Edward VIII's Irish Goodbye
World War Wednesday - the Uachtarán and the King
The British monarch had a problem; his lover was a soon to be twice divorced American with two husbands living. This was unacceptable. He would have to choose between the crown and the woman. Across the Irish Sea, the government in Dublin was also considering a divorce, from King Edward VIII.
After the Great War, Ireland rose against the British in the Anglo-Irish War—aka the Irish War of Independence 1919-1921—commanded by the “Big Fella” Michael Collins. Collins led the Irish well but with resources running low he agreed to a compromise that would end the conflict but give the Irish a state, but one divided with Northern Ireland’s six counties of Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry, and Tyrone remaining in the UK. Collins was murdered for his pragmatism.
As part of the treaty ending the war, the British king remained the “Free-State” of Ireland’s head of state and a governor-general would reside in Ireland as his personal representative. The new government of the Free-State formed by the pro-treaty faction made William Thomas Cosgrave the president of the Executive Council as head of government and leader of the parliament, and appointed Timothy Michael Healy, a former Irish Nationalist MP, as the first governor-general. Healy’s background signaled that nationalists were in charge of the south of Ireland, but Healy’s official status reminded everyone of the oath allegiance to the Crown that was the price of the independence treaty. The anti-treaty faction, who lost the brief Irish Civil War 1922-23, hated the office, and never let good manners get in the way of their hatred.
As long as the governor-general existed, Irish laws required symbolic royal assent. Following the Statute of Westminster (1931), Ireland became a dominion with its own relationship with the crown and the British cabinet in Westminster lost influence over the Irish governor-general. Unlike other dominions like Canada, the many in the Irish government wanted to eliminate the monarchy altogether. As a result of Imperial Conference of 1930, it was declared that the appointment of goverors-general should rest solely with the Commonwealth nation concerned. And this would give the Irish republicans a chance.
In the Great Depression election of 1932, Fianna Fáil—the party of the defeated civil war anti-treaty faction—led by the American born Éamon de Valera, won control of the lower house of the Irish parliament, the Dáil. As new president of the Executive Council, de Valera sought to break the link with the king and establish a functional republic. To this end he began a campaign of targeted disrespect against the incumbent governor-general, James McNeill.
McNeill was a nationalist who had helped draft the Free-State constitution and had collaborated with Michael Collins. It did not matter. It did not matter that when de Valera won the election, McNeill did not force him to come to the governor-general’s office for the swearing in and instead went to de Valera. The de Valera’s government set out to degrade the office. Things came to a head when at a diplomatic function Mr. McNeill showed up and members of de Valera’s Executive Council immediately walked out. McNeill complained to de Valera that this behavior was unacceptable, de Valera demurred but would not apologize. McNeill then formally published his communications with de Valera about the incident against de Valera’s wishes, de Valera then asked the king to dismiss McNeill and the king, who was likely exacerbated by de Valera picking a fight with a fellow Irish nationalist, put together a compromise: McNeill would retire in November 1932; he was already scheduled to retire at the end of the year anyway. All that from de Valera and it only got him an extra month. Mean Girls of the Great Depression the Dáil edition
To further reduce the office’s prestige, de Valera appointed Domhnall Ua Buachalla, a 1916 uprising veteran, as the new governor-general. Mr. Ua Buachalla lived in a modest house, avoided public duties, and refused the ceremonial trappings of the Viceregal Lodge. By making the office invisible, the government rendered the crown’s representative as irrelevant as possible to Irish life political life. Then King George V died in 1936, and the British crown was rocked by the scandal that the new King Edward VIII was carrying-on with a married woman named Wallis Simpson, who was still married to her second husband. And the king wanted to marry her.
The royal family was appalled. The Church of England could not stand for the flouting of marriage vows. British security agents had evidence that Simpson was too friendly with the representatives of Nazi Germany. The final blow to Edward came when the prime ministers of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa told the British prime minister they could not accept Wallis Simpson as the wife of the monarch, and de Valera joined in with the calculating proviso that for Ireland it would be impossible to accept Simpson, because as a Catholic country the government did not recognize divorce. That was it the king would have to abdicate. And de Valera seized the moment. The British needed him because under the terms of the statute of Westminster, any change to the Crown required the unanimous consent of the realms to keep unity. London could no longer tell them who their king was.
If British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin wanted Edward VIII gone for good, he needed to prevent an Irish breakaway. Otherwise, Edward would still be king in the Irish Free State with his younger brother soon to be George VI reigning in Britian; no one in Britian wanted the headache of a split Crown. Politically this made it hard for the other realms to object to the changes de Valera made to the role of the monarch in Ireland.
In December 1936, De Valera passed two laws making Ireland de facto a republic for domestic issues. First, he amended the Free State Constitution, removing all mention of the king and abolishing the office of the governor-general. Then his government passed the External Relations Act which 1) recognized the abdication and 2) kept the Crown but restricted the king to nothing more than rubberstamping international treaties and recognizing diplomatic credentials. At home it was if the monarchy did not exist.
All of this helped with the project de Valera had worked on all year, a new Irish Constitution. It would formally transition the country from the “Free State” to simply Ireland and with the indigenous name Eire also official. Irish Gaelic would be the official language alongside English. The same went for indigenizing the names of the officers of the state. This included the new office of prime minister, or Taoiseach, which de Valera meant for himself, and to replace the governor-general, he created the very republican sounding office of president of Ireland, the Uachtarán na hÉireann.
Where before de Valera wanted degradation, now he needed gravitas, he needed a president with statue, someone to elevate this brand-new office and make the people take notice. With the enthusiastic support of the opposition party Fine Gael led by his old rival W. T. Cosgrave, they selected a Protestant academic, Douglas Ross Hyde. A celebrated linguist from an Anglican family, Hyde was the first president of Conradh na Gaeilge, the Gaelic League setup to revive the Irish language. No better way to divorce the crown than to make a protestant the stealth chief of state of a Catholic country, something unconstitutional in Britian.
The king was still king, but Dublin was not calling anymore.
