The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (82 page)

Even the King had doubts about using force against the Orangemen. He asked Bonar Law: “Will it be wise, will it be fair to the Sovereign as head of the Army, to subject the discipline and indeed the loyalty of his troops to such a strain?” Law, a Canadian who had become an adopted Orangeman, exploited the King’s discomfort. At stake, he told the monarch, was not merely Ulster, but the entire British Empire. Home Rule would be the thin end of the wedge for His Majesty’s fractious subjects all over the world. He should refuse to recognize it, whatever Parliament did. Law said: “You will save the Empire by your example.”
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Meanwhile, the tale of the twenty-five thousand smuggled Mausers had leaked out. The possibility of a Belfast-Berlin collaboration seemed very real, and was discussed in the House. Liberal back-benchers demanded prosecution of Orangemen negotiating with the Germans. Asquith refused; he was vacillating. Churchill spoke out: “We have,” he said, “been confronted with an avowed conspiracy to defy Parliament and the law, leaving a great army practising preparations for rebellion and for the setting up of a provisional Government, which would be an outrage against the realm and the Empire.” England, he said, would not be intimidated by plots to raise a revolt “greater than the police could cope with.”
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He was not speaking only to Belfast; Redmond and his fellow Irish Nationalists had been desperately worried about the response to all this among their own people in the south, and their nightmares were being realized. Riots were reported in Dublin. Catholic youths were flocking to join the Irish Nationalist Volunteers. Irish MPs who were counselors of moderation were losing their followers. In 1913 a militant working-class movement had forged a tight alliance with the Sinn Féin, who regarded themselves as Irishmen first and last and gentlemen never, and wearers of the green were turning to these champions of violence.

By March 1914, with final passage of the Home Rule bill less than two months away, the strain was becoming insupportable. Asquith, with Redmond’s reluctant consent, promised that Ulster would be permitted to vote itself out of Home Rule for six years, or until two successive general elections had been held. Carson angrily rejected this as “a sentence of death with a stay of execution for six years.” Churchill decided to take his gloves off. He had been conciliatory at Dundee. Now he would swing over to the attack. At Bradford on March 14 he called Bonar Law “a public danger seeking to terrorize the Government and to force his way into the Councils of his Sovereign” by exploiting the issue for partisan purposes. “Behind every strident sentence which he rasps out,” he said, “you can always hear the whisper… ‘Ulster is our best card; it is our only card.’ ” That was fair. The Tories had asked for it. But then, carried away by his own rhetoric, he blundered, salting the Unionists’ wounds with sarcasm. Having raised troops, he said, Ulster seemed anxious for battle “so that her volunteers could assert themselves.” But the proposed moratorium would deprive them of that test. He put words in their mouths: “ ‘Now the Government have had the incredible meanness to postpone all possible provocation for six long years.’ ” Bitterly he commented: “Coercion for four-fifths of Ireland is a healthful, exhilarating, salutary exercise, but lay a finger on the Tory fifth—sacrilege, tyranny, murder!” The Liberals were not cowed, he said: “There are worse things than bloodshed…. We are not going to have the realm of Britain sunk to the condition of the Republic of Mexico.” The issue, for him, was “whether civil and Parliamentary government in these realms is to be beaten down by the menace of armed force.” If Orangemen would extend the hand of friendship, it would be eagerly clasped by Liberals and Irish Nationalists, but “if every effort to meet their views is only to be used as a means of breaking down Home Rule… if the civil and Parliamentary systems are to be brought to the crude challenge of force… then I can only say to you: Let us go forward and put these grave matters to the proof.” Lord Fisher wrote him: “I should say it’s probably the best speech you ever made.” But
The Times
commented the next day that, having carried his naval estimates over the protests of rank-and-file Liberals, he “seemed to think it necessary to show that on occasion he could shout defiance with the rest,” and another critic called his remarks redolent of “cheap champagne made of gooseberry juice and vitriol, exhilarating at the moment but nauseating sooner or later.”
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It was quickly forgotten, for within a week Churchill found himself in deep trouble. He and Seely were worried about the loyalty of British soldiers in Ireland. A high proportion of them were natives of Ulster. Moreover, they were badly deployed for the approaching climax; of the twenty-three thousand regulars on the island, only nine thousand were stationed in the north. Mutinous mutters had met proposals for a redistribution which would transfer troops billeted on the Curragh plain, outside Dublin, to Belfast. Even if the men remained subordinate, it was reported, Ulster officials of the Great Northern Railway might refuse to carry them northward. However, it was feasible to send them up by sea. Encouraged by Lloyd George, the two service ministers, with the approval of Asquith and the King, decided to take precautionary steps. Guards at the Ulster arms depots of Armagh, Omagh, Enniskillen, and Carrickfergus were doubled. Winston signaled the vice admiral commanding his Third Battle Squadron: “Admiralty, 19 March 1914. Secret. Proceed at once at ordinary speed to Lamlash…. Acknowledge and report dates of arrival. WSC.” This would put eight battleships, a cruiser, and three destroyers in Irish waters.
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The warships never reached the North Channel. General Henry Wilson sent word of their destination to Brigadier General Hubert Gough, commander of the Curragh garrison. Gough resigned his commission, whereupon fifty-seven of his seventy officers resigned, whereupon Sir John French, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, also resigned. The prime minister faced an army revolt. He countermanded Churchill’s orders and canceled Seely’s plans to reinforce Ulster. That wasn’t enough for Gough. He sent Asquith a message through Wilson: “In the event of the present Home Rule Bill becoming law, can we be called upon to enforce it under the expression of maintaining law and order?” To make certain that his position was understood, he came to London and demanded assurances in writing. He got them. The prime minister wrote that it had all been “a misunderstanding”; that, though His Majesty’s government had the right to employ crown forces anywhere, it had “no intention of taking advantage of this right to crush political opposition to the policy or principles of the Home Rule Bill.” Gough and his officers then withdrew their resignations. Timothy M. Healy, an Irish Nationalist MP, concluded: “Asquith threw over Churchill, Seely and Lloyd George and refused to back up their actions.”
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Wilson leaked all this to Bonar Law, and there was a storm in the House. The Tory press was jubilant over Asquith’s “complete surrender”; the Liberals and Irish Nationalists were furious. Scapegoats were needed, so Seely and his two chief advisers resigned. The prime minister—who had initialed all the military arrangements—claimed ignorance of them. That left the first lord of the Admiralty to face the music. It would seem that twenty-five thousand rifles in the hands of Orangemen justified precautions of some sort, but the Tories believed that he had been trying to goad the Ulster Volunteers into open rebellion. One Conservative MP accused him of hatching a “plot” designed to create an excuse for an “Ulster pogrom.” Balfour added scathingly: “There is one character disgusting to every policeman and which even the meanest criminal thinks inferior to himself in point of morals, and that character is the
agent provocateur.
”
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On April 28 Churchill blazed back: “What we are now witnessing in the House is uncommonly like a vote of censure by the criminal classes upon the police.” A Tory interjected: “You have not arrested them.” He replied: “Is that the complaint—that we have been too lenient?” He declared that the Conservatives, “the party of the comfortable, the wealthy… who have most to gain by the continuance of the existing social order,” were now “committed to a policy of armed violence and utter defiance of lawfully constituted authority… to tampering with the discipline of the Army and the Navy… to overpowering police, coastguards and Customs officials… to smuggling in arms by moonlight.” If this was an example of “how much they care for law, how much they value order when it stands in the way of anything they like,” what would be the impact on England’s impoverished millions, on “the great audiences that watch in India,” on the Germans who believed that Britain was paralyzed by factions “and need not be taken into account as a factor in the European situation?” He said: “I wish to make it perfectly clear that if rebellion comes we shall put it down, and if it comes to civil war, we shall do our best to conquer in the civil war. But there will be neither rebellion nor civil war unless it is of your making.”
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At this point he altered his tone dramatically and ended on a propitiatory note. He appealed directly to Carson: “The right honourable Gentleman… is running great risks in strife. Why will he not run some risk for peace? The key is in his hands now. Why cannot the right honourable and learned Gentleman say boldly: ‘Give me the Amendments to this Home Rule Bill which I ask for, to safeguard the dignity and the interests of Protestant Ulster, and I in return will use all my influence and good will to make Ireland an integral unit in a federal system’?” The House was stirred. Balfour, while describing Churchill’s earlier remarks as “an outburst of demagogic rhetoric,” declared that he was “heartily in sympathy with the First Lord’s proposal,” and Carson went so far as to say that he was “not very far from the First Lord.” Negotiations were reopened. Liberals and Irish Nationalists, who insisted that northern Ireland must yield, protested angrily. Winston’s position in the party was still shaky; he wrote Clementine that his plea for a truce was “the biggest risk I have taken.” His cabinet colleagues, generous with their “hear, hears” when he had taken the offensive, had sat on their hands when he offered Carson an olive branch.
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But the negotiations stalled and were again discontinued. The general feeling was that it was too late for one man to halt the drift toward fratricide. Churchill himself said wearily, “A little red blood had got to flow,” though he quickly added: “We shall give no provocation. The Ulstermen will have no excuse, and we think that public opinion will not support them if they wantonly attack.” On May 26 the Home Rule bill passed for the third and last time. Officially it was now law. The possibility of enforcing it, however, was as remote as ever. Each side was still waiting for the other to shoot first. On July 20 the King intervened, summoning an all-party conference to Buckingham Palace. The Speaker of the House presided as the delegates wrangled for four days. Winston wrote Clementine: “We are to go ahead with the Amending Bill, abolishing the time limit and letting any Ulster county vote itself out if it chooses. The [southern] Irish acquiesced in this reluctantly. We must judge further events in Ulster when they occur.”
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Asquith’s cabinet met on the afternoon of Friday, July 24, 1914, to discuss the final conclusions of the King’s conference. The report was sterile; absolutely nothing had been accomplished. It was at this point that the Irish issue, foremost in everyone’s mind, so certain to burst into flames at any moment, was unexpectedly deferred, destined not to re-emerge for years, by which time the whole cast of characters would have changed. The ministers were about to break up when Grey began reading in quiet, grave tones a document which had just been sent in to him from the Foreign Office. It was an Austrian note to Serbia. Churchill was very tired; several minutes passed before he could disengage his mind from the tedium which had just ended. Gradually the phrases and sentences began to take shape and meaning. The foreign secretary was reading an ultimatum. Winston had never heard anything like it. He did not see how any country could accept it, or how any acceptance, however abject, could satisfy the government which had sent it. He later recalled: “The parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone faded back into the mists and squalls of Ireland, and a strange light began immediately, but by perceptible gradations, to fall and grow upon the map of Europe.”
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C
hurchill later blamed three men for the outbreak of the Great War: the Serb assassin, the Austrian foreign minister who had written that first ultimatum, and the kaiser, who could have stopped the chain reaction of governments bound by military alliances. But the initial culprit was an incompetent chauffeur whose name has not survived. On June 28, 1914, four weeks before the delivery of the fateful note to Serbia, Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his morganatic wife, Sophie, had been riding through the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo when the driver took a wrong turn. Realizing his mistake, he came to a dead halt—right in front of a Serbian fanatic armed with a revolver. Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were shot dead on the spot. In Vienna the toils of vengeance, like everything else in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, moved very slowly. But they were moving. Meanwhile, Britain stood aside. There was every reason to believe Britain would remain there. It had nothing at stake. Grey’s “moral obligation,” assumed eight years earlier, had been given privately and was not binding. Britain’s only commitment on the Continent was to defend Belgian independence, which hardly seemed threatened then, and even that was vague. Winston didn’t care for the Belgians; he thought their behavior in the Congo disgraceful. At the Admiralty he lunched with Kitchener, on leave from Egypt and soon to be Seely’s successor at the War Office. Both suspected the existence of a secret agreement between Brussels and Berlin which would permit German troops to cross Belgium on their way to France. For England, they agreed, such an “invasion” would be an inadequate casus belli. But it was all very speculative, very remote, quite nebulous.