I Signed My Death Warrant

by Ryle T. Dwyer

  ‘Are they in the Empire or are they out? Are we to control or are we not?’ These were some of the questions he told Jones to put to them. ‘What are the safeguards for Ulster?’

  ‘All of my colleagues would share my view of this document,’ the prime minister said. ‘If they are not coming into the Empire, then we will make them.’

  Griffith refused to withdraw the document. ‘Owing to the Crux over the crown and empire, they feel their position weakened if not gone,’ he wrote de Valera that night. ‘In view of your letter of October 25th I cannot discuss the alternative with them.’ He thought the conference was on the brink of collapse. ‘I presume Lloyd George will send a letter terminating the negotiations and to this we shall reply, and then leave London for home, unless you think the time has come for you to cross over here.’

  Next morning Childers presented the delegation with a document headed, ‘Concessions Contained in our Proposals of 22 November’. He noted that eight of the ten clauses in latest proposals involved Irish concessions. ‘Ireland’s full claim is for a Republic, unfettered by any obligation or restrictions whatever,’ Childers began. Neither Griffith nor Collins ever thought that they had come to London to make such a claim. They were sent to negotiate a compromise, but Childers seemed to be dangerously close to suggesting that the delegation was responsible for watering down the absolute claim. Griffith ‘exploded’, but this did not stop Childers, who compounded his insensitivity by arguing that the sub-conference meetings should be discontinued. He was clearly exceeding his authority. He was reflecting the views of Barton and Gavan Duffy, but they should have had the courage to insist on their own inclusion. They did, in fact, insist that Barton should accompany Griffith and Collins that afternoon.

  ‘The presentation of the draft of our proposals was the first rude shock the English had received,’ Barton noted. ‘It was the first time they had come up against the united strength of the Delegation since the preliminary series of conferences early in October. Our draft was forwarded by a messenger without comment or explanation. It created a sensation in Downing Street. In it no quibbling or suggestion of recognition of private undertakings. It was a clear concise statement of Ireland’s independence with conditional terms for a free alliance for specific purposes viz Peace, War and Defence.’

  The prime minister accused Griffith of going back on their understanding about Northern Ireland. ‘On Ulster Lloyd George declared that I had assured him I would not let him down, if he put up the proposals subsequently embodied in their memorandum to Craig, and complained that we had not embodied them in our memorandum,’ Griffith wrote to de Valera that night. ‘I said I had given him that assurance and I now repeated it, but I told him at the time it was his proposal – not ours. Therefore, it did not appear in our document. Our proposal was, in our opinion, better but it was different.”

  Lloyd George was satisfied. ‘He had misunderstood us in this instance and said as much,’ Griffith continued. ‘He would put his proposal to Craig from himself only.’

  Members of the British government were sending mixed signals in relations to the Boundary Commission. On 23 November Austen Chamberlain led Bonar Law to believe that the Boundary Commission would only make minor adjustments. He was satisfied that Northern Ireland would not be forced under Dáil Éireann so he agreed to advise Craig and Carson that they could not expect the British government to fight to maintain the existing border.

  Griffith intimated Sinn Féin would accept the Boundary Commission proposal, if Craig accepted it, but he knew there was no possibility of this. The real problem was the crown and the empire.

  Meanwhile Childers observed that Barton ‘made notes which added much and showed AG[riffith]’s minutes of such Conferences cannot be relied on even if and when RCB[arton] is present.’ Barton noted the next meeting was going to deal with constitutional matters. Lloyd George suggested that Birkenhead and Attorney General Gordon Hewart should meet with Griffith and Collins. The latter suggested that the Irish side should have a constitutional lawyer with them, by which he meant Chartres, but the others felt it should be Gavan Duffy. Barton told Collins that Gavan Duffy must go and this was agreed. Barton and Gavan Duffy also argued that Childers should go as an authority on whole subject. This was essentially left hanging overnight.

  ‘Why did they bring that pip-squeak of a man Barton with them?’ Lloyd George asked Jones afterwards. ‘I would not make him a private secretary to an under-secretary’

  While Griffith could not hide his contempt for Childers, Collins was quietly critical of him. ‘He is sharp to realise how things will have due effect in Dublin – and acts accordingly,’ Collins wrote. ‘To go for a drink is one thing. To be driven to it is another.’

  The suggestion that Childers should be included as an expert in the Irish team for the constitutional discussions on 24 November had been left hanging overnight and Gavan Duffy called for a meeting of the delegation next morning. Griffith ‘lost his temper’, according to Childers. He said he had had enough of Gavan Duffy’s intrigues and he accused him of letting him down on neutrality at an early conference. Barton and Gavan Duffy insisted that Childers should go to the meeting. Griffith got ‘very angry’, and Collins remarked with a smile that he did not know Childers knew anything about constitutional matters. Charters made a perfunctory offer to withdraw himself. ‘I of course jumped on the idea of JC[Charters] not going and effaced myself,’ Childers wrote.

  Gavan Duffy and Chartres accompanied Griffith and Collins to meet with Birkenhead and Hewart at the House of Lords. Childers also accompanied them but Griffith ‘went in first and needless to say arranged that I would be left out!’ Childers observed somewhat bitterly.

  ‘We had Duffy with us today,’ Collins wrote to a friend. ‘It went fair, no more than that. If Duffy spent less time admiring his own voice we’d do better. Proof of it is when G[riffith] and I are together. You would appreciate the difference.’

  The meeting achieved very little but it did have an extra­ordinary sequel when Hewart forwarded to the Irish delegation a synopsis contradicting an earlier account stating that the Irish should not suppose that war was the alternative. ‘What the Attorney General stated was “the Irish delegates must not suppose that the British Government was contemplating with equanimity the alternative was war”.’ This was, in effect, a threat to resume the war.

  ‘There was war in the air,’ Barton noted. ‘I thought the nego­tiations had ended but there was to be one more conference before we returned to discuss the situation at home.’

  While the British were able to function as a united delegation, the Irish were divided. Collins no longer trusted Childers, but, unlike Griffith, he hid his feelings. For instance, Collins offered to present a document that reflected his thinking on the crown and empire. There was no problem about submitting this mem­orandum, unlike at the start of the month when Griffith furnished Lloyd George with the letter of 3 November, but the lack of opposition this time was possibly because Childers was the main author of the memorandum, as it had his figu­rative fingerprints all over it. Collins essentially accepted the arguments of Childers who had studied in detail and written about the constitutional aspects of the dominions in his book The Framework of Home Rule.

  Like Childers, Collins was now arguing for External Asso­ciation as simply a means of ensuring that Ireland would have the same de facto status as Canada. ‘The only association which it will be satisfactory to Ireland to Great Britain and the Dominions for Ireland to enter will be one based, not on the present technical legal status of the Dominions, but on the real position which they claim, and have in fact secured,’ Collins contended. ‘In the interest of all the associated states, in the interest above all of England herself, it is essential that the present de facto position should be recognised de jure, and that all its implications as regards sovereignty, allegiance, [and] constitutional independence of the governments, should be acknowledged.’

  He went on to argue that such an
association ‘might form the nucleus of a real League of Nations of the world’, which would be ‘the best and only way’ for England to ensure her permanent security. ‘Into such a League might not America be willing to enter?’ Collins asked. ‘Without real and permanent co-operation between Britain and America world-peace is an idle dream,’ he continued. ‘With such co-operation war would become impossible.

  ‘The possibility of such a League, and the need for it, would be more clearly understood if it were more fully recognised how far the claim of the Dominions to independent statehood has matured, and the progress which has been made in finding ways in which independent nations may act in concert.’

  Chamberlain described the memorandum as ‘extraordinarily interesting though sometimes perverse and sometimes Utopian. Who (outside our six) would guess the name of the writer?’ Chamberlain wrote to Birkenhead.

  14 - ‘By Tuesday next’

  Griffith, Collins and Barton returned to Dublin for a cabinet meeting on 25 November. While they were gone Jones had a thirty-minute conversation with Chartres when he delivered a memorandum offering to contribute to the King’s Civil List.

  I pleaded with him on the subject of allegiance but found him utterly irreconcilable on allegiance to the King in Ireland. He had seen such things done in the King’s name by the King’s servants in the last two years that he would rather, as he put it, go underground tomorrow than consent to any intervention ever again by this country in domestic affairs of Ireland. He spoke with great earnestness and there was no misunderstanding the dept of his conviction.

  But Chartres was more moderate than some of the cabinet in Dublin. When Collins gave the cabinet the memorandum by Chartres proposing a voluntary contribution to the king, Brugha dissented. ‘It is not going to settle the matter,’ he complained. ‘I don’t believe we are going to settle on that.’

  Collins said that the memorandum was already presented to the British.

  ‘I pointed out that I had not agreed to that,’ Brugha noted afterwards. He had refused to go to London as part of the delegation, yet he seemed to think that he should be consulted not just on Defence matters, but on other matters, such as the crown, as well.

  ‘Well,’ de Valera asked, ‘can we have unity or can we not?’

  Brugha replied that it could be recorded as ‘agreed to, with one dissenting.’

  ‘This means now that we have not unanimity in the cabinet and the object all along in these negotiations was to have un­animity,’ de Valera said.

  ‘Very well,’ Brugha responded, ‘if it has been handed in I am agreed in order to preserve unity to the finish.’

  They were far from united, however. Mulcahy attended the cabinet meeting as the controversy over the attempt to impose Austin Stack as deputy chief of staff was coming to a head. The headquarters’ staff was balking, and Mulcahy asked that the cabinet clarify the situation for the staff. With Mulcahy objecting to Stack’s appointment, de Valera tried to mollify him by suggesting that Eoin O’Duffy could remain as deputy chief of staff but Stack would be ‘Cathal’s ghost on the Staff’. Mulcahy refused to accept this and the others were invited into meeting.

  They sat around the perimeter of the drawing-room of the Mansion House, where the cabinet had been meeting. De Valera, who was sitting at one end of a small table at which his ministers were still seated, said that he wished to reform the headquarters staff. Having spoken briefly about the changes that he wished to make, he asked the men for their opinions. One after another they spoke against the changes, taking turns in the order in which they were sitting from the left-hand side of the room. J. J. O’Connell expressed the general tone when he said ‘the General Headquarters Staff had been a band of brothers’. All spoke in the same vane until it came to O’Duffy who was sitting in the second-last position on the right-hand side. His voice became shrill and he became a touch hysterical as he characterised the effort to appoint Stack as a criticism of himself.

  De Valera then became somewhat hysterical. He pushed the table in front of him as he rose and declared in a half-scream, ‘Ye may mutiny, if ye like, but Ireland will give me another Army.’

  Then, Mulcahy recalled, ‘he dismissed the whole lot of us from his sight.’

  As they were leaving Mulcahy walked down the steps of the Mansion House with Seán Russell, who was also a rather highly-strung individual. He was very pale and incensed at the way de Valera had addressed Mulcahy. ‘I didn’t think that there was a man in Ireland that would speak like that to my Chief,’ he said in a tense kind of whisper.

  In his biography of Collins, Rex Taylor quoted from the record of undated exchanges between Griffith and Collins dur­­ing the latter stages of the negotiations.

  ‘I will not agree,’ Collins declared, ‘to anything which threatens to plunge the people of Ireland into a war – not with­­out their authority. Still less do I agree to being dictated to by those not embroiled in these negotiations.’ It was significant that he actually placed more emphasis on his objection to being ‘dictated to’, than to plunging the country into war. After all he, more than anybody else, was responsible for provoking the Black and Tan war. Now his ego had become involved.

  ‘If they are not in agreement with the steps which we are taking, and hope to take, why then did they themselves not consider their own presence here in London?’ asked Griffith. ‘Brugha refused to be a member of this delegation.’

  ‘Supposing,’ Collins added, ‘we were to go back to Dublin to­­morrow with a document which gave us a Republic. Would such a document find favour with everyone? I doubt it.’

  ‘So do I,’ remarked Griffith. ‘But sooner or later a decision will have to be made and we shall have to make it.’

  The negotiations on the association question were coming to ahead, when the delegation got together again in London. De Valera noted that the latest British proposals had no address and no signature. ‘You could in your reply, if you thought it desirable, follow the same course and send them an unsigned draft,’ de Valera wrote on 27 November. ‘But there has been so much “beating around the bush” already that I think we should now get down to definite business and send them, as far as possible, our final word.’

  Childers had been preparing a whole series of documents on dominion status. ‘The Dominion Status’, contrasted the real status of the dominions with their legal, technical status. It noted that the British Government, or the Imperial Executive, could make treaties in the name of the dominions, but, in fact, the dominions had to be consulted. The British could commit the dominions to war and peace, but the dominions actually had to be consulted first. In it he contrasted the real status of the dominions with their inferior legal status. In theory the dominions were subject to the crown on all matters but in reality the king’s representative acted on the advice of the dominion cabinets in all domestic matters. He summarised the situation by contrasting the technical de jure status of Canada with real, de facto status in separate columns.

  Canada’s legal status was that of ‘a subordinate dependent of Britain holding her self-governing rights under a British Act of Parliament’. It could therefore be legally repealed or amended at Westminster without Canada’s consent. But Canada’s constitutional position under Britain’s unwritten constitution was something quite different. She was an independent country in total control of her own affairs. Although Canadians swore allegiance directly to the British crown and were technically subject to the royal veto, Childers argued that in fact the crown has no authority in Canada. ‘It signifies sentiment only,’ because ‘the Canadian owes obedience to his own constitution only.’ In short, he wrote, ‘Canada is by the full admission of Bri­tish statesmen equal in status to Great Britain and as free as Great Britain.’

  In another memorandum – headed, ‘Notable Definitions of Dominion Status’ – Childers quoted pronouncements by prominent people on the real status of the dominions. ‘We have received a position of absolute equality and freedom not only among the othe
r States of the Empire but among the other nations of the world’, Smuts had told the South African parliament on 10 September 1919. Bonar Law told the House of Commons on 30 March 1920 that the dominions ‘have control of their whole destiny’. Lloyd George had actually written to General James Hertzog, ‘The South African people control their own national destiny in the fullest sense.’

  Childers contended that the British had no intention of giving Ireland the same status as Canada, seeing that they were demanding trade and defence concessions that were un­precedented in the case of Canada. Even if those demands were dropped, Ireland could not enjoy the same status, because the Canadians essentially enjoyed their freedom as a result of their distance from Britain. The British were simply too far away to enforce their legal edicts. If they tried to use force it would lead to complications with United States in view of the Monroe Doctrine. But Ireland was close enough that British laws ‘could be enforced against Ireland so as to override the fullest constitutional freedom nominally conferred.’

  Although Childers had prepared a memorandum for the British, at this point he believed the negotiations had reached an impasse, but he noted in his diary that night that ‘it is pretty clear’ that Griffith and Duggan ‘took steps, possibly through Cope (or C.[Cope] may have taken the initiative to re-open the matter.’ Griffith insisted on presenting his own document to the British. It included the first two clauses of the proposals of 22 November (see p. 175) with the added specification of the offer to vote an annual contribution to the king’s personal revenue as a token recognition of the crown.

  ‘Useless to criticise much,’ Childers noted in his diary, ‘I object to the Defence par[agraph]. which gives away our case but only succeeded in getting it slightly altered. AG made the usual explosion about waste of time. Little help from anyone else.’