Week 11: The Ulster Crisis, 1912-14 ‘Ulster will fight – and Ulster will be right’ Week 11: The Ulster Crisis, 1912-14

‘Britain may soon be stained with the blood of civil war … No method remains, except armed revolt, by which the country can make its will prevail’. Conservative Election Guide, 1914

Charles Stewart Parnell and Home Rule 1885 Election 1886 Election

December 1910 Election 272 272 84 42 Turnout: 81.1%

1912 Government of Ireland Bill A bi-cameral Irish Parliament - 164 Member Irish House of Commons - 40 Member Senate 40 Irish MPs to remain at Westminster, to vote on imperial matters Abolition of the Lord-Lieutenant and the British administration at Dublin Castle No power over defence, foreign policy, trade, policing or religion.

Ulster Unionism December 1910

Sir Edward Carson (1854-1935)

The Ulster Volunteers

Andrew Bonar Law: Unionist Leader, 1911-

Bonar Law inspects the Ulster Volunteers, 1914

Bonar Law at Blenheim, 1912 ‘there are things stronger than Parliamentary majorities. … We shall take whatever means seem to us most effective, to deprive [the government] of the despotic power which they have usurped’

‘Ministers who try and use the army will end up swinging from the lamp-posts of London’. F. E. Smith Newcastle, 1914 F. E. Smith (1872-1930)

The Larne Gun-Running, April 1914

Redmond: The ‘Dollar Dictator’

‘Ulster, 1912’ ‘We know the wars prepared On every peaceful home, We know the hells declared, For such as serve not Rome. The terror, threats and bread In market, hearth and field – We know, when all is said, We perish if we yield’. Rudyard Kipling

Herbert Asquith (1852-1928) King Charles I (1600-1649)

Forerunners of Fascism?

December 1910 Election 272 272 84 42 Turnout: 81.1%

The House of Lords as a democratic force Lord Selborne, 1912: The Lords stand ‘for a great democratic principle (cheers) – the principle that there should be an appeal from Ministers who may be unscrupulous, from majorities which may be subservient, to the people from whom Ministers and majorities alike derive their power’. Sir Robert Finlay, 1912: The Parliament Act ‘absolutely alien to the spirit of democracy’. F.E. Smith, 1912: Ministers had ‘cheated the people of every vestige of effective control over the national policy’

1885 1886 1892 1910

Partition?

Belfast Street Murals (Unionist)

Carson Statue, Stormont Parliament