full plenipotentiary powers ‘to negotiate and conclude’ an agreement, so the moment of truth had come. They had to make up their own minds.

  ‘Would we, or would we not, come within the Community of Nations known as the British Empire?’ That was the question the members of the Irish delegation had to answer, according to Griffith.

  ‘The cabinet had advised the delegation to try the get the British draft treaty amended, especially in regard to the oath. ‘We were all tired by the long drawn out negotiations, by the cabinet meeting in Dublin, the travelling, the meetings of the delegation, the rupture of the day before and then Griffith and Collins and I by the five hours meeting of that day,’ Barton explained. ‘We had got both draft and oath amended but not in any essential particular. Remember the indefiniteness of the decisions of our Cabinet, the refusal to listen to Duffy when he had gone over, the refusal of the other members to come to London. The cabinet had certainly told us that they were prepared to face a renewal of war but a situation had now arisen which they had never visualised. Griffith had gone over to the English. In Dublin he had declared that he would not break upon the question of the Crown and yet he was sent back as our leader. He had been out-manoeuvred, out-witted and smashed and he now proceeded to smash us.’

  A copy of the revised British draft terms was delivered at Hans Place at nine o’clock and the Irish delegation then began its deliberations. ‘Griffith, who was perhaps the most strung up amongst us, said he would be a murderer if such an opportunity were allowed to slip and the country be plunged back into a war of extermination,’ according to Barton. Childers noted that Griffith ‘spoke almost passionately for signing.’