I Signed My Death Warrant (12 page)

‘Would you be British subjects or foreigners?” the prime minister asked.

‘We would be Irish subjects,' Griffith said. ‘We would ass­ume that Irishmen in England and Englishmen in Ireland would have the same rights. The position would be the same as at present. We would make no change and expect you not to make a change. Actually it would be status quo.'

‘Our experts think it impossible to defend the main stream of commerce unless we can defend ourselves against submarines, and for that end have certain facilities in your harbours,' Birkenhead said. If these facilities were provided, neutrality would be ‘reduced to a shadow – a meaningless trophy which would give you nothing.'

‘In principle we make no objection to taking those safeguards which are necessary to your security,' Griffith explained. ‘We accept the principle that your security should be looked after, though the working out of the details might be very difficult.'

‘Britain had won on defence,' Frank Pakenham (later Lord Longford) declared in
Peace by Ordeal.
If this was so, they really won before the negotiations began, because de Valera had long ago acknowledged that Ireland would accommodate Britain's legitimate security needs. That had been at the very heart of his controversial
Westminster Gazette
interview in February 1920, and he had reaffirmed it just before his arrest in June in a twenty-minute interview with Chris O'Sullivan for an Australian syndicate headed by Keith Murdoch, the father of Rupert Murdoch. O'Sullivan asked what attitude the Irish would adopt, if there were a settlement and Britain subsequently became involved in a war.

‘In that event Britain would have the right to throw her troops across Ireland' to repel an attack, de Valera replied.

As a courtesy O'Sullivan showed his report to Childers, who had arranged the interview. Childers was appalled at the report.

What was wrong with it? O'Sullivan asked.

‘Sometimes de Valera doesn't appreciate fully what “Republic” means,' Childers replied. ‘No Republic could agree in advance to another power throwing troops across its territory. This commits us to something that could not be tolerated. I cannot let it go,' he said. ‘Cancel it.'

Childers may have been able to block the president in June, but he had very little influence following Griffith's acceptance of the principle that Ireland would provide Britain with defence facilities. Of course, it did not mean that the right to neutrality was being abandoned; it still remained to work out the details of the necessary defence concessions.

Affording facilities to Britain ‘would entitle other nations with whom we were at war to make you an enemy,' Birkenhead argued.

Collins admitted this. ‘A country refusing to recognise Ireland's neutrality would make Ireland an enemy,' he said. Hence the British should not worry about Irish neutrality.

‘They contemplate a situation where they would not auto­matically be at war,' Chamberlain observed when the British delegates withdrew to talk among themselves in Frances Steven­son's office.

‘They will give way on that,' Birkenhead pre­­­dicted.

Members of the British delegation generally believed that Griffith's answers marked an important advance in the negotiations. But Birkenhead said that the answers ‘have shaken me'. He thought Lloyd George and Chamberlain should make it plain to Griffith and Collins that the crown had to be accepted as ‘we cannot possibly have agreement without that'.

‘They have some idea of a president,' Churchill noted.

Before going to Downing Street on 24 October the Irish delegation was informed that Lloyd George and Chamberlain wished to meet with Griffith and Collins for about ten minutes after that day's conference meeting. Thereafter the conference never met again in full session. Instead there were twenty-three informal sub-conference meetings before the signing of the Treaty.

Barton was given to believe by Griffith that ‘Lloyd George was conscious of what he thought must be obvious to us also namely that the negotiations were making no material progress. He explained that their cabinet was a coalition and that its members represented different parties with divergent political views. He held that the conferences with our delegation were too large for the interchange of views and the discussion of matters vital to a final settlement. The impression conveyed was the Lloyd George's difficulty was rather with his own colleagues than with us and that if we wanted to make any progress at all we must assist him to get rid of his recalcitrants by agreeing to a reduction of members during two or three sub-conferences.'

‘We discussed this proposition among ourselves,' Barton continued. ‘Griffith was very anxious to agree to it and none of us had any reasons for opposing him. It was a temporary expedient. It was not suggested that these meeting should become stereotyped. So Duffy and I agreed.'

There were no secretaries to take notes at those meetings. Childers and Chartres attended one meeting each, but that was in their capacity as advisors. Griffith attended twenty meetings. Collins was at nineteen; three of the four meetings that he missed were held during his frequent visits to Dublin. Barton attended four sub-conference meetings, and Gavan Duffy and Duggan two each.

Barton and Gavan Duffy quickly became disillusioned at their virtual exclusion from the conference talks. ‘We were led to understand that the difficult people were Hamar Greenwood and Worthington-Evans,' Barton noted. Although Collins despised Greenwood, the latter was the most sympathetic of the British delegates towards External Association. As a Canadian he understood the Irish desire to ensure that they had the full freedoms enjoyed by Canada.

Barton quickly concluded that the British argument for the rationalisation of the conference was specious. He did not suspect his colleagues were behind the whole thing at first. ‘We all thought more progress might be made in this way,' he explained. ‘Gavan Duffy and I had not at that stage lost confidence in our colleagues!'

‘The reasons given for the smaller conference were false is now obvious to me,' Barton later wrote, ‘and I have grave doubts as to whether the suggestion emanated from the English in the first place at all.' Of course, he was right. Duggan said he had been told by Cope that the prime minister wished to arrange the meeting, but it was Duggan who suggested to Cope, on behalf of Collins, that Lloyd George should ask for this meeting with Griffith and Collins. Technically Duggan was telling the truth when he said that the British requested the meeting. He just did not bother to mention that he had asked them to request it.

As the British delegates were conferring amongst them­selves Barton, Duggan, Gavan Duffy, and the two secre­taries – Childers and Chartres – were led to another room while Griffith and Collins were asked to remain in the cabinet room for the private meeting with the prime minister and Chamberlain.

In his account of the day's discussions Griffith merely reported that Collins and himself ‘were asked to see Lloyd George and Chamberlain this evening.' It was actually Griffith and Collins who conspired to bring about the rationalisation of the conference, mainly in order to exclude Childers. But Barton thought it was a ploy to cut out Duffy and himself. ‘I believe that this suggestion was the thin end of the wedge to get rid of us both,' he wrote. Of the four sub-conferences to which he was invited, three were in the final thirty-six hours of the conference. In the following days they would become growingly suspicious, especially of Duggan's meetings with Cope.

‘Duggan was practically a cipher throughout the negotiations and acted as an echo to Collins but there was a constant corres­pondence by meetings between Cope and Duggan,' Barton ex­plained. ‘Duffy and I soon became suspicious that our leaders were giving away more than we were willing to give away and the delegation took sides against itself.'

‘From the moment Griffith and Collins met Lloyd George and Chamberlain alone their power to resist was weakened,' Barton wrote in 1924. ‘They became almost pro-British in their arguments with us and Duffy and I often felt that we had to fight them first and the English afterwards. We grew personally anti–pathetic to one another and the cleavage showed itself in numerous ways. Duffy and I felt that we were kept deliberately in the dark and that another channel of communications over which we had no control was opening up by clandestine meetings between Duggan and Alfred Cope.'

Of course, at the same time Griffith and Collins felt that they had gone to London to negotiate and compromise, not make a hopeless stand. They likewise felt that they had to struggle with their own colleagues within the delegation first before confronting the British. It was all part of the tug-of-war that de Valera envisaged.

The first sub-conference meeting was supposed to be for only ten minutes but it lasted about an hour and a half and that was longer than the last plenary session, which preceded it. The prime minister and Chamberlain briefed their colleagues afterwards.

‘Griffith is better than Collins,' Lloyd George said. As representatives of a republic Griffith had said they could not accept the crown, but if everything else was satisfactory, he would undertake to recommend it.

‘If we came to an agreement on all other points,' Griffith wrote to de Valera that evening, ‘I could recommend some form of association with the Crown.'

Collins was not sure what acceptance of the crown entailed. ‘What does it involve?' he asked.

‘The oath of allegiance,' Lloyd George replied.

‘That's a pretty big pill,' said Collins. ‘Cannot we have an oath to the constitution?'

Lloyd George believed at this stage that the Irish would accept the crown, if they were satisfied on other matters, but Chamberlain thought the crown would be the real difficulty, because the Irish seemed to be thinking of ‘a republic within the Empire'.

Next afternoon when he and Collins met Chamberlin and Attorney General Gordon Hewart, Griffith emphasised that he could only recommend acceptance of the crown, if unity were assured. Chamberlain asked if it would be easier to accept the six county set up, if Stormont agreed to come under the Dublin Parliament. No, they replied. Why would the British not ‘agree to a County Option?'

Chamberlain told his colleagues afterwards that he said that they ‘could not put a more difficult question'. Birkenhead and Churchill realised that they were in a very difficult position on the Ulster question. ‘We can't give way on six counties,' Churchill argued. ‘We are not free agents; we can do our best to include Six in larger Parliament plus autonomy. We could press later to hold autonomy for Six from them instead of from us.'

‘I rather agree with Winston,' Birkenhead said. ‘Our position re Six Counties is an impossible one if these men want to settle, as they do.'

‘I don't see how Ulster is damnified,' Churchill said. ‘She gets her own protection, an effective share in the Southern Parliament and protection for the Southern Unionists.'

‘If they accept all subject to unity we are in a position to go to Craig,' Lloyd George argued. ‘If they don't, the break is not on Ulster. My proposal is to put Ulster on one side and to ask S[inn] F[éin] for their views in writing.'

‘I think it conceivable that if they could agree with Craig on unity,' Chamberlain said, ‘they would accept the Six Counties.'

When Griffith talked about ‘some form of association with the Crown', he was not necessarily talking about allegiance, as Chamberlain clearly realised. Griffith was thinking on lines being advocated by John Chartres, but de Valera assumed he was referring to allegiance. When the Dublin-based members of the cabinet met to consider the report, the president asked whether anyone present would be willing to give allegiance to the British crown. All answered in the negative, including Kevin O'Higgins.

De Valera therefore warned the delegation that agreeing to allegiance was out of the question. ‘If war is the alternative we can only face it,' he wrote, ‘and I think that the sooner the other side is made to recognise it, the better.'

Griffith and Collins were furious. They considered the warning an unjustifiable interference with their powers. De Valera had been giving somewhat vacuous advice since the start of the conference, suggesting they do something without specifying what they should do. ‘I note that LG is just covering again the ground he covered with me,' the president wrote to Griffith after just the first day of the conference, for instance. ‘You will have to pick him up soon, I fear, on this “further than this we can't go” stunt.'

‘The Ulster question should be pushed ahead at once,' he wrote to Griffith on 25 October, and in the same letter he suggested that ‘the big question should be put to them at once'.

‘The main thing now it seems to us is to clinch with them on the “Ulster” question without delay and get the basis for representation in an all-Ireland Parliament agreed upon definitely,” de Valera wrote next day. And after that, the “make or break” question.'

He had not provided the delegation with the Ulster clause for Draft Treaty A until after the issue had been first discussed at the conference, and when the delegation asked for advice on the crown, none was forthcoming. Yet when they took one of the courses outlined by Childers, he admonished them.

Griffith drafted a strong letter of protest and insisted that the whole delegation sign it. Barton, who considered the fuss a mere ‘storm in a tea cup', initially refused to sign, as did Duffy. Collins complained that those in Dublin were attempting to put him in the wrong by trying to ‘get me to do the dirty work for them.'

‘Unless the Cabinet at home left our hands free,' Griffith said, according to Barton, ‘he would go home, and it was largely to gain time and learn something more about the matter that Duffy and I signed it.'

‘Collins was still very angry and said he would not sign the letter, but return home,' Barton continued. ‘Duffy and I said that if Collins was not going to sign it, certainly we would not, for it would then look as tho' we were all willing to give allegiance while Collins refused.'

Eventually Griffith persuaded Collins to make his protest by signing the letter, instead of returning home. Barton, puzzled at ‘what was the cause of Collins' extraordinary outburst', noted in the light of what he learned later that ‘Collins feared he was being led into a trap by Brugha and Stack. That he was in some way to be committed to a compromise and discredited.'

‘We strongly resent, in the position in which we are placed,' Griffith wrote in the letter signed by the delegation, which protested against ‘this interference with our powers'. Although the instructions committed the delegation to refer back to the cabinet before signing any agreement, the powers given to the delegates imposed no limits on the fullest form of discussion, ‘Obviously,' the delegation continued, ‘any form of association necessitates discussion of recognition in some form or another of the head of the association.'

De Valera was stunned by the tone of the letter. ‘There is ob­­viously a misunderstanding,' he replied. ‘There can be no question of tying the hands of the plenipotentiaries beyond the extent to which they are tied by their original instructions. These memos of mine, except I explicitly state otherwise, are nothing more than an attempt to keep you in touch with the views of the cabinet here on the various points as they arise. I think it most important that you should be kept aware of these views.'

The president soon came to appreciate that a form of recognition of the crown advocated by Chartres was compatible with External Association. He enthusiastically endorsed the idea and eventually persuaded Brugha and Stack to agree to recognise the King as head of an association to which Ireland would be externally linked.

Before allowing his name to go forward for re-election as president in August de Valera had stressed that no road to a peace settlement was being barred. But in an address to the Sinn Féin Árd Fheis (Convention) on 28 October he announced before his re-election as president of the party, that one road was barred and there were barriers on others. Ireland's Representatives would never call upon the people to swear allegiance to the English King, he said, and they might therefore have to call upon them to face the ‘abomination of persecution' if a settlement could not be agreed in London.

‘The problem is to devise a scheme that will not detract from Irish freedom,' he told the Árd Fheis. ‘They may come back having found what seems to them a way and recommend it to us. When they come we in the Cabinet will have to decide our policy with respect to the scheme, Dáil Éireann will then have to consider it. What may happen I am not able to judge, but I am anxious that you should realise the difficulties that are in the way, and the fact that the best people might legitimately differ on such a scheme. The worst thing that could happen would be that we should not be tolerant of honest differences of opinion. I believe that if such difference of opinion arose and were carried to the country it would mean disaster for our hopes.

‘One question, the allegiance question, is closed from our point of view,' he said, winding up his address. ‘The question of some form of association with the States of the British Empire is open. There is no reason why this nation should not associate itself with other nations provided the association was one a self-respecting nation might enter, and that it was not against our interests to do so. The question of defence is partially open. We have never denied that, if the rights of other people should conflict with ours, it was a question of adjusting our respective rights. We will not, however, ever take the view that English interest may over-ride our rights.'

Some of those in Dublin were tending to under-estimate the weakness of Lloyd George's political position. His government had presided over victory in the First World War, and the coalition enjoyed the largest parliamentary majority in history, but his own party had been hammered in the 1918 general election and was a distinct minority within the coalition, while his unionist coalition partners enjoyed a comfortable overall majority. In the coming days there would be two separate challenges to the government – one, a backbench revolt in the House of Commons, and the other at the Unionist Party Conference in Liverpool.

Many Conservatives, or unionists as they were more com­monly called at the time, were anxious to withdraw their party's support of the coalition and set up a government of their own. unionist diehards, led by Colonel John Gretton and Captain Charles C. Craig, a brother of prime minister Sir James Craig of Northern Ireland, tabled a motion of censure against the government over its Irish policy. The challenges were not something that could be dismissed lightly, especially as there was an obvious alternative leader waiting in the wings. In March 1921 Andrew Bonar Law had stepped down as leader of the Conservative Party after ten years, and he resigned from the cabinet for health reasons, but his health had since improved. He was ready to take up where he had left off. He had always been a particularly strong supporter of Irish unionists. He could have challenged Lloyd George for the position of prime minister in 1916, but chose to support the Welshman instead. Born in 1858 in New Brunswick in what would later become Canada, he was the son of a Coleraine-born Presbyterian preacher. Bonar moved to Glasgow as a twelve-year-old to complete his education. He was elected to parliament in 1900 and became leader of the Conservative Party in 1911. One of the strongest opponents of Home Rule, he described ‘fair play' for Ulster unionists as one of his two great political passions, with the result that the Conservative dissidents had an obvious candidate for the leadership in him. He had the experience and political stature to form a government. Indeed, within twelve months he and the Conservatives would oust Lloyd George.

With the censure vote due to be taken on 31 October 1921, Lloyd George was anxious for a distinct indication from the Irish delegation that a settlement was possible to keep most of the Conservatives in line. Cope suggested to Duggan that he call Tom Jones to arrange a meeting with the prime minister for Griffith and Collins. The meeting was duly arranged for Churchill's home, where the prime minister was due to dine on the eve of the censure motion.

Many people have exaggerated Churchill's role in the nego­tiations. He did not play a major part, other than in matters related to defence, which were essentially resolved during the plenary sessions. He only attended four of the sub-conference meetings – the one at his home and the other three in the last thirty-six hours before the Treaty was signed. None of his own team really trusted him. Even his Liberal colleague, Lloyd George, only included him in the delegation because he was too dangerous to leave out.

Churchill stated that there was always ‘a certain gulf' be­­tween himself and Collins, who looked on him as a political animal who would ‘sacrifice all for political gain'. Describing Churchill as ‘inclined to be bombastic' and ‘full of ex-officer jingo,' Collins had his own reservations. ‘Don't actually trust him,' he wrote. Had he got on very well with Collins, Churchill would undoubtedly have played a much greater role in the actual negotiations.

While Griffith was upstairs with Lloyd George, Churchill and Birkenhead remained down stairs with Collins. ‘He was in his most difficult mood, full of reproach and defiance,' according to Churchill. ‘It was very easy for everyone to lose his temper.'

‘You hunted me night and day,' Collins exclaimed. ‘You put a price on my head!'

‘Wait a minute, you are not the only one,' said Churchill, who took down a framed copy of a reward notice for his re­capture after he had escaped from the Boers during the Boer War some twenty years earlier. ‘At any rate it was a good price -£5,000. Look at me -£25 dead or alive. How would you like that?'

‘He read the paper, and as he took it in he broke into a hearty laugh,' Churchill continued. ‘All his irritation vanished. We had a really serviceable conversation, and thereafter - though I must admit that deep in my heart there was a certain gulf between us – we never to the best of my belief lost the basis of a common understanding.'

Upstairs, Griffith was holding out the possibility of accom­modating the British on association, the crown and defence, if the British could assure ‘the essential unity' of Ireland. This was the kind of talk Lloyd George had wanted to hear. ‘If I would give him personal assurances on these matters,' Griffith reported, ‘he would go down and smite the diehards and fight on the Ulster matter to secure essential unity.'