Product Code Database
Edward Henry Carson, Baron Carson, PC, PC (Ire), KC (9 February 1854 – 22 October 1935), from 1900 to 1921 known as Sir Edward Carson, was an Irish unionist politician, barrister and judge, who was the Attorney General and Solicitor General for England, Wales and Ireland as well as the First Lord of the Admiralty for the British Royal Navy. His authority as a unionist leader saw him elevated to the British War Cabinet as a Minister without Portfolio in 1917, and he was subsequently appointed as a life peer in the House of Lords in 1921, taking office under the political title Lord Carson of Duncairn. Due to his actions in both Great Britain and Ireland, he became widely regarded as one of the founding figures of Northern Ireland.
From 1905 onwards, Carson was both the Irish Unionist Alliance member of parliament (MP) for the Dublin University constituency and leader of the Ulster Unionist Council in Belfast. In 1915, he entered the war cabinet of H. H. Asquith as Attorney-General. However, he was defeated in his ambition to maintain Ireland as a whole in union with Great Britain. Carson was instrumental in leading the Ulster unionist resistance against the British crown's attempts to introduce home rule for the whole of Ireland, and later played a key role in forcing the resignation of Prime Minister Asquith in 1916. His leadership, however, was celebrated by some for securing a continued place in the United Kingdom for the six northeastern counties, albeit under a devolved Parliament of Northern Ireland that neither he nor his fellow unionists had sought.
He is also remembered for his open-ended cross-examination of Oscar Wilde in a legal action that led to plaintiff Wilde being prosecuted, gaoled and ruined. Carson unsuccessfully attempted to intercede for Wilde after the case.John Brown, "Carson, Sir Edward, Baron Carson 1854–1935" in David Loades, ed., Reader's Guide to British History (2003) 1:227
He spoke Irish and was a regular player of Gaelic games as a child.
He later received an honorary doctorate (LL.D.) from the University of Dublin in June 1901.
Kevin Myers states that Carson's initial response was to refuse to take the case. Later, he discovered that Queensberry had been telling the truth about Wilde's activity and was therefore not guilty of the libel of which Wilde accused him.
Carson portrayed the playwright as a morally depraved hedonist who seduced naïve young men into a life of homosexuality with lavish gifts and promises of a glamorous artistic lifestyle. He impugned Wilde's works as morally repugnant and designed to corrupt the upbringing of the youth. Queensberry spent a large amount of money on private detectives who investigated Wilde's activity in the London underworld of homosexual clubs and procurers.
Wilde abandoned the case when Carson announced in his opening speech for the defence that he planned to call several who would testify that they had had sex with Wilde, which would have rendered the libel charge unsupportable as the accusation would have been proven true. Wilde was when he was then ordered to pay the considerable legal and detective bills Queensberry had incurred in his defence.
Based on the evidence of Queensberry's detectives and Carson's cross-examinations of Wilde at the trial, Wilde was subsequently prosecuted for gross indecency in a second trial. He was eventually found guilty and sentenced to two years' hard labour, after which he moved to France, where he died penniless.
The articles alleged that George's son William had gone to São Tomé in 1901 and observed for himself the slave conditions, and that the Cadbury family had decided to continue purchasing the cocoa grown there because it was cheaper than that grown in the British colony of the Gold Coast, where labour conditions were much better, being regulated by the Colonial Office. The Standard alleged that the Cadbury family knew that the reason cocoa from São Tomé was cheaper was because it was grown by slave labour. This case was regarded at the time as an important political case as Carson and the Unionists maintained that it showed the fundamental immorality of free trade. George Cadbury recovered contemptuous damages of one farthing in a case described as one of Carson's triumphs. Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics, and the Ethics of Business, by Lowell J. Satre
Carson maintained his career as a barrister and was admitted to the English Bar by The Honourable Society of the Middle Temple in 1893 and from then on mainly practised in London. In 1896 he was sworn of the Irish Privy Council. He was appointed Solicitor-General for England on 7 May 1900, receiving the customary Knight Bachelor. He served in this position until the Conservative government resigned in December 1905, when he was rewarded with membership of the Privy Council.
In the 1918 general election, Sinn Féin won 73 out of the 105 Irish seats in the House of Commons. In 25 constituencies, Sinn Féin won the seats unopposed. Unionists (including Ulster Unionist Labour Association) won 26 seats, all but three of which were in the six counties that today form Northern Ireland, and the Irish Parliamentary Party won only six (down from 84), all but one in Ulster. The Labour Party did not stand in the election, allowing the electorate to decide between home rule or a republic by having a clear choice between the two nationalist parties. Irish Republicans regarded these elections as the mandate to establish the First Dáil. As such, all persons in Ireland elected to Westminster were considered to have been elected to Dáil Éireann. Had he chosen to do so, Carson could have exercised the option of attending the meeting of the First Dáil in the Mansion House on 21 January 1919. Like all of those elected to Irish seats in December 1918, he received an invitation, written Irish language, to attend. He kept the invitation as a souvenir. When his name was called out in the first roll call of the new Dáil, it was met by silence, and then laughter, from the Sinn Féin delegates and the audience in the Mansion House. He was listed as "as láthair", or absent.
Carson campaigned against Home Rule. He spoke against the Bill in the House of Commons and organised rallies in Ireland promoting a provisional government for "the Protestant province of Ulster" to be ready, should a third Home Rule Bill come into law.
On Sunday 28 September 1912, "Ulster Day", he was the first signatory on the Ulster Covenant, which bound 447,197 signatoriesThe number eventually exceeded 470,000 in England and Scotland. to resist Home Rule with the threat that they would use "all means necessary" after Carson had established the Ulster Volunteers, the first Ulster loyalism paramilitary group. From it, the Ulster Volunteer Force was formed in January 1913 to undergo military training and purchase arms.M McNally, Easter Rising 1916: Birth of the Irish Republic, Osprey, 2007, pp. 8–9. In Parliament Carson rejected any olive branch for compromise demanding Ulster "be given a resolution rather than a stay of execution".McNally, Easter Rising 1916, p. 11. The UVF received a large arms cache from Germany on the night of 24 April 1914.known as Operation Lion. Stewart, The Ulster Crisis, p. 88. Historian Felician Prill says Germany was not trying to start a civil war, for the Ulster cause was not popular in Berlin. Later that year, a further shipment of arms from Germany was delivered to the pro-Home Rule and IRB-influenced Irish Volunteers at Howth near Dublin.Asgard (yacht)#cite note-ring95-99-1
The Home Rule Bill was passed by the Commons on 25 May 1914 by a majority of 77 and due to the Parliament Act 1911, it did not need the Lords' consent, so the bill was awaiting royal assent. To enforce the legislation, given the activities of the Unionists, H. H. Asquith's Liberal government had prepared to send troops to Ulster. This sparked the Curragh Incident on 20 March. Together with the arming of the Irish Volunteers, Ireland was on the brink of civil war when the outbreak of the First World War led to the suspension of the Home Rule Act's operation until the end of the war.A. T. Q. Stewart, The Ulster Crisis, Resistance to Home Rule, 1912–14, p. 235 (Faber and Faber, London, 1967, 1979), By this time Carson had announced in Belfast that an Ulster Division would be formed from the U.V.F., and the 36th (Ulster) Division was swiftly organised.
Brown examines why Carson's role in 1914 made him a highly controversial figure: In 1914, suffragettes Flora Drummond and Norah Dacre Fox (later known as Norah Elam) besieged Carson's home, arguing that his form of Ulster "incitement to militancy" passed without notice whilst suffragettes were charged and imprisoned for same action.
In a 1921 speech opposing the pending Anglo-Irish Treaty, Carson attacked the "Tory intrigues" that had led him on the course that would partition Ireland, an outcome he opposed almost as strongly as Home Rule itself. In the course of the speech, Carson said: Later in the speech, Carson said:
Although considering himself proudly British, Carson also considered himself a proud Irishman stating "I am very proud as an Irishman to be a member of the British Empire".
He played a major role in forcing the resignation of Asquith as Prime Minister, returning to office on 10 December 1916 as First Lord of the Admiralty, and elevated to the powerful British War Cabinet as a Minister without Portfolio on 17 July 1917. War Memoirs of David Lloyd George, Vol. III, London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1934, pp. 1175–77
Carson was hostile to the foundation of the League of Nations as he believed that this institution would be ineffectual against war. In a speech on 7 December 1917, he said:
Talk to me of treaties! Talk to me of the League of Nations! Every Great Power in Europe was pledged by treaty to preserve Belgium. That was a League of Nations, but it failed.Henry R. Winkler, "The Development of the League of Nations Idea in Great Britain, 1914–1919", The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 20, No. 2. (June 1948), p. 105.
Early in 1918, the government decided to extend conscription to Ireland, and that Ireland would have to be given home rule in order to make it acceptable. Carson disagreed in principle and again resigned on 21 January. He gave up his seat at the University of Dublin in the 1918 general election and was instead elected for Belfast Duncairn.
He continued to lead the Unionists, but when the Government of Ireland Act 1920 was introduced, advised his party to work for the exemption of six Ulster counties from Home Rule as the best compromise (a compromise he had previously rejected). This proposal passed and as a result, the Parliament of Northern Ireland was established.Frank Costello, "King George V's Speech at Stormont (1921): Prelude to the Anglo-Irish Truce", Eire-Ireland, (1987), pp. 43–57.
In January 1921, he met in London over three days with Father O'Flanagan and Lord Justice Sir James O'Connor to try to find a mutual agreement that would end the Anglo-Irish war, but without result. "Memorandum by James O'Connor of an interview with Edward Carson"; RIA, Dublin, 1993. National Archives of Ireland file UCDA P150/1902
After the partition of Ireland, Carson repeatedly warned Ulster Unionist leaders not to alienate northern Catholics, as he foresaw this would make Northern Ireland unstable (see The Troubles in Ulster (1920–1922)). In 1921, he stated: "We used to say that we could not trust an Irish parliament in Dublin to do justice to the Protestant minority. Let us take care that that reproach can no longer be made against your parliament, and from the outset let them see that the Catholic minority have nothing to fear from a Protestant majority." In old age, while at London's Carlton Club, he confided to the Anglo-Irish (and Catholic) historian Sir Charles Petrie his disillusionment with Belfast politics: "I fought to keep Ulster part of the United Kingdom, but Stormont is turning her into a second-class Dominion."Sir Charles Petrie, A Historian Looks at His World (London: Sedgwick & Jackson, 1972), p. 27.
Carson did not see himself as an Ulsterman and, unlike many northern unionists, it is thought he had an emotional connection with Ireland as a single entity.
The first Lady Carson died in 1913. His second wife was Ruby Frewen (1881–1966), a , the daughter of Lt.-Col. Stephen Frewen, later Frewen-Laton MP (1857–1933) and Emily Augusta (Peacocke) Frewen. They were married on 17 September 1914; she was 32 and he was 60. They had one son:
|
|
