Enigma

by Paul Bew

  The government had little choice save to respond by introducing a significant change in parliamentary procedure—the closure of debate. On the day following this move, 3 February, the government announced the arrest of the Land League’s main inspiration, Michael Davitt, and in the ensuing uproar Parnell and thirty-five other Irish members were expelled from the House. In fact this was far from effective parliamentary strategy, as it gave the initiative to the government. It was widely rumoured that Parnell later apologised to his colleagues for his lack of self-control.58

  Later this moment was presented by Davitt himself as the critical one. Irish passions were running very high. This was clearly the time to make the revolutionary bid for secession of the Irish Party and for an all-out ‘no rent’ campaign. In fact it is doubtful if the crisis ever had this potential. At this moment a majority of even the most committed militants feared to push things so far: in their view the country was not sufficiently ripe for such drastic action. The ‘hard men’ had the more limited objective of sending Parnell to America to obtain more money while they tightened their grip on the home organisation, while the less committed—the avowed parliamentarians—felt that their position had been strengthened by their good showing in the coercion debate and were consequently more ready to resist ‘extremism’.

  The Land League executive assembled in Paris within a couple of days of Davitt’s arrest to discuss their response. But for a whole week Parnell did not appear. In desperation they opened his mail, and for the first time (so it was recalled) his colleagues learned of the O’Shea liaison. If so, they also learned of another woman in Parnell’s life when they opened one of his letters. Healy later claimed it was from ‘Lizzie from Blankshire’, a barmaid with whom Parnell was having a sexual relationship. In fact, as Frank Callanan has shown, Healy’s claim to knowledge was rather more detailed: Lizzie from Shropshire worked in the Wellington Hotel in Manchester, very much an Irish centre.59 It was a hotel which Parnell had often used. At any rate, Parnell’s lieutenants as a group were now sharply aware of the sexual scandals potentially connected to their leader. Within hours of this invasion of their leader’s privacy Parnell himself arrived. However, Parnell’s views, when finally made clear, were a relief to almost everyone. Parnell refused the secession option and in doing so acted in accord with his deepest convictions; at this point they were also the deepest convictions of most of his followers. He spoke instead of the value of parliamentary work and of building links with the English masses. He gave an interview also to the French press marking considerable distance from Fenianism.

  Andrew Kettle, perhaps the most convinced advocate of secession in this period—unlike the more realistic neo-Fenians—was bitterly disappointed. When he heard Parnell’s proposals he fully agreed with Dillon’s whispered aside: ‘It was Kitty wrote that, Parnell never wrote a line of it.’ Not without some regrets, Parnell had made an irrevocable decision. He had turned his back on a rapid solution of the land problem—a rapid solution which his own views implied was strictly necessary—and effectively surrendered the initiative to Gladstone. In September 1891, a fortnight before his death, Parnell lunched with Kettle in Dublin. Kettle records Parnell as having said: ‘How much better would it have been had we taken your advice in ‘81. It would have been all over and won long ago.’ Kettle replied: ‘I suppose if the land question had been settled then, you would have most of the property people in your movement before this.’60

  The British premier continued to feel that Ireland was on the edge of social dissolution—or, to put it another way, was about to enter a crisis which contained incalculable risks for British policy. The obvious alternative was to attempt to split the agitation by buying off a significant section of its adherents. In April 1881 he therefore introduced a bill which provided for a fixed period of tenure at fair rents and for free sale of the tenants’ interest in the farms. But was it too late? There was a serious issue of timing as well as of principle. There had been a serious argument against proceeding with the coercion bill before a land bill. Moderate nationalists and northern Liberals tended to agree on precisely this point.61 Regardless, however, of its imperfect timing, Parnell immediately recognised privately that Gladstone had done enough. His speech in reply was characteristic. ‘We do not wish the Irish landlords’, he told the House of Commons, ‘and the Irish tenants continually to live in opposing camps. As individuals, the landlords are well fitted to take their place as the leaders of the Irish nation.’62 It was a remark which provoked the radical Thomas Mooney (alias ‘Transatlantic’), the correspondent of the New York Irish World: ‘“Individual landlords are well fitted to take their place as leaders of the Irish nation.” Who are these landlords, Mr Parnell? Except yourself, I see not one in the crowd.’63 It was indeed a major reform. It was to bring about a rent reduction of about 20 per cent for the Irish tenantry and to point the way towards the abolition of landlordism. Even those peasants who regarded the ‘three Fs’ only as a stopgap reform were interested in Gladstone’s proposal for a land court to consider rents. In the circumstances of the time, it was felt that this agency must bring about substantial reductions.

  Before Gladstone’s proposal became law in late August Parnell had relatively few problems in dealing with it. Parnell himself had always been sure that Gladstone’s bill would become law, but many on his left had been equally sure that somehow reactionary forces in London would block it. To maintain agitational feeling was the easiest way of ensuring that amendments made the legislation even more favourable to the Irish tenants. However, with the passing of the act—towards which Gladstone developed an emotional and sentimental attitude—the situation entered a new phase. Refusal to wind down the agitation implied the risk of imprisonment and the loss of ‘moderate’ support in Ireland. On the other hand, refusal to maintain the agitation would have alienated Irish-American feeling and the radical wing of the Land League.

  Then, in early September, a by-election in Tyrone was to play a key role in influencing the course of events. The Liberal candidate, T. A. Dickson, had been closely associated with the shifts of Ulster Liberalism towards a more radical agrarian position. His Conservative opponent was Col. W. S. Knox, a long-established Orange deputy grand master and for many years MP for Dungannon. Initially an advocate of confrontation with the Land League, Knox now supported the 1881 act. Also contesting the seat was the Rev. Harold Rylett, an Ulster-based Unitarian minister who had been active in the Land League. At the 1880 election the Catholic vote had gone almost 100 per cent Liberal, while the protestant vote had been two-thirds Conservative and one-third Liberal. But at the 1881 by-election the Catholic vote was split two ways, with the Liberal and the Home Rule candidates getting about equal shares, while the Protestant vote was divided again, this time with 44 per cent for the Liberal and 56 per cent for the Conservative. The final tally was: Dickson 3,168, Knox 3,084, and Rylett 907. Gladstone took great heart from the defeat of both the Tory and the Parnellite.

  The Tyrone by-election result was, in fact, a success for Parnell in that half the Catholic vote had gone to a Protestant Home Rule candidate, contrary to clerical dictation and in a manifestly hopeless constituency for that cause. But it was also a coup for Ulster Liberalism to have collected just under half the Protestant vote in a constituency where pan-Protestant sentiment had previously sustained landlord hegemony. But by following only the ‘headline fact’ of a Liberal victory, it seemed to Gladstone that his brand of metropolitan Liberalism was alive and well in Ireland.

  The victory did not immediately tip Gladstone towards any coercive act, rather the reverse. Gladstone wrote to Forster on 8 September 1881: ‘The unexpected victory in Tyrone is an event of great importance and I owe it much, which increases my desire to meet this remarkable Irish manifestation and discomfiture both of Parnell and Tories with some act of clemency.’64 There is no doubt that the GOM’s self-confidence was boosted. On 10 September Gladstone wrote to John Givan, the Liberal MP for Monaghan, of the ‘t
errible blow which you have been able to inflict on Parnell and Parnellism in Tyrone’.65 As the days passed he became more and more exasperated with Parnell. Gladstone told Bright on 29 September: ‘My inclination is to denounce outright Parnell (not the Irish party, nor even the Land League) and his works and ways.’66 In fact Gladstone simply did not grasp the inner drift of Parnellite policy—nor, indeed, his dominant place within the popular imagination.

  Shortly after the Tyrone defeat Parnell told William O’Brien:

  This Act won’t settle the question. Of course it won’t. It proposes to unsettle it every fifteen years whether we like it or not. But so far as it works, it can only help the farmers. It will bankrupt one-third of the landlords, which is more than any ‘No Rent’ campaign of ours could do, and it will make the rest only too happy to be purchased out in an escape from the lawyers. It does not abolish landlordism, but it will make landlordism intolerable for the landlords. There is the Act, and you will have to lay hold of it or others will, and crush you. That is the only blunder that could damage the League.’67

  Parnell tried to steer a middle course. At a Land League convention in September 1881 majority sentiment refused to reject the reform. The bulk of Parnell’s speech, however, developed a typical theme. He maintained that the disputes between landlord and tenant prevented the unity of classes in an Irish national movement. The British government, realising this, had deliberately produced a mechanism in the 1881 Land Act, providing for rent to be revised every fifteen years, which would maintain the existence of these disputes. ‘Parnell [at the convention] was at one and the same time’, William O’Brien commented, ‘as truly conservative as the most staid ecclesiastic in the assembly, and to any necessary extent more truly revolutionary than the most blatant of the young lions who roared at him for revolutionary measures.’ But he admitted that Parnell’s analysis of the effects of the Land Act ‘passed unnoticed at the time’.68 The face-saving formula that the act was to be ‘tested’ was produced to allay the fears of the left. Also in September, and again to mollify the left, it was decided that two tenants in each district should be chosen to determine what was a fair rent for all holdings; this was a blatant attempt to usurp the powers of the Land Commission, which had been set up to operate the Land Act. And no sooner had Parnell persuaded the Land League to adopt the programme of ‘testing the act’ than he sent a wire to the president of the Land League of America stressing that tenants had been advised to ‘rely on the old methods to reach justice’ and alleging that the test cases were intended to expose the hollowness of the act. Open confrontation with Gladstone became more and more likely. At Cork, at the beginning of October, Parnell declared: ‘Well, my definition of a fair rent is this (cries of “No rent” and orders) that the landlord might have whatever the land was worth originally, before it was improved by the tenant or his predecessors in title. . . . Now, gentlemen, I would measure the original value of the rental of Ireland before it was improved by the tenant at about two or three million pounds sterling a year—not more.’69

  Gladstone took this language literally and saw a scheme to sabotage the Land Act by setting a standard for rent reduction which was clearly absurd. On 7 October Gladstone assaulted Parnell verbally at Leeds:

  For nearly the first time in the history of Christendom a body—a small body—of men has arisen who are not ashamed to preach in Ireland the doctrine of public plunder. . . . I will frankly take the case of Mr Parnell as exhibiting what I mean when I say the state of things in Ireland is coming to a question between law on the one hand and sheer lawlessness on the other. . . .

  Mr Parnell says if the Crown of England is to be the link between the two countries, it must be the only link; but whether it is to be the link at all—I am not quoting his words—is a matter on which he has not, I believe, given any opinion whatever. . . .

  Mr Parnell is very copious in his references to America. He has said America is the only friend of Ireland; but in all his references to America he has never found time to utter one word of disapproval or misgiving about what is known as the assassination literature of that country.70

  Gladstone also declared at Leeds: ‘He [Parnell] desires to arrest the operation of the Land Act, to stand, as Moses stood, between the living and the dead; but to stand there, not to arrest but to extend the plague.’ There was a clear logic here: Parnell was threatening the operation of the Land Act, and if he continued to do so, he would be removed. ‘If it shall appear that there is still to be fought in Ireland a final conflict between law on one side, and sheer lawlessness on the other, if the law purged from defect and from any taint of injustice is still to be repelled and refused, and the first conditions of political society to remain unfulfilled, then I say, gentlemen, the resources of civilisation are not yet exhausted.’71

  But other parts of the speech seemed to lack logic and realism. The increased wealth of Irish farmers as registered by their bank statements was noted—but did this not imply that Irish disaffection was not simply a product of distress, as Liberals rather implied? More profoundly, Gladstone did everything possible to deny Parnell the title of the authentic leader of the Irish people. Dead (Daniel O’Connell) or veteran (Charles Gavan Duffy) patriots were exalted. The Liberal victory in the recent Tyrone by-election was hailed. The supporters of Shaw were mentioned, ‘moderate’ Land Leaguers were mentioned, so also were sensible Catholic clerics, and even John Dillon MP, temporarily in tactical disagreement with Parnell.

  The Parnellites, Gladstone continued, were an unrepresentative elite, ‘a handful of men’ but not a party, afraid that the people of England will win the ‘hearts of the Irish people’. Their strategy would be to approach the land courts with generously treated tenants and thus hope to establish a scale of concession in the early cases which would, in effect, destroy the Irish land system. But the admission that Liberals had not yet won the hearts of the Irish people was telling. Gladstone spoke as if there was a silent majority in Ireland which backed him, but he had to admit that it was silent. He bemoaned the weakness of the Irish middle class, adding that ‘the government had no moral force behind it in Ireland’.72

  It was a stunning admission which clearly undermined the rest of his analysis. It gave Parnell the opening for a very effective reply. It was a speech characterised by ‘a provoking coolness, a merciless strength of argument, and a suspicion of contempt for the thunders of his angry antagonist’.73 He laughed at Gladstone’s praise for O’Connell—Gladstone had, of course, forgotten to mention that, for all O’Connell’s legalism, he (Gladstone) had been part of a cabinet which had locked O’Connell up. Parnell noted: ‘Perhaps the day may come when even I may get a good word from an English statesman as a moderate man—even if I am dead and buried.’74 William O’Brien concluded: ‘He wound up with the anticipation—calm, almost businesslike, but sure as if his tongue had been touched with the Hebrew prophet by fire—that Gladstone would yet eat his brave words and recognise that England’s mission in Ireland has been a failure, and that Irishmen have established their right to govern Ireland by laws, made by themselves on Irish soil.’75

  Parnell’s reply was contemptuous but he must have been concerned by the Prime Minister’s choice of words. Gladstone imagined himself as avoiding a threatening tone in this speech, but it contained some distinctly menacing statements. Gladstone had made reference to ‘the resources of civilisation’, which, in the Prime Minister’s view, were not yet exhausted. Did the ‘resources of civilisation’ include a cell in Kilmainham? Parnell’s ally, John Ferguson, told him that was exactly what was coming—Parnell dismissed the idea, but he must have known that Ferguson was probably right.76

  6

  When the crunch finally came, it came in confusing circumstances which make it difficult to assess fully Parnell’s intentions. Despite the increasingly sharp nature of his exchanges with Gladstone, it is unlikely that Parnell was actually courting arrest. Parnell was personally convinced that his subsequent arrest was unluc
kily determined by the result of the by-election in Tyrone in September 1881. J. J. O’Kelly agreed that the Parnellites should never have fought the seat. But, in truth, Gladstone’s misreading of that by-election was only part of a wider misreading of Irish politics.

  William O’Brien, the editor of Parnell’s newly established newspaper, United Ireland, who had been in close touch with the Irish leader since the summer of 1881, records Parnell’s strong personal distaste for the prospect of arrest at this time. Parnell was also speaking of going abroad for a continental holiday, which he probably intended as cover for a further stay in the company of Mrs O’Shea. Parnell had other more personal reasons for not wanting to be arrested. Mrs O’Shea was at this time pregnant with his child. Labouchere has also contributed to an understanding of Parnell’s feelings at this moment. He wrote: ‘Physically he was no coward, but he had a morbid horror of imprisonment, partly because it interfered with his burrowing proclivities, and partly because he thought that it would weaken the fetishism of the Irish for him, which placed him on a higher level than common humanity.’77 At the time of his arrest he seems to have even considered for a minute the possibility of escape. At 6 a.m. on 13 October 1881 the porter at Morrison’s Hotel in Dublin, where Parnell was staying, was called up to receive a visit from John Mallon, the chief of the Dublin detective division, with a warrant for the arrest of Parnell as one ‘reasonably suspected of treasonable practices’. The porter managed to keep the detectives in the hall while he communicated the ill news to Parnell in his bedroom. Parnell was told that every servant in the house would die for him, and he was also shown a passage along the chimney-pots over which he could easily reach the attic window of a neighbouring friendly house. Parnell considered this idea for a moment but finally replied: ‘Thanks, no—I don’t think so.’ ‘Kindly bid them wait below,’ he added, issuing this order to the detectives, according to one account, ‘with a hauteur of which his own servants never knew a trace’.