page_title: Bonar Law
section_title: Third Home Rule Bill
hierarchical_section_title: Bonar Law / Leader of the Conservative Party / Irish Home Rule / Third Home Rule Bill
caption_attribution_description: Blenheim Palace front entrance
context_page_description: Andrew Bonar Law was a British Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1922 to 1923.
  Law was born in the British colony of New Brunswick, the first British prime minister to be born outside the British Isles. He was of Scottish and Ulster Scots descent and moved to Scotland in 1870. He left school aged sixteen to work in the iron industry, becoming a wealthy man by the age of thirty. He entered the House of Commons at the 1900 general election, relatively late in life for a front-rank politician, and was made a junior minister, Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade, in 1902. Law joined the Shadow Cabinet in opposition after the 1906 general election. In 1911, he was appointed a Privy Councillor, and stood for the vacant party leadership. Despite never having served in the Cabinet, and despite trailing third after Walter Long and Austen Chamberlain, Law became leader when the two front-runners withdrew rather than risk a draw splitting the party.
  As Leader of the Conservative Party and Leader of the Opposition, Law focused his attentions in favour of tariff reform and against Irish Home Rule.
context_section_description: The 1912 session of Parliament opened on 14 February with a stated intent by the Liberal Party in the King's Speech to introduce a new Home Rule Bill. The bill was to be introduced on 11 April, and four days before that Law travelled to Ulster for a tour of the area. The pinnacle of this was a meeting on 9 April in the grounds of the Royal Agricultural Society near Balmoral (an area of Belfast), attended by seventy Unionist MPs, the Primate of All Ireland and topped by "perhaps the largest Union Jack ever made" – 48 feet by 25 feet on a flagpole 90 feet high.
  At the meeting both Law and Carson swore to the crowd that "never under any circumstances will we submit to Home Rule". However, the Parliament Act and the government majority made such a victory against the Bill unlikely unless the government could be brought down or Parliament dissolved. A second problem was that not all Unionists opposed Home Rule to the same degree; some hardcore Unionists would oppose any attempt at Home Rule, others thought it inevitable that the Bill would pass and were simply trying to get the best deal possible for Ulster. The spectre of civil war was also raised – the Ulstermen began to form paramilitary groups such as the Ulster Volunteers, and there was a strong possibility that if it came to fighting the British Army would have to be sent in to support the underfunded and understaffed Royal Irish Constabulary.
  The argument of Law and the Unionists between 1912 and 1914 was based on three complaints. Firstly, Ulster would never accept forced Home Rule, and made up a quarter of Ireland; if the Liberals wanted to force this issue, military force would be the only way. Law thundered that "Do you plan to hurl the full majesty and power of the law, supported on the bayonets of the British Army, against a million Ulstermen marching under the Union Flag and singing 'God Save The King'? Would the Army hold? Would the British people – would the Crown – stand for such a slaughter?". A second complaint was that the government had so far refused to submit it to a general election, as Law had been suggesting since 1910. Law warned that "you will not carry this Bill without submitting it to the people of this country, and, if you make the attempt, you will succeed only in breaking our Parliamentary machine". The third complaint was that the Liberals had still not honoured the preamble of the Parliament Act 1911, which promised "to substitute for the House of Lords as it at present exists a Second Chamber constituted on a popular instead of a hereditary basis". The Unionist argument was that the Liberals were trying to make a massive constitutional change while the constitution was suspended. In May 1912, Law was told by the Conservative whip Lord Balcarres that outside of Ireland "the electors are apathetic" about Home Rule, suggesting that he should de-emphasis the topic.
  In July 1912 Asquith travelled to Dublin (the first sitting Prime Minister to do so in over a century) to make a speech, ridiculing Unionist demands for a referendum on the issue via an election and calling their campaign "purely destructive in its objects, anarchic and chaotic in its methods". In response the Unionists had a meeting on 27 July at Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of Winston Churchill, one of Asquith's ministers. More than 13,000 people attended, including over 40 peers. In Law's speech he said "I said so to [the Liberals] and I say so now, with the full sense of the responsibility which attaches to my position, that if the attempt be made under present conditions, I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster will go, in which I shall not be ready to support them, and in which they will not be supported by the overwhelming majority of the British people". Law added that if Asquith continued with the Home Rule bill, the government would be "lighting the fires of civil war". This speech was more known and criticised than any others; it implied both he and the British people would support the Ulstermen in anything, including armed rebellion.
  Despite the conflict
caption: Blenheim Palace, where the anti-Home Rule factions held their meeting on 27 July 1912
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