COMMENTATORS on the visit of Queen Elizabeth have drawn contrasts between her coming as equal head of a neighbouring state and the coming, exactly a century ago, of her grandfather, King George V, as “ruler of his subjects”. In the latter case, that was certainly the formal state of affairs, but a more complex reality underlay the appearances.
Those who may imagine that the king was a diehard opponent of Irish self-government would be wrong. For he supported the idea of restoring to Ireland the parliament it had lost with the 1801 Act of Union, and became deeply involved in the efforts to bring this about.
George V succeeded to the throne in 1910 at the age of 45 on the death of his father, Edward VII, who had reigned for only nine years. His accession coincided with the most serious constitutional crisis in British history since the overthrow of the Stuart monarchy at the end of the 17th century. The Liberal government of Herbert Asquith had set about removing the absolute veto power of the hereditary House of Lords over legislation passed by the Commons. The government and the peers had clashed in late 1909 when the latter had refused to pass the budget introduced by the chancellor of the exchequer, David Lloyd George, a measure that sought to lay the foundations of a future welfare state.
Another politician with an interest in ending the Lords’ veto was John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party that represented nationalist Ireland in the Commons. The Lords had shot down the 1893 Home Rule Bill after its passage by the Commons. Redmond extracted a pledge from Asquith that committed the Liberals to follow the clipping of the Lords’ wings with legislation to give Ireland “full self-government in regard to purely Irish affairs”. Two elections in 1910 returned the Liberals to power, each time with Redmond holding the balance of power between them and the Tories, alternately threatening and cajoling the Liberals to stiffen their resolve to fight the Lords.
The legislation to remove the veto was passed amid great acrimony in 1911, the year in which King George was crowned and in which he visited Ireland. One of the king’s early tasks was to sign the new Parliament Act into law. The way was then open for the introduction of the third Home Rule Bill the following year. From the beginning, it was known that the king was personally in favour of Irish self-government.
Much of the credit for this must go to Redmond and other nationalist parliamentarians, who had convinced the British public that Home Rule offered a reasonable settlement of the Irish question.
However, as the Home Rule Bill made its slow course through the House of Commons in 1912 and 1913, and the opposition to its application to Protestant Ulster became ever more strongly expressed, talk of civil strife increased. The province’s unionists demanded the total exclusion of Ulster from the Bill. By late 1913, well-drilled Ulster Volunteers were marching regularly in Belfast streets, and a nationalist response took shape with the founding of the Irish National Volunteers in Dublin.
King George became concerned.
In January 1914, a plan to give Ulster a veto on laws made by a Dublin parliament was considered, but the king warned the Cabinet that such a “safeguard” would not be enough to induce the unionists to accept rule by a Dublin Parliament. He told them that, while he would be delighted with a settlement by consent, it was his duty to prevent civil war and he was considering exercising the royal power to dismiss the prime minister and precipitate a general election. He also warned that, if no settlement were agreed, many army officers might resign their commissions rather than be used to enforce Home Rule in Ulster.
Averting such an action became the concern of Asquith. In March, he and Lloyd George persuaded Redmond to accept a temporary partition: Ulster counties could vote themselves out of Home Rule in separate plebiscites for a period of six years, after which they would automatically “come in”. The king told Asquith he felt sure that the time limit would be unacceptable to the unionists, a fear confirmed when Carson dismissed the plan as “a sentence of death with a six-year stay of execution”.
And, as he had predicted, officers stationed at the Curragh did hand in their commissions in March when it seemed that they were about to be sent to Ulster.
In April, the king urged the prime minister to renew talks with both sides. From Redmond, he sought a further concession: to exclude six counties en bloc without a plebiscite and for an indefinite period until Parliament should decide to include them. Asquith, believing he had pushed Redmond to the limit of concession, did not act on this. There soon followed the sensational landing of 35,000 rifles with ammunition by the Ulster Volunteers at Larne and other northern ports, and a dramatic rise in recruitment to the Irish Volunteers. The civil war threat now looked real.
As the final stages of the Home Rule legislation passed the Commons in the summer of 1914, feverish moves continued behind the scenes to arrange direct negotiation between the nationalist and unionist leaders in a last hope of winning an agreed settlement. The king now made his last contribution. When Asquith suggested Buckingham Palace as the venue for a conference, he eagerly agreed. On July 21st, Redmond and John Dillon for the nationalists, Carson and James Craig for the Ulster unionists, Asquith and Lloyd George for the Liberals and Bonar Law and Lord Lansdowne for the Tories convened at the Palace. The king told them his apprehensions were made sharper by his feelings of attachment to Ireland and her people. He prayed God’s help on their deliberations, concluding “Your responsibilities are indeed great. The time is short . . .” By the second day, the conference had become deadlocked on the issue of the area to be excluded. Immediately after the breakdown, the king held a private audience with each participant and, making the best of it, told Redmond that he was delighted to hear of the “amicable and conciliatory manner” in which Redmond and Carson had met and parted.
The time was indeed short. Within a week of the breakdown, Germany invaded Belgium, and King George’s kingdom was at war. A small civil war had been averted by an unimaginably greater slaughter.