Between 1910 and 1914 the struggle over Irish Home Rule dominated, diverted, and distorted British politics. In retrospect, the fierce intensity of this interparty conflict, which might have led to civil strife in Ireland but for the intervention of world war, seems entirely out of proportion, especially considering that the majority of British people appear to have been indifferent to or impatient with Irish issues. Still, the battle over Home Rule has fascinated historians throughout the intervening century. Why did Conservatives, representing Britain's only truly national party, merely adopt the narrow and negative agenda of Ulster Unionism and pursue this for nearly three turbulent years without offering any meaningful alternative Irish policy? Why were various federal or devolutionist plans for resolution of the Irish crisis, developed by thoughtful and respected Conservative thinkers, never given serious consideration? Why did the party readily embrace extremist rhetoric and unconstitutional actions when it prided itself on defending the constitution and upholding law and order? Did such an approach represent a broad consensus or did it reflect a divided party's inability to determine other politically viable issues to place before the electorate? Why, finally, did party leaders effectively betray southern Irish unionists by accepting partition, a policy that satisfied the Ulster Protestants, who represented 5 percent of Britain's population, but undermined the ostensible reason for establishing a national Unionist alliance in 1886? Who were the winners and losers, moral as well as political, in this arresting but unedifying contest?

For decades, Edwardian Conservatives, and particularly their leader Andrew Bonar Law, appeared to be the losers. They suffered at the hands of historians who matured in the light, or, some might say, the shadow, of George Dangerfield's depiction of a party devoid of positive influences and led by a man of little talent and no imagination, whose volatile rhetoric and reckless actions verged on treason.Footnote 1 Later critics have been somewhat less harsh, though E. H. H. Green, the most perceptive younger historian of British Conservatism, has noted that by focusing nearly exclusively on opposing Home Rule for the sake of Ulster, Bonar Law drew his party “into a political minefield.”Footnote 2 Even studies on the whole sympathetic to the general thrust of Conservative policy during the twentieth century have noted that the upshot of the Tory's unrelenting Ulsterization of the Home Rule struggle was an ominous drift toward political instability and civil war.Footnote 3

During the past decade, however, there has been a vigorous revisionist challenge to Dangerfield's severe assessment of the Tories and their leader. R. J. Q. Adams's massive and masterful biography of Bonar Law, drawing upon an array of previously unavailable sources, depicts the Conservative leader as a canny and capable politician whose anti–Home Rule deportment, underpinned by strong personal belief in the justice of Ulster's cause, was a matter of strategic necessity in the struggle to bring down what he and his associates viewed as a dangerously wrongheaded Radical government allied to disloyal Irish Nationalists.Footnote 4 In another impressive recent study, Jeremy Smith, while noting the unconstitutional and even unprincipled nature of Unionist policies, carries Bonar Law to greater heights, picturing him as a master tactician, smoothly and effectively manipulating the Ulster crisis like the conductor of a hitherto shaky symphony orchestra, skillfully directing the tunes to which British Unionists sang, danced, and sometimes howled. Thus, even when the rougher street bands of Ulster banged their loud, cacophonous Orange drums, the Conservative chief believed that, under the hypnotic sway of Sir Edward Carson, inflammatory rhetoric and rumbustious parades were not an inducement to violence but a useful means of both frightening the Liberals and controlling the more militant elements of Ulster Protestantism.Footnote 5

The purpose of this essay is to question the accuracy of this revisionist analysis and to argue that by nearly exclusively concentrating on the perceived wishes of Ulster's Protestant population Tory leaders not only abandoned conservatism, parliamentary rule, and their southern Irish unionist colleagues, but also suppressed every positive instinct within their party. They ignored the ideas of earnest and imaginative Conservative thinkers who formulated promising schemes for a negotiated settlement with a view to satisfying major Irish factions while simultaneously saving the Union. Whether Tory leaders undertook a “backs to the wall” defense of Ulster as a means of diverting party factions from acrimonious debates over food taxes, social reform, and agricultural policy or as a device to drive the Liberals from office by forcing Home Rule to crash against the equally treacherous rocks of Ulster sectarianism and Irish nationalism, their actions revealed an utter confusion induced by a paucity of imagination.Footnote 6 If, as Patricia Jalland has noted, the Liberals foolishly ignored Ulster until it was too late, ultimately, the Tories disregarded or disdained, admittedly at greater cost to the nation than to their party, any persons in Ireland who were not Protestants living in six Ulster counties.Footnote 7 Indeed, their sense of proportion and priority was so far out of balance that they were unable, for a time, to gracefully accept the fact of being rescued from political disaster by the Great War.Footnote 8

Between 1905 and 1910 the marriage of convenience that, under the imminent threat of Gladstonian Home Rule, had bound British Conservatives to their erstwhile Ulster Unionist allies was not altogether blissful, even though the Irish Unionist party was, after 1906, led by an Englishman, the Wiltshire squire Walter Long. It was partly fear of betrayal by Arthur Balfour's government that inspired the formation of the Ulster Unionist Council (UUC) in March 1905 as a means both of keeping closer watch on Ulster's parliamentary representatives and of establishing a modern and efficient grassroots political movement. Thereafter, Ulster Unionism was more cohesive and more democratic, but from 1906 to 1910 Ulstermen displayed a penchant for following their own narrow agenda, which often diverged from the priorities of British Conservatives thrown into opposition by devastating electoral defeat in January 1906.Footnote 9 During these years the correspondence of party leader Balfour and his private secretary, J. S. (Jack) Sandars, is laced with fretful remarks about an irksome “gang of noisy Irish Protestants” who were defying the party whip in Parliament or “foolish Northern Unionists” who were obsessed with opposing Home Rule to the near exclusion of other political considerations.Footnote 10

Still, if Ulster Unionists mistrusted mainstream Conservative leadership, especially Balfour, they had strong friends among old-line Tories, especially in the House of Lords. In 1909, when the Tory-dominated Lords determined to defy ancient precedent by rejecting the Liberal government's so-called People's Budget, the UUC Standing Committee declared its “hearty approval.” They lauded the peers for protecting the people from a House of Commons that, though popularly elected, had “ceased to represent the Nation.”Footnote 11 Thereafter, the Ulster Party's embracing of political and social radicalism proved to be a decisive development in the saga of the northern province's rise to a predominant place in British politics. And while Ulster Unionists might wax enthusiastic at the determination of die-hard peers to block the Liberals’ “guns and butter” budget, mainstream Unionist leaders, especially Balfour, were placed in the awkward position of being forced into an electoral struggle fought on grounds—“the Peers versus the People”—chosen by the enemy. Furthermore, the question of tariff reform, an ideological legacy of Joseph Chamberlain's powerful intrusion into the Unionist camp, remained a bitterly fractious issue that, as Green has noted, “was apparently disastrous both for the party's unity and its electoral prospects.”Footnote 12 By 1910 some variant of tariff reform may have been embraced by most party regulars, but it was vehemently opposed by an influential body of Unionist free traders, especially with regard to the demonstratively unpopular idea of “food taxes” or duties on foodstuffs imported from areas outside the British Empire.Footnote 13

Conservatives might well derive satisfaction from having gained over a hundred seats in the general election of January 1910, but this result—repeated in December 1910 after interparty conferences collapsed, largely over irreconcilable differences on Ireland—made eighty-plus Irish Nationalist MPs arbiters of the imperial parliament. So, a fractured party, loser in three consecutive elections, was faced with the dreaded certainty of opposing a generally popular policy of reducing the power of the hereditary House. It also had to work against Home Rule, about which the British electorate seemed generally indifferent.Footnote 14 This scenario brought no joy to the hearts of Conservative leaders, especially Balfour, whose prestige and power were seriously weakened by the subsequent decision of a coterie of hereditary peers, right-wing radicals, and Ulster Unionists to resist the Liberal Parliament Bill to the last ditch. But the scene was shifting.

In the wake of the 1910 elections and their aftermath, two monumental changes in leadership helped to transform the substance and direction of Unionist politics. First, early in 1910, after the English leader of the Irish Unionists, Walter Long, opted to vacate his south Dublin constituency for a safe seat in London, Sir Edward Carson was persuaded to become Ulster Unionist leader. Although Carson began his tenure without intimate knowledge of the northern province, Ulster Unionists could not have chosen a more intensely combative or rhetorically effective leader. For if Walter Long had pestered Balfour like a buzzing fly, Carson would become a sort of menacing bird of prey periodically swooping down to denounce even the slightest hint of Unionist weakness with regard to the defense of Ulster's interests. After the first stalemated election of 1910, Sir Edward told the socially and politically powerful Lady Theresa Londonderry, his Irish mother confessor: “I like being chairman of the Ulster Unionists. … I feel boiling with rage & I hope there will be violence.”Footnote 15 A year later, Carson was even more fierce: “I earnestly hope,” he growled, “that all the bitterest hate of the innate savagery of the human being will be brought to play. … I never felt more savage.”Footnote 16 Carson's ferocity was no doubt strengthened by the knowledge that he had become one of the few British politicians with the power to beckon thousands of fervent followers into the streets with the sound of his voice or a wave of his hand.Footnote 17

Carson and Balfour had been friends and colleagues since the latter's tenure as Irish chief secretary, but so long as Balfour remained party leader both his priorities and his sense of propriety, no doubt, sustained a cautious approach toward the maverick Ulster faction that had given him good reason for suspicion.Footnote 18 The suspicion was mutual, and Carson, “calling for a strong man” and “for something more than ‘the gentlemanly party,’” told Lady Londonderry of his fear that Balfour would offer only a “milk and water” Irish policy that would not “satisfy the party's thirst.”Footnote 19

In 1911, the Liberal government, at once electorally victorious and politically dependent, introduced the Parliament Bill to limit the veto power of the Lords, legislation immeasurably strengthened by the threat, reluctantly endorsed by an inexperienced new monarch, to swamp the Upper House with new peers if the Parliament Bill was rejected by the Lords. Faced with a Hobson's choice, Unionist leaders Balfour and Lord Lansdowne recommended indignant surrender. Party diehards, galvanized by the impending emasculation of a venerable institution they had long dominated, saw Balfour's refusal to join their futile, last-ditch resistance as a consummate reflection of his enduring weakness as party leader. Amid a rising crescendo of demands that “Balfour Must Go” emanating from the right-wing Tory press, he resigned party leadership in November 1911. The subsequent struggle of a divided and demoralized party to choose a new leader ended with the selection of a compromise candidate, Andrew Bonar Law, of whom, at least among the general public, little was known and less expected.

David Lloyd George once commented that in choosing Bonar Law, the Tories had “accidentally stumbled upon the right man.”Footnote 20 Accident or no, Bonar Law, in the words of Unionist chief whip Lord Balcarres, gradually “weaned” Unionists from their divisive, electorally problematic concentration on tariff reform by grounding opposition to Home Rule on the defense of Ulster. From his accession, Bonar Law eschewed “milk and water” and shaped an Irish policy that seemed prepared to accept even blood, if necessary. Announcing that British Conservatives would not shrink “from any action … we think necessary to defeat one of the most ignoble conspiracies … ever formed against the liberties of free-born men,” Bonar Law succeeded in making the protection of Ulster, rather than the constructive advancement of Union, the raison d’être of Unionist resistance to Home Rule.Footnote 21 From early 1912, saving Ulster from the depredations of an allegedly corrupt, revengeful, priest-ridden Irish Nationalist Party “became the microcosm for all those Conservative assumptions once projected on to the Union.”Footnote 22 Still, even if after 1911 the defense of Ulster gradually became the primary focus of Conservative policy, there were always elements of opposition to Ulsterization among Unionists. To begin, a small body of moderate or traditional Conservatives came to believe, for a variety of reasons, that the party's Irish strategy was unwise, unprincipled, and ultimately unworkable, but these were generally backbenchers or intellectuals whose protests made little impact. A more important component of dissent from Bonar Law's “damn the consequences” stance on behalf of Ulster was the Conservative federalists, a complex collection whose ranks included forward-looking tariff reformers as well as antidemocratic imperial “realists” and high-minded moderates. What united them was a desire to resolve the Irish question and save the Union through constitutional restructuring that would provide Ireland with local autonomy as part of a federal arrangement for the entire United Kingdom.Footnote 23 Represented in Ireland by earnest and dedicated men like Sir Horace Plunkett and Lord Dunraven, British federalism centered on a group gathered around a thoughtful, practical, and tough-minded Scottish businessman, lawyer, and author, Frederick Scott Oliver. A staunch imperialist, Oliver was closely associated with the Round Table group dominated by former members of Lord Milner's South African “kindergarten.” He based his persistent efforts to achieve a negotiated Irish settlement on his belief that the British nation and Empire faced far more compelling problems than the resolution of Irish difficulties. At the same time, he understood that long-range national and imperial challenges could not be adequately addressed until there was an Irish settlement.Footnote 24 Oliver's first federalist thrust was a series of “Pacificus” letters published in The Times in late 1910 in an attempt to influence negotiations at the interparty conferences that followed the death of Edward VII.Footnote 25 For a time his proposals for a settlement based on federalist principles gained the support of Conservative newspapers as powerful as The Times and the Observer and of politicians as influential as F. E. Smith and Austen Chamberlain.Footnote 26 Measuring his own impact from the reaction of prominent Ulster leaders like Lord Londonderry who had, as he joked to Milner, “challenged me to fight duels,” Oliver confidently assured The Times’s proprietor, Lord Northcliffe, that federalism, bolstered by “the united force of the Unionist Party in Parliament,” would soon carry the day.Footnote 27 Milner himself told Balfour that he could accept the idea of “all round devolution” so long as the imperial parliament retained supreme authority.Footnote 28 At about the same time, Lord Balcarres wrote derisively in his diary that “Ulster members are firing blank cartridges about Devolution, banging the Orange drum, and denouncing … those of us who may concede something to [Irish] nationalism.”Footnote 29 Still, as influential as the movement for a negotiated settlement in Ireland among moderate Conservatives seemed to be, deep-rooted opposition to any concession on the Irish question remained. For example, in early November the Morning Post, bellwether of the right-wing Tory press, published the “Manifesto” of the so-called Reveille Group, which denounced the ideas of “all federalists, federationists, devolutionists … and other constitution mongers” as unworthy of consideration.Footnote 30 After the collapse of the final interparty conference, Oliver's influence waxed and waned with the peaks and valleys of the Home Rule struggle. But his single-minded sense that the Union could be saved and the imperial parliament freed from Irish distractions through a negotiated settlement remained the most positive and realistic Conservative approach to resolving the Irish imbroglio.

There was also a constitutionalist approach to the Irish question thrown into the Unionist mix. The central figure in this regard was Albert Venn Dicey, renowned legal scholar, free trader, and fervent anti–Home Ruler. From the time his former hero W. E. Gladstone embraced Home Rule, Dicey was a leading Liberal Unionist opponent of Irish self-government. Beginning with England's Case against Home Rule (1886), he eventually published four closely argued anti–Home Rule tomes. Dicey opposed any change in Ireland's constitutional status because he believed in the principle of absolute sovereignty historically embedded in the imperial parliament. For this reason, Dicey always spurned a federal solution for Ireland or any other part of the United Kingdom. His studies of American federalism led him to conclude that it was an inherently ineffectual and divisive system.Footnote 31 What Dicey wanted was strong, orderly government and a change of heart that would bring economic justice and social stability to all of Ireland. As George Boyce has pointed out, Dicey's emphasis on the need for constitutional integrity in dealing with the Irish question gave the Unionist cause a moral dimension that transcended mere party politics.Footnote 32 At the same time, Dicey's solution seemed the mirror opposite of proposals offered by fellow Unionists like Oliver and Dunraven, demonstrating the confusion spreading through party ranks after 1911.

Dicey's moral authority and academic credentials gained him access to leading Conservative politicians, but his concern that the anti–Home Rule campaign be conducted with strict adherence to the rule of law clashed with the realities of Ulster politics. When, for example, in early 1912 the UUC vowed to prevent Winston Churchill, by force if necessary, from delivering a pro–Home Rule speech at the Ulster Hall in Belfast, Dicey warned Bonar Law that the Ulstermen's threat of violence was “the worst mistake” possible, undermining “the whole moral strength” of their position. But, as Carson admitted to Bonar Law, the situation in Belfast threatened to get out of his or anyone else's control because Churchill's provocative visit had forced the UUC's hand.Footnote 33 This incident, defused when Churchill agreed to speak at another venue, was a harbinger of the kind of sectarian strife and social instability that Dicey deplored. In any case, by late 1913 Bonar Law, Carson, and other Unionist leaders began embracing partition for Ulster, thus forsaking Dicey's central vision of an indivisible Ireland united to Greater Britain by law and history.

Unionists from the south and west of Ireland never abandoned Dicey's view of Ireland undivided and inseparable from Britain and the Empire, but for less disinterested reasons. When British Conservatives turned from being defenders of the Union to being bodyguards for Ulster, many southern unionists came to believe that the political cause, and personal interests, for which they had fought since 1885 were being betrayed by members of the Unionist alliance whose name embodied their cause. While southern unionists, unlike their northern counterparts, were not an organized political body, their ranks included prominent Conservatives like Lansdowne, the Unionist leader in the Lords, and Lord Edmund Talbot, who would become Unionist chief whip in the Commons, as well as former Secretary of State for War Lord Midleton. They could not threaten to call a host of followers into the street to fight for the Union, but, in the end, die-hard southern unionists and their British supporters proved to be the most politically dangerous element of dissent from the narrowing compass of the Edwardian Conservative party's Irish, or more accurately, Ulster policy.Footnote 34

After the passage of the Parliament Act in August 1911 opened the way for the inevitable introduction of a Home Rule bill, The Times’s editor Geoffrey Robinson traveled to Ireland on a fact-finding tour. Robinson concluded that the Unionist party was mistaken in believing it could regain power “through uncompromising opposition to Home Rule.” Since the ending of widespread outrages arising from the land agitation, there had been “comparative peace in Ireland” and, outside of Ulster, only “half-hearted” Unionist opposition to some form of Home Rule, especially among younger men.Footnote 35 Robinson's assessment, however, failed to account for a number of new and dynamic factors. To begin, there was Carson, whose rhetorical skill and unshakable determination galvanized the spirit and heated the blood of Protestant Ulster. Nor was The Times’s editor fully cognizant of the political and managerial skills of Carson's top lieutenant and political organizer, Ulster MP James Craig. Finally, there was the fact that for Carson and Craig the Unionist party's return to power was always less important than protecting Ulster from the presumed Reign of Terror that would be visited upon the northern province by a Dublin parliament.

In September 1911, Craig stage-managed Ulster's first great loyalist demonstration, a parade of fifty thousand men, which was intended to let all of Britain see the strength and dedication of its resistance as well as officially to welcome Carson “as leader in the forthcoming struggle … [and] to prove” he had “a solid phalanx the very best of all Ulster” behind him.Footnote 36 This massive demonstration created a surge of anti–Home Rule “Carsonmania” that surpassed even Craig's expectations. But some British Conservatives were less than impressed. Oliver told Robinson that the “effect of all this Ulster shouting and drum-beating and treasonable tom-foolery is to weaken the defence of Unionism. … The main reason why Ulster is opposed to Home Rule is its blind unreasoning religious jealousy and hatred.”Footnote 37 Soon afterward Oliver embarked on his own Irish journey and returned, as he told Lord Milner, “confirmed in my Federal heresy.” In surveying Irish Unionist opinion outside Protestant Ulster, Oliver “didn’t hear a good word … for either of the two planks of Carson's programme, viz., Religious Prejudice and Treason.” The Unionist party's chief aim, he said, should remain the preservation of the Union, which could be achieved only if the party disposed of “the silly Religious Persecution argument and the still sillier Rebellion argument” and concentrated on a federalist solution that would be acceptable to sensible people of all parties. Milner, at the time, seemed to agree, noting that the Unionists should have taken up Oliver's federal scheme in 1910 when they had the chance. But the ghost of a future Milner also appeared with his addendum that the door should be left “open to ultimate support of a reasonable revolt of Ulster.”Footnote 38

A serious problem for those who followed Bonar Law in pinning their hopes for a return to power on the back of Ulster's threats of resistance and rebellion was that, as Lord Balcarres noted in May 1912, “the electors are apathetic” about Home Rule, a view confirmed by Unionist junior whip Robert (“Peter”) Sanders six weeks later.Footnote 39 Feeling obliged to stir up the faithful and unbelievers alike, Bonar Law threw down the gauntlet from the steps of Blenheim Palace on 27 July 1912 in his famous warning that if the government pressed forward with Home Rule they would be “lighting the fires of civil war” and that he could imagine “no length of resistance to which Ulster will go, in which I shall not be ready to support them.”Footnote 40

The Conservative leader's hard, and dangerous, words no doubt soothed or energized many Ulster Protestants—but not all. Lord Northcliffe told Robinson that his Ulster aunt, Margaret Ball, had informed him that many leading Ulster people did not approve of such provocative language. “I cannot think,” she complained, “that the people who make these speeches have any idea of the dangerous elements in the North of Ireland to whom they are appealing.” Northcliffe's aunt was no doubt representative of an older northern elite who did not understand or did not appreciate the political value of linking Ulster's upper-class leadership to working-class populism. From a similar perspective, Lord Dunraven cautioned Bonar Law that many Irish people who detested Home Rule “detest still more the violence of Carsonism,” which, however noisy, was “not very wide” and was likely to fade away in the face of some moderate federal arrangement.Footnote 41

The Ulster movement proved to be wider and even noisier than Dunraven imagined. On 28 September 1912, James Craig engineered an immense political demonstration with emotional overtones that harked back to monster meetings of the Great Liberator, Daniel O’Connell, and, perhaps, forward to the great Fascist and Nazi spectacles of the following generation, with the addition of a religious intensity that recalled the fiercest struggles of the Reformation era. Over 218,000 men signed their names to Ulster's “Solemn League and Covenant,” a no-surrender pledge that evoked the seventeenth-century Scots Presbyterian Remonstrance.Footnote 42 Ulster's Covenanters vowed to stand united against Home Rule, with a sub-rosa promise to transfer their allegiance to an incipient Ulster provisional government should Home Rule ever become law.

The violent sectarian overtones of the covenant were more than Lady Ismay Crichton-Stewart, Viscount Gormanston's daughter, who had married into the Catholic family of the Third Marquess of Bute, could bear. Distressed that British Conservatives were aiding and abetting the Ulstermen's belief that “they are the only people worth considering in Ireland,” Lady Ismay asserted that “much of the religious bitterness in Ireland … is due to the Unionist Party having officially backed the Ulstermen in their fanatical outcry against Catholicism.” At the same time, Alfred Cripps, Unionist MP and the future Lord Parmoor, reminded Bonar Law that English Catholics, like himself, were generally strong Unionists but were growing restive as the anti–Home Rule campaign seemed to be turning into “an occasion to attack their religion.”Footnote 43 In carefully measured responses to these troubled protesters, Bonar Law contended that he opposed religious bigotry as much as anyone and that, so far as he was aware, no responsible Unionist leader had made any attacks on the Catholic Church.Footnote 44

One might question whether Lord Hugh Cecil was a responsible Unionist, but Oliver reported to Arthur Lee that, even in the wake of serious sectarian rioting during the past summer, Lord Hugh was “going around Ulster crying ‘to Hell with the Pope.’”Footnote 45 Lord Balcarres told his aunt that he was attempting to convince Carson to tone down his rhetoric, lest his words inspire Protestant workers in Belfast to expel Catholics from their workplaces as they had in July 1912.Footnote 46 Another English Conservative who deplored the manner in which some Unionists, in and out of Ulster, seemed ready to give the anti–Home Rule campaign the trappings of a Protestant crusade was W. A. S. Hewins, former director of the London School of Economics and Unionist MP (1912–18). A fervent tariff reformer closely associated with the social imperialists of the Round Table Group, he believed that Conservative support for Ulster militancy was counterproductive from both political and social perspectives.Footnote 47 Other English Conservatives found the atmosphere in Belfast brimming with hostility, which might at any moment erupt into dangerous civil conflict among opposing working-class elements. An article in the Irish Times related the story of a “prominent Tory [election] agent” who, upon attending a meeting of the UUC, discovered that English gentlemen like himself who did not advocate armed rebellion or dying in the last ditch were being called “traitor” by a section of the northern Protestant population.Footnote 48

Walter Long, who had organized a vigorous anti–Home Rule platform campaign in England, reported that a survey indicated the anti–Home Rule campaign was attracting little attention in cities like Bradford, Bristol, and Newcastle, although Liverpool and Manchester remained supportive of the Ulster cause.Footnote 49 As 1912 drew to a close, Arthur Steel-Maitland, newly selected Conservative party chairman, noted that Home Rule was exciting little popular interest and that Bonar Law's heavy-handed support for an increasingly militant and autonomous Ulster seemed an unpromising issue in English constituencies.Footnote 50 Steel-Maitland was a strong tariff reformer, and his assertion might well have served as a warning to Bonar Law about an intraparty storm brewing while his attention was focused on the Irish question.Footnote 51

By 1912 tariff reform elements within the Unionist party, led by the so-called whole-hoggers, who believed duties on imported food from outside the Empire were essential to a successful policy of imperial preference, appeared to represent a strong majority of party opinion. At a party conference at Royal Albert Hall in November, Bonar Law and Lansdowne, confident of general support, announced that party leaders had agreed to abandon Balfour's pledge of November 1910 to consult voters through a referendum before a Unionist government implemented any “taxes on food.” This dramatic proclamation proved to be a dangerous miscalculation.Footnote 52 Within a few weeks, Bonar Law faced a grave and distracting intraparty squabble initiated by the free-food faction, led by Lord Derby, who believed that Conservative support for tariffs on agricultural imports would bring electoral disaster. In the first days of 1913, a spreading free-fooder rebellion, sparked by fears of electoral disaster if the Referendum Pledge was not reinstated, replaced Ulster as the central issue within party circles. Indeed, it seemed for a time that Bonar Law, faced with a paralyzing split over his announced policy, might be forced to resign as party leader. A letter from Dicey pointed out electoral and other dangers for Bonar Law and the party. The paramount duty of Unionists, Dicey said, was to save the Union and avert civil war in Ulster. That might prove impossible if anxious voters believed that supporting Unionists would bring food taxes.Footnote 53 The Unionist leader, it seemed, was hoist on his own petard. At the crucial moment, however, a compromise solution, which Carson, Craig, and Max Aitken helped to draft, emerged to save the day. In exchange for his agreeing to restore the Referendum Pledge, Bonar Law received an overwhelming vote of confidence from Unionist MPs.Footnote 54 The rift over tariff reform had been a near disaster, and the fact that Sir Edward Carson and James Craig were instrumental in working out a resolution reflects the influence that the Ulster Party and its leaders wielded within Unionist circles.

In 1912 the UUC gave substance to its threats of armed resistance by recruiting tens of thousands of men into its own paramilitary organization, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).Footnote 55 Where would the Conservative party stand electorally and constitutionally if, as seemed increasingly possible, Ulster Unionists made good on their promises to fight to the death against Home Rule? The federalist Lord Hythe asked Bonar Law if the Unionist party did not have an obligation to present some alternative to the Home Rule bill and was it not the party chief's “duty to tell these Ulstermen” that such a measure was necessary? Lord Balcarres's diary indicated that senior Conservatives were “deeply confused and uncertain” and that “policies of reckless defiance” had no standing in “average party opinion.” Lord Salisbury wrote to tell Bonar Law that as strongly as he opposed Home Rule, “I cannot support political lawlessness and I shall either disenfranchise myself or vote Liberal … rather than encourage armed resistance in Ulster.”Footnote 56 Bonar Law himself was apparently beginning to hedge, promising, according to Robert Sanders, that if voters supported Home Rule in a general election, “he would not countenance further Ulster resistance.”Footnote 57

From the spring of 1913, however, more than Ulster's resistance appeared on the political horizon. In late March Lord Willoughby de Broke, a leader among die-hard peers in their futile struggle against the Parliament Act, announced the formation of the British League for Support of Ulster and the Union (BLSUU), composed of Englishmen prepared “to fight side by side with Ulstermen.”Footnote 58 Although the militant new league never had the official imprimatur of the Conservative party, some party members reluctantly complained to Bonar Law concerning its operations. After Joseph Welch, a vice president of the Tariff Reform League and active party campaigner, encountered a BLSUU recruiter on a train “secretly enrolling men to join in a Civil War,” Welch warned that such an “action was likely to result in dire consequences to the Conservative Party and to the Kingdom in general.” He urged Bonar Law to give public assurances that the party leadership would not countenance these activities. Another concerned Tory, H. M. Imbert-Terry, told of members of the Junior Imperial League who asked him for advice after being approached by BLSUU recruiters. Unable to justify recommending hotheaded young men to take so serious a step, Imbert-Terry looked to the party leader for direction. Bonar Law responded to such concerns with generalized remarks about the government's responsibility for creating the situation in the first place.Footnote 59

No doubt Balfour agreed that the “criminal folly” of Liberal Irish policy had provoked Ulster's belligerent stance, but belligerence was a double-edged sword. In a famous letter to Bonar Law, he expressed “much misgiving upon the general loosening of the ordinary ties of social obligation. … I do most strongly feel that nothing can be more demoralizing to a society than that some of its … most loyal members should deliberately organise themselves for the purpose of offering … armed resistance to persons … representing lawful authority.”Footnote 60 Balfour's concerns encompassed more than events in Belfast. He also referenced the rise of a militant labor movement, in particular the prolonged and festering strike/lockout of Dublin transit workers, whose leader, the fiery socialist James Larkin, advised laboring men who wished to protect themselves from capitalist bosses and the police to emulate Ulster's resort to arms.Footnote 61 Lord Lansdowne, an increasingly nervous southern unionist, also evinced anxiety about the direction of party policy. Expressing his agreement with Balfour's admonishments, Lansdowne suggested to Bonar Law that party leaders be “extremely careful in our relations with Carson and his friends” so as to ensure that the public would not hold British Conservatives responsible for any Ulsterite extremism. To that end, he further recommended that they put a hold on F. E. Smith's “habit of expressing rather violent sentiments in the guise of messages from the Unionist party.”Footnote 62 Indeed, the volatility of the Ulster situation seems to have created a widespread sense of impending crisis among British Conservatives. Lord Balcarres wrote that Lord Edmund Talbot, the party's new chief whip, was “in as great a confusion as I am about the issue of present controversies, and much alarmed lest some sporadic outbreak by Orangemen should … alienate English sympathies.”Footnote 63

This new round of Tory confusion coincided with some crucial developments in the Home Rule struggle. During the debate on the second reading of the Home Rule bill, Carson, as a tactical ploy, introduced an amendment to exclude all nine Ulster counties from the operation of the bill. The amendment, as expected, was defeated, but its consequences were far-reaching. To begin, southern unionists were seriously alarmed that fellow Unionists would even hint at the nightmarish prospect of partition. Carson's action may also have been the inspiration for a public letter from the former Liberal lord chancellor Lord Loreburn calling for an interparty conference as the first step toward a negotiated settlement along federal lines.Footnote 64 In response to Loreburn's proposal, Carson told Bonar Law that he believed opinion was turning toward the idea of a settlement that would exclude Ulster from the operation of the Home Rule bill, ideally as part of a comprehensive devolutionary scheme including Scotland and Wales.Footnote 65 Bonar Law himself expressed the view that the public was “so sick of the whole Irish question” that electors would probably vote in favor of a settlement with special consideration for Ulster.Footnote 66 From a broader perspective, Steel-Maitland suggested that a Home Rule conference might be a means of halting Lloyd George's “raging, tearing Land Campaign,” which was causing the Conservative party chairman considerable concern.Footnote 67 Although Carson deprecated the idea of a conference, as Alvin Jackson has pointed out, it was from this time that the Ulster Unionist leader showed increasing impatience with the complaints of his southern unionist colleagues.Footnote 68

While hard-line Unionists continued to denounce any hint of exclusion or any other type of settlement by consent, a number of “quiet blokes” from the federalist camp used the occasion of Loreburn's plea to reenter the argument.Footnote 69 Lord Dunraven's proposal for incorporating Ulster under the federal principle appeared in The Times on 24 October. Lord Hythe, himself an Ulster landlord, told Austen Chamberlain that if the Unionists went to the polls without an alternative to supporting Ulster's hard line, they would not win and “would not deserve to win.” For his part, Oliver, shuddering at the thought of “high-spirited Masters of the Hounds … going across helter-skelter in packet-boats … to the relief of Londonderry or Belfast,” published a pamphlet on “The Alternatives to Civil War,” to illustrate the practicality of a federal solution that appeared to impress important figures like Lord Selborne and Austen Chamberlain.Footnote 70 Oliver's Scottish friend political insider Arthur Lee remarked that “all these bellicose gents will have to accept your solution in the end.” Another close friend, Colonel William T. Furse, decrying “wearisome and futile” political games, hoped this new proposal would inject some sense into politicians on both sides. “I hate the official Unionist game almost as much as I do the Radical.”Footnote 71

Even as Furse was writing to his old friend, the political game on offer was a series of meetings between Bonar Law and Prime Minister H. H. Asquith with a view to working out some agreement for the exclusion of Ulster from the operation of the pending Home Rule bill.Footnote 72 Although the Bonar Law–Asquith conferences were intended to be secret, they were, as winter came on, the center of political gossip. What they also brought was a mounting anxiety among southern Irish unionists as well as militant hard-liners that Conservative leaders were plotting to accept Ulster's exclusion as a way out of the looming political and constitutional crisis. In November, Long warned Bonar Law that any compromise would bring “a schism … more deeply seated than … at the time of the passing of the Parliament Act” while leaving southern loyalists “at the mercy of the Hibernians.”Footnote 73 At the same time, Lord Ashtown complained that southern unionist landlords were being sold out “to propitiate a lot of rebels.” A neutral observer might well inquire as to which band of rebels were being appeased? Dublin author and editor George W. Russell (AE) had no doubt. As he put it to Oliver, Ulstermen, having preached Union for a quarter century, “now … calmly purpose to desert us after all their heroics.”Footnote 74

The year 1914 opened (as it would close) on a gloomy note, and not just for southern Irish unionists. The talks between party leaders had not emitted any positive results. In Oliver's opinion, this was not only because Asquith was “a double-dealing, dishonest man” but also because neither Bonar Law nor Lansdowne had the “faith or imagination” to really come to grips with the situation. Oliver's fellow federalist Lord Hythe was equally pessimistic. With no other policy than “to go whole hog on the Ulster ticket” until either the government agreed to an election or civil war broke out, Hythe believed the Unionists were headed for “certain disaster.” Furthermore, as Lansdowne reminded Bonar Law at the end of January, “Ulster leaders have … given no sort of indication that they would pay any attention to the result of an election.”Footnote 75

While party leaders were offering no new ideas, the radical Conservatives rushed in to fill the political vacuum led by a new champion with a fresh and exciting initiative. Early in 1914 Lord Milner, drawn by Ulster's struggle out of his purported retirement from politics, cleverly maneuvered the country gentlemen in Lord Willoughby de Broke's BLSUU into associating themselves with a document Milner called the “British Covenant,” whereby Englishmen and Scots would pledge themselves to use any available means to avert Home Rule and “to prevent the armed forces of the Crown being used to deprive the people of Ulster of their rights as citizens of the United Kingdom.” Of course, Milner's movement had no official connection to the Unionist party, but, after a meeting with Milner, Bonar Law told Lansdowne that if such a movement were “started by the right people and on the right scale[,] it would be decisive.”Footnote 76

However, after Milner began privately circulating his covenant in mid-January, several prominent Conservatives expressed grave reservations about its implications. Economist Hewins, whose membership on both the Conservative Tariff Reform and Social Reform Committees reflected a sense of priorities very much at odds with the leadership's apparent Ulster obsession, saw British covenanters as advocates of a “policy of disintegration,” who were as great enemies to imperial unity as any Home Ruler.Footnote 77 The Chamberlain brothers, Austen and Neville, as well as Lord Robert Cecil, wrote to Milner's chief lieutenant, Leopold Amery, criticizing those who signed the covenant for the vague, open-ended, and possibly violent commitment to resist the imposition of Home Rule on Ulster. “Civil war is so serious a thing,” Cecil wrote, “that I will not ever threaten it unless … there is no other way out.”Footnote 78

At about the same time, Sir Horace Plunkett wrote from Belfast to inform Robinson at The Times that the situation in Northern Ireland was bad and likely to get worse “as long as the Ulster bigots feel that they have the support of the Tory party.” In a letter to Oliver during the same week, Plunkett expressed concern that Carson seemed to have little control over the militant forces he was inspiring. With a sort of forlorn hope, Plunkett added that his recent letter to The Times might cause some “thoughtful Tories” to ruminate on the possible repercussions of the party's standing toe-to-toe with Ulster extremists.Footnote 79 The Duke of Northumberland was more to the point concerning rousing the masses to possible violence. Writing to BLSUU leader Lord Willoughby de Broke, his lordship stated: “I don’t approve of the organization of armed resistance in Ulster & I believe those who are preparing it are hatching a brood of chickens which will some day … come very awkwardly home to roost in England.”Footnote 80

Northumberland was not alone among highborn Tories who harbored reservations about Conservative leaders making the combative and inflexible stance of Ulster Unionists the singular plank of their opposition platform. King George V, through his adviser and intermediary Lord Stamfordham, expressed strong disapproval of the harsh tone of Tory rhetoric both in Parliament and on the streets. However earnest and determined, Stamfordham noted, Ulster's defiance, rather than intimidating the government, might in the end cause the Liberals to “stiffen up and make an agreement still more difficult.” Bonar Law's blunt and unbending response to this royal complaint could not have pleased His Majesty. The strong language of Conservative speeches, he emphasized, were “part of a policy carefully considered and deliberately pursued.”Footnote 81

Still, the question remained: where was the Ulster Unionist movement taking the British Conservative party and the country? Some grassroots party officials such as George Davies, chair of the Bristol Conservative Central Committee, feared that British Unionists were moving toward electoral disaster if they offered no positive alternative to Home Rule.Footnote 82 In fact, as the Home Rule bill inexorably wound its way through the three-year legislative process defined by the Parliament Act, opposition leaders did frame an alternative, although one would be hard put to call it positive. From early in 1914, they gave serious consideration to moving an amendment in the House of Lords to the Army Annual Bill, a legislative chestnut that, each April since the Glorious Revolution, gave legislative fiat for the continuation of a standing army. The amendment being considered would forbid employment of the regular army to suppress any Ulster loyalist resistance to the imposition of Home Rule until a general election had taken place. The implications of this strategy, gravely debated by Unionist leaders for several weeks, were stark indeed.Footnote 83 The inevitable refusal of the Liberal-controlled Commons to accept the Lords’ amendment would prevent the Army Act's usual pro forma passage, with the result that the army would thereupon cease to exist as a legal entity.Footnote 84 Was the army, in fact, to be the Tories’ trump card? Ominously, during the final months before the outbreak of the First World War, some Conservatives not only thought that it should be but also took deliberate steps to ensure that it would be.

In July 1913, The Times’s military correspondent, Charles à Court Repington, in the wake of rumors about discontent in the army over the Home Rule threat to Ulster, warned Robinson that “we dare not admit politics to the Army” and pleaded with his editor to print a “special appeal” to this effect.Footnote 85 Five months later, Colonel Furse, Oliver's friend, poured scorn on Unionists who were “trying their best to tamper with the discipline of the Army by exploiting the traditional Unionist color—sheeplike, unthinking of the commissioned ranks.”Footnote 86

Through the first three weeks of March, Conservative leaders and prominent party intellectuals continued to debate the efficacy of using the army to achieve their political goals. On 10 March, Austen Chamberlain, with all the zeal of the newly converted, deluged Oliver with all the reasons that convinced him to support amending the army bill. Unimpressed, Oliver told Lord Milner that, all justifications aside, British electors “would consider that the Unionists, for party purposes, had laid a sacrilegious hand upon … the British Army.”Footnote 87 Dicey protested that while it was a “foul lie … that Ulster Unionists are trying to tamper with the British Army,” he was certain that the public would never countenance the politicalization of the forces. “Surely,” as he told Milner, “in no free country can the army be allowed to demonstrate against the legally expressed orders of the nation.”Footnote 88

Still, Conservative leaders seemed to be holding fast to their determination to fiddle with the army while the Liberals burned.Footnote 89 After a select committee of prominent Unionist lawyers supported the idea, Bonar Law on 12 March “reluctantly” announced his own intention to follow thorough with the amendment to an unenthusiastic shadow cabinet.Footnote 90 Two days later, Bonar Law, in a six-page response to the protest of Sir Henry Craik, MP, argued that, because the initial intent of having an Army Annual Act was to prevent the monarch or the executive from using force to thwart the will of the people, amending that bill offered the party a constitutional method of fulfilling its pledge to support Ulster.Footnote 91 Certainly, influential members of the party's Ulster-centric right wing endorsed this view, confident in their military connections, especially the insider information provided to Bonar Law by the director of military operations, Anglo-Irish major general Henry Wilson, who remained comfortable with the idea of amending the army bill. Wilson's diary recorded a dinner attended by Carson, Milner, Leander Starr Jameson (famed South African raider), and Sir Charles Hunter, MP, where “all agreed that ‘the Lords must amend the Army Annual Act.’”Footnote 92

But on that same day, J. P. Croal of the Scotsman had warned Bonar Law that any attempt to amend the army bill would seal the party's doom in Scotland, and Robinson reported to Milner that another fervent Unionist opponent of Home Rule, Ian Malcolm, MP, had told him, “with unusual ferocity,” that if the Tories tampered in any way with the army bill, he would leave the party. Robinson added that Malcolm did not really mean what he said and that, in any case, he did “not count for much” in party circles. Still, Malcolm insisted “that his views were shared by the bulk of private members on the Unionist side” and that a party meeting would bear out his claims.Footnote 93

Amid such confusion of claims and counterclaims, the chief party whip, Lord Edmund Talbot, quietly put the question of amending the Army Act to the rank and file of the Unionist MPs and discovered, as Junior Whip Sanders noted in his diary on 18 March, that “on the whole the feeling in the party is against it.”Footnote 94 So, perhaps the opinions of MPs like Malcolm counted for more than the editor of The Times believed. Adams maintains that Bonar Law always felt a strong connection with his party's backbenchers, who, in the end, had decisive influence in this matter.Footnote 95 One might also ask if some of these backbenchers had remembered what Bonar Law and his most militant followers, in their preoccupation with Ulster, seemed to have forgotten? Any parliamentary action qualifying the army's obligation to obey legitimate civil authority would create a precedent that, at some future time, trade unionists and socialists might use to prevent the army from taking action against striking workers, as had occurred in August 1911 at Llanelli, Wales, where two strikers were killed when the military fired on an unruly crowd. In any case, two days later, Bonar Law told Croal that “it would be quite fatal to do if there were any serious opposition to it in our ranks” and that the obvious presence of dissent made “it impossible to do.”Footnote 96

At the moment the Tories felt compelled to abandon their most innovative, and perilous, ploy, they were handed a great propaganda triumph as a result of the government's botched attempt to move more troops into Ulster to prevent the possibility of arms depots falling into the hands of the increasingly bold UVF. When most of the officers in an elite cavalry regiment threatened resignation rather than be obliged to march “against” Ulster, an incident known as the Curragh Mutiny, they set off a political crisis that profoundly embarrassed the Asquith government. Amid cries of a Liberal conspiracy to use the army and navy to put down Ulster resistance by force, the government issued a humiliating denial of any intention to use force, accompanied, suspiciously, by the resignations of both the secretary of state for war, J. E. B. Seely, and Field Marshal Sir John French, commander of the Imperial General Staff. In the aftermath of this debacle, Henry Wilson, the ultimate political general, gleefully declared that the army had “done what the Opposition failed to do” and might actually succeed in bringing down the hated “Squiff,” as Asquith was tagged. Leading Conservatives, including Austen Chamberlain, leaped on the opportunity to condemn the “criminal folly” of the Liberals for inflicting “immeasurable harm” on the army and the nation.Footnote 97 Others, both in the army and in the party, were less sure about what harm had been inflicted and upon whom. Captain (later Field Marshal) A. P. Wavell, in assessing the affair for his father, Major General A. G. Wavell, noted: “I think they have won a political battle to the ruin or great danger of the Army and the country. … What right have the Army to be on the side of the opposition?” Protests from dissident Conservatives also appeared in the Unionist press. The Times printed a letter from George Lloyd, MP, and John Lyttleton denouncing the idea that soldiers might decide on political grounds which orders to obey as a “doctrine of a very dangerous character.” A self-proclaimed old-fashioned Tory, E. H. C. Barnes-Austin, declared in the Spectator that Unionist attempts to encourage violent Orange resistance and undermine Army discipline had convinced him never again to vote for the party.Footnote 98

Unlike the disillusioned Barnes-Austin, most hard-line Tories were jubilant about the Curragh fiasco, especially in light of the fact that the incident seemed to indicate that henceforth the Liberals could not safely count on the army in the event of a violent showdown with the UVF. Still, however gratifying, mortification of the government was not a solution to Irish difficulties that remained as troublesome for the opposition as for the Liberals. For if the Ulster movement was considerably buoyed up by recent events, Irish Nationalists were increasingly outraged that their nonviolent, constitutional agitation seemed about to be overborne by Ulster's threats of violence and secession. The anger felt by Home Rulers was reflected in the rapid growth of the Irish Volunteers, the Nationalists’ own paramilitary response to the Ulster Volunteer movement. The search for some alternative to this drift toward civil strife shifted back to the expedient of excluding all or part of Ulster from the provisions of the Home Rule bill. In this regard the Conservative federalists again held out hope that the possible temporary exclusion of Ulster might be the first step to the sort of “Home Rule All Round” arrangement that Oliver and others had long envisioned. There was some evidence that even Carson might be leaning toward this possibility, though always with the proviso that Ulster's exclusion precede any broader constitutional settlement.Footnote 99 For a few weeks, influential Tories, including Austen Chamberlain and Lord Selborne, expressed the hope that an agreement along these lines was possible. Elated by heightened prospects for real progress, Oliver pressed Chamberlain to take the lead in working for a resolution on federalist grounds, warning that “the country is deadly, deadly sick of acrimony … violent epithets [and] ill-mannered accusations.” What was needed, he held, was a leader to “speak from his heart in a grand manner, with a pitch of generosity & human sympathy.” Chamberlain had the opportunity to be that leader, Oliver said: “This is an occasion in your life and perhaps the life of the Unionist Party when the life of your country is literally hanging in the balance.”Footnote 100

As seems inevitable in Anglo-Irish relations, the elevated hope of one faction gave rise to the bitter condemnation of another. The idea of separate treatment for Ulster was not only anathema to Irish Nationalists and hard-line Tories; it also remained the bane of loyalists in the other three Irish provinces. In mid-April, Lord Midleton, parliamentary leader of the southern unionists, complained to Bonar Law that Ulster Unionists were holding strategy sessions without inviting their southern unionist colleagues. Therefore, he put the party leader on notice that he and Lord Barrymore had organized a group of southern peers to fight for the preservation of the Union embracing all of Ireland.Footnote 101 In a letter to The Times on the “Duty of Unionists,” Midleton expressed the view that in agreeing to the exclusion of Ulster, Conservative leaders would effectively be throwing southern unionists to the Nationalist wolves. The party should instead, he argued, concentrate its campaign on forcing the government to call a general election or a referendum on Home Rule.Footnote 102 Lansdowne fumed that Midleton's letter “was not dexterously prepared” and might suggest to the public that a new die-hard movement was forming to thwart any attempt to resolve the Irish crisis through concessions to Ulster. Bonar Law's response was a feeble effort to assuage southern unionists’ feelings by asserting that the party was still solidly opposed to Home Rule and, further, that exclusion was likely a moot point, as the Nationalists would never agree to it.Footnote 103 In fact, Midleton expressed the reality of Lansdowne's fears of a southern unionist die-hard movement in a letter to Bonar Law in mid-May. The party's concentration on placating Ulster rather than defending the Union, Midleton stated, created the double danger of imposing “the gravest injustice” on the southern loyalist minority and rousing “very deep feeling” in English Conservative constituencies.Footnote 104

Lansdowne expressed “dismay” at Midleton's apparent lack of understanding that party leaders wanted an election as much as he did but that they also wanted to win it, a doubtful proposition if the southern loyalists maintained their putative revolt. For his part, Midleton emphasized the growing feeling in the party that “Carson's hands are tied, and Bonar Law is less impressed with the whole question of Home Rule than the Ulster trouble.”Footnote 105 Midleton's contention that the party's Ulster policy was causing confusion and division among members was to some degree borne out by the puzzlement of Conservative chief whip Lord Edmund Talbot that “neither Bonar Law or [sic] Carson are quite clear what their actions should be, and do not seem anxious to thrash the matter out.” The bane of party morale, Talbot said, was the refusal of its leaders to invite free and frank discussion.Footnote 106

Amid these confused and troubling circumstances, Balfour composed a “Memorandum on Ireland” in which he warned that “the chief peril to be feared is the notion that the leaders of the party have compromised their Unionist principles for the sake of Ulster.” This view might be “augmented by contagion” if a southern unionist revolt took root. To stop the rot, Balfour recommended that Conservatives abstain from voting on any Liberal amending bill for excluding Ulster, thus placing the onus back upon the government where it belonged.Footnote 107

So far as the Midleton faction was concerned, such a Unionist ploy would be self-defeating since it would effectively acquiesce in a Liberal amendment that would protect Ulster from Home Rule, while abandoning southern unionists to their presumably miserable fate under a Nationalist-dominated parliament in Dublin. The Unionist party, Midleton argued, had been formed around a pledge to safeguard the Union for all of Ireland, and, to fulfill that pledge, the party could do no less than force an election based upon the preservation of the Union.Footnote 108 But, as Tory whip Sanders pointed out a few days earlier, even a Unionist victory at the polls would not end the Irish nightmare. “I do not know,” Sanders gloomily summed up the situation on the ground in Ireland, “whether our leaders have yet come to the conclusion that if we beat Home Rule we could not govern Ireland, but it is becoming more apparent every day.”Footnote 109 By making the defense of Ulster the singular focus in the struggle against Home Rule, the Tory leadership was, at once, ignoring the somehow invisible Catholic minority in Ulster, abandoning the Protestant minority in the South, and further alienating the rejuvenated Catholic nationalist majority in Ireland as a whole. But if Ulster were not protected by exclusion, Ulster would fight, a contingency made more likely by the thousands of newly acquired rifles placed in the UVF's hands through brilliant, but illegal, gunrunning activities carried out with the knowledge of and monetary support from Unionist party leaders, including Carson, Bonar Law, and Walter Long.Footnote 110 This was a political minefield indeed.

The king's last-minute intervention to patch together a negotiated settlement during a series of all-party meetings at Buckingham Palace (21–24 July) was probably doomed to failure from the beginning. For although Asquith had painfully extracted a promise from the Nationalist leadership to accept an “adjusted” six-county exclusion for Ulster for a limited time period, Unionists were badly divided over not only the idea of exclusion but also what an acceptable adjustment might be. According to Balcarres's information, Bonar Law assumed that “the position of Tyrone is the only outstanding problem.” “Is this conceivable?” asked the bewildered new Earl of Crawford, who feared that anything less than the exclusion of all nine Ulster counties would bring cries of betrayal from the Tory right and cause another “terrible split” in Unionist ranks. “The outlook is hateful,” he concluded.Footnote 111

Doubtless, the party was, as Leopold Amery told the editor of the Morning Post, “in a state of suspense and uncertainty.” Perhaps the subsequent failure of the Buckingham Palace meetings, which Amery called “a narrow escape from what, from a party point of view … would have been utter disaster,” clarified the situation.Footnote 112 But if the failure of conciliation was really a victory for the party, the instrument of that triumph, volatile Ulster, was beyond the command of British Tories and perhaps of Sir Edward Carson himself. Some have argued for the success of Unionist strategy under Bonar Law's canny leadership. By pushing hard even to the edge of civil strife, they say, Unionists sought to unnerve the shaky Liberal leadership to the point where they would agree to proposals unacceptable to Irish Nationalists, thus undermining the Home Rule alliance, leading to the defeat of the Liberals in Parliament and bringing redemption for Conservatives at the polls. On the other hand, Asquith's unexpected determination to pacify Ulster by exclusion, without calling an election, was disastrous for the Conservatives. What did Britain's only truly national party have to gain from a Liberal-mandated compromise that satisfied Ulster but was likely to widen the divisions within Conservative ranks? Indeed, even as the sudden European crisis began to replace the Ulster dilemma, Austen Chamberlain found Carson's statements in private conversation deeply disturbing. He warned Lansdowne that “any public expression of the thoughts Carson uttered tonight … will absolutely ruin the cause of Union.”Footnote 113

It is a historical commonplace that the coming of the Great War rescued the Unionist party from this predicament of its own design, although the extrication took some time to effect, accompanied as it was by considerable ill-grace. For all the talk of an ingenious political strategy to unite the fractured party while undermining the Liberal/Nationalist alliance, it appears that Bonar Law, rather than cleverly manipulating the situation for party advantage, was dragged along by events he did not anticipate and could not control. Ulster resistance, given unqualified Unionist endorsement, loosed the latent forces of sectarian prejudice and violence. Bonar Law and his associates remained largely silent as party extremists, on both sides of St. George's Channel, took advantage of a virulent anti-Catholic tradition to advance their cause. When die-hard right-wing Tories vowed to fight alongside their Ulster brethren, Bonar Law's reaction was not an attempt to defuse antidemocratic threats to civil order but to denounce Liberals for causing the situation in the first place. And for all his reckless rhetoric, the Conservative party leader seemed to have an abiding faith in Sir Edward Carson's ability to keep the lid on any serious outbreak of violence. But as records of the UVF make clear, Carson had good reason to doubt his ultimate control of the situation.Footnote 114 When events began to move inexorably toward violent rebellion, Bonar Law was helpless because he dared not challenge the Tory radical right wing’s abhorrence of the sort of compromise solution that would have pleased party moderates and federalists. Thus, by August 1914, a still divided party was reacting to events rather than shaping them. As Green has noted, the Conservative obsession with Ulster as a means of uniting the party, defeating Home Rule, and returning to power “was a continuation of its search for an issue or programme that would bind the forces of conservatism together … [and] proved as ineffective as all their other efforts in this direction.”Footnote 115 The Great War created the issue the Tories had been seeking, uniting the party in a show of strength and determination that put fading Liberals and liberalism in the shade. Still, in the long term, the Conservatives’ prewar struggle to save Ulster left the Union in ruins, Ireland in chaos, and the Northern Province a bitter, isolated adjunct, festering for half a century until, as the Duke of Northumberland had predicted, foul and fearsome broods came “awkwardly home to roost.”