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The rise and fall of Parnell
If Ireland shared an identity with anywhere it was not with its supposed Celtic cousins on the western fringe of Britain, it was with oppressed nations across Europe and their aspiration for freedom from alien domination. When revolutions erupted in France, Italy and Germany in 1830 and again in 1848, British governments realised belatedly that political reform could not be postponed. The 1832 Reform Act began a process of change in Britain’s industrial conditions, local government, poor law, tariffs and trade. Peel’s Tories were, at least for a while, a self-consciously reformist party, while the Whigs converted to Gladstonian Liberalism. Parliament at Westminster was where the argument took place, on how far and how fast reform should occur. It was Parliament that kept British revolution at bay.
Except in Ireland. Here the chasm that gradualist 1830s-style reform had to bridge was simply too wide, the sense of grievance too deep. After the 1840s and the famine, Ireland’s clamour for land reform fused with that for home rule. The hundred Irish MPs who came to London after union in 1801 had mostly been in London’s thrall. Yet by the 1870s more than half of them, Protestants as well as Catholics, were committed to home rule. This commitment had no institutional forum for its expression and debate. The Parliament at Westminster was too distant and too negligent.
This left direct action as the only option. Irish reformism was now expressed in ‘wars’ – tithe wars, land wars, wars over home rule and wars over whether wars should be hot or cold. The Fenian Irish Republican Brotherhood was formed in 1858 and was for hot. It was committed to making Ireland an ‘independent democratic republic’, explicitly inheriting the mantle of the 1798 rebellion. Irish blood was yet again up. At the same time there emerged on the Irish scene a figure of charisma, intelligence and pragmatism, Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–91). He was of Anglo-Irish Protestant background, born in Wicklow to a prominent landowning father and an American mother. Educated in England, he made his way to Magdalene College Cambridge and travelled to America, returning to devote himself to his family estates and rising to become county sheriff of Wicklow.
Parnell was attracted to the moderate Home Rule League founded in 1873 by an Ulster journalist turned politician, Isaac Butt (1813–79). Two years later he was elected Westminster MP for Meath as one of Butt’s sixty-strong Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP). The group was a new force in British politics, explicitly committed to home rule. After Scottish union in 1707, Scottish MPs had assimilated into English political life as loyal members of the Liberal Party. Irish unionism saw no such assimilation. The IPP brought to Westminster a hundred MPs – a bloc large enough, if so minded, to disrupt business and upset the bipartisan parliamentary equilibrium. They might sympathise with liberalism but they were primarily Irish.
London responded to the new Irish challenge with gestures of mild reform. The Liberal government in 1869 conceded the disestablishment of the Anglican Church of Ireland and the ending of Irish tithes. This was followed in 1870 by the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act, protecting tenants and allowing them in certain circumstances to own their farms. Such reform merely encouraged demands for more, raising the issues of absentee land ownership and anti-Catholic discrimination, which lay as ticking bombs on the parliamentary table.
In 1880 the Liberal leader William Gladstone returned to power and Parnell took over as leader of the IPP. This was Ireland’s moment. Parnell now headed a disciplined parliamentary force whose sole aim was to advance Irish home rule within the United Kingdom. He was the first parliamentary leader to deploy whipping, filibustering and tactical ‘hung parliament’ deals. His initial battle was to advance the right to buy land. Gladstone accepted both the justice of the Irish cause and his need for Irish votes in Parliament. He also fell under Parnell’s personal spell, finding him ‘the most remarkable man I ever met … an intellectual phenomenon’. The Commons passed a series of land acts – there were eventually six – enabling rents to be regulated and providing loans for farm purchase.
In 1884 the further expansion of the UK franchise more than doubled the size of the Irish electorate and Parnell now turned his attention to full home rule. Gladstone understood that there was no way the Irish electorate would vote for anything less and was convinced it had somehow to be conceded. He and Parnell went into virtual coalition on the issue. Various options for self-rule had long been mooted. They ranged from total government separation to forms of federation and devolution of ‘domestic affairs’. There was talk of a ‘Norwegian option’, where an autonomous state merely offered ‘homage’ to the Swedish crown. Few Irish were truly republican and few wanted to break all links with the British monarchy or kingdom. They just wanted to govern themselves.
It was to no avail. In April 1886 an ageing Gladstone made what was widely regarded as his greatest ever speech, over three and a half hours in favour of his Irish bill. He warned that if some such autonomy was not granted it would eventually be seized and Britain ‘humiliated’. It was to no avail. In the event ninety-three Liberal Unionists voted against their leader and home rule was lost. Parnell’s domestic popularity began to recede, his political downfall completed by a personal divorce scandal. This led to his health deteriorating and an early death in 1891.
Parnell had been the uncrowned king of Irish nationalism. His ambition was to bring self-government to his nation. He wished to do so without bloodshed and to put in place a constitutional relationship that would bring peace between the eastern and western ‘sides’ of the British Isles. That he failed, even after securing the support of England’s dominant statesman, tells to the potency of English imperialism. To conservative London opinion, England’s domestic union had to be indissoluble. That was the essence of the United Kingdom.
Like many enthusiasts for home rule, Parnell never fully articulated its implications or its details. To be sure, Irishmen – if not yet women – should decide for themselves the laws by which they should be governed. Whether this should be a reinstated Grattan’s Parliament or varying degrees of sovereignty under a crown ‘dominion’ was left open. The longer debate continued, the more home rule became less a fixed goal than a staging post; the longer it was postponed, the more its champions were driven to the extreme of full independence. As both Grattan and Gladstone had said, the warnings were plain.
There was also a cuckoo in the Irish nest, the Protestants of Ulster, descendants of plantation. A degree of home rule they might have favoured, but they left no doubt they would fight Catholic supremacy in Dublin. The inner weakness of home rule was thus the inverse of its strength. Its lack of definition was an opportunity for some, but a source of division for others. Either way, the failure of home rule in 1886 reopened the well-worn and bloodstained path to yet another civil conflict on the British Isles. London’s custodianship of its oldest empire was deaf and blind.
Killing home rule with ‘kindness’
Policy on Ireland was now being formed at a climactic in British imperial power. Britain was globally dominant, its sovereignty unequalled and for the most part unchallenged. That it might be at risk was therefore unimaginable. There were plenty of voices warning of overreach, as from India, the Sudan and South Africa. An influential liberal, the Cambridge historian Sir John Seeley, wrote in The Expansion of England (1883) of the ‘barbarism’ of claiming that ‘one community should be treated as the property of another … whether by conquest or otherwise’. There was no ‘vast superiority of the English race’. Yet while Seeley intriguingly applied this warning to England’s ‘internal and external empires’, his concern was exclusively with the latter. The internal empire was taken as secure.
Seeley’s recognition of two English empires was rare. British authority was alert to constitutional diversity, if only because it was now ruling a multitude of peoples living inevitably under a variety of regimes. France’s smaller empire was fashioned into a greater France, its overseas territories as départements of a central state and represented in the Paris assembly. For Britain one size could not possibly fit all.
Seeley’s advocacy of diversity was realised on the ground by Lord Lugard (1858–1945), governor of Hong Kong and then Nigeria. He enunciated a concept of indirect rule fashioned to forms of native government already existing in individual colonies. Lugard was experienced in imperial administration and understood that Britain’s army and civil service could not hold territories from which, at the end of the nineteenth century, it was deriving little if any profit at enormous cost. A believer in the civilising virtues of empire, he understood that they could work only if administered through indigenous rulers and power structures. Hence the empire’s network of dominions, princely states and protectorates.
Although Burke and others had long advocated learning Irish lessons from the loss of America, there were no lessons learned from Lugard’s concept of indirect rule. With the fall of Parnell, London’s Irish policy reverted to type. For Tories and Liberal Unionists, ‘losing Ireland’ would merely set a bad example for the empire elsewhere. The Liberal Unionist Joseph Chamberlain questioned why ‘five million Irishmen have any greater right to govern themselves without regard to the rest of the United Kingdom than the five million inhabitants of the Metropolis’. It was classic imperial blindness.
In retrospect the United Kingdom Parliament during the Irish home rule crisis of the 1880s did come within shouting distance of attaining a federal constitution. Gladstone did not give up. As he aged, Ireland became an obsession that was said to consume half his waking hours. He returned briefly to power in 1892 and presented another home rule bill to Parliament. This time Liberal and Irish votes saw him through the Commons, but he was overruled by the Tories in the then hereditary House of Lords. Gladstone left office a year later and it was for the Tories under Lord Salisbury to lead Ireland into the new century.
Salisbury was not deaf to Irish demands. Two decades of land reform had proved insufficient to shift much ownership from English to Irish hands for the simple reason that few Irish farmers could afford to buy their freeholds. Further legislation was now enacted to allow the Dublin government to subsidise the purchase. This de facto land nationalisation was radical and remarkably successful. Big estates were broken up. Absentee landlordism collapsed. The government even built new cottages on acres allotted to landless labourers, a version of state crofting. In this manner, 310,000 Irish tenants bought their farms and more were rehoused, dotting the Irish countryside with identical cottages.
Almost half of all farms changed hands in a generation and Irish landownership went from under 10 per cent of farmers in the 1870 to an extraordinary 97 per cent by the 1920s. Within half a century of the famine, Ireland had been compensated with probably the most progressive land policy in Europe. As if in belated recognition that Scotland was being left out, London in 1886 passed a Crofters Act granting crofters similar rights to the Irish. This included security of tenure and fair rent arbitration, though it did not extend to subsidised purchase.
The Irish were now free of Anglican tithes, free of absentee landlordism and free to exercise the same franchise as the English. Foster concludes that ‘by the turn of the twentieth century, English oppression manifested itself in ways that were historical and cultural rather than economic or political. Reforms in land tenure, taxation and local government had transformed Irish society, and a solid rural bourgeoisie was in place.’ The Tories were said to have ‘killed home rule with kindness’.
Irish reform was a classic of virtue postponed until too late. Had it been enacted under Grattan’s Parliament in the 1790s or at the time of Parnell in the 1880s, Ireland would almost certainly have found its way to a peaceful federal concordat with England. As it was, by the turn of the century one rebel diarist, Liam de Róiste, spoke for many in writing that he had had enough. He did not care if Ireland was a monarchy, republic or socialist state, ‘so long as it is freed from British rule’. Full independence and even republicanism now gained widespread appeal. Like partition movements everywhere, the cause of ‘freedom’ took on an emotional momentum that no warnings of economic doom and no offer of compromise from London could stem.
Easter 1916: the long goodbye
In the 1910 general election Herbert Asquith’s Liberals came to power reliant on the Irish Parliamentary Party, and therefore unable to avoid a third home rule bill. This was initially vetoed by the House of Lords, but for once England’s domestic politics came to Ireland’s aid. The Lords had also blocked chancellor David Lloyd George’s ‘people’s budget’, a clearly intolerable veto on democracy. Such a veto had to be ended, and it was by the Parliament Act of 1911. Irish home rule was finally enacted in 1914. At last, and with the agreement of Parliament, Ireland had what it had so long desired, the right to govern its own people, albeit under the protective umbrella of the British crown.
A new disaster now struck. Implementation was postponed by the outbreak of the Great War and by fierce opposition from Ulster’s Protestants, adamant that they would not be ruled by southern Catholics. In an echo of the Scots in 1643, a quarter of a million Ulster Protestants in 1912 signed a ‘solemn league and covenant’, this one declaring home rule by Dublin ‘subversive of our civil and religious freedom, destructive of our citizenship and perilous to the unity of the Empire’. This was the same Ulster community that in 1791 had helped found the Society of United Irishmen against the collapse of Grattan’s home rule.
Ulster Protestantism now pledged itself ‘to use all means necessary’ to forestall rule from Dublin. An Ulster Volunteer Force was formed to that end. A year later officers at a British army base at the Curragh in the south mutinied and said they would not fight against Ulster if ordered to do so. Meanwhile, the postponement of home rule put the Sinn Féin League and more shadowy Fenian bodies such as the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) on the warpath. They did not trust Britain. Just as Wolfe Tone in 1798 had turned to Britain’s enemies in France for assistance, so the IRB turned to its new adversary, Germany. A prominent former British diplomat allied to Sinn Féin, Roger Casement (1864–1916), held talks with the Germans and secured a promise of weapons. The republicans formed the Irish Volunteers to confront the Ulster Volunteers.
The outcome was a chaotic Dublin uprising at Easter 1916. Its leadership was divided and the German arms failed to arrive. Some 1,200 volunteers led by a fervent nationalist, Patrick Pearse, seized buildings in the city centre including the General Post Office, and for five days Pearse declared an Irish republic. However, the rebels failed to capture the government offices in Dublin Castle, the railway station or the port, and were soon overrun by newly arrived British reinforcements. Almost 500 people died, the majority being civilians caught in crossfire. The centre of Dublin was shelled and numerous buildings reduced to rubble, after which the republicans surrendered unconditionally. Sixteen of their leaders including Pearse were executed while 1,800 were imprisoned in England.
The rising had taken most Irish by surprise and did not initially enjoy wide support. The leader of the Irish MPs at Westminster, John Redmond, acknowledged the government’s right to suppress it. But the executions, after two weeks of secret and procedurally irregular trials, generated an upsurge of anti-army and anti-British feeling. Criticism was raised even at Westminster, including from Asquith himself and from Ulster’s champion, Edward Carson. The executions, the damage to Dublin and revelations of British atrocities against demonstrators undermined the government’s cause. Yeats’s poem ‘Easter 1916’ reflected an ambivalence towards the martyrs but ultimate support for their cause. He wrote, ‘We know their dream; enough/ To know they dreamed and are dead’. These men ‘Wherever green is worn,/ Are changed, changed utterly:/ A terrible beauty is born.’
With home rule already on the statute book, any hope of Britain retaining sovereignty over Ireland evaporated. The militant wing of Irish republicanism under Sinn Féin grew overnight from an extremist republican club to a mass party. There was no Irish plebiscite on a new constitution, on the monarchy or on any federal version of home rule. There was initially not even a negotiation. Instead Lloyd George, Asquith’s successor as prime minister, lit a fuse of rage by announcing in early 1918, with the war still on, that conscription into the British army would include Ireland – then on the brink of independence.
The ballot box now took up the cry of ‘England, be gone’. At the post-armistice 1918 ‘khaki’ election to the UK Parliament, Ireland saw Sinn Féin win seventy-three of Ireland’s 105 Westminster seats. The following month, in January 1919, these MPs met not in Westminster but in Dublin. There they declared themselves the Dáil Éireann, the parliament of a newly independent Ireland. Reporters were baffled when hardliners conducted much of the proceedings in Irish, resulting in nine-tenths of the assembly sitting in silence. A few hesitantly conversed in French. Eamon de Valera (1882–1975), a fighter in the 1916 uprising and an Irish language activist, became chief executive. The Dáil sent delegates to the Versailles peace conference, though only Lenin welcomed them.
The response of the British government to events in the Dáil was inexplicable. It had already conceded home rule and needed only to negotiate its introduction. Instead, it declared the Dáil illegal and sparked an immediate return to armed conflict. A new Irish Republican Army under the leadership of Michael Collins (1890–1922) mounted guerrilla attacks on British police, troops and installations and on Protestant targets in the north. The British government reacted with barely controlled violence. It deployed special police auxiliaries, mostly former soldiers from the trenches, known as Black and Tans from the colour of their uniforms.
The final Anglo-Irish war of independence (1919–22) imitated its predecessors. It saw summary executions, civilian punishment killings and the burning of the city centre of Cork. In one incident unionists drove an armoured car to a Gaelic football match and opened fire with a machine gun, killing a player and spectators. It was as if, in saying farewell to its Irish colony, London decided to reprise five centuries of repression.
Peace through partition
Only after a temporary ceasefire in mid-1921 did Lloyd George and de Valera finally meet in London. It was said that the latter formally addressed Lloyd George in Irish in the absence of an interpreter. Lloyd George duly replied to him in Welsh, conversing with his secretary Tom Jones and leaving de Valera baffled in turn. We thus glimpse the spectacle of the elected leaders of the two principal peoples of the British Isles, each addressing the other in a Celtic language which he could not understand. It is a vignette of the disintegration of the first English empire.
In December 1921 de Valera sent Collins to broker an independence treaty with Lloyd George. The treaty meant that Collins had to face down the more fanatical anti-treaty republicans by pleading what he called ‘the duress of facts … the freedom to achieve freedom’. Most difficult was how to handle the seemingly insoluble problem of Ulster. To appease unionist opinion, six of Ulster’s nine counties were eventually granted ‘temporary’ secession from the new state, representing roughly a third of Ireland’s population. The border was to be fixed by a special commission.
Partition infuriated hard-line nationalists in the south, determined on becoming a republic, but by now the realpolitik was unarguable. A divided Ireland was the only way for all parties to accept a new treaty. The alternative was another Irish civil war. Collins declared himself ‘absolutely against coercion: if Ulster is going to join us, it must be voluntary’. He also saw that Ulster in its present state could easily deny his new Ireland its stability. The north was Britain’s creation and it should remain Britain’s problem. He was right.
The following year, 1922, the so-called Irish Free State came into being, technically loyal to the crown and the Commonwealth and with an (Irish) governor-general in Dublin Castle. Britain had by then committed some 57,000 soldiers to a final struggle to retain control over its disintegrating corner of empire. The army staggered back to England, leaving Ireland to embark on what looked like a perilous and impecunious path to freedom.
Partition proved anything but temporary. The commission, intended to embrace all local Protestant communities, took years to reach a decision. The north’s leadership under the implacable James Craig and supported by Carson and other unionists in London, was eager for Ulster to enjoy its own instant home rule. Even before peace in the south was finally agreed, 1921 saw the opening of a new Belfast parliament by George V personally. It was to be housed in a pompous 1930s classical palace on the hill of Stormont in a Belfast suburb. Unionist MPs at Westminster might declare Irish independence as leaving ‘the British Empire doomed’, but a portion of its oldest colony was left clinging to the raft, blessed with precisely the sort of provincial parliament London had for over a century denied to Ireland as a whole.