‘Phrases make history here’: Churchill, Ireland and the rhetoric of Empire
This article examines the imperial dimension of Winston Churchill’s rhetoric on
Ireland over the course of his entire career. Whereas previous discussions of
Churchill and the Irish question have tended to focus on whether he was sincere or
opportunistic, his views are treated here in the context of the rhetorical environment
in which he was operating. It is shown that, in his Edwardian Liberal phase, his
argument that Home Rule would strengthen the Empire was part of a pre-existing
Liberal and Nationalist discourse. He refashioned these arguments in order to sell the
Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921-2, but they were later turned against him by Conservative
colleagues when he opposed the Statute of Westminster, and the imperial dimension
of his Irish rhetoric weakened thereafter. However, certain themes, such as his praise
of Irish military heroism, remained constant. It is argued that rhetorical analysis is a
valuable but neglected tool for Irish and imperial historians.
The problem of Ireland’s relationship to the British Empire has been the cause for
much historical debate.1 The ambivalence of its position was in part the product of the
different uses that ‘the Irish question’ was put within British domestic politics. As
Andrew Thompson has noted, ‘the terms “empire” and “imperialism” were like empty
boxes that were continuously being filled up and emptied of their meanings.’2 Ireland
– and its position within the Empire - likewise served a wide range of rhetorical
functions according to the speaker, the audience addressed, and the immediate
political context. Rhetorical analysis, therefore, is a potentially valuable (but hitherto
neglected) tool for addressing the vexed issue of Ireland’s imperial standing. The
rhetoric of Winston Churchill is a useful place to begin. Starting his career as a
1
vociferous Tory opponent of Home Rule, his shift to the Liberal Party in 1904
required him to finesse his position considerably. As Ireland advanced once more to
the forefront of British politics, Churchill emerged as a champion of Home Rule – but
also as an early advocate of partition. As Secretary of State for War during the AngloIrish conflict of 1919-21 he pursued repressive policies against the rebels, but then, as
Secretary of State for the Colonies, played a significant role in the treaty negotiations
that followed. By the early 1930s he had reinvented himself once more as a Tory
Diehard and sought to restrict the application of the Statute of Westminster as it
applied to Ireland. His wartime conflicts with Taoiseach Eamon de Valera, which
culminated in a verbal spat over the airwaves in 1945, are well known. Nonetheless,
after World War II Churchill continued to advocate Irish unification. Thus, by the end
of his career he had almost – but not quite - run through the gamut of positions on
Ireland that it was possible for a mainstream Westminster politician to hold.
Consideration of Churchill’s rhetoric on the issue allows us to examine a wide variety
of the (highly contested) uses to which ‘Empire’ could be put in the context of the
British debate about Ireland in the first part of the Twentieth Century.
Churchill’s many biographers have dealt with his involvement with Ireland in
considerable detail. There have also been a number of more specialized treatments.3
Although John Ramsden has widened the field of enquiry by looking at Churchill’s
reception by the Irish, most historians have focused on the detail of Churchill’s policy
involvement.4 Interpretations of his motives vary, as can be seen in the debate over his
role in the Home Rule controversy in the years before 1914. Andrew R. Muldoon
argues that Churchill supported Home Rule for reasons of state, and that his devotion
to it ‘grew solely from motives of imperial patriotism, to strengthen Britain and its
2
Empire in the world.’5 Ian Chambers counters that Churchill was an opportunist
whose support for Home Rule was ‘an aberration’ brought on by his desire to advance
himself politically.6 This article does not aim to arbitrate between these positions, as it
is not primarily concerned with the biographical question of whether Churchill’s
views were sincere or otherwise. Rather, it seeks to place those views in the context of
arguments made by Churchill’s contemporaries. It aims to illuminate the debates that
took place about Ireland and the Empire, with reference to the rhetorical environment
in which Churchill was operating and the role that imperial language played within it.
Ronald Hyam has suggested that Churchill ‘was not all that interested in the empire,
apart from its rhetorical potentialities, and as distinct from what he regarded as the
larger and more portentous issues of international relations’.7 Yet if we want to
understand fully how he and his contemporaries attempted to sell their views on
Ireland to the British and Irish publics (and to their fellow politicians), then the
‘rhetorical potentialities’ of Empire are exactly what we need to consider. In
particular, we need to understand the ‘context of refutation’ – that is, in this case, the
Empire-related arguments that Home Rulers were attacking and seeking to rebut.8
In this article, ‘rhetoric’ denotes discourse in its spoken form.9 Churchill was, of
course, a prolific author who often wrote about Ireland. Minor discrepancies aside, the
ideological content of these writings is not at variance with that of his speeches and
broadcasts; so what, it may be asked, is the value of focusing on the latter category in
particular? Part of the answer is simply that Churchill’s speeches on Ireland often
became the subject of intense political controversy – sometimes even before they
were given – in a way that his written texts about it generally did not. Over and above
this, however, the significance of spoken rhetoric comes from the part it plays in the
3
‘symbolic ritual dimension of politics’, as Alan Finlayson and James Martin have put
it.10 (This naturally applies more to speeches at public meetings than to broadcasts.)
The direct interaction which occurs when a speaker addresses an audience face-toface is frequently significant both in influencing the course of events and in revealing
the preoccupations of those present. It is important, therefore, to be aware not only of
the words spoken but also of the politics of gesture, the competition for dominance of
political space, and the construction of ‘image events’ for wider public
consumption.11 (All of these phenomena can be seen at work, for example, in
Churchill’s 1912 Belfast speech, discussed below.) As J.G.A. Pocock explains, the
process of the ‘creation and diffusion of languages’ must be seen as occurring not
only ‘within the activity of discourse’ but also ‘in the interactions between discourse
and other social phenomena.’12 Examining the production and reception of rhetoric in
our sense, then, provides us a window on the creation and diffusion of imperial
language, the ‘imperial’ quality of which was often derived from its setting as well as
its content. We are still left with the paradox, though, that just as Churchill tended to
write his speeches and dictate his books, his rhetoric, in days before his radio
addresses of 1940, was more widely read than it was heard. Mediated through
newspaper accounts, the physicality and drama of his rhetoric was ‘read’ remotely by
far greater numbers than were able witness it first-hand.
Historians of empire discuss the language of imperialism a great deal, although they
do not tend to distinguish between ‘discourse’ and ‘rhetoric’.13 Meanwhile – in
contrast to the thriving state of rhetorical studies in the United States14 – scholars of
modern Britain have paid comparatively little explicit attention to political rhetoric.
There are signs that this may be changing, with some recent work considering the
4
imperial and post-imperial dimensions of British political rhetoric.15 Meanwhile, few
historians of Ireland have yet engaged fully with the history of rhetoric.16 There are
many potential advantages in doing so. Rhetorical analysis, when conducted with
sensitivity to cultural and constitutional context, can illuminate a wide range of
themes.17 Even though imperial historians such as Bernard Porter and Andrew
Thompson pay only a comparatively modest amount of attention to Ireland,
exploration of Irish rhetorical issues can help tackle the key question they address, i.e.
to what extent did imperialism penetrate British society? 18 Churchill’s rhetoric on
Ireland (like that of many other politicians) was aimed both at winning support for
immediate policy objectives and at achieving a meta-solution to the Irish problem by
integrating the Irish themselves into a wider imperial patriotism.19 This latter project
failed, for reasons which clearly ran beyond the problem of political language; but the
part played by rhetoric should not be neglected. As Sir John Maffey, the UK
representative in Ireland, wrote in 1945 in frustration at Churchill’s public outburst at
de Valera, ‘Phrases make history here’.20
I
The Churchill family’s longstanding involvement in Ireland is well known.21 From the
rhetorical point of view, Winston Churchill had to contend with the heavy legacy of
comments made by his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, during the crisis of 1886. In
a notorious speech at the Ulster Hall in Belfast, Lord Randolph argued that Loyalists
in Ireland might have to resort to violence in order to resist subjection to a Home Rule
parliament in Dublin. A few days later, in a public letter, he used the phrase ‘Ulster
will fight, Ulster will be right’.22 This remark remained a touchstone of popular
5
memory into the Edwardian period and beyond. However, Lord Randolph’s position
was one of the few available that the younger Churchill never espoused himself. He
never supported the coercion of Ulster (although he was suspected of doing so in
1914); but equally, he never suggested that it would be acceptable for the people of
Ulster to resist Home Rule through violent means. Lord Randolph used the standard
argument, also deployed by Lord Salisbury and others, that Home Rule would ‘shatter
the British Empire’.23 Gladstone and other Home Rulers – using a type of argument
that had already been used in nationalist circles - made the case that, in fact, it would
strengthen the Empire.24 Winston Churchill would echo the former argument in the
first stages of his career and the latter after he had joined the Liberals.
In the run-up to his first parliamentary election campaign in 1899, Winston Churchill
claimed that Liberal policies would lead to ‘the heart of the empire’ being ‘riven in
twain by the old ridiculous measure of Home Rule.’25 (As Stephen Howe points out,
this type of claim, which was very common, portrayed Home Rule as a threat to the
British state and society as a whole; Ireland was not being viewed in the same terms
as more distant Empire territories.)26 Raising the issue of Home Rule was an effective
means of highlighting Liberal divisions; the impending conflict in South Africa was
about to split the party into ‘Liberal Imperialist’ and ‘pro-Boer’ factions, with leader
Henry Campbell-Bannerman struggling to hold it together from the centre ground.27
For the Tories, meanwhile, as Daniel Jackson has noted, ‘the defence of the union was
an issue that was coincidentally a vote winner and an ancient and fundamental
Conservative totem.’28
6
Although Churchill lost the by-election, he was comfortably elected at the general
election of 1900, following his exploits in the Boer War. Before taking his seat he
embarked on lengthy lecture tours at home and in the USA. He did this mainly for the
money, and his listeners came mainly for the entertainment, but his lectures, which
were illustrated by magic lantern, also had a didactic purpose and were laden with
imperial symbolism. In Belfast, the ‘huge screen’ on which his slides were projected
‘had been artistically draped with Union Jacks, presenting a charming effect.’
Churchill concluded his talk on this occasion ‘by hoping that the memories of the
indomitable courage and bravery of Christian De Wet and the skill of General [Piet]
Joubert [both Boer leaders] would in the future be themselves amongst the forces that
support the Union Jack as it waves over a free and united South Africa.’ This was his
standard finale, but the sub-text for a Belfast audience was obvious: Ireland too could
be reconciled to the flag. In the exchange of pleasantries that rounded off the meeting
he said that he thought that public interest in the war ‘showed that the people of
Belfast, in common with the rest of the United Kingdom, had at last become alive to
the value and importance of our colonies and over-sea possessions’.29 Churchill’s next
stop was Dublin, where he tailored his message to the audience, praising the bravery
of the Dublin Fusiliers in South Africa, reminiscing about his childhood days in the
city, and suggesting that ‘the perplexing problems of Irish politics’ were now nearer
solution than they had been then.30 His reception was gratifying, with even the
nationalist press giving grudging acknowledgment of his skill as a speaker, although
the Freeman’s Journal considered the lecture to be in ‘gross bad taste’.31 Churchill’s
Irish lectures had advanced no specific policy agenda; he had instead taken the role of
imperial educator, trying to bring home to the Irish people the value of Britain’s
overseas possessions. In the Commons, however, his praise of the courage of Irish
7
soldiers took on overtly political edge. In his maiden Commons speech he made play
with it to suggest that the Nationalist Party’s opposition to the war was
unrepresentative: ‘It is wonderful that hon. Members who form the Irish party should
find it in their hearts to speak and act as they do in regard to a war in which so much
has been accomplished by the courage, the sacrifices, and, above all, by the military
capacity of Irishmen.’32
The launch of Joseph Chamberlain’s Tariff Reform campaign in 1903 pushed
Churchill towards the Liberals. In January 1904 – before he formally crossed the floor
– Churchill delivered a lecture on ‘Ireland and the Fiscal Question’ to an audience of
bankers in Dublin. The burden of his argument was that, if protectionism was right in
principle (which of course he thought it was not) then Ireland should be entitled to set
its own tariff rather than having a common external tariff with the rest of the UK. If
tariff questions were to dominate politics in the future, he warned, ‘there would be an
overwhelming demand that Irish tariff arrangements should be left in Irish hands.
Those Irishmen who were profoundly opposed to any parliamentary separation should
take notice where the protectionist argument must inevitably carry them.’ In other
words, he was adapting for his own purposes the ‘slippery slope’ argument that
Unionists traditionally used about Home Rule. He implied that Chamberlainite
policies, which were intended to bolster the Empire, would actually tend to subvert
it.33 In this way, he exploited the malleability of ‘Empire’ in order to turn one of the
Tories’ strongest rhetorical cards against them.
II
8
Having taken the Liberal whip, Churchill remained a declared opponent of a separate
parliament, although he did support a more modest delegation of powers under the
label ‘administrative Home Rule’. This, he hoped, would lead Ireland to a position
where it was no longer ‘a source of danger and weakness to the Empire.’ 34 His
position meant that he and his new colleagues had to engage in some nimble
rhetorical footwork.35 Liberals continued to view Churchill with suspicion on account
of his attitude to Home Rule; and when a speech by Lord Rosebery threatened to
bring the issue back to the forefront of politics, at the very point when the Liberals
were about to return to office, Churchill feared that he would be put ‘in an awful
hole’.36 After 1906, however, he progressively accommodated himself to the
mainstream Liberal position on Ireland. As a junior minister at the Colonial Office, he
played an important role in devising self-government for the former Boer Republics in
South Africa, and this led him to draw overt analogies with the Irish. He told a
meeting in May 1907 that room had been found within the Empire for the FrenchCanadians and South African Dutch, and that he thought the day ‘was inscribed in the
book of fate when Ireland too will be brought into the circle of the British Empire in
spirit as well as in name.’37 Although Churchill was not yet explicitly committed to
Home Rule - that came in 1908 during his by-election campaign in Manchester, where
the Irish vote was influential38 - he nonetheless tried to invert the traditional Unionist
argument that increased freedom for Ireland would strike a blow at the heart of
Empire. Ireland in its current discontented state, he claimed, posed a risk to the
Empire; addressing Irish grievances would increase the Empire’s spiritual strength.
After 1910, the Nationalists held the balance in the Commons and were thus in a good
position to enforce their demands, but a Home Rule bill did not emerge until 1912. In
9
the months before its publication, Churchill began to develop his arguments about
Ireland and the Empire more systematically than before. Muldoon is quite right to
draw attention to the importance of Churchill’s statements, but he fails to put them in
context.39 They need to be understood as part of a political and rhetorical strategy to
which Churchill contributed but which he did not invent. For example, in 1911,
Jeremiah MacVeagh, Nationalist MP for South Down and ‘pamphleteer-in-chief to
his party’, published Home Rule in a Nutshell. By April the following year this penny
booklet had sold 250,000 copies.40 It was partly intended to serve as a primer for
speakers; MacVeagh himself was an effective orator for the Home Rule Council
(which Churchill chaired).41 MacVeagh claimed that Britain’s self-governing colonies
all supported Irish Home Rule, and that Home Rule would strengthen the Empire.42
Similar arguments can be found in much other contemporary literature and, as far as
Empire opinion went, had some basis in fact, although there was a strong tendency for
domestic supporters of Home Rule to oversimplify the case.43 In view of the vexed
‘Was Ireland a colony?’ debate it is worth remembering that contemporary
Nationalists argued that the Irish ought to be treated in the same way as the white
populations of Britain’s ‘self-governing’ colonies and that this was being denied to
them unfairly. In a sense, then, they aspired to colonial status. Furthermore, when
faced with actual proposed legislation, leading Unionists argued (doubtless
opportunistically) that ‘if there is to be Home Rule they would prefer the real measure
on Colonial lines’ rather than the halfway house or ‘hybrid monstrosity’ that they
claimed was in fact being offered.44
The Daily Chronicle swiftly republished MacVeagh’s booklet with an introduction by
Churchill.45 This argued that Home Rule would gratify not only the self-governing
10
Dominions but also opinion in the United States, which led him to make an early
reference to his well-known theme of ‘the unity of the English-speaking peoples’.46
(Again, the claim that Home Rule would strengthen the Empire by improving AngloAmerican relations was not unique to Churchill.)47 MacVeagh’s pamphlet generated a
rebuttal by ‘An Irish Unionist’; and Sir Edward Carson and Andrew Bonar Law
ridiculed the preface in their speeches. Law invoked memories of the South African
conflict, rejected ‘the analogy of the Colonies’, and raised the spectre of a Home Rule
parliament sending messages of goodwill to Britain’s enemies in the case of a future
war.48 Variants of the Churchill-MacVeagh line were to be found in the speeches of
Asquith, Grey and Lloyd George and many others around this time.49 As John
Redmond noted in 1913, ‘every Home Rule speaker insists to-day, upon the colonial
analogy.’50 We may surmise that Home Rule supporters invoked imperial arguments
at least partly because they wanted to occupy ground on which they knew their
opponents would fight.
In February 1912, Churchill and John Redmond addressed a joint meeting in Belfast,
a move that many unionists portrayed as a calculated insult to their community. It was
initially planned that the meeting should take place in the Ulster Hall, where Lord
Randolph had spoken in 1886. Carson said that ‘the most provocative speaker in the
whole Party, is going under the most provocative circumstances to a place where the
words of his own father are still ringing in the ear’, and went on to describe Churchill
as a ‘turncoat’.51 In the event, Churchill was forced to switch venue, although the fact
that he was able to hold the meeting at all could be claimed as a success. In his
speech, Churchill suggested that an Irish Parliament would be ‘an enrichment and an
added glory to the treasures of the British Empire’. As in his preface to the MacVeagh
11
pamphlet, he hinted that Home Rule should be implemented as part of a wider scheme
of imperial federation. (Later in the year, encouraged by members of the imperialist
Round Table group, Churchill would develop this theme further.)52
From the
rhetorical point of view this had the advantage of undercutting the idea that the Irish
were to receive special treatment denied to others, and also exploited the fact that
some Tories had themselves preached federation in the past. Much of Churchill’s
rhetoric was directed to Ulster Protestants. (A number of protestants who supported
Home Rule were present in the audience, an important symbol of the meeting’s nonsectarian character.) He said that he hoped that his imperial arguments would hold at
least as much weight with this group as religious concerns did, and, at the same time
as he warned them against allowing themselves to be used as a cat’s-paw of the
Tories, he also stressed the safeguards against religious oppression that would be built
into the Home Rule legislation. In his conclusion he turned his father’s slogan on its
head, appealing to the people of Ulster to ‘fight for the unity and consolidation of the
British Empire’ and ‘for the spread of charity, tolerance, and enlightenment.’ If they
would do this, he said ‘Then indeed “Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right.”’
Redmond followed, saying that Churchill seemed specially destined ‘to bear a large
part in what he might call saving Ireland to the Empire.’ By saying that he accepted
‘every word’ of Churchill’s speech, Redmond signaled that he himself believed that
Ireland’s future did indeed lie within the Empire.53
Redmond, who can be seen as falling within the ‘Catholic loyalist’ tradition, had been
making imperial arguments for Home Rule for many years. 54 Although some in his
party shared his position, the support for it was not strong, and his conciliatory tone
was shared only by a minority of nationalists, many of whom had a continuing
12
affection for the physical force tradition. In addition, his formal style of classical
rhetoric, which lacked the force of Carson’s oratory, may have put him at some
distance from his supporters.55 But whether or not Churchill and Redmond on this
occasion coordinated the content of their speeches in advance, they, at least, were
singing from the same hymn-sheet.
There were at this time a number of ‘Unionist Home Rulers’ who adopted a similar
line to Redmond and Churchill.56 On the whole, though, their pleas for conciliation
fell on stony ground. In the febrile atmosphere, this was unsurprising, but it may be
that Churchill’s basically secular – albeit somewhat mystical – imperial vision failed
to appeal to those for whom the Empire was an essentially protestant concern.57
Perhaps more importantly, many Unionists simply did not believe Nationalist
protestations of imperial loyalty, which were felt to be incompatible with, for
example, support for the Irish language movement.58
‘Mr. Churchill was really
eloquent when he spoke of the storming of the Tugela Heights and the Relief of
Ladysmith’, said Carson. (Churchill had again praised the bravery of Irish soldiers.) ‘I
think he must have forgotten that he was speaking in the presence of men who
publicly prayed in the British House of Commons that success might attend the Boer
arms.’59 Redmond, of course, was proceeding on the understanding that a Home Rule
Ireland would be a united Ireland. Churchill, together with Lloyd George, now
privately recognized that Ulster – often described as ‘the Imperial Province’ - would
require special treatment.60 In July 1912, Bonar Law warned that ‘I can imagine no
length of resistance to which Ulster will go in which I shall not be ready to support
them’.61 Churchill publicly suggested that Law’s logic could be used to justify ‘every
lawless or disruptive movement in any part of the Empire’.62
13
In response, a wide range of Empire-related arguments were deployed by anti-Home
Rulers. Some chose to cast doubt on the patriotic protestations of Redmond and his
followers, others said that pro-Home Rule sentiment in other parts of the Empire such
as Canada was not as strong as was often claimed, and yet others suggested that the
government was itself attempting to compel the loyal people of Ulster to leave the
Empire and to thrust them under the domination of the disloyal. (Churchill’s antiHome Rule comments from his Tory days were also thrown back at him.)63
Churchill’s charge of disloyalty, however, was a powerful one, as it struck at the heart
of the credentials that the Ulster Unionists claimed for themselves. The true course of
loyalty, he urged in February 1913, would be for the Ulster resisters to swallow their
‘unfounded fears’ and accept, with all necessary reassurances, the majority will: ‘Half
a province cannot claim to stand for all time in the way not only of the demands of a
nation but of the needs of an Empire.’64 Carson’s means of tackling such criticisms
(which his preparations to establish a provisional government in Ulster strongly
invited) was to cast resistance to the current Westminster government as a way to
keep the province ‘in trust for the Empire and under the King.’65
Of course, few at the time were inclined to take their opponents’ arguments about
Ireland and Empire at face value. When Churchill introduced the second reading of
the Home Rule Bill with a notably moderate speech a sceptical leader in the Yorkshire
Post suggested that ‘Ministers are posing as restrained, thoughtful, high-minded
statesmen, with a great mission of imperial reconstruction’. Churchill, it argued, was
going along with this game at the expense of his natural instinct for provocative
rhetoric.66 Moreover, although speeches were aimed at winning votes in parliament
14
and at securing the support of the electorate in general, these were not their only
purposes. Liberals, Conservatives and Nationalists all used oratory (in parallel with
private negotiations) as a form of public diplomacy. The functions of rhetoric were
many: to reassure allies or to try to keep them in line, to intimidate opponents or to
hold out the chance of compromise, to float initiatives or to paper over intra-party
divisions. Churchill had a reputation for taking an independent line and made use of
this to air in public positions to which Asquith and other ministers did not yet care to
commit themselves. In particular, he raised the possibility of special treatment for
Ulster, an opportunity some Opposition leaders were keen to exploit.67 Redmond,
however, was obliged to repudiate the idea. 68
Churchill did sometimes resort to intemperate language. In a conversation with
Austen Chamberlain, Churchill explained that he did so in order to bring a deal
nearer. Chamberlain recorded Churchill’s views as follows:
Public opinion had got to have a shock. Both sides had to make speeches full
of party claptrap & no surrender & then insert a few sentences at the end for
wise & discerning people on the other side to see & ponder. ‘A little red-blood
had got to flow’ & then public opinion would wake up & then ---! ‘And you
must remember that we think that time is on our side. We shall give no
provocation. The Ulstermen will have no excuse, & we think that public
opinion will not support them if they wantonly attack.’69
Churchill failed to realise, however, that his own speeches might be perceived by the
less discerning as a provocation in themselves. In March 1914, after the government
15
had extracted Redmond’s reluctant consent to the idea of a six-year opt-out from
Home Rule for Ulster, Churchill made a speech in Bradford. His clear intention was
to achieve compromise; he emphasized the sincerity of the government’s offer, whilst
simultaneously arguing that it took away any justification for unconstitutional
resistance to Home Rule. Furthermore, he said, the government was prepared to use
any lawful measure to enforce its will. Bloodshed would no doubt be regrettable, ‘But
there are things worse than bloodshed, even on extreme scale. An eclipse of the
central Government of the British Empire would be worse.’70 The speech backfired.
Not only did it fail to win over Unionists, but, in the wake of the ‘Curragh incident’
that followed a few days later – when fifty-eight army officers made clear that they
would rather resign than engage in ‘active military operations against Ulster’71 - it
came to be read by many of them as part of a coordinated government plot to coerce
the North.72 By the time that war broke out later in the year the sustained efforts of
Churchill and his colleagues to use imperial arguments to win over Unionist opinion
had clearly failed. The war was to bring about, along with the reshaping Irish politics,
some important shifts in the rhetorical landscape that surrounded them.
III
At the start of the war, the Home Rule Bill was placed upon the statute book with its
operation suspended for the duration. The Irish Parliamentary Party was not yet in
terminal decline, but the new generation of Nationalists that emerged with the 1916
rising – at which point Churchill was temporarily out of office – blamed Redmond for
his support for the war and, unlike him, saw no future for Ireland within the Empire.
As Michael Wheatley observes, ‘Redmond’s moderate, conservative vision […] of
16
Home Rule peacefully and constitutionally achieved within the British empire, simply
could not be realized.’73 As Secretary of State for War during the Anglo-Irish conflict
of 1919-21 Churchill was closely involved in the efforts to suppress the IRA and was
also very much aware of new rebellious movements elsewhere in the Empire. In
addition, he was a vociferous supporter of the anti-Bolshevik forces in Russia. In this
context it is not surprising that his rhetoric now identified Irish nationalism as a
mortal threat to the Empire, not something that could be accommodated within it. In
November 1920, echoing Carson, he claimed that that Lenin, Sinn Féin and Indian
and Egyptian extremists were all linked in ‘a world-wide conspiracy’ to overthrow the
Empire.74 Although there is no evidence that Churchill harboured any sectarian
prejudices himself, it is possible that some listeners would have been reminded of the
familiar allegation that Home Rule was part of a ‘popish plot’. (Churchill’s remarks
were quickly echoed in turn by Hamar Greenwood, the Chief Secretary to Ireland, and
were also shared by Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff.)75 But
when the government concluded that force had failed and agreed a truce with the Irish
rebel leaders, he and his colleagues had to justify their about-turn. In a speech in
September 1921 – he was now Colonial Secretary – Churchill argued that ‘the main
interests of the British Empire’ would be ‘greatly furthered’ by a lasting Irish peace.
He now put a very different spin on the pre-war ‘loyalty’ argument, saying that the
Northern Irish could not be accused of frustrating the wishes of the Irish majority
given that they had accepted (under the 1920 Government of Ireland Act) ‘great
changes in her status in order to conform to what she believes is in the interest of the
British Empire’. There was, however, a key which the Southern Irish could use to
‘unlock the gates of Ulster’ (i.e. facilitate a united Ireland), and this key was ‘loyalty
to the British Empire.’76 Sinn Féin thought this speech sufficiently important to merit
17
a special number of the Irish Bulletin dedicated to rebutting it. In its analysis, the
government’s offer of ‘Dominion Home Rule’ was unacceptable because it would
mean that Ireland would remain within the Empire: ‘if as Mr. Churchill suggests, a
successful conference can only be one in which Ireland must surrender her national
position and yield up her right to self-determination, no successful conference is
possible.’77
Churchill and his fellow ministers got their way on this issue in the treaty negotiations
that followed. This was crucial from their point of view, as they had to sell the
agreement to the Lloyd George coalition’s (mainly Conservative) supporters in
government. Tory opponents of the treaty cast it as a surrender to the anti-imperial
conspiracy that Churchill and other ministers had previously identified, and were able
to quote Sinn Féin’s boast that Ireland had ‘taken the strongest Empire by the throat
and […] brought it to its knees.’78 Defending the treaty in the Commons, Churchill
played up its benefits for the Empire, much on the lines that he had argued for Home
Rule before the war. In a striking passage, he discussed the Irish diaspora, on the one
hand casting it in a positive, Empire-building role, and on the other suggesting that it
had helped poison intra-imperial relations. His use of familial imagery is particularly
noteworthy given that, in 1918, he had described Ireland as ‘the sick and ailing child
of the British Empire’.79
Ireland is not a daughter State. She is a parent nation. The Irish are an ancient
race. […] They are intermingled with the whole life of the Empire, and have
interests in every part of the Empire wherever the English language is spoken,
especially in those new countries with whom we have to look forward to the
18
greatest friendship and countenance, and where the Irish canker has been at
work.
Reconciling ‘the spirit of the Irish nation to the British Empire’, he argued, would
bring major advantages, and this the treaty would likely do.80 Sir Lamar WorthingtonEvans was one minister who echoed these themes: if the treaty was passed, ‘I hope
and believe that the Irish may still be willing to share the glory and the burden of
Empire.’ 81
Yet the more Churchill and his colleagues emphasised that a free Ireland would be
tightly bound into the Empire, the more Irish critics of the treaty were provided with
rhetorical opportunities of their own. This was seen during the debates about the
treaty in the Dáil, in which (as at Westminster, but for different reasons) the proposed
oath of allegiance to the Crown was a major point of contention. Constance
Markievicz, for example, argued that ‘if we pledge ourselves to this oath we pledge
our allegiance to this thing, whether you call it Empire or Commonwealth of Nations,
that is treading down the people of Egypt and of India.’82 By contrast, Michael Collins
argued that the treaty defined Ireland as having the same constitutional status of
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, which had real solid
independence.83 When, in the wake of their narrow victory in the Dáil, Collins’s protreaty-ites won the Free State general election, Churchill told the House of Commons
that in his view the Irish people were saying to the British: ‘You have given us our
freedom; we wish to give you our friendship. You will help us towards a united
Ireland; we will help you towards a united Empire.’84 He continued to articulate his
hope of a united Ireland even after the outbreak of the civil war; but he did not believe
19
that Ulster should be coerced into such an arrangement and he continued to assume
that a united Ireland would be ‘interwoven with the United British Empire.’85
It is notable that Churchill thus continued to deploy this kind of rhetoric beyond the
point where the realistic chance of a united Ireland had evaporated and at a time when
pro-Empire sentiment in southern Ireland was distinctly thin on the ground. As
Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, speaking in Belfast in 1926, he declared:
‘I may cherish the hope that some day all Ireland will be loyal (cheers) will be loyal
because it is free, will be united because it is loyal, and will be united within itself and
united in the British Empire.’86 On this occasion he received a warm welcome,
speaking in the Ulster Hall, the venue that he had been denied in 1912. A few months
earlier Churchill had won new friends in Ulster through his role in the settlement that
guaranteed the existing border; his audience may not have been very keen on his
message of Irish unity, but they were certainly prepared to tolerate it, given the work
that he had so recently done to cement partition.
IV
In later years, Churchill continued to place considerable stress on the importance of
the Free State remaining within the ambit of the Empire, although he also expressed
relief that Sinn Féin members had kept away from Westminster after World War I,
thus bolstering the Conservative forces in the Commons.87 In 1931, he sought to limit
the Statute of Westminster - which recognised the Dominions as ‘autonomous
Communities within the British Empire’ – insofar as it applied to Ireland. With de
Valera’s Fianna Fáil on the verge of taking power in Dublin, Churchill feared that the
20
Free State could use the legislation to repudiate the treaty, including the oath of
allegiance. (Now at the early stages of his Indian campaign, he also predicted that a
‘frightful disaster’ would befall India if full Dominion status as set out in the statute
were granted to it.)88 After Churchill spoke in this sense in the Commons, Leo Amery
described his contribution as powerful and impressive; and yet, he said, ‘it was a
speech which I feel was based upon a conception of the British Empire utterly
different from that which I hold.’ Amery played on his own credentials as a Unionist
who had opposed the treaty at the time. In spite of that, he said, ‘once we had set
Ireland upon the footing of a Dominion, there was only one way to treat it, and that
was like the other Dominions’. Britain should make it ‘worth Ireland’s while to be
loyal’ and the nation should act boldly with a confidence ‘which will weld this
Empire more closely together’.89 The amendment backed by Churchill was not
successful. This was not solely, to be sure, as a result of Amery’s intervention. There
was, however, a certain irony in Amery’s use in this context of a type of rhetoric that
Churchill had himself often deployed in earlier years.
Churchill later claimed to have been vindicated, arguing that the de Valera had been
able to use the Statute of Westminster to repudiate the treaty with complete legality.
He also warned that the safeguards built into the National Government’s Indian
reform legislation would in time be repudiated in turn.90 The adoption of the new Irish
constitution in 1937 further accentuated Churchill’s hostility to the de Valera
government. The following year, when attacking the Chamberlain government’s
decision to return control of the Treaty Ports to the Irish, Churchill declared:
21
No doubt I shall be told about South Africa, Canada and Australia. The case of
Ireland is not comparable with the Dominions. Southern Ireland is not a
Dominion; it has never accepted that position. It is a State based upon a
Treaty, which Treaty has been completely demolished. Southern Ireland,
therefore, becomes a State which is an undefined and unclassified anomaly.
He explained why the comparison of Ireland with the Dominions was inapplicable:
‘The Dominions are far away. […] The Dominions are loyal. […] But here the danger
is at our very door.’91 Pre-1914 opponents of Home Rule had deployed very similar
arguments.92 These remarks undoubtedly contributed to his reputation, by 1940, as
someone who ‘hates Ireland’ and who wanted to ‘drive Eire out of the Empire’.93
Nevertheless, as Prime Minister he reverted to his earlier (theoretical) support for
Irish unity. In a minute of June 1940, Churchill wrote that ‘I could never be a party to
the coercion of Ulster to join the Southern counties: but I am much in favour of their
being persuaded. The key to this is de Valera showing some loyalty to Crown &
Empire.’94 Although he must have known the scenario was unlikely, the sentiments
were not vastly removed from those he had expressed publicly in the 1920s. At no
point during the war, however, did he use such language to the Irish privately, nor did
he use it in his public rhetoric, even at moments of maximum anger. There was, in
short, not much of an imperial dimension to his vociferous public criticisms of
Ireland’s neutrality, although in 1944 he did (without mentioning the country by
name) describe Éire as a ‘lamentable exception’ to wartime imperial unity.95
Notoriously, in his May 1945 victory broadcast, he dwelt on how Britain, instead of
seizing the treaty ports, had ‘left the De Valera government to frolic’ with German
22
and Japanese representatives in Dublin. Yet although he praised ‘the loyalty and
friendship of Northern Ireland’ he did not, in the course of this passage, mention the
word ‘Empire’. Rather – in a trope familiar from Boer War days – he praised the
‘Irish heroes’ who had died on the British side.96 De Valera’s quiet and considered
reply did not mention ‘Empire’ either.97
Churchill’s final significant remarks on Ireland came three years later, soon after John
Costello, Taoiseach in the new inter-party government, had announced his intention to
lead Éire out of the Commonwealth. Churchill’s criticisms of this decision need to be
read in the context of the developing Cold War and of the Attlee government’s
swifter-than-expected moves towards decolonization. In the Commons, Churchill
denounced Labour ministers’ allegedly insufficient enthusiasm for the word ‘Empire’
and preference for ‘Commonwealth’. He suggested that this was a kind of linguistic
political correctness (he did not used that phrase) aimed at ‘enabling Mr. Costello and
Pandit Nehru to participate to the full, if they choose to, in any benefits and securities
of our association, without committing themselves to the slightest obligation or even
to any symbolic or sentimental gesture or token in return.’ Churchill argued that he
himself had been a consistent supporter of Irish unity, rehearsed the story of Irish
neutrality during the recent war, and praised the ‘superb gallantry’ of the Irish
volunteers who had fought in it. He went on to say that opposition to Soviet tyranny
had ‘made new ties of unity of thought and of sympathy between the Irish and the
British peoples’ and praised the Catholic Church for its commitment to liberty. He
then suggested that ‘the passage of time might lead to the unity of Ireland itself in the
only way in which that unity can be achieved, namely, by a union of Irish hearts.
There can, of course, be no question of coercing Ulster, but if she were wooed and
23
won of her own free will and consent I, personally, would regard such an event as a
blessing for the whole of the British Empire and also for the civilised world.’ The
declaration of the Republic at this time was ‘strange and, if I may say so,
characteristically Irish’, because this supposed opportunity would be thrown away.
‘This decision may well prevent for ever that united Ireland, the dream of which is
cherished by so many ardent Irish patriots.’98 The argument that Costello’s actions
would only serve to entrench partition was probably a fair one.99 Nevertheless, it is
hard not to be struck by Churchill’s rhetorical tactics. He went to considerable lengths
to establish his belief in the desirability of an improbable goal, laid down impossible
conditions for it to be met, and then blamed other people for frustrating it.
V
In advance of his return to power, Churchill continued to pay lip service to Irish unity
in private and even expressed a sentimental preference for Southern Ireland over
Ulster.100 During the 1951 general election, however, he recorded a message to be
played at meetings of Ulster Unionist candidates in which he affirmed his
determination that ‘the present relationship between Ulster and the United Kingdom
and Empire’ would not be altered without the consent of the Stormont parliament.101
In terms of Irish affairs, his final premiership was notable only for his first and only
direct encounter with de Valera, who was now in power once more. The occasion was
surprisingly cordial but led to no diplomatic breakthrough. When de Valera raised the
question of Irish unification, Churchill pointed out the obstacle posed by Ulster and
Conservative Party opinion.102 With the Republic an established fact there was at any
rate little further scope for Churchill or anyone else to talk positively about Ireland in
24
imperial language. (This was again made clear in a speech Churchill made after his
retirement, when receiving, at a ceremony in London, the freedom of two Ulster
cities.)103 Even within Northern Irish politics, the Empire card did not play equally
well everywhere – rural areas were apparently more receptive to it than urban ones.104
If, to use Thompson’s analogy, the term ‘Empire’ was repeatedly filled up and
emptied of its meaning, then there did at last come a point where refilling it no longer
served a valuable political function. In the case of Churchill and Ireland, the 1930s
marked a clear decline in his use of imperial language; his reversion to it in 1948 was
somewhat exceptional. Seemingly, it was Fianna Fáil’s decision to make ‘scrap-iron’
(as Churchill put it) of the Anglo-Irish treaty, rather than the subsequent de jure
creation of the Republic, that triggered this rhetorical shift.105 His differing statements
over the years, however, meant that his views remained a point of contestation in the
rhetoric of others. In the Stormont parliament in 1953, the veteran nationalist Cahir
Healy insisted that, although Churchill was now a prisoner of the Tory Party on the
Irish issue, his 1912 Belfast speech represented his true opinion: ‘If he were to declare
his mind to-day he would want a united and free Ireland.’ The Prime Minister,
Viscount Brookeborough, counteracted with Churchill’s views as expressed in 1948,
and another member suggested that in 1912 Churchill had been ‘young and
uneducated’.106
It may well be said, of course, that Churchill merely adjusted his language to suit the
new realities of Britain’s relationship with Ireland. If so, however, the fact that he did
so is in itself noteworthy. In other contexts, he talked unapologetically about the
benefits of ‘British imperialism’ much beyond the point that ‘Commonwealth’ had
supplanted ‘Empire’ in common usage by his fellow politicians.107 The suggestion
25
that he retained a ‘Victorian’ imperial mentality was made by numerous
contemporaries and has been echoed by historians, including by some sympathetic to
Churchill; he himself seemed to revel in the idea.108 Yet in the case of Ireland,
Churchill showed considerable rhetorical flexibility. The standard line of Victorian
(and later) Unionists, that Home Rule posed a mortal danger to the Empire, was one
that he used early in his career but then dropped. He then argued across a sustained
period that Home Rule would strengthen the Empire by increasing the loyalty of
Ireland’s people. He did not endorse Lord Randolph’s dictum in its original sense but
reversed its meaning; and he also suggested that the threatened Ulster rebellion, were
it not faced down, threatened the eclipse of the central imperial government. His
language became quite lurid during the Anglo-Irish War, but his arguments in favour
of the subsequent treaty were similar to those that he had used on behalf of Home
Rule prior to 1914; the difference was that he no longer raised any doubts about
Ulster’s fundamental loyalty. His subsequent gestures in the direction of Irish
unification were the rhetorical quid pro quo for his non-negotiable support for the
consent principle in Northern Ireland. In the debates on the Statute of Westminster, he
found his own former arguments turned against him; and if in the 1930s he showed
some tendency to revert to the themes of his youth, the statements of his final years
cannot be easily read as the simple product of Victorian die-hard-ism.109
Some themes, however, did crop up repeatedly throughout the years. The first of these
was Churchill’s references to the bravery of Irish soldiers in British conflicts. The
implication was that, much as some nationalists might criticize the Empire, they were
not fully representative of an Ireland that was prepared to send its sons into battle on
Britain’s behalf. This suggestion that Irish anti-imperialism was a marginal tendency
26
served different functions at different times. During the Boer War, Churchill used it to
reproach the Nationalist Party. In Belfast in 1912 he used it to back up his claim that
the Irish and their leaders had a fundamental capacity for loyalty. Later still, he again
used it as a reproach to de Valera for Ireland’s neutrality, although by this point the
imperial context was left in the background.
The second recurring theme was Churchill’s emphasis on the imperial spirit which it
was the role of policy to foster and encourage. The Crown’s place as ‘the magic link’
that united the Empire-Commonwealth was the symbol of this approach.110 Its
advantage, from the rhetorical point of view, was its extreme malleability; it could be
invoked as a balm that, with sufficient time and goodwill, could soothe away
apparently intractable difficulties. Once the people of Southern Ireland were relieved
of their grievances, he frequently suggested, their national spirit could be reconciled
to the Empire; as the old animosities died away, so hearts would meet across the
border and partition would dissolve in a fog of mutual benevolence. ‘Empire’ in this
context was not intended to have a connotation of domination; rather, it was a call to
sink sectarian differences in the interests of the common good. Churchill, of course,
presented the common good in such a way as to acknowledge no possibility of
divergence between the interests of Britain and those of Ireland. And he did indeed
treat the needs of the Empire as though they were an unquestionable moral principle.
Finally, it must again be emphasized, the imperial dimension of Churchill’s Irish
rhetoric was by no measure peculiar to him. He was operating on a highly contested
battlefield, and his comrades-in-arms – Redmondite Nationalists as well as British
Liberals – wielded many of the same rhetorical weapons. (Later, Amery turned his
27
own previous weapons against him.) They did so, it must be presumed, at least in part
because they believed their audiences to be receptive to imperial messages and that,
by the same, token, it was necessary to counter those put across by their Unionist
opponents. Politicians were of course always talking to multiple audiences and it is
usually impossible to say who exactly was being targeted by particular pieces of
Empire rhetoric. But whether or not Britain, in the days before the partition of Ireland,
was ‘an imperial society’, it was certainly a society in which politicians knew the
risks of neglecting imperial language and reacted accordingly. After partition – a
rhetorical as well as a political watershed - such language became an optional and not
necessarily advisable extra. Churchill’s public contributions on the Irish issue, both
before and after 1922, reveal him not so much as an antediluvian imperialist as a
pragmatic and responsive (if sometimes impetuous) rhetorical practitioner.
28
Reference list
‘An Irish Unionist’, The Home Rule ‘Nutshell’ Examined. Dublin and Belfast:
Unionist Associations of Ireland, 1912.
Addison, Paul. ‘Winston Churchill’s Concept of “The English-Speaking Peoples”’. In
The Fabric of Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of Éva Haraszti Taylor, edited by
Attila Pók. Nottingham: Astra Press, 1999.
Aldous, Richard, ed. Great Irish Speeches. London: Quercus, 2007.
Bell, Duncan. The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order,
1860-1900. Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press, 2007.
Bew, Paul. Ideology and the Irish Question: Ulster Unionism and Irish Nationalism
1912-1916. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
Braddick, Michael J. ‘Introduction: The Politics of Gesture’. Past & Present
Supplement 4 (2009): 9-35.
Bromage, Mary C. Churchill and Ireland. Notre Dame (IN): University of Notre
Dame Press, 1964.
Callaghan, Michael. ‘John A. Costello: The Forgotten Taoiseach’. Ph.D. diss.,
University of Exeter, 2008.
Cambray, Philip G. Irish Affairs and the Home Rule Question (2nd edn.). London:
John Murray, 1911.
Cannadine, David. ‘Churchill and the British monarchy’. Transactions of the Royal
Historical Society, 6th ser., 11 (2001): 249-72.
Chambers, Ian. ‘Winston Churchill and Irish Home Rule, 1899-1914’. Parliamentary
History 19 (2000): 405-421.
______. The Chamberlains, The Churchills and Ireland 1874-1922. Youngstown,
New York: Cambria Press, 2006.
29
Charmley, John. Churchill: The End of Glory: A Political Biography. London:
Hodder and Stoughton, 1993.
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of
Metaphor. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Churchill, Randolph S., ed. Winston S. Churchill vol. II: Companion Part I, 19011907. London: Heinemann, 1969.
Churchill, Winston S. Lord Randolph Churchill vol. II. London: Macmillan, 1906.
______. My Early Life: A Roving Commission. London: Macmillan, 1941 (first
published 1930).
______. The Aftermath: being a sequel to The World Crisis. London: Macmillan,
1944 (first published 1929).
Clayton, Pamela M. ‘Two Kinds of Colony: “Rebel Ireland” and the “Imperial
Province”’. In Was Ireland a Colony? Economics, Politics, and Culture in
Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by Terrence McDonough. Dublin: Irish Academic
Press, 2005.
Collini, Stefan, Liberalism and Sociology: L. T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in
England 1880-1914. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Edwards, Aaron, A history of the Northern Ireland Labour Party: Democratic
socialism and sectarianism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009.
Finlayson, Alan, ‘“What’s the Problem?” Political Theory, Rhetoric and ProblemSetting’. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 9 (2006):
541-557.
Finlayson, Alan and James Martin. ‘“It Ain’t What You Say …”: British Political
Studies and the Analysis of Speech and Rhetoric’. British Politics 3 (2008): 445-464.
30
Finnan, Joseph P. John Redmond and Irish Unity, 1912-1918. Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 2004.
Foster, R.F. ‘To the Northern Counties station: Lord Randolph Churchill and the
prelude to the orange card’. In Ireland under the Union: Varieties of Tension, edited
by F.S.L. Lyons and R.A.J. Hawkins. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.
Gilbert, Martin, Winston S. Churchill, vol. VI: Finest Hour, 1939–1941. London:
Heinemann, 1983.
Gill, T.P. The Home Rule Constitutions of the British Empire: London, Irish Press
Agency, 1887.
Harvey, John, ed. The Diplomatic Diaries of Oliver Harvey 1937-1940. London:
Collins, 1970.
Howe, Stephen, ‘Minding the Gaps: New directions in the Study of Ireland and
Empire’. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 37 (2009): 135-149.
______. Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000.
Hyam, Ronald. Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation 1918-1968,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006.
______. Elgin and Churchill at the Colonial Office 1905-1908: The Watershed of the
Empire-Commonwealth. London: Macmillan, 1968.
Irish Free State, Dáil Éireann Debates, Second Dáil vol. T (1921-2).
Jackson, Ben. ‘The rhetoric of redistribution’. In In Search of Social Democracy:
Responses to Crisis and Modernisation, edited by John Callaghan, Nina Fishman,
Ben Jackson and Martin McIvor. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009.
Jackson, Daniel. Popular Opposition to Irish Home Rule in Edwardian Britain.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009.
31
Jalland, Patricia. The Liberals and Ireland: The Ulster Question in British Politics to
1914. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980.
Jeffery, Keith. Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson: A Political Soldier. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006.
Johnson, Davi. ‘Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 Birmingham Campaign as Image
Event’. Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10 (2007): 1-25.
Jordan, Anthony J. Churchill: a founder of modern Ireland. Dublin: Westport Books,
1995.
Kelly, Matthew. ‘Irish Nationalist Opinion and the British Empire in the 1850s and
1860s’. Past & Present 204 (2009): 127-154.
Kendle, J.E. ‘The Round Table Movement and “Home Rule All Round”’. Historical
Journal 11 (1968): 332-353.
Kenny, Kevin, ed. Ireland and the British Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004.
Koebner, Richard and Helmut Dan Schmidt. Imperialism: The Story and Significance
of a Political Word, 1840-1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964.
Koss, Stephen. Asquith. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1985 (first published 1976).
Lawrence, Jon, Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth
to Blair. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Longford, The Earl of and Thomas P. O’Neill. Eamon De Valera. London:
Hutchinson, 1970.
Loughlin, James. ‘Mobilising the sacred dead: Ulster Unionism, the Great War and
the politics of remembrance’. In Ireland and the Great War: ‘A War to Unite Us
All’?, edited by Adrian Gregory and Senia Pašeta. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2002.
32
MacDonald, Robert H. The Language of Empire: Myths and Metaphors of Popular
Imperialism, 1880-1918. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1994.
MacVeagh, Jeremiah, Home Rule in a Nutshell: A Pocket Book for Speakers and
Electors. Dublin: Sealy, Bryers & Walker, 1911.
McConnel, James. ‘John Redmond and Irish Catholic Loyalism’. English Historical
Review 125 (2010): 83-111.
McConnel, James and Matthew Kelly. ‘Devolution, federalism and imperial
circuitry’. In Debating Nationhood and Government in Britain, 1885-1939:
Perspectives from the ‘Four Nations’ , edited by Duncan Tanner, Chris Williams,
Andrew Edwards, and W.P. Griffith. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006.
Marsh, Peter T. Joseph Chamberlain: Entrepreneur in Politics. New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1994.
Matthew, H.C.G. ‘Rhetoric and Politics in Britain, 1860-1950’. In P.J. Waller, editor,
Politics and Social Change in Modern Britain. Brighton: Harvester, 1987.
Matthews, Kevin. Fatal Influence: The Impact of Ireland on British Politics 19201925. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2004.
Maume, Patrick. The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Life, 1891-1918. Dublin: Gill
& Macmillan Ltd., 1999.
Moran, Lord. Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940–1965. London;
Constable, 1966.
Muldoon, Andrew R. ‘Making Ireland’s opportunity England’s: Winston Churchill
and the third Irish Home Rule Bill’. Parliamentary History 15 (1996), 309-331.
Myers, Frank. ‘Harold Macmillan’s “Winds of Change” Speech: A Case Study in the
Rhetoric of Policy Change’. Rhetoric & Public Affairs 3 (2000), 555-575.
33
O’Brien, R. Barry, ed. Home Rule: Speeches of John Redmond MP. London: T. Fisher
Unwin, 1910.
Phelan, Jim. Churchill Can Unite Ireland. London: Victor Gollancz, 1940.
Pocock, J.G.A. ‘The concept of a language and the métier d’historien: some
considerations on practice’. In The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern
Europe, edited by Anthony Pagden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Ponting, Clive. Churchill. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994.
Porter, Bernard. The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in
Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Quinault, Roland. ‘Churchill and Black Africa’. History Today, June 2005: 31-36.
______. ‘Lord Randolph Churchill and Home Rule’. In Alan O’Day et al, Reactions
to Irish Nationalism. London: Hambledon Press, 1987.
Ramsden, John. Man of the Century: Winston Churchill and His Legend since 1945.
London: HarperCollins, 2002.
Regan-Lefebvre, Jennifer. Cosmopolitan Nationalism in the Victorian Empire:
Ireland, India and the Politics of Alfred Webb. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009.
Rhodes James, Robert, ed. Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963,
8 vols. New York: Chelsea House, 1974.
Roberts, Andrew. Salisbury: Victorian Titan. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999.
Ryder, Sean. ‘Defining Colony and Empire in Early Nineteenth-Century Irish
Nationalism’. In Was Ireland a Colony? Economics, Politics, and Culture in
Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by Terrence McDonough. Dublin: Irish Academic
Press, 2005.
34
Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Intercourse in Journalism, Travel
Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham (NC) and London: Duke University
Press, 1993.
Thompson, Andrew S. The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on
Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd., 2005.
______. ‘The Language of Imperialism and the Meanings of Empire: Imperial
Discourse in British Politics, 1895-1914’. Journal of British Studies 36 (1997): 147177.
______. Imperial Britain: The Empire in British Politics, c. 1880-1932. Harlow:
Pearson Education Ltd., 2000.
Toye, Richard. Lloyd George and Churchill: Rivals for Greatness. London:
Macmillan, 2007.
______. Churchill’s Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made.
London: Macmillan, 2010.
Tulis, Jeffrey K. The Rhetorical Presidency, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1987.
United Kingdom. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th ser.
Weidhorn, Manfred. ‘Churchill the Phrase Forger’. Quarterly Journal of Speech 58
(1972): 161-74.
Wheatley, Michael. Nationalism and the Irish Party: Provincial Ireland 1910-1916.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Williamson, Philip. Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
35
36
1
See especially Kenny, Ireland and the British Empire. Valuable recent contributions
include Howe, ‘Minding the Gaps’ and Kelly, ‘Irish Nationalist Opinion’.
2
Thompson, ‘The Language of Imperialism’.
3
Bromage, Churchill and Ireland, and Jordan, Churchill. Churchill’s role also
receives detailed coverage in Jalland, The Liberals and Ireland, and Kevin Matthews,
Fatal Influence.
4
Ramsden, Man of the Century, Chapter 5.
5
Muldoon, ‘Making Ireland’s opportunity England’s’, 328.
6
Chambers, ‘Winston Churchill and Irish Home Rule’, 420. See also idem., The
Chamberlains, The Churchills and Ireland, 186-97.
7
Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire, 172.
8
Collini, Liberalism and Sociology, 9.
9
It has been argued that ‘A sense of the spoken language of Empire is now impossible
to retrieve’, which is true insofar as there few pre-1918 recordings. (MacDonald, The
Language of Empire, 3). However, it is still worth trying to recapture some sense of
its effect via written accounts.
10
Finlayson and Martin, ‘“It Ain’t What You say … ”’, 448.
11
Braddick, ‘Introduction: The Politics of Gesture’; Johnson, ‘Martin Luther King
Jr.’s 1963 Birmingham Campaign’.
12
Pocock, ‘The concept of a language’, 29.
13
For example, Koebner and Schmidt, Imperialism, and Spurr, The Rhetoric of
Empire.
14
A key text is Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency.
37
15
Matthew, ‘Rhetoric and Politics in Britain’; Charteris-Black, Politicians and
Rhetoric; Finlayson and Martin, ‘“It Ain’t What You say … ”’; and Jackson, ‘The
rhetoric of redistribution’. For the Empire/Commonwealth dimension, see
Williamson, Stanley Baldwin; Myers, ‘Harold Macmillan’s “Winds of Change”
Speech’; and Thompson, ‘The Language of Imperialism’. Churchill’s rhetoric has of
course received much attention, for example Weidhorn, ‘Churchill the Phrase Forger’.
16
Exceptions include Ryder, ‘Defining Colony and Empire’; Finlayson, ‘“What’s the
Problem?”’; and Wheatley, Nationalism and the Irish Party, Chapter 4.
17
The culture of public speaking in Britain is described in Lawrence, Electing Our
Masters.
18
Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists; Thompson, Imperial Britain; idem., The
Empire Strikes Back?
19
On this wider patriotism, see Thompson, Imperial Britain, 31-2, 66.
20
John Maffey to Eric Machtig, 21 May 1945, DO 35/1229, The National Archives
(TNA), Kew, London. I am grateful to Martin Thomas for supplying me with a copy
of this document.
21
Quinault, ‘Lord Randolph Churchill and Home Rule’; Foster, ‘To the Northern
Counties station’.
22
Winston Churchill, Lord Randolph Churchill Vol. II, 60-65.
23
The Times, 23 Feb. 1886.
24
The Times, 4 May 1886; Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? 129-30; and Regan-
Lefebvre, Cosmopolitan Nationalism, 131. See also, for example, Gill, The Home
Rule Constitutions of the British Empire.
25
Birmingham Daily Post, 2 June 1899.
26
Howe, Ireland and Empire, 65.
38
27
Marsh, Joseph Chamberlain, 497.
28
Jackson, Popular Opposition, 20-21.
29
The Belfast News-Letter, 27 Nov. 1900.
30
Ibid., 28 Nov. 1900.
31
Quoted in Western Mail, 30 Nov. 1900.
32
Speech of 18 Feb. 1901. Unless otherwise stated, all Churchill’s public statements
cited are from Rhodes James, Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches.
33
The Times, 26 Jan. 1904.
34
Speech of 16 June 1904; Chambers, ‘Winston Churchill and Irish Home Rule’, 410.
35
See for example, Churchill’s speech of 13 May 1904 and The Times, 14 May 1904.
36
D.A. Thomas to Winston Churchill, 5 May 1904, in Randolph S. Churchill (ed.),
Winston S. Churchill Vol. II, 342-3; Winston Churchill to John Morley, John Morley
Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Eng. d. 3559, f. 22; Irish Times, 1 Jan. 1906.
37
Speech of 18 May 1907.
38
Winston Churchill to H.H. Asquith, 18 Apr .1908, H.H. Asquith Papers, Bodleian
Library, Oxford, Box 19, ff. 285-6.
39
Muldoon, ‘Making Ireland’s Opportunity England’s’, 317-320.
40
Home Rule Notes, 6 Apr. 1912.
41
The Times, 18 and 23 Apr. 1932.
42
MacVeagh, Home Rule in a Nutshell, 17.
43
See McConnel and Kelly, ‘Devolution, federalism and imperial circuitry’, 171.
44
Bonar Law, Andrew. 24 Oct. 1912: Hansard Parliamentary Debates, Commons,
5th ser., vol. 407, col. 2473.
45
Jeremiah MacVeagh to Winston Churchill, 7 Oct. 1911, Winston Churchill Papers,
Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, CHAR 2/53, f. 43.
39
46
Substantial quotations from the introduction can be found in The Times, 8 Jan.
1912. See also Addison, ‘Winston Churchill’s Concept of “The English-Speaking
Peoples”’, 105.
47
See, for example, Home Rule Notes, 9 Dec. 1911.
48
‘An Irish Unionist’, The Home Rule ‘Nutshell’ Examined; The Times, 27 Jan.1912.
49
Asquith, H.H.15 Feb. 1911. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th ser.,
vol. 21, cols. 1100-1101; , The Times, 22 Jan. and 1 July 1912.
50
Introductory note by Redmond to Justin McCarthy, ‘Home Rule’, English Review,
Apr. 1913, 113.
51
Manchester Courier, 24 Jan. 1912, quoted in Jackson, Popular Opposition, 55.
52
Kendle, ‘The Round Table Movement’, 348-9.
53
‘The Times, 9 Feb. 1912. For Tory views on imperial federation, see MacVeagh,
Home Rule in a Nutshell, 76-83. For a critique of Liberal rhetorical strategy, see
Cambray, Irish Affairs and the Home Rule Question, 79-80.
54
McConnel, ‘John Redmond’; O’Brien, Home Rule; Saturday Review, 5 Oct. 1907.
55
Finnan, John Redmond, 159-61; Wheatley, Nationalism and the Irish Party, 74-7;
Maume, The Long Gestation, 118; Bew, Ideology and the Irish Question, 43.
56
Notably Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who shared a platform with Erskine Childers
when the latter read a paper on ‘The Home Rule Problem in Relation to Colonial
Constitutions’ in March 1912: Home Rule Notes, 6 Apr. 1912.
57
Jackson, Popular Opposition, 11; Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain, 30.
58
Bew, Ideology and the Irish Question, 50, 84-5.
59
Quoted in ‘An Irish Unionist’, The Home Rule ‘Nutshell’ Examined, 95.
60
Loughlin, ‘Mobilising the sacred dead’, 140; Toye, Lloyd George and Churchill,
113-4.
40
61
The Times, 29 July 1912.
62
On this occasion, Churchill made his argument in a public letter; he made a similar
point in the Commons on 28 April 1914: Hansard Parliamentary Debates, Commons,
5th ser., vol. 61, col. 1578; The Times, 12 and 13 Aug. 1912. Churchill may have been
influenced by his own experience of dealing with troublesome colonists, for which
see Hyam, Elgin and Churchill, esp. 239-262.
63
These various themes can be found in, for example, The Times, 12 Aug., and 23 and
24 Sept. 1912, and 17 May and 19 July 1913. Further examples can be found in press
cuttings in the Churchill Papers, CHAR 2/60.
64
Speech of 11 Feb. 1913.
65
The Times, 15 Sept. 1913.
66
Yorkshire Post, 1 May 1912, copy in Broadwater Collection, Churchill Archives
Centre.
67
Jalland, Liberals and Ireland, 150-151.
68
Bew, Ideology and the Irish Question, 99.
69
Austen Chamberlain, ‘Memo of conversation with Winston Churchill, Nov. 27
1913’, Austen Chamberlain Papers, University of Birmingham Special Collections,
AC 11/1/21.
70
Speech of 14 March 1914. Lloyd George’s speech on the same topic the following
week developed the imperial theme more systematically: The Times, 23 March 1914.
71
Koss, Asquith, 137.
72
See, for example, Leo Amery, ‘The Curragh Crisis: Diary of Events’, Leo Amery
Papers, Churchill College, Cambridge, 1/2/29, and W.A.S. Hewins diary, 28 March
1914, University of Sheffield Special Collections.
73
Wheatley, Nationalism and the Irish Party, 266.
41
74
Speech of 4 Nov. 1920; Clayton, ‘Two Kinds of Colony’, 243.
75
The Times, 25 Nov. 1920; Jeffery, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, 277-8.
76
Speech of 24 Sept. 1921.
77
Quoted in Irish Times, 29 Sept. 1921.
78
Gwynne, Rupert. 15 Dec. 1921. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th
ser., vol. 149, 15 col. 157.
79
New York Times, 12 Dec. 1918.
80
15 Dec. 1921. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th ser., vol. 149, col.
182.
81
Worthington-Evans, Lamar. 15 Dec. 1921. Hansard Parliamentary Debates,
Commons, 5th ser., vol. 149, col. 258.
82
3 Jan. 1922. Dáil Éireann Debates, vol. T., 183.
83
19 Dec. 1921. Dáil Éireann Debates, vol. T, 33.
84
26 June 1922, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th ser., vol. 155, col.
1710.
85
The Times, 1 July 1922.
86
Belfast Chamber of Commerce Journal, March 1926, copy in Churchill Papers,
CHAR 9/77A.
87
Churchill, The Aftermath, 283.
88
Hansard Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th ser., vol. 259, 20 Nov. 1931, col.
1198.
89
Amery, Leopold. 20 Nov. 1931. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th
ser., vol. 259, cols. 1206-7.
90
10 July 1935. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th ser., vol. 304, cols.
445-6.
42
91
5 May 1938. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th ser., vol. 335, cols.
1103-4.
92
See, for example, Roberts, Salisbury, 389.
93
John Maffey to Lord Caldecote, 16 July 1940, TNA, DO 130/12; Harvey,
Diplomatic Diaries, 326. For a more positive view, see Phelan, Churchill Can Unite
Ireland.
94
Churchill, Winston S., minute of 18 June 1940, quoted in Gilbert, Winston S.
Churchill, vol. VI, 433.
95
21 Apr. 1944. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th ser., vol. 399, col.
582.
96
Broadcast of 13 May 1945.
97
De Valera, Eamon, broadcast of 16 May 1945, in Aldous, Great Irish Speeches, 83-
87.
98
28 Oct. 1948. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th ser., vol. 457, cols.
242-8. See also Churchill’s comments of 25 Nov. 1948. Ibid., vol. 458, cols. 1415-18.
99
Callaghan, ‘John A. Costello’, 157-8.
100
Julian Amery diary, 28 Feb 1951, Julian Amery Papers, Churchill Archives Centre,
Cambridge, 4/302; F.H. Boland to the Secretary, Department of External Affairs, 9
May 1951, National Archives of Ireland, DFA P250.
101
The Times, 18 Oct. 1951.
102
Longford and O’Neill, Eamon De Valera, 443; Ramsden, Man of the Century,
258-9.
103
Speech of 16 Dec. 1955.
104
Edwards, A history of the Northern Ireland Labour Party, 33.
105
‘Conscription Crisis’, 26 May 1941, National Archives of Ireland, DFA P70.
43
106
7 July 1953. Parliament of Northern Ireland, Parliamentary Debates, Commons,
vol. 37, col. 1316. In 1948, Healy himself had been strongly critical of Churchill. See
ibid., vol. 32, cols. 3646-7.
107
Canberra Times, 30 Apr. 1953.
108
For example, Moran, Struggle, 131; Ponting, Churchill, 23; Charmley, Churchill,
16; Quinault, ‘Churchill and Black Africa’, 36; Churchill, My Early Life, 9.
109
On this point more generally see Toye, Churchill’s Empire.
110
Cannadine, ‘Churchill and the British monarchy’.
44