Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (30 page)

It would of course be wrong to place too great a burden of interpretation upon two outrageous satires (both works, for example, end with the triumphant re-establishment of the Union). But the comic success of these works rested in the fact that Moore worked from a series of popularly held Unionist assumptions concerning the clericalism, the rapacity and the violence of any future Home Rule administration. These assumptions were shared (as will become clear) even by the most solemn Unionist commentators on Home Rule.

Other writers, working from the premise that no settlement would be reached, concentrated much more directly than Moore on the likely militancy of Ulster Unionists. At the time of the third Home Rule Bill at least two novelists speculated about the likely attitude of the North, and both - working from rather different political and national perspectives - detailed some of the broader, as well as some of the more personal, repercussions of Ulster Unionist militancy. These authors were George Birmingham, writing from a Liberal Protestant perspective in
The Red Hand of Ulster
(1912), and an English novelist, W. Douglas Newton, whose work
The North Afire
(1914) explored the same theme of civil war in Ulster. Both authors wrote before the outbreak of the European war in August 1914, and neither gave any serious consideration to the wider diplomatic context to British policy in Ireland. Both, however, deserve some attention, if only because their vision of Ulster with Home Rule but without the Great War, provides the theme for one of the counterfactual hypotheses explored in the last section of this essay.

George Birmingham, within the limits of a mildly comic and mildly satirical fantasy, predicted with remarkable clarity some of the actual forms of Unionist militant politics, as well as providing informed guesses about other likely developments. Joseph Conroy, an American millionaire of Irish extraction, and of Fenian sympathies, perceives that the potentially most disloyal and violent elements within Ireland are the Ulster Unionists, and he therefore chooses to fund their resistance to Home Rule (this - apparently unlikely - device in fact crisply foreshadowed the real, if grudging admiration of some militant republicans for the defiance of their northern loyalist contemporaries).
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Conroy’s Unionists fight a number of minor but successful engagements with the British army and (improbably) the Royal Navy, and secure a thoroughgoing grant of independence for all of the island. Douglas Newton, writing evidently without much first-hand knowledge of Ireland, and within the constraints of a rather florid romance, speculated not unconvincingly about the shape and personal repercussions of an Ulster Unionist rebellion. Comyns Loudoun, a British army officer, finds himself fighting a fellow officer and Unionist sympathiser in the course of the Ulster rising, while being otherwise distracted from his duty through his love for one of the rebel women. Birmingham’s rebellion culminates in an Orange-toned Irish republic; Newton’s rebellion flares briefly and bloodily, but is resolved after two weeks in a manner which is not detailed.

Birmingham’s fantasy is of particular interest because it emphasises the complicated range of Unionist attitudes towards violence, and because it prophesies some of the likely political dynamics of any Ulster rebellion against Home Rule. The leaders of Unionist resistance, Lord and Lady Moyne (who bear a resemblance to Lord and Lady Londonderry) and the talented orator Babberly (who has some similarity to Carson) are nudged to the sidelines during the early stages of the rising by more militant forces, reliant upon American finance and upon German weapons (the actual loyalist militants used some funds from North America - though not of course from republican sources - and imported weapons from a private supplier in Germany).
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Babberly, who combines in a Carsonian manner public belligerence and private moderation, highlights the possible effects of Ulster Unionist violence upon potential English support: ‘I know that we shall sacrifice their friendship and alienate their sympathy if we resort to the argument of lawlessness and violence.’
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In addition, the novel illustrates, in its paradoxical denouement, the highly constrained limits of Irish loyalism: the rebels prefer to dictate the terms of Irish independence rather than to return to the Union or to some form of Home Rule. Though this was a self-consciously comic and seemingly improbable finale, it reflects other, less ironic views of contemporary Irish Unionists, and their likely response to Home Rule. For example, the otherwise sober southern Unionist lawyer, A. W. Samuels, warned English observers in a prosy fashion that they ‘may be well assured if they desert those in Ireland to whom they are in honour bound, then undoubtedly the bitterest opponents of England in the future, wherever their lot may be cast, will be those men and their descendants who shall have been so betrayed’.
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Newton’s fantasy looks forward to the weeks following the passage of Home Rule. A bloody loyalist uprising is sparked by the killing of an Orangeman during a police raid. The new Ulster provisional government ‘advises’ Nationalists to leave their homes and property, while throughout Ulster the prevailing majority in a locality, whether Unionist or Nationalist, attacks the minority, inflicting casualties and destroying property. Sectarian resentment is compounded by a degree of economically inspired violence (such as the torching of factories by workers). British ministers, initially disoriented (‘the Government had started weathercock whirlings as is the way with Governments with whom the essence of existence is the expending of wind’), finally agree on a declaration of martial law; and, after several bloody encounters between the crown forces and the insurgents, a form of compromise is settled.
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This fantasy, though weak in certain details (Ulster is lavishly endowed with coal mines, and an Orange hero bears a Gaelic Irish Christian name), speculates rather convincingly concerning the development and local consequences of a loyalist revolt. The dilatory but ultimately effective response of the British government is in keeping with the combination of procrastination and swift, heedless action which characterised the Asquith administration ; and the overall picture of a brief, bloody and pointless conflict is also plausible, in keeping with the unenthusiastic militancy of influential sections of the Unionist command, and the reluctance of the Liberal government to become embroiled in civil unrest.

Nationalist speculation, whether in historical or political polemic, or in fiction, tended to worry much less about the North than these English or Ulster Protestant commentators; and the apocalyptic themes which recurred in Unionist political rhetoric and literary fiction were generally absent from their Nationalist counterparts. There are, however, some points in common. One of the most revealing contemporary counterfactual speculations about Home Rule was offered by George Bernard Shaw in the ‘Preface for Politicians’ (1907) which he provided for the play
John Bull’s Other Island
. Shaw, a Home Ruler, deemed a ‘loyal’ Irishman to be ‘unnatural’ (in much the same way as the republican socialist James Connolly viewed Ulster Unionism as a form of false consciousness). Shaw instead emphasised the radical potential within Irish Protestantism.
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He believed that Irish loyalism and Protestant social ascendancy were interdependent; and that with the end of ‘English’ rule in Ireland, and the end of the concomitant ascendancy class, so Irish loyalism would disappear. Shaw, writing before the elaboration of Ulster Unionist militancy, and as a Dublin Protestant, saw his co-religionists, not as sustained opponents of a Home Rule administration, but rather as potentially a most advanced and energetic presence within the new regime. Irish Protestant determination to influence national life would lead, in Shaw’s vision, to an ever greater identification with ‘the vanguard of Irish Nationalism and Democracy as against Romanism and Sacerdotalism’; and this Protestant interest would be aided by the votes of those Catholics anxious to advance national freedom, and throw off clerical supremacy.
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While these hypotheses imposed upon northern Protestantism some of the preoccupations of its southern counterpart, and while the speculation as a whole owed much to Protestant national conceit, it is intriguing that Shaw should stress, in common with George Birmingham and others, the apparently very thin line separating trenchant Ulster loyalism and advanced Irish separatism. Both writers underline the fragility of any true unionism among the northern Protestant militants; and the vision of Ireland under Home Rule which each provides is coloured very largely by a dominant Protestant separatism.

Shaw’s vision of Irish Catholicism under Home Rule is no less intriguing. Shaw saw the Union as an agent for clericalism, in so far as the church provided one of the key institutions around which popular Catholic political and religious resentments had gathered. The removal of the Union and the establishment of Home Rule would liberate Irish Catholics from servitude to Rome, freeing them to create their own Irish Gallican church: ‘Home Rule will herald the day when the Vatican will go the way of Dublin Castle, and the island of saints assume the headship of her own church.’
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Home Rule promised, according to Shaw, excited by the roller-coaster of his own paradoxes, to convert Orangemen into advanced separatists and pious Catholics into advanced Gallicans.

One final fictional vision of Home Rule may be offered, representative of separatist conviction. Terence MacSwiney, a Sinn Feiner, who was ‘out’ in the 1916 rising, and who died in prison in October 1920 after a seventy-four-day hunger-strike, published a play in 1914,
The Revolutionist
, which looked forward to the plight of separatists under an unsympathetic Home Rule administration.
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The underlying premise of the drama, as with the other literary evidence which has been discussed, is the successful enactment of the third Home Rule Bill. The protagonist, Hugh O’Neill (a deliberate reference, presumably, to the late-sixteenth-century Gaelic lord and rebel), is confronted by bluster and timidity within his own advanced Nationalist circle, and with the intense hostility of influential figures within the Catholic Church: some of his personal intimates, in common with the rest of Nationalist Ireland, are softening in their attitude towards the empire. O‘Neill is denounced from the altar as an atheistic revolutionary (he is in fact a sincere Catholic); he observes acquaintances compromising their political convictions in the interests of personal advancement; and, looming behind the action of the play, is the ‘Empire Carnival‘, a popular entertainment, which, though designed ostensibly to celebrate the attainment of Home Rule, is luring good-hearted Nationalists along imperialist paths. O’Neill’s fight for separatist principles is lonely and tragic; but his death, which comes after a ferocious proselytising campaign, is depicted as a beautiful and heroic culmination.

These literary visions of Ireland under Home Rule, though sometimes bizarre or even comic in their detail, were remarkably close to the speculations offered by ostensibly more sober commentators. The defining feature of these, as with the literary fantasies, was party affiliation, but some assumptions spanned the party divide. A Unionist satirist, such as Frankfort Moore, might look forward to the anarchic division within the Nationalist ranks after the passage of Home Rule, but this was only an exaggerated version of John Redmond’s own prediction; Redmond looked forward (as did the agrarian radical, Michael Davitt) to the collapse of the Home Rule party,
‘functus officio’
, after its goal had been attained.
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In fact Redmond generally, and skilfully, turned the taunts of his opponents into political capital: when Unionists prophesied that Home Rule would destabilise the British constitution (the distinguished jurist, A. V. Dicey, claimed that ‘Home Rule does not close a controversy - it opens a revolution’), Redmond accepted the general point, while claiming that Home Rule would precipitate a healthy revision in the form of a general federation of the United Kingdom.
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Redmond, like the Unionists, accepted that aspects of the measure were highly unsatisfactory; like the Unionists, though working from a different perspective, he damned the financial provisions of the measure as, at best, provisional. It may also have been the case that, like the Unionists, he foresaw specific problems with the provision of the Bill which linked any default in the land purchase annuities with a reduction in the Transferred Sum.
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But, of course, the overall vision provided by Nationalist and Liberal commentators was of (in the words of the historian Richard Bagwell) a ‘future Arcadia’, and stood in contradistinction to the grim fantasies conjured up by Conservative and Unionist politicians.
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Both Home Rulers and Unionists (albeit for different reasons) tended to emphasise the extent of the powers which were being devolved to the new Irish administration. But Redmond saw the Home Rule Bill as a final settlement of the historic quarrel between the English and the Irish (even though he accepted that some details were problematic), where Unionists saw merely a staging post to a much greater degree of autonomy. Some Liberal commentators envisaged the devolution of power to Dublin, and the reduction of Irish representation at Westminster, as ‘the first step forward in the direction of Imperial efficiency’, where Unionists saw only the probability of enhanced constitutional chaos (‘the statement that the passing of the Home Rule Bill would relieve congestion at Westminster is palpably false’, declared Carson’s private secretary, Pembroke Wicks).
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Redmond believed that the Bill heralded the establishment of a talented national assembly in Dublin (since Irish political skills were no longer being siphoned off in quantity to Westminster); Unionists foresaw the creation of an assembly of self-seeking and fratricidal mediocrities (‘the scenes of Committee Room No. 15 are’, claimed Dicey, ‘a rehearsal of parliamentary life under Home Rule at Dublin’).
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Redmond saw the Bill as creating improved relations between Ireland and Britain, as well as between the Irish diaspora and the British. In particular, he argued, Britain would profit from improved relations with Irish America. Unionists believed, or at any rate argued, that the Home Rule Bill merely provided a forum for a fuller expression of national resentments, and that the British would pay dearly - especially in the event of war - for their light-headed optimism.
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