To those who saw the empire as essential to British greatness, some kind of imperial renovation was now urgently required. But they disagreed on how this was to be brought about. For some of them – including members of the so-called ‘Round Table’, a self-appointed elite of colonial administrators which started life as the ‘Kindergarten’ of imperial civil servant Lord Milner – formal and wide-ranging reform of the empire’s internal structures was key. This might entail the creation of some kind of imperial federation, perhaps even an imperial parliament where strategic imperial issues would be discussed at length by imperial representatives, rather than in the Westminster Parliament where domestic British issues inevitably dominated debate, attention and time.6
Other imperialists were sceptical of the idea. As Briton Richard Jebb discovered on a tour of empire at the turn of the century:
The assumption which underlines such phrases as the ‘Expansion of England’ or ‘Greater Britain’ and suggests the familiar principle of federation as the logical form of closer union is not justified by the tendency either of instinctive sentiment or of actual developments in Canada and Australia. So far as generalization is possible, it may be said that there is not, in fact, any growing consciousness of a common nationality, but exactly the reverse. In other words, the basis of imperial federation, instead of expanding and solidifying, is melting away.7
Manifestations of Britannic identity aside, the political economy of any potential imperial federation was perhaps being eroded by the internationalism of trade and finance, substituting traditional economic ties to the mother country with a much wider set of commercial relationships. Some British politicians, foremost amongst them Joseph Chamberlain, sought to answer this by proposing tariff reform, backtracking on Britain’s traditional support for free trade and instead envisaging an imperial trading block.8
As it was, the greatest imperial innovations up to 1913 had been the creation of the self-governing Dominions – Canada, the Commonwealth of Australia, New Zealand and, from 1910, the Union of South Africa. The Dominions looked to London for guidance on some policy issues, but were not controlled by it. Besides the occasional get-togethers of the colonial premiers – most recently in London, in 1907 and again in 1911 – imperial government with regard to the Dominions boiled down to a constant negotiation between the empire’s unequal parts, with London sometimes cajoling, sometimes playing the role of arbitrator, and only very rarely actually dictating outcomes, something she was in most cases constitutionally unable to do. The debate over imperial defence in Canada in 1913 or the public criticism of South Africa’s Indian policy by the British Viceroy in India the same year were examples of the way in which the empire often functioned – as a loose network of political entities with different interests and aspirations, rather than as a vertically managed hierarchy. In a 1913 book entitled The Britannic Question, Richard Jebb provided four diagrams of possible structures for the British Empire, ranging from ‘Colonial Dependence’ (which was now of the past), to ‘Britannic Alliance’ Jebb’s preferred option, essentially a free alliance of self-governing ‘Britannic’ states), and two versions of ‘Imperial Federation’ (one without racial equality, and one with racial equality – the latter implying Indian equality with Australia, Canada and the others).9 It was not clear which path would ultimately be chosen – perhaps a combination, perhaps none.
Some outsiders anticipated that Britain would remain a great imperial power for the foreseeable future. ‘It is possible that the day will come when the costs of empire will surpass the resources of the nation’, wrote the French historian Elie Halévy.10 But in Halévy’s mind, these were problems shared by other empires. Reform could put off Britain’s day of reckoning for a long while yet:
Why should imperialism present more difficulties or dangers [for the British] than it does for the North Americans, or for the Russians, or for the Japanese, if the Japanese indeed succeed in establishing an Empire of their own? The same causes, scientific and technical, which have driven industrial and commercial concentration encourage military and political concentration: the twentieth century will be the century of empires.
Others presented more dire, but not entirely unreasonable, scenarios. In 1905 a pamphlet entitled the Decline and the Fall of the British Empire, purporting to be published in Tokyo a hundred years in the future, in 2005, imagined a world where India was now ruled by Russia, South Africa by Germany, where Egypt had gained her independence, where Canada had joined the United States and Australia was now a Japanese protectorate. In this pamphlet, supposedly published for the edification of Japanese imperial strategists, the Britain of the future provided a case study of an empire in decline, and perhaps finally extinguished:
As Babylon and Assyria have left us their monuments, Egypt her pyramids, Carthage her Queen, and Rome her laws, so too England has bequeathed to posterity Shakespeare and her world-wide language. And, while these endure, so long will her history be the schoolroom of mankind, and the story of her fall a reminder to living Empires of those subtle influences which are ever present, to quicken the germs of national decay, and transfer the sovereignty of the earth.11
The key ‘subtle influences’ were enumerated as: the rise of the city over the countryside, the loss of Britons’ maritime skills, the growth of refinement and luxury, the absence of literary taste, the decline of the physical form of Britons, the decay of the country’s religious life, excessive taxation, false systems of education and, finally, the inability of the British to defend their empire. All of these problems were there in 1905. It only took a small effort of imagination, extrapolating these forward a century, to come to the conclusion that Britain’s empire was not indeed guaranteed to last forever. The seeds of its fall were already there. Perhaps the rot was already beginning to set in.
For many Londoners in 1913, the rot seemed to start rather closer to home, in labour unrest, in a radical campaign to secure votes for women, and in the oldest and most politically difficult imperial problem of them all: Ireland. Grand theorising about the possible future structure of the British Empire was an enjoyable parlour game for imperialists with time on their hands, but the situation in Ireland was a more immediate threat to the integrity of the British Empire. In London itself, the rise of militancy – both within the labour force and amongst the suffragettes – was represented by others as a direct challenge to the stability and even the security of the United Kingdom. The Roman Empire had degenerated from within, from Rome itself – would the same be true of the British Empire? Affairs in Australia, New Zealand and Canada could hardly compete with protest marches in Dublin, or broken windows in Westminster, or the threat of strikes in London’s docks.
London was rich, and it was powerful. It was the conductor of a worldwide empire, and its black-suited clerks held the reins of global finance in their hands. It was the biggest city on the face of the earth. But London’s greatness could not by itself deflect demands for reform of the British polity of which it was the head. One crucial political reform had already been passed – the Parliament Act of 1911, whereby the ancient and unelected House of Lords lost its indefinite veto over legislation supported by the House of Commons. This was a seismic shift in a country which had had an aristocratic Prime Minister as recently as ten years previously, and it was a sign that, for better or worse, democracy was overhauling privilege. But demands for political reform in Ireland, for social change, for greater equality between the sexes did not stop there. Britons were no longer content to simply accept what they were given; they wanted more.
The existence of a great empire overseas did not solve Britain’s domestic problems. In some cases, empire now magnified and relayed them. Britain exported the divisions of Ireland in the form of Protestant–Catholic tensions in Australia, Indian nationalists drew inspiration from the Irish example, and British suffragettes could point at Australia and New Zealand as examples of British imperial societies where women had already won the right to vote. Why could women
vote on the periphery of empire, but not at its heart, suffragettes could reasonably ask? Why was it that political freedoms granted in one part of the empire were not available in another? The inconsistencies of the British Empire, in many ways the secret to its rise, were now turned against it.
The question of Irish Home Rule – the formation of a Dublin parliament and the granting of powers to manage Ireland’s domestic arrangements – had been trawled over by British Parliaments for years. Up until 1801 there had been an Irish parliament under the British monarchy; in that year Ireland was made an integral part of the United Kingdom. In the second half of the nineteenth century Irish nationalists had become increasingly vocal about their desire for powers to be repatriated. The subject was politically toxic to many Irish Protestants and to many in Britain, bound up as it was with the historical narrative of the birth of the British state as a Protestant entity facing off against Catholic Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was an issue charged with emotion, full of claims of Papist disloyalty and counter-claims of treachery, double-dealing and broken promises. It was clear that the last century had hardly been a bright one in Ireland’s long history. Its population had steadily declined throughout. The Great Famine of the 1840s had accelerated the trend. Many Irish had emigrated, setting up new homes on the east coast of the United States but never forgetting the troubled lives of their compatriots on the other side of the Atlantic.
More recently some things had got better in Ireland. Educational opportunity for Irish Catholics had widened in recent years. Tenant farmers had become wealthier (though at the expense of agricultural labourers). The census of 1911 showed the slowest decrease in Ireland’s population yet recorded.12 But the nationalist genie was out of the bottle. In the meantime, Home Rule for Ireland remained stuck. Too much had passed between Ireland and Britain for them to live comfortably together in the same house now – each knew the other’s faults too well, and had their prejudices and assumptions – and yet an amicable divorce, or even a trial separation, was opposed by those in Britain who saw it as the first step to imperial disintegration, as giving in to Catholic pressure and selling Ireland’s Protestants down the river. Two bills for Irish Home Rule had reached the floor of the Westminster Parliament in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. One failed to pass the House of Commons in 1886, voted down by Conservative MPs; the other failed in the House of Lords in 1893, voted down by Conservative peers.
By 1913, it was twenty years since that last defeat. But the Irish Parliamentary Party, led by John Redmond, still sent over seventy Irish MPs to Westminster. Alongside them sat the eight members of the anti-sectarian All-for-Ireland party, which supported Irish Home Rule yet was wary of replacing a Protestant ascendancy with a native Catholic one. Irish MPs held the balance of power between Conservatives and Liberals in Parliament, a disruptive single-issue force in British politics, albeit one with justified complaints about the past and reasonable aspirations for the future.
The British Liberal government of Herbert Asquith was committed to trying for Home Rule once again. Though many Conservatives were certain to oppose this, it was considered not impossible that the Conservatives would propose a constructive alternative, perhaps invoking the kind of federalism which some sought as the future structure for the empire as a whole.13 Irish nationalists were in many respects natural partners for British Conservatives on social and even some wider issues. They tended to support protectionism; Redmond himself spoke out against female suffrage. Might the Conservatives stomach some degree of greater Irish autonomy in return for political support? In the end however, the Conservatives reverted to the blustering positions of the past, opting for all-out opposition, seeking to force an election in the process.
The crux of the problem for the government in London – the Conservatives’ point of leverage, and the Home Rulers’ nightmare – was Ulster. Here, in the north, rule from Dublin was strongly opposed. Protestants, who were the majority in most of Ulster, feared the prospect of being ruled by the Catholic majority in the south who, as they saw it, was more loyal to Rome than to London. Historic sectarian antagonisms, an accepted reality of everyday life in northern Ireland, could easily flare up when appropriately fired by the rhetoric and conviction of religious and political leaders. As the Liberal government in London proposed to try again for Irish Home Rule, Sir Edward Carson, member of Parliament for Dublin’s Protestant Trinity College and leader of the Unionist party, became the master and mouthpiece for Ulster’s fury.
Over the course of 1912, a new Home Rule Bill made its stormy way through Parliament, being voted down in the House of Lords but reintroduced in the House of Commons. The Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law, struck by Protestant Ulster’s apparent unity at an Easter church service outside Belfast, went further and further in his denunciations of Home Rule. In July, calling the Liberal government a ‘revolutionary committee’, he proclaimed that ‘I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I should not be prepared to support them’, including force, adding that he felt this view would be supported ‘by the overwhelming majority of the British people’.14 This was strong stuff. The leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition had virtually endorsed a challenge to the decisions of the legally constituted authorities of the United Kingdom. In September, Carson organised the signing of Ulster’s Solemn League and Covenant, describing plans to set up a Dublin parliament as a conspiracy and pledging the signatories to refuse to recognise such a parliament should one be formed. Rudyard Kipling penned an incendiary pro-Ulster poem, a warning of dark forces being unleashed, and of bloodshed foretold:
The dark eleventh hour
Draws on and sees us sold
To every evil power
We fought against of old.
Rebellion, rapine, hate,
Oppression, wrong and greed
Are loosed to rule our fate
By England’s act and deed
…
The blood our fathers spilt,
Our love, our toils, our pains,
Are counted us for guilt
And only bind our chains.
Before an Empire’s eyes,
The traitor claims his price.
What need of further lies?
We are the sacrifice.
We know the war prepared
On every peaceful home,
We know the hells declared
For such as serve not Rome –
The terror, threats, and dread
In market, hearth and field –
We know, when all is said,
We perish if we yield.15
But the Home Rule Bill inched forward into 1913, nonetheless. ‘The world moves slowly, and yet it moves’, editorialised the sympathetic Daily Chronicle in January that year, after the bill had passed the House of Commons a second time.16 ‘No doubt we will be told in a day or two by speakers in the House of Lords that an irreparable injury has been done to Empire’, it continued, anticipating the House of Lords’ ongoing opposition. But, under the stipulations of the Parliament Act passed in 1911, the opposition of the Lords could not prevent Home Rule from eventually coming into effect: ‘We can assume that the Home Rule Bill will suffer the full delay permissible under the Parliament Act and in 1914 will become law’.
The situation in 1913, therefore, became a three-sided deadlock. A Unionist movement prepared to use force to defend themselves against what they viewed as the depredations of a Dublin parliament. A beleaguered British government, without a majority in the House of Commons, committed to delivering a Dublin parliament. And a nationalist movement unable and unwilling to countenance Ulster’s exclusion from the workings of Home Rule. All sides recognised the causes of the deadlock; but no side had the means, or perhaps the will, to break it. And so the bloody union of Britain and Ireland began to slide towards bloody disunion. Civil war could not be excluded. Some counted it likely.
*
Londoners could at least c
onsole themselves that if arguments over Home Rule spilled over into violence this would most likely be played out on the streets of Dublin, Belfast and Londonderry, rather than in the City or in the East End or around Leicester Square. London would be affected, if at all, indirectly.
The same was not true of labour militancy. In the years to 1913 a rising tide of labour unrest had hit the country’s mines, railways and docks. While the Labour Party represented the interests of the workers in Westminster – alongside the Liberal and Conservative MPs still elected in working-class districts – on the streets of working-class towns and in the factories it was often the more militant trade unions who wielded power and influence. London, particularly the docks, would inevitably be a major part of any national labour unrest – with the potential for wider civil conflict. And London, dependent on the rest of the country for fuel, and on the nation’s transport networks for food supplies, could not expect to be immune from the material consequences of a prolonged strike in any one of the main strategic sectors of the economy.
The language of union militancy gave succour to this fear. In 1911, during a transport strike involving the port of London, a manifesto had been sent to government departments which read:
You know the Transport workers have the Key to the Nation’s industrial position, also we hold the power over the food supply, and if the Shipowners and Dock Companies still persist in their War against the Port Workers of the Country, then we shall bring about a state of war … Hunger and poverty has driven the Dock and Ship workers to this present resort, and neither your police, your soldiers, your murder and Cossack policy will avert the disaster coming to this Country …17
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