1916 Read online

  Later generations of nationalists – and some contemporary nationalist thinkers such as Sinn Féin’s founder, Arthur Griffith – professed astonishment that a modest measure of devolution should occasion such a fervent protest from unionists in Britain and Ireland. But apart from the belief (propagated by nationalists themselves since 1886) that home rule offered ‘freedom’ and ‘independence’, the 1912 bill was a serious measure of self-rule. It was true that the Westminster parliament was to remain sovereign, and that it retained unimpaired authority over questions of peace and war, treaties, the levying of customs duties, coinage, postal services and, for six years, the Royal Irish Constabulary. The Irish parliament could not endow religion or impose religious disabilities. It had limited taxation powers, and could not add more than 10 per cent to the rate of income tax or death duties. Irish membership of the House of Commons was to be reduced from 103 to 42, though the 42 could speak on all subjects, and were not confined to contributing to debates on subjects affecting Ireland alone.7 But the key point in the bill was not its definition of the powers of the Irish parliament, but its lack of definition: for the new parliament could make laws for the ‘peace, order and good government of Ireland’. This left a large and unlimited scope for the parliament to enhance its powers, in an age when states across Europe were embarking on social policies that would significantly increase their legislative output and executive control.

  There can be no doubt that the crisis over the 1912 home rule bill did mark a significant change in the Irish political climate. This was the third such bill to be placed before the British parliament. Those of 1886 and 1893 occasioned heated opposition from British and Irish unionists alike, but the grave threats to Irish Protestants, and especially to Ulster Protestants, were not met by any serious armed opposition. There was plenty of fighting talk, but that was all. In June 1892 at a great unionist convention in Belfast, one speaker proclaimed ‘firm and unchangeable determination of the people of Ulster to resist by constitutional means and, if need be, by force the passing of the home rule bill into law’. Another, neatly adopting Gladstone’s phrase when he declared his determination to resist agrarian violence in Ireland in the early 1880s, warned that the resources of civilisation were not yet exhausted; but when they were, ‘it remained for them, as loyal sons of sires agone, to find out how they might resist the resolution of the imperial parliament to hand them neck and heel to a tyranny that was beyond the conception of the English elsewhere’.8 But the Irish Times noted that the speeches at the convention contained ‘no threat, no boast, no bluster. The purpose was that more than a million of the people of Ireland should say simply no.’9 Alvin Jackson has explained that, because unionism had only a generally narrow and inadequate constituency base, with few pressure groups beyond the Orange Order able to claim a mass membership (and virtually none long surviving the defeat of the second home rule bill), unionism was for all practical purposes a parliamentary movement, and it was to MPs in the House of Commons that northern Protestants looked for political redress or personal advancement.10

  Yet twenty years later words were replaced, or perhaps reinforced, by deeds; and the proceedings of the British parliament became increasingly irrelevant to the clash of ideologies in Ireland itself. What was described as potentially a matter of life and death in 1892 was now indeed a matter of life and death in 1912, since the home rule bill must pass into law. Moreover, the Ulster unionists had, by 1912, provided themselves with their own organisation, the Ulster Unionist Council, which held its first meeting in March 1905, and which offered a more representative and permanent body for Ulster Protestants, as well as a more narrowly focused political perspective.11 The Irish unionist parliamentary party was now looking more like a first – or, in due course, a second – amongst equals, rather than the representative of general unionist opinion. The increasingly particularist outlook of Ulster unionists was reflected in their decision in September 1911 to set up a provisional government for Ulster should the home rule bill become law. Ulster unionists were glad to have British unionist support for their stand against home rule, but it was not their only, nor indeed their main, pillar of resistance.

  This resistance took a more ominous shape when, as early as 1910 and on local initiative on the part of Orange Order lodges, volunteers offered themselves as defenders of the Union. Although Sir Edward Carson and Sir James Craig welcomed the UVF, they played no part in the organisation’s day-to-day running; this was indeed a new departure in unionism.12 Institutions, however, expressed but did not create the Ulster unionist mood of 1912. A new generation of political leaders had emerged, new men, Edwardians like James Craig and Fred Crawford, who found a militant stand more congenial than had their forebears. The importance of the South African war of 1899–1902, which introduced a spirit of militant patriotism in Great Britain and worked the same spell in Ireland, should not be underestimated. It occasioned the formation of Volunteer forces, comprising civilian soldiers who had not engaged in warfare before 1899. One such force was the City of London Imperial Volunteers, in which the later Irish republican Erskine Childers enlisted ‘to do something for one’s country’.13 And the early debacles in the campaign against the Boers gave new impetus to the idea of military conscription in the United Kingdom, which was almost unheard of before then. Tunes of glory were being played all over the British Isles. Irish nationalists, for their part, insisted that they held common cause with the Afrikaaners, and would indeed themselves resort to arms if such an option were likely to succeed, which they conceded it was not, at least for the foreseeable future.14

  The crisis over the third home rule bill raised political, constitutional and even moral issues which, the Ulster unionists claimed, justified a resort to force of arms. These were stated in ‘Ulster’s Solemn League and Covenant’ which thousands of Protestants signed in September 1912. ‘Being convinced in our consciences’, the signatories pledged themselves to use all means necessary to defeat a conspiracy which, they believed, would be disastrous to Ulster’s and Ireland’s material well-being, destructive of Protestants’ civil and religious liberty, and perilous to the unity of the empire. Bonar Law declared in the House of Commons in June 1912 that the Liberal government ‘are putting themselves in a position from which they cannot recede … That means that they know that if Ulster is in earnest, if Ulster does resist, there are things stronger than parliamentary majorities. They know that in that case no government would dare to use British troops to drive them out.’15 It was equally true, however, that if Ulster unionists were in earnest, they too might put themselves in a position from which they could not recede; and the use of troops, and their willingness to be employed as an instrument of force, was not – as yet – in any doubt.

  Ulster and southern Irish unionist fears about the real character of Irish nationalism were perhaps reinforced by new forces that were stirring at the turn of the century. The Gaelic League, founded in 1893 with the aim of ‘de-anglicising Ireland’, and bringing to a point earlier nationalist ideas that there was a distinct gaelic nation, or even race, suggested that those who did not belong to that race or nation might be treated as foreigners, uncomfortable interlopers in a country to which they did not ‘really’ belong. This, it must be stressed, was not the purpose of the league’s founder, Douglas Hyde, himself a Protestant, who sought to use language to overcome Irish religious divisions. But this noble idea was diluted by those who saw the league as a means of furthering the separatist cause, or as a way of excluding those who did not ‘belong’. The determined efforts by the Catholic church to infiltrate and guide the league, as it did other kinds of pressure groups and organisations, was likewise an uncomfortable sight. Paul Bew has demonstrated that unionists had fears about the Irish language under home rule; for example, at the committee stage of the home rule bill in October 1912 unionists moved an amendment with the aim of preventing an Irish parliament making Irish a qualification for holding public appointments,16 though the first occupant of t
he chair of Irish in Queen’s University Belfast in 1909 was an Anglican clergyman, the Reverend F.W. O’Connell.17

  Religious divisions remained the bedrock of Irish politics. For Ulster Protestants the enemy was, as it had been since 1886 (and indeed since the 1830s and 1840s, when ‘the Liberator’, Daniel O’Connell, roamed the Ulster border area), the Catholic majority in Ireland, which carried its own potent ideological mixture of religion, grievance, and desire to reverse history’s verdict that Protestants would be up, and they, the Catholics, would be down. This ideology accommodated the home rule movement as comfortably as more radical nationalism: the men of ’98 were as much the property of Redmond and his followers (especially his followers) as they had been of Parnell and his, and the new Sinn Féin party and its. The Irish party did not, in principle, rule out the use of force to achieve freedom.18

  Ulster unionists did not need new foes, gaelic or otherwise, in the period 1912–14; they felt they had enemies enough. On Ulster Covenant day Dr William McKeon, former moderator of the Presbyterian church, claimed that:

  We are plain, blunt men who love peace and industry. The Irish Question is at bottom a war against Protestantism; it is an attempt to establish a Roman Catholic ascendancy in Ireland to begin the disintegration of the empire by securing a second [sic] parliament in Dublin.19

  Between 1898 and 1902 there appeared ominous signs of Roman Catholic ‘triumphalism’. The Ancient Order of Hibernians, a kind of Catholic mirror image of the Protestant Orange Order, was founded in 1898; a ‘Catholic Association’ in 1902. Then in 1908 the papacy promulgated the Ne temere decree which laid down regulations for bringing up children in marriages in which one of the partners was a non-Catholic. This soon made its impact on Ulster life, when, in 1910, a Mrs McCann, a Presbyterian married to a Roman Catholic, in a union in which each attended their own church, found herself the centre of controversy. It was claimed that Mr McCann’s priest visited their home to tell the couple that their marriage was invalid according to the Ne Temere decree, and that they must re-marry in a Roman Catholic ceremony. It was alleged that Mrs McCann’s husband began to ill-treat her, and that he made off with the children (and the furniture), leaving her destitute. Her minister, a Mr Corkey, claimed that the incident demonstrated the ‘cruel punishment’ which the Roman Catholic church was ready to inflict on any member of the Protestant faith ‘over whom she gets any power’.20 There were some doubts about the details of the case, but in the febrile atmosphere of Ulster’s religion and politics, it provided a rallying cry for Protestants, and pushed the Protestant churches (not always well-disposed towards each other) together, in a way that foreshadowed the solidarity with which they confronted home rule. The Presbyterians, repositories of Ulster radicalism in days gone by, were the first to mobilise, warning in a convention on 1 February 1912 that ‘our civil and religious liberties would be gravely imperiled’. On Ulster day, when the covenant was signed, St John Ervine (unionist in politics but a leading light in the Irish literary revival) wrote that ‘Belfast suspended all its labours and became a place of prayer.’21

  Out of this political/religious atmosphere came the rational and moral argument that a body of British citizens, utterly opposed to a measure which threatened to deprive them of their citizenship, had the right to resist an unjust law by force. When Lord Milner was canvassing for signatures to a British covenant on the lines of Ulster’s Solemn League and Covenant, he asked: ‘When before, in our lifetime, have thousands upon thousands of sober steady-going citizens deliberately contemplated resistance to an Act of Parliament, because they were sincerely convinced that it was devoid of all moral sanction?’ There were a great many people who still entirely failed to realise ‘what the strength of our feeling is on this subject. They think it is just an ordinary case of opposition to a political measure, a move in the party-game.’ This might be true of many unionists, ‘but there is certainly a large body, who feel that the crisis altogether transcends anything in their previous experience, and calls for action, which is different, not only in degree, but in kind, from what is appropriate to ordinary political controversies.’22

  This line of argument offered a more palatable reason for resistance than the narrow ground of Catholic/Protestant enmity. It attracted the support, though conditional support, of the eminent Vinerian Professor of English Law in Oxford university, A.V. Dicey. Dicey, a most forceful opponent of Irish home rule since 1886, cited the example of Lord Hartington, who asked: did not Ulster unionists have the right to resist home rule as James II had been resisted by England and Protestant Ireland in 1688–90, especially if home rule was to be imposed by force? Dicey described this as an ‘old Whig doctrine’ that oppression and especially resistance to the will of the nation ‘might justify what was technically conspiracy or rebellion’. But he insisted that the Ulster unionists should offer only moral resistance, which might endure for a year or a year and a half after home rule became law; this would be ‘fully justified’. Unionist resistance should be ‘conducted with extreme attention to the preservation of order’. In July 1912 he reiterated his concern that Ulster’s resistance must be passive; but he feared that Ulster unionists would not have the ‘self-control necessary for carrying out the very difficult policy of passive resistance within the limits of the law, tho’ I believe it would be successful’. Even in the case of oppression with which Ulster was menaced, ‘no loyal citizen should, until all possibilities of legal resistance is exhausted, have recourse to the use of arms’.23

  Ulster unionists gave notice of their determination to by-pass this suggested era of passive resistance on 24–5 April 1914, when they carried out a daring gun-running adventure at the port of Larne, landing 25,000 rifles and 3,000,000 rounds of ammunition. The possibility of moral resistance was further endangered by the character of the UVF, which began as a ‘bottom up rather than top down’ unit in many areas; their activities might, especially in time of increased tension, be hard to control.24 Thus the commanding officer of the 2nd battalion, South Down regiment, Roger Hall, issued orders that Volunteers were ‘not to mix themselves up in riots or street fights unless to protect themselves or other Protestants, who may be assaulted, or when called upon by the police to assist them’. The police were to deal with ‘ordinary rowdyism, and Volunteers were not to interfere’ unless the police found themselves ‘unable to cope with the disturbance and call for help’. No rifles or revolvers were to be used ‘until the last extremity’ and indiscriminate revolver firing was ‘strictly forbidden’. Revolvers were not authorised in the UVF and any Volunteer carrying one ‘does so on his own responsibility, and must take the consequences if arrested’.25

  Hall was harking back to the Volunteer movement of the late eighteenth century, when the Irish Volunteers (almost exclusively Protestant) were deployed on law and order tasks, as well as defying the British government. But the question was what would happen if the Liberal government of 1914 sought to assert its authority by deploying the British army against the UVF (which the British government of the 1770s had not done). The unionist peer, the Earl of Selborne, who enjoyed cordial relations with several senior Liberals, warned that if the government attempted to ‘crush Ulster with the army and fleet’, then Ulster’s resistance ‘would take all the forms, with which we are familiar in the history of such cases, some heroic and some hideous’. ‘Russian methods’ must fail.26 Dicey took the ominous, and probably accurate, view that if the shooting began, ‘British soldiers will, in any case, do their duty, and not forget that the primary duty of the soldier is obedience to lawful orders.’27

  It was hard for any British government, not least a Liberal government, to weigh up the consequences of using force to crush Ulster unionist resistance. There was, as so often in politics, a balance of evils to be assessed. What confounded the Liberals was their bungled attempt, not to crush, but perhaps overawe the UVF in March 1914, when it was still a poorly armed organisation. On 14 March 1914 Winston Churchill warned in a speech in B
radford that it was time ‘to go forward and put these grave matters to the proof ’.28 On the same day the war office wrote to Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Paget (commander in chief in Ireland) that ‘evil-disposed persons’ may try ‘to obtain possession of arms, ammunition and other government stores’. Steps must be taken to safeguard depots in the north, but also in the south of Ireland.29 At a meeting on 19 March at which Winston Churchill and Augustine Birrell, the chief secretary for Ireland, were present, Paget was told that the third battle squadron of the royal navy was to be sent to Lamlash in Scotland ‘in order to be available if required’.30 Paget was concerned about the impact of sudden troop movements in the middle of a political crisis and on 20 March gave the impression to his senior officers that the army might soon engage the UVF, in which case Ireland might be ‘ablaze by Saturday, and would lead to something more serious than quelling of local disturbances’. He said that the war office had authorised him to inform officers domiciled in Ulster that they might be excused duties, and permitted to ‘disappear’ from Ireland, but others would not be thus permitted to choose whether or not they would obey orders. Brigadier General Sir Hubert Gough admitted that he could not claim exemption as a resident of Ulster, but added that ‘on account of birth and upbringing, and many friendships, he did not see how he could bear arms against the Ulster loyalists, and that, if he did take up arms against them, he could never face his friends again.’