I Signed My Death Warrant (18 page)

Collins was understandably furious. Such an important issue – indeed, what ultimately became the vital issue – should not have been determined by a simple answer to an almost throw­away question from a secretary.

Part of Collins' confusion was undoubtedly contributed to by his recollection that de Valera had proposed an oath that was consistent with Dominion Status. Together with Griffith and Duggan, he recalled that the president had suggested that they could ‘recognise the King of Great Britain as Head of the Associated States.' This could be interpreted to mean that the king was head of each state individually as well as the head of the combined association of states.

Barton and Childers contended, however, that de Valera had proposed recognising the king only as ‘Head of the Association'. Barton produced his notes, but these proved inconclusive because he had simply written ‘Head of the Assoc'. Childers, on the other hand, actually recorded in his diary that the president had suggested ‘King of the Associated States'. Moreover, Ó Murchada's notes were identical with the version remembered by Griffith, Collins and Duggan.

When de Valera later contended that he had said ‘Association' and not ‘Associated States', he found himself in the embarrassing position of confronting formidable evidence. He actually damaged his own case during a secret session of the Dáil by recalling what he had said a fortnight earlier.

‘I do swear to recognise the King of Great Britain as Head of the Associated States,' he said. ‘That is the way I expressed it verbally meaning the association of states.'

As this oath was rejected by the British, it is not really of much importance, except that the whole controversy does help to illustrate why Collins could have wondered whether Dublin was trying to advise or confuse the delegation. He was so annoyed over the confusion about re-proposing External Association that he became quite obstreperous.

Childers essentially accused him of ‘deliberately' trying to make the new document ‘unreasonable' by insisting that ‘Dev had said that only two ports [and] nothing else' could be conceded to the British. Childers took issue with Collins. ‘I protested against making Dev's words ridiculous,' he noted.

‘Collins declared that our proposals had already been dis­cussed again and again with English and turned down by them and he was not going to stultify himself by saying it all over again,' according to Barton. ‘He stated that the proposals in the document were defeatist tactics and it was for those who wanted to break to present them. I do not remember what Duggan said but he probably echoed Collins as he always did. All three refused to present them at Downing Street.'

The other three had challenged them to go alone and present their proposals. ‘Duffy and I immediately accepted it,' Barton continued. ‘I certainly realised and I suppose that Duffy did too that it was a hopeless kind of Balaclava charge as it was an obvious indication of a divided delegation but as we had com­posed the document and as they challenged us to present it of course we accepted it, tho' knowing that we were going like lambs to the slaughter house. Directly we did accept Griffith jumped up and said he would go too. He had changed his mind and I had little doubt but that the reason was that he did not wish us to break or have words with the English.'

Collins refused to go and Duggan supported him. ‘I did not attend this conference,' Collins wrote next day, ‘for the reason that I had, in my own estimation argued fully all points.' In addition, he had already shown his hand to the British by suggesting an oath that was consistent with Irish membership of the British commonwealth.

‘Failure was foredoomed,' according to Barton. ‘To succeed, our cause would have to have been pressed with vigour by all five of us.' Not one word was spoken in the car as the three of them set off for Downing Street. ‘But when we got in front of the English,' he noted, ‘Griffith played up like a man and fought as hard as we did.'

The British again flatly rejected External Association, as Collins predicted. The meeting actually broke up when Gavan Duffy blurted out that the Irish ‘difficulty is coming within the Empire'. At that point the conference broke down. The two sides announced that they would submit their final proposals the following day, and they would formally announce that the conference had collapsed.

As Duffy emerged from the conference room he whispered to Childers who was waiting outside, ‘
C'est fini
'.

‘I admire the way you stuck like a bulldog to the Ulster issue,' Barton said to Griffith as they were leaving Downing Street in a car. ‘It may all be for the best yet.'

‘For Duffy and myself it was a gloomy drive back to our house in Hans Place,' Barton wrote. ‘Griffith was cynical, morose and insulting by turns. He twitted Duffy with his lack of discretion in having brought the conference to so abrupt a conclusion. Declared that we had undone all the good work that he and Collins had done in private negotiations and that not content with having to put forward proposals impossible for English acceptance we had been so inept as to cause a rupture on the very point which it had been our policy to avoid a break, namely on the crown, and the Empire connection. We let him have his innings for a while, for I think we were both a bit crestfallen but before we reached our house we had turned the tables upon him by reminding him that two of our colleagues had run away from the most critical conference and therefore made its success impossible.'

The Irish delegation held a meeting at Hans Place. Griffith drafted a report of the meeting for de Valera and read it to his colleagues. Barton insisted that he add that Lloyd George had said the amendments in the latest Irish proposals were ‘a complete going back on the discussions of the last week or so.' Collins objected strongly that this implied that Griffith and he ‘had given way'. Barton refused to retract, but did not object when they contended the real meaning of the prime minister's complaint was that the latest proposals were merely a ‘revision to amendments already discussed and rejected'.

While this report was being prepared, Griffith came back to say that ‘he forgot to say that something had been said about the possibility of changing for the form of the Oath.' Barton and Gavan Duffy had left Hans Place by then and Childers waited to check with them upon their return. Barton agreed to the inclusion although he could not remember the incident, but Gavan Duffy did remember it ‘and said Birkenhead remarked it rather casually'.

‘The negotiations were over then as we thought,' Barton ex­plained. He was despondent. ‘Bob says all the dead fought for is lost,' Childers wrote to his wife. ‘I say no – the dead died to prevent surrender.

‘There can't be war on this,' Childers added. ‘Our offer is too generous.'

‘Duffy, Childers and I prepared to leave London next day but this was not to be,' Barton continued. ‘The English must have noticed the significance of Collins' absence and at 2 a.m. Jones, the English Cabinet Secretary, came to Hans Place, unknown to the rest of us, and had a long private conversation with Griffith. What transpired at that Conference we shall never know but it is reasonable to suppose that Griffith informed the English that he and Collins had not said their last word, anyway Jones invited Collins to confer with Lloyd George again the next morning.'

Barton was right. Jones found Griffith ‘labouring under a deep sense of the crisis'. The Irish chairman ‘spoke throughout with the greatest earnestness and unusual emotion'. Collins and himself were in favour of the British terms, but needed some­­thing further to offer the Dáil. Their position would be simplified, Griffith said, if the British could get Craig to give ‘a conditional recognition, however shadowy, of Irish national unity in return for the acceptance of the Empire by Sinn Féin.' If the British delegation could obtain an assurance that Northern Ireland would agree to unity, he said that Dublin would give all the safeguards the northern majority needed and the Boundary Commission could be scrapped. With a northern acceptance of unity, he was confident he could get the Dáil to accept a treaty with an oath that would be acceptable to the British. He added that Barton and the doctrinaire republicans could then be ignored, because ninety per cent of the gunmen would follow Collins.

Without the support of Collins, however, Griffith did not have a chance of getting the Dáil to accept the British terms. He therefore asked Jones to arrange a meeting so that Lloyd George could have a ‘heart to heart' talk with Collins. Jones then left and arranged a meeting with the prime minister for the following morning, but Griffith had great difficulty persuading Collins to attend.

Collins was so annoyed over the confusion in Dublin that he was refusing to have anything further to do with the negotiations. It was not until just before the meeting with Lloyd George was due to begin that he finally relented and agreed to go to Downing Street. In fact, he had been so determined not to attend that he was some fifteen minutes late for the meeting, which was most uncharacteristic as he had a virtual obsession with punctuality.

During the meeting Collins emphasised he was ‘perfectly dissatisfied' with the British terms regarding Northern Ireland. He said the British government should get the position clari­fied by pressing Craig for a letter specifying the conditions under which unity would be acceptable, or else rejecting it outright. At that point Lloyd George said, according to Collins:

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.

‘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.