Crossing the Irish Sea, the Churchills were kept awake all night by women who stood outside their cabin window chanting: “Votes for women! Votes for women!” Policemen patrolled the eighteen-mile railroad line from Larne, where they docked, to Belfast. Arriving at Belfast Station, Churchill was told that four infantry battalions—thirty-five hundred troops—had been called up to line his route. Even so, the risks were grave; glass had been removed from the windows of their car because demonstrators were carrying stones. The drive to the Grand Centre Hotel was a tribulation in itself. Winston stared out at a burning effigy of himself. At one point, the Guardian reported, the mob lifted the car’s back wheels eighteen inches off the ground. The Times correspondent wrote that “men thrust their heads in and uttered fearful menaces and imprecations. It seemed to me that Mr Churchill was taking a greater risk than ever he expected…. Yet he never flinched and took hostility visualised as well as vocalised calmly and no harm befell him.” This observer noted that he “smilingly raised his hat whenever the crowd groaned.” Clementine, badly frightened herself, thought that “the opposition and threats seemed to ‘ginger him up.’ ”183
Nevertheless, it was clear that he had misjudged Ulster’s mood. A hostile throng of ten thousand awaited them at the hotel. Businessmen in the lobby angrily shook their fists. The windows of their suite were heavily draped; when Winston tried to peek out, a roar of boos and oaths swelled up from below. Meeting in Ulster Hall was out of the question. The local Unionist Council, which had resolved to prevent his appearance “in the centre of the loyal city of Belfast,” had occupied it with armed “Hooligan Corner Boys,” as they were called. Evicting them would cost the lives of at least six policemen. A dozen plots were afoot to murder Churchill if he even approached the hall. The rally was therefore moved to Celtic Park in the Falls neighborhood, a Catholic stronghold, where a heavy rain began falling at 2:00 P.M. as Winston, standing beneath a leaking canvas marquee, rose to address a drenched crowd of five thousand Irish Nationalists and a handful of Unionist hecklers. The Tories, he told them, were trying to regain office by using Ireland as a cat’s-paw, but “the flame of Irish nationality is inextinguishable.” Of his father he said: “The reverence which I feel for his memory, and the care with which I have studied his public life, make me quite content to leave others to judge how far there is continuity or discontinuity between his work and any I have tried to do.” Then he ended audaciously, ringing a change on Lord Randolph’s most famous words: “If Ulster would fight for the honor of Ireland, for reconciliation of races and for forgiveness of ancient wrongs, for the consolidation of the Empire, then indeed Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right.”184
The apologetic Liberals of Ulster presented Winston and Clementine with blackthorns, stout walking sticks—a pleasant gesture which was swiftly forgotten when, as they mounted the Larne gangplank for the journey home, dockers pelted them with rotten fish. It was a fitting farewell; in the eight centuries since Pope Adrian IV gave Ireland to Henry II, the relationship between England and Ireland had been marked by wave after wave of violence, and now new fury was rising. Churchill wasn’t even safe in the House of Commons. In June, Ronald MacNeill, a prominent Unionist MP, picked up a copy of the House’s standing orders from the ledge of the Speaker’s chair and flung it at the first lord, cutting him in the forehead. Next day MacNeill apologized. Churchill assured him he hadn’t minded at all, which was true; he was enjoying the battle, and if tempers on the other side grew frayed, he was the first to admit that his own remarks were incendiary. His treatment in Ulster, he said, was proof that Carson and Bonar Law, leader of the Tories in the House, had plotted war on the British army and had “even suggested that this process in Ireland should be accompanied by the lynching of His Majesty’s Ministers.” Captain James Craig, an Ulster MP, called him “contemptible.” Winston replied: “If I valued the honourable Gentleman’s opinion I might get angry.” He enjoyed a studied insult, even when he was its victim, and chortled when he read that Lord Charles Beresford, during a Hyde Park rally, referred to him as a “Lilliput Napoleon—a man with an unbalanced mind, an egomaniac whose one absorbing thought is personal vindictiveness towards Ulster.” He didn’t even mind when feelings ran so high in the House that only a quick-thinking Labour MP, who started everyone singing “Auld Lang Syne,” prevented fistfights on the floor.185
He was, however, troubled by talk of Belfast’s gutters running red with British blood. Abuse was tolerable only up to a certain point. Carson passed it when he called him “Lord Randolph’s renegade son, who wants to be handed down to posterity as the Belfast butcher who threatened to shoot down those who took his father’s advice.” Though his language was less blistering, Law went even farther. He said: “Ireland is two nations. The Ulster people will submit to no ascendancy, and I can imagine no lengths to which they might go in which they would not be supported by the overwhelming majority of the British people.” This was an open invitation to revolt, from the man who would be prime minister in a Conservative government. Such speeches were fanning the flame of discord in northern Ireland. Protestant volunteers were already forming insurgent regiments. Law warned the House that Ulster might explode at any moment; if blood were shed, he said, the cabinet would be answerable for it. Winston retorted that “those who talk of revolution ought to be prepared for the guillotine.” In a letter to The Times he said: “Mr Bonar Law and his lieutenant Sir Edward Carson have…. incited the Orangemen to wage civil war…. All this talk of violence, of bullets and bayonets, of rebellion and civil war has come from one side alone.” He wouldn’t budge: “Whatever Ulster’s rights may be, she cannot stand in the way of the whole of the rest of Ireland.”186
One reason the Irish crisis grew is that it was given time to grow. Asquith introduced his Home Rule bill on April 11, 1912, two months after Churchill’s Belfast speech, and the issue was still before the country in the summer of 1914. The House of Lords was responsible for the delay. The peers no longer possessed an absolute veto, but they retained some power to obstruct; if they stonewalled, as they did in this instance, they could force the House of Commons to pass a bill in three successive parliamentary sessions. As the seasons passed, the Orangemen’s enmity hardened. For more than two years, Churchill later calculated, the question “absorbed nine-tenths of the political field.” Meanwhile, he and his fellow ministers were struggling to find a compromise which would give Ireland both Home Rule and peace. His first proposals were naive. He saw the Transvaal constitution as a sound precedent, though it would be hard to imagine two breeds less alike than the Boers and the Irish. Lloyd George suggested a “referendum…. each of the Ulster counties is to have the option of exclusion from the Home Rule Bill,” which was equally impractical. The idea of partition was first mooted in June 1912, when two MPs introduced an amendment to the bill exempting four Ulster counties from Home Rule. Carson, believing that “if Ulster were left out, Home Rule would be impossible,” supported their measure in the hope of defeating the bill in its entirety.187
It was rejected, but the idea remained. On August 31 Churchill wrote John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Nationalists, that “something should be done to afford the characteristically Protestant and Orange counties the option of several years before acceding to an Irish Parliament.” This was the first indication that he might be receptive to partition. At the time he thought of it as a temporary measure. With the Ulster Volunteers drilling, and Carson designated head of a “provisional government,” he appealed for a fresh approach at Dundee in October 1913. By this time Home Rule had passed the Commons twice and been spurned twice by the Lords. Its enactment was now certain. Churchill, however, was looking beyond that, to the practical problems of enforcement. The Unionists’ claim for special treatment, he said, was “very different from the claim to bar and defer Home Rule and block the path of the rest of Ireland.” He added significantly: “Our bill is not unalterable.” The Liberals could pass it without a single Tory vote, “b
ut it will take more than one party to make it a lasting success. A settlement by agreement… would offer advantages far beyond anything now in sight. Peace is better than triumph provided it is peace with honour…. Only one thing would make it worth while or even possible to recast a measure on which so much depends: It is a very simple thing—good will.” Redmond, afraid that his most powerful ally might be weakening, denounced the “two-nation theory” as “an abomination and a blasphemy.” Carson was scornful. One solitary Conservative, F. E. Smith—who, astonishingly, remained close to Winston through all this—said he had “shown a grasp of those facts which are fundamental which none of his colleagues, at least in public, has displayed.”188
If his motive in entering this donnybrook had been political—and surely that was among his reasons—he had chosen the wrong arena. To be sure, he was reestablishing his credentials as a Liberal, but the cost was prohibitive. By agreeing to be Asquith’s chief spokesman on Home Rule, he had added his name to that long list of English public men who had intervened in the Irish question and emerged bloodied. Other members of Asquith’s cabinet could speak out in support of Winston when his decision was popular and remain silent when it wasn’t. This was even true of the prime minister. Eventually Asquith would have to commit himself, but in the interim he could leave the stump to Churchill. Moreover, Winston couldn’t confine himself to polemics. He had to search for a solution, a hopeless task which was bound to antagonize partisans in both Belfast and Dublin. Twice in the autumn of 1913 he conferred with Conservative leaders in the hope of finding middle ground, talking to Bonar Law at Balmoral in September, and then to Austen Chamberlain aboard the Enchantress in late November. Chamberlain’s memorandum on their discussion, written immediately afterward, shows how far Churchill was prepared to go at that time to reach a settlement: “In answer to W’s opening remark I said that I had assumed that… he was prepared to [exempt] Ulster. He replied: ‘We have never excluded that possibility—never.’ Of course Redmond hated it, but they were not absolutely bound to R. and he was not indispensable to them. They would not allow Ulster to veto Home Rule, but they had never excluded the possibility of separate treatment for Ulster. This was repeated more than once in the course of our talk.”189
Winston was still not considering permanent partition. His papers leave no room for doubt on that point. He was merely contemplating a transition period for the northern counties. Yet it hardly seemed to matter. Neither side was interested in finding a middle course. Right or wrong, Ulster was preparing to fight. On September 12, 1912, Carson had drawn up a covenant, not against Home Rule for Ulster, but against any version of Home Rule, and a half-million Orangemen had signed it, some in their own blood:
Being convinced in our consciences that Home Rule would be disastrous to the material well-being of Ulster as well as the whole of Ireland, subversive to our civil and religious freedoms, destructive of our citizenship, and perilous to the unity of the Empire, we whose names are undersigned, men of Ulster, loyal subjects of His Gracious Majesty King George V, humbly relying on the God whom our fathers in days of stress and trial confidently trusted, do hereby pledge ourselves in solemn Covenant throughout this our time of threatened calamity to stand by one another in defending for ourselves and our children our cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom, and in using all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland. And in the event of such a Parliament being forced upon us we further solemnly and mutually pledge ourselves to refuse to recognize its authority. In sure confidence that God will defend the right we hereto subscribe our names…. God save the King.
Now, a year later, the deterioration of the situation was alarming. The month after the Enchantress conference, Belfast police reported that British army depots there might be raided. Carson publicly boasted that the soldiers would neither resist such raids nor fire on Orangemen. “The Army,” he said, “are with us.” General Henry Wilson, Seely’s director of military operations, agreed; should the army be ordered to coerce Ulster, he said, there would be “wholesale defections.” Law told the House: “If Ulster does resist by force, there are stronger influences than Parliamentary majorities… no Government would dare to use their troops to drive them out.” Then, speaking to a massive Unionist rally at Blenheim, he declared: “I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster will go in which I shall not be ready to support them.”190
Lloyd George warned: “We are confronted with the gravest issue raised in this country since the days of the Stuarts.”191 The signers of the Belfast Covenant had pledged armed resistance to the last man. And they had arms. In the early spring of 1914, a German lighter bearing 25,000 Mauser rifles and 2,500,000 rounds of ammunition had slipped out of Hamburg port and transshipped its cargo to a Norwegian tramp, the Fanny. Before Danish Customs officials could inspect the Fanny at the Kattegat, between Sweden and Denmark, the skipper had made a run for it and disappeared into the mists of the North Sea. Anchoring in a remote cove, the crew changed the steamer’s appearance and renamed her the Doreen. Danish Customs having raised the alarm, Churchill had patrol boats searching these waters, but as the Doreen the renegade ship reached Yarmouth, then Lundy Island in Bristol Channel, and finally, on the night of April 19, Tuskar Rock off county Antrim in the Irish Sea. There she rendezvoused with the Clydevalley, an ancient collier black with coal dust and red with rust. The two masters lashed the hulls together and ran a single set of navigation lights as crewmen heaved the deadly crates from one hold to the other. On April 25 the Clydevalley groaned its way into Larne, the very harbor through which the Churchills had passed. Orangemen in the town had cut telephone wires and organized a convoy of trucks. Between 11:00 P.M. and 2:30 A.M. volunteers sweating under rigged lights lugged the guns and ammunition from the collier to waiting trucks. By dawn they had fanned out all over northern Ireland. Now, if Home Rule were forced upon them, they could field an army.
By the end of the month fifty thousand Orangemen, aged seventeen to sixty-five, had joined the Ulster Volunteer Force. Their morale was excellent, and they were superbly led. England’s best generals were backing them. Kitchener belonged to the Protestant Ascendancy; so did Lord Roberts. Kitchener’s duties in the Middle East ruled him out, but Roberts declined the UVF command only because, at eighty-five, he was too old. More and more one heard the name of General Henry Wilson, who had been appointed Britain’s chief of military operations despite the fact that as an Ulsterman he had signed the covenant. Tall, lanky, with a look of despondent fidelity which was entirely misleading, Wilson was one of many establishmentarians whose names gave the incipient revolt an aura of respectability. Others included Lord Rothschild, Edward Elgar of “Land of Hope and Glory,” and Rudyard Kipling. Kipling had contributed £30,000 to the UVF and published a poem honoring it—not in The Times, which supported Home Rule, but in the archconservative Morning Post:
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.
Even the King had doubts about using force against the Orangemen. He asked Bonar Law: “Will it be wise, will it be fair to the Sovereign as head of the Army, to subject the discipline and indeed the loyalty of his troops to such a strain?” Law, a Canadian who had become an adopted Orangeman, exploited the King’s discomfort. At stake, he told the monarch, was not merely Ulster, but the entire British Empire. Home Rule would be the thin end of the wedge for His Majesty’s fractious subjects all over the world. He should refuse to recognize it, whatever Parliament did. Law said: “You will save the Empire by your example.”192
Meanwhile, the tale of the twenty-five thousand smuggled Mausers had leaked out. The possibility of a Belfast-Berlin collaboration see
med very real, and was discussed in the House. Liberal back-benchers demanded prosecution of Orangemen negotiating with the Germans. Asquith refused; he was vacillating. Churchill spoke out: “We have,” he said, “been confronted with an avowed conspiracy to defy Parliament and the law, leaving a great army practising preparations for rebellion and for the setting up of a provisional Government, which would be an outrage against the realm and the Empire.” England, he said, would not be intimidated by plots to raise a revolt “greater than the police could cope with.”193 He was not speaking only to Belfast; Redmond and his fellow Irish Nationalists had been desperately worried about the response to all this among their own people in the south, and their nightmares were being realized. Riots were reported in Dublin. Catholic youths were flocking to join the Irish Nationalist Volunteers. Irish MPs who were counselors of moderation were losing their followers. In 1913 a militant working-class movement had forged a tight alliance with the Sinn Féin, who regarded themselves as Irishmen first and last and gentlemen never, and wearers of the green were turning to these champions of violence.
By March 1914, with final passage of the Home Rule bill less than two months away, the strain was becoming insupportable. Asquith, with Redmond’s reluctant consent, promised that Ulster would be permitted to vote itself out of Home Rule for six years, or until two successive general elections had been held. Carson angrily rejected this as “a sentence of death with a stay of execution for six years.” Churchill decided to take his gloves off. He had been conciliatory at Dundee. Now he would swing over to the attack. At Bradford on March 14 he called Bonar Law “a public danger seeking to terrorize the Government and to force his way into the Councils of his Sovereign” by exploiting the issue for partisan purposes. “Behind every strident sentence which he rasps out,” he said, “you can always hear the whisper… ‘Ulster is our best card; it is our only card.’ ” That was fair. The Tories had asked for it. But then, carried away by his own rhetoric, he blundered, salting the Unionists’ wounds with sarcasm. Having raised troops, he said, Ulster seemed anxious for battle “so that her volunteers could assert themselves.” But the proposed moratorium would deprive them of that test. He put words in their mouths: “ ‘Now the Government have had the incredible meanness to postpone all possible provocation for six long years.’ ” Bitterly he commented: “Coercion for four-fifths of Ireland is a healthful, exhilarating, salutary exercise, but lay a finger on the Tory fifth—sacrilege, tyranny, murder!” The Liberals were not cowed, he said: “There are worse things than bloodshed…. We are not going to have the realm of Britain sunk to the condition of the Republic of Mexico.” The issue, for him, was “whether civil and Parliamentary government in these realms is to be beaten down by the menace of armed force.” If Orangemen would extend the hand of friendship, it would be eagerly clasped by Liberals and Irish Nationalists, but “if every effort to meet their views is only to be used as a means of breaking down Home Rule… if the civil and Parliamentary systems are to be brought to the crude challenge of force… then I can only say to you: Let us go forward and put these grave matters to the proof.” Lord Fisher wrote him: “I should say it’s probably the best speech you ever made.” But The Times commented the next day that, having carried his naval estimates over the protests of rank-and-file Liberals, he “seemed to think it necessary to show that on occasion he could shout defiance with the rest,” and another critic called his remarks redolent of “cheap champagne made of gooseberry juice and vitriol, exhilarating at the moment but nauseating sooner or later.”194