[Sir] Edward Carson (1854-1935)

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George Bernard Shaw (on Irish Partition): ‘England has gone too far this time. She has done what I thought impossible. She has rallied me to the side of Ulster. Now I suppose I shall be shot; but I cannot help that. Am I not a Protestant to the very marrow of my bonoes? Is not Carson my fellow townsman? Are not the men of Ulster my countrymen?’ [236; …] ‘And yet, could Sir Edward Carson and Lord Birkenhead have been put more completely in the cart if the British Government had made Ireland a present to the PopeP What is Ulster to do with her self-determination? One-eyed people are full of surmises as to what the southern Parliament will do, prophesying, with assumed confidence, that it will declare the Republic. Nobody thinks of poor Ulster, who is in a far more difficult position. For the first act of her Parliament must be to re-unite her with England. That goes without saying. But the difficulty will begin earlier. Can she consistently elect a separate Ulster Parliament at all? Is she not bound by all her vows and covenants to boycott this abomination of a Home Rule Parliament: nay, of two Home Rule Parliaments? And yet if she does, Labor will jump the claim. Is it any wonder that Sir Edward Carson sat glum and refused to give any assurances to the perfidious Welshman [Lord Birkenhead] who, with an air of solving the problem for him, was putting him into the worst hole of his career?’ (Letter to The Irish Statesman, 10 Jan. 1920; rep. in The Matter with Ireland, ed. David Greene & Dan Laurence, Constable, 1962, pp.236-40; pp.236, 239.)

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Mary C. Bromage, Eamon de Valera and the March of a Nation (NY: Noonday Press 1956): ‘Up in Belfast only a few hours’ train trip north of Dublin, the advocacy of home rule by a young Englishman connected with the British government, Winston S. Churchill, sounded daring. His own father, Lord Randolph Churchill, had preached the very {34} opposite of home rule, declaring, "Ulster will fight, Ulster will be right," and this remained the motto of Edward Carson, chief among those resisting home rule. The possibility that the North and South of Ireland would be partitioned over the matter of loyalty to the Crown arose by 1912. The Orangemen of the North would sooner part company from the rest of Ireland than from the monarch, and Carson was organizing a force called the Ulster Volunteers to defend union. In this he had the expert advice of an Irishman high up in the British Army, Sir Henry Wilson.’ (pp.34-35.) Further: ‘The Northerners being mustered by Carson in Belfast constituted a focus of belligerent unionism. They were determined to separate themselves if the British Government, in response to the programme of the Irish Party, should move in the direction of home rule for all of Ireland. / England was not so much occupied with this problem as with watching the crisis developing on the continent. […]

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M. J. MacManus, ‘The Last Stage Irishman’, in Adventures of an Irish Bookman [ed. by Francis MacManus] (Dublin: Talbot Press 1952), pp.112-16, being an account of St. John Ervine’s biography of Carson in which Ervine appears to advance the theory that Ulster choose Carson because he was the last stage-Irishman: ‘[…] the starry hero of all the politest young ladies of Belfast, has not done anything to promote the well-being of Ireland, never has done anything, and never will.’ Further: ‘Sir Edward Carson is a stage Irishman […] Sir Edward Carson is the last of the Broths of a Boy. He has a touch of Samuel Lover’s Handy Andy in him. He is the most notable of the small band of Bedadderers and Bejabberers left in the world; the final Comic Irishman, leaping on to the music-hall stage or the political platform, twirling a blackthorn stick and shouting at the top of a thick, broguey voice (carefully preserved and cultivated for the benefit of English audiences) … “bedad and bejabers and begorra, is there e’er a man in all the town dare tread on the tail of me coat, bedad, bejabers and begorra!” (p.115.) ‘I would have said more [Ervine pleads] if there had been more to say.’ (p.116.). See also ‘The Playboy of the Irish Literary Revival’ [on George Moore] and ref. to ‘Mr St John Ervine’s rollicking Sir Edward Carson’ (ibid., p.122; see further under Ervine, infra.)

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A.T.Q. Stewart, Edward Carson [Gill Irish Lives] (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1981): Carson called the Home Rule Bill ‘the most nefarious conspiracy that has ever been hatched against a free people we must be prepared … the morning Home Rule passes ourselves to become responsible for the government of the Protestant Province of Ulster.’ (Craigavon meeting, 23 Sept. 1911). [73] Ulster Day, 28 Sept., 1912, 237,368 men signed Ulster Covenant, based on Scottish Covenant of 1775, and 234,046 women signed a similar ‘declaration’. [78] A. T. Q. Stewart corrects misconceptions about gun-running, Larne, 24,600 of which 20,000 German, April 1914. [ftn, 84.] Carson, relinquishing leadership of the Ulster Unionist Council, 4 Feb. 1921, ‘For the outset let us see that the Catholic minority have nothing to fear from Protestant majority. let us take care to win all that is best among those who have been opposed to us in the past. While maintaining intact our own religion let us give the same rights to the religion of our neighbours.’ (Hyde, 449) [120] Expressing sense of betrayal in House of Lords, in his maiden speech, following the Anglo-Irish treaty, 1921, he aspersed Chamberlain, Birkenhead (W. E. Smith), Curzon, et al., ‘I was in earnest. What a fool I was! I was only a puppet, and so was Ulster, and so was Ireland, in the political game that was to get the Conservative Party into power…. I could not help thinking that it was very like, after having shot a man in the back, going over to him and patting him on the shoulder, and saying, ‘Old man, die as quickly as you can, and do not make any noise … Why all this attack made on Ulster? What has Ulster done? I will tell you. She has stuck too well to you, and you believe because she is loyal you can kick her as you like.’ (Hyde, 446) [126] [Cont.]

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A.T.Q. Stewart (Edward Carson, 1981) - Bibl.: The official biography, Edward Majoribanks[1 vol.] & Ian Colvin [2 vols.] (3 vols., 1932-36); H. Montgomery Hyde, Edward Carson (1953; rep. 1979) [more accurate]. See J. C. Beckett, ‘Carson - Unionist and Rebel’, in F. X. Martin, Leaders and Men of the Easter Rising: Dublin 1916 (London 1967), rep. in Beckett, Confrontations, Studies in Irish History (London 1972); R. B. McDowell, ‘Edward Carson’, in Conor Cruise O’Brien, ed., The Shaping of Modern Ireland (London 1960). Contemp. memoirs incl. F. E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, Contemporary Personalities (London 1924); Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt, ‘The Ulster Leader’, in National Review (Oct. 1913); Thom. Moles, Lord Carson of Duncairn, with foreword by Sir James Craig (Belfast 1925); Sir Douglas Savory, ‘Lord Carson’, in ODNB. Also Patrick Buckland, Irish Unionism I, The Anglo-Irish and the New Ireland 1885-1922 (Dublin 1972), II, Ulster Unionism and the Origins of Northern Ireland 1886-1922 (Dublin 1973), and Irish Unionism 1885-1923, A Documentary History (Belfast 1973). COMM & SOURCES incl., John N. Biggs-Davison, George Wyndham (London 1951); Wilfrid S. Blunt, The Land War in Ireland (London 1912); Frederick H. Crawford, Guns for Ulster (Belfast 1947); F. P. Crozier, Impressions and Recollections (London 1930); St John Ervine, Craigavon, Ulsterman (London 1949); Daniel Farson, The Man who Wrote ‘Dracula’ (London 1975); Sir James Ferguson, The Curragh Incident (London 1964); Denis Gwynn, Life of John Redmond (London 1932); Thomas Jones, Whitehall Diary, Vol. III, ‘Ireland 1918-1925’, ed. Keith Middlemas (London 1971); Ronald McNeill, Ulster’s Stand for Union (London 1922); Lord Peter O’Brien, Reminiscences (London 1916) [‘called Peter the Packer’]; A. P. Ryan, Mutiny at the Curragh (London 1956); A. T. Q. Stewart, The Ulster Crisis (London 1967; rep. 1979).

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Joseph Lee, Ireland 1912-1985 (Cambridge 1989); Sir Edward Carson, a Dubliner rather than an Ulster Scot, elected Unionist leader in Feb. 1910, was a ‘sombre, melanchol[ic] man, a man of notable courage and forensic ability, he brought the Orange cause a considerable capacity for organisation, a moral fervour almost fanatical in its intensity and an instinctive feel for high, political drama.’ [5] Further, Carson shared in the widespread illusion that the south of Ireland could not survive without the industrial north. At a monster meeting at Craigavon in Sept. 1911, he told the crowd that ‘we must be prepared the morning Home rule passes, ourselves to become responsible for the government of the Protestant province of Ulster’; ‘… Carson told his Ulster Protestant audience of 200,000 at Balmoral in April 1912 that ‘the government by their Parliament Act has erected a boom against you, a boom to shut you off from the help of the British people.’ [13] Carson resigned Feb. 1921; James Craig abandons political career in London to succeed him. By mid 1922 there was one armed policeman to every two Catholic families in Ulster. [59-60] Bibl., A. T. Q. Stewart, The Ulster Crisis (London 1969); Stewart, Sir Edward Carson (Dublin 1981) See also Joseph Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, Politics and Society (Carmbridge 1989).

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David Stevens, ‘Religious Ireland (II)’, in Edna Longley, ed., Culture in Ireland, Diversity or Division [Proceedings of the Cultures of Ireland Group Conference] (QUB: Inst. of Irish Studies 1991), quotes Carson’s maiden speech in House of Lords, calling it ‘a bitter threnody, and requiem for an Irish Unionists tradition’, ‘I speak - I can hardly speak - for all those relying on British honour and British justice, who have in giving their best to the service of the State seem themselves now deserted and cast aside without one single line of recollection or recognition in the whole of what you call peace terms in Ireland.’ [quoted from HM Hyde, Life of Carson, Heinemann, 1953, n.p.] Stevens remarks: ‘Carson’s tragedy was that he was not an Ulster Unionist but an Irish Unionist; and I think he must have been speaking for many.’ (p.145).

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Frank Callanan, review of Geoffrey Lewis, Edward Carson: The Man Who Divided Ireland, in The Irish Times (15 June 2005), Weekend, p.10: ‘[…] Carson was bereft of political imagination or reflectiveness. This served him well in his history role if it makes a somewhat forbidding subject for a political biography. He saw himself as a patriotic conscript rather than a politician, obliged in a time of peril to forsakehis professional life to defend the existing constitutional order. His modus operandi was that of a barrister brutally wresting and imposing a settlement. […; &c.]’

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Roy Foster & Alvin Jackson, ‘Men for All Seasons? Carson, Parnell, and the Limits of Heroism in Modern Ireland’ , in European History Quarterly, 39, 3 (2009): ‘Charles Stewart Parnell and Edward Carson both failed in their fundamental political objectives (a socially and geographically united and autonomous Ireland, as against a wholly Unionist Ireland). However, both men were the objects of great reverence during their lifetimes; and each was the focus of careful image building. Their heroic reputations were swiftly defined in regal, mystical and sexual terms: the reputation of each was commodified. / Both were redefined according the needs of later generations: Parnell’s alleged radicalism grew with the passing of the years, and with the establishment of an independent Ireland under bourgeois Catholic domination; the complexities of Carson’s career were masked by the demands of later Unionist generations. Both men have to some extent been superseded by rival heroic reputations within their respective cultures. Parnell’s standing has been challenged by the insurgents of 1916-21, while Carson’s legacy has been sometimes overshadowed by that of his former lieutenant, James Craig.’ (p.414.)

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References
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2; all contemporary Irish leaders defeated in their aims, 209; Unionist proclaim readiness to resist Home rule and if necessary to set up their own government; Eoin MacNeill’s lesson drawn from it, in The North Began (1913), 285-288 [passim]; Smith acting as prosecution at the Casement trial reminiscent of Carson at Wilde’s; Smith was Carson’s aide-de-camp in the UVF [Seamus Deane, ed.], 295; (499); Hart, a character in Ervine’s Mixed Marriage (1911), probably modelled on Carson, 713n. Also, Windham Thomas Wyndam-Quin seconded Lord Morley’s motion supporting the Articles of Agreement with the Free State in 1921, and was addressed thus by Carson, ‘The seconder of the Address is a brother Irishman. I have known him for many years. His one great characteristic has always been that he never could agree with anybody on any subject, and I cannot but congratulate him that this evening he has at last found peace and understanding in the knowledge that he will be under that perfect Government which will be evolved out of the murder gang in Ireland. I wish him every success and every happiness in the future of his country and his own life there.’ (14 Dec. 1921).

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Quotations
Resistance: ‘What I am anxious about is to satisfy myself that the people really mean to resist. I am not for a mere game of bluff and unless men are prepared to make great sacrifices which they clearly understand the talk of resistance is no use.’ (Letter to James Craig, 29 July 1911, quoted in Ervine, Craigavon: Ulsterman, 1949, p.185; cited in Calton Younger, A State Divided, 1972, p.165.)

Warning: ‘We tell you this - that if, having offered you help, you are yourselves unable to protect us from the machinations of Sinn Féin, and you won’t take our help, well then we will tell you that we will take the matter into our own hands.’ (12 July 1920; quoted in Alan Parkinson, Belfast’s Unholy War: The Troubles of the 1920s (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2004; cited by John Kirkaldy, in review of same, Books Ireland, March 2005, p.54.)

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Notes
Harcourt St.: During the attempt to save Carson’s house on Harcourt St., in 1993 [as reported in the Irish Times], Ian Paisley submitted the view that plans to demolish it revealed a total misunderstanding which the Dublin authorities had towards Northern Ireland. Ireland was one country when Carson was born: ‘He was adamant that he was an Irishman and while he led the Ulster Unionists he always maintained that he was an Irish Unionist […] Great men in the country of their birth are honoured in history not only by those who agreed with their political and religious ideals but all who have interest in the heritage of history.’

Oscar Wilde reputedly remarked, on having Carson pointed out to him with comments on his likelihood of his reaching the top in public affairs, ‘Yes, and one who will not hesitate to trample on his friends in getting there.’ Later, on hearing that Carson had taken Lord Queensbury’s brief, Wilde said, ‘No doubt he will perform his task with all the added bitterness of an old friend.’ (Quoted in Merlin Holland, Wilde Album, pp.30, 123).

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Brian Inglis (Downstart, 1990), records that Sir Edward Carson prosecuted Angel Anna, the madam of a brothel, who was sentenced to seven years in prison.’ p.200; see further under Lola Montez, infra.)

Drivel: In his play Saint Oscar (1989), Terry Eagleton makes Carson ask Wilde in court if he is not talking ‘unbelievable amount of utter drivel.’

Portraits: There is a caricature of Carson in full-length profile addressing parliament from the dispatch box by “Lib” [i.e., Liberio Prosperie], in Vanity Fair (3 Nov. 1893).

Play/film: Carson modelled for Sir Robert Morton in Terence Rattigan’s play The Winslow Boy and was played by Robert Donat in the 1948 film.

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