Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

LOYALTY AND THE CROWN 165
never can apply to Ireland. We have a past—a glorious past—
the Colonies have no past. We have been enslaved and
oppressed— the Colonies have not. We have been and still are
a distinct and separate nation; the Colonies have never been
more than British Colonies. Colonial self-government is not
applicable to Ireland because we have never yielded up our
divine right to complete nationhood, and have never
degraded ourselves by accepting the position of a British
colony or surrendering our claim to be treated as a distinct or
separate nation…. Why should we descend from the lofty
position we occupy and submit to the degradation of being
treated as a Crown Colony of England? 32
For dual monarchists, separation from the British Crown and
Empire did not automatically mean the severance of all relations
with British imperialism. For example, following the 1917 Imperial
Conference in London, Griffith claimed to see a possible revolution
in the government of the British Empire, and the approximation,
after the war, of its government to the government of the German
Empire. He considered ‘The British Empire’ to be an alias for
‘England’. England made war, peace and policy; the function of the
Empire was to follow England, and this included not consulting
Australia or Canada, nor Ireland, Scotland or Wales either. Thus the
‘British Empire’ was a name and nothing more, an alias for an
autocratic England. But, at the Imperial Conference, Griffith
detected what he believed was the resolve of the Dominions that
the existing state of affairs had to end and that at the war’s
cessation England would have to take her place as a state within
the Empire and not as its ruler. England was to be Prussianised,
one state among many—similar he thought to the pre-Norman
model which existed in Ireland, combining the independence of
the different parts with the unity of the whole against external
enemies. 33 Sir Roger Casement had also developed his thinking
along similar lines in 1915. He too had denied the existence of a
‘British Empire’: there was a supreme and absolute England, to
which Ireland, India and Scotland were all dependencies, the direct
antithesis of the German Empire which was founded upon racial
unity, with each state self-governing and having a common
control of imperial policy. Were the British Empire to be modelled
upon the German Empire it would involve the reappearance of
Ireland and Scotland as separate kingdoms within the Empire, the
erection of Wales into what she was only in name, a principality,
self-government for India and an Imperial Council representing
all. Casement thought home rule would not solve the Irish