Asquith (48 page)

When drafting the third Home Rule Bill the Cabinet had one question of great difficulty to settle. Was the precedent of the two Gladstonian bills to be followed, and the whole of Ireland to be treated as a single unit? Or was Ulster, or at least a part of Ulster, to be excluded? Anything short of the first solution would be most unwelcome to the Nationalists. The degree of devolution they were offered was in itself mild enough. The Dublin parliament was to be so circumscribed in its powers as to be closer to a “ glorified county council ” than to a sovereign assembly.

Nevertheless its prospective powers were sufficient to provoke the Ulster Protestants to a paroxysm of hostility. In February, 1910, Sir Edward Carson, a Southern Irishman of Italian origin who sat for Dublin University and combined great personal charm, hypochondriacal neurasthenia, a huge law practice, and a strong taste for melodrama, had become leader of the Ulster Unionists. His choice as chief of the narrow, charmless, dour bigots of Belfast was almost as bizarre as that of Parnell, a generation before, as head of the Nationalists. And he was almost equally effective. In September, 1911, he responded to the new Home Rule prospect which had been opened up by the passage of the Parliament Act with the most extreme threat of resistance. “We must be prepared... the morning Home Rule is passed,” he told a large audience at Craigavon, “ ourselves to become responsible for the government of the Protestant Province of Ulster.”

There were prominent members of the Cabinet who could not be insensitive to the Ulster problem. Churchill, never lacking in filial piety, was unlikely to forget that his father had responded to the first Home Rule Bill by announcing that “ Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right.”
¹
And Lloyd George, closely in touch with the leaders of the
Free Churches, knew the political dangers of forcing unwilling Protestants under Catholic rule. The fact that Home Rule could be presented as “Rome Rule ” was a much greater liability to the pre-1914 Liberals than it would be to any party in the Britain of today.

¹
_{The moral force, but not the electoral effectiveness, of Lord Randolph’s slogan was however somwhat reduced when it became known (on the publication of his son's biography in 1906) that he had written a contemporary letter to James Fitzgibbon saying: "I decided some time ago that if the G. O. M. went for Home Rule the Organge card would be the one to play. Please G
od it may turn out the ace of trumps and not the two."}

There was no likelihood of the Conservatives failing to exploit this—or any other promising line of attack. To many of them (although Bonar Law was a notable exception) the plight of the northern Protestants made little instinctive appeal. Balfour, and the whole Cecil connection, found the Ulstermen deeply antipathetic. Lord Hugh Cecil’s one attempt to address an Orange rally was a dismal failure. Balfour himself avoided all such distasteful enterprises. His knowledge of Ireland was greater than that of any other Prime Minister of the last hundred years, but his interest was in trying to preserve the Union as a whole and not in salvaging an Ulster corner from the wreck. Lansdowne held the same views in a still more accentuated form. He was a Kerry landlord, and no concessions for Antrim or Armagh could ever have changed his attitude towards Home Rule. But they all quickly recognised that “ the Orange Card ” was the one to play. And they were prepared to play it with the utmost ruthlessness. The Conservatives of those days were sick with office hunger. Three successive electoral defeats had severely shaken their self-confidence. The lesser men amongst them became consumed by a mixture of hatred and jealousy for the long-lived Liberal Government. The intellectual blandness which was a characteristic of Asquith’s leadership—and one copied from him by some of the other ministers—they found peculiarly irritating. The Liberals had established themselves as the natural mandarins of Whitehall, and the Conservatives had become the lesser-known, inexperienced men. When would it end? From the perspective of today it is easy to look back on the last pre-Great War years as the obvious swan song of the old Liberal Party. At the time it was much less obvious that the swan was going to die.

The epoch-barrier of August, 1914 could not be foreseen. If the next general election could be taken in the Liberals’ own time, per-slogan was however somewhat reduced when it became known (on the publication of his son’s biography in 1906) that he had written a contemporary letter to James Fitzgibbon saying: “ I decided some time ago that if the G.O.M. went for Home Rule the Orange Card would be the one to play. Please God it may turn out the ace of trumps and not the two.” perhaps in the spring of 1915, with a successful Irish settlement behind them, who could be sure that they would not win again? Then the Unionists would assume the appearance of a permanent opposition. This was an eventuality which had to be prevented at all costs. Bonar Law’s leadership between 1912 and 1914 was in part an expression of an almost “ poor white ” sense of inferiority,
¹
and in part based upon a deliberate tactic of using the Ulster issue to force the Government out of office. “ I am afraid I shall have to show myself very vicious, Mr. Asquith, this session,” Law said as they walked together in procession to the House of Lords to listen to the King’s Speech in February, 1912. “ I hope you will understand,” he added, with the simplicity which was one of his few engaging characteristics.

“ I had no hesitation in reassuring him on that point,” Asquith recorded,
^a
and by so doing gave a good example of his bland style. But did he really understand just how “ vicious ” Bonar Law and the other Unionists were prepared to be, not only in 1912, but in 1913 and 1914 as well? Did he realise the extent to which the Ulster struggle, unlike that over the veto of the Lords, was to be carried on outside the parliamentary arena?

In one sense it might seem that the Government had prepared themselves well for trouble. They decided to present the Home Rule Bill in a form which would be acceptable to the Nationalists, but to leave a line of retreat if Ulster proved adamant. After a crucial Cabinet meeting on February 6th, Asquith reported to the King that a discussion had taken place as to whether the Ulster counties with large Protestant majorities should be allowed to contract out of the Bill: The subject was debated at great length and from a number of diverse points of view. In the end the Cabinet acquiesced in the
conclusions suggested by Lord Crewe and strongly recommended by the Prime Minister,
viz:

(a)
that the Bill as introduced should apply to the whole of Ireland;

(b) that the Irish leaders should from the first be given clearly to understand that the Government held themselves free to make such changes in the Bill as fresh evidence of facts, or the pressure of British opinion, may render expedient;

(c) that if, in the light of such evidence or indication of public opinion, it becomes clear as the Bill proceeds that some special treatment must be provided for the Ulster counties, the Government will be ready to recognise the necessity either by amendment of the Bill, or by not pressing it on under the provisions of the Parliament Act. In the meantime, careful and confidential inquiry is to be made as to the real extent and character of the Ulster resistance
.
^b

The nature of the Government’s “ confidential inquiry ” in Ulster has never been revealed, but all the public evidence which emerged from that province (or at least the north-east corner of it) pointed to a highly-organised but deep-rooted resistance. The English Unionists stoked up the agitation and made unprecedented offers of illegal support. F. E. Smith, who had been quite willing to throw over Ulster in the 1910 coalition negotiations, suddenly discovered that a birthday on the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, combined with his affiliations in Liverpool politics, made him an honorary Orangeman. He became Carson’s principal henchman in Belfast. In September, 1912, he watched him, as the first of 471,444, so it was claimed, sign the “ Solemn Covenant ” in which the signatories individually pledged themselves never to recognise the authority of a Dublin Parliament; and in the following year he acted as his “ galloper ” at a review of 7,000 Ulster Volunteers. Throughout the agitation these two leaders of the English bar, both of whom were later to be Law Officers under Asquith, vied with each other in the calculated extremity of their language.

They could not go too far for the Orangemen. There was never any sign that the merchants, manufacturers and ministers of religion of Belfast and the surrounding counties, or their followers, ever found these English lawyers too extreme and irresponsible for their taste. Ulster may have been “ a business community, desiring rest,” as Carson once put it to Asquith. But the Orangemen were fanatics
before they were businessmen. Nor were Carson and Smith ever in much danger of going too far for Bonar Law. The new leader’s golden rule was to be as unlike Balfour as possible. He never attempted to steer a course inside that of his more extreme followers. He looked always, at this stage, to his reputation
inside
and not
outside
the Unionist Party. As a result he fully kept his promise to be “ very vicious ” that session. He denounced the Government for being as corrupt as it was revolutionary. He talked of its Irish policy as being ‘ a conspiracy as treacherous as ever has been formed against the life of a great nation.” He accused Asquith, across the table of the House of Commons, of not even having any convictions to sell, and at Edinburgh of a crime against the Crown greater “ than has ever been committed by any minister who had ever held power.”

From behind the sad eyes of Bonar Law the tide of quiet violence poured out. Its first high-water mark came at Blenheim on July 29th, 1912. There, before a gathering of 15,000 Unionist stalwarts, who were also addressed by Carson and Smith, he announced:

I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I should not be prepared to support them, and in which, in my belief, they would not be supported by the overwhelming majority of the British people.
^c

Nor was there any length to which Bonar Law was not prepared to go to get the Government out. One night in May, after dinner at Buckingham Palace, he told the King:

Your only chance is that they (the Government) should resign within two years. If they don’t, you must either accept the Home Rule Bill, or dismiss
your
 
Ministers and choose others who will support you in vetoing it: and in either case, half your subjects will think you have acted against them. . . . They may say that your Assent is a purely formal act and the prerogative of veto is dead. That was true as long as there was a buffer
¹
between you and the House of Commons, but they have destroyed this buffer and it is true no longer.
^d

During the first parliamentary circuit
²
of the Home Rule Bill,
therefore, Asquith was not without warning that a crisis of unprecedented difficulty was building up over Ulster.

¹
_{By this he meant the pre-Parliament Act House of Lords.}

²
_{This lasted from April nth, 1912 to January 30th, 1913. A laborious committee stage occupied much of the summer and autumn. Then, on January 16th, the House of Commons gave the bill a third reading by a majority of 109. A fortnight later it was thrown out on second reading by
the Lords by a vote of 326 to 69. In this and in the two subsequent sessions the Welsh Church Disestablishment Bill followed an almost exactly parallel course.}

But neither during that circuit nor during the second, much shorter one
^2
3
did he make a firm move for a negotiated settlement along the lines of the Cabinet letter of February 6th, 1912. The fact that he neither did this, nor deployed the full force of the criminal law against those who sent seditious threats echoing from Belfast to Blenheim and back again has often been made the chief count against his peace-time leadership.

Yet it is easy to see why he took no precipitate action. In politics he was never a restless man. The whole technique of his statesmanship was to watch events calmly until he saw an opportunity for effective intervention. “ A sudden curve developed of which I took immediate advantage,” was his typical description, previously quoted,
⁴
of how he solved the Cabinet naval crisis of 1909. In Irish affairs, no such curve showed itself during 1912 and 1913. It was unlikely to do so. The Parliament Act procedure put a premium on delay. The first two circuits were dummy runs. Why should anyone settle until they saw what the disposition of the forces was likely to be when it came to the final confrontation?

Independently of Asquith’s character, this was the position of both sides at this stage in the dispute. The Nationalists and many of the Liberal back-benchers would not countenance the division of Ireland until they were convinced that this was the only way to avoid civil war. There was no reason why they should. There was a great case, economic, administrative and mystical, for a united Ireland. Asquith himself felt the force of it. “ . . . Ireland is a nation, not two nations, but one nation,” he said in Dublin in July, 1912. But even had he not done so, and even if he could have persuaded all the Liberal back-benchers to fall easily into line, there would still have remained the problem of the Nationalists. For them to have abandoned any part of the country at the first whiff of braggadocio from Craigavon would have been political suicide. And with Redmond against him Asquith had no parliamentary majority. There was nothing discreditable in recognising this fact. So long as the Irish were in the Imperial Parliament their votes were as good as anybody else’s and they were fully entitled to every scrap of influence which they could extract from them.