Sir Edward Henry Carson, Baron Carson of Duncairn (1854–1935), lawyer and Unionist politician. He was born in Harcourt Street, Dublin, on 9 February 1854. His father was Edward Henry Carson, an architect and civil engineer. His family was of Scottish origin. His mother was Isabella Lambert, of Castle Ellen, Athenry, Co. Galway, a member of an Ascendancy landowning family. Her ancestor, General Lambert, was one Oliver Cromwell’s major-generals. The young Carson was educated at Arlington House, Portarlington, and went on to study law at Trinity College Dublin in 1871. He spent much of his time debating in the College Historical Society. He took a pass degree in 1876 and then studied at the King’s Inns, Dublin. He was called to the Irish Bar in 1877.

Carson was among the most successful lawyers of his generation. In 1886 John Gibson, Irish attorney-general, nominated him to be his crown counsel. In 1887 he found himself heavily politically involved and under threat of assassination. During the Plan of Campaign Carson was nicknamed ‘Coercion Carson’. He believed that he was acting quite correctly in prosecuting tenants who refused to pay rent or who revolted against their landlords. He argued that the only way to pacify those who challenged Irish landlordism was to enforce ‘twenty years of resolute government’. In fact, he was proposing a kind of police state. In 1889 Carson became the youngest Queen’s Counsel in Ireland. He was a senior member of the legal profession and for the next three years worked at ordinary civil law cases. On 1 July 1892, Balfour decided to make him Solicitor-General for Ireland. Carson represented Dublin University as a Liberal Unionist MP between 1892 and 1918. In parliament his speech attacking the Second Home Rule Bill in 1893 was highly acclaimed.

Carson transferred his legal practice to London in 1893, and swiftly built up a reputation in the courts and in the House of Commons. He was called to the English Bar in 1892 and to the Inner Bar two years later. A new and exciting period in his life began. Carson was a prominent advocate in many famous trials including Wilde v. the Marquess of Queensberry in 1895. Oscar Wilde ill-advisedly sued Queensberry, an eccentric and violent aristocrat, for libel. Wilde had been Carson’s fellow-student in Trinity, but now he acted for Queensberry. Wilde’s comment when he heard this was: ‘No doubt he will perform his task with all the added bitterness of an old friend’. Carson’s cross-examination was sardonic and relentless—the trial judge later wrote to him saying: ‘I never heard a more powerful speech, or a more searching cross-examination. I congratulate you.’ Wilde lost, but worse was to come. On foot of the evidence elicited by Carson in the libel case, by decision of the Director of Public Prosecutions and with the agreement of H. H. Asquith, then Home Secretary, Wilde was arrested, tried for indecency, convicted, and sentenced to the maximum of two years’ imprisonment. Wilde died in Paris in 1900.

Carson became a member of the Irish Privy Council in 1896. His defence of Irish landlordism from the backbenches made him a critic of Lord Salisbury’s Conservative government. By 1900 Carson was earning a substantial £20,000 a year in fees. He joined the Unionist Government in 1900 as Solicitor-General and received a knighthood. For the next few years he represented the Crown in many cases. He spoke on Irish affairs in Parliament. He supported the demand for a Catholic University and lent his backing to the Irish Universities Act of 1908. When the National University was finally established in 1908 he hoped that it would be

‘a step forward in the union of all classes and religions in Ireland for the progress of our country and its education’.

Carson helped to establish the Ulster Unionist Party in 1905. This was done in response to the threat to the Union posed by the Home Rule crisis in Ireland. The decisive Conservative and Unionist defeat in January 1906 removed many of his ministerial rivals, leaving him free to emerge as one of the most prominent politicians in the United Kingdom. In February 1910 Carson became leader of the Irish Unionist MPs at Westminster. In September 1911 he accepted Craig’s invitation to lead the Ulster Unionists. He refused to contest the leadership of the Conservative Party when Arthur Balfour resigned on 8 November 1911.

He succeeded in bringing credibility and prestige to the Unionist movement. His objective throughout was to preserve the Union between Britain and Ireland, believing it to be in the best interests of his fellow countrymen. Carson was an Irish patriot but not a nationalist. When the Liberals under Asquith introduced the Home Rule Bill (1912), Carson took a leading part in the formation of the Ulster Volunteers, who drilled openly to show that they were prepared to resort to arms rather than be ruled by an Irish parliament in Dublin. The Ulster Unionists planned to set up a government of their own if the Home Rule Bill was passed. He accepted the Agar–Robartes Proposal for the exclusion of four Ulster counties (Antrim, Down, Armagh, and Londonderry), though on 1 January 1913 he had looked for the exclusion of the entire province. On 28 September 1922 Carson signed the ‘Solemn Covenant of Resistance’ to Home Rule in Belfast, together with 200,000 Ulster Unionists. Carson urged people not to be ‘afraid of illegalities,’ and in April 1914 the Ulster Volunteers landed guns at Larne, Co. Antrim, in defiance of the British government but with the open approval of the Conservative Party and most were prepared for conflict. However, a much larger war broke out, the Great War (1914–18). The Home Rule Bill became law in August 1914 but its operation was immediately suspended until after the war. By this time Carson had come to support Irish partition as a solution. He accepted that Home Rule was inevitable.

Carson was appointed Attorney-General on 25 May 1915 but resigned on 19 October in protest at the Government’s conduct of the war. After the Easter Rising he was assured by Lloyd George that the six north-eastern counties would be excluded from the Home Rule Act (1914). He accepted office as First Lord of the Admiralty in the War Cabinet on 7 December 1916, but he resigned on 22 January 1918 after the dismissal of his protegé, John Rushworth Jellicoe, as First Sea Lord in the Admiralty.

When the war ended he became MP for the Duncairn division of Belfast. He published the book Ireland and Home Rule in 1919. With Carson’s advice and with Ulster Unionist support the Government of Ireland Act was passed in 1920. Under this Act parliaments were to be established in the North and in the South. Its aim was to keep both jurisdictions under Westminster control and satisfy and reconcile legitimate Unionist and Nationalist aspirations. In addition, a Council of Ireland was to be established to consider questions of common concern. Carson described the Council as ‘the biggest advance towards unity in Ireland’. In July 1920 he supported Craig in calling for the reorganising of the Ulster Volunteer Force. In May 1921 Carson resigned the leadership of the Unionist Party to become Lord of Appeal in Ordinary in London. In 1921 he accepted a peerage as Baron Carson of Duncairn. He strongly criticised the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921), but from a southern Irish Unionist perspective. Carson continued as a law lord, between 1921 and 1929, defending the interests of southern Unionists in the new Irish Free State. He was by now living permanently in England. He was involved in the curbing of British Government policy in India in 1933.

Outside of his political roles Carson was an ardent Church of Ireland member. He proposed an Alternative Prayer Book of the Church of England (1927). He attended the opening of the new Northern Ireland parliament buildings at Stormont in 1932, and unveiled his own statue in front of the buildings in July 1933. He died at his home at Cleve Court, Isle of Thanet, Kent on the 22 October 1935 and was given a state funeral in Belfast. He was buried in St Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast.

Biography & Studies. St. John G. Ervine, Sir Edward Carson and the Ulster movement (Dublin & London 1915). Edward Marjoribanks & Ian Duncan Colvin, The life of Lord Carson (3 vols, London 1932–36). F. H. Crawford, Guns for Ulster (Belfast 1947). A. T. Q. Stewart, The Ulster crisis: resistance to Home Rule, 1912–1914 (London 1967). J. C. Beckett, ‘Carson: unionist and rebel’, in his Confrontations: studies in Irish history (London 1972). Patrick Buckland, Irish Unionism (Dublin 1972–3). Patrick Buckland, Irish Unionism, 1885–1923: a documentary history (Belfast 1973). H. Montgomery Hyde, Carson: the life of Sir Edward Carson, Lord Carson of Duncairn (London 1974). A. T. Q. Stewart, Edward Carson (Dublin 1981). Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London 1987). Alvin Jackson, Sir Edward Carson (Dundalk 1993). John Hostettler, Sir Edward Carson: a dream too far (Chichester 1997; 2nd ed. Chichester 2000). Merlin Holland, Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess: the real trial of Oscar Wilde (London 2003). Alvin Jackson, Home Rule: an Irish history, 1800–2000 (London 2003). Owen Dudley Edwards, ‘Carson as advocate: Marjoribanks and Wilde’, in Sabine Wichert (ed), From the United Irishmen to twentieth-century unionism (Dublin 2004). Geoffrey Lewis, Carson: the man who divided Ireland (London 2005).

Tomás O’Riordan