The Rest Is History - 338: Ireland: Home Rule, Mutiny - and Civil War?

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

The year is 1912. The bitter arguments about Home Rule for Ireland are reaching boiling point. But with Ulster in uproar, the Tories encouraging mutiny and thousands of rifles pouring into Ireland, is the United Kingdom really heading for a bloody civil war? And was Sarajevo really the turning point that saved Britain from a sectarian inferno? In today's episode, Tom and Dominic are joined by friend of the show Dan Jackson to discuss the thrilling climax to the Home Rule saga, with appearances from characters such as H. H. Asquith, Andrew Bonar Law and Sir Edward Carson. We end with Britain and Ireland plunging into the abyss of the Great War - and the Easter Rising fast approaching... *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. The dark eleventh hour draws on and sees us sold To every evil power we fought against of old. Rebellion, raping, hate, oppression, wrong and greed Are loose to rule our fate by England's act and deed. We asked no more than leave to reap where we had sown, through good and ill, to cleave to our own flag and throne. Now England's shot and steel beneath

that flag must show how loyal hearts should kneel to England's oldest foe. We know the war prepared on every peaceful home. We know the hells declared, for such as serve not Rome. The terror, threats and dread in market, hearth and field. We know when all is said, we perish if we yield. Believe we dare not boast. Believe we do not fear. We stand to pay the cost in all that men hold dear. What answer from the north? One law, one land, one throne. If Englandling poem, Ulster, was written by Rudyard Kipling and published in the Morning Post on the 9th of April, 1912. And it's a call to arms, isn't it, by Kipling on behalf of what he sees as the guardians of the British flame, the people of Ulster, or as we would now say, well, what eventually becomes the state or statelet or province, whatever you'd like to call it, of Northern Ireland. So here we are, and a civil war is approaching. It is, Dominic. And I think that listeners will be able to tell from that that we are now a long way from the GPO in Dublin, where we were for our previous two episodes on the build-up to the Easter Rising. Well, I probably wouldn't have read it in the GPO, Tom, to be honest. I'm brave,

but not that brave. So to explain, to remind listeners, we've done two episodes in Dublin with Paul Rouse, and now we're taking a break. By magic, we have left, we have spirited ourselves away from the GPO, and we are now back, where are we? We're back in England. We're back in Liverpool. We're back in Newcastle. We're back in the great cities of Britain. Edwardian Britain. Edwardian Britain. Because this story that we have framed as a story about Ireland is, of course, also a story about the other constituent parts of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. And we shouldn't forget that.

No, we shouldn't, Tom. I mean, we left last time. So those of you who listened to our first two episodes in this series will know that we left last time with Paul Rouse from University College Dublin, saying very firmly that at the beginning of the 1910s, the United Kingdom was, in his view, heading for civil war, and the Great War interrupts it. And of course, we know there wasn't a civil war, but today's episode is about that civil war that never was. And we're joined, Tom, by one of the great friends of the rest of history, aren't we? We are. So Dan Jackson, who has appeared on two episodes, he appeared on the episode we did on the North-South Divide. He appeared on the episode we did on the North-South Divide. He appeared on the episode

we did on the beginnings of the railways. He is probably best known for his wonderful, wonderful book, The Northumbrians, about the history and culture of the Northeast, which I know both of us nominated as History Book of the Year back when it was published. But Dan has also published another book. And that book has the very, very promising title of Popular Opposition to Irish Home Rule in Edwardian Britain. And Dan, this was your doctoral subject. So we are absolutely now on your home territory. Thanks very much. And thanks for the invitation again. Yes. And this is, you know, I was saying to Dominic before, historians go on about their period. This is the best period. This is so fantastic. Such a gripping story. And it has so much resonance for today, actually. So I'm glad that my old thesis, published in 2009 by Liverpool University Press, and it's still available, is getting another airing. So Dan, let's do the background because in the previous episode, we were talking a lot about 19th century Ireland and about the pressures, the sense of distinctiveness, the growing pressures, the demands for home rule that were embodied by the Irish Parliamentary Party under John Redmond.

The Liberals under Gladstone had floated home rule. Gladstone had split his own party about it in the 1880s. Then they'd had another go in the 1890s, frustrated by the House of Lords. But things all change at the end of the 1900s, don't they? Can you give us a bit of a reminder of what's changed? Yeah. So before we get into the politics, I think there's something to be said about our general impressions about the Edwardian period. People look back kind of fondly to it. I guess it's the Downton Abbey era for some people.

It's the Indian summer, Delhi-Durbar, Henley-Regatta. It's cricket at the Oval. It's the Kaiser at Cowes. Yeah, the Philip Larkin poem. Yes, it's all that sort of thing. It's also an era when Newcastle United are regularly champions of England. So it's a golden age. A golden age. A golden age.

In many respects. But actually, once you delve into the period, you realise that the country is, certainly by 1914, the story we're going to tell, is having a nervous breakdown. And you see traces of that in the debates that rage around the turn of the century, that sense of foreboding that people have. You know, Kipling's poem, Recessional, you know, we are masters of the universe, or are we? Or are there threats looming over the horizon? Are we as confident and prosperous and impregnable as we once were? And that plays out in the political field through a slightly dry topic of tariff reform, which emerges as a conservative policy idea pushed by Joseph Chamberlain, of course, a conservative politician at the time. And it's the idea that basically we can adjust

our tariff barriers to better protect our empire and encourage industrial growth in the empire and also prosperity at home. But this is a massively controversial subject for a country that had set out its store politically for decades around free trade and that had driven much of Britain's prosperity and so for although after the 1860s when Gladstone has his unfortunate period of trying to get home rule through parliament and fails the Tories capitalise on that the in 1886 of course Rand, a leading Conservative, is described as having played the orange card in his support for or opposition to Irish Home Rule. There's about two decades of Tory hegemony until the 1906 general election, which is a Liberal landslide. And there's no sense of Irish Home Rule being on the Liberal Party's agenda in that period. Because it doesn't need to be, because the Irish Parliamentary Party are not holding the balance of power. They need to hold the balance of power to have any influence.

But also, even so the Liberals are associated with the Home Rule cause. But one thing I hadn't really gauged until you and I, Tom, both read this book, Fatal Path, by a brilliant Irish historian, Ronan Fanning, was the extent to which even in the Liberal Party, which is, as it were, the more sympathetic to Irish home rule, the people running that party are fervently anti-Catholic and have an enormous dislike of Ireland and the Irish, Asquith, Lloyd George especially. I mean, Lloyd George, non-conformist, he thinks Catholic priests are the devil incarnate. He has no time for Ireland. He thinks, you know, it's just a sort of much worse Wales.

You know, I hadn't gauged. I'd always thought there'd been some sentimental fondness for Ireland in the Liberal Party. But no, they couldn't give a damn about Ireland, could they, Dan? Certainly not. And even when, you know, Asquith eventually becomes Premier in 1908, Asquith's too busy, you know, drinking port, playing bridge and basically texting his various girlfriends because he corresponded with them so frequently to care a damn about Ireland. What changes? First, they have the liberal landslide, but that majority's nibbled away in the course of the controversies around the people's budget and so on in 1909 in

the Confrontational House of Lords. There are two general elections in 1910 in which basically the Liberals lose their majority. They still want to push forward their social program. And the price of that that the Irish Nationalist Party extract from them is, let's go back to home rule. We want home rule in return for supporting the program of the Liberal government and getting it through Parliament. And now there's a plausible chance the Home Rule can pass because, as we were talking with Paul last time, there's been this huge parliamentary reform which has removed the veto power of the House of Lords. So now, instead of blocking something, the House of Lords can only delay it by two years. You have to keep the legislation unchanged, don't you? Unamended.

And the third time you introduce it, it will pass the House of Lords and it's through. And the Conservatives, am I right, that the Conservatives see this as, I mean, they're going on all the time about the Liberals as a revolutionary committee, aren't they? I mean, they haven't coined the phrase Bolsheviks, but they basically see the Liberals as people who are blowing up the constitution just to stay in office yeah this is a vastly controversial move on behalf of the liberals but they had to do something because their legislative program was consistently blocked in the tory dominated house of lords this was the last era when the landed interest had you know a huge political influence still

in great britain and they consistently did that. And they confronted the House of Lords over it. And they pushed through the Parliament Act in 1911, which basically removed the veto of the House of Lords from legislation that came from the Commons. And that opened the way to, because of course, in the 1880s, Gladstone had the numbers to get home rule

through the House of Commons, but not through the House of Lords. So this was a was a real game changer and you've got David Lloyd George and it famously in a speech in Newcastle saying you know but the Liberal government are trying to pay for the massive armament program of building dreadnoughts and so on and he says you know a duke costs as much as two dreadnoughts and lasts twice as long this is unheard of almost in British political history for that to be such ridicule and confrontation with the old aristocracy. And so a lot of Tories lose their minds over this. And some of them are called the ditchers because they're prepared to die in a ditch over

Lord's reform. But once the negotiations of the Irish Nationalist Party proceed after those two general elections, the way the path is clear, or maybe it isn't, but the path seems to be clear to reintroduce a home rule bill. So Dan, if the Tories see the Liberals as kind of dangerous, subversives, communists, whatever, that fear presumably starts to radicalise the Tories. And they have two massive causes now. They're deeply upset about what's happened to the House of Lords, the degradation of the ability of the Lords to block liberal legislation. So that's one thing they're very upset about. But now, Hoving interview is the issue of what Irish home rule, which now seems a very, very practical

possibility. Indeed, it's been passed, hasn't it? It's been legislated for. What are the implications of that for the British Empire? Of course, absolutely. And as we shall see, Ireland, especially the north of Ireland, is seen to represent the British Empire in microcosm. Some people describe Ireland as England struck Britain's first colony. And so this is the first kind of chink in the armour of the British Empire. This comes hot on the heels, of course, of all these debates about how do we best shore up our global dominance? Is tariff reform the answer? And those debates are still actually playing out within the Tory party in this period. Maybe we can have another go at tariff reform. And then the Irish Home Rule issue is back on the agenda.

And does that serve as a kind of unifying issue? I mean, is that part of why they pile in behind it? It is. But I think the most decisive factor for particularly Conservative Party's politics in this period is a change of leadership. Because, of course, in the years of Tory hegemony, it's Lord Salisbury. He passes on to his nephew, Arthur Balfour. Hence the phrase, Bob's your uncle, of course. But Arthur Balfour is a very different character. He's a man of the kind of the salons of London. He's a bachelor. His nickname at Oxford University was Pretty Fanny. Do you know my favourite Balfour aphorism, Dan? Go on. Which is to say, nothing matters very much and few things matter at all yes so he wasn't exactly the dynamic leader that the tories needed he's not going to die in a ditch

he's not going to die in a ditch so they cast around a bit and they have some internal debates and the man they come up with as their leader is andrew bonner law who until boris johnson came along was the only british prime minister because he becomes prime minister in the 1920s, to be born outside of the United Kingdom. He was born in New Brunswick, the back of beyond New Brunswick to a Presbyterian minister. And he's got this Ulster and Scottish background. And that's the key. That's the key factor here. I was about to say, Dan, that's the key, isn't it?

Because I opened with that Kipling poem, Ulster. And we haven't, in all of this, Tom, we haven't talked very much about the situation in the north of the island of Ireland. Right. So that's the key thing, isn't it? But Paul described the plantations. So in the 16th and 17th century, all these settlers arriving, including Cromwell's troops, who are fervently Protestant, often of Scottish heritage. And they, Dan, I mean, this is where the issue becomes, as it were, incendiary, sometimes literally incendiary, because they are concentrated in the northeastern corner of the island of Ireland. Some of them, many of them can trace their, you know, they're not settlers now, they can trace

their lineage back centuries, can't they? I mean, as far as they're not settlers now, they can trace their lineage back centuries, can't they? I mean, as far as they're concerned, they've built, I mean, Kipling says in this sort of poem, they want to reap where they had sown. They had created this world and they are terrified of Irish home rule because they think they will be governed by a Catholic majority on the island of Ireland. That's right, isn't it? Completely.

And as I know you've discussed on many occasions on different topics on this podcast, it's important for us to get back into the mindset of an era when debates about how you did Christianity were still really important. Because this is basically the last time that religion matters in British political history, I would argue, before the First World War, because it coalesces around the cause of Ulster and not being seen to betray these loyal Protestant subjects and hand them over, as it's seen, to a disloyal and Roman Catholic. And this is still an era when prejudice against Roman Catholics is massive, widespread, and very often violent, it dumbfounds people. It dumbfounds people in the Tory party. But the guy who galvanizes that anger

into a political program is Andrew Bonner Law. He's known as Bonner. It was his middle name, so he's known as Bonner Law. He's described as Law in the papers at the time. It wasn't a double-barreled name. But he's absolutely critical here because he is so hardcore he's a former Glasgow iron merchant he's been an MP in Glasgow and Liverpool and they're basically the two most sectarian cities in Britain so he knows the emotions that this issue can can cause on kind of Edwardian street politics and And this is basically the issue that the Tory party had been casting around for a substantive issue to confront the Liberals with, a vote winner. This is what they settle on. And this is how it plays out for the next few years.

But for law, or I mean, I know people call him Bonaraw now, by the time he said people called him law. It's not just a cynical manoeuvre, is it? I mean, he'd lost his father, I think his father had moved back to Northern Ireland. He had spent a lot of time traveling to see his father. He was, biographers sort of say, when his father died, he was prostrate with grief. He swore to uphold his father's legacy, all of this stuff. I mean, for Bonalor, who, as you said, is a really hard man, quite a doer man. Oh, very much so.

This is really, really passionate kind of stuff, isn't it? It is completely. I don't want to give the impression that it was just a cynical maneuver by any means, because this was important to people. But Bonaloh spotted this in a way that someone like Arthur Balfour, I would suggest, couldn't really see the passions that this could engender and did. But it did require someone to stoke the flames of anger. And it was through the work of Bonalor, working hand in glove with the

leadership of the Ulster Unionists, as we'll go on to discuss, that really tipped this country very closely towards a conflagration on the outbreak of the First World War. So Dan, you mentioned there the leadership of the Ulster Unionists. So we've been hearing how the Irish Parliamentary Party, Enthusiasts for Home Rule, I mean, the whole point of them is that they are parliamentary, they are working through constitutional means. Yes. Do the Ulster Unionists have a constitutional approach, a possibility of blocking home rule, or are they absolutely set on pushing it even to the degree of violence, of kind of setting up paramilitary opposition? Basically, yes, because

they can see the logic of the Parliament Act having been enacted, that there isn't the House of Lords bulwark to protect them anymore after 1911. So when, on 11th of April 1912, Herbert Asquith introduces the third Home Rule Bill to Parliament, they know that the writing's on the wall. There are very limited parliamentary obstacles in its way now. And so they start to mobilize in every possible sense. And one of the first things they do is that they select a man called Sir Edward Carson as their leader. Now, Carson is an absolutely fascinating figure. He's probably better known these days because he had a glittering career in the law. He's probably one of the best paid barristers in the country, millionaire

in that period. He took on a range of very famous cases. Probably the most famous one, though, was when he defended the Marquess of Queensbury against Oscar Wilde's accusation of libel in 1895, I think it was. Because they'd been at school together, hadn't they, in Dublin? They'd gone to Trinity College Dublin together. They both came from that Anglo-Irish ascendancy Dublin world. And interestingly, Edward Carson is the unionist MP for Dublin University, because this is still the era when the top universities sent MPs to Parliament. So Oxford and Cambridge, the Scottish universities, UCL and Dublin University sent two MPs and Carson was one of them. Because Dublin in this period, I mean, you explored it. It's a Georgian city in many respects. It's where Dublin Castle is located and it's still a pretty unionist

city in many respects. And there's an Irish insult that's occasionally used for Dubliners to call them Jackines, which is said to come from the fact that they wave Union Jacks around, or used to, at least. If you look at the armistice pictures from Dublin in 1918, there's just Union Jacks all over the place. But that history changed pretty quickly. But that's where Carson comes from. He comes from that world, and he's a brilliant public speaker. And he's such a charismatic figure in contrast to much of the kind of Ulster Unionist leadership in this period. Very photogenic. He's got the lantern jaw, you know, the enormous bald head. He's a very, he's a kind of dandified dress. He's often got the carnation, his buttonhole, the Homburg hat. He's a very imposing figure. And he's brought in, Carson remains for the rest of his life, an Irish unionist. He's from Dublin. In an ideal world for Carson, the whole of Ireland would have remained as part of the union.

But there comes a realization that that's just not possible. And so most of the unionists in Ireland are concentrated in Ulster, obviously. Well, actually, the far northeast corner of Ulster, not the whole of the historic province. And so that concentration around Ulster, which had a very different developmental path in the 19th century. You go to Belfast in 1900, it looks like Newcastle or Glasgow or a city in the north of England. It's industrial. It's built around shipbuilding and linen and engineering and all the rest of it. And it's got a very strong, prosperous, confident, Protestant working and middle class. And they're horrified at the thought of being governed from Dublin. Yeah, Bonalor said something like that. I came across it the other day, that when he was traveling back and forth to visit his father, I think it was, he was struck by how Northern, you know, what like a Northern English or Scottish city it was. He said, would you hand

over, you know, Liverpool, Sheffield, Manchester to Rome? No, of course you wouldn't. And that clearly really matters to him. But the other thing I was going to ask about was, so Carson is a great performer, is a barrister, he's a theatrical man. And I mean, the ACMI, the high points of men and 229,000 women queue up to sign this pledge that they will use all means necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a home rule parliament in Ireland. Right, so all means necessary. What do they mean by all means necessary? Yeah, at this period, it's still a bit ambiguous. What exactly does that mean? I mean, some people are signing, reputedly, are signing this Ulster Covenant in their own blood. That's how strongly they feel about this. And it's got deliberate echoes, of course,

of the 17th century, the various covenants that were subscribed to in Scotland to object to Charles I's religious reforms, introduction of new prayer books and all that sort of thing. And many of these people could trace their ancestry back to 17th century Scotland and Northern England. So this had enormous emotional resonance. But at this point, it isn't until after the covenant is signed amidst great ceremony in late 1912 that thoughts quickly turned to what practical steps are we going to take here to withstand this measure and they quickly move by the early months of 1913 by the formation of what was originally called the ulster volunteers then became known as the ulster volunteer force maybe i'll be familiar with the uF, which was the second founding.

The UVF was founded for a second time in the 1960s, late 60s, during the Troubles period. But this initial manifestation of the Ulster Volunteers was a different beast, really. It had much more widespread middle-class participation. It was drawn from the militias of Northern Ireland that existed already, played into the very strong Anglo-Irish martial tradition. If you think about Wellington and Montgomery and all them who came from Ireland, the formation of the Ulster Volunteers is almost unprecedented in British history to have such a large scale military, paramilitary force formed in opposition to a bill in Parliament. Right. Okay. So this isn't looking good for the stability of Ireland or indeed for the United Kingdom as a whole. So I think we should take a break at this point. And Dan, when we come back, perhaps we can talk about what effect the emergence of this paramilitary force

has on British politics in the build-up to August 1914. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. I have always wished the Catholics in Ireland to govern themselves, wrote Lord Esher to Margot Asquith. We have shown ourselves unfit to govern a community of Catholics, this over centuries, but we are not half as unfit to govern Catholics as they are to govern the Protestant community. That is the whole ethical and political aspect of the situation. Although such flagrantly anti-Catholic sentiments were rarely committed to paper, they coloured the mentality of government and opposition. Esher, as the king's liaison with ministers, moreover, would scarcely have written in such

terms to the prime minister's wife were he not satisfied that she was of like mind. The home rule crisis of 1912-14, as Daniel Jackson has observed, was the last time that religion and politics seriously intersected in British politics. So that was Ronan Fanning, who, Dominic, you mentioned in the first half, author of Fatal Path. He was Professor of Modern History at University College Dublin, which is Paul Rouse's university. And the Daniel Jackson that he mentions there, Dan, is you. Yes, well, delighted to hear that. And I met Ronan Fanning many years ago, and he was in that book, The Fatal Path. He's fantastic.

But I think that Daniel Jackson's right. He's brilliant, isn't he? What a scholar. I think this is an era when people take seriously still the kind of Protestant ascendancy, which you saw in the coronation recently, where the king had to pledge to uphold the Protestant reformed religion, the governance of the Church of Scotland and all this business, which seemed slightly jarring to us. But back then, we've seen it's incredibly important how religion intersected with politics. I mean, at the same time as the Irish Home Rule Bill is going through, the Welsh Church Disestablishment Bill is also being pushed through in the teeth of

massively hostile opposition. God, it's carnage. Dan, let's get into this. So this is, you know, the early 1910s. Britain is, for all the jitteriness about the Boer War and national degeneracy and all this sort of carry on that you get in the Edwardian period, Britain is still very clearly the world's leading imperial power. I mean, it's being challenged, but it's kind of just about still top nation. People have, you know, electricity is coming in, gramophones, people are going to the cinema, all of these kinds of things. What the astounding thing is that there are people all over the United Kingdom in Great Britain

itself, who are living in their kind of suburban villas, reading the Daily Telegraph or the Daily Mail or whatever, or the Times, and they are saying to themselves, you know, Catholic rule would be awful for these poor people in Northern Ireland. We can't, you know, obviously Rome is, I mean, this is what all the politicians, Liberal as well as Tory, think. What is it about this issue that is so incendiary, that is so toxic and so threatening to people's sense of what Britain is and means? Well, I think it combines a number of really interesting points. Firstly, the centrality of the Union, the Empire, and Protestant Christianity

in the matrix of Edwardian British national identity is still really important. I think this is still the end of a long 19th century. I think the First World War is a watershed. Things do change massively after the First World War, but they hadn't changed yet. And the ordinary people in Britain and Ireland could still be motivated by these ancient grievances and fears and so on. And it's still a period where there's widespread condescension and hostility towards Catholicism. Catholicism in general and Irish Catholics in particular. Now, I sometimes think that the story of Britain being a nation of immigrants is often overdone. If anything, Britain's most often been

a nation of emigrants. It's been an exporter of people. And sometimes the story we tell ourselves about immigration to Britain in particular, misses out Irish migration, which was enormous. And that added another kind of piquancy to these questions that had been fundamental to British national identity from the kind of late 1500s onwards, when you had the arrival in huge numbers in the 19th century, not just in the famine period, although that massively expanded the numbers, but throughout the 19th century and into the early 20th century, huge numbers of Irish Catholics into particularly urban Britain. And there was such a thing as a backlash vote against them. It's a typical story. We don't like your religion. We don't like the fact you're coming here taking our jobs and reducing our wages. And we don't like the fact you're disloyal either. You cheered on the Boers during the Boer War. from based in Dublin would be like handing over the Falkland Islands to Argentina or Gibraltar to Spain. It would be that mind-blowing to people. What? This is how you're returning?

This is how you're repaying the loyalty of these sober, industrious people who just live in a place that just looks like Middlesbrough or Sheffield or wherever? This is outrageous. This is absolutely outrageous, and we won't stand for it. Those feelings still needed to be kindled though and exploited and fanned. And that's exactly what the Tory, the unionist parties that were widely known in that period do. And so isn't that the paradox that the people encouraging paramilitary displays in British cities and villages, the people who are seriously proposing that the army, rather than be sent to intervene, should potentially mutiny, that the people doing this are the avowed defenders of the constitution, the Tories, the Conservatives, the people

who, by definition, oppose the kind of radical solutions. Tom, just to jump in for a second, I know what my answer to that would be, which is that, I mean, you see it in their speeches, Andrew Bonalor's speeches. He would say, through a terrible stroke of misfortune, power has been seized by a cynical group of revolutionaries, Asquith, Lloyd George. We are just taking up arms to defend. He would say we're defending the constitution, wouldn't he, Dan? Yeah dan yeah he would and he makes a famous speech speech at blenheim palace in late 1912 the gist of which is i can think of no length of resistance that ulster would go that they wouldn't either be justified in doing and that we won't support them in doing this is still at this ambiguous phase i mentioned earlier but even when the the ulster volunteer force is inaugurated in early 1913

around the time by the way that carson, that Edward Carson introduces in Parliament an amendment to the Home Rule Bill to exclude all nine counties of the historic province of Ulster, that eventually becomes six counties after the First World War. Because the Ulster Unionists don't want their three extras that have lots of Catholics, do they? Because they think they won't be able to govern. Exactly. They want to make sure that the portion of Ulster has an inbuilt Protestant majority to safeguard their position. But that's a bit of a pill for Carson to swallow, of course, because he could see that this will leave the Southern Unionists, of which there are still quite a lot in places like Dublin, even Cork, Galway and other places. In urban Ireland, there are still quite a number of Unionists, but they don't have the numbers really, and they're Party to embrace a policy of revolution without parallel in modern British history. Do you think he's right about that? Completely. I think it's because the Tories in this period are completely boxed in.

Their support for the Constitution, if I was being cynical, is entirely provisional on it conforming to their understanding what the constitution should look like and not up for amendment via the democratic process and so they're they're quite willing brazenly willing to support the ulster volunteer force and there are really prominent conservative politicians if i can introduce one name here an absolutely massive lad called F.E. Smith. Dan, you've made me so happy that you've mentioned F.E. Smith. F.E. Smith. I mean, he is yet another barrister. And I always think this is bad news for a nation's polity when barristers are prominently involved in the political scene. But F.E. Smith, another extraordinarily wealthy, dazzling Oxford scholar, but he's a Liverpool Tory MP, and he understands what all this means. And Liverpool in this period is absolutely central to this story. It's where

Carson goes after signing the covenant. He sails across the Irish Sea. The Liverpool Courier has this enormous headline, Liverpool's Sister of Belfast. And Liverpool is still this kind of sectarian cauldron. In 1910, the elections of 1910, nine out of the 11 Merseyside seats are held by unionists, one by a liberal, and the other one is held by an Irish nationalist, T.P. O'Connor, the only Irish nationalist MP outside of the island of Ireland. This is how unique this city is. And often think that liverpool's tradition is as england's most tory city which it was until right until the 1970s has been completely airbrushed out of that city's understanding yeah they don't go on about that now no no they can't the idea that a crowd of liverpool supporters would boo the national anthem as they were doing recently would be mind-boggling

even as recently as the 1950s. But Liverpool's political tradition was partly shaped by its economic base, which was largely landlordism in terms of dockside rather than productive industries, like Manchester was. The presence nearby of the landed interest through the earls of Derby, who were still very influential in British politics, but chiefly the growth of a native orange tradition in Liverpool, which was massive and largely prompted by a kind of backlash vote. But anyway, I mentioned F.E. Smith. He gets the nickname Galloper Smith because he acts as the sort of Carson's ADC, riding around on horseback at UVF parades and manoeuvres and so on in Northern Ireland

throughout 1913 and 14, quite brazenly supporting basically armed rebellion against the British government. Dan, I think you've sold F.E. Smith a tiny bit short by describing him as this incredibly charismatic and dashing barrister, because he's actually probably the greatest wit, isn't he? Or one of the two or three greatest wits. So he was Churchill's great hero. Tom, I'm going to read you some F.E. Smith quotes. Is this the wit and wisdom of F.E. Smith? Exactly, by Winston Churchill and his great contemporaries. So when F.E. Smith was a young barrister, he was up in front of a man called Judge Willis. And Judge Willis said to him,

Mr. Smith, have you ever heard of a saying by Bacon, the great Bacon, that youth and discretion are ill-witted companions? And F.E. Smith said, yes, I have. And have you, sir, ever heard of a saying by Bacon Bacon the great Bacon that a much-talking judge is like an ill-tuned cymbal and the judge at that said to him you are extremely offensive young man and Effie Smith said in open court as a matter of fact we both are but I'm trying to be and you can't help it but even better than that is he was talking to a high court judge who was presiding in a case of a man who'd been accused of sodomy. The high court judge said to F.E. Smith, could you tell me what do you think one ought to give a man who allows himself to be buggered?

And F.E. Smith said, oh, 30 shillings or two pounds, whatever you happen to have on you. But that's the kind of joke that if Carson had been listening to it, he'd have got F.E. Smith sent to Reading Jail for 10 years or whatever. And F.E. Smith plays up to his – he was Churchill's great drinking buddy, even though Churchill's a liberal in this period. Smith's a Tory. He's making – F.E.'s making a speech somewhere, and he says – it's about the liberals' kind of welfare program. And he says something like, I see mr churchill has stolen the socialists clothes while they were bathing if they do bathe which i doubt so he's full of little quips like that but uh he's another charismatic figure i think i remember discussing with the great professor

roy foster once about uh doyen of ir Historians in many ways, about Edward Carson. And he said, Carson, you know, he had a certain sexual charisma that was well noted by not just female voters, I would imagine, but particularly female voters who were just kind of all of a quiver

whenever he appeared. And some people have seen a kind of a premonition of a sort of almost fascist vibe. I don't think that it's quite right, but I think there is something in the strong man, the mass rallies, the arc lights. The paramilitary is marching up and down.

So, I mean, this is the age of the Boy Scout movement, I suppose, but it's also the age when there's an absolute fascination. I mean, Tom, we did that podcast about King Solomon's Mines, published, what, 20 years earlier? Obsession with manliness, with brotherhood, with people in tight trousers, riding up and down, promising civil wars. But specifically, this idea of Carson and F.E. Smith as kind of charismatic, almost sexually charged leaders, these are not the kind of people I imagine that Asquith, for instance, would particularly understand, would particularly have a handle on. So if Asquith doesn't understand

the emotions that are being stirred up in Ulster, the religious emotions, presumably also he's constitutionally incapable of understanding what the potential kind of power of people like Carson and Smith is as well. I mean, does he just simply not appreciate the scale of the crisis that he's building? I think he appreciates the crisis, but I just don't think he knows what to do about it. You see a bit of that in the First World War. There's a famous line, because you know, he was quite a laid back figure, to say the least, when he meets some society aristocratic lady and who says to him, this is about 1915

or 16 he said mr askwith do you take an interest in the war you know because that's the dynamic leadership that britain needs so does he take an interest in ulster i think he basically askwith basically wishes it would all just go away you know he's not he's not the charismatic stump speaker that carson or smith or even bono law who's quite a quite a know, he's not the charismatic stump speaker that Carson or Smith or even Bonalor, who's quite a draw because he can fulminate and he's got that stern look about him as well. No contemporary political campaign gets the numbers out on the streets like Carson's campaign, which he quickly realizes it's no good just speaking to demonstrations in Belfast. He needs to go and shift public opinion in Britain.

And that's what he spends his time doing throughout 1913 and the first half of 1914. But aren't there two other things though? One, the liberals are trapped. They rely on the Irish parliamentary party, the Irish nationalists of John Redmond, to whom they've promised home rule. So they can't welch out of it because then they're sunk.

Then they lose their majority. That's number one. But number two, because of this, what seems like a very arcane procedural thing, which is the Parliament Act, which means the House of Lords can't scrap your legislation. They can delay it for two years, can't they? You have to introduce it three times. Because of that, they're stuck on this, you know, what's the expression? It's not a treadmill.

It's one of those things that- Hamster wheel. Hamster wheel. Exactly. They're in a hamster wheel. And it's very Brexit, isn't it? Yeah, it is very Brexit. They're stuck.

The sense of a ticking clock. They're stuck, but it's a three-year ticking clock, right? 1912, 1913, 1914. And that means that Carson has the best part of two to three years to go around the country whipping people up, but also presumably to recruit his paramilitaries and to get guns. But Dan, I mean, a thing that a government does when faced by an insurgent paramilitary force is to send the police or failing that, the army in, to suppress them. So why don't they do that? Well, I think firstly, that would be quite a big step. And the Liberal government in this

period are hoping that the Irish Home Rule can be enacted peacefully. They'd rather not have any confrontations because, of course, this is a period where there are troops on the streets more often than more or less any other time in the 20th century. If you read George Dangerfield's famous book, The Strange Death of Liberal England, particularly confrontations over trade union disputes in 1911, it's quite a febrile atmosphere. And the last thing you want is, you know, having to deal with, you know, striking railways in Liverpool or wherever and then having to send troops to Northern Ireland. But of course, as it will play out when we get to 1914, the loyalty of the army, particularly its Anglo-Irish officer caste, are absolutely not on board with the idea of enforcing home rule on basically their family and friends in the north of Ireland, or in fact, in Dublin as well, of course, given that many of those landed families were based in the south of Ireland too.

So they couldn't really rely on the army. And this is demonstrated by what's called the Curragh Incident, the Curragh Mutiny. The Curragh Mutiny, yeah. Yeah. So this is how this whole story plays out. The UVF forms in 1913. It very rapidly professionalizes itself. It brings in a retired Indian army general to command it. It's drilling regularly and so on, but it's short of arms. So it manages through this kind of John Buchan-esque gunrunning episode where a ship sails from, I think it's Denmark,

and eventually arrives at Laan on the northern Irish coast, importing 24,000 rifles, which they purchased from Germany. The Ulster Unionists had bought outright, but had to basically spuggle into the country. This is a huge deal at the time. And when the army get wind of this at the Curragh camp, which is the main British army base just outside Dublin, many of them make their feelings known to their commanding officer to say, we won't, we'd rather resign our commissions than be forced to coerce the unionists in the North into accepting Irish Home Rule. What happens then? The government panic, the army, some of the more kind of loyal, if you want to put it that way, army top brass try and rein these officers in,

but they're adamant. Many of them are Anglo-Irish, as I mentioned. And then there's an enormous demonstration in Hyde Park in London with about a quarter of a million people who turn out to hear Edward Carson speak in defence of the Curragh mutineers, as they're called. The popular opinion is, well, they're doing exactly the right thing. This is completely unjust to try and impose this on Northern Ireland. When you say the popular opinion, Dan, this is an age before opinion polls. Do we actually have a sense of what the British, maybe, I don't know, from by-elections or whatever, of what the British public, which way they would have, the majority or plurality would have sided? Well, this is basically the question that I try to explore in my book on this topic, which was,

there aren't opinion polls. The evidence from ordinary voters is usually sketchy. You usually only ever get high political accounts of this period, which I thought was a major gap in the historiography. So you try and discover how people were feeling. And one of the ways you can look at it is the huge demonstrations. And Carson speaks everywhere in Britain. He speaks in Inverness, in Plymouth, in Norwich, in Mountain Ash, in the Ronda Valley, in Birmingham, frequently in Liverpool and Glasgow as you might expect but in Walls End, in Durham, at the Hearn Hill, Velodrome Tom not far from Holland Towers. He speaks to a mass demonstration in 1914. So there's usually huge turnout for these events. They're often highly

stylized. Have you ever watched the Mitchell and Kenyon archive of kind of Edwardian newsreels? And you see how often processions were a big deal for the Edwardians and various different guys as religious, trade unions, whatever. The usual deal would be there'd be a procession through the town, bit like an Orange March almost, similar sort of thing. Or Carson's carriage would be unhorsed and loyal supporters would pull him through the town. So he gets huge numbers out onto the street. And at the same time, the Liberal government are losing by-elections left, right and centre to unionists who are campaigning on this platform. So Dan, the army has, elements of the army seem to mutinied. There are all these processions. There are people drilling. So there's not just the volunteers in Ulster. There's been a rival group of Irish volunteers

that has been formed, I think, in 1913. There's also talk of people recruiting in Britain, people signing covenants in Britain. And the question is, what's George? I said, George V, very much a friend of the rest is history, top king, what's he doing? I mean, he must be thinking, geez, my United Kingdom is, you know, heading for the knacker's yard. The king is massively spooked by this. And of course, he's had a tough early period of his reign because he was going to be forced to flood the House of Lords with liberal peers, of course,

at the height of the people's budget debate, which I think you've touched on already. But George V intervenes in politics. He calls the Buckingham Palace Conference in July 1914 to try and get the key players around the table to try and thrash out some sort of compromise. But of course, the Irish nationalists are not willing to compromise, and they still see the island of Ireland as a single political unit, and they're not prepared. But Dan, this is happening in July 1914, and they're having to have a conference to discuss what to do about Ireland. But I thought the Home Rule Bill has already passed, hasn't it? So why are they still discussing it? Tom, I don't want to terrify the listeners, but we've actually given them a very, very simplified version of the story.

It's even more complex. Well, because the bill had passed in May 1914. I think that's right, isn't it, Dan? The bill had passed in May, but even at that point, the Asquith government are still dithering about what to do with it. They are talking about excluding part of Ulster. But the question now is, are they going to exclude a bit of it? Are they going to exclude the whole province? Are they going to exclude nine counties, six, maybe even three counties? And does that mean they're going to sell out in Carson's view or the unionists? I mean, he's still holding out for no home rule at all. Okay, but what does the Irish Parliamentary Party think about this? Because they've been promised home rule, the bill has passed, and it's still not being instituted. So what's their take

on this? basis. And he's not prepared to concede ground to the Ulster Unionists, no matter how much they're recruiting to the UVF. Maybe there's a sense that John Redmond underestimates the vehemence of their opposition. You kind of expect that once it's passed through Parliament, then it will happen. The Liberal government will ensure it will happen. But it just doesn't, though, because it stands on a knife edge. There's kind of real brinkmanship in this period about how is this going to play out? Because as Dominic touched on before, not only have we had the Ulster Covenant, we've had the British Covenant as well.

And it's claimed in some circles that 2 million people signed the British Covenant in Britain. This is outside of Ireland. People are openly joining UVF-style groups in Glasgow and London and Liverpool and are willing to go and defend Ulster in the event of violence. Is it fair to say that by July 1914, the government is faced with large numbers of people in Ulster and across Britain who are

prepared to resort to violence in defence certainly certainly of Ulster, staying British, not being subjected to home rule as they would see it. And at the same time, presumably, this is radicalising nationalist opinion in Catholic Ireland too. Completely. So just as the Ulster volunteers had illegally smuggled guns into the north of Ireland, in many respects, the Ulster volunteers are sort of admired by the Irish volunteers. They kind of admire their pluck and the action they're taking. And they likewise import guns via the yacht that belongs to the novelist Erskine Childers, who'd written that novel, The Riddle of the Sands in 1903. Fascinating character. But they import arms via Hoth, which is a town outside dublin and this leads to a bit of a

confrontation afterwards in the city of dublin between british troops and sympathizers with the gunrunners as they're seen and some some irish people are killed so this adds to the sense of kind of this febrile stuff that's going on in the summer of 1914 but also the one-sidedness right that the british troops refused to do anything against the Unionist gunrunners. And indeed, there was the Curragh Mutiny, but they've opened fire on a crowd of Irish Catholic supporters of the Irish volunteer gunrunners. So it's as though they're party-free. Well, they are party-free, I suppose. Completely. And the injustice seems obvious to people. And this adds to the sense of, well, neither side want to back down.

And this is where Britain is poised in the summer months of 1914. All attention is on Ireland. There's an editorial written in the Liverpool Courier that says, you know, if a spark happens in Belfast, say, the first blood spilled in Ulster would raise a storm in the large towns of England and Scotland. The problem of the working classes of Liverpool, Glasgow, Barrow, Manchester and Newcastle would be difficult to handle and would be even worse than in Belfast. Now, that might be an exaggeration because the Liverpool Courier was a Tory paper, but still, there's no sense of a resolution to this problem, and then something happens. But Dan, before the thing happens, so in other words, D'Arcy Franz Ferdinand is assassinated on the 28th of June. Austria declares war on Serbia on the 28th of July. That crisis could have played out differently. The Austrians could not have made the decision they did or whatever. Had that not happened, I mean, I know Tom and I

are always rubbishing what ifs. It's one of our specialities, but had that not happened, do you think civil war would have happened before the end of the year? I think if violence had broken out in Ireland, that would have affected the whole of the United Kingdom in 1914. But it's hard to see, I guess, how the violence might have happened, given that, in effect, we're in this stalemate position in 1914. The bill had passed but there was no real prospect of enforcing an ulster given the position of the army the relative weakness of the liberal government the fact that neither neither the irish nationalists or the ulster unionists or the british tory party torian unionist party wanted to give any ground

here so the kind of trenches were dug as it were It's hard to see how this could have been resolved peacefully. But we were awaiting a spark. So Dan, the Irish historian Michael Laffan says of this period that it is the greatest crisis to confront a British government since the civil wars of the 17th century. So presumably you would agree with that. I do agree. And as I said at the start of this discussion, this is the last time that religion really seriously mattered. But it's also the last time that Ireland really mattered in British politics. Because I think that even at the height of the troubles, what was happening in Northern Ireland didn't really affect the outcome of British general elections. No, not at all. It was a serious issue, but it didn't really change how people voted, I wouldn't say. Maybe it contributed to people rewarding the Labour government after the Good Friday Agreement or whatever,

but it never really mattered again, arguably until 2014 in the Scottish independence referendum. The union had been a dead issue for a long time. But it goes back to my original point that the First World War changed everything. Everything was changed, changed utterly. You know, as soon as war was declared, the British government introduces what's called a suspensory act, which is to say we won't enact the Home Rule for Ireland until at least one year after the cessation of hostilities. They had no idea how long the war was going to end. So the Irish issue is effectively parked.

But I think there are bigger issues that happen in the course of the First World War. You know, the extension of the franchise in 1918, the exhaustion of the First World War. No one wants to go back to what Churchill called the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone. Irish issues were the last thing on Britain's mind, even in the teeth of an Irish war of independence and then civil war. People just weren't as bothered as they once were. And I've got this hunch that for a lot of people, the social mixing in the trenches of the First World War was another decisive factor because people didn't used to mix across religious lines.

People have been taught for centuries that Catholics were this disloyal fifth column in Britain. And then they served alongside them in the trenches and they saw how brave they were. They saw how gallant their Irish Roman Catholic chaplains were. And they went, do you know what? They're actually all right, this lot. It was all nonsense what we were told. Isn't there a more cynical explanation though? I mean, in Ronan Fanning's book that we've mentioned a few times, Fatal Path, one of the reasons he says in his preface that he wrote that book was because he wants to show, to some degree, that violence worked. That violence, radicalisation won. That it got results. He doesn't necessarily like it, but that's how he sees it.

Couldn't you say that the reason the issue fades for people in Britain is that the Ulster Unionists won. They got what they wanted by arming, by marching, by making the great hullabaloo with their Tory allies. They were excluded from home rule. They eventually get their own parliament. I mean, they didn't necessarily want their own parliament to begin with, but they get their own parliament. They get the six-county state that they wanted, but they get their way. As in fact, of course, to the Catholic Irish nationalists, both sides get their way as in fact of course to the catholic irish nationalists both sides get their way and so that's why it's settled some degree isn't it i mean there are people who lose out obviously which are the kind of minorities either

side of the border especially in the north but those two majorities if you like both win and so people in britain say great they've won let them crack on don't you think yeah i think that's right and i've got a lot of sympathy for Ronan Fanning's view on that question. Even Carson actually looks back on that period and writes in the early 1920s to say we were just a pawn in a political game. We were used, our campaign was used by the Tories to get back in power. I don't quite believe, I align more with your take on this and Ronan Fanning's take that to a lot of British people it was, this seems like a sensible solution. It's not ideal. It's settled. We're not going to impose anything on the Protestants of Northern Ireland as it became. So let's just leave it. But do you think also, Dan, that the reason that people in Britain don't remember this is because

they have chosen not to remember it? because actually it threatens the idea of British politics as always having been Pacific, constitutional, law-based. We don't want to remember how effective violence actually was in an immense constitutional issue. I mean, one that ends up ripping a chunk of the United Kingdom away. Yes, I think that's a really good point. I think that this whole period, that's why I mentioned at the start that people's slightly sepia-tinged view of the Edwardian period as this Indian summer, as I mentioned, is completely false. And I don't know where that comes from.

Maybe it was a deliberate thing because people could remember how febrile, how potentially violent it could have easily become in Britain, if not in Ireland itself. And so this story has been largely buried for decades. But surely the answer to that is, to both of those things, is it goes back to the thing you said right at the beginning, Dan, about the Great War changing everything. The Great War eclipses this in the national imagination. Of course, people are always going to remember the Somme, Pashtun Dale, Ypres, rather than constitutional wranglings about the Home Rule Act, and then a lot of paramilitary violence that kind of doesn't quite happen. So it's a bigger story.

But also, it's because of the Great War that people construct this fantasy image of what life was like before the war, don't you think? Because they're dreaming of a lost golden age, you know, before this, you know, these hundreds of thousands of people were killed. Never such innocence. Yeah, I completely agree. And actually, there's a potentially other angle as well, which was the places that were so important in that story before the First World War, if I take Liverpool, for example, they were never as prominent again in the national conversation. You know, leading politicians, Harold Wilson, of course, in the 1960s, cities like Liverpool, the North, Scotland, were never as quite as important as they once were in the national conversation as they were before 1914. So the prospect of violence in Liverpool and Glasgow is a very

different proposition in 1914 as it would have been in the 1980s. Right. So the United Kingdom in 1914 does not erupt into violence, but we have a sense that in some way paramilitaries in Ulster have kind of won. Home rule has not been given to Ireland. And of course, a knock-on effect of that is that it influences paramilitaries in nationalist Ireland to play the card of violence. And that, Dominic, is really the subject of our next and final episode in this, because two years after the beginning of the war, violence comes to the streets of Dublin. It does indeed in the East Rising. So for that episode, which of course you can listen to

if you're a member of the Rest Is History Club. So if you're a member of the Rest Is History Club, you can listen to that right now. But if not, you'll have to wait until Thursday because that is when we will be returning Dan to his box and we will be taking out again, but we will be returning, won't we, to returning won't we to the gpo in dublin tom taking wing back to dublin we'll be back in dublin at the gpo at the epicenter of the irish

revolution in 1916 for the easter rising with professor paul rouse but we can talk about paul rouse next time because dan that was somebody once sometimes says that people on this podcast are responsible for these great tour de force. You ever heard anybody say that, Dan? Once or twice, I think. Once or twice. So at this time, instead of him saying it, I will say it. That was an absolutely splendid tour de force.

So your book, your PhD, which I heartily, it's a tremendous page turner. It's called Popular Opposition to Irish Home Rule in Edwardian Britain. It's still available in all good bookshops, isn't it, Dan, from Liverpool University Press? Maybe not WH Smith's, but... No, it's available at a fairly discounted price of £23.99, I'm told. That's insane value. Insane value.

Rush out and buy it now. That's actually, that is actually remarkably good value for a PhD thesis. That's not bad. But of course, the other book of Dan's that you can absolutely get very readily is The Northumbrians on a very different topic, but absolutely wonderful, wonderful book. So Dan, thank you so much. Thank you everyone for listening. And we will be back on Thursday with the Easter Rising.

Bye-bye. Bye. Goodbye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.

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