‘THE DARK HORSE OF ENGLISH POLITICS’
The Irish delegation arrived in London from Dublin on Saturday 8 October and took up residence in Hans Place, a small leafy square in Knightsbridge tucked discreetly away behind Harrods luxury department store. Its leader was Arthur Griffith, Sinn Fein’s founder who had fought for the Boers against the British in South Africa. Churchill laconically described him as ‘that unusual figure, a silent Irishman’. Eamon de Valera deliberately opted to stay in Dublin. This left Griffith’s principal lieutenant as the IRA’s director of intelligence, the thirty-year-old Michael Collins, who slipped quietly into London unnoticed two days later and stayed in a different house from the others round the corner in Cadogan Gardens. The group’s secretary was the Anglo-Irish Erskine Childers, author of the best-selling pre-war spy thriller, The Riddle of the Sands. A wartime lieutenant-commander in the British Navy who had been awarded the DSO, he was a late and uncompromising convert to the cause of Sinn Fein.
Churchill later wrote of Collins that ‘he had elemental qualities and mother wit which were in many ways remarkable’. To this he added: ‘He stood far nearer to the terrible incidents of the conflict than his leader . . . His hands had touched directly the springs of terrible deeds.’ Indeed, Collins’ campaign to paralyze Britain’s intelligence system in Ireland had been masterful and ruthless. Speaking of the British officers his squad had murdered the previous November, he declared unabashedly that ‘By their destruction the very air is much sweeter. For myself, my conscience is clear. There is no crime in detecting and destroying in wartime the spy and the informer. They have destroyed without trial. I have paid them back in their own coin.’ Collins had also doubled as a remarkably successful Minister of Finance for the Sinn Fein government.1
It was scarce wonder that Churchill described the first meeting at 10 Downing Street on Tuesday 10 October as ‘not without its shock’. When Clementine had first heard of the truce in July she immediately hoped he could play an active part in the negotiations. A good Liberal, she abhorred her husband’s violent language about Ireland and disliked its handling by Hamar Greenwood – ‘nothing but a blaspheming, hearty, vulgar, brave Knock-about Colonial’. But her reason this time was bluntly political – his relationship with Lloyd George. ‘I do feel,’ she told him, ‘that as long as he is P.M. it would be better to hunt with him than to lie in the bushes & watch him careering along with a jaundiced eye.’ Her wish had come true. He was now one of the seven Cabinet ministers selected by Lloyd George for the negotiating team and sat almost directly across the long Cabinet table from Collins – the leader of what he had frequently denounced as ‘the Murder Gang’. By now the tall dark-haired Irishman was something of a celebrity. Beaverbrook’s Daily Express described him as ‘this big, good-humoured Irishman with the rich brogue and the soft, yet decisive voice’, while to The Times he was handsome and debonair but also ‘sulky, obstinate, and forbidding’. Across the Atlantic, the Washington Post portrayed him as a man who hardly slept and worked his stenographers from seven in the morning until ‘all three of his own girls [were] dropping from fatigue’.2
On his side, Collins saw in Churchill the creator of the Black and Tans that had wreaked havoc across his homeland. Anxious to have a better measure of the men he would be negotiating with, he requested background briefings on them all. Sinn Fein had many English sympathizers, and one of them obliged. The fifty-three-year-old pipe-smoking Crompton Llewellyn Davies was a former Liberal advisor on land reform to Lloyd George and official solicitor to the British Post Office. He came from a radical family: his father lost his post as rector of Christchurch in Marylebone after unwisely delivering a sermon against imperialism in the presence of Queen Victoria; his aunt was the founder of Girton College in Cambridge; and he was uncle to the boys who inspired the author Sir James Barrie to create the characters in Peter Pan, a favourite of many Irish nationalists, including Collins. As a student and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Davies had been a member of the elite intellectual group known as ‘The Apostles’ that included such distinguished figures as John Maynard Keynes, the novelist E. M. Forster, and the poet Rupert Brooke. The philosopher Bertrand Russell, who was a close friend, described Davies as ‘able, high-minded, and passionate’. His wife Moya was the daughter of James O’Connor, an Irish Nationalist MP who had spent four years in prison as a Fenian. Radicalized by the Easter Uprising, Moya moved to Dublin where she stored guns for the IRA in her mansion and gave Michael Collins other practical help. In 1919, when he travelled to London hoping to plead the Irish independence case with President Wilson before the Paris Peace Conference, she and her husband helped draft his submission. Davies, thought Bertrand Russell, ‘admired rebels more, perhaps, than was wholly rational’.
Early in 1921, a Black and Tan raid on Moya’s Dublin house turned up incriminating documents and she was detained in Mountjoy Prison for several weeks. In London, her husband was dismissed from the Post Office and joined a distinguished firm of City solicitors. But he remained passionate about the Sinn Fein cause and agreed to assist Collins with his insider knowledge about his negotiating opponents. Lloyd George he described as ‘fertile in expedients, adroit, tireless, energetic and . . . skilled in political strategy’. About Churchill, he wrote:
The ‘dark horse’ of English politics. Too adventurous and independent for the ordinary party ties and labels . . . Can hammer out an argument thin, and has an intellectual thoroughness which is very rare in a politician . . . In spite of his reputed ‘militarism’ and dictatorial air, has more real idea of freedom and care for it than other politicians, and a better understanding of its political framework, and more real regard for the future of England and the British Empire as based on freedom. Can look ahead to necessary and desirable developments.
Collins had strongly protested against de Valera’s insistence on sending him to London. ‘To me,’ he said, ‘the task is a loathsome one.’ But Llewellyn Davies’ profile of Churchill gave at least a glimmer of hope that the defender of the Black and Tans might also be a man the Irish could deal with.3
The talks were to last for eight weeks. They were difficult, fraught, frustrating, and often hovered close to collapse. The Sinn Fein delegation constantly had to refer back to de Valera and more vehemently minded Republicans in Dublin, while its members flitted regularly to and fro between the two capitals. On the British side, Lloyd George had to keep his traditionally pro-Ulster Conservative partners happy. By shrewdly choosing both Austen Chamberlain and the fiercely pro-Unionist Birkenhead as negotiators, he made sure he could win crucial Tory support for the treaty. Lloyd George also demonstrated his negotiating wizardry by quickly abandoning the plenary sessions in favour of smaller discussions by the key players on each side.4
Churchill’s specific role in the talks was to chair a joint committee to discuss naval and air issues. ‘We must have free use of the Irish coasts in peace or war for Imperial Defence,’ he made clear to the Irish from the start. British control of ports, and hence the denial of any neutrality for Ireland, met instant objection by Collins and the others. Only if they could be assured of the continued unity of the whole of Ireland, stated Griffith, could they consider allegiance to the British Crown. But Northern Ireland by now had its own separate Parliament and prime minister in Belfast and abandoning it would, at the very least, be political suicide for Lloyd George. But holding out the hope that by free consent Ulster might one day in the future play a part in overcoming Irish division offered some chance, however slight, of winning Sinn Fein over to accepting Dominion status under the Crown. ‘We can’t give way on Ulster,’ declared Churchill. ‘We are not free agents.’ But he could envisage trying to persuade the Northern Irish to accept some kind of loose all-Irish body in the future. In addition, the promise of adjustments to the border between North and South might help to bring Sinn Fein along.5
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Beyond the practical matters at hand was the issue of trust. ‘We found ourselves confronted in the early days not only with the unpractical and visionary fanaticism and romanticism of the extreme Irish secret societies,’ wrote Churchill later, ‘but also the distrust and hatred which had flowed between the two countries for so many centuries.’ On principle the Sinn Fein delegates refused to accept any official British hospitality and kept themselves to themselves. They paid for their own accommodation and Arthur Griffith even turned down the offer of a drink during a visit to Chequers. Collins brought his own staff to London including couriers and bodyguards, and early each morning slipped out of his house alone to pray at the nearby Brompton Oratory. At nights the Irishmen mostly socialized together in Hans Place. Often Collins preferred to spend time with his sister Hanna who lived and worked in London, or with old friends he had known before or since the war such as the Llewellyn Davies. Ironically, the most important couple he visited during the negotiations were the Churchills’ close friends, the Laverys. ‘Do you remember how good he was in the War to us when we were in the Cromwell Road,’ Clementine once asked her husband, referring to the artist. ‘I used sometimes to go & sit with him in the evenings when I was anxious about you & when you came back from Flanders you used to paint in his studio.’6
John Lavery’s dominating concern was painting and he was cautious in what he said in public about Ireland. But the much younger Hazel was passionate and outspoken about politics. Her American family had an Irish pedigree, and although she grew up as an Episcopalian she converted to Roman Catholicism. By 1921 both had made known to Churchill their views on Ireland. ‘You asked me the other day what I thought of my country’s state and I had not the courage to tell you,’ Lavery wrote in a letter clearly prompted by Hazel. ‘But if one artist may speak to another I will give you my beliefs . . . I believe that Ireland will never be governed by Westminster, the Vatican, or Ulster without continuous bloodshed. I also believe that the removal of the “Castle” and all its works, leaving Irishmen to settle their own affairs, is the only solution left. I am convinced with the knowledge I possess of my countrymen that such a situation would make her one of your staunchest allies instead of an avowed enemy of all time. Love is stronger than hate.’
Once the truce was signed, the Laverys opened their home as a ‘neutral ground’ where both sides might meet, and soon after the Sinn Fein delegates arrived in London they were invited to Cromwell Road to have their portraits painted. Through his sister Hazel contacted Collins personally. One morning, he turned up unannounced at Lavery’s studio, ‘a tall young Hercules with a pasty face, sparkling eyes, and a fascinating smile,’ recalled the artist. ‘I helped him with a heavy overcoat to which he clung, excusing himself by saying casually, “There is a gun in the pocket.” ’7
Lavery’s portrait showed Collins with the moustache he wore for his intelligence work. The painting was subsequently lost in Ireland and the artist replaced it with another. Painted almost certainly posthumously, it portrayed him clean shaven and looking younger with unruly dark hair and casually wearing a jacket and white shirt and tie. Collins found it ‘absolute torture’ having to sit still while being painted and Lavery noted that he sat facing the door and was ‘always on the alert’. His capture of the charismatic Collins was an artistic coup. Augustus John had also hoped to paint him, and according to Hazel her husband’s fellow Irish portrait artist William Orpen was so jealous that he openly abused Lavery for ‘siding with murderers’. Lavery also received several anonymous and threatening letters, including one that claimed his painting of the ‘murderer’ Collins would no doubt be hung at 10 Downing Street by ‘his friend and fellow Republican Lloyd George’.8
Over the several weeks of negotiations, the Laverys threw numerous dinner parties and other functions to help bring the two sides together. Collins was always a welcome guest. Sometimes he would stay late at night reading a book from their shelves. ‘I found this portion of a wonderful book in an old shop,’ Hazel told him once. ‘I am trying hard to get an intact copy to send you as you would delight in it I know, and be interested in all the facts about the French Revolution.’ In turn Collins presented her with a Kerry Blue terrier, which she named ‘Mick’.
This was when Hazel’s paintings along with those of her husband were on show in London and her name was being frequently featured in the social columns of the press. She was also an inveterate hostess who readily inflated her own role in the negotiations. Shane Leslie did much to help the myth along. ‘History will show,’ he claimed, ‘how much [she] achieved to make the Irish Treaty possible – Mike Collins, Winston and Hazel made a powerful and scintillating trio. Something had to be created and without them there would have nothing been.’9 Leslie’s family loyalty, as well as a strong sexual attraction to Hazel, clearly helped inflate matters. There were also many stories about her alleged sexual relationship with Collins. These owed much to Hazel herself, who was clearly infatuated with the young Irishman. One of those inclined to believe in an affair was Lady Diana Cooper, who along with her husband Duff – notoriously no stranger to extra-marital affairs himself – was hosted by Hazel at a dinner with the Churchills during the negotiations. Malicious rumours were also spread by Collins’ enemies to discredit him in Republican ranks. Yet despite all this mythmaking, it is clear that the turbulent waters swirling round the Sinn Fein–British talks were indeed sometimes smoothed by the personal links between Collins, the Laverys, and Churchill.10
On Saturday 29 October he was again at Lympne with Philip Sassoon, but returned the next day to London to meet with Lloyd George and Birkenhead at his house for dinner. It was a critical moment. Lloyd George was facing a parliamentary vote of censure from diehard Unionists opposed to the talks and he needed some firm assurances from Sinn Fein to bolster his position. Urgently summoned by the assistant Cabinet Secretary Tom Jones, Griffith and Collins turned up at his house at ten o’clock that night. Lloyd George took Griffith upstairs for private talks, leaving Collins alone with Churchill and Birkenhead.
So far, Collins had little good to say about Churchill. ‘Don’t know quite whether he would be a crafty enemy in friendship,’ he noted at one point during the talks, ‘outlook: political gain, nothing else . . . Studies, I imagine, the detail carefully – thinks about his constituents, effect of so and so on them. Inclined to be bombastic. Full of of ex-officer jingo or similar outlook. Don’t actually trust him.’11 It was no surprise, either, that Churchill found the Irishman ‘in a most difficult mood, full of reproaches and defiance and it was very easy for everyone to lose his temper’. But memories of the settlement with the Boers after the hard-fought South African War stood him in good stead. When Collins complained bitterly that the British had hunted him day and night and put a price on his head, Churchill instantly responded: ‘Wait a minute,’ he said, ‘You are not the only one,’ and took down from the wall a framed copy of the reward offered for his recapture by the Boers following his escape from their prisoner-of-war camp. ‘At any rate it was a good price,’ he pointed out to Collins, ‘£5,000. Look at me – £25 dead or alive. How would you like that?’ Collins looked at it, paused for a moment, and laughed. ‘All his irritation vanished,’ wrote Churchill and from then on, so he claimed, they never lost some measure of trust – although, as he freely admitted, ‘deep in his heart’ there remained a certain gulf between them. But he was certainly striving hard to grasp the Irish perspective. Three days before, at a Canada Club dinner, he had spoken earnestly of the need to ‘penetrate the true spirit of the Irish heart, and by understanding it to lay aside once and for all the ghost of medieval hatreds that had survived even to this hour’. That night at his home, Collins also regaled Birkenhead with tales of his many hair-breadth escapes from the police and the two men became ‘good buddies’. This was a turning point for Collins. ‘I trust them,’ he said afterwards. ‘I’m prepared to take their word.’ Upstairs, Lloyd George had also reached a crucial personal understanding with Griffith that enabled him the next day easily to defeat the diehards in Parliament.12
Meanwhile, Churchill was doing his best to ensure mainstream Tory support for the government. A week later, when he was staying with the Montagus at Breccles for the Guy Fawkes celebrations, he argued vociferously against abolishing the British protectorate and granting internal self-government to Egypt. It was a stance that had already put him at odds with Curzon, who bitterly complained that ‘Winston [wants] to concede nothing and to stamp out rebellion in Egypt by Fire and Sword.’ But Duff Cooper detected something more calculating at work. The only reason Churchill was taking such an intransigent line, he believed, was that he hoped to make the Irish settlement ‘more palatable to the Tories’. Churchill told Cooper and the other guests that the chances of an agreement were ‘7 to 2 on’.13
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In Ireland, violence continued despite the truce and the IRA continued to smuggle in guns. In Dublin, de Valera kept a tight and suspicious rein on the London delegates. During the first week of November, Lloyd George grew so frustrated that he threatened to resign, but Churchill strongly urged him against it. Not only would it be an abdication of responsibility, it would precipitate ‘a very great public disaster’ by pitting a hard-line Conservative Party against Labour. The prime minister stayed on. Talks continued, now mainly conducted on the British side by just him, Birkenhead, and Chamberlain. Before the end of the month it appeared as though a breakthrough was close and Lloyd George summoned Griffith to Chequers.
He arrived shortly before ten o’clock in the evening of Saturday 26 November and was ushered into the Long Gallery, a room packed with mementos of English history. Above the mantelpiece hung the sword of Oliver Cromwell, and displayed elsewhere was the letter the Roundhead general wrote after his victory over Royalist forces at the battle at Marston Moor: ‘The Lord made them as stubble in our hands.’ What Cromwell meant for Irish Catholics and Anglo-Irish relations was best explained later by Churchill himself in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples: ‘Cromwell’s record was a lasting bane. By an uncompleted process of terror, by an iniquitous land settlement, by the virtual proscription of the Catholic religion . . . he cut new gulfs between the nations and the creeds . . . Upon all of us there still lies “the curse of Cromwell”. ’ What effect all the Chequers memorabilia might have had on Griffith is unclear. But when Lloyd George returned to London shortly before midnight, he declared that things were ‘better’. The next day a draft treaty was handed to the Sinn Fein delegates. It offered them an Irish Free State with a place within the British Empire akin to that of Canada, but with a guarantee of continued use by the Royal Navy, in both peace and war, of certain defined ports and dockyards. If Northern Ireland chose not to enter a united Ireland, then a Boundary Commission would determine the final border between the two countries.
The Irish delegates took the draft to Dublin to confer with de Valera and returned divided between themselves on how to respond. Collins by now was ‘fed up’ with the muddle and next day refused to meet with Lloyd George. At this point, according to Sir John Lavery, the Irishman turned up at Cromwell Place in a foul mood and only after hours of persuasion by Hazel did he agree to see the prime minister. ‘Take what you can now and get the rest later,’ she urged him. Then she drove him to Downing Street in her car. Clementine Churchill repeated this story later, adding that Hazel had done so dressed in her favourite opera cloak. She and Hazel were certainly close enough to have shared confidences. ‘That bright, gay, beautiful affectionate [sic] who brought so much pleasure & animation wherever she went,’ Clementine said of her when she died sadly young just over a decade later.14
True or not, the climax to the talks came on Monday 5 December. Newspaper headlines revealed extremes of opinion about the likely outcome. For the Daily Chronicle there was ‘Little Hope of Settlement’, while Beaverbrook’s Daily Express announced boldly ‘Irish Conference Fails’. But for The Times the negotiators ‘have not yet given up the task’, and the Late Night Special edition of the Evening Standard announced that ‘Both the Government and the Sinn Fein leaders are undesirous of breaking the truce.’ Indeed, at three o’clock that afternoon, Lloyd George, Churchill, Austen Chamberlain and Birkenhead met with Collins, Griffith, and another of the Sinn Fein delegates, Robert Barton, at 10 Downing Street. Here, Lloyd George gave them an ultimatum. Either they signed that night, or talks would end and both sides would be free to resume war. For the Irish delegation decision time had come. Griffith said he would sign even if the others refused. By contrast, in Churchill’s words, Collins glowered as if he were going to shoot someone, ‘preferably himself’.
During these critical hours Churchill also seemed in a belligerent mood. On the one hand, he had some fruitful discussions with the political philosopher Harold Laski, an old acquaintance from Manchester days, about constructive ways of satisfying Sinn Fein over the terms of an oath of allegiance to the Crown. Yet, as Laski told friends, he simultaneously uttered threats ‘of John Bull laying about [Ireland] with a big stick’. Just half an hour before the critical meeting at Downing Street, Churchill summoned the bellicose Ulsterman and Chief of the Imperial General Staff Sir Henry Wilson to his office in the Colonial Office to consult him about Royal Navy bases in Ireland. War, he told him, seemed likely. At Downing Street itself, Erskine Childers noted Churchill’s body language. ‘My chief recollection of these inexplicably miserable hours,’ he recorded in his diary, ‘was that of Churchill in evening dress moving up and down the lobby with his loping stoop and long strides & a huge cigar like a bowsprit.’ The Sinn Fein delegates then returned to Hans Place to argue bitterly between themselves about what to do.15
In the evening Lloyd George and the others waited in Austen Chamberlain’s room in the House of Commons to receive their reply. Churchill was still in a bullish mood. If they hadn’t received an answer by 10 p.m., he declared, the Irish should be left in no doubt ‘as to what we are going to do’. He was ignored, and the deadline passed. So did midnight. Then, in the early hours of 6 December the Irish delegation returned and Griffith announced they were prepared to accept the treaty – so long as some ‘points of drafting’ could be cleared up. This took until almost three o’clock. When the Sinn Fein members finally rose to leave, the British ministers walked round the table and for the first time shook hands.
The treaty gave Ireland practically the same status within the Empire as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. This meant full self-government and financial autonomy, the withdrawal of all British officials, armed forces and police, and an independent Parliament. In return, it would have a Governor-General and grant the Royal Navy certain permanent harbour facilities along with others to be given in the event of Britain going to war. The six counties of the North had a month after ratification of the agreement either to become part of a united Ireland or remain separate as part of the United Kingdom. If they chose the latter, a Boundary Commission would be set up to decide the proper extent of this territory.
So far as Collins was concerned, the terms of the treaty gave ‘freedom, not the ultimate freedom that all nations desire and develop to, but the freedom to achieve it’. He also knew that it would bitterly divide Sinn Fein against itself and that his enemies would use it to destroy him. That same day he wrote to one of his oldest friends, ‘I tell you this – early this morning I signed my death warrant.’ The next day the Cabinet discussed what should happen to Sinn Feiners who had been convicted of murder, and accepted Churchill’s view that the Irish should be told privately that the death penalty would not be imposed. Meanwhile Collins and his colleagues returned to Dublin to make their case for the treaty. De Valera was bitterly opposed to Dominion status. But the majority of his Cabinet supported the deal and the treaty was duly sent to the Dail, or National Assembly, for debate. It was now up to it and to the Irish people to decide their fate.16