Introduction
In 1914, the United Kingdom was - probably - saved from civil war by jumping headfirst into the First World War. Classic example of "out of the frying pan, into the fire". Of all the things to fight a civil war over, though, the Brits decided to pick Ireland. The whole thing has an air of unreality for observers a century removed; even at the end, when it came down to it, two Irish counties, Tyrone and Fermanagh, held the balance for a whole state. This affected people from Dublin to Glasgow to Liverpool to, yes, London. It's one of the single weirdest crises in the political history of the British Isles.
So, why the hell did all these people pick Ireland to fight over?
Goodbye To You
At the turn of the century, a lot of Brit politicians were pretty worried about national security. Like it or not, the UK had been the cock of the industrial walk for the past century and loved shoving it down everybody else's throats. Now that didn't look true anymore. France, Germany, Russia, Japan, and the United States were all building large navies; Germany and the United States, and to a lesser extent Russia, were all threatening, even surpassing, British industry. In 1902 the "splendid isolation" ended for good when Lord Lansdowne negotiated an alliance with Japan; two years later the entente cordiale with France tidied up British colonial commitments.
The UK needed an industrial solution in addition to the foreign-policy offensive, and in 1903 Joe Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, decided to advocate one. Since the 1880s British "fair trade" societies had sprung up, supporting the end of free trade in order to erect protectionist barriers against American and German industry and keep British jobs safe. This had proven contentious in the extreme, but after the Boer War and the "Khaki Election" that followed it, Chamberlain's Tories were in the driver's seat by a large margin in the Commons. He figured that he'd be able to push through whatever he wanted.
What he proposed was labeled several things. Supporters euphemistically called it "empire free trade", "tariff reform", and "imperial preference". The Liberal Opposition called it the return of the hated Corn Laws. Basically, Chamberlain wanted to slap import duties on everything that didn't come from the Empire, and have the Dominions do the same. That way the preferential system would act as glue for the Empire and a solution to the industrial slowdown at the same time. Opponents pointed out that the program would increase food prices in the UK, since the British Isles were a net food importer by that point in time.
Chamberlain's plan immediately stalled. By 1906 the Tories were forced to call a general election, and suffered a tremendous defeat at the polls. The Liberals had an outright majority in the Commons and were back in the driver's seat for the next decade. That, of course, didn't mean anything. The Tories had control of the Lords, and the Lords could destroy any Liberal legislation they pleased. Which they proceeded to do, despite the histrionics of the Liberal President of the Board of Trade, David Lloyd George. In 1908, the Liberal PM Henry Campbell-Bannerman died and was replaced by Herbert Henry Asquith, a stereotypically English English lawyer.
Asquith's ascension brought David Lloyd George into the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was in a singular position in late 1908. The naval arms race with Germany and the demands of old-age pensions meant that Lloyd George had a large deficit to rectify. Where to find new revenue sources, in the absence of a hated tariff? Where else but the pocketbooks of those unreconstructed enemies of Progress, the Lords themselves? Lloyd George proposed a tax on undeveloped land, of which the Lords had plenty. He planned an increase in the estate tax, a duty on coal and mineral royalties, an increased tax on liquor, and a tax on all incomes in excess of five thousand pounds annually.
It was a direct threat to the Lords, of course, and, as George Dangerfield wrote, "crying to be vetoed". But the Lords had never vetoed a budget before. In that weird British manner, it became part of the "constitutional tradition" that they could not veto a budget. What if they did? The government would be forced to dissolve, and a general election would be fought on the issue of this budget, and on the issue of the Lords' veto. And if the Liberals won that, well, the budget would reappear, this time accompanied by several hundred Liberal Lords to push it through. And that would be as bad as bad could be...so what did the Lords do? They threw out the budget. Asquith called for an election in January 1910. And the Tories lost. So did the Liberals. Neither of the two parties had an outright majority in the Commons, even with Labour on the side of the Liberals. So the Liberals were now driven to ask the help of the Irish Parliamentary Party, whose seventy-odd MPs held the key to avoiding a hung parliament. John Redmond, leader of the Parliamentary Party, had but one trifling request to ask of the Liberal Party in exchange for his help in pushing through the budget. A minor detail. Nothing more than Irish Home Rule.
Irish Home Rule was dead. Nobody in Great Britain cared for it; "Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right" had won out over Gladstone and killed the Liberal Party for two decades, it was best that those days were behind everybody, and that was that. Limited internal autonomy for Ireland was not a cause one could rally behind. Opposing "Rome Rule" was, and that was that. But the Irish Parliamentary Party had its demands, and the Irish Parliamentary Party was the key to the Commons, and to Lloyd George's budget, and to crushing the Lords. And so, after hearing Redmond say for the thousandth time how much of a sacrifice it was for Irishmen to vote for liquor duties and land taxes, Asquith was forced to go along. Even with the Irish at his back, initially he quailed before bringing the budget back before the Lords.
Instead, he first brought forth a Parliament Bill, which, in sum: limited the duration of Parliament to five years; abolished the Lords' veto on money bills; restricted the Lords' veto on all bills, such that, if the Commons were to pass a bill in three consecutive sessions, it would become law, no matter how the Lords voted. Now the big guns were out; now, as April turned to May, Lloyd George's "People's Budget" could be safely passed, almost contemptuously, by a quorum of the Lords - clearing the decks for the real fight. That fight was interrupted by the death of King Edward VII on May 7. He was replaced by a man famously derided by H.G. Wells as "dull", George V.
So began the backroom negotiations between Tories and Liberals, which lasted to November. They foundered on that now-looming question of Irish Home Rule. Asquith was now forced to resort to yet another election. It would be fought as a referendum on the power of the Lords, on Asquith's Parliament Bill. It would be the last chance the Liberals had to escape John Redmond, the last chance the Tories had to escape the certain death descending upon the Lords, and hilariously, neither of the two parties was to receive a reprieve. In December 1910, after a month of electioneering, in came the returns: 272 Liberal, 272 Tory...42 Labour...84 Irish Parliamentary Party and All-for-Ireland League.
Still, the Lords would never go so far as to actually vote away the Parliament Bill that, with Liberal, Labour, and Irish MPs behind it, would be certain to pass the Commons yet again. They would never countenance the creation of hundreds of Liberal Lords...would they? Some of them clearly would; beginning in May, the Tory Lords split. The "Ditcher" Lords staunchly believed in fighting the Parliament Bill to the end; they refused to, as they put it, "die in the dark". The "Hedger" Lords were convinced that the Prime Minister would make good on his threats to advise the King to create hundreds of new peers, and preferred to die in the dark, honorably. In June 1911, the Ditchers mutilated the Parliament Bill in committee, returning it to the Commons in unrecognizable shape. Asquith responded by laying his cards on the table: the bill goes through in its original form or the House of Lords would be a lot more crowded. He had in his pocket a promise to follow through from King George himself. Even then, the Ditcher Lords kept up the fight until the very end. The final vote on the Parliament Bill was 131-114 in favor.
The path was clear - the Lords had been stripped of their greatest power once and for all. Now Ireland took center stage.
Empty Handed
Home Rule had never been the only option Asquith was contemplating for Ireland even with his IOU in Redmond's pocket. As far back as January 1910, when the Liberals lost their majority and were forced to court Mr. Redmond, both Liberal and Tory MPs had brought up the prospect of federalism. Federalism was a word untainted by the sloganeering of the 1880s, but more importantly it was a word blessed with ambiguity. From 1910 to the death of the federal solution in 1913-4, no two avowed federalists could agree on what federalism itself actually meant. Limited autonomy to Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England each? Separate Parliaments, subject to Westminster, like Dominions? And what of that nagging problem in northern Ireland, Ulster?
Ah, Ulster. Even before Arthur Balfour was forced to abandon his headship of the Tories, Ulster was seen as the new bulwark of the party. After he left, they made it official. In 1912 the Tories finally formally unified with the Liberal Unionists, though to all intents and purposes they had been one party for two decades. They even put Unionism in the name - "Conservative and Unionist Party" - where it remains to this day. To go with their new name, since November 1911 the Tory Party had a new leader. The top two candidates for leadership in Balfour's absence had strong, nearly equal support. Austen Chamberlain, idiot scion of the famous Tory Chamberlain family, whose political abilities rated below even those of his oft-decried half-brother Neville, led the Imperial Preference wing of the Tory Party. Walter Long, his opponent, had a slight majority in the 1911 Tory leadership election, due to his harder line on Irish Unionism. To avoid splitting the party, neither was chosen. Instead, a Canadian Scotsman with the unfortunate name of Andrew Bonar Law ascended to party leadership.
Bonar Law's mission to keep the Tory Party together would define his tenure. His solution was to force the issue. He was disliked by both Longists and Chamberlainites. Classically, he went on the offensive immediately - by speaking. Andrew Bonar Law was an immensely better and more vigorous public-speaker than either Long or Chamberlain - so much so that he sometimes focused on style rather than substance, inflating claims or making wild accusations. What did it matter, though? What was important was that he spoke well. And so much the better, as far as Walter Long's supporters were concerned, was that Bonar Law was uncompromising. First, he spoke out against Liberal corruption and the blatant unconstitutionality of the Parliament Act 1911. He flatly refused to consider federalism, Home Rule, or anything but total union. Forget Peoria - the man played well in Ulster, and that was what mattered.
His general argument ran like this: the Parliament Act had destroyed the British constitution by eliminating the Lords' veto. Only a general election, he said, could restore government's legitimacy by giving it popular sanction for a Home Rule Bill. If the Liberals passed a Home Rule Bill against the Lords without first going to the country in an election, he said, the Tories were fully justified in employing any tactics - any means necessary - in resisting Home Rule's implementation.
Some grass-roots sentiment existed, among the Ulster Orangemen especially, in full opposition to Home Rule. It had manifested itself as far back as 1910, when Home Rule first returned to the equation, in the formation of some militias. But it was a fringe movement at best - much like the American tea party groups of today. Even among the Orangemen, the notorious drumbeaters of Ulster, armed resistance to Home Rule did not initially find much appeal. Only when Bonar Law and the Tories threw their support behind total opposition to Home Rule did it gain wider support. The man perhaps best connected with the development of the opposition to Home Rule within Ireland itself is Sir Edward Carson. Sir Edward, originally best known for successfully defeating his childhood friend Oscar Wilde's libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, quickly adopted Ulster as his new home, insinuating himself among the Orangemen effectively despite their initial distrust of a Dubliner like himself. Even the most die-hard Ulster Unionist could not pretend that there was no Unionist sentiment elsewhere in Ireland. Some Unionist societies sprang up in Cork and Waterford during those heady days in 1912.
Carson’s threats became immeasurably clearer in September 1911 when he delivered a speech near Belfast to a crowd of Ulstermen, looking for their support as he ascended to the headship of the Ulster Unionist Council. His speechifying was just as bald as that of Bonar Law in proclaiming Ulster’s opposition to Home Rule:
To round out our cast of Tory would-be revolutionaries (or counterrevolutionaries, depending on whose rhetoric you like better) we have James Craig, the later Viscount Craigavon, and F.E. Smith, eventually to become first Earl of Birkenhead. Craig, a veteran of the Boer War, was the Member of Parliament for East Down, and could be well liked to a Carson in miniature. He was one of the worthies on Carson’s panel for drawing up the Constitution for the Provincial Government of Ulster. Smith was more interesting – a longtime friend of the Liberal First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, a man avowedly interested in the federalist solution, but also a man who would soon enough be known as “Galloper” for his horseback antics when reviewing Unionist militiamen as Carson’s ADC. He was a singularly slippery man, guaranteed to be found in the middle of any political firestorm; he had spent 1910 and 1911 rallying Ditcher sentiment, and kept the limelight with his actions in Ulster and on the Commons floor.
One of These Days
It was these men who, beginning in the summer and autumn of 1912, spearheaded one of the most vehement rhetorical attacks on the Government an Opposition has ever mounted. Some members of the Liberal Party and its allies responded in kind. Churchill and Lloyd George were perhaps the most vehement of these. Bluster and threat of armed rebellion met bluster and threat of mass arrests and what appeared to be resolute determination to carry the Home Rule Bill through.
The First Reading of the Home Rule Bill was on 15 April 1912. It was, to put it lightly, the most weaksauce Home Rule Bill possible. An Irish Parliament was to be created, with the Westminster Imperial Parliament still to receive 42 Irish MPs. It could only deal with “purely Irish matters”, all others to be referred to Westminster. It could not “establish and endow” any religion, or restrict one. It could not raise new taxes, and could only increase existing ones by ten percent over the rates set by the Imperial Parliament. The Royal Irish Constabulary was to remain under the Imperial Parliament for the next six years. And financial wizardry was worked such that Ireland would become a net beneficiary of English tax monies. On 9 May 1912 the Bill passed through its Second Reading with a majority of 101 MPs. And this is where it stalled. The next few months are a litany of trap and counter-trap prepared by the Liberals and Tories; inevitably, the Tories, especially the quick-witted Carson, danced out of the way.
Once again, negotiation entered the forefront. Bonar Law’s plan was obvious; its mechanics less so. It is clear that he was not interested in opposing Home Rule for its own sake. His chief goal was to hold the Tory Party and its disparate interests together around the Home Rule wedge issue. Threatening civil war, he believed, could force the Liberal government to call a general election, and so permit the Tories to return to power. All well and good. The problem was that any appearance of a willingness to negotiate on Home Rule would help to split the Tories and crush his plan. Federalists were one such nefarious group, who gained significant support because they never actually had to enumerate any principles or program. Devolutionists were another similar, if slightly distinct group. They had a concrete plan, mostly: the reversion of authority to regional or local councils within Ireland itself, and perhaps Scotland, Wales, and England as well. The problem was that devolutionists were increasingly isolated by both sides. Asquith’s government showed no real willingness to implement a devolutionary scheme as a part of a compromise, and Bonar Law, Carson, and the other die-hards continued to shift the Tories towards the other extreme. Left out in the cold, most of them ended up supporting the Tory program.
By 1913, that Tory program had evolved (ha) into hardline exclusion. Home Rule was acceptable, declared “Galloper” Smith to a crowd of Ulstermen that winter – but only if it applied to the southern Irish counties. This essentially shaped the debate for the rest of the crisis. Redmond and the Irish Parliamentarians had to be brought around to accepting exclusion gradually, ever gradually, until they could agree with it in principle. But how to implement it?
Not all of Ulster was wholly Protestant, after all. County Donegal was more Catholic than County Antrim was Protestant. County Cavan and County Monaghan were similarly proportioned. And it was clear that County Antrim and County Down would be within any excluded Ulster. Counties Armagh and Londonderry probably would, too. The sticking points were, as already acknowledged in 1913, County Tyrone and County Fermanagh. Both were narrowly – oh, so narrowly – Catholic-majority. Both were non-negotiable demands, as far as Bonar Law and Carson were concerned. This view was successfully transmitted to most of the Tory Party by 1913, partly due to Redmond and his cohorts’ inability to agree to the principle of exclusion at all.
Other moves were made, serving both as showboating and as practical politics. The most famous of these was probably the creation and signing of the Ulster Covenant beginning on 28 September 1912. The Covenant, which was directly modeled on the Scottish “Solemn League and Covenant” of the Civil Wars, ran as follows:
Parliamentary tactics were clearly not working for the Tories, and the Bill was beginning its third and final circuit without any sign of a general election call from Asquith. Bonar Law and Carson put in more chips when the Ulster Volunteer Force was formed in January 1913. This was not as top-down an organization as has been commonly stressed in the literature of the period. Far from being the creature of the old Orange Order and Belfast financiers, the UVF was initially formed because of popular pressure. As already mentioned, beginning in 1910 (but arguably traceable even as far back as the Gladstonian Home Rule debates of the 1880s) small militia units and clubs began to drill across Ulster, show up at Ulster Unionist rallies, and generally make themselves visible. The UVF formed chiefly as a response to these organizations’ grassroots pressure.
Bonar Law himself went to the King to try an end run around the Liberals. Starting in the spring of 1913 he tried to suggest that King George dissolve the Liberal government and appoint a new one led by the Leader of the Opposition (himself), a more straightforward avenue to power than the general election he craved. He also suggested that the King simply use his royal veto – the royal veto that hadn’t been employed since gouty Queen Anne was still alive – to crush the Home Rule proposal, which naturally enough would throw the government into…an election. But Bonar Law could no longer be sure of winning such an election. Some elements of the Tory Party were beginning to shy away from his extremist tactics and their lack of success as 1913 began to turn into 1914. Irish Unionists in particular, led by Lord Lansdowne, were keeping up a more or less constant stream of communications with the Liberals. Yet the Liberals, behind the stern façade they kept up while pushing the Bill relentlessly through the Commons, were beginning to crack too.
Asquith may have been behind the push, by Lord Loreburn and the King, to get the Liberal and Tory leaderships into a round-table talk in the autumn of 1913. Whether it was the Prime Minister’s initiative or others’, Bonar Law and Carson found themselves compelled by party opinion to sit down and negotiate by October 1913. Neither Bonar Law nor Carson really wanted a compromise, as that would destroy the prospects of returning to power. But they had to step carefully, to avoid appearing to obstruct the settlement. Public opinion in the general election they craved would not look kindly upon the party that prolonged this crisis. In this, they were immeasurably aided by Redmond, who took infinitely long to even think about exclusion as a viable basis for a settlement. Bonar Law managed to hit the balance and appear moderate and willing to compromise, while in fact prevented from ever having to do so by Irish Parliamentarians’ intransigence. By December, the talks broke down.
In 1914, the United Kingdom was - probably - saved from civil war by jumping headfirst into the First World War. Classic example of "out of the frying pan, into the fire". Of all the things to fight a civil war over, though, the Brits decided to pick Ireland. The whole thing has an air of unreality for observers a century removed; even at the end, when it came down to it, two Irish counties, Tyrone and Fermanagh, held the balance for a whole state. This affected people from Dublin to Glasgow to Liverpool to, yes, London. It's one of the single weirdest crises in the political history of the British Isles.
So, why the hell did all these people pick Ireland to fight over?
Goodbye To You
At the turn of the century, a lot of Brit politicians were pretty worried about national security. Like it or not, the UK had been the cock of the industrial walk for the past century and loved shoving it down everybody else's throats. Now that didn't look true anymore. France, Germany, Russia, Japan, and the United States were all building large navies; Germany and the United States, and to a lesser extent Russia, were all threatening, even surpassing, British industry. In 1902 the "splendid isolation" ended for good when Lord Lansdowne negotiated an alliance with Japan; two years later the entente cordiale with France tidied up British colonial commitments.
The UK needed an industrial solution in addition to the foreign-policy offensive, and in 1903 Joe Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, decided to advocate one. Since the 1880s British "fair trade" societies had sprung up, supporting the end of free trade in order to erect protectionist barriers against American and German industry and keep British jobs safe. This had proven contentious in the extreme, but after the Boer War and the "Khaki Election" that followed it, Chamberlain's Tories were in the driver's seat by a large margin in the Commons. He figured that he'd be able to push through whatever he wanted.
What he proposed was labeled several things. Supporters euphemistically called it "empire free trade", "tariff reform", and "imperial preference". The Liberal Opposition called it the return of the hated Corn Laws. Basically, Chamberlain wanted to slap import duties on everything that didn't come from the Empire, and have the Dominions do the same. That way the preferential system would act as glue for the Empire and a solution to the industrial slowdown at the same time. Opponents pointed out that the program would increase food prices in the UK, since the British Isles were a net food importer by that point in time.
Chamberlain's plan immediately stalled. By 1906 the Tories were forced to call a general election, and suffered a tremendous defeat at the polls. The Liberals had an outright majority in the Commons and were back in the driver's seat for the next decade. That, of course, didn't mean anything. The Tories had control of the Lords, and the Lords could destroy any Liberal legislation they pleased. Which they proceeded to do, despite the histrionics of the Liberal President of the Board of Trade, David Lloyd George. In 1908, the Liberal PM Henry Campbell-Bannerman died and was replaced by Herbert Henry Asquith, a stereotypically English English lawyer.
Asquith's ascension brought David Lloyd George into the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was in a singular position in late 1908. The naval arms race with Germany and the demands of old-age pensions meant that Lloyd George had a large deficit to rectify. Where to find new revenue sources, in the absence of a hated tariff? Where else but the pocketbooks of those unreconstructed enemies of Progress, the Lords themselves? Lloyd George proposed a tax on undeveloped land, of which the Lords had plenty. He planned an increase in the estate tax, a duty on coal and mineral royalties, an increased tax on liquor, and a tax on all incomes in excess of five thousand pounds annually.
It was a direct threat to the Lords, of course, and, as George Dangerfield wrote, "crying to be vetoed". But the Lords had never vetoed a budget before. In that weird British manner, it became part of the "constitutional tradition" that they could not veto a budget. What if they did? The government would be forced to dissolve, and a general election would be fought on the issue of this budget, and on the issue of the Lords' veto. And if the Liberals won that, well, the budget would reappear, this time accompanied by several hundred Liberal Lords to push it through. And that would be as bad as bad could be...so what did the Lords do? They threw out the budget. Asquith called for an election in January 1910. And the Tories lost. So did the Liberals. Neither of the two parties had an outright majority in the Commons, even with Labour on the side of the Liberals. So the Liberals were now driven to ask the help of the Irish Parliamentary Party, whose seventy-odd MPs held the key to avoiding a hung parliament. John Redmond, leader of the Parliamentary Party, had but one trifling request to ask of the Liberal Party in exchange for his help in pushing through the budget. A minor detail. Nothing more than Irish Home Rule.
Irish Home Rule was dead. Nobody in Great Britain cared for it; "Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right" had won out over Gladstone and killed the Liberal Party for two decades, it was best that those days were behind everybody, and that was that. Limited internal autonomy for Ireland was not a cause one could rally behind. Opposing "Rome Rule" was, and that was that. But the Irish Parliamentary Party had its demands, and the Irish Parliamentary Party was the key to the Commons, and to Lloyd George's budget, and to crushing the Lords. And so, after hearing Redmond say for the thousandth time how much of a sacrifice it was for Irishmen to vote for liquor duties and land taxes, Asquith was forced to go along. Even with the Irish at his back, initially he quailed before bringing the budget back before the Lords.
Instead, he first brought forth a Parliament Bill, which, in sum: limited the duration of Parliament to five years; abolished the Lords' veto on money bills; restricted the Lords' veto on all bills, such that, if the Commons were to pass a bill in three consecutive sessions, it would become law, no matter how the Lords voted. Now the big guns were out; now, as April turned to May, Lloyd George's "People's Budget" could be safely passed, almost contemptuously, by a quorum of the Lords - clearing the decks for the real fight. That fight was interrupted by the death of King Edward VII on May 7. He was replaced by a man famously derided by H.G. Wells as "dull", George V.
So began the backroom negotiations between Tories and Liberals, which lasted to November. They foundered on that now-looming question of Irish Home Rule. Asquith was now forced to resort to yet another election. It would be fought as a referendum on the power of the Lords, on Asquith's Parliament Bill. It would be the last chance the Liberals had to escape John Redmond, the last chance the Tories had to escape the certain death descending upon the Lords, and hilariously, neither of the two parties was to receive a reprieve. In December 1910, after a month of electioneering, in came the returns: 272 Liberal, 272 Tory...42 Labour...84 Irish Parliamentary Party and All-for-Ireland League.
Still, the Lords would never go so far as to actually vote away the Parliament Bill that, with Liberal, Labour, and Irish MPs behind it, would be certain to pass the Commons yet again. They would never countenance the creation of hundreds of Liberal Lords...would they? Some of them clearly would; beginning in May, the Tory Lords split. The "Ditcher" Lords staunchly believed in fighting the Parliament Bill to the end; they refused to, as they put it, "die in the dark". The "Hedger" Lords were convinced that the Prime Minister would make good on his threats to advise the King to create hundreds of new peers, and preferred to die in the dark, honorably. In June 1911, the Ditchers mutilated the Parliament Bill in committee, returning it to the Commons in unrecognizable shape. Asquith responded by laying his cards on the table: the bill goes through in its original form or the House of Lords would be a lot more crowded. He had in his pocket a promise to follow through from King George himself. Even then, the Ditcher Lords kept up the fight until the very end. The final vote on the Parliament Bill was 131-114 in favor.
The path was clear - the Lords had been stripped of their greatest power once and for all. Now Ireland took center stage.
Empty Handed
Home Rule had never been the only option Asquith was contemplating for Ireland even with his IOU in Redmond's pocket. As far back as January 1910, when the Liberals lost their majority and were forced to court Mr. Redmond, both Liberal and Tory MPs had brought up the prospect of federalism. Federalism was a word untainted by the sloganeering of the 1880s, but more importantly it was a word blessed with ambiguity. From 1910 to the death of the federal solution in 1913-4, no two avowed federalists could agree on what federalism itself actually meant. Limited autonomy to Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England each? Separate Parliaments, subject to Westminster, like Dominions? And what of that nagging problem in northern Ireland, Ulster?
Ah, Ulster. Even before Arthur Balfour was forced to abandon his headship of the Tories, Ulster was seen as the new bulwark of the party. After he left, they made it official. In 1912 the Tories finally formally unified with the Liberal Unionists, though to all intents and purposes they had been one party for two decades. They even put Unionism in the name - "Conservative and Unionist Party" - where it remains to this day. To go with their new name, since November 1911 the Tory Party had a new leader. The top two candidates for leadership in Balfour's absence had strong, nearly equal support. Austen Chamberlain, idiot scion of the famous Tory Chamberlain family, whose political abilities rated below even those of his oft-decried half-brother Neville, led the Imperial Preference wing of the Tory Party. Walter Long, his opponent, had a slight majority in the 1911 Tory leadership election, due to his harder line on Irish Unionism. To avoid splitting the party, neither was chosen. Instead, a Canadian Scotsman with the unfortunate name of Andrew Bonar Law ascended to party leadership.
Bonar Law's mission to keep the Tory Party together would define his tenure. His solution was to force the issue. He was disliked by both Longists and Chamberlainites. Classically, he went on the offensive immediately - by speaking. Andrew Bonar Law was an immensely better and more vigorous public-speaker than either Long or Chamberlain - so much so that he sometimes focused on style rather than substance, inflating claims or making wild accusations. What did it matter, though? What was important was that he spoke well. And so much the better, as far as Walter Long's supporters were concerned, was that Bonar Law was uncompromising. First, he spoke out against Liberal corruption and the blatant unconstitutionality of the Parliament Act 1911. He flatly refused to consider federalism, Home Rule, or anything but total union. Forget Peoria - the man played well in Ulster, and that was what mattered.
His general argument ran like this: the Parliament Act had destroyed the British constitution by eliminating the Lords' veto. Only a general election, he said, could restore government's legitimacy by giving it popular sanction for a Home Rule Bill. If the Liberals passed a Home Rule Bill against the Lords without first going to the country in an election, he said, the Tories were fully justified in employing any tactics - any means necessary - in resisting Home Rule's implementation.
Bonar Law said:
Bonar Law said:
The constitutional argument may not have made a whole lot of sense, when you got down to what the British "constitution" actually was and is. That didn't matter. It was a rallying cry, it solidified Bonar Law's leadership of the Tory Party, and it scared the bejeezus out of anybody who wasn't a Unionist. As a rallying cry, it worked just as brilliantly as talk of Secession did in the antebellum American South. To hell with legality - open season on attacks on the legal foundation of the state!Bonar Law said:
Some grass-roots sentiment existed, among the Ulster Orangemen especially, in full opposition to Home Rule. It had manifested itself as far back as 1910, when Home Rule first returned to the equation, in the formation of some militias. But it was a fringe movement at best - much like the American tea party groups of today. Even among the Orangemen, the notorious drumbeaters of Ulster, armed resistance to Home Rule did not initially find much appeal. Only when Bonar Law and the Tories threw their support behind total opposition to Home Rule did it gain wider support. The man perhaps best connected with the development of the opposition to Home Rule within Ireland itself is Sir Edward Carson. Sir Edward, originally best known for successfully defeating his childhood friend Oscar Wilde's libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, quickly adopted Ulster as his new home, insinuating himself among the Orangemen effectively despite their initial distrust of a Dubliner like himself. Even the most die-hard Ulster Unionist could not pretend that there was no Unionist sentiment elsewhere in Ireland. Some Unionist societies sprang up in Cork and Waterford during those heady days in 1912.
Carson’s threats became immeasurably clearer in September 1911 when he delivered a speech near Belfast to a crowd of Ulstermen, looking for their support as he ascended to the headship of the Ulster Unionist Council. His speechifying was just as bald as that of Bonar Law in proclaiming Ulster’s opposition to Home Rule:
Carson said:
To round out our cast of Tory would-be revolutionaries (or counterrevolutionaries, depending on whose rhetoric you like better) we have James Craig, the later Viscount Craigavon, and F.E. Smith, eventually to become first Earl of Birkenhead. Craig, a veteran of the Boer War, was the Member of Parliament for East Down, and could be well liked to a Carson in miniature. He was one of the worthies on Carson’s panel for drawing up the Constitution for the Provincial Government of Ulster. Smith was more interesting – a longtime friend of the Liberal First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, a man avowedly interested in the federalist solution, but also a man who would soon enough be known as “Galloper” for his horseback antics when reviewing Unionist militiamen as Carson’s ADC. He was a singularly slippery man, guaranteed to be found in the middle of any political firestorm; he had spent 1910 and 1911 rallying Ditcher sentiment, and kept the limelight with his actions in Ulster and on the Commons floor.
One of These Days
It was these men who, beginning in the summer and autumn of 1912, spearheaded one of the most vehement rhetorical attacks on the Government an Opposition has ever mounted. Some members of the Liberal Party and its allies responded in kind. Churchill and Lloyd George were perhaps the most vehement of these. Bluster and threat of armed rebellion met bluster and threat of mass arrests and what appeared to be resolute determination to carry the Home Rule Bill through.
The First Reading of the Home Rule Bill was on 15 April 1912. It was, to put it lightly, the most weaksauce Home Rule Bill possible. An Irish Parliament was to be created, with the Westminster Imperial Parliament still to receive 42 Irish MPs. It could only deal with “purely Irish matters”, all others to be referred to Westminster. It could not “establish and endow” any religion, or restrict one. It could not raise new taxes, and could only increase existing ones by ten percent over the rates set by the Imperial Parliament. The Royal Irish Constabulary was to remain under the Imperial Parliament for the next six years. And financial wizardry was worked such that Ireland would become a net beneficiary of English tax monies. On 9 May 1912 the Bill passed through its Second Reading with a majority of 101 MPs. And this is where it stalled. The next few months are a litany of trap and counter-trap prepared by the Liberals and Tories; inevitably, the Tories, especially the quick-witted Carson, danced out of the way.
Once again, negotiation entered the forefront. Bonar Law’s plan was obvious; its mechanics less so. It is clear that he was not interested in opposing Home Rule for its own sake. His chief goal was to hold the Tory Party and its disparate interests together around the Home Rule wedge issue. Threatening civil war, he believed, could force the Liberal government to call a general election, and so permit the Tories to return to power. All well and good. The problem was that any appearance of a willingness to negotiate on Home Rule would help to split the Tories and crush his plan. Federalists were one such nefarious group, who gained significant support because they never actually had to enumerate any principles or program. Devolutionists were another similar, if slightly distinct group. They had a concrete plan, mostly: the reversion of authority to regional or local councils within Ireland itself, and perhaps Scotland, Wales, and England as well. The problem was that devolutionists were increasingly isolated by both sides. Asquith’s government showed no real willingness to implement a devolutionary scheme as a part of a compromise, and Bonar Law, Carson, and the other die-hards continued to shift the Tories towards the other extreme. Left out in the cold, most of them ended up supporting the Tory program.
By 1913, that Tory program had evolved (ha) into hardline exclusion. Home Rule was acceptable, declared “Galloper” Smith to a crowd of Ulstermen that winter – but only if it applied to the southern Irish counties. This essentially shaped the debate for the rest of the crisis. Redmond and the Irish Parliamentarians had to be brought around to accepting exclusion gradually, ever gradually, until they could agree with it in principle. But how to implement it?
Not all of Ulster was wholly Protestant, after all. County Donegal was more Catholic than County Antrim was Protestant. County Cavan and County Monaghan were similarly proportioned. And it was clear that County Antrim and County Down would be within any excluded Ulster. Counties Armagh and Londonderry probably would, too. The sticking points were, as already acknowledged in 1913, County Tyrone and County Fermanagh. Both were narrowly – oh, so narrowly – Catholic-majority. Both were non-negotiable demands, as far as Bonar Law and Carson were concerned. This view was successfully transmitted to most of the Tory Party by 1913, partly due to Redmond and his cohorts’ inability to agree to the principle of exclusion at all.
Other moves were made, serving both as showboating and as practical politics. The most famous of these was probably the creation and signing of the Ulster Covenant beginning on 28 September 1912. The Covenant, which was directly modeled on the Scottish “Solemn League and Covenant” of the Civil Wars, ran as follows:
Sir Edward Carson was the first signatory; Craig was the second. Signatory ceremonies were carried on at Ulster Hall in Belfast; Covenant-signers could be found in the south of Ireland too. For all its pomp and circumstance, though, the Covenant did not derail the First Circuit of the Home Rule Bill. The Third Reading passed the Commons in January 1913. Within three days of its arrival in the Lords the Bill was summarily defeated. So began the Second Circuit. It proceeded in the same fashion as the first one did. By July it was in the Lords, having passed the Commons with flying colors and no amendments; this time, the Lords took two days to vote it down.
Parliamentary tactics were clearly not working for the Tories, and the Bill was beginning its third and final circuit without any sign of a general election call from Asquith. Bonar Law and Carson put in more chips when the Ulster Volunteer Force was formed in January 1913. This was not as top-down an organization as has been commonly stressed in the literature of the period. Far from being the creature of the old Orange Order and Belfast financiers, the UVF was initially formed because of popular pressure. As already mentioned, beginning in 1910 (but arguably traceable even as far back as the Gladstonian Home Rule debates of the 1880s) small militia units and clubs began to drill across Ulster, show up at Ulster Unionist rallies, and generally make themselves visible. The UVF formed chiefly as a response to these organizations’ grassroots pressure.
Bonar Law himself went to the King to try an end run around the Liberals. Starting in the spring of 1913 he tried to suggest that King George dissolve the Liberal government and appoint a new one led by the Leader of the Opposition (himself), a more straightforward avenue to power than the general election he craved. He also suggested that the King simply use his royal veto – the royal veto that hadn’t been employed since gouty Queen Anne was still alive – to crush the Home Rule proposal, which naturally enough would throw the government into…an election. But Bonar Law could no longer be sure of winning such an election. Some elements of the Tory Party were beginning to shy away from his extremist tactics and their lack of success as 1913 began to turn into 1914. Irish Unionists in particular, led by Lord Lansdowne, were keeping up a more or less constant stream of communications with the Liberals. Yet the Liberals, behind the stern façade they kept up while pushing the Bill relentlessly through the Commons, were beginning to crack too.
Asquith may have been behind the push, by Lord Loreburn and the King, to get the Liberal and Tory leaderships into a round-table talk in the autumn of 1913. Whether it was the Prime Minister’s initiative or others’, Bonar Law and Carson found themselves compelled by party opinion to sit down and negotiate by October 1913. Neither Bonar Law nor Carson really wanted a compromise, as that would destroy the prospects of returning to power. But they had to step carefully, to avoid appearing to obstruct the settlement. Public opinion in the general election they craved would not look kindly upon the party that prolonged this crisis. In this, they were immeasurably aided by Redmond, who took infinitely long to even think about exclusion as a viable basis for a settlement. Bonar Law managed to hit the balance and appear moderate and willing to compromise, while in fact prevented from ever having to do so by Irish Parliamentarians’ intransigence. By December, the talks broke down.
