Edward Carson: even today, almost 70 years after his death, the name of the barrister and Unionist leader has the power to inspire hatred or adulation. A short time ago Ian Paisley was photographed at the election count in Belfast City Hall touching a bust of Carson as though it was a sacred relic. To his detractors, Carson stands in the same relation to the rancorous, sectarian creed of Paisleyism as Hitler does to neo-Nazism.
Carson has not lacked biographers, notwithstanding the dust-jacket’s puff for this as the first modern biography. The three-volume official biography, started by Edward Marjoribanks, half-brother of the late Lord Hailsham, and completed by Ian Colvin, was published a decade or so after The Waste Land; it was hardly modernist but it was certainly modern. Eighteen years after Carson’s death, H. Mont- gomery Hyde published a substantial life in one volume. The Belfast historians A. T. Q. Stewart and Alvin Jackson have both written brief but elegant biographical essays, the one in 1981 and the other 12 years later. Eight years ago John Hostettler produced a lengthier but less original biography. And now Geoffrey Lewis appears on the stage of Carson studies.
What sort of contribution has he made? His work is longer than Stewart’s or Jack- son’s, more interesting than Hostettler’s, and more critical than those of Montgomery and the official biographers. He is not unduly hostile, though, in the way of George Dangerfield in his beautifully written but vastly overrated The Strange Death of Liberal England.
Lewis makes fairly extensive use of some private archival sources in addition to those in public hands. He has been given access to papers still in the possession of Carson’s family. He makes good use of the letters of Carson’s patroness Lady Londonderry (not Edith, but her mother-in-law, Theresa). Some printed primary works and secondary sources have escaped his attention, though; most notably Alvin Jackson’s The Ulster Party, Patricia Jalland’s The Liberals and Ireland, Paul Bew’s Ideology and the Irish Question and Ian Beckett’s The Army and the Curragh Incident.
There are also signs that Lewis is not entirely familiar with Carson’s Irish background. For example, he rejects, correctly, the absurd story that Carson was of Italian descent; he does not know, however, that it was a tale that Carson himself believed. More seriously, he appears to be under the impression that all Ulster Protestants are Presbyterians, even making one out of the Anglican Colonel Saunderson, Carson’s predecessor but one as Unionist leader. A few irritating mistakes appear: the foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh was the second, not the first, Marquess of Londonderry; John Gough, brother of Hubert Gough, leader of the officers at Curragh, was not knighted; General Sir Bryan Mahon, eight years Carson’s junior, could hardly have been his schoolfriend; and the Unionist politician Arthur Samuels was a KC, not a solicitor.
Lewis, himself a barrister and the author of two previous legal biographies, might be expected to be at his best on Carson’s career at the bar. That career was astonishing enough. At 35 Carson was the youngest QC in Ireland, having made his name as a Crown prosecutor. By 1893, having been called to the English bar only a year before, after his election as MP for Trinity College Dublin, he took silk in London. Making his mark in court, in the House, and in society, Carson was a Protestant Phineas Finn. By the end of the century his annual earnings were estimated at £20,000 — equivalent to the seven-figure sums earned by today’s top QCs. And he came to live in the sort of grand style which few, if any, of today’s barristers could aspire to: a house in Eaton Place rather than Highgate or Islington, a sizeable Queen Anne mansion in Kent, regular holidays at German spas, where he hobnobbed with the Kaiser. In due course he held both the law offices under the Crown: Solicitor-General under Salisbury and Balfour, and Attorney-General in the wartime coalition.
Carson was one of the greatest of courtroom advocates, dominating witnesses (in Lewis’s words) ‘not by bullying but with an impression of power’. As a Lord of Appeal (following his resignation as Unionist leader in 1921) he proved undistinguished: as Lewis observes, he was no jurist. One colleague among the Law Lords thought he would have been better suited to the office of Lord Chief Justice. Such a career would provide material enough for a biography even without Carson’s political involvement. Alas, Lewis gives too little space to Carson in court: some of the familiar cases — the Wilde trial, the defence of Archer-Shee, the Marconi libel suit — are dealt with adequately, but others are simply ignored.
Carson’s political career from the start of the Third Home Rule crisis to the end of the Great War is dealt with in greater detail, but problems of interpretation arise all too often. Carson’s relationship with the Orange Order (a subject of some importance with regard to his period as Unionist leader) is a case in point. Lewis writes that Marjoribanks’s claim that Carson joined the Order at 19 cannot be verified. Lewis is too sceptical. Marjori- banks wrote with Carson’s assistance (and paid him for it). Moreover, Carson’s use of fraternal language in addressing Orange gatherings and the use of such language to and about him by Orangemen put his membership of the Order beyond doubt.
More serious still is Lewis’s interpretation of the high points of the Third Home Rule crisis, the Curragh Incident, and the Larne gun-running of the spring of 1914. He believes that the gun-running put Carson ‘in a position in which no one could any longer doubt the reality of Ulster resistance’. It is arguable that the importance of the arms importation has been greatly exaggerated. The Curragh Incident had made coercion of Ulster by Asquith’s administration almost impossible and, as Charles Townshend and Alvin Jackson have observed, the Ulster Volunteer Force (a body established to resist Home Rule, and not to be confused with the later terrorist group which appropriated its title) was still poorly armed even after the arms were landed at Larne. Lewis also asserts that Bonar Law, the Conservative leader, remained ignorant of the gun-running until after it had occurred. In a footnote he dismisses Jackson’s argument to the contrary on the grounds that some of the evidence rests on the testimony of Fred Crawford, the hot-headed organiser of the gun- running; he fails to note that Jackson adduces manuscript evidence which appears to corroborate Crawford.
The book’s subtitle (‘The Man Who Divided Ireland’) is itself questionable. Carson, a Dubliner, had no wish to see Ireland divided when he embarked on his political career. Later he came to see Ulster as a means of preventing Home Rule for the whole of Ireland; later still he came to accept the exclusion of Ulster from a Home Rule settlement. But the development of the partitionist settlement after 1921 has nothing to do with him. For that we must look not to Carson but to de Valera’s irredentist policies of the 1930s and the Provisional IRA’s campaign of the last 35 years.
Lewis is perhaps stronger on Carson’s personal life than on his public career. Here his use of private family papers is of value. Carson the man contrasted with Carson the public figure: before an audience he was a charismatic leader; in private he had a tendency to self-pity and even depression. The vigour and determination he exudes in photographs were belied by his hypochondria. His first marriage was less than happy: Annette Carson was never contented in London and became unreasonably jealous of her husband’s friendships with Lady Londonderry and other political hostesses. His eldest son, a gambler like his mother, was a disappointment. After his first wife died, Carson, like his fictional counterpart Sir Robert Morton in The Winslow Boy, married a much younger woman; his second wife gave him the domestic happiness and political admiration he had not always enjoyed in his first marriage.
As has already been mentioned, Lewis is generally fair and balanced. He makes it clear that Carson was capable of flexibility (though he could also be difficult as a colleague — he was a serial resigner). He is also in no doubt that Carson, the advocate of a Catholic university in Dublin and admirer of Irish peasant piety, was no bigot. In these and other respects he differed sharply from Ian Paisley, who has spent much of his career under the impression that he is Carson redivivus.
But it is hard to give a very enthusiastic welcome to this biography. Its fundamental fault is its length. It is too short to be comprehensive: only 35 pages are given to Carson’s life before the Wilde trial, and only two are devoted to his last 14 years. More space is allowed to his leadership of the Unionists, but even here Lewis does not write on a sufficient scale or with adequate intellectual ambition. Carson’s life, so full of incident and of such significance to Britain and Ireland, deserves a broader canvas.
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