NEGOTIATIONS FOR SETTLEMENT
The position in which Ulster was now placed was, from the political
point of view, a very anxious one. Had the war not broken out when it
did, there was a very prevalent belief that the Government could not
have avoided a general election either before, or immediately after, the
placing of Home Rule on the Statute-book; and as to the result of such
an election no Unionist had any misgiving. Even if the Government had
remained content to disregard the electorate, it would have been
impossible for them to subject Ulster to a Dublin Parliament. The
organisation there was powerful enough to prevent it, by force if
necessary, and the Curragh Incident had proved that the Army could not
be employed against the Loyalists.
But the whole outlook had now changed. The war had put off all thought
of a General Election till an indefinite future; the Ulster Volunteers,
and every other wheel in the very effective machinery prepared for
resistance to Home Rule, were now diverted to a wholly different
purpose; and at the same time the hated Bill had become an Act, and the
only alleviation was the promise, for what it might be worth, of an
Amending Bill the scope of which remained undefined. While, therefore,
the Ulster leaders and people threw themselves with all their energy
into the patriotic work to which the war gave the call, the situation so
created at home caused them much uneasiness.
No one felt it more than Lord Londonderry. Indeed, as the autumn of 1914
wore on, the despondency he fell into was so marked that his friends
could not avoid disquietude on his personal account in addition to all
the other grounds for anxiety. He and Lady Londonderry, it is true, took
a leading part in all the activities to which the war gave rise
--encouraging recruiting, organising hospitals, and making provision of
every kind for soldiers and their dependents, in Ulster and in the
County of Durham. But when in London in November, Lord Londonderry would
sit moodily at the Carlton Club, speaking to few except intimate
friends, and apparently overcome by depression. He was pessimistic about
the war. His only son was at the front, and he seemed persuaded he would
never return. The affairs of Ulster, to which he had given his whole
heart, looked black; and he went about as if all his purpose in life was
gone. He went with Lady Londonderry to Mount Stewart for Christmas, and
one or two intimate friends who visited him there in January 1915 were
greatly disturbed in mind on his account. But the public in Belfast, who
saw him going in and out of the Ulster Club as usual, did not know
anything was amiss, and were terribly shocked as well as grieved when
they heard of his sudden death at Wynyard on the 8th of February.
The death of Lord Londonderry was felt by many thousands in Ulster as a
personal bereavement. If he did not arouse the unbounded, and almost
delirious, devotion which none but Sir Edward Carson ever evoked in the
North of Ireland, the deep respect and warm affection felt towards him
by all who knew him, and by great numbers who did not, was a tribute
which his modesty and integrity of character and genial friendliness of
disposition richly deserved. He was faithfully described by Carson
himself to the Ulster Unionist Council several months after his death as
"a great leader, a great and devoted public servant, a great patriot, a
great gentleman, and above all the greatest of great friends."
Ulster, meantime, had already had a foretaste of the sacrifices the war
was to demand when the Division should go to the front. In November 1914
Captain the Hon. Arthur O'Neill, M.P. for Mid Antrim, who had gone to
the front with the first expeditionary force, was killed in action in
France. There was a certain sense of sad pride in the reflection that
the first member of the House of Commons to give his life for King and
country was a representative of Ulster; and the constituency which
suffered the loss of a promising young member by the death of this
gallant Life Guardsman consoled itself by electing in his place his
younger brother, Major Hugh O'Neill, then serving in the Ulster
Division, who afterwards proved himself a most valuable member of the
Ulster Parliamentary Party, and eventually became the first Speaker of
the Ulster Parliament created by the Act of 1920.
Notwithstanding the bitter outbreak of party passion caused by the
Government's action in putting the Home Rule Bill on the Statute-book in
September, the party truce was well maintained throughout the autumn and
winter. And the most striking proof of the transformation wrought by the
war was seen when Mr. Asquith, when constrained to form a truly national
Administration in May 1915, included Sir Edward Carson in his Cabinet
with the office of Attorney-General. Mr. Redmond was at the same time
invited to join the Government, and his refusal to do so when the
British Unionists, the Labour leaders, and the Ulster leaders all
responded to the Prime Minister's appeal to their patriotism, did not
appear in the eyes of Ulstermen to confirm the Nationalist leader's
profession of loyalty to the Empire; though they did him the justice of
believing that he would have accepted office if he had felt free to
follow his own inclination. His inability to do so, and the complaints
of his followers, including Mr. Dillon, at the admission of Carson to
the Cabinet, revealed the incapacity of the Nationalists to rise to a
level above party.
Carson, however, did not remain very long in the Government.
Disapproving of the policy pursued in relation to our Allies in the
Balkans, he resigned on the 20th of October, 1915. But he had remained
long enough to prove his value in council to the most energetic of his
colleagues in the Cabinet. Men like Mr. Churchill and Mr. Lloyd George,
although they had been the bitterest of Carson's opponents eighteen
months previously, seldom omitted from this time forward to seek his
advice in times of difficulty; and the latter of these two, when things
were going badly with the Allies more than a year later, endeavoured to
persuade Mr. Asquith to include Carson in a Committee of four to be
charged with the entire conduct of the war.
It was, perhaps, fortunate that the Ulster leader was not a member of
the Government when the rebellion broke out in the South of Ireland at
Easter 1916. For this event suddenly brought to the front again the
whole Home Rule question, which everybody had hoped might be allowed to
sleep till the end of the war; and it would have been a misfortune if
Carson had not then been in a position of independence to play his part
in this new act of the Irish drama.
The Government had many warnings of what was brewing. But Mr. Birrell,
the Chief Secretary, who in frivolity seemed a contemporary embodiment
of Nero, deemed cheap wit a sufficient reply to all remonstrances, and
had to confess afterwards that he had utterly miscalculated the forces
with which he had to deal. He was completely taken by surprise when, on
the 20th of April, an attempt to land weapons from a German vessel,
escorted by a submarine from which Sir Roger Casement landed in the West
of Ireland, proved that the Irish rebels were in league with the enemy;
and even after this ominous event, he did nothing to provide against the
outbreak that occurred in Dublin four days later. The rising in the
capital, and in several other places in the South of Ireland, was not
got under for a week, during which time more than 170 houses had been
burnt, £2,000,000 sterling worth of property destroyed or damaged, and
1,315 casualties had been suffered, of which 304 were fatal.
The aims of the insurgents were disclosed in a proclamation which
referred to the administration in Ireland as a "long usurpation by a
foreign people and government." It declared that the Irish Republican
Brotherhood--the same organisation that planned and carried out the
Phoenix Park murders in 1882--had now seized the right moment for
"reviving the old traditions of Irish nationhood," and announced that
the new Irish Republic was a sovereign independent State, which was
entitled to claim the allegiance of every Irish man and woman.
The rebellion was the subject of debates in both Houses of Parliament on
the 10th and 11th of May--Mr. Birrell having in the interval, to use a
phrase of Carlyle's, "taken himself and his incompetence
elsewhere"--when Mr. Dillon, speaking for the Nationalist Party, poured
forth a flood of passionate sympathy with the rebels, declaring that he
was proud of youths who could boast of having slaughtered British
soldiers, and he denounced the Government for suppressing the rising in
"a sea of blood." The actual fact was, that out of a large number of
prisoners taken red-handed in the act of armed rebellion who were
condemned to death after trial by court-martial, the great majority were
reprieved, and thirteen in all were executed. Whether such measures
deserved the frightful description coined by Mr. Dillon's flamboyant
rhetoric everybody can judge for himself, after considering whether in
any other country or at any other period of the world's history, active
assistance of a foreign enemy--for that is what it amounted to--has been
visited with a more lenient retribution.
On the same day that Mr. Dillon thus justified the whole basis of
Ulster's unchanging attitude towards Nationalism by blurting out his
sympathy with England's enemies, Mr. Asquith announced that he was
himself going to Ireland to investigate matters on the spot. These two
events, Mr. Dillon's speech and the Prime Minister's visit to
Dublin--where he certainly exhibited no stern anger against the rebels,
even if the stories were exaggerated which reported him to have shown
them ostentatious friendliness--went far to transform what had been a
wretched fiasco into a success. Cowed at first by their complete
failure, the rebels found encouragement in the complacency of the Prime
Minister, and the fear or sympathy, whichever it was, of the Nationalist
Party. From that moment they rapidly increased in influence, until they
proved two years later that they had become the predominant power all
over Ireland except in Ulster.
In Ulster the rebellion was regarded with mixed feelings. The strongest
sentiment was one of horror at the treacherous blow dealt to the Empire
while engaged in a life-and-death struggle with a foreign enemy. But,
was it unpardonably Pharisaic if there was also some self-glorification
in the thought that Ulstermen in this respect were not as other men
were? There was also a prevalent feeling that after what had occurred
they would hear no more of Home Rule, at any rate during the war. It
appeared inconceivable that any sane Government could think of handing
over the control of Ireland in time of war to people who had just proved
their active hostility to Great Britain in so unmistakable a fashion.
But they were soon undeceived. Mr. Asquith, on his return, told the
House of Commons what he had learnt during his few days' sojourn in
Ireland. His first proposition was that the existing machinery of
Government in Ireland had completely broken down. That was undeniable.
It was the natural fruit of the Birrell regime. Mr. Asquith was himself
responsible for it. But no more strange or illogical conclusion could be
drawn from it than that which Mr. Asquith proceeded to propound. This
was that there was now "a unique opportunity for a new departure for the
settlement of outstanding problems "--which, when translated from
Asquithian into plain English, meant that now was the time for Home
Rule. The pledge to postpone the question till after the war was to be
swept aside, and, instead of building up by sound and sensible
administration what Mr. Birrel's abnegation of government had allowed to
crumble into "breakdown," the rebels were to be rewarded for traffic
with the enemy and destruction of the central parts of Dublin, with
great loss of life, by being allowed to point to the triumphant success
of their activity, which was certain to prove the most effective of all
possible propaganda for their political ideals in Ireland.
Some regard, however, was still to be paid to the promise of an Amending
Bill. The Prime Minister repeated that no one contemplated the coercion
of Ulster; that an attempt must be made to come to agreement about the
terms on which the Home Rule Act could be brought into immediate
operation; and that the Cabinet had deputed to Mr. Lloyd George the task
of negotiating to this end with both parties in Ireland. Accordingly,
Mr. Lloyd George, then Secretary of State for War, interviewed Sir
Edward Carson on the one hand and Mr. Redmond and Mr. Devlin on the
other, and submitted to them separately the proposals which he said the
Cabinet were prepared to make.[93]
On the 6th of June Carson explained the Cabinet's proposals at a special
meeting of the Ulster Unionist Council held in private. His task was an
extremely difficult one, for the advice he had to offer was utterly
detestable to himself, and he knew it would be no less so to his
hearers. And the latter, profound as was their trust in him as their
leader, were men of singularly independent judgment and quite capable of
respectfully declining to take any course they did not themselves
approve. Indeed, Carson emphasised the fact that he could not, and had
not attempted to, bind the Council to take the same view of the
situation as himself. At the same time he clearly and frankly stated
what his own opinion was, saying: "I would indeed be a poor leader of a
great movement if I hesitated to express my own views of any proposition
put before you."[94]
His speech, which took nearly two hours in delivery, was a perfect model
of lucid exposition and convincing argument. He reviewed in close detail
the course of events that had led to the present situation. He
maintained from first to last the highest ground of patriotism.
Mentioning that numerous correspondents had asked why he did not
challenge the Nationalist professions of loyalty two years before at the
beginning of the war, which had since then been so signally falsified,
he answered:
"Because I had no desire to show a dissentient Ireland to the
Germans. I am glad, even with what has happened, that we played the
game, and if we had to do it again we would play the game. And then
suddenly came the rebellion in Dublin. I cannot find words to
describe my own horror when I heard of it. For I am bound to admit
to you that I was not thinking merely of Ulster; I was thinking of
the war; I was thinking, as I am always thinking, of what will
happen if we are beaten in the war. I was thinking of the
sacrifice of human lives at the front, and in Gallipoli, and at
Kut, when suddenly I heard that the whole thing was interrupted by,
forsooth, an Irish rebellion--by what Mr. Dillon in the House of
Commons called a clean fight! It is not Ulster or Ireland that is
now at stake: it is the British Empire. We have therefore to
consider not merely a local problem, but a great Imperial
problem--how to win the war."
He then outlined the representations that had been made to him by the
Cabinet as to the injury to the Allied cause resulting from the
unsettled Irish question--the disturbance of good relations with the
United States, whence we were obtaining vast quantities of munitions;
the bad effect of our local differences on opinion in Allied and neutral
countries. He admitted that these evil effects were largely due to false
and hostile propaganda to which the British Government weakly neglected
to provide an antidote; he believed they were grossly exaggerated. But
in time of war they could not contend with their own Government nor be
deaf to its appeals, especially when that Government contained all their
own party leaders, on whose support they had hitherto leaned.
One of Carson's chief difficulties was to make men grasp the
significance of the fact that Home Rule was now actually established by
Act of Parliament. The point that the Act was on the Statute-book was
constantly lost sight of, with all that it implied. He drove home the
unwelcome truth that simple repeal of that Act was not practical
politics. The only hope for Ulster to escape going under a Parliament in
Dublin lay in the promised Amending Bill. But they had no assurance how
much that Bill, when produced, would do for them. Was it likely, he
asked, to do more than was now offered by the Government?
He then told the Council what Mr. Lloyd George's proposals were. The
Cabinet offered on the one hand a "clean cut," not indeed of the whole
of Ulster, but of the six most Protestant counties, and on the other to
bring the Home Rule Act, so modified, into immediate operation. He
pointed out that none of them could contemplate using the U.V.F. for
fighting purposes at home after the war; and that, even if such a thing
were thinkable, they could not expect to get more by forcible resistance
to the Act than what was now offered by legislation.
But to Carson himself, and to all who listened to him that day, the
heartrending question was whether they could suffer a separation to be
made between the Loyalists in the six counties and those in the other
three counties of the Province. It could only be done, Carson declared,
if, after considering all the circumstances of the case as he unfolded
it to them, the delegates from Cavan, Monaghan, and Donegal could make
the self-sacrifice of releasing the other counties from the obligation
to stand or fall together. Carson ended by saying that he did not intend
to take a vote--he "could be no party to having Ulstermen vote one
against the other." What was to be done must be done by agreement, or
not at all. He offered to confer separately with the delegates from the
three omitted counties, and the Council adjourned till the 12th of June
to enable this conference to be held.
In the interval a large number of the delegates held meetings of their
local associations, most of which passed resolutions in favour of
accepting the Government's proposals. But there was undoubtedly a
widespread feeling that it would be a betrayal of the Loyalists of
Cavan, Monaghan, and Donegal, and even a positive breach of the
Covenant, to accept exclusion from the Home Rule Act for only a portion
of Ulster. This was, it is true, a misunderstanding of the strict
meaning of the Covenant, which had been expressly conditioned so as not
to extend to such unforeseen circumstances as the war had brought
about[95]; but there was a general desire to avoid if possible taking
technical points, and both Carson himself and the Council were ready to
sacrifice the opportunity for a tolerable settlement should the
representatives of the three counties not freely consent to what was
proposed.
In a spirit of self-sacrifice which deeply touched every member of the
Council, this consent was given. Carson had obtained leave for Lord
Farnham to return from the Army in France to be present at the meeting.
Lord Farnham, as a delegate from Cavan, made a speech at the adjourned
meeting on the 12th which filled his hearers with admiration. That he
was almost heart-broken by the turn events had taken he made no attempt
to conceal; and his distress was shared by those who heard his moving
words. But he showed that he possessed the instinct of statesmanship
which compelled him to recognise, in spite of the powerful pull of
sentiment and self-interest in the opposite direction, that the course
recommended by Carson was the path of wisdom. With breaking voice he
thanked the latter "for the clearness, and the fairness, and the
manliness with which he has put the deplorable situation that has arisen
before us, and for his manly advice as leader "; and he then read a
resolution that had been passed earlier in the day by the delegates of
the three counties, which, after recording a protest against any
settlement excluding them from Ulster, expressed sorrowful acquiescence,
on grounds of the larger patriotism, in whatever decision might be come
to in the matter by their colleagues from the six counties.
It was the saddest hour the Ulster Unionist Council ever spent. Men not
prone to emotion shed tears. It was the most poignant ordeal the Ulster
leader ever passed through. But it was just one of those occasions when
far-seeing statesmanship demands the ruthless silencing of promptings
that spring from emotion. Many of those who on that terrible 12th of
June were most torn by doubt as to the necessity for the decision
arrived at, realised before long that their leader had never been guided
by surer insight than in the counsel he gave them that day.
The Resolution adopted by the Council was a lengthy one. After reciting
the unaltered attachment of Ulster to the Union, it placed on record the
appeal that had been made by the Government on patriotic grounds for a
settlement of the Irish difficulty, which the Council did not think it
right at such a time of national emergency to resist; but it was careful
to reserve, in case the negotiations should break down from any other
cause, complete freedom to revert to "opposition to the whole policy of
Home Rule for Ireland."
Meantime the Nationalist leaders had been submitting Mr. Lloyd George's
proposals to their own people, and on the 10th of June Mr. Redmond made
a speech in Dublin from which it appeared that he was submitting a very
different proposal to that explained by Carson in Belfast. For Mr.
Redmond told his Dublin audience that, while the Home Rule Act was to
come into operation at once, the exclusion of the six counties was to be
only for the period of the war and twelve months afterwards. That would,
of course, have been even less favourable to Ulster than the terms
offered by Mr. Asquith and rejected by Carson in March 1914. Exclusion
for the period of the war meant nothing; it would have been useless to
Ulster; it was no concession whatever; and Carson would have refused, as
he did in 1914, even to submit it to the Unionist Council in Belfast.
Mr. Lloyd George, who must have known this, had told him quite clearly
that there was to be a "definite clean cut," with no suggestion of a
time limit. There was, however, an idea that after the war an Imperial
Conference would be held, at which the whole constitutional relations of
the component nations of the British Empire would be reviewed, and that
the permanent status of Ireland would then come under reconsideration
with the rest. In this sense the arrangement now proposed was spoken of
as "provisional"; but both Mr. Lloyd George and the Prime Minister made
it perfectly plain that the proposed exclusion of the six Ulster
counties from Home Rule could never be reversed except by a fresh Act of
Parliament.
But when the question was raised by Mr. Redmond in the House of Commons
on the 24th of July, in a speech of marked moderation, he explained that
he had understood the exclusion, like all the rest of the scheme, to be
strictly "provisional," with the consequence that it would come to an
end automatically at the end of the specified period unless prolonged by
new legislation; and he refused to respond to an earnest appeal by Mr.
Asquith not to let slip this opportunity of obtaining, with the consent
of the Unionist Party, immediate Home Rule for the greater part of
Ireland, more especially as Mr. Redmond himself had disclaimed any
desire to bring Ulster within the Home Rule jurisdiction without her own
consent.
The negotiations for settlement thus fell to the ground, and the bitter
sacrifice which Ulster had brought herself to offer, in response to the
Government's urgent appeal, bore no fruit, unless it was to afford one
more proof of her loyalty to England and the Empire. She was to find
that such proofs were for the most part thrown away, and merely were
used by her enemies, and by some who professed to be her friends, as a
starting-point for demands on her for further concessions. But, although
all British parties in turn did their best to impress upon Ulster that
loyalty did not pay, she never succeeded in learning the lesson
sufficiently to be guided by it in her political conduct.
FOOTNOTES:
[93] Mr. Lloyd George's memory was at fault when he said in the House of
Commons on the 7th of February, 1922, that on the occasion referred to
in the text he had seen Sir Edward Carson and Mr. Redmond together.
[94] The quotations from this speech, which was never published, are
from a report privately taken by the Ulster Unionist Council.
[95] See _ante_, p. 105.