5

Charles Stewart Parnell

1846–1891

 

One of the great influences on Parnell, the uncrowned king of Ireland, the almost mythical leader through the Land War to the edge of Home Rule, was his American-born mother.  She was the daughter of Adm. Stewart of the US Navy.  Many of his contemporaries thought, and recent historians have confirmed, that he derived his abiding dislike of the English and their ways from her.  An Irish journalist writing Parnell's life asked his mother why her son had such a rooted antipathy to the English.  'Why should he not?' she answered with American deliberation.  'Have not his ancestors always opposed England?  My grandfather Tudor fought against the English in the War of Independence.  My father fought against the English in the War of 1812, and I suppose the Parnells have no great love of them.'

      His grandfather, Sir John Parnell, had been chancellor of the Irish Exchequer in the last decades of the eighteenth century, when Ireland had its own independent parliament under Grattan, a parliament swept away by the Act of Union in 1801.

      Parnell was the son of a Protestant landowner in Wicklow who retained nationalist sympathies.  Parnell was, however, educated at Yeovil and Chipping Norton, places quintessentially English.  He went to Magdalen College in Oxford, but left the university without taking a degree.

      Parnell was not an intellectual in any way.  However, he took a great interest in practical matters, such as the mines on his Irish estates, and liked nothing better than chemical experiments as light entertainment.  He was solitary and difficult to know, but he was a master of men in public life, and of their emotions.

      Elected member of Parliament from Meath in 1875, he joined the Home Rule group of Irish MPs at Westminster, led by Isaac Butt.  He was in his element in the House of Commons, and soon mastered its procedures, and the techniques of obstruction, which the Irish party had used since they were created by Joseph Biggar.  If the Irish could not rule Ireland, they would attempt to make England ungovernable.  What is called filibustering in America drove the British parliament to distraction.

      After Butt died in 1879, Parnell was a dominant personality in the party, which had many colourful and energetic people in it.  He was asked by Michael Davitt to become the first president of the Land League in 1879, and it was through the Land War that he emerged as the pre-eminent leader of Ireland.

      The Land War involved a great deal of violence and intimidation, and the British government arrested Parnell and other leaders.  A compromise, called the Kilmainham Treaty, was reached while they were in jail in Kilmainham.  Parnell was released, but a few days later a terrorist group murdered the Irish secretary in the Phoenix Park outside Dublin.  Coercion returned.

      The Land League, however, was converted into the National League, and the efforts of Parnell were now directed not towards land reform, which eventually came, but to Home Rule - restoring to Ireland not full independence at once, but full control of its internal affairs.

      This was not fully acceptable to all advanced nationalists.  The Home Rule Bill of 1886 failed, and it was followed by the sensational accusations a year later by The Times of London that Parnell had been connected with the Phoenix Park murders.  But at a special inquiry the letters that they published were soon proved to be forgeries and though the violence of the Land War could not be concealed, Parnell was triumphantly vindicated in the eyes of his followers by the suicide of Richard Pigott, the forger of the letters.  (These events echo all through the work of JAMES JOYCE [25], especially in Ulysses.)

      However, later in 1890, Parnell faced another challenge.  For many years he had been living privately with Mrs Katharine O'Shea, the wife of a fellow Irish member of parliament, by whom he had several children.  In November 1890, Captain O'Shea sued her for divorce and named Parnell as the other man.  The scandal that ensued ruined Parnell in the eyes of many Catholics in Ireland, and the Irish bishops called on the Irish party to reject him as its leader.  In the course of the ensuing split between the two wings of the party, Parnell suddenly died.

      A few years after Parnell's death, a journalist put it to the prime minister, William Gladstone himself, that the Irish leader must have suffered intense pain in that last year.  'Poor fellow!  Poor fellow!  I suppose he did; dear, dear, what a tragedy!  I cannot tell you how much I think about him, and what an interest I take in everything concerning him.  A marvellous man, a terrible fall.'

      With him died any hope of Home Rule for the time being, as the Irish party remained split until 1900.  However, no sooner had it revived itself than it faced a new challenge from the rise of Sinn Féin, demanding outright independence and not merely Home Rule.  Home Rule was granted in 1914, but suspended for the duration of the war.  The Easter Rising and the following Anglo-Irish war led to the creation of the Irish Free State.  Though Parnell was not a republican, he retained the admiration of many of them.  His great achievement was to push the land question towards a conclusion, and to provide the Irish people with a quality of leadership they had not had since DANIEL O'CONNELL [20].

      He remains a man of mystery, for he all too often kept his views to himself.  He ruined himself over his love for Katharine O'Shea, and that was also, in the eyes of many of his followers, an admirable thing.

      A flawed and tragic figure, Parnell survives in the memory of the Irish as one of their greatest leaders.