Asquith (55 page)

The Prime Minister’s decision to take over the War Office proved a successful and steadying move. “ The soldiers trusted Asquith,” was Mr. A. P. Ryan’s summing up; “ his massive common sense and refusal to be stampeded into the excitement of the moment proved invaluable.”
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Nevertheless the Curragh incident and its repercussions left a legacy of bitterness and unrest in the army—particularly that part of it stationed in Ireland—which could not quickly be eradicated. This feeling was expressed with great forthrightness in a report written by Major-General Fergusson about April 20th. One of the troubles, he said, was the common belief that the General Staff would resign when the crisis came, accompanied by a conviction that “certain Officers holding high appointments, in and out of the War Office, are in the confidence of the Ulster Party, and are practically working against the Government and the constituted authority of the army.” Nor had the soft treatment of Gough and his three colonels helped. "These Officers returned covered with glory, while those who had taken the other line had had to put up with misrepresentations and reproach from their relations and friends. It is not surprising that many of them, especially the younger, are resentful, and inclined to think that they ' backed the wrong horse'
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This document was at once an encouragement to firm civilian control of the army and an indication of how much damage had been done by Seely and Paget.

The state of the army apart, Asquith’s Irish worries during that April would have been crushing to a man of less equable temperament. The King was pressing him hard to make further concessions to Ulster. In the week before Easter he had received what he described as
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a rather hysterical letter from G.R.” This communication was an extreme example of royal pressure in favour of a particular policy.

The King wanted the six counties to be allowed to contract out without a plebiscite and for an indefinite period.

“Surely you could persuade Mr. Redmond and his friends ‘ to go to this length ’ for the sake of peace, which the whole country is longing for,” he wrote. “ I trust that you will lose no time to renew your conversations with Mr. Bonar Law and Sir E. Carson as you promised me. I repeat what I said to you last week, that I have every confidence in you. I have also absolute confidence in your ability to bring about a peaceful solution, whenever you put in force the great powers you possess. You appreciate I know the terrible position in which I shall be placed if that solution is not found. My duty will be to leave nothing undone which lies within my power to save Ireland from what you have yourself described as civil strife.”
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But Asquith believed that he had already forced Redmond to the limit of what was reasonable. In addition, before any further meeting with Law or Carson could be arranged, there occurred the highly provocative illegality of the Ulster gun-running at Larne. This took place on the night of Friday, April 24th, and was reported to Birrell in the following telegram sent
via
Dublin Castle on the morning of the 25th:

About 8 p.m. last night a large body of Ulster Volunteers Force armed with truncheons numbering about 800 mobilised at Larne under Sir William Adair and Major McCalmont,
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They drew a cordon round the harbour and vicinity and allowed no one to pass except a few on business; police and Customs officers particularly excluded; signals from sea had been observed and large numbers of motor cars arrived. Two steamers believed “ Mountjoy ” and “ Millswater ” discharged cargoes of what appeared to be arms and ammunition which were conveyed away by motor cars. Reporting fully today. Telegraph and telephone communication interrupted.
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Aberdeen, the Viceroy, followed up this message with a telegram to Asquith urging the immediate arrest of McCalmont and Adair, and asking for authority to proceed even though he judged that “ the persons named and other leaders will be prepared to resist.” This request—and other possible courses of action—were considered by the Cabinet on the Monday morning. Three methods of procedure suggested by the Irish Law Officers were rejected. Instead it was
decided, on the advice of Simon, that the proper course was to prosecute by what sounded the somewhat ineffective method of “ exhibiting an information ” in Dublin. Eventually, after Cabinets on four successive mornings, even this method of proceeding was abandoned. “ Please do not sign informations until further notice,” Asquith telegraphed to Birrell in Dublin as soon as the Thursday Cabinet broke up; and that was the end of the matter.

The pressures which pushed the Cabinet towards this retreat were typical of those which always destroyed the possibility of resolute action against Ulster illegality. The King was firmly against prosecution, of course. But so was Birrell, the member of the Cabinet with direct responsibility, and so too was Redmond. The latter wrote insistently to Asquith on April 27th. He did not believe that any Irish problem could be solved by the application of the criminal law. Most insidious of all the influences, however, was the line taken by the Unionist leaders in the House of Commons debate on the Tuesday and Wednesday. Carson, in particular, let drop a few hints of moderation. Perhaps these were an invitation to a settlement. The Government, at any rate, was only too prepared to hope that they were and to abandon the possibly exacerbating prosecutions.

Partly in genuine pursuit of this hope, and partly to satisfy the King, Asquith took part in further secret conversations on May 5th. Edwin Montagu’s house was once again the meeting place, but on this occasion the Prime Minister was confronted by both Bonar Law and Carson. Law did not depart from his usual mood of dogged pessimism, and the meeting was not fruitful. His party, he announced, were growingly averse to any kind of settlement.” Nevertheless a little procedural progress was made. It was agreed that a committee stage for the Home Rule Bill would serve no purpose, and that it was better that any changes should be incorporated in a separate amending bill which would receive the Royal Assent on the same day as the Home Rule Bill itself. But it was not agreed what should be in this amending bill, and such agreement was of course a necessary prelude to its running a quick parliamentary course over the twin hurdles of the Liberal and Nationalist majority in the House of Commons and the Unionist majority in the House of Lords. Law and Carson insisted that the Home Rule Bill ought not to leave the Commons for the last time until the terms of a settlement were agreed.

Asquith was unable to accept this last demand, if only for the
obvious reason that it would have given the opposition complete control over the whole Home Rule parliamentary timetable. He was determined to get rid of the major bill before Whitsun, and this, at the price of another day of almost unprecedented disorder in the House of Commons, was satisfactorily accomplished. In the meantime, the Cabinet, to the accompaniment of insistent royal requests that the Ulster case should be met as completely as possible, was engaged in drafting the amending bill.

The terms were announced after Whitsun
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and the bill was introduced into the Upper House by Lord Crewe on June 23 rd. It was obviously sensible to see what the peers would do to this measure before wasting the time of the House of Commons upon it. There was no need to wait long for an answer. Within little more than a week the Lords had re-fashioned the amending bill so as to make it accord with the most extreme Unionist demands. All the nine counties of Ulster were to be excluded, without plebiscites and without a time limit. For the first time Asquith was brought up against a complete
impasse.
Within a month the Home Rule Bill, protected by the Parliament Act, would at last be ready for the Royal Assent. Trouble with the King would no doubt have to be faced, but even assuming that this was overcome, how was the measure to be implemented? It would have been difficult enough to enforce it upon parts of Ulster in any event, but once the Government had publicly declared in favour of some form of exclusion, this became simply impossible. Yet the Lords would only allow the bill to be amended in a form that was unacceptable to the majority in the House of Commons. A settlement by negotiation had therefore become an urgent necessity for the Government. Asquith could only hope that the opposition, as the critical moment approached, had become equally worried by the dangers of continued deadlock.

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_{They were almost identical with those which Asquith had offered in March. Each Ulster country could opt out by plebiscite for a period of six years.}

The time had clearly arrived to put into practice his theory that negotiations were most likely to succeed when the pressure for settlement had become urgent upon both sides. On May 3rd Speaker Lowther had written to Asquith suggesting that an all-party conference on the Irish problem might be held in his library. Asquith wrote a stalling reply, and later returned similar answers to the King, who, on
May 17th and 23 rd, and again 011 June 19th and 29th, had pressed hard for a meeting between Redmond and Carson, under the aegis either of the Speaker or of himself. The Prime Minister thought that May and June were too early for serious negotiations of any sort, and even in the first half of July he believed that they should be kept as informal as possible in order to avoid what he regarded as the disaster of a formal failure. But during these July weeks he used a variety of go-betweens and created an almost over-complicated private net. Lloyd George saw Redmond and Dillon together; J. A. Spender, on Asquith’s behalf, saw Dillon alone; and the Master of Elibank (by then Lord Murray) was brought in for a series of negotiations with Lord Rothermere
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and later with Carson.

Asquith’s object in these discussions was to try to narrow the difference to a simple and limited question of geography. By mid-July he thought that he had succeeded. Everything was still tentative, but if acceptable partitions of Tyrone or Fermanagh could be agreed or imposed, both sides seemed likely to acquiesce in the exclusion, without a time limit, of the resultant five or five-and-a-half county
bloc.

On July 16th, accordingly, Asquith told the King that the moment for a conference had at last arrived, and proposed that it should be held at Buckingham Palace. He broached the matter at a State Ball:

I found the royal person in a tent in the garden and had nearly half an hour with him. He was full of interest and excitement about the Conference—and made one really good suggestion—namely that the Speaker should preside.

We arranged that I should write a memorandum for the
King, advising a Conference and that the King should send a cordial reply amounting to an invitation. He was anxious that Arthur Balfour shd. come in, but I objected to this strongly, as A.J.B. is in this matter a real wrecker. As between Crewe and Ll.G.—the K. was (with me) in favour of the latter.

Asquith got his way about both Balfour and Lloyd George, although the choice of the latter involved a delicate and excusably disingenuous letter to Crewe. “ I find that our Irish friends are very insistent that Lloyd George should be our second man,” Asquith wrote, “ believing as they do (perhaps partly from the experience of victims) that his peculiar gifts of blandishment and negotiation would be invaluable.”
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Crewe made no difficulty about the change,
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and the conference was quickly constituted. Asquith, Lloyd George, Redmond and Dillon confronted Bonar Law, Lansdowne, Carson and Captain Craig.
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The first meeting was held on July 21st and the last on July 24th. Despite all Asquith’s careful preparation of the ground, Lloyd George’s “ blandishments,” and the choice of meeting place, with the atmosphere of national unity it was intended to convey, the conference was a complete failure. Mr. Robert Blake, in his biography of Bonar Law, states forthrightly that the Unionists never expected success and “ only attended in deference to the King’s wishes.”
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Their expectations were not disappointed. Two subjects were marked out for discussion—area and time limit. After some initial scuffling, it was agreed that area should be discussed first. Asa result the second subject was never reached. The conference, in Churchill’s phrase, lost itself in “ the muddy by-ways of Fermanagh and Tyrone.” After the second meeting, on July 22nd, Asquith wrote Miss Stanley an account of how this happened:

We sat again this morning for an hour and a half, discussing maps and figures, and always getting back to that most damnable creation of the perverted ingenuity of man—the County of Tyrone. The extraordinary feature of the discussion was the complete agreement (in principle) of Redmond & Carson.

Each said ‘ I must have the whole of Tyrone, or die; but I quite understand why you say the same.’ The Speaker who incarnates bluff unimaginative English sense, of course cut in: ‘ When each of two people say they must have the whole, why not cut it in half? ’ They wd. neither of them look at such a suggestion. L.G. and I worked hard to get rid of the county areas altogether and proceed on Poor Law Unions wh. afford a good basis of give and take. But again both Irish lots would have none of it. Nothing could have been more amicable in tone or more desperately fruitless in result. We agreed to meet again tomorrow, when we shall make a final—tho’ I fear futile—effort to carve out a ‘ block ’. I have rarely felt more hopeless in any practical affair: an impasse, with unspeakable consequences, upon a matter which to English eyes seems inconceivably small, & to Irish eyes immeasurably big. Isn’t it a real tragedy ?