Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (26 page)

III

After the armistice in November 1918, Lloyd George called an immediate general election. The result was a massive victory for the coalition. Lloyd George now gave Churchill the job of Secretary of State for War and Air. It was no easy posting. During the war Britain had conquered new territories, notably in the Middle East, that would have to be absorbed into the Empire. At the same time there was continuing nationalist ferment in Ireland, and in India there were the first mass protests against the Raj. In Egypt, too, there was a major revolt against British rule. Thus, Britain’s worldwide military capacity was stretched to the limit just when pressure was emerging at home to reduce spending and when conscripted troops were demanding rapid demobilization. The Bolshevik triumph in Russia fuelled fears of revolution at home in Britain, which, although exaggerated, were given credence by major outbreaks of industrial unrest. It was the Bolshevik threat, in particular, that obsessed Churchill, and the question of British involvement in the Russian civil war dominated much of his period at the War Office. In April 1919 Lloyd George described him privately as ‘a dangerous man’ who had ‘Bolshevism on the brain’.
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Lloyd George himself had no love for the Bolsheviks but, together with the majority of the Cabinet, was not prepared to make an unlimited commitment in support of the opposing, counter-revolutionary ‘White’ forces. Churchill did not share the essentially pragmatic viewpoint of his colleagues on this issue as, in his eyes, they failed to recognize the severity of the issues at stake. He claimed that Lenin, Sinn Féin (the Irish republican party) and the Indian and Egyptian extremists were all linked in a joint effort to overthrow the Empire. ‘It is becoming increasingly clear that all these factions are in touch with one another, and that they are acting in concert’, he declared in a speech in 1920. ‘In fact there is developing a world-wide conspiracy against our country, designed to deprive us of our place in the world and to rob us of the fruits of victory.’
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Churchill was himself capable of pragmatism, however, as his involvement with the Irish question was to demonstrate. Up until his entry into government in 1905, he had been an instinctive opponent of Home Rule. At the point that he became a minister it had been dormant as an issue for some time, but looked set to re-emerge; Churchill feared that if it did so it would put a great many people, himself included, ‘in an awful hole’.
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From 1910 onwards, when John Redmond’s moderate nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party held the balance of power in the House of Commons, the government was obliged to offer Home Rule as the price of its support. This provoked Unionist rage, but Churchill argued that the achievement of an Irish settlement would be ‘a boon and a blessing’ to the Empire and ‘a masterstroke of imperial policy’. He drew comparisons with the settlement that had been made with the Boers, and argued that a solution would increase trust between the self-governing Dominions and the motherland.
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Redmond reciprocated by saying that with the advent of Home Rule ‘every Irishman on the habitable globe will become a loyal citizen of and a loyal friend to the Empire’.
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Ireland was, of course, an imperial question unlike any other, insofar as the country was represented directly at Westminster. This enhanced the intensity and bitterness of the debate. When Andrew Bonar Law, the new leader of the Conservative Party, spoke in support of the rebellious anti-Home Rule Protestants of Ulster, Churchill suggested Law’s arguments for non-compliance with the government’s will could be used to justify ‘every lawless or disruptive movement in any part of the Empire’.
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Churchill wrote to Redmond, ‘I do not believe there is any real feeling against Home Rule in the Tory Party apart from the Ulster question, but they hate the Government, are bitterly desirous of turning it out, and see in the resistance of Ulster an extra parliamentary force which they will not hesitate to use to the full.’
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Recognizing this, he and Lloyd George were amongst the first ministers to see that the Protestant-dominated northern counties might have to be excluded from the operation of the Home Rule Bill. Churchill’s notorious speech of March 1914 was widely seen by Unionists as an attempt to coerce Ulster into acceptance of Home Rule under threat of state violence. In fact, he was arguing that Ulster did deserve special treatment, in the form of the six-year exclusion from Home Rule that the government was now offering. In his view that offer removed all possible excuse for rebellion, which, he emphasized, would be met firmly. But, in the febrile atmosphere of the times, it is hardly surprising that his language was seen as provocative. He insisted that ‘there are things worse than bloodshed, even on extreme scale. An eclipse of the central Government of the British Empire would be worse.’
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He seemed to think that extremity of language would wake the populace up to the enormities of the situation and thus facilitate an accord between the two sides. Around this time he commented privately: ‘Public opinion had got to have a shock. [. . .] “A little red-blood had got to flow” & then public opinion would wake up & then—!’
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Churchill’s tendency – whether he was dealing with nationalist or loyalist opinion – was to veer between the language of coercion and that of conciliation. This remained true over the following years. After the outbreak of war, Home Rule was put onto the statute book but with its operation suspended for the duration. The resulting nationalist frustration contributed to the Easter Rising of 1916, which was brutally suppressed by the British. (Churchill was out of office at the time and so was not implicated in the Cabinet’s misjudgements.) These events sounded the death knell of constitutionalist Redmondite nationalism and triggered the emergence of Sinn Féin as a major political force. In 1918 the party won 73 out of the 105 Irish seats, but its MPs declined to attend Westminster and established an alternative, illegal parliament (the Dáil Éireann) instead. In January 1919 the murder of two men of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) triggered the cut-throat and deadly Anglo-Irish War, or War of Independence. As War Secretary, Churchill put his faith in the RIC’s reserve force, the ‘Black and Tans’, which was responsible for indiscriminate shootings and burnings in reprisal for attacks by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Churchill knew this – he may have been reminded of his experiences on the North-West Frontier of India – but he defended Black and Tan officers as ‘loyal and gallant’.
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He was confident of victory, asserting in a speech in October 1920 that the IRA’s terrorist tactics would not change the history of the British Empire: ‘We are going to break up this murder gang.’
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That confidence, which was shared by most of Churchill’s colleagues, including Lloyd George, was soon eroded. The enemy’s guerrilla tactics could not be overcome, even by theoretically overwhelming force, and reprisals simply increased the local population’s resentment of the British. In July 1921, a few months after moving to the Colonial Office, Churchill privately ‘acknowledged the failure of the policy of force’.
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However, the Irish rebel leaders were also tiring of the war, and they now agreed a truce. In due course they agreed to negotiate on ‘how the association of Ireland with the community of nations known as the British Empire can best be reconciled with Irish national aspirations’.
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This was a euphemistic way of addressing the ultimate point of division between the two sides. Although the British were prepared to offer Ireland de facto independence they were insistent that this would be on the basis of Dominion status within the Empire. For Sinn Féin only full, formal independence would do.
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Churchill was assigned to the ministerial team of the negotiators on the British side, although his centrality to the talks should not be overstated. One of the leading figures on the Irish side was Michael Collins, a young, dashing impresario of terror who had played a key role in Bloody Sunday – the murder of twelve British officers on 21 November 1920. Collins’s impressions of Churchill were not positive, as his contemporary notes reveal: ‘Outlook: political gain, nothing else. [. . .] Inclined to be bombastic. Full of ex-officer jingo or similar outlook. Don’t actually trust him.’
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Subsequently, relations between the two warmed up, albeit not perhaps to the extent depicted in the more romantic interpretations, but it is at any rate important not to focus on the personalities of the ‘great men’ involved to the exclusion of the issues at stake. The eight weeks of the negotiations were to lead to the creation of an Irish Free State, but there were major stumbling blocks on the way. The first of these was the right of the six counties comprising ‘Northern Ireland’ to opt out of Home Rule – a right that was exercised immediately – and the British demand that MPs in the new Southern parliament swear allegiance to the Crown. The former problem, the question of partition, may have been the more substantive, but the oath of loyalty was an emotive issue that struck at the heart of national identity. Churchill was present on 5 December 1921 when Lloyd George presented the Irish delegates with an ultimatum: either sign the treaty as it stood, partition and the oath of allegiance included, or face a renewal of the war. One of the Irish delegates, Erskine Childers, wrote that his ‘chief recollection of these inexpressibly miserable hours’ was of Churchill in evening dress walking up and down ‘with his loping stoop and long strides and a huge cigar like a bowsprit’.
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After some hours of hesitation, the Irish signed, with heavy hearts. Collins remarked that in doing so he was signing his own death warrant.
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In his Commons defence of the treaty, Churchill maintained his imperial theme: ‘Every Colonial statesman will feel that if this succeeds, his task in his Dominion of bringing people closer and closer into the confederation of the British Empire will be eased and facilitated.’
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This kind of rhetoric was useful in the difficult task of selling the agreement to the government’s Conservative supporters. Yet the more Churchill and Lloyd George emphasized that a free Ireland would be tightly bound into the Empire, the more doubts were raised in Irish minds about whether such an Ireland would be free at all. This was seen during the debates about the treaty in the Dáil. Eamon De Valera, the Dáil’s President, had agreed to the negotiations but had stayed away from them himself; he now repudiated the outcome. He demanded, ‘does this assembly think the Irish people have changed so much within the past year or two that they now want to get into the British Empire after seven centuries of fighting?’
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Constance Markievicz, aristocrat and veteran of the Easter Rising, declared that she ‘would sooner die than give a declaration of fidelity to King George or the British Empire’. (Given that she had been sentenced to death for her part in the Rising – and then reprieved because she was a woman – these words carried some conviction.) She argued that ‘if we pledge ourselves to this oath we pledge our allegiance to this thing, whether you call it Empire or Commonwealth of Nations, that is treading down the people of Egypt and of India. [. . .] And mind you, England wants peace in Ireland to bring her troops over to India and Egypt.’
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Collins, by contrast, argued that the treaty gave Ireland scope to increase its freedom in the future. He pointed out that it defined Ireland as having the same constitutional status of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, which had real solid independence. ‘Judged by that touchstone, the relations between Ireland and Britain will have a certainty of freedom and equality which cannot be interfered with.’ As for those who quoted Lloyd George and Churchill’s interpretations of the document, ‘I say the quotation of those people is what marks the slave mind.’
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In January 1922, in a fraught atmosphere, the Dáil approved the treaty by 64 votes to 57. But De Valera and his supporters were not prepared to live with the result, and in June the country descended into civil war. Although the pro-treaty forces won within a year, Collins’s prediction as to his own fate was proved correct. In August he was killed in an ambush by anti-treaty republicans. Not long before, he had sent a message to Churchill thanking him for the support he had given to the fledging Free State government: ‘Tell Winston we could never have done anything without him.’
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Arguably, however, Churchill was not completely even-handed in his dealings with the governments of North and South. He privately assured the Northern loyalists that ‘Ulster would come out top’ from the deliberations of the Boundary Commission, which was established under the Treaty to review the demarcation of the border.
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This was a sound prediction, for when the Commission drew up its report in 1925 it recommended only trivial changes, frustrating Free State hopes of major gains of territory; in fact its plans proved so controversial that its report was not published, the two governments agreeing to ratify the existing border unchanged.