ABSTRACT
This verse, written by an English schoolboy in the 1890s, happily captures two of the three themes of this essay. The first theme is that, from an English perspective, the role of Ireland in the United Kingdom was distinctive and ambiguous, and raises important questions about the nature of the Union at the end of the nineteenth century. The second theme is that the great developments in the history of the Union in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which culminated in the establishment of the Irish Free State but did not change the relationships between Scotland and Wales and the rest of the Union, were entangled in the struggles of Westminster politics. The third theme of the essay is that the First World War cast a strong, if unnatural, light on British attitudes to the nature of the Union, from which there is much to be learned about Britain as a national or multi-national state. Each of these themes is illustrated by an examination of the position taken by the Conservative and Unionist Party, whose very name and existence were predicated on maintaining the Union with Ireland, towards the separation of Southern Ireland as it developed from nightmare to reality between 1917 and 1921.
