The Lost History of 1914

by Jack Beatty

  Yet, a century on, can that be how one wishes the thing had come out? “It is hard to imagine the conflict that began in Europe in 1939 without the legacy of the Great War,” Ian F. W. Beckett concludes in The Great War 1914–1918. Put plainer, it is hard to imagine World War II without Germany’s defeat in World War I. If Germany had won in 1914, as Ferguson believes it would have done if the British army were tied down in Ulster, then “Hitler could have lived out his life as a failed artist and a fulfilled soldier in a German-dominated Central Europe about which he could have found little to complain.” Starker yet, Richard Ned Lebow writes: “If Germany had won, there almost certainly would have been no Hitler and no Holocaust.”* That vertiginous perspective lends the events in Ireland in the spring of 1914, buried beneath the war, a significance beyond themselves.7

  Today Northern Ireland (comprising most of the historic province of Ulster) is part of the United Kingdom. So was the whole of Ireland in 1914. Today Northern Ireland elects members of Parliament who serve in the House of Commons in London. So did the whole of Ireland in 1914. In addition, today Northern Ireland has a regional assembly. It meets in Belfast, and deals with domestic issues. That is “Home Rule”; Ireland lacked Home Rule in 1914.

  Meeting of the Asquith cabinet. Having foxed the House of Lords into a general election over its power to veto legislation, the Liberals are gleeful. Lloyd George is hugging Churchill. Asquith is standing. But the future hovers over the semi-recumbent Augustine Birrell, the Irish Secretary. The election would make the Liberals beholden to Irish Nationalist MPs and their goal, that smile-stopper, home rule.

  Home rule, a “demand that captivated the majority of the Irish people for almost a half a century,” was the Irish norm. Since 1264, Ireland had had a parliament of some kind, losing it only after 1798, when the Irish—few and doomed—with French troops fighting beside them rose up against their English overlords. To prevent Napoleon’s meddling in their backyard again, Britain annexed Ireland in the Act of Union. Home rule was the one way the Irish could work out to live in dignity under the “English system in Ireland … founded on the bayonets of 30,000 soldiers, encamped permanently in a hostile country,” as defined by the Liberal Joseph Chamberlain. The Union sustained by those bayonets was felt as an affront, a punishment for bad behavior. Ireland had grown “intensely disloyal and intensely disaffected” under the Union, the great Anglo-Irish leader of the 1870s and 1880s, Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–1891), argued in the House of Commons. Though Parnell could offer no guarantees about the future, for “no man can fix the boundary to the march of a nation,” he promised the English that home rule would calm the passion to “break the connection with England” animating Irish nationalism through seven centuries of alien rule.8

  In the 1880s, Parnell pledged the MPs of his parliamentary or Nationalist Party to whichever English party came out for home rule. Under Prime Minister William E. Gladstone the Liberals took this deal, and twice tried to deliver on the promise of what Parnell called their “Union of Hearts” with the Nationalists. The first time, in 1886, the Liberals lost in the House of Commons, their party splitting, and the rebels, led by Chamberlain, defecting to the Conservative opposition, relabeled the Unionist Party to receive them. The second Home Rule Bill passed the Commons in 1893 but was vetoed by the House of Lords.9

  When the Liberals regained power in 1906, their majority was large enough that they did not need Nationalist votes and so could delay the fated appointment with Irish home rule. That changed in 1909, when the House of Lords vetoed Lloyd George’s so-called People’s Budget for taxing its members’ estates, and the Liberal prime minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, called for a general election to be fought over the issue of stripping the veto from the unelected House of Lords. That election, and a second eleven months later, left the Liberals and Unionists tied, with 272 seats each. But the latter had received three hundred thousand more votes, one source of Unionist bitterness.

  Another was the “corrupt bargain” to remain in power that the Liberals struck with forty-two Labour and eighty-four Nationalist MPs, the latter regarded by Unionists as a “purely sectional interest [with] no right to impose their views on the kingdom as a whole.” The corrupt bargain was a myth to fire up the Unionist base. The Liberals could govern without Nationalists; there were enough Labour MPs to assure their majority, but Asquith & Co. were chary of depending on a party they competed with in England.

  As his price the Nationalist leader, John Redmond, obliged the Liberals to drain the cup. “I believe the current members of the Liberal Party are sincere,” he told a Limerick audience. “Whether they are or not we will make them … toe the line.” By the newly enacted Parliament Act, a bill that passed in three sessions of the House became law. Home rule passed in 1912; it passed again in 1913; and, as soon as the government submitted it, it would pass a final time by summer 1914.10

  The bill envisioned a parliament with the powers of a “glorified County Council.” It would, Redmond assured an English audience, “be solely to deal with those plain, common, hum-drum, every-day Irish affairs which you cannot understand as the people themselves do.” This modest assembly was to meet in Dublin.11

  The “Protestant people of Ulster” would sooner be governed from Berlin. They would not submit to the Catholic majority in the south of Ireland. “Ordinary people [in Ulster] had wildly exaggerated ideas of Papal influence in Ireland, and thought of the Pope as a personal and inveterate enemy, who spent all his time scheming to get his hands on the Belfast shipyards … Religion was the dynamic in Ulster, not merely a cloak for other motives.” In “Ulster 1912” Rudyard Kipling expressed the regnant prejudice:

  We know the wars prepared

  On every peaceful home,

  We know the hells declared

  For such as serve not Rome.12

  Some of the reasons Ulster’s Protestants gave for their bigotry soften judgment on it. They touch on family: the Catholic Church’s decree of 1908, for example, voiding mixed marriages between Catholics and Protestants unless performed by a priest. In one incident, a Belfast man, supposedly egged on by a priest, had abandoned his Protestant wife and absconded with their children. The Government of Ireland Act (home rule) forbade the state from establishing any religion, whether Catholicism or Protestantism, but frightened people could not be expected to credit politicians’ promises over fear-inflated facts. And as to the worth of those promises, the reported words of Joseph Devlin, Nationalist MP for Belfast, known to be close to the Catholic hierarchy, were not reassuring: “He did not believe that artificial guarantees in an Act of Parliament were any real protection.”13

  To save them from their fears, Ulstermen looked to a fanatic, the member of Parliament from Trinity College Dublin, Sir Edward Carson, drafted in 1910 to lead the Ulster Unionist Party in the surety that compromise was foreign to his nature. “I like being chairman of the Ulster Unionists,” he confided to Lady Londonderry. “I feel boiling with rage & I hope there will be violence.”14

  Carson, a barrister, won fame as Oscar Wilde’s inquisitor in the famous 1895 libel trial. At first things seemed to be going Wilde’s way. Treating the dour Carson, his Trinity College classmate, like a straight man in one of his comedies, Wilde elicited guffaws from the courtroom. Carson quoted a line from The Picture of Dorian Gray spoken by one man to another—“I quite admit that I adored you madly”—and then asked Wilde, “Have you ever felt that feeling of adoring madly a beautiful male person many years younger than yourself ?” Wilde replied, to loud laughter, “I have never given adoration to anybody except myself.”

  But, catching Wilde in petty lies and inconsistencies, Carson wove an inexorable web. Wilde had sued for libel the Marquess of Queensbury, his lover’s father, after Queensbury inscribed “To Oscar Wilde, posing as a somdomite [sic]” on his calling card and left it at Wilde’s club. But truth is a defense against libel, and armed with evidence gathered by Queensbury’s detectives of Wilde’s dalliances with yo
ung working-class men Carson was ready to show that there was no “posing” to it, when Wilde’s counsel called a halt.15

  Sir Edward Carson. The lawyer crusading for truth in Terence Rattigan’s 1946 play The Winslow Boy is based on Carson. Robert Donat stars in the 1948 film; Jeremy Northam plays the Carson figure in David Mamet’s 1999 version. That was the good side of Carson. Ulster brought out the other side.

  Gaunt, haunted-looking, frequently impaired by acidic emotions, Carson had the look of a man gnawed at by his convictions. His speeches were seditious. But lest riots erupt over the prosecution of Ulster’s hero-savior* before whom women knelt and kissed his hands, the Liberal Cabinet left him free to declaim sentiments like, “We must be prepared, the morning Home Rule passes, ourselves to become responsible for the government of the Protestant Province of Ulster.” For Carson, “there could be no permanent resting place between complete union and total separation.” Given the Catholic predominance in the whole of Ireland, home rule was the entering wedge. Begin there and Ireland would end as an independent republic, “a foreign, probably hostile, neighbor along Britain’s western coast.” As the Liberals prepared their Home Rule Bill, he confided in Lady Londonderry, “I never felt more savage.”16

  The Conservative Party backed Carson with giddy relish. Indulging in what Asquith labeled “reckless rodomontade … furnishing for the future a complete grammar of Anarchy,” the Tory leader Andrew Bonar Law pledged to a crowd of angry Unionists in September 1912: “I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I should not be prepared to support them … They would be justified in resisting … by all means in their power, including force.”17

  That “monster demonstration” was held on the grounds of Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. Built as a gift for the Duke of Marlborough in the early eighteenth century and named for his great victory in the War of the Spanish Succession, Blenheim was selected as the first English site for an anti–home rule rally partly to twig Marlborough’s descendant Winston Churchill, who was born there in 1874. In January 1912, escorted by five battalions of infantry and a detachment of cavalry, Churchill had braved showers of “Belfast confetti” (steel rivets) to deliver a home rule speech in Belfast that incensed all Unionism against him.18

  Churchill’s swoop into Belfast stirred local memories of his father’s. In 1886, Lord Randolph Churchill, an ambitious Tory politician, attacked home rule there in a speech that fanned intolerance against Belfast Catholics. In a public letter to a Belfast paper Lord Randolph distilled his message in the notorious line “Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right.”19

  In his 1905 biography of Lord Randolph, Winston published a letter that impeached the sincerity of his father’s indignation: “I decided some time ago that if the G.O.M. [Grand Old Man, Gladstone’s sobriquet] went for Home Rule, the Orange card would be the one to play. Please God it may turn out to be the ace of trumps and not the two.” “Orange,” shorthand for “Orangemen,” referred to Ulster’s Scots Presbyterians. They took their color from King William of Orange, “who saved us from Popery, slavery, knavery, brass money, and wooden shoes,” to quote an Orange Order toast—saved them in 1689 when his forces arrived in time to lift the hundred-day siege of Derry by Catholic troops under King James before every Protestant within the city walls had died of hunger with the Ulster anthem “No Surrender!” on his lips.20

  Liberal commentators compared Lord Randolph’s expedient playing of the “Orange card” with Bonar Law’s. Tories detested Winston as a turncoat for “crossing the floor” to join the Liberals in 1904. To that partisan animus, Law, who had Ulster roots, added personal rancor over Churchill’s belaboring him with his ancestral shorthand for cynical politics.

  “When you are dealing with Orange Ulster, you are dealing with the real passions and real anxieties of real people,” Churchill sallied in a House speech. “No such excuse applies to Mr. Bonar Law … You can always detect the rasp of the Tory party manager” in his die-hard Ulster rhetoric. And then Churchill, voicing Law’s thoughts, surfaced Law’s hidden demagogue: “Ulster is our best card; it is our only card … our chance to smash the Parliament Act, to restore the veto of the House of Lords, and to carry a protective tariff unto the statute books.”21

  In The World Crisis, written in the 1920s, Churchill rendered in still-resonant terms the “excesses of partisanship which on both sides disgraced the year 1914”:

  No one who has not been involved in such contentions can understand the intensity of the pressures to which public men are subjected … The vehemence with which great masses of men yield themselves to partisanship and follow the struggle as if it were a prize fight, their ardent enthusiasm, their glistening eyes, their swift anger … the sense of wrongs mutually interchanged, the extortion and enforcement of pledges, the infectious loyalties, the praise that waits on violence; the chilling disdain, the honest disappointment, the cries of “treachery” with which every proposal of compromise is hailed; the desire to keep good faith with those who follow, the sense of right being on one’s side, the harsh unreasonable actions of opponents—all these acting and reacting reciprocally upon one another tend toward the perilous climax … At a certain stage it is hardly possible to keep that contention within the limits of words or laws. Force, that final arbiter that last soberer, may break upon the scene.22

  Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. His calm verged on inanition. He could not fathom Protestant Ulster’s rebellion over home rule—the Pope did not frighten him.

  We will follow the last act of the Ulster crisis through Churchill’s eyes, picking up the story in March 1914, when Churchill, so the Times charged, sprung THE PLOT AGAINST ULSTER.

  Asquith woke to the extremity of the Ulster danger only in late 1913. His man in Ireland, Chief Secretary Augustine Birrell, tended to see the North through the “green glasses” of Nationalist politicians who mocked fears of rebellion as so much “Ulsteria.” Birrell’s emollient counsel allowed Asquith to do something he found congenial—nothing. Sixty-two in 1914, Asquith had reached the top in politics on the confidence inspired by his level temperament. “I was never able to find any fault with Asquith as a human being except that he was always very much the same,” Birrell said of him. Less kindly, Lord Lovat regarded Asquith as “incapable of doing anything except drift,” because of “drink, bridge, and holding girls’ hands.” Asquith, a Latin scholar at Oxford, styled himself a “cunctator” who preferred to outwait events. In Ireland they had got ahead of him, and would not wait for him to catch up.23

  Asquith thought to put off compromise with his Irish opponents until circumstances had shown the necessity of it to his Irish friends. Baffled by Ulster’s adamancy—“No Surrender!” did not stir his blood—he hoped that the Unionists would propound a plan of their own, lifting the burden of accommodation from him and sparing the Liberals accusations of betrayal from the Nationalists. Knowing Asquith’s ways, the Unionists sat tight, drilling their army in Ulster and winning support in England, where prominences like Kipling and Sir Edward Elgar contributed thousands of pounds to their gun fund and, with two million other Englishmen, signed the British Covenant, pledging to “resist a government dominated by men disloyal to the empire … to whom our faith and tradition are hateful.”24

  A letter received in January 1914 from a spy in the Liberal camp left Carson in doubt whether Asquithian dithering or Machiavellian strategy lay behind the cabinet’s delay in seeking a compromise:

  I am a private secretary to the wife of one of the Under-Secretaries; members of the government meet at his house socially and informally at all hours and discuss matters with considerable freedom. Less than a week ago Mr. Asquith, Mr. McKenna [the home secretary] and Mr. Pease [the House whip] were there about the same time. The plan is to procrastinate until the patience of the hooligan element in Belfast is exhausted and they begin to riot. That is the moment when the troops will step in and crush the riot … They have agents in Belfast … who … are to say when it
is the right moment to stir up a riot.

  Needing to keep the flame high under his movement to deter the government from imposing home rule, Carson was gambling that “the hooligan element” would not act on his indictment of the government as brigands in hock to the papist enemies of the Union south of the Boyne and their Ulster coreligionists—the 690,000 Roman Catholics sharing a province smaller than Delaware with 880,000 Protestants. Pogroms against Belfast’s Catholic shipyard workers had disfigured the resistance to Gladstone’s home rule bills. Any repetition, Carson knew, would give the government the pretext to send the army to protect the Catholic people of Ulster.25

  The climactic third passage of the Home Rule Bill was set for May 1914. Before then, Asquith must strike a deal with Carson or “the morning Home Rule passes” a Provisional Government, backed by a lightly armed but strongly motivated people’s army, would seize power in Belfast.

  On March 9, Asquith announced the government’s idea of a compromise. Any of the six Ulster counties could vote themselves out of the home rule scheme for a period of six years—long enough for two general elections “so that the electorate in both countries would have ample experience of the working of the Irish executive”—then “automatically” be included. During that interval the competence of the Dublin government would silence charges that home rule, to quote a prevalent Unionist sentiment, would release a wave of “corruption and graft, and probably the country would be inundated with unscrupulous Irish-American low class politicians.” Good government in Dublin, Asquith assumed, would motivate the counties opting out of home rule to opt in. (But, Unionists sensibly asked, why force them in with automatic inclusion if they’ll come in willingly?) Redmond pronounced the six-year opt-out “the extremist limit of concession.” Carson rejected the whole scheme: “We do not want sentence of death with a stay of execution for six years.”26