Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (27 page)

Catholics were admitted to parliament and to most forms of government office in 1829; but while the Emancipation Act opened the door to Catholic advancement, it could not compel admission. Though there were some Smilesian success stories (Lord O’Hagan was the first Catholic Lord Chancellor of Ireland in modern times (1868-74), Lord Russell of Killowen was the first Catholic Lord Chief Justice of England (1894-1900)), on the whole there was a glass ceiling beyond which Catholics did not progress in the ranks of officialdom or in certain aspects of professional life. Though there was a vocal Irish Catholic representation at Westminster from an early stage, this was of course a minority interest, and possessed only an intermittent influence. The Union, therefore, served as a highly inadequate vehicle for Catholic social and political ambition.

The Catholic response to the inadequacies of the Union came increasingly in the form of calls for its modification or abandonment. O‘Connell sought to raise an agitation demanding repeal of the Union, especially after 1840, when he created the Loyal National Repeal Association.
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He garnered considerable popular Catholic support, but won few converts among the ranks of either northern Protestants or the British political elite. Though his emphasis was negative - upon repeal, rather than upon the type of government which might replace the Union - O’Connell may be regarded as an essential precursor of the Home Rule movement. He educated a large section of the Catholic poor (who were largely untouched by government, whatever its form) in the need for legislative independence; and he created a distinctive mixture of parliamentary pressure and popular protest which later Home Rulers would successfully mimic.

However, a specific call for ‘Home Rule’ was raised only after 1870, when a Protestant lawyer, Isaac Butt, created the Home Government Association from an unlikely mixture of disgruntled Tories and Catholic Liberals: when Butt’s Home Rule party contested the general election of 1874, it captured the electoral base of the Irish Liberals, and emerged as the single largest Irish body at Westminster. The reasons for this dramatic electoral upset have preoccupied numerous Irish historians: popular sympathy with the fate of three revolutionary nationalists (‘the Manchester Martyrs’), executed - many thought unjustly - for the murder of a police sergeant in 1867, developed into a national agitation which the Home Rulers were able to exploit; while the popular Catholic hopes invested in the government of W. E. Gladstone withered into disappointment after a timid Land Act (1870) and an abortive proposal for university reform (1873).
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In addition Gladstone’s assault on the Papacy in his pamphlet,
The Vatican Decrees
, alienated many of his Irish Catholic admirers. Home Rule therefore exploited popular Catholic exasperation at the apparent inadequacy of the British judicial system, as well as the failings of their most likely British sympathisers. Home Rule built upon popular sympathy with the thwarted revolutionary nationalists (as distinct from support for revolutionary nationalism, which remained a minority enthusiasm); it built upon the recognition (shared initially by Liberals and some Tories) that the opportunities for Irish gain from the British party system were highly limited.

Home Rule was also eventually fuelled by intense agrarian unrest. The movement had been launched in the early 1870s, against a background of relative agrarian prosperity; and to some extent this had determined both the character of the Home Rule party and the nature of its programme. Home Rule MPs were, initially, often landed ex-Liberals, and they pursued their constitutional cause in a genteel and gradualist manner. However, the advent of a new and authoritarian parliamentary leader in 1879-80, Charles Stewart Parnell, brought a more populist direction to the management of the party: Parnell harnessed the unrest which had been generated by the economic downturn of 1878-9, and - though himself a Protestant landlord - yoked together the Home Rule movement and the distress of the farming interest.
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Parnell, in other words, had re-created the potent combination of forces which had driven the repeal movement in the early 1840s: popular agitation and a rigorous, urgent, vociferous parliamentary presence. The agrarian crisis was defused by good harvests and by a generous Land Act (passed by Gladstone in 1881), but the identification of the farmers with the Home Rule cause remained. By the mid-1880s, Parnell stood at the head both of a disciplined parliamentary party (numbering eighty-five members in November 1885), and a coherent local organisation, endorsed by the twin pillars of local Catholic society: the substantial farmers and the clergy.

Between 1870 and 1885 Butt and Parnell had resuscitated the popular campaign for the repeal of the Union which O‘Connell had launched forty years earlier. But, if the battle for the hearts and minds of Catholic Ireland had been replayed and won, the Home Rulers still confronted the twin obstacles which had helped to break the earlier movement for repeal: the opposition of the British parties, and the more trenchant hostility of northern Protestants. The two areas of opposition were interrelated, a point which deserves some emphasis: it would have been virtually impossible for one of the main British political parties to oppose Home Rule effectively given the acquiescence - however sullen - of Ulster Protestants. The Home Rule movement never successfully either wooed or subjugated their northern opponents, and the Protestant attitude, which would prove crucial to the fate of the Home Rule movement, will presently receive some detailed consideration. If there is a danger in oversimplifying the politics of Irish Catholicism, or of supplying an over-determined analysis, then these pitfalls are also present in the interpretation of Irish Protestant politics in the nineteenth century. Irish Protestants were not automatically Unionist, any more than Irish Catholics were natural separatists. In the eighteenth century Irish Protestants had urged the case for legislative autonomy in the context of a prevailing connection with Britain and within a Protestant-dominated constitution; northern Presbyterians, though politically divided, had supplied enthusiastic recruits to the rebel armies of the 1798 rising. Economic prosperity under the Union, combined with the growth of a strong regional identity in Ulster and the spread of ‘Britishness’ - British royal and imperial imagery and attitudes - helped to suppress these earlier political attitudes: in addition, indeed crucially, the rise of a self-confident and popular Catholic nationalism appeared to create a variety of political and cultural challenges which Irish Protestants believed might only be overcome within the context of the Union. But to try to explain the evolution of late-nineteenth-century Protestant Unionism from late-eighteenth-century Protestant patriotism is perhaps to miss the point: many of the Irish patriotic notions of the eighteenth century continued to live on within the (apparently) coherent British Unionism of the Home Rule era. Indeed, the central paradox of Irish Unionism was that it was born as much out of a distrust of the British willingness to protect Irish Protestant interests as out of fear of Home Rule.
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Fear of Catholic ascendancy and fear of economic victimisation appear to have played greater roles in sustaining Ulster Unionism than any abstract notion of national identity: certainly these were the emphases of Irish Unionist propaganda.

The opposition of Ulster Unionism will be reviewed in greater detail, and their political options in 1912-14 explored below. Neither O‘Connell nor Parnell effectively addressed the problem of Ulster Unionism, and indeed both had only a passing acquaintance with northern politics: it was only at the end of his life, in 1891, that Parnell appears to have devoted serious consideration to the challenge proffered by northern Protestants
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However, Parnell’s great advance over the achievement of O’Connell came with the breaking of the log-jam of British party politics: O‘Connell had faced united British opposition to repeal, where Parnell’s command of Irish popular opinion and of a strong parliamentary force helped to win Gladstone to the Home Rule cause. Gladstone’s motives have been exhaustively researched: he certainly exaggerated Parnell’s political genius and saw Parnellite Home Rule as a means - perhaps the only means - of sustaining a connection between Ireland and Britain.
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He was also clearly convinced (through typically copious reading) of the historical case for the restitution of ancient wrongs, and for the re-establishment of the Irish Parliament.
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There may, in addition, have been narrower party and leadership considerations: Home Rule may have been a means of consolidating his failing hold over a highly fissile Liberal movement.
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Certainly Home Rule was a characteristically Gladstonian ‘great issue’ - an apparently simple political cry, highly charged with morality, and equally spiked with difficulty for his internal party challengers. Gladstone’s political conversion was leaked to the press in December 1885, and in early 1886 he began to work quietly on the details of a Home Rule Bill (advised, it would seem, not by ministerial colleagues, but principally by two senior civil servants): he introduced the completed measure into the House of Commons in the spring of 1886.
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This initiative failed (the Bill was defeated on its second reading in the House of Commons in June 1886): but Gladstone’s actions helped to determine the shape and some of the preoccupations of British parliamentary politics until 1921. His surprise endorsement of Home Rule precipitated the resignation of some Whig and radical ministerial colleagues: it also provoked an almost immediate hardening of the Tories’ Unionist convictions. The short-term fall-out from Home Rule was therefore, paradoxically, Unionist in tendency, for the two great parties of the British state were more than ever bound to Irish subsidiary parties (this would have been to Gladstone’s liking): the Liberals and Irish Parliamentary party forged an informal but lasting ‘union of hearts’, while the Tories pledged themselves with ever greater conviction to the Irish Unionists. But the party shake-down also brought the disruption of old political allegiances and friendships: the overall effect was akin to the aftermath of a civil war, where the combatants, traumatised by unfamiliar and brutal conflict, clung tenaciously to their new rallying call. Remarkably few of the dissident Liberal ministers retraced their steps across no man’s land to the Gladstonian party (George Trevelyan was one): remarkably few Tories (even those who had flirted with the possibility of Parnellite support) showed anything other than a trenchant Unionism. Although a second Home Rule Bill was defeated in 1893, and although other issues achieved a momentary pre-eminence, Home Rule remained a touchstone of British party allegiance until the First World War and beyond. Gladstone retired in 1894, and died in 1898: but his imprint lingered upon the Liberal party. A new generation of Liberals remained unenthusiastically loyal to the legacy of Home Rule, and won elections in 1906, and twice in 1910, with the devolutionist commitment present, but buried, in their manifesto. The closely fought contest in December 1910 brought a renewed dependence upon Irish Nationalist votes: and the Liberal Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, though he may have lacked the righteous convictions of the Grand Old Man, did not lack his sense of party advantage - for a third Home Rule Bill, constructed along Gladstonian lines, was launched in the House of Commons in April 1912.

The third Home Rule Bill serves as a focus for the counterfactual arguments put forward in the remaining sections of this chapter. Some explanation for this choice (as opposed to the original Gladstonian measures of 1886 and 1893) may be appropriate, before the details of the Bill are outlined. Two suggestions, or premises, are offered: first, that the 1912 Bill, suitably presented, had a greater chance of success than its predecessors, and is therefore an intellectually more valuable focus for counterfactual speculation; and, second, that the range of counterfactual possibilities in the years before the First World War is greater and more intriguing than in either 1886 or 1893.

In 1912 and after, many Liberals looked back to the first Home Rule Bill, and speculated mournfully about the advantages which its successful passage would have brought.
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In fact such speculation owed more to the intrinsic difficulties of Home Rule as an issue, and more to the problems (and increasing expense) caused by the government of Ireland in the intervening years, than to the rosy outlook for Home Rule in 1886. The first Home Rule Bill was decisively defeated in the House of Commons by a coalition of Conservatives and dissident Liberals. There is no doubt that, even had the divisions within Liberalism been settled (a highly unlikely prospect), the Bill would have fallen in the House of Lords. There was therefore an overwhelming parliamentary majority for the Unionist case. In addition, when, in July 1886, an election was held on the Home Rule issue, though Irish voters confirmed their support for the Parnellite party, British voters endorsed the Union. There remains the intriguing possibility that Home Rule might have been carried, had the Conservative party embraced the policy with tacit Liberal approval. This, though an apparently unlikely scenario, was in fact not quite as fantastic as appearances might suggest. In 1885, during the brief lifetime of the first Salisbury government, senior Conservative ministers (Lord Randolph Churchill, Lord Carnarvon) had flirted with the idea of some form of accommodation with Parnell: Parnell, famously, advised Irish voters in Britain to support Conservative candidates at the general election held in November-December 1885.
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But the Tory enthusiasm for Home Rule and for Parnell was to prove more apparent than real. When, in December 1885, Gladstone held out the possibility of Liberal support for a Conservative measure of Home Rule, the offer was unhesitatingly rejected. Moreover, though some Tory ministers had toyed with the idea of cultivating Parnellite support in order to bolster a minority administration, Irish loyalists were simultaneously placated through honours and appointments. Lord Salisbury and his ministers appear to have been keeping their options open, in shoring up their minority regime.
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