1916 (7 page)

Between 1898 and 1902 there appeared ominous signs of Roman Catholic ‘triumphalism’. The Ancient Order of Hibernians, a kind of Catholic mirror image of the Protestant Orange Order, was founded in 1898; a ‘Catholic Association’ in 1902. Then in 1908 the papacy promulgated the
Ne temere
decree which laid down regulations for bringing up children in marriages in which one of the partners was a non-Catholic. This soon made its impact on Ulster life, when, in 1910, a Mrs McCann, a Presbyterian married to a Roman Catholic, in a union in which each attended their own church, found herself the centre of controversy. It was claimed that Mr McCann’s priest visited their home to tell the couple that their marriage was invalid according to the
Ne Temere
decree, and that they must re-marry in a Roman Catholic ceremony. It was alleged that Mrs McCann’s husband began to ill-treat her, and that he made off with the children (and the furniture), leaving her destitute. Her minister, a Mr Corkey, claimed that the incident demonstrated the ‘cruel punishment’ which the Roman Catholic church was ready to inflict on any member of the Protestant faith ‘over whom she gets any power’.
²⁰
There were some doubts about the details of the case, but in the febrile atmosphere of Ulster’s religion and politics, it provided a rallying cry for Protestants, and pushed the Protestant churches (not always well-disposed towards each other) together, in a way that foreshadowed the solidarity with which they confronted home rule. The Presbyterians, repositories of Ulster radicalism in days gone by, were the first to mobilise, warning in a convention on 1 February 1912 that ‘our civil and religious liberties would be gravely imperiled’. On Ulster day, when the covenant was signed, St John Ervine (unionist in politics but a leading light in the Irish literary revival) wrote that ‘Belfast suspended all its labours and became a place of prayer.
^’21

Out of this political/religious atmosphere came the rational and moral argument that a body of British citizens, utterly opposed to a measure which threatened to deprive them of their citizenship, had the right to resist an unjust law by force. When Lord Milner was canvassing for signatures to a British covenant on the lines of Ulster’s Solemn League and Covenant, he asked: ‘When before, in our lifetime, have thousands upon thousands of sober steady-going citizens deliberately contemplated resistance to an Act of Parliament, because they were sincerely convinced that it was devoid of all moral sanction?’ There were a great many people who still entirely failed to realise ‘what the strength of our feeling is on this subject. They think it is just an ordinary case of opposition to a political measure, a move in the party-game.’ This might be true of many unionists, ‘but there
is certainly a large body, who feel that the crisis altogether transcends anything in their previous experience, and calls for action, which is different, not only in degree, but in kind, from what is appropriate to ordinary political controversies.’
²²

This line of argument offered a more palatable reason for resistance than the narrow ground of Catholic/Protestant enmity. It attracted the support, though conditional support, of the eminent Vinerian Professor of English Law in Oxford university, A.V. Dicey. Dicey, a most forceful opponent of Irish home rule since 1886, cited the example of Lord Hartington, who asked: did not Ulster unionists have the right to resist home rule as James II had been resisted by England and Protestant Ireland in 1688–90, especially if home rule was to be imposed by force? Dicey described this as an ‘old Whig doctrine’ that oppression and especially resistance to the will of the nation ‘might justify what was technically conspiracy or rebellion’. But he insisted that the Ulster unionists should offer only moral resistance, which might endure for a year or a year and a half after home rule became law; this would be ‘fully justified’. Unionist resistance should be ‘conducted with extreme attention to the preservation of order’. In July 1912 he reiterated his concern that Ulster’s resistance must be passive; but he feared that Ulster unionists would not have the ‘self-control necessary for carrying out the very difficult policy of passive resistance within the limits of the law, tho’ I believe it would be successful’. Even in the case of oppression with which Ulster was menaced, ‘no loyal citizen should, until all possibilities of legal resistance is exhausted, have recourse to the use of arms’.
²³

Ulster unionists gave notice of their determination to by-pass this suggested era of passive resistance on 24–5 April 1914, when they carried out a daring gun-running adventure at the port of Larne, landing 25,000 rifles and 3,000,000 rounds of ammunition. The possibility of moral resistance was further endangered by the character of the UVF, which began as a ‘bottom up rather than top down’ unit in many areas; their activities might, especially in time of increased tension, be hard to control.
²⁴
Thus the commanding officer of the 2nd battalion, South Down regiment, Roger Hall, issued orders that Volunteers were ‘not to mix themselves up in riots or street fights unless to protect themselves or other Protestants, who may be assaulted, or when called upon by the police to assist them’. The police were to deal with ‘ordinary rowdyism, and Volunteers were not to interfere’ unless the police found themselves ‘unable to cope with the disturbance and call for help’. No rifles or revolvers were to be used ‘until the last extremity’ and indiscriminate revolver firing was ‘strictly forbidden’. Revolvers were
not authorised in the UVF and any Volunteer carrying one ‘does so on his
own responsibility, and must take the consequences if arrested’.
²⁵

Hall was harking back to the Volunteer movement of the late eighteenth century, when the Irish Volunteers (almost exclusively Protestant) were deployed on law and order tasks, as well as defying the British government. But the question was what would happen if the Liberal government of 1914 sought to assert its authority by deploying the British army against the UVF (which the British government of the 1770s had not done). The unionist peer, the Earl of Selborne, who enjoyed cordial relations with several senior Liberals, warned that if the government attempted to ‘crush Ulster with the army and fleet’, then Ulster’s resistance ‘would take all the forms, with which we are familiar in the history of such cases, some heroic and some hideous’. ‘Russian methods’ must fail.
²⁶
Dicey took the ominous, and probably accurate, view that if the shooting began, ‘British soldiers will, in any case, do their duty, and not forget that the primary duty of the soldier is obedience to lawful orders.’
²⁷

It was hard for any British government, not least a Liberal government, to weigh up the consequences of using force to crush Ulster unionist resistance. There was, as so often in politics, a balance of evils to be assessed. What confounded the Liberals was their bungled attempt, not to crush, but perhaps overawe the UVF in March 1914, when it was still a poorly armed organisation. On 14 March 1914 Winston Churchill warned in a speech in Bradford that it was time ‘to go forward and put these grave matters to the proof ’.
²⁸
On the same day the war office wrote to Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Paget (commander in chief in Ireland) that ‘evil-disposed persons’ may try ‘to obtain possession of arms, ammunition and other government stores’. Steps must be taken to safeguard depots in the north, but also in the south of Ireland.
²⁹
At a meeting on 19 March at which Winston Churchill and Augustine Birrell, the chief secretary for Ireland, were present, Paget was told that the third battle squadron of the royal navy was to be sent to Lamlash in Scotland ‘in order to be available if required’.
³⁰
Paget was concerned about the impact of sudden troop movements in the middle of a political crisis and on 20 March gave the impression to his senior officers that the army might soon engage the UVF, in which case Ireland might be ‘ablaze by Saturday, and would lead to something more serious than quelling of local disturbances’. He said that the war office had authorised him to inform officers domiciled in Ulster that they might be excused duties, and permitted to ‘disappear’ from Ireland, but others would not be thus permitted to choose whether or not
they would obey orders. Brigadier General Sir Hubert Gough admitted that he could not claim exemption as a resident of Ulster, but added that ‘on account of birth and upbringing, and many friendships, he did not see how he could bear arms against the Ulster loyalists, and that, if he did take up arms against them, he could never face his friends again.’

Fifty seven out of seventy officers of the third cavalry brigade at the Curragh camp responded that, if their duty involved the initiation of active military operations against Ulster, they would chose dismissal.
³¹
When
Gough and three senior commanders went to London to meet Seely (the secretary for war) the following Sunday, the minister acknowledged in writing that the government had no intention of using the armed forces to ‘coerce Ulster’.
³²
This concession was withdrawn by the government and Seely resigned on 25 March, but the episode cost the government its credibility, and opened it to Law’s censure that there had been a ‘plot against Ulster’.
³³
There is no evidence for this, but it is hard to explain the sudden lurch towards ‘precautionary’ movements on 14 March, since the Ulster crisis was no worse then than it had been before that date; perhaps government ministers did not so much plot against Ulster as bluff against Ulster.

Whatever the official motives, Ulster unionists rejoiced at the failure of the ‘plot’. Paramilitary organisations could act, it seemed, with impunity. But nationalist suspicions at the partiality of the official and military response to the UVF was shown when, on 26 July 1914, the Irish Volunteers emulated the UVF and landed guns and ammunition at Howth, near Dublin, but this time openly and in daylight. Clumsy efforts by the police and then the army to intercept and disarm the Volunteers resulted in soldiers opening fire on civilians who were goading them, resulting in the death of three people and the wounding of thirty eight.

While these dramatic events unfolded, efforts were being made between government and opposition to reach some kind of compromise that would save John Redmond’s face and prove acceptable to the unionists, British, Ulster and Irish. Given that so many parties had to be satisfied, it is hardly surprising that the prospects were not good. Law, for his part, was not hankering after civil war; his belief was that, as he wrote to Dicey in June 1913, ‘the best chance of avoiding civil war, or something like it, is to convince ministers that we are in earnest.’
³⁴
But this desire to show earnestness drove him into dangerous waters, including the idea of amending the annual Army Act, which was passed to legalise the existence of the armed forces for the next twelve months (this again was a legacy of the seventeenth century ‘Glorious Revolution’ and King James II’s determination to use the army to fight for his throne). The unionist leadership discussed this in 1912, and again in 1913, with the intention of amending it to prevent the use of troops to coerce Ulster, but finally abandoned the plan in March 1914 when, indeed, the Curragh episode made it redundant.
³⁵
Carson spoke the language of rebellion, but feared the outcome if matters were put to the proof.
³⁶
Sir James Craig, for the Ulster unionists, went on with his preparations for such an event. Southern Irish unionists looked with alarm on the efforts being made by all sides to find a compromise, for these became more focused on the expedient of finding some special treatment for Ulster, or part of it, and abandoning the rest of Ireland to home rule. Not all British unionists were satisfied with seeking a compromise of the Union in the form of special treatment for Ulster unionists. Irish home rulers were uneasy about what concessions might be demanded of them in order to disarm Ulster unionist resistance. They had also the substantial Catholic population in Ulster to consider.

The Liberal government, seeking to find a compromise, was obliged to put pressure on John Redmond on the Ulster issue, for where else was compromise to come from? A survey of the attempts made to offer special treatment for Ulster, with some form of exclusion from the home rule bill for some period of time, and for some area of the province, shows how the Liberals were retreating from the Gladstonian tradition of seeing Ireland as the unit of devolution, with safeguards for individuals, to one that saw Ulster or perhaps four or six counties of it, as a bloc to be excluded. On 9 March 1914 Asquith proposed an amendment to the home rule bill that would allow the electorate of each Ulster county, with Belfast and Londonderry, to vote whether it wished to opt out of home rule for six years. The time limit was fixed so that before it expired the electors of the United Kingdom would have been twice consulted (i.e. not later than December 1915 and not later than December 1920); and if it ratified the inclusion of the excluded counties, then Ulster should have no cause for resistance. In June 1914 an amending bill offering ‘county option’ for six years was introduced in the House of Lords by Lord Crewe, but the peers rejected it and voted instead for the permanent exclusion of the whole of Ulster. On July 21–4 a conference held at Buckingham palace between the party leaders failed to find a way out of the dilemma: Redmond would go no further than county option, which meant the exclusion of four Ulster counties; Law wanted six; Carson demanded the ‘clean cut’ of the whole province of Ulster. Asquith was prepared to give way on the time limit for exclusion,
but suggested leaving out of the bill south Tyrone, north Fermanagh and the four north eastern counties, except for south Armagh. This was unacceptable to both unionists and nationalists.
³⁷