Asquith

Would Bonar Law lead or authorize a coup against the Asquith government?

But after two indecisive general elections in 1910, Asquith and the Liberals needed the votes of moderate Irish nationalists in Parliament to remain in power.

Bonar Law was both a true believer in the Ulster cause and a shrewd political operator, who correctly perceived that home rule could be used to bring down Asquith and the Liberals.

His infamous Blenheim Palace speech of July 1912 bears comparison with the most inflammatory things Trump has ever said, beginning with his denunciation of Asquith’s coalition government — all of whose members had been elected by the voters — as “a Revolutionary Committee which has seized upon despotic power by fraud”:

When dozens of officers at the Curragh, the British Army’s principal base in Ireland, announced in March 1914 that they would refuse orders to enforce home rule in Ulster — with the private encouragement of generals in London — Asquith’s Cabinet caved in to their demands and covered up the entire affair, insisting that no mutiny had occurred because no direct orders were disobeyed.