Certainly Craig – like Trimble – vaulted into the national consciousness as a hardline Unionist. But both men were far more complex than they first appeared. Indeed, when each man eventually sought to treat with the representatives of Irish nationalism, their flexibility would amaze supporters and opponents alike. Born in 1924, Craig had been a gunner in RAF Lancaster bombers during the Second World War. After building up successful solicitor’s practices, he had entered the Northern Ireland Parliament for Larne in 1960. During the O’Neill era, he was portrayed (along with Faulkner) as a dynamic, modernising Wunderkind who could accomplish great things for the Province: a meritocratic, almost Wilsonian contrast with the ‘big house’ Unionists who largely ran the Province till 1971. Craig was also an ardent proponent of German-style federalism for the United Kingdom and Ireland. Significantly, Trimble recalls that Craig and he were the only two elected Unionists publicly to support a ‘Yes’ vote in the 1975 Referendum on the Common Market.20 Moreover, most Ulster Unionists were instinctive Tories who until 1974 took the Conservative whip in the Commons – hence the latter party’s official title of ‘Conservative and Unionist’. By contrast, neither Craig nor Trimble were High Tories in the Enoch Powell mode.
These subtleties were, for the time being, lost in the mêlée. Unionist Ulster felt it was fighting for its life. Only a campaign of mass cross-class mobilisation – of the kind which Loyalists had launched against Home Rule in 1912 – could save the Province from absorption into an all-Ireland Republic. To a young Unionist activist at Queen’s such as David Burnside, it did not then seem improbable that such a feat could be replicated. After all, it had been accomplished within living memory: veterans of the original UVF and 36th (Ulster) Division still regularly walked on Orange marches and there were large numbers of people around with military training from the Second World War.21 Craig’s chosen vehicle for conducting the struggle was the Vanguard Movement, which he launched as a pressure group within the Unionist party on 9 February 1972. Following the precedent of 1912, they produced a Vanguard Covenant. It asserted that the 1920 settlement – which partitioned Ireland into two parts, North and South – could not be undone save with the consent of the Parliament of Northern Ireland. By proroguing Stormont, and introducing an almost colonial system of direct rule from Westminster, Heath had unilaterally abrogated the terms of that bargain. The key test of political authority, the consent of the governed, was now lacking. Craig was accused of denying the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty; but he replied that there were political and moral limits to its theoretical power to legislate as it pleased.
Such propositions would have been uncontroversial amongst most Unionists. But where Vanguard differed was that it drew some highly radical conclusions from this state of affairs. Historically, the unique Ulster-British way of life had best been preserved by Union with Great Britain. But what if Ulster was locked into a loveless marriage and her affections were not reciprocated? What if the terms of that marriage could be altered under pressure from Irish nationalists and the IRA – as exemplified by Westminster’s unilateral destruction of Stormont? What, indeed, if Westminster could use its sovereign power within the Union to deliver the Ulstermen ‘bound into the hands of our enemies’? The price of marriage would then have become too high. Thus, for Vanguard, the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was not an end in itself, but a means to an end. If they could not regain an Ulster Parliament on satisfactory terms within the Union, then Vanguard preferred negotiated independence. The arrangements enjoyed by the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man – under the Crown but not in the Union – looked attractive. Vanguard’s enthusiasm for independent dominion status would soon expose them to accusations from some supporters of Faulkner that they were no longer Unionists, but rather had become ‘Ulster nationalists’.22
At the time, Trimble was prepared to give such Vanguardist ideas a fair wind. In an article in the Sunday News on 20 January 1974, he rebutted the views of Desmond Boal, QC, a leading adviser of Paisley. Boal believed that the time for greater integration of Northern Ireland with the rest of the United Kingdom had passed – but that Ulster independence had never been a runner. Instead, he favoured a federal Ireland Parliament and Provincial Parliament with ‘Stormont’ powers.23 Trimble took particular issue with Boal’s rejection of independence for Northern Ireland. He argued that if one accepted the notion that the British were prepared to pay large sums of money to leave Northern Ireland, then they would surely be just as happy to subsidise an independent Ulster as a united Ireland. He was implying that the coercion of Ulster into a united Ireland was costlier than independence. By contrast, independence might satisfy enough unionists and nationalists to leave behind a relatively stable entity. Intriguingly, he posited the idea that republicans mainly disliked ‘British’ forces, but had an ambiguous attitude towards Protestants (whom he did not describe as ‘British’). Once these ‘British’ forces were gone, and Protestants gave a guarantee that the purpose of such an entity was not to reinforce an anti-Catholic hegemony, all but the most irreconcilable elements of the republican movement might be able to enter into some compact in a new, independent Ulster.
Such ideas must have seemed fairly fanciful as sectarian tensions sharpened. Vanguard held a series of Province-wide rallies, culminating in a great demonstration at Belfast’s Ormeau Park in March 1972: the News Letter estimated the crowd to be 92,000, the RUC put it at 60,000.24Theatricality was an integral part of the Craig roadshow, who would arrive at gatherings with motorcycle outriders. It was widely reported that they were members of a uniformed group called the Vanguard Service Corps – although Trimble, for one, now doubts whether it actually ever existed in any organised sense. Trimble rebuts all allegations by the now deceased loyalist Sam McClure – that he was sworn into VSC at an initiation ceremony at Vanguard headquarters in Hawthornden Road – as ‘utter balls’.25 Some nationalists found Vanguard gatherings fascistic and even Trimble now says he was ‘never terribly comfortable’ at these ‘embarrassing’ occasions. Nonetheless, he attended many such events. He was present at Castle Park, Bangor, in February 1972, where Craig inspected 6,500 men as they stood to attention wearing Vanguard armbands (although Trimble declined to wear one).26 He also turned up for the mass gathering at Stormont, just days after the abolition of the Northern Ireland Parliament had been announced.27
Given the circumstances – both civil war and British withdrawal seemed to be on the cards – Trimble did not consider Craig’s rhetoric to be unjustified. ‘Craig had a tendency to outbursts and to overstate things even before the Troubles,’ recalls Trimble. ‘But he was saying, “Look, there are a lot of people who don’t like the direction of government policy and if pushed they are prepared to fight.” His intention was to make Government in London sit up and think. He certainly succeeded in