He pushed Collins as hard as he could. Learning that IRA men of all convictions were planning to meet, and that they would consider renunciation of the treaty, he put him on notice: “An adverse decision by the convention of the Irish Republican Army (so-called) would… be a very grave event at the present juncture. I presume that you are quite sure there is no danger of this.” In reality Collins could be quite sure of very little. A band of Irregulars had occupied Dublin’s Four Courts—its law buildings—and he hadn’t ordered them evicted because he wasn’t certain he would be obeyed. On May 20 startling news reached the Colonial Office from one of Winston’s friends in Dublin. Collins and De Valera had met on neutral ground and signed a pact, agreeing that Free State men would have sixty-four seats in the new Dáil and the Irregulars fifty-seven, thus preserving the existing ratio, and that after the election Eire would be governed by a coalition of five Free Staters and four Irregulars. “The Irish masses,” Churchill tartly wrote afterward, “just like the Russians two or three years before, were not to be allowed a voice in their fate.” Churchill’s informant had told him that Collins was beginning to have doubts about the agreement, however, and a confrontation might “make him break down.” Winston wrote Collins: “I had better let you know at once… that as far as we are concerned in this country, we should certainly not be able to regard any such arrangement as a basis on which we could build.”106 Half abashed and half mutinous, Collins arrived in London with Griffith and William Cosgrave, another Free State leader, and tried to explain the inexplicable: that in Ireland’s present chaos, any measure, however makeshift, was preferable to ravagement and slaughter. But Churchill had no time for them just then. He was rushing to the House to battle their real English adversaries. At No. 10 the three Irishmen were given tickets to the Strangers’ Gallery, and they watched his fight from there.
Hardly had he reached the Treasury Bench when Sir Henry Wilson challenged him. What, he asked angrily, were the British troops in Dublin doing? “They are not there to keep order,” he answered himself, “because they are not allowed to keep order.” Winston tried to speak, but Wilson overrode him, shouting another question: Were not the colonial secretary’s reports to the House “from end to end an admission that every single development of the Irish problem has been miscalculated?” In replying, Churchill reassumed a fighting stance. His militant moves to suppress the Curragh mutiny eight years earlier were, he knew, remembered by almost all the MPs present. Now he had to convince them that he could be as stern with Eire as he had been with Ulster then. He said: “We shall not under any circumstances agree to deviate from the Treaty either in the strict letter or the honest spirit.” Should an Irish coalition attempt to destroy it “by setting up a Republic, it would be the intention of the Government to hold Dublin as one of the preliminary and essential steps in military operations.” He was confident he could mobilize enough veterans of the trenches to hold the city. Shipments of munitions to the provisional government had been stopped, he said, to avoid the possibility that they might be used later against Englishmen. The outcome of the election, now scheduled for June 16, would go far toward clarifying the situation. Wilson, unreassured, lashed back: “The Colonial Secretary says we can wait. Can we? All this time murders are going on at the rate of… six or seven a day.” Winston demurred: “I think there were only three or four murders in southern Ireland in the last ten days. The number has been larger in Northern Ireland.” Wilson pressed him again: “My point is, can you wait while men are murdered like that?”107
It was not only men, of course. After the House rose Collins showed Winston a photograph of an entire family of Catholics, the McMahons, who had just been massacred in Ulster. According to Frank O’Connor, Collins’s biographer, “Churchill wept.” The Troubles were worsening. The Free State’s provisional government was losing control of the country. Collins acknowledged it, and said he understood Churchill’s threat to draw England’s sword. De Valera was defiant: “Mr. Churchill’s threats do not affect us. We deny the right of any English authority to prescribe what an Irishman shall or shall not do.” But Churchill wrote Clementine: “Our position is a vy strong one, so long as we adhere to the Treaty. And Ulster’s position is a vy strong one so long as she respects the law. I have made it clear I will defend or conceal no irregularities of any kind. I will expose them coldly to Parliament whoever is guilty. We must not get back into that hideous bog of reprisals, from which we have saved ourselves.”108
All through that spring the horrors of internecine strife clotted in suffering Eire. Hemorrhaging within as IRA Irregulars fought the Free State, its battered people faced the growing possibility of intervention by Britons and Orangemen. The frontier disputes loomed ever larger. Lloyd George wrote Churchill that he had conducted the negotiations with “skill and patience,” but he was “profoundly disquieted by the developments on the Ulster border. We are not merely being rushed into a conflict, but we are gradually being manoeuvered into giving battle on the very worst grounds which could possibly be chosen for the struggle. I cannot say whether Henry Wilson and de Valera are behind this but if they are their strategy is very skillful.” He suspected the Orangemen of planning to incite violence and warned against encouraging them to believe they might be reinforced by Englishmen: “We have surely done everything that Ulster can possibly expect to ensure its security.” Churchill agreed, but he pointed out that Belfast’s fears were not entirely unjustified. He could not discount the danger that the factions in southern Ireland might unite to invade the smaller state in the north. During one of Collins’s calls at the Colonial Office, Winston told him that “if any part of the Irish Republican Army, either pro-Treaty or anti-Treaty, invaded Northern soil, we would throw them out.” In point of fact he contemplated the use, not of troops, but of warships. In a memorandum he wrote: “The effect of a blockade would not starve the Irish people, but it would at a stroke ruin their prosperity. Out of 205 millions exported from Ireland last year, 203 were purchased by Great Britain. This fact alone is decisive.”109
Once more he was captivated by the possibilities of force: deep within him lurked the imaginative child who had played with toy soldiers in his Mayfair nursery. If he meant to stiffen Collins’s spine, however, it was unnecessary. The man was a paradigm of valor. And in the end Winston knew it, knew that Collins was not only the best but the only alternative to De Valera, who, in Winston’s words, had “come to personify not a cause but a catastrophe.” Reversing the policy he had presented to the House, he instructed Cope to resume consignments of weapons to Dublin, drawing “arms from the British Government, which has a large surplus.” He added: “I am quite ready to continue the steady flow of arms to trustworthy Free State troops.” Collins was constantly commuting between Ireland and England, sleeping in deck chairs, electioneering at home and drawing up Eire’s constitution with Churchill and Colonial Office advisers. Confirming Winston’s faith in him, he agreed to constitutional changes which could only sharpen the conviction of IRA hardliners that he had turned his coat. The King would be invested with the formalities of executive power in the Free State; judges would be nominated by the governor-general; any constitutional amendment conflicting with the treaty would be void. These provisions would not, however, be published until the early hours of election day. Shaking Churchill’s hand as he left London, Collins said, “I shall not last long. My life’s forfeit, but I’ll do my best. After I’m gone it will be easier for the others. You’ll find they will be able to do more than I can do.” It was his valediction. Winston, profoundly moved, stammered a quotation from Johannes Brand, a pro-British Boer who had helped him hammer out the terms of peace in South Africa: “Alles zal regt kom”—“All will come right.” Collins said he doubted it. He was right.110
But on Friday, June 16, he won a great victory. That morning De Valera, fulminating against the constitution’s final draft, told reporters: “As it stands it will exclude from public service, and practically disenfranchise, every
honest Republican. Its test code is as comprehensive against Republicans as the test acts of the Clarendon and Shaftesbury code against Catholics and dissenters in the reign of Charles II.” But most of southern Ireland’s voters had never heard of Clarendon or Shaftesbury, and, more important, Irish republicanism, in the eyes of many, had been discredited by the crimes of the Irish Republican Army. When the ballots were counted that evening they showed that the people of Eire had elected 93 candidates committed to the treaty and only 35 Irregulars. The New York Times called the results “a triumph for imperial methods of pacification.” De Valera, whose terrorism had nullified his pact with Collins, described it to a Times correspondent as a victory of “outrage, murder, and massacre” and said ominously, “England’s gain is for the moment only.” Once his people discovered that they had chosen lackeys of “Churchill’s hate,” who dared “blacken forever the fair name of this fair nation,” he said, Ireland would “rise up and fling them from the positions they have usurped and dishonoured.”111 One of his gunmen, Reginald Dunne, a member of the IRA’s London branch, received orders to wreak vengeance for the lost election by striking at the heart of the British establishment. On Thursday, June 22, six days after the Free Staters had gone to the polls, Sir Henry Wilson donned his field marshal’s uniform and unveiled a memorial to Britain’s war dead in London’s Liverpool Street Station. Returning to his Eaton Place home by the tube and then by taxi, he was mounting his steps when Dunne and another IRA man opened fire from behind a nearby hedge. Sir Henry’s hand instinctively flew to his sword hilt, but they emptied their pistols into his chest and left him sprawled on the pavement, dying.
The killers were caught before they could escape Belgravia. Within an hour Churchill was standing beside Lloyd George at No. 10, staring down dumbly at the two pistols which, in his words, had “drunk this loyal man’s blood.” Scotland Yard collared an IRA Irregular carrying a list of prominent Englishmen marked for death. Churchill’s name led it. All were assigned bodyguards and the public gallery in the House was closed. As young Randolph recalled later, he and his sister Diana returned from roller-skating in Holland Park that Thursday afternoon and “found the house surrounded by policemen. Indoors all sorts of tough-looking men were running up and down the stairs, looking in cupboards, attics and cellars.” That night Winston told Clementine he would sleep in the attic. Erecting a metal shield between himself and the attic door, he waited till dawn, gripping a Colt revolver. After breakfast he ordered an armchair reinforced with steel, and for months he slept in it, the pistol in his lap. He was, he told his wife, ready to “fight it out.” Norman Harding, a real-estate agent with whom he had made an appointment to see country properties, afterward recalled joining him in the backseat of his automobile and remarking that it was “the darkest car I have ever been in.” Churchill explained: “Well, you see, it is armoured, and the windows are bullet resisting, and I have a loaded revolver.” Detective Thompson sat in the front seat. Introducing him, Winston said, “he also has a revolver.” He then turned around, the agent later remembered, and “slid back a small shutter and asked, ‘You see that car behind us?’ Harding did, and counted three men in it. Churchill said, ‘That car will accompany us ten miles out of town, and, on our return, will pick us up again and escort us back to the Colonial Office or to my home. I have had a number of threatening letters each week, some telling me the actual time and method of my death, and I don’t like it.”112
After the assassination of Sir Henry a wave of rage against the Irish swept England. It scalded Churchill; Lady Wilson let it be known that no one who had negotiated the Free State treaty would be welcome at her husband’s funeral. Bonar Law demanded that the government act. Churchill had to respond. On the Monday after the crime he stood in the well of the House and observed that IRA Irregulars, calling their post “Headquarters of the Republican Executive,” still held out in Dublin’s Four Courts. “Their presence is a gross breach of the Treaty,” he said. “If it does not come to an end… then it is my duty to say, in behalf of His Majesty’s Government, that we shall regard the Treaty as having been formally violated, that we shall take no further steps to carry out or legalize its further stages, and that we shall resume full liberty of action in any direction that may seem proper and to any extent that may be necessary to defend the interests and the rights that are entrusted to our care.” In that gentler time this was the strongest diplomatic language he could use to goad the provisional government into action. Collins realized it. During the early hours of Wednesday morning he ordered the law buildings shelled. De Valera protested that “soldiers of the Army of the Republic have been attacked by forces of the Provisional Government at the instigation of English politicians… in order to avert from themselves political consequences which they feared,” and Rory O’Connor, the leader of the embattled Irregulars inside the buildings, sent out a statement to the press charging that “the enemy is the old enemy, England…. Mr Churchill cracked the whip in his speech… when he ordered the Provisional Government to attack the Four Courts.” English soldiers, he said, were preparing to rush his position. Collins and Griffith scoffed at this: “Statements that British troops are cooperating… are false and malicious. None but Irish forces, with the cooperation of citizens, who are loyally and enthusiastically supporting the Government, are engaged in putting down the disorderly element who attempt to tyrannize over the people and defy their will.” In London, Churchill announced: “The Provisional Government is solely responsible for the operations…. They have declined assistance except so far as equipment is concerned.”113
Churchill and Sir Henry Wilson, February 1919
The operative sentence was the last one, and it gave the lie to the rest. Macready had secretly lent Collins a battery of fieldpieces and ammunition for them. Griffith later acknowledged that he and Collins had taken their cue from Winston; they knew he would move if they did not, and so “finally we went on.” But the real significance of the cannonade, and the subsequent storming of the position by Collins’s volunteers, was much larger than that. It was an answer to Winston’s earlier question. Men were ready to fight for the Free State. On Friday they captured a corner of the Four Courts. The defenders, abandoning hope, set the buildings ablaze and then surrendered. O’Connor subsequently became the first of seventy-seven IRA men to be executed by Free State firing squads. Churchill cheered the Free Staters’ militancy, their uncompromising justice, and the implications of their readiness to raze the law buildings: “They have not even hesitated, in order to stamp out the armed resistance to the Treaty, to invade by force of arms, and to destroy as a result of their assault, even their own property.” Privately he wrote Collins that he understood that this had been a “terrible ordeal for you and your colleagues” but believed it “indispensable if Ireland is to be saved from anarchy and the Treaty from destruction. We had reached the end of our tether over here at the same time as you had in Ireland. I could not have sustained another debate in the House of Commons on the old lines without fatal consequences to… the Treaty…. Now all is changed. Ireland will be mistress in her own house, and we over here in a position to safeguard your Treaty rights and further your legitimate interests effectually.”114
Yet it was far from over. Indeed, the Irish tragedy was approaching another crisis. On August 12 the quiet Griffith, exhausted by the accumulated strain of the past two years and privately appalled by Collins’s belligerence, dropped dead of a heart attack. “How sad for Ireland,” Clementine wrote Winston, “is Arthur Griffith’s death.” IRA Irregulars captured Dundalk that same day, but before the week was out they had been driven back. The Free State, backed by the population, was winning everywhere now. Then, at 7:30 P.M. on August 22, a band of De Valera’s gunmen ambushed Collins and his convoy on a back road in county Cork, in a gulley called Bealnamblath, between Macroos and Bandon, and Collins was slain. He was thirty years old. Almost his last words were: “Tell Winston we could never have done it without him.” The mar
tyred hero was wrapped in the green flag for which he had sacrificed his life, and his keening mourners sang, to the tune of the “Londonderry Air,” that most haunting of Irish songs, now, for him, a dirge:
Oh, darlin’ boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
From glen to glen, and down the mountain side,
The summer’s gone and all the roses falling,
It’s you, it’s you must go and I must bide.
But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow,
Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow,
It’s I’ll be here in sunshine and in shadow,
Oh, darlin’ boy, I love you, love you so!
Churchill wrote: “The presentiment of death had been strong upon him for some days, and he only narrowly escaped several murderous traps…. His funeral was dignified by the solemn ritual of the Roman Catholic Church and every manifestation of public sorrow. Then Silence. But his work was done. Successor to a sinister inheritance, reared among fierce conditions and moving through ferocious times, he supplied those qualities of action and personality without which the foundation of Irish nationhood would not have been reestablished.” Cosgrave became president, with Kevin O’Higgins as his field commander. Ireland, said O’Higgins, presented “the spectacle of a country bleeding to death, of a country steering straight for anarchy, futility, and chaos.” Then O’Higgins, too, was trapped and slain by IRA gunmen.115
It was a scowling year in Eire’s history, but the Irish have a genius for transforming squalor into nobility. Early in the treaty negotiations Churchill had come to know, and dislike, Erskine Childers, a fervent nationalist now remembered for his classic suspense story The Riddle of the Sands. Childers threw in his lot with De Valera’s Irregulars and became a killer of Free Staters. When he was caught and sentenced to die, Winston, in a rare moment of vindictiveness, publicly expressed satisfaction over the fate of this “mischiefmaking, murderous renegade and malicious hater.” On the eve of his death Childers wrote, “I feel what Churchill said about my ‘hatred’ and ‘malice’ against England is untrue…. I die loving England, and praying that she may change completely, and finally toward Ireland.” Learning later that Childers had fought gallantly against the Germans in the Cuxhaven raid of New Year’s Day, 1915, Winston issued a retraction, calling him a man of “distinction, ability, and courage” who had died “with the utmost composure.”116