Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (29 page)

Much, then, hinged upon the state of Liberal ministerial opinion in late 1911 and early 1912: was exclusion regarded then as a practical proposition? To begin with a related issue, it is evident that some form of special treatment for north-east Ulster
ought
to have been seriously considered before the introduction of the Bill; this case had been made by several leading scholars of Edwardian Liberalism, and seems incontrovertible. As Patricia Jalland has argued, while Gladstone in 1886 might have been forgiven for underestimating the ferocity of Unionist opposition, Asquith (who had been in the House of Commons since 1886) had twenty-five years in which to observe the tenacity and fury of Ulster loyalism.
³⁸
The resources of Unionism, emotional and institutional, had been grimly mobilised in 1904-5, in opposition to devolution, and again, in 1907, in opposition to the Irish Council Bill: in particular, the Ulster Unionist Council - which was the fulcrum of northern loyalist opposition to the third Home Rule Bill - had been founded in 1905, and was from the start quite clearly a powerful organisational tool. The appointment, in February 1910, of a formidably talented parliamentarian and lawyer, Carson, to head the Irish Unionist party in the Commons, was also a foretaste of the ferocious battles which lay ahead.

Asquith and other members of his Cabinet were in fact convinced of the probable need to deal separately with Ulster. The two leading proponents of some form of special treatment for the North were also the two most controversial and gifted members of the Cabinet, David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill; they were joined by the less gifted and certainly less enthusiastic Chief Secretary for Ireland, Augustine Birrell. As early as August 1911 Birrell was privately toying with the notion of county option and temporary exclusion - a proposal which would be laid before the opposition parties (by Lloyd George) only in February 1914.
³⁹
Birrell was directly acquainted, and on a day-to-day basis, with the powerful realities of Unionist intransigence, while Churchill (whose father, Lord Randolph, had been an outspoken advocate of Ulster) and Lloyd George (a Non-Conformist) had family and religious motives for their concern. Asquith affirmed in September 1913 that he had ‘always thought (and said) that, in the end, we should probably have to make some sort of bargain about Ulster as the price of Home Rule’ - but a combination of his rather vapid interest in the entire question along with a natural desire to identify with the majority case in any Cabinet discussion meant that in practice he was a highly uncertain exclusionist.
⁴⁰
When, on 6 February 1912, Churchill and Lloyd George presented their Cabinet colleagues with a plan to exclude the Unionist counties of Ireland from Home Rule, they achieved some support - but were eventually voted down by a majority which included the Prime Minister.
⁴¹

Nevertheless, the essential point should not be lost: that there was considerable support in the Liberal Cabinet for exclusion - even in February 1912, two months before the introduction of the Home Rule Bill. The Gladstonian purists were led by Lord Crewe and Lord Loreburn, and carried the day, but the exclusionists numbered, beyond those already mentioned, Haldane, Hobhouse and - for at least the first part of the cabinet debate - Asquith.
⁴²
Given that Carson and Bonar Law were demonstrably not irrevocable militants, and given the presence of an exclusionist lobby within the Liberal Cabinet (a lobby which grew as the months passed), some form of constitutional settlement was clearly not beyond the bounds of credibility. In fact it is possible, on the basis of the evidence presented, to go further than this, and to suggest that the best chance for Home Rule - the Home Rule moment - came and went in the spring of 1912. The last sections of this essay are therefore devoted to considering the form of such a settlement, and its broader consequences.

Before a description of the likely state of Ireland under Home Rule can be hazarded, the details of Asquith’s measure, and the nature of the administrative devolution which it proposed, should be defined.
⁴³
As will be evident from the earlier discussion, the Bill treated Ireland as a whole, though there were certainly numerous safeguards designed to address the more urgent Ulster Unionist fears. The initial clauses of the Bill dealt with the new, bicameral Irish legislature, and with its relationship to the imperial Parliament at Westminster. Although there was to be a vestigial Irish presence at Westminster (42 members as opposed to the existing 103), the focus of Irish parliamentary representation was to be shifted to a new House of Commons in Dublin, with 164 members elected for five years, and a nominated Senate, with 40 members. In addition provision was made for the creation of a responsible executive. It was calculated that the Unionists would probably win around 39 of the 164 seats in the Irish Commons, and perhaps 10 of the 42 Westminster seats; but (at least in the short term) they possessed another political resource in the Senate, which was initially to be nominated by the London government. Redmond, the Irish party leader, was certainly clear that the purpose of nomination was ‘to secure inclusion from the first of valuable elements in the public life of Ireland which might be excluded by election on strictly party lines’ - a comment which was probably directed to the southern Unionists, who were too thinly spread to exercise a significant electoral influence.
⁴⁴

The new body was to be subordinate to Westminster, and Asquith in fact emphasised ‘the overriding force of Imperial legislation, which can at any time nullify, amend, or alter any Act of the Irish Parliament’.
⁴⁵
Aside from this general assertion of imperial ascendancy, there were specific areas which were defined in the Bill as being beyond the authority of the new legislature: these included the crown, the making of peace or war, the army and navy, foreign and colonial relations, honours, the coinage, trade marks and certain aspects of foreign trade and navigation. There were in addition areas, known as the ‘reserved services’, which were excluded from the Home Rule Bill on a provisional basis: these matters included land purchase, pensions, national insurance, tax collection, the Royal Irish Constabulary, and the regulation of the Post Office Savings Banks, Trustee Savings Banks and friendly societies. There was also an expansive prohibition on legislation which would discriminate either in favour of, or against, any form of religious practice. In particular the Parliament was prevented from legislating to ‘make any religious belief or religious ceremony a condition of the validity of any marriage’.
⁴⁶
Although much of the rest of the Bill was Gladstonian in origin, this restriction was a novelty, designed to address Protestant fears concerning the recent Papal decree,
Ne Temere
, and its effect on mixed marriages; as an emollient, it was however peculiarly ineffective. Aside from this range of permanent and provisional exclusions, and the particular ban on religious discrimination, there was a further brake on the Irish Parliament’s freedom in the shape of the royal veto. The head of the Irish executive under the proposed Home Rule scheme, as indeed under the Union, was the lord lieutenant; and though this office was redefined along slightly more popular lines (it was now open to all religions, and was removed from the arena of British party politics), it was also empowered with both a suspensory authority over Irish legislation, and the right of veto - both to be exercised according to instructions supplied by London.

The financial clauses of the Bill were regarded by many contemporaries as a technical quagmire, and (in so far as they were fully understood by backbenchers) provoked rumbling disquiet. If an agreement on Home Rule had been achieved in early 1912, it almost certainly would have been on the basis of some form of special treatment of Ulster. This would have meant minor adjustments to some parts of the Bill (such as those which have already been outlined), but it also would have meant the collapse of the entire financial settlement, which was predicated on a unitary Irish state. It was no coincidence, therefore, that some of the more ardent opponents of exclusion within the Liberal Cabinet were also those who were most closely associated with the construction of the financial clauses of the Home Rule Bill (most conspicuously, Herbert Samuel).
⁴⁷
A compromise on Ulster in 1912 would also have meant, therefore, a complete readjustment of the financial settlement. Accepting all of this, the financial aspect of the Bill is worth mentioning because it provides the best evidence available (however flawed) of some of the key principles upon which Home Rule would have been launched. And it is also the case, as will become clear, that many of the contemporary speculations concerning the future of Ireland emphasised the strengths and weaknesses (depending on party perspective) of Home Rule finance.

Under Samuel’s elaborate proposal, all Irish revenue was to be paid into the imperial Exchequer. The operating cost of all the devolved services - a sum of around £6 million - would be returned to Ireland as the bulk of a ‘Transferred Sum’; in addition a small surplus of (to begin with) £500,000 would be added to provide a margin of error for the new Irish administration. If the Irish government levied new taxes, the revenue from these would also be returned but the scope for new taxation was in fact highly limited. The new administration could impose new taxes, provided that they did not conflict with existing imperial taxation (a Joint Exchequer Board, controlled by the British government, would adjudicate on what did or did not constitute ‘conflict’); and they could raise the existing taxes, but by no more than 10 per cent. Part of the levy still raised in Ireland by the imperial government consisted of land purchase annuities, paid by those farmers who had bought their holdings using government credit. Any arrears of these annuities would be charged to the new Irish government through a reduction of the Transferred Sum. As John Redmond commented bleakly, ‘the whole revenue of Ireland is thus held in pawn for the security of payments under the Land Purchase Acts’.
⁴⁸
Here was one issue which, in the opinion of contemporaries, held the potential for bitter future controversy between the new Home Rule administration and the imperial Parliament.

Another controversial aspect of these clauses, at least so far as Unionists were concerned, was the mechanism for furthering Irish financial autonomy. It will be evident that Samuel’s legislative architecture concealed a miserable grant of financial devolution behind a grand façade, but he allowed for the possibility of further construction. If, in the verdict of the Joint Exchequer Board, Irish revenue met or exceeded Irish expenditure for three years in succession, then the Board could seek from Westminster fuller financial powers for the Home Rule Parliament. Irish Nationalists, who otherwise loathed Samuel’s proposals, clung on to the hope of a later, and more generous revision. Irish Unionists, prophesying an economic apocalypse, based their jeremiads on the indefinite nature of the financial settlement.

The fate of the measure may be swiftly outlined. Asquith’s strategy, which has since been much criticised, appears to have involved delaying an amendment on Ulster until the extent of opposition, and therefore the likely extent of concession, became more fully apparent.
⁴⁹
Viewed from the relative serenity of Cavendish Square or of Sutton Courtney, and from the point of view of high-political gamesmanship, this was clearly a logical course of action - but of course it served to inflame an already highly volatile Ulster Unionism. In practice Asquith created immense difficulties for the Ulster Unionist leadership, and this may indeed have been part of his original calculation; but the price paid for this tactical squeeze was out of all proportion to any benefit obtained. In fact it was the financial proposals, rather than Ulster, which initially provoked the greatest ministerial concern and flexibility. In the aftermath of a Liberal backbench revolt, the government amended the Bill in committee so that the new Irish regime would have no power to reduce customs duties.
⁵⁰
With the exception of the minor safeguards contained in the Bill (and regarded as not merely inadequate but also defective), no firm conciliatory proposal was offered to the Ulster Unionists until January 1914, when the Prime Minister’s ‘Suggestions’ - a scheme of Home Rule-within-Home Rule - was placed on the table. Although an enhanced offer was put forward in March 1914 (a combination of temporary exclusion and county option), and incorporated within an Amending Bill in May, this still fell short of the Unionist demand for permanent exclusion. Moreover, by this time the extent of Ulster Unionist militancy was such that leaders like Carson and Craig had comparatively little room for manoeuvre - and proposals which might in 1912 have formed the basis for a successful negotiation could not now be countenanced. The antagonists were still deadlocked on 30 July 1914, by which time it was clear that a European war was looming. On the initiative of the Ulster Unionist leaders, and in the interests of at least the semblance of national unity, it was then agreed to postpone the Irish conflict. Asquith chose to exploit this party truce in order to place the Home Rule Bill on the statute book, albeit with an accompanying measure designed to suspend the establishment of an Irish parliament for the duration of the war.

Contemporaries, reading the details of the Bill, or viewing its tortuous progress through Parliament, extrapolated numerous visions of the nation’s future.
⁵¹
The defining feature of these contemporary counterfactual arguments was partisanship: Unionists and Nationalists cherished their own distinctive, but often conflicting, views of Ireland under Home Rule. Occasionally these speculations were cast in either a satirical or dramatic form, but even with the most imaginative or outrageous literature there was often a kernel of political reality (or virtual reality). Frank Frankfort Moore, a highly prolific novelist of Irish Protestant descent, published a variety of work at the time of the third Home Rule Bill (
The Truth about Ulster
(1914);
The Ulsterman
(1914)), but his fullest commentary on Home Rule came with two satirical squibs published a generation earlier, at the time of the second Home Rule proposal.
⁵²
In the comic D
iary of an Irish Cabinet Minister
(1893), Moore incorporated a number of loyalist prejudices into a pantomimic vision of an independent Irish government. The new regime is characterised by a rapacious attitude towards Ulster (a proposed hike in income tax is complemented by a retrospective tax on the profits from the Belfast shipbuilding industry), and by an abject surrender to clerical authority (the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin has a right of veto over all legislation, is consulted on official appointments and is in direct communication, through the novelty of the telephone, with the Cabinet chamber). Unionist institutions, such as Trinity College Dublin and the
Irish Times
, are suppressed. The economic background to the new administration is equally bleak, with a failed national loan, unpaid officials and a collapse in Irish stock. Moore’s
The Viceroy Muldoon
, published a few weeks after
Diary of an Irish Cabinet Minister
, works from the same premise of a newly established Home Rule administration, and shares with the earlier work a range of assumptions about the new regime. In both works Ulster Unionists defy the Dublin government: in both they are treated as a resource to be mulcted (in the
Viceroy Muldoon
it is proposed to force 15/16ths of the taxation of Ireland on to the North). Clericalism is rampant in the regime envisioned in the
Viceroy
, and business is brought to a standstill through a combination of public and political anarchy and official improvidence. A low standard of political morality and of political debate is assumed in both satires, each of which concludes with set-piece punch-ups within the new Nationalist governing elite. In both tales it is assumed that the limitations of Home Rule will be initially swept aside by Nationalist ambition (in the
Viceroy
the Irish Parliament quickly acquires the right to nominate the lord lieutenant).