18 - The Home Rule Crisis

Summary

Interpretations

The social crisis was overshadowed by a larger political crisis of the years 1910–14 which involved high politics in Westminster and high drama in Ireland. What distinguishes the third Home Rule episode from former controversies was the greater importance of the Ulster question, the threat of violence with which the matter was attended and the debate about whether or not the British state could or would use force to impose a settlement. If they had, there could well have been a civil war, for it seems unlikely that either side would have backed down. But the counterfactual is an alluring distraction. Civil war did not take place. Hart would argue that the situation was not ‘even potentially revolutionary’. Instead the Great War broke out and the Home Rule bill was put on hold for the duration with momentous consequences. Conventionally, historians regard the Unionist and Conservative combination as key to the untimely abortion of a full settlement. Whether the means they took to do this (militarisation) were legitimate forms of resistance, as they claimed, is highly doubtful. Conservative involvement made the whole murkier still and potentially destabilising to the entire political system. Darwin regards the episode as an emphatic contradiction of any kind of metropolitan consensus. But it is possible to read further into the matter. Patricia Jalland puts the initial blame squarely on Asquith's shoulders.