Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (27 page)

F
OR another generation, though, Empire would not let them be. The Afghans were troublesome again; the Persians rejected their protectorate; the Indians were restive; Sierra Leoneans went on strike; Kenyans rebelled; the Egyptians murdered their Sirdar, second in succession to Kitchener himself. Above all the British were plagued by the anxieties of the closest, oldest and most reproachful of all their possessions, Ireland: for it was in Ireland, even before the Great War ended, that the prototype of imperial revolution was launched—the precursor of all the coups, rebellions and civil wars which were to harass the British Empire from now until the end.

The English had been in Ireland for nearly 800 years. The Empire in France had gone; the Empire in America had come and gone; the vast Empire of Victoria had achieved its climax and now entered its decline; through it all they had kept their hold upon Ireland from the fortress-palace of their Viceroys, Dublin Castle. The Irish, for their part, consistently resented this occupation. Overwhelmingly Catholic in a predominantly Anglican Empire, proud of traditions as ancient as the English, they were never really reconciled to government from London: even the deliberate settling of Scottish Protestant families in Ireland, which gave some counties of the north a loyal nonconformist majority, had failed to stifle the perennial Irish instinct of rebellion. Time and again the Catholic Irish had risen, always to be subdued, and nothing it seemed could quench their spirit for long. For several centuries an Anglo-Irish gentry, the Protestant Ascendancy, had owned most of the land and governed the destinies of the country, but the Irish still honoured their own ways, preserving their national identity through every
rebuff, and periodically giving their hearts to some new political Messiah.
1

Many Englishmen refrained from reading Irish history, wrote Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, ‘but it is a brand of knowledge as indispensable to the statesman or publicist as morbid anatomy to the surgeon’. He was right.
2
Ireland was the running sore of English politics. The Liberal Party had been split asunder by it, political reputations were made or broken on it. In the years before the Great War the House of Commons habitually devoted two days a year to Indian affairs, and one to colonial, but seldom a debate passed without a passionate exchange on Ireland. To most Englishmen it was a domestic problem, concerning a constituent part of the United Kingdom: but to the Irish, and their sympathizers abroad, it was a matter of Empire, and the Irish patriots habitually claimed to represent all the subject peoples in their struggle for liberty.

The Liberal solution for the problem was Home Rule—limited self-government for Ireland—but two Home Rule Bills had failed to get Parliamentary assent, one being defeated in the Commons, the other vetoed in the Lords. The Conservative-Unionists had shelved the issue during their years of power, concentrating instead on social reform in Ireland, but in 1911 the Liberals came back into office dependent upon the Irish vote, and a third Home Rule Bill was introduced. The veto of the peers was now limited to a delaying power of two years, so its passage seemed almost certain. All being well, Ireland would be self-governing within five years. The Irish Nationalist Party, Ireland’s constitutional representatives at Westminster, accepted the promise and worked to implement it, and several Government committees, in London and in Dublin, began to prepare the machinery of Home Rule.

Not everyone, though, viewed the prospect sanguinely. The Conservatives remained immovably hostile—and there was always
the chance that they might return to power before Home Rule became law. The more extreme of the Irish Catholic patriots, including the ultra-secret Republican Brotherhood, would accept nothing but absolute independence. And most fiercely of all, Home Rule was opposed by the Protestants of Ulster in the north.
1
Tough, down-to-earth, implacably anti-Catholic, they wanted nothing of a self-governing Ireland. They vehemently distrusted the southern Irish, with whom they shared little but their island, and they believed that under Home Rule their whole manner of living, not to speak of their thriving industries and well-run commerce, would soon fall prey to Papist or Socialist bigotries. An Ireland run from Dublin would be an affront to the organic hierarchy of Empire—and it was after all Mrs Alexander, wife of the Bishop of Derry, who had most famously expressed the imperial instinct for order and decorum—

The peculiar situation of Ireland was to prove harbinger to the disintegration of Empire itself, and it was brought to a head by the arrival on the coast of Antrim, one spring night in 1914, of a small and undistinguished steamship.

She was a collier, the
Clydevalley
, 460 tons, twenty-eight years old, ex
-Londoner
, ex
-Balniel,
and familiar for years on the regular run between Glasgow and Belfast, the capital of the Irish north. On April 25, 1914, this unlovely vessel, its hull red with rust and blackened with decades of coal-grime, sailed quietly into the small packet-port of Larne, eighteen miles north of Belfast, with a cargo of
25,000 German rifles and 2½ million rounds of ammunition. They were to be used, if need be, to prevent by force the creation of a united self-governing Ireland.

Larne was a pleasant humdrum town, very typical of the Protestant north. Its streets ran gently down a hillside to the harbour, and there was a prominent Protestant church, and a discreet Catholic chapel, and a few shops, and a straggle of offices and warehouses along the water-front, where twice a week there docked the ferry-boat from Stranraer, forty miles away on the Scottish coast. Larne did not seem at all a passionate place. Its social order was secure—there was the Smiley family in the mansion outside town, there was the Protestant Minister in the manse, there was the usual handful of professional families, there were the dockers and seafarers in their cottages at the waterside, there was the Orange Order, the ancient society of Protestant militancy which bound all ranks and classes in sectarian loyalty. The Catholic minority kept to itself, and life in Larne was generally orthodox and uneventful—the rich man in his green demesne, the poor man at the docks.

A visitor indeed might have thought himself not in Ireland at all, that island of vitriol, but over the water in Scotland. The light was a washed, Scottish light, the sea had a clear Scottish glitter, the accents of the people sounded nearer Inverness than Dublin, and when the weather was right you could actually see, dimly beckoning across the Irish Sea, the distant outline of the Wigtown coast. The people of Larne were proud enough of being Ulstermen, but were still attached to Scotland too, one of their most popular holiday trips being a weekend visit, at excursion rates, to the home of their ancestors over the water.

All Protestant Ireland looked metaphorically towards Larne that night, for upon the supply of weapons, so its people believed, depended Ulster’s future. ‘Home Rule’, they had been told by their leaders, ‘is Rome Rule’, and they were prepared to resist it even at the price of rebellion against the British Government at Westminster—of treason, in fact, against the Crown. All classes were united in this resolve, from the baronial industrialists of Belfast, who foresaw economic catastrophe in a self-governing Catholic-dominated Ireland, to the labourers’ wives of the Londonderry slums, who simply
hated Catholics. A Provisional Ulster Government was already in being, a shadow-regime for the north, and the public resolve was passionate, sometimes fanatic. Only guns were needed, to give it teeth.

It was a kind of resistance movement, but of the oddest kind. In Africa it would have been called a revolt against the Imperial Factor, the interference of Whitehall with the affairs of settlers: the Ulster Protestants were intensely loyal to the Crown and to the Empire, but they felt that the Liberal Government’s policies were treacherously mistaken. Far from wishing to leave the Empire, they wished only to remain for ever part of the United Kingdom itself. This underlying loyalty, all the more poignant because it was to become, over the years, increasingly unrequited, gave to the Ulster Movement a character of its own. Though it was potentially revolutionary, half the British Establishment sided with it. The British Army was almost unanimously with these rebels, and so were all the imperial activists, from the cleverest Milnerites to the crudest surviving Jingos.

So as the
Clydevalley
tied up at Larne that night, the Ulster Movement stood ready to split Ireland and bewilder the Empire—for its leaders maintained that compulsory Home Rule for all Irishmen was a threat to that venerable abstraction, the imperial trust.

There was nothing haphazard to it. It was intricate and calculating. Its political chief was the formidable King’s Counsel Sir Edward Carson, leader of the Irish Unionist Party in the House of Commons. Carson was not an Empire man: he was an Irishman, born in Dublin, a lawyer, and his concern was habitually concentrated, in the lawyers’ way, on small intense issues. He was a heavy-weight with a narrow imagination, a Rhodes without an Africa, whose harsh and resonant brogue could be terrifying, and comforting, and even inspiring, but never poetic. Carson was Protestant of course, and his particular kind of rhetoric, ominously flamboyant, exactly suited the passions of the Ulster Protestants, whose dour manners masked such
impetuous beliefs. Carson was a large man, but vulnerable—a worrier, a hypochondriac, a man of second thoughts and hidden doubts: but none of it showed, his imposing unsmiling figure gave confidence to any Protestant assembly, and as long before they had called the enigmatic Parnell the Uncrowned King of Ireland, so now they called this very British sort of Irishman ‘King Carson’.

Beneath Carson’s aegis an army of resistance awaited the outcome of the third Home Rule Bill, laboriously passing through its successive Parliamentary stages. The Ulster Volunteer Force was no raggle-taggle army of idealists. It was as professional and thorough as Carson himself. Its organizers were mostly men of the Ulster gentry, retired soldiers very often, who believed passionately in the unity of the British Empire. Its financiers were the businessmen of Belfast. Its patrons included great Ulster grandees like Lord Londonderry and Lord Dunleath. It had no uniforms and was armed with no better weapons than sporting rifles, shot-guns or even dummy rifles (supplied on demand, 1/8d in pitch pine, 1/6d in spruce): but its organization was sophisticated, and its activities were ubiquitous. Every village in Ulster had its members, and the police knew all about it from the start, loopholes in the law making it theoretically legal. When Carson visited Portadown in 1912, he was escorted through the streets in an open carriage by cavalrymen with bamboo lances, field guns made of wood, infantry with wooden rifles and pipers in neo-military dress.

By 1914 some 50,000 men, aged seventeen to sixty-five, had enlisted in this force. No military sanctions kept them there, but so proud and resolute was the Ulster spirit that the mere threat of expulsion from the ranks was enough to maintain discipline. The army was organized conventionally in divisions, regiments, platoons, and all military services were represented. There was an astute intelligence unit. There were supply and medical branches, artillery, signallers and despatch riders, three squadrons of cavalry. Half the car-owners of Ulster had pledged their vehicles to the transport branch, and there was a register of farmers willing to lend horses and wagons. The force had its own postal service and its own devoted corps of nurses. It had large secret stores of food. It had chaplains. It had a pension scheme for the wounded. It had a headquarters
(the Old Town Hall, Belfast), a slogan (‘For God and Ulster’), a flag (the Red Hand of Ulster).
1

Above all it had a Manifesto. In September, 1912, Carson, consulting Scottish precedents, presented to the people of Ulster a declaration of intent, in the form of a pledge. It was called the Ulster Covenant, it was paraded at meetings throughout Ireland, and nearly half a million Ulster men and women put their signatures to it, some of them in their own blood. This is what it said:

‘
Being
convinced
in
our
consciences
that
Home
Rule
would
be
disastrous
to
the
material
well-being
of
Ulster
as
well
as
the
whole
of
Ireland,
subversive
to
our
civil
and
religious
freedoms,
destructive
of
our
citizenship,
and
perilous
to
the
unity
of
the
Empire,
we
whose
names
are
undersigned,
men
of
Ulster,
loyal
subjects
of
His
Gracious
Majesty
King
George
V,
humbly
relying
on
the
God
whom
our
fathers
in
days
of
stress
and
trial
confidently
trusted,
do
hereby
pledge
ourselves
in
solemn
Covenant
throughout
this
our
time
of
threatened
calamity
to
stand
by
one
another
in
defending
for
our
selves
and
our
children
our
cherished
position
of
equal
citizenship
in
the
United
Kingdom,
and
in
using
all
means
which
may
be
found
necessary
to
defeat
the
present
conspiracy
to
set
up
a
Home
Rule
Parliament
in
Ireland.
 
And
in
the
event
of
such
a
Parliament
being
forced
upon
us
we
further
solemnly
and
mutually
pledge
ourselves
to
refuse
to
recognize
its
authority.
In
sure
confidence
that
God
will
defend
the
right
we
hereto
subscribe
our
names
….
God
save
the
King.
’