11
The Orange card
Male supremacism informed the government’s repressive response to the suffragette movement. Yet it may have also been prompted by the fact that the campaign took place at a time of unprecedented social chaos, during which Asquith’s minority administration felt under siege. Between 1910 and 1914, industrial action was evident throughout the country, and in 1912 the third political fire of the period broke out in Ireland.
Ireland was nominally amalgamated with England in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, yet it had been treated as a de facto colony by Britain for centuries. A union between the countries had been established in 1800, after the United Irishmen Rebellion against British overlordship had been brutally suppressed, with members of Ireland’s independent parliament bribed to support the Act of Union. The parliament in Dublin was dissolved, and thereafter Ireland’s elected politicians sat in Westminster. The British continued to govern the country through the Lord Lieutenant in Dublin Castle.
Neither the 1800 Act of Union nor the British colonial administration rested on popular Irish consent, and nor was the British government’s record in Ireland in the nineteenth century by any measure exemplary. It took Britain three decades to fulfil its promise of repealing the penal laws that discriminated against the majority Catholic population. The government’s response to the Irish potato blight of the 1840s, which caused around 1 million Irish people to die of starvation or disease and another million to emigrate, was incompetent and indifferent when it was not cruel. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the majority of the Irish population had supported Daniel O’Connell’s movement to repeal the union, and in its second half they had consistently returned to Westminster MPs who campaigned for Irish Home Rule.
After the 1910 election, the minority Asquith government was dependent on the votes of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), led by John Redmond. As a price for the party’s support, Redmond insisted on autonomy for Ireland within the Union through the establishment of a Dublin parliament to deal with ‘local’ matters. The Liberal government agreed to the proposal, for principled as well as pragmatic reasons. The party had been committed to granting Home Rule to the Irish ever since its leader Gladstone had been converted to the cause in 1885 and allied his party with the IPP. Gladstone’s two attempts to pass Home Rule legislation in 1886 and 1893 had been sabotaged by the Tory-dominated Lords, but as the 1911 Parliament Act had deprived the House of Lords of its power of veto, implementing Home Rule might now be easier. In 1912 Asquith announced the government’s plan to introduce a third Home Rule Bill.
Yet Protestant Unionists in Ireland, along with a handful of Unionist Alliance MPs at Westminster, strenuously opposed the proposed legislation, arguing that Home Rule would allow Ireland’s Catholic majority to oppress them. Resistance was especially strong in the four north-eastern counties of Ulster that had majority-Protestant populations. These Ulster Protestants defended the Union, which maintained their hold on local economic and political power, and informed their cultural and religious identity. Some of them were descended from the English and Scottish settlers who had come to Ulster following the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century British colonization of the region, when land had been appropriated in order to establish a Protestant Ascendancy.
The Ulster Unionist MPs had a forceful and charismatic leader in Edward Carson, whose hatred of Home Rule was fanatical. Yet what gave Protestant Unionism influence at Westminster was support from the Tory party. The alliance of Toryism and Ulster Unionism dated back to 1886 when the Tories had opposed Gladstonian Home Rule, despite having previously favoured self-government for Ireland. In order to bring down the Liberal government, the Tories had decided, in the words of Randolph Churchill, that ‘The Orange card was the one to play’, a reference to the ‘Orange Order’ that had been founded in Ulster in 1795 to defend the region’s Protestant Ascendancy. The Tories had played that card repeatedly in the years that followed. In the 1890s they had opposed Gladstone’s second Home Rule Bill and established an official alliance with Ulster Unionist MPs and peers. In the early twentieth century, the association had been strengthened. Amidst fears of imperial decline provoked by the Boer War, the idea of granting Ireland any degree of autonomy had become abhorrent to many Tories: the ‘root objection’, as Austen Chamberlain put it, was the idea that Ireland as a nation might one day leave the Union and the empire, thereby undermining them. The Tories were, moreover, in a fragile political position after defeat at the 1906 election and the 1911 Parliament Act. Divided over Tariff Reform, bereft of compelling ideas and deprived of the Lords’ veto, they were eager for a popular cry behind which to unite. Once more the temptation to play the Orange card proved irresistible, though the consequence was the increase of sectarian division in Ireland.
It is no coincidence that a staunch Unionist of Ulster Scots ancestry had around this time become prominent within the Tory party. The rapid ascent of the self-educated and self-made businessman Andrew Bonar Law can be attributed in part to his fervent Unionism, yet it was also a reward for his striking interventions in the Commons. According to one Tory MP, Law’s forthright parliamentary style was ‘like the hammering of a skilled riveter, every blow hitting the nail on the head’. It was, as Asquith noted, also an entirely new style in its use of insults and sarcasm: Law dismissed the Liberal cabinet as a ‘gaggle of gamblers’ and ‘swine’. Such combative rhetoric identified him as heir to Joseph Chamberlain, as did his protectionist views and enthusiasm for the empire, of which he believed Ireland to be an integral part.
The middle-class Law was himself the target of insults. Asquith referred to him as ‘the gilded tradesman’, while some aristocratic Tories found his manner disconcerting: ‘I felt,’ remarked one, ‘as if I were being addressed by my highly educated carpenter.’ In this new era, wealthy businessmen – even those who, like Law, had no English roots and adhered to Nonconformist beliefs – became the leading figures in the party of old England. Joseph Chamberlain had been the ‘trailblazer’, to use a contemporary term, with Law and others following in his path. The new era for the party began in earnest in 1911, when a beleaguered Balfour resigned the Tory leadership and Law replaced him. The witty English patrician had been superseded by a tough-talking, middle-class and teetotal Ulster Scot. If the appointment caused dismay among Tory aristocrats, it also provoked anxiety on the Liberal front bench: ‘The fools,’ remarked Lloyd George, ‘have stumbled on their best man by accident.’
Law’s elevation to the Tory leadership hardened the party’s opposition to Irish Home Rule. The new leader’s father had been a Presbyterian minister in Ulster, and he was proud of his membership of the Protestant denomination that held power in the four north-eastern counties of Ulster. They were a ‘homogeneous people’, he declared, who had a ‘right’ to participate in the Union. One of his first acts as leader was to rename the Conservative and Liberal Unionist party as the ‘Unionists’, an indication that Ulster Unionism was now integral to the party’s identity. He also struck up a close relationship with Edward Carson, who ensured that his Unionist MPs and peers took the Tory whip. While Law and Carson were zealots in the Ulster Protestant cause, the marriage of their groups was one of convenience. The Tory party offered the Ulster Unionists help in maintaining their ascendancy in north-east Ulster, while the Ulster Unionists were a weapon the Tories could employ against the Liberals and their proposed Third Home Rule Bill.