Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (28 page)

On the other hand, it has been persuasively argued that, had the second Home Rule Bill passed in 1893, ‘a real possibility would have existed of a peaceful settlement of this issue’.
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Ulster Unionists had not yet developed a paramilitary structure (as they were to do between 1910 and 1914, and especially in 1913-14); and even the rhetorical threat of armed resistance was still highly qualified, being contingent upon any coercion from Dublin of passive loyalist resistance. For their part, Irish Nationalists would probably have been so constrained by the financial terms of the Home Rule Bill that they would have had little choice other than to conciliate their Ulster Unionist opponents (eastern Ulster was the industrial power-house of the island). However, if the outlook in Ireland was as favourable in 1893 as it was ever likely to be in the Home Rule era, then the parliamentary and high-political prognosis remained distinctly bleak. It is true that Home Rule passed through the House of Commons, but it was sustained by only a small and unenthusiastic majority: on 9 September 1893 it was rejected (amid laughter) by 419 votes to 41 in the House of Lords. It is also true that an angry Gladstone proposed a dissolution of Parliament to his colleagues, and suggested an appeal to the electorate on the issue of the Lords’ highhandedness. But Gladstone and his protégé John Morley were among the few Home Rule enthusiasts in the Liberal Cabinet; and their colleagues refused to sanction such a strategy. Moreover, not only was Gladstone an isolated zealot, he was also in his eighty-fourth year at the time of the second Home Rule Bill, and already experiencing ‘a marked physical decline’.
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It is also debatable whether, even allowing for the demands of a popular campaign on Gladstone’s health, the Liberals would have won such a contest. Home Rule would have been presented to the British electorate by a doubtful combination of half-hearted Liberals and divided Nationalists.

There remains the last of the Gladstonian measures, the third Home Rule Bill of 1912. It is easy to see the prospects of this measure as being as bleak as those of its predecessors, but such a judgement (while giving a proper weight to the vehemence of Ulster Unionist opposition) may well involve interpreting 1912 in the light of the looming violence of mid-1914. By August 1914, on the eve of the Great War, Ulster Unionists had created a massive, armed paramilitary association, the Ulster Volunteer Force; they had also gone a considerable way to creating a provisional government for the North. They had, in addition, apparently tenacious support from their British Conservative allies. At no time was the chance of securing a peaceful and mutually satisfactory settlement so slight. The traditional judgement that Ireland was spared a civil war only by the German invasion of Belgium seems hard to fault.

And yet the outlook for Home Rule in 1912, though by no means uncomplicated, could not have been more different. While allowing due weight to the Ulster Unionist difficulty, the (by no means sanguine) Liberal civil servant Lord Welby deemed the prospects of Home Rule in early 1912 to be ‘fairly favourable’.
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Within the House of Commons the Liberals, the Irish party and Labour were united in their support; the House of Lords, the assassin of Home Rule in 1893, was now virtually disarmed, having lost its legislative veto through the Parliament Act of 1911. Outside Parliament there was still a Unionist majority in England, but this was offset by Home Rule sympathy in Scotland, Wales and of course Ireland. Moreover, English Unionism, in Welby’s opinion, ‘does not show any sign of vigorous or violent opposition as in 1886’.
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The soundness of this judgement was in fact confirmed by the experience of British and Irish Unionist electioneers, who repeatedly encountered a more lively popular interest in land and social welfare issues than in the familiar plight of Irish loyalty. Otherwise sympathetic English Unionists were, by 1912, experiencing the Edwardian equivalent of donor fatigue: their concern for the likely fate of Irish Unionists under Home Rule was by now exhausted.

In defining the prospects of Home Rule in 1912, it is also important to gauge accurately the extent of Ulster Unionist resistance. It would be wrong to underplay the militancy of Ulster Unionism - even as early as 1912. In November 1910 a leading Ulster Unionist hawk, F. H. Crawford, wrote - apparently with the knowledge of other senior Unionists - to five munitions manufacturers, inviting quotations for 20,000 rifles and one million rounds of ammunition; the men of the ultra-loyalist Orange Order were beginning to learn simple drill movements by December 1910.
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In April 1911 Colonel Robert Wallace, a veteran of the Boer War, and a leading Belfast Orangeman, confided that he had been ‘trying to get my Districts in Belfast to take up a few simple movements - learning to form fours and reform two deep, and simple matters like that’.
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But it was swiftly decided to postpone any large-scale purchase of weapons; and, though paramilitary drilling developed on a haphazard basis in 1911 and 1912, this was not centrally regulated until the creation of the Ulster Volunteer Force in January 1913. Thus, when the third Home Rule Bill was launched, in April 1912, Ulster Unionists had certainly demonstrated the seriousness of their concern; but they were as yet largely unarmed, and their military training (though already supervised by several distinguished veteran officers) was still relatively uncoordinated. There was certainly nothing like the fever-pitch of excitement and belligerence among the Unionist public which was reached in the summer of 1914.

Nor were the leaders either of British or Irish Unionism beyond the power of peaceful persuasion in 1912. The popular historical vision of Bonar Law, the British Unionist leader, and of Carson in these years depends largely on several histrionic displays of militancy (such as Bonar Law’s angry endorsement of Ulster Unionist extremism at Blenheim Palace on 29 July 1912).
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It would indeed be wrong to discount this anger: numerous public speeches from both men testify to its potency, as indeed do occasional private utterances (such as Carson’s blunt declaration in a letter to James Craig written in July 1911 that he was ‘not for a mere game of bluff, and unless men are prepared to make great sacrifices which they clearly understand, the talk of resistance is no use’).
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But such declarations, read out of context, do little to aid an appreciation of the complex political role which each of these senior Unionist statesmen occupied in the era of the third Home Rule Bill. Each was certainly angered by the successful alteration of the constitution achieved by the Liberals through the Parliament Act. Each was also fearful - rightly, as it transpired - that the new Home Rule proposal would contain as few concessions to northern Unionism as had its predecessors. But each was considerably more emollient and flexible in private than his public belligerence would lead one to expect.

Bonar Law had family connections in Protestant Ulster, and was highly sympathetic to the aspirations of this community. Yet it appears that in 1910, during the inter-party conference held to address the constitutional issues arising from the People’s Budget, Bonar Law (along with F. E. Smith and other Tories) favoured a compromise involving concessions on the Home Rule question.
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In 1911, when the Tory party divided into hardliners (‘ditchers’) and moderates (‘hedgers’) over the controversial Liberal Parliament Bill, Bonar Law was again in favour of the more conciliatory stance.
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He was an ardent tariff reformer - tariff reform and Ulster were, he claimed, the two driving forces behind his political career - but he contrived to remain acceptable to both extreme tariff reformers (‘confederates’) and other, less zealous Unionists: in January 1913 he was persuaded to accept the relegation of the tariff question in the face of internal Tory opposition.
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Equally, while his aggressive Unionism may have been partly a result of what Thomas Jones called ‘primitive passion’, there was also a more considered dimension.
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It has been argued persuasively that Bonar Law’s particularly virulent defence of Unionism was a conscious and reasoned strategy designed to consolidate his own party leadership, and to extort a dissolution and general election from the Liberal government.
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There is much to be said for this case, and indeed for the subsidiary argument which emphasises Bonar Law’s hesitation when the stakes in the parliamentary game of brinkmanship were raised. In the context of mounting tension in Ulster (indeed Ireland as a whole) between October and December 1913, Bonar Law met the Liberal Prime Minister, Asquith, on three occasions in a discreet effort to establish the grounds for a peaceful settlement of the crisis. After the second of these meetings, on 6 November, it seemed probable that a deal would be struck on the basis of the exclusion from Home Rule of either four or six Ulster counties for a number of years; with the expiry of this period a plebiscite would be held within the excluded area to determine its future constitutional status. Bonar Law in fact appears to have misinterpreted Asquith’s intentions (the guileful Prime Minister seems to have been less interested in a definite proposal than in assessing the minimum terms which the Opposition would accept). Nevertheless, Bonar Law’s comment on this meeting is revealing: if the deal were accepted he saw that ‘our best card for the election will have been lost’.
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On the other hand, if a firm proposal were made ‘I don’t see how we could possibly take the responsibility for refusing’. Bonar Law, while alert to party advantage, had evidently some more statesmanlike instincts: indeed, party advantage and highmindedness coincided, for the Tories could not refuse a settlement which the English electorate might interpret as reasonable. Later actions - his refusal in 1914 to follow through extreme parliamentary strategies (such as amending the Army Bill to prevent the military coercion of Ulster) - tend to confirm the presence of a more circumspect and amenable personality behind the prophet of apocalypse.
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A similar interpretation might be applied to Carson. At public meetings, at Craigavon, the grim Victorian home of his lieutenant, James Craig, and at the Balmoral showgrounds, a favoured venue for militant display, Carson roused and blessed the anger of his supporters. In private, behind closed doors at Westminster and in Belfast, he appears to have urged caution. Between December 1912 and May 1913 confidential police reports on private Unionist meetings chronicled several occasions when Carson had ‘counselled peace and peaceful ways’ on his leading followers.
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In particular he seems to have been unenthusiastic about a general arming of the Ulster Unionists, a course of action which was being urged by some of his more hawkish lieutenants. When a mass importation of weapons was finally sanctioned, in January 1914, the decision appears to have been forced by the restlessness of certain elements within the Ulster Volunteer Force, and by the likelihood that - given the abortive negotiations with Asquith - the government were unlikely to offer serious concessions.
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Certainly Carson, while he publicly celebrated militant loyalist coups (such as the Larne gunrunning of April 1914), appears to have been deeply concerned about the implications of such activity. By April 1914 he was frankly admitting his incapacity to control his own forces. In May 1914 his tentative exploration of a federal solution to the Home Rule impasse was brutally rejected by his own supporters. By the early summer of 1914 it seemed that the command of Ulster Unionism had been seized by the hawks within the Ulster Volunteer Force.
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By 1914 the likelihood of a peaceful settlement was slipping from the politicians’ grasp. But, as will be clear, this was not because of any pathological cussedness on the part of Carson or Bonar Law. Both men, despite apocalyptic rhetoric, were essentially constitutional politicians; but both were in (partial) command of a volatile political following, and Carson in particular - who was profoundly fearful of civil war - was probably losing control over his own, increasingly militant support. This is not to mitigate his role in arousing Unionist passions (though here, again, the influence of any one politician, given the long history of loyalist unrest, may well be exaggerated): but it is to suggest that Carson and his British Conservative allies were open to compromise, and were probably in a position to deliver a compromise - but only in the earlier stages of the Home Rule crisis, and certainly not by the summer of 1914.

Could the Liberals and their allies in the Irish Parliamentary party have offered a deal, involving some form of Ulster exclusion, in the spring of 1912, at the start of the Home Rule crisis? If such a settlement was within the realm of practical politics,
should
it have been offered? It is important to remember that it was only in 1914, when both Unionist and Nationalist militancy were already far advanced, that any serious concessions were offered: but this should not obscure the chances of a peaceful settlement in 1912. Had some form of Ulster exclusion been contained within the Home Rule Bill, Irish Nationalists would undoubtedly have been angered; they viewed the island of Ireland as an indivisible whole, and were in any event inclined to dismiss the seriousness of Ulster Unionist protest. In addition, any form of exclusion would have placed the northern Catholic minority beyond the protection of the Home Rule executive. This might have mattered less in terms of practical politics had not one of John Redmond’s most influential deputies, Joe Devlin, been a Belfast Catholic (Devlin was secretary of the United Irish League, the Nationalists’ local party organisation).
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But, viewed simply as a matter of political judgement, the Irish Parliamentary party would have done better to strike a deal in 1912, rather than to give way, inch by humiliating inch, between 1914 and 1916, when finally - in the middle of the war - Redmond accepted the temporary exclusion from Home Rule of six northern counties. Had the Liberal government demanded a slighter concession than this in 1912 (say four-county exclusion on a temporary basis), there would have been bitter Nationalist protest: but the Irish party would have been spared subsequent ignominy, and the electoral consequences of popular expectations which had been raised and crushed. In addition, Redmond would have had little choice but to accept the decision of the Liberals - for, while the government was dependent upon his party for support, he was dependent upon the government for Home Rule. The Irish Parliamentary party might have assisted the Tories in voting a partitionist Liberal government out of office, but this might well have brought either a Unionist majority in the House of Commons, or a Liberal government with an independent majority. Either outcome would have meant the relegation of Home Rule.