Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

42 IRELAND IN 1914
take the offer seriously if the time limit were removed, declaring
that Ulster would not accept a sentence of death with a stay of
execution for six years. 2 After Carson’s rejection of the six-years’
compromise, British army authorities were instructed to reinforce
troops in Ulster. The military authorities decided, because of
widespread sympathy within the army for the Ulster Unionist cause,
that officers whose military homes were in Ulster need not be
involved in any measures which might result in their fighting
friends and relatives, but that they might ‘disappear’ for the
course of any operations. General Paget, Commander-in-Chief in
Ireland, delivered a confused version of these instructions to his
senior officers, implicitly giving those who could not claim Ulster
residence a choice between obedience or dismissal without
pension. The result was that the War Office’s plans for possible
operations against Ulster came to be seen as plans for an
offensive. After consultations, General Gough and fifty-seven of
his cavalry officers stationed at the Curragh declared that while
they were prepared to maintain order in Ulster they would prefer
to be dismissed than to be involved in starting hostilities. After the
Curragh crisis, the Government had little confidence that it could
use the army to crush a UVF rising.
On 25 May 1914, the Home Rule Bill passed through the
Commons for the third time and needed only the King’s signature
to become law. The Government held firm and offered to the
House of Lords an Amending Bill identical to that rejected by
Carson on 9 March. In July, the Lords returned the Bill after
modifying it by proposing the exclusion of all nine Ulster counties,
forever. Later that month, a round table meeting of two leaders
from each of the British and Irish parties met in Buckingham
Palace, at the invitation of the King. Despite protests from Carson
and the leader of the British Unionist Party, Andrew Bonar Law, the
discussions dealt only with the question of which area was to be
excluded, with no talk of how long such exclusion would last.
Redmond argued that there were more Catholics in the Ulster
counties of Londonderry and Armagh than there were Protestants
in Fermanagh and Tyrone, and over 100,000 more Catholics in the
four ‘Protestant’ counties than there were Protestants in the five
‘Catholic’ counties, so making the Government’s compromise an
advantage to Unionists rather than Nationalists. But Carson
rejected this asking how ‘men in one county are going to abandon
men in another county just because there may be a majority here
or a majority there’. Carson insisted that what he (mistakenly)
termed the six Ulster plantation counties of Antrim, Armagh,
Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry and Tyrone, should be excluded