Edward Henry Carson, Baron Carson

Edward Henry Carson, Baron Carson (born Feb. 9, 1854, Dublin, Ire.—died Oct. 22, 1935, Minster, Kent, Eng.) , known as the “uncrowned king of Ulster,” was a lawyer and politician who successfully led Ulster unionist resistance to the British government’s attempts to introduce Home Rule for the whole of Ireland.

Although Carson was to become the champion of the northern province, he was born into a Protestant family in southern Ireland and was reared and educated there. Early in his Irish legal career (from 1877), he came to mistrust the Irish nationalists. As senior crown prosecutor, he sternly enforced the Crimes Act of 1887, securing numerous convictions for violence against Irish estates owned by English absentee landlords. He was appointed Irish solicitor general and elected to the British House of Commons in 1892, was called to the English bar in 1893, and served as British solicitor general from 1900 to 1905. During these years Carson achieved his greatest success as a barrister. In 1895 his cross-examination of Oscar Wilde largely secured the Irish writer’s conviction for homosexuality.

On Feb. 21, 1910, Carson accepted the parliamentary leadership of the anti-Home Rule Irish Unionists and, forfeiting his chance to lead the British Conservative Party, devoted himself entirely to the Ulster cause. His dislike of southern Irish separatism was reinforced by his belief that the heavy industry of Belfast was necessary to the economic survival of Ireland. The Liberal government (1908–16) under H.H. Asquith, which in 1912 decided to prepare a Home Rule bill, could not overcome the effect of Carson’s extra-parliamentary opposition . The Solemn League and Covenant of resistance to Home Rule, signed by Carson and other leaders in Belfast on Sept. 28, 1912, and afterward by thousands of Ulstermen, was followed by his establishment of a provisional government in Belfast in September 1913. Early in that year he recruited a private Ulster army, the Ulster Volunteer Force, that openly drilled for fighting in the event that the Home Rule Bill was enacted. In preparation for a full-scale civil war, he successfully organized the landing of a large supply of weapons from Germany at Larne, County Antrim, on April 24, 1914. The British government, however, began to make concessions to Ulster unionists, and on the outbreak of World War I Carson agreed to a compromise whereby the Home Rule Bill was enacted but its operation suspended until the end of the war on the understanding that Ulster’s exclusion would then be reconsidered.

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Appointed attorney general in Asquith’s wartime coalition ministry on May 25, 1915, Carson resigned on October 19 because of his dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war. In David Lloyd George’s coalition ministry (1916–22) he was first lord of the Admiralty (Dec. 10, 1916, to July 17, 1917) and then a member of the war cabinet as minister without portfolio (to Jan. 21, 1918).

Disillusioned by the Government of Ireland Act of 1920 that partitioned Ireland and established what was essentially a Home Rule parliament in Belfast, he declined an invitation to head the Northern Ireland government and resigned as Ulster Unionist leader in February 1921. Accepting a life peerage, he served from 1921 to 1929 as lord of appeal in ordinary and took the title Baron Carson of Duncairn.