by Paul Bew
Conor Cruise O’Brien has written that Parnell’s speech to the Eighty Club was a ‘masterly one’. In Dr O’Brien’s assessment, he effectively neutralised his clerical wing and his agrarian wing by knocking ‘their heads together lightly but firmly’. ‘No leader who was not immensely sure of his own prestige could have made such a speech; the leader who could make it, and evoke no public protest, might be pardoned if he thought himself thereafter to be almost omnipotent.’25 While the speech at Eighty Club was masterly, it was also in part untrue. Parnell’s interview with William O’Brien was in December 1886, not early in 1887, and neither Parnell nor Dillon was in prison when Parnell was called on to give his verdict on the plan.26 Parnell’s career had been built on an ability to exploit English ignorance of significant details of Irish political history, and it is not surprising that he fell into the habit of spinning tales; but it was a little worrying for his supporters that some of the details of Parnell’s stories were checkable and therefore open to refutation. In a rather different spirit to that of Dr O’Brien, Dr Laurence M. Geary has observed: ‘The assertion that he [Parnell] was maturing a method of agrarian organisation to succeed the Plan, while incontrovertible, was uncorroborated, and in the circumstances must remain questionable. Parnell’s Eighty Club address was a cynical attempt to reassert his authority over a movement which two years of seclusion, political inactivity and, particularly, his failure to lead the agrarian struggle had done much to undermine.’27
The Conservative Morning Post denounced the Eighty Club as an ‘anarchical’ body.28 It admitted that for Parnell it was ‘a triumph for him no doubt’. The Times noted that it seemed surprising that Mr Parnell appeared to be unaware that the official organ of the League, United Ireland, supported the Plan of Campaign.29 The Irish Times was, however, rather more subtle: it commented that while Parnell’s speech appeared to be a rejection of the papal rescript against the Plan, it was, in effect, an ‘endorsement of the edict of the sacred college’.30 The editorial gently mocked those Gladstonians who had supported the Plan of Campaign but were now left isolated by the Irish leader.
4
But there was still the nagging problem of the Times allegations. In fact, this problem was to be aggravated by Frank Hugh O’Donnell’s libel suit against that newspaper which came on in court in July 1888. O’Donnell’s case failed; but worse—from Parnell’s point of view—the case was used by The Times to repeat the old accusations and to add some more. The Times, for example, produced a new letter, dated 9 January 1882 and supposedly from Parnell to Patrick Egan:
Dear E,
What are these people waiting for? This inaction is inexcuseable [sic]. Our best men are in prison and nothing is being done. Let there be an end to this hesitency [sic]. You undertook to make it hot for old Forster and Co. Let us have some evidence of your power to do so. My health is good, thanks.
Yours very truly,
Chas S. Parnell
The spelling mistakes in this letter were to provide clues which were to lead to the unmasking of the forgery, but in the first instance the letter placed Parnell once more on the defensive. Parnell’s reaction was to demand a select committee of the House of Commons to settle the matter. The Salisbury government, however, was in no mood to assist him; indeed, it gave practical aid to his enemies at The Times.
The government established a Special Commission to investigate not only the letters but also the list of charges made in ‘Parnellism and Crime’ by The Times against the Nationalist movement. The government was to give much covert assistance to the Commission. Behind the scenes—and here the Parnellite suspicion of Chamberlain is fully justified—Chamberlain was pushing the government in this direction also.
Parnell seems to have been a little puzzled. Surely the Conservatives could not believe in his guilt? He had an interesting conversation with a society hostess on this point:
During either the second or third call he said, ‘You know Lord S, do you not?’ I replied I did and had been dining there a few evenings previously. Mr Parnell then said, ‘Do you happen to know whether he personally thinks I was in any way connected with Burke’s murder? And what his opinion is about these forgeries?’ Now, it so happened that there had been considerable discussion on these subjects; the Parnell Commission was sitting at the time if I remember rightly, to inquire into these forgeries, and the general consensus of opinion had not been in Mr Parnell’s favour. Lord S had spoken rather severely. I, therefore, turned from a direct reply, saying, ‘His Lordship did not tell me any secrets, but offered me a golden crown if I would bring to him your head on a charger.’ He looked amused and grasped that pumping me was no use.31
During 1888 and 1889 the Special Commission carried out a detailed inquiry into Irish Nationalist activity. Unfortunately the historical value of this massive investigation is considerably lessened by the fact that it was dominated by a series of loaded questions. It tended to treat one of the greatest popular mass national movements Europe has known as a conspiracy. It was obsessed with the role of Fenian republicans behind the scenes: with the idea that they may have been the paymasters of violence and that they were a subversive controlling agent behind the open ‘front’ movement. At the end of its deliberations the Commission reported that the Land League leaders had promoted an agrarian agitation and that outrages had been committed in this context. However, the Commission exonerated them from serious charges of criminal association. This was inevitable following the exposure of the Times documents as forgeries. ‘Really, between ourselves, I think it is just about what I would have said myself,’ Parnell laconically observed.
For long before the Commission reached its final, rather obvious, conclusion, a Dublin journalist, Richard Pigott, was revealed in February 1889 as the real author of the letters supposedly written by Parnell. Pigott’s financial difficulties and general unscrupulousness—not to mention his spelling and handwriting peculiarities—were so well known that leading Home Rulers had been quick to guess his role. Henry Labouchere had, of course, scented in the whole business a chapter of chroniques scandaleuses after his own heart. He set to work to study it at once con amore, and very soon came to the conclusion that all the letters had been forged by Richard Pigott, the story of whose chequered career was soon to become the property of the general public. Parnell, however, was rather disappointed that the guilty party was not O’Shea. He resolutely refused to accept Pigott’s denials that the Captain had been involved. He tried to persuade his Liberal backers to place a detective to spy on a public house which O’Shea used for assignations. When they refused, Parnell himself took to hanging around the spot. All this came to nothing: Pigott it was, and not O’Shea.
The collapse of Pigott during his cross-examination by Parnell’s counsel, Sir Charles Russell, was accompanied by scenes of ghastly farce. As even the sombre Victorian judges rolled about with laughter, the unfortunate forger disintegrated. His exit lines became more and more pathetic: ‘Bad as I am, I am always true to those who trusted me. . . . I don’t pretend to be virtuous. . . . Spelling is not my strong point.’32 J. L. Garvin records: ‘The lamentable Pigott, with his bald head, red face, white whiskers, loose mouth, his disreputable but not unkindly lineaments, foolishly smiling—he looked like a churchwarden or sidesman gone wrong—was racked and crushed in the witness box.’33 Every statement seemed to increase the hilarity. Few men could survive such a public humiliation. Pigott’s suicide was tacitly expected on all sides. Within a fortnight he shot himself when being arrested in Madrid. He was the victim not alone of his own follies but of the vicious atmosphere in British politics in this period.
There certainly seems to have been an element of official collusion involved in Pigott’s ‘escape’. Andrew Dunlop saw Pigott leave his two ‘minders’ at the door of Anderton’s Hotel and walk straight into the dense crowd in Fleet Street ‘while his two “keepers” remained at the door of the hotel’. Dunlop added: ‘I quite realised at the moment that Pigott would not be seen a
gain in the witness box, and that the men who had charge of him did not prevent his “escape”.’34 Of course, there would have been many important figures glad to see Pigott’s departure and subsequent death: the whole seamy story of the Tory/Times plot against Parnell required to be forgotten as quickly as possible.
Parnell had been particularly lucky because Pigott’s collapse followed hard on the heels of Major Le Caron’s damaging evidence. Le Caron was one of several British spies who sat at the heart of American Fenianism in the 1880s. Sir Robert Anderson, the spymaster, had accepted Le Caron’s offer to testify in order to boost the Times case—yet another indication of the way in which shadowy forces worked behind the scenes in this period. Le Caron proved beyond any doubt that Parnell was in the habit of giving leading Irish-Americans a decidedly revolutionary prospectus in private as late as 1881. He told the court that Parnell had assured him personally that he believed that only a revolution would free Ireland. But strangely, he did not tell the Commission about one incident. In his last report, filed in December 1888, Le Caron told his London ‘handlers’ that Luke Dillon, the great hard man of Philadelphia Irish nationalism, had told him that Patrick Egan had told him (Dillon) that Parnell had foreknowledge of the Phoenix Park murders. In his later memoir Le Caron mentions Egan’s claim that Parnell was ‘all right’ as a ‘revolutionist’ without discussion of the Luke Dillon story about Phoenix Park. Why did Le Caron not raise the issue in his evidence or his book? There is one possible answer. Compared to the Times letters, the Egan story is third-hand tittle-tattle—and it is worth noting that Le Caron gave his evidence just before Pigott’s collapse. Le Caron believed that Parnell had been a genuine revolutionary, but, like others, he held the view that imprisonment had changed the Irish leader: being behind bars had a ‘singularly happy effect on moderating his views’.35 This does not quite explain Le Caron’s failure to mention Luke Dillon’s story in his later book, but there is a sense in which the exposure of Pigott’s forgeries rendered all such stories at a discount. In truth, as Parnell well understood, all the other evidence before the Commission—however interesting some of it was—was now irrelevant. He now became the stellar figure of London politics, both vindicated and glamorous; still with the whiff of cordite but without unpleasant associations. He was now the hero of the hour for Liberal audiences.
In early March Parnell was once again invited to dinner at the Eighty Club, the elite Liberal dining club. He had been invited on an earlier occasion as guest of honour; this time the guest of honour was Earl Spencer, and Parnell was present as the guest of Sir Charles Russell. Parnell was, as usual, half an hour late and delayed the start of dinner. Richard Burdon Haldane warned him that he might be expected to say a few words about Spencer: a reluctant Parnell asked to be reassured on certain points—had Spencer been Lord Lieutenant twice, and had he been in Ireland when the Irish Church Bill was passed?
Parnell hastily inserted a brief reference to Spencer’s Irish career in his speech, but the main preoccupation of his speech lay elsewhere. What he did say was that there were two ways, and two ways only, in which Ireland could be governed. One was by full Home Rule. The other was through a dictator. But for such a dictatorship there was one man unfit, and he was Mr Arthur Balfour. Haldane added: ‘I was the more impressed by this because he had said to me only a few minutes before that he had been reading a most remarkable book, which threw more light on the Irish question than any book he had seen. I had eagerly asked what this new source of knowledge was and he replied: “It is a book called The English in Ireland by a Mr Froude.”’36
Haldane’s surprise is understandable. In the early 1870s Froude’s ‘anti-Irish’ histories infuriated Irish liberals such as W. E. H. Lecky, J. E. Cairnes and G. C. Brodrick—while nationalists such as John Mitchel, W. J. O’Neill Daunt and Father Thomas N. Burke saw Froude as an apologist for torture and oppression. As Roy Foster has acutely observed, Parnell took a certain pleasure in saying the unexpected, but this reference to Froude was not done merely to shock. He was, as the content of his speech made clear, accepting Froude’s fundamental insight that attempts to combine colonialism and liberal democracy in Ireland were bound to be self-defeating: the fact that Balfour, derided as ‘pretty Fanny’ when he first arrived in Ireland, made a better fist of it than many expected did not negate the point.
At a meeting in London a few days later Morley hailed Parnell as the leader who would make Ireland an ‘equal’ member of the British Empire: ‘The Irish leader looked extremely well and was dressed with taste and care. The buttonhole of his double-breasted frock coat was adorned by a carnation.’37 Sir Robert Peel (junior), the only Tory MP to defect to Gladstone on the Home Rule issue, was present. This was a great symbolic comfort to Gladstone, a former member of a Peel cabinet in the 1840s. Gladstone argued that moderate serious Peelite Tories would have supported his policies on Ireland, unlike the degenerate chauvinists of the Salisbury era.
But if Parnell enjoyed shocking Haldane with historical paradox, he did not enjoy a further historical discussion with Gladstone. On 19 March 1889 Mrs Sydney Buxton recorded an incident during a dinner held in her home: ‘After dinner Mr Gladstone and Mr Parnell had a long talk. Mr Gladstone, of course, assumed that Mr Parnell knew all about the ancient history of Ireland and when he said “That occurred in ’41”, Mr Parnell looked as if he didn’t know what century and didn’t the least care.’38 Katharine O’Shea recorded: ‘Almost the only comment when he got home was, “That’s over; thank goodness.”’39
If it were possible, Parnell’s cynical attitude towards British Liberalism became even more marked. As Parnell’s wife was later to put it: ‘As Parnell became moderate in politics, Gladstone became more extreme.’ It was Gladstone and not Parnell who spoke of ‘the government itself as of all the greatest master and most perfect pattern of illegality’.40
Gladstone continued on his radical course: he talked of the ‘slaughter’ perpetuated by the authorities in Ireland and appeared to suggest that the atrocities of the Irish constabulary outweighed the Armenian atrocities.41 Such language was open to an obvious riposte. In 1882, for example, when Gladstone was Prime Minister, the Irish police had killed children at Ballina in a collision with, at least, some similarity to the Mitchelstown tragedy of 1887. Critics suggested that Gladstone ought to have approached these events in a more moderate spirit, acknowledging that his government had made similar mistakes and offering advice as to how they could be avoided in the future. Yet Gladstone’s use of rather more extreme rhetoric is telling. For Gladstone, the essential point on which he had staked all was to argue that a non-Home Rule government in Ireland could not be stable and must, of necessity, be oppressive. The Spectator concluded: ‘Mr Gladstone is one of those great orators whose chief force, as well as chief weakness, consists in the fact that they live in their own present and cannot, by an effort of imagination, live in their own past.’42
A few weeks later (30 April to 8 May) Parnell returned to give his own evidence to the Special Commission. His performance was little short of ludicrous. He certainly misled the Commission on the question of his connections with Fenianism in the 1870s. This may reasonably be put down to political necessity. Yet it is difficult to avoid the feeling that Parnell carried this to an unnecessary extreme—and one which was embarrassing to his followers. As Jasper Tully later noted critically, ‘Parnell gave the impression that he knew nothing about the movement he was supposed to be leading.’43 Yet this exaggerated terseness was combined with occasional outbreaks of quite needless verbosity—for example, in his unnecessary admission that he had in 1881 ‘deliberately misled’ the House of Commons about the existence of secret societies in Ireland. Sir Alfred Robbins noted:
The one whom the public had agreed to regard as ‘the strong silent’ man of mythical value in the world’s affairs proved diffuse, explanatory, argumentative, everything a perfect witness should not be. Asquith [H. H. Asquith, Russell’s junior counsel] soon found the difficulty. �
��Are you a son of the late Mr John Parnell?’ he started by asking. Instead of the simple affirmative required, Parnell gave a long biographical sketch of that deceased parent. ‘Too discursive’ was the note I made.44
‘Yes,’ Parnell admitted later in the day to J. M. Tuohy, after his remark about misleading the House, ‘that was an absurd answer, but the truth of it is that when I gave it I was so worn out in body and mind from standing in the box for three days, replying to the tiresome and irritating questions of the Attorney-General, that almost any answer could have been extracted from me.’45 Parnell’s poor performance was of little significance.
Gladstone was hardly dismayed by Parnell’s performance, for the simple reason that he regarded the Special Commission itself as a Tory conspiracy, ‘the worst thing since the Popish Plot in Charles II’s time’.46 He was more concerned at the time to win Parnell’s support on the issue of the proposal that parliament should vote a grant for the support of the children of the Prince of Wales. Although Gladstone and his frontbenchers supported the proposed grant, it was coming under fire from radicals in his own party. He believed that Parnell—who had served on the committee considering the proposed legislation—was prepared to rescue him on this issue.47
On 19 July 1889 Parnell arrived in Edinburgh to receive the freedom of the city—a further indication of Liberal esteem. The Edinburgh working classes arranged a great demonstration in his favour, escorting him from the station to Calton Hill. The whole length of Princes Street was thronged with thousands of people, and Parnell’s drive was one triumphant procession, the vast crowd of 30,000 cheering again and again. Parnell’s theme was unambiguous: ‘Justice to Ireland (cheers) so far from weakening the greatness of the Empire must consolidate and increase its strength (cheers).’ He insisted that ‘Ireland will, henceforth, be united in the bonds, the strong and enduring bonds of friendship, mutual interest and amity; that she will prove a source of strength to the Empire instead of a source of weakness.’48 In this speech Parnell left his ‘last link’ speech in the United States a long way behind. For Cecil Rhodes, the imperial federationist, it must have seemed like a good return on his investment. Irish-American separatists, on the other hand, can only have regarded the speech with dismay. British intelligence, in the shape of Major Gosselin, who was in private a Home Ruler anxious to stress Parnell’s moderation, was also delighted.
