Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (31 page)

Perhaps the single most complete Liberal or Home Rule vision of devolved government was provided by J. H. Morgan’s edition,
The New Irish Constitution
(1912). Here the Bill was depicted as a perfect combination of generous devolution alongside judicious imperial restraint. Commentators acknowledged the existence of religious apprehensions, but (following the argument pursued in rather more flamboyant terms by Bernard Shaw) argued that ‘full and free political life is the best, perhaps the only, solvent of intolerance’.
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The notable Presbyterian Home Ruler, Revd J. B. Armour, turned conventional fears on their head by arguing (again with Shavian overtones) that Home Rule would benefit, and not destroy, Irish Protestantism, because it would free Protestantism from its damaging anti-democratic and anti-national associations: Home Rule gave ‘Protestantism a chance of being judged on its own merits’.
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The writer on financial affairs Lord Welby was similarly dismissive of Unionist fears, arguing that Home Rule could not produce (as Unionists claimed) a viciously protectionist Irish government, because the English market for Irish goods was simply too important.
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Unionist predictions of profligate administration were also dismissed. One of the most perceptive Home Rule commentators, Jonathan Pym, argued that the likely danger in the new Ireland came, not from excessive expenditure, but rather from excessive miserliness: ‘the overwhelming peasant vote may render the administration unduly parsimonious, and so unwilling to place any additional burden on the owners of land that a kind of political stagnation may arise therefrom’.
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This was far removed from Frankfort Moore’s bitterly comic portrayal of a corrupt and spendthrift Home Rule government - but it was in fact a remarkably prescient forecast of the financial administration of the independent Ireland of the 1920s. The Unionist vision of an anarchic Ireland, where the old Royal Irish Constabulary would be humiliated and demoralised, was explored and dismissed elsewhere in the volume, where it was argued that the executive could not interfere with the legal process, and where the prediction was offered that agrarian disturbance would die out in the face of democratic institutions.
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Nationalists, dulled by years of loyalist bluster, dismissed the threat of Ulster Unionist violence as folly. Indeed, it was argued (again, with a skilful turning of the argument) that the very strength of Ulster Unionism within any Home Rule settlement would prevent persecution. Redmond predicted both that the Home Rule party would disintegrate after the successful attainment of its goal, and that Irish Unionists would have a strong representation within the Dublin House of Commons (roughly one-quarter of the seats); the combination of a splintered nationalist grouping and a strong Unionist bloc implied that Unionists would exercise an important influence within Home Rule Ireland.
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In addition Nationalists believed that the third Home Rule Bill adequately reflected Unionist sensitivities: for example, as has been mentioned, the Irish parliament was not permitted, under the terms of the Bill, to legislate to the advantage, or to the detriment, of any form of religious conviction; and in particular it was not permitted to impose any religious condition on the validity of marriage. This last restriction (new to the Bill of 1912) was added in the light of the Papal
Ne Temere
decree on mixed marriages, and was designed to disarm some of the wilder loyalist predictions of an impending Catholic ascendancy.

Unionist commentators were less sanguine about their looming fate under Home Rule. Much of the Unionist vision of Ireland under Home Rule has already been outlined, but the Unionist case, as with the Nationalist, depended on offering a detailed forecast of the impending apocalypse. Unionists, whether the satirist Frankfort Moore or the sober ex-Solicitor-General for Ireland, J. H. M. Campbell, predicted anarchy. Moore’s Home Rule parliamentarians sent a deputation to Tammany Hall to learn the arts of political management, while Campbell prophesied (without apparent irony) that after Home Rule ‘politics in Ireland would be shaped after the model of Tammany Hall rather than that of St Stephen’s.
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Dicey, Peter Kerr-Smiley (an influential Ulster Unionist MP) and others believed that the ruthlessness with which Nationalists pursued internal disputes would be applied more generally within a Home Rule parliament.
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Most Unionist writers and commentators predicted, not the fraternal harmony described by Redmond, but rather continuing friction between Ireland and Britain. Indeed, many believed that the Bill, with its complex array of checks and balances, was a seed-bed for grievance and distrust. Pembroke Wicks argued that the combination of rights and restrictions with which the new Irish administration was burdened promised continual conflict with the imperial authorities; in particular the financial settlement, described earlier, was ‘capable of producing only the minimum of revenue for the Irish Exchequer and the maximum of friction with the British Treasury’.
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The Joint Exchequer Board, created as a peace-keeping mechanism, would - as a British-dominated institution - serve only as a further irritant for Irish Nationalism.

Unionists accepted that such continuing friction would destabilise the Home Rule settlement, and would help to inflame advanced separatist feeling within Ireland. No Unionist viewed Home Rule in Redmondite terms, that is as a final, or even lasting, constitutional arrangement (‘our new constitution is not made to last’, lamented Dicey).
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Most saw the elaborate system of checks on Irish autonomy as being either (if the checks worked) a taunt to nationalist sentiment or (if they did not) practically worthless; Peter Kerr-Smiley, for example, dismissed the lord lieutenant’s veto as ‘a sham’ and the right of judicial appeal to the British Privy Council as ‘worthless’.
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Several Unionist writers foresaw that tensions between Britain and Ireland would arise from the ongoing payment of the land purchase annuities. Some Unionists, like Richard Bagwell, shared the presumptions of Terence MacSwiney’s
The Revolutionist -
and predicted that a moderate Home Rule administration would come under increasing pressure from advanced separatist feeling.
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Many assumed that such feeling would be fired by Anglo-Irish tensions, and by the cancerous instability of Home Rule.

Political instability would affect the health of business. Frankfort Moore’s satirical comment on the anarchic economic fall-out from Home Rule was not fundamentally different from the observations of some stolid northern Unionist businessmen. Moore predicted that the Home Rule parliament would impose penal taxation on northerners and upon northern business - and some less flippant Unionists feared that this would indeed be the case. Most informed comment, however, was centred less on the fear of immediate and brutal taxation than upon a more fundamental anxiety. If, as Unionists believed, Home Rule threatened political instability, then it also threatened the stock market and Irish credit. The Home Rule crises had been associated with a dip in Irish stock, and many Unionists feared that, were Home Rule to be enacted, this depreciation would be permanent. An able northern critic of the Bill, the Liberal Unionist businessman Thomas Sinclair, believed that Home Rule would seriously damage all forms of northern prosperity - industrial, commercial and agricultural; and he traced ‘the root of the evil’ to the financial instability of any future Irish administration.
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The new Home Rule government, indebted and unstable, would fail to win credit in the international money market; and this would have damaging repercussions for the general prosperity. Sinclair’s analysis, while sombre and measured, recalled Frankfort Moore’s comic depiction of the Irish national £10 million loan, and the chaotic aftermath of its failure.
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But the instability of Home Rule, which these grim fantasies presumed, arose not merely from the pressure of advanced Nationalists, but also from the opposition of the Ulster Unionists themselves. Most serious Unionist comment between 1911 and 1914 assumed, at the very least, that there would be unrest in Ulster; many came to believe that civil war loomed. Peter Kerr-Smiley linked the likely financial instability of Home Rule Ireland to northern disturbance by arguing that the new administration would be burdened by exceptional policing costs.
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Pembroke Wicks made the same connection in a rather different manner: Wicks prophesied that, if the Bill were forced into law, there would be ‘civil war in Ulster and an end to public confidence, security and credit throughout the rest of Ireland’.
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One of the most eerily prescient of these Unionist jeremiahs was Earl Percy, an army officer and son of the 7th Duke of Northumberland, who - writing in 1912 - was already utterly convinced of the impending European cataclysm, and who drew on his experience of South Africa to offer predictions of Irish politics. Percy’s primary interest was in the general military disadvantages of Home Rule, but he toyed with two of the hypotheses which will be explored shortly, in the last section of this chapter: he imagined an Ireland under Home Rule, with Ulster excluded, and argued that there would be an irrevocable slide, as there had been in the Transvaal and Orange Free State, towards independence.
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Unionists would be treated with the same asperity as had been applied to the British Uitlanders in southern Africa in the years before the Boer War. Alternatively, Percy worked with the notion of a unitary Ireland, governed by a Home Rule administration, and riven by at worst civil war, at best ‘a condition where the rousing of old animosities, religious and otherwise, leads to internal disturbances of all kinds’.
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Basing his judgement on the embryonic militancy in the North, Percy deemed an insurrection against any Home Rule administration to be ‘highly probable’; and he was equally certain that troops would be required to quell unrest, and restore the authority of the Dublin regime.
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Part of Percy’s vision of ‘the march to Armageddon’ came to life in August 1914. But the accuracy of his prophecies for Europe ensured that his fears of an Irish apocalypse were dispelled, at least for the moment. For, with the outbreak of the Great War, the paradoxical loyalist rebellion faded away, and the regiments of insurgents became battalions of king’s men. None of the political futurologists, whether Nationalist or Unionist, speculated about the fate of Home Rule in the context of a European war: certainly none, not even Percy, dared to guess what the impact might be on Ireland of mass slaughter in the trenches. Percy was virtually alone in recognising the seriousness of the international situation, but not even he foresaw the profound political fall-out from the battles which he imagined on the horizon. Nevertheless, if speculations were made without allowance for the central event of European as well as Anglo-Irish history, then the seers accurately predicted some of the forces within, if not Home Rule Ireland, then at least the Dominion created in 1921, the Irish Free State: a Catholic and frugal polity, which hankered after fuller autonomy. And, given that the war, rather than Ulster, killed Gladstonian Home Rule, these partisan but acute and informed fantasies are the best guide which we have to the lost Liberal arcadia - an Ireland bound to Britain, but self-governing, an Ireland divided by religion and by culture, but united in patriotism.

The available contemporary evidence for the likely shape of Irish government under Home Rule has been outlined and debated: the background to the Home Rule agitation has been sketched, the details of the third Home Rule Bill have been presented, and some of the rich array of contemporary speculation concerning Home Rule government has been excavated. It is now possible to draw together these different skeins to weave several counterfactual hypotheses: the first of these works with the assumption, already outlined, that a Home Rule settlement might well have been agreed in 1912; and the second toys with the premise that the European war was either delayed or averted, and that the Liberal government and the Ulster Unionists had directly to confront their own actions (rather than pirouette out of danger, as each did in August 1914).

Home Rule is agreed in 1912, and it is established on the basis of the temporary exclusion of six Ulster counties. The Cabinet meeting on 6 February 1912, at which Lloyd George and Churchill present their plans for Ulster exclusion, is divided, but the clamour for a pre-emptive offer grows, and Asquith, who has independently recognised the need for a deal, adds his weight to the exclusionist camp.
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The Chief Secretary for Ireland, Birrell, aided perhaps by Lloyd George and Churchill, has to sell this proposal to Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary party; the semblance of a united and powerful ministerial front, allied with the temporary nature of the scheme, helps to overturn the deep-seated antipathy which the Irish leadership, and especially Devlin, the northern Nationalist leader, harbour towards any retreat from an all-Ireland polity.
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However, the alternative to refusal is probably a dissolution, and perhaps a Unionist electoral victory.

A Home Rule Bill is therefore launched in April 1912 with a temporary partition scheme. The Conservatives and Ulster Unionists are - as Lloyd George has foreseen - wrong-footed and divided. The Conservative front bench is torn in several directions: influential southern Unionist sympathisers, like Lord Lansdowne, are bitterly unhappy with the Bill where more passionless figures such as Austen Chamberlain or Lord Hugh Cecil see the Liberal offer as a basis for negotiation, if not settlement.
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Bonar Law’s instincts are much more consensual than is widely understood, and he realises that his plans for an Ulster crusade in Britain are fundamentally undermined by the Liberal initiative. He may be able to rally the party on the basis of a call to defend embattled Ulster; but he will not be able to sway either the party or the country on the basis of squabbles over the minutiae of a partition deal. He is therefore prepared to work with the Liberals.