Enigma

by Paul Bew

  It is essential to note one critical point. Parnell won his first parliamentary victory in Meath by virtue of his acceptability to the Mitchel–Martin Young Ireland tradition. Mitchel, in particular, believed in an Irish parliamentary withdrawal from Westminster. Many of Parnell’s early allies in Irish politics—John Devoy, Michael Davitt, Thomas Brennan, Patrick Egan—all believed the same thing. Yet, in December 1882, Parnell explicitly told his supporters that Mitchel’s strategy is ‘not a practicable one’.63 With that announcement, any understandable confusion as to Parnell’s ultimate intentions came to an end.

  There were powerful political reasons for making this choice and, once made, for sticking to it. The 1880s saw a major change in the Anglo-Irish balance of power. This is all the more impressive when compared with the futile squabbling and disunity of the nationalist forces in the 1870s. Yet this cannot disguise the fact that the much-vaunted unity of the Parnellite bloc was bought at a price—and part of that price was the leader’s self-censorship. Barry O’Brien commented: ‘No quarrels was certainly a favourite thought, if not a favourite expression of Parnell. To have any single force which made for Irish nationality in conflict with any force which could be made in the same direction was utterly abhorrent.’64 But there could be no real unity between those who saw the ethos of the new Ireland as being specifically Catholic and peasant and a Protestant squire who would have preferred to save the remnants of his class from the ravages of history. (It would, however, be a serious exaggeration to claim that Parnell believed he could reconstruct the hegemony of the Irish landed class in a post-feudal Ireland.)65 The price for this false unanimity was paid by Parnell personally. His project of integrating Irish Protestants with the new order of things in Ireland was kept alive only in fits and starts. The ideal of an autonomous, peaceful, pluralistic country eluded him; more importantly, it has also eluded later generations.

  What was his legacy? There is no question that there is a certain distinctive Parnellite set of beliefs which were inherited by John Redmond, first as leader of the Parnellite minority in the 1890s and then as leader of a reunited Irish Party from 1900 to 1918. All of Redmond’s characteristic policies have their roots in Parnellite doctrine. For, when Irish local government was fully democratised in 1898, he urged Parnellite voters to use their votes to support or favour of a policy of toleration:

  Now let me ask a question: is there a possibility, however small, in the near future of obtaining through the instrumentality of the County Council a return to the ranks of Ireland of any men whose forefathers stood with Grattan a hundred years ago, but who since that day, for one reason or another, stood aloof from the national movement?

  Redmond then continued:

  What has been the real stumbling-block in the way of the English people in granting us home rule? It has been the fact that Ireland herself has been divided upon this question of home rule into two camps, and that many thousands and tens of thousands of the Irish people have held aloof from the national movement or a movement in favour of an Irish nation, which I desire to see, and which, if it once came into existence, would mean the obtaining of home rule within six months—in a movement in which all creeds and classes could unite.66

  In 1903 Redmond saw the Wyndham Land Act as a posthumous triumph for Parnell—let us not forget that Parnell, if he had lived, would have been only fifty-seven years of age—as the Tories finally took the big decision to finance the creation of a peasant proprietorship in Ireland. Again, Redmond wanted to seize upon the advantage as a moment for national reconciliation but was thwarted by other, more militant members of the party. Redmond’s ‘imperial nationalism’ finds its sanction in Parnell’s declaration of Irish loyalty to the British Empire (in the event of Home Rule being granted). His desire that Irish MPs should stay at Westminster and even become British ministers after the granting of Home Rule is also pure Parnell—or at any rate, the Parnell who had reached a deal in 1888 with Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes was to tell Gladstone that Parnell had ‘promised him that he would never agree to the exclusion of the Irish members’.67 Redmond, of course, also wanted Irish members to serve in British cabinets, much as Scottish and Welsh members have served in British cabinets after devolution in the early twenty-first century. But then, Parnell talked not about becoming himself the prime minister of a Home Rule administration; rather, he saw himself as home secretary, or perhaps even prime minister, of a Westminster government.68 ‘Parnellism without Parnell’ had a vigorous life in Ireland in the generation after his death—ironically, it was the men of 1916, some of whom saw themselves as authentic Parnellites, as opposed to the West Britons of the parliamentary machine, who were finally to extinguish the Grattan tradition in Irish politics.

  Parnell’s great flaw from a conventional Catholic nationalist point of view, of course, remains. The Parnell–O’Shea relationship has attracted its admirers and also its critics. Lord George Hamilton, the Ulster Tory, admired the ‘great element’ of ‘tenderness’ in Parnell’s character as displayed by his loyalty to Mrs O’Shea. Others were rather less impressed. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt wrote that ‘she was a woman quite unworthy of Parnell who neither sympathised with his politics nor at all appreciated the height of his position’. The Nationalist MP Jasper Tully saw Mrs O’Shea as essentially a British state operative, sent by Gladstone to ensnare Parnell. There is no suggestion at all to support this view in the Gladstone Diaries, though it is true that many of Gladstone’s friends, including Edward Hamilton, believed he was insufficiently guarded in his dealings with Mrs O’Shea: he, Gladstone, always insisted that he did not believe that Mrs O’Shea could have so ruthlessly betrayed her husband. Therefore he chose instead to believe that she was acting in good faith. Nonetheless, Sir William Harcourt told the cabinet on 16 May 1882 that ‘the Kilmainham Treaty would not be popular when the public discovered that it had been negotiated by Captain O’Shea, the husband of Parnell’s mistress’. On the same day Dilke wrote of ‘Parnell’s relations with Mrs O’Shea as disclosed in cabinet’.69 It is easy to see how Parnell regarded the subsequent Liberal campaign against him during the divorce crisis as fraudulent cant.

  The O’Shea liaison was reckless in the extreme. But it can now be seen in a different light. Too often in the years after 1882, when he might have fought actively for his ideal, Parnell lingered in Eltham. He saw the problem—that of sectarian division in the Irish people. He early grasped the nature of this problem in the south; belatedly he appreciated its full significance in the north. But he intervened only fitfully before his last great fight. He surrendered, not the leadership, but much of the initiative, to other, inferior hands.

  APPENDIX

  by Patrick Maume

  A Counterfactual Chief? If Parnell had lived till 1918

  [This essay was inspired by Daniel Mulhall’s article ‘Parallel Parnell’ in History Ireland, xviii, no. 3 (May–June 2010), which speculates on the course Parnell’s career might have taken if he had married in 1880 and never become involved with Katharine O’Shea.]

  Parnell seems to be the figure of modern Irish history who most strongly attracts counterfactual speculation. This is because he died at a point in his life when a significant proportion of his career might have been expected to lie ahead of him, whereas de Valera died in his nineties after a lengthy retirement and O’Connell’s later years were marked by morbid depression, incipient senility and political decline. (Counterfactual speculation might more fruitfully centre on their possible early removal. If D’Esterre had killed O’Connell in their 1815 duel, what course might Irish Catholic politics have taken? If the bullet which grazed de Valera at a 1923 election rally in Ennis had shot him dead, how might the Irish state have developed?)

  Only Michael Collins rivals Parnell as a focus for ‘lost leader’ speculation—but though Collins had shown himself to be a capable administrator and organiser of guerrilla warfare, he did not have time to build—or destroy—a record as a statesman, whereas Parnell operated adroitly and succe
ssfully at the highest levels of British as well as Irish politics for a decade. (In his unpublished memoirs the lawyer and Freeman’s Journal reporter Ignatius O’Brien remarked that Parnell’s problem was that he led his party with such little effort as to make it seem that anyone could do it, until he was gone and everyone else tried it.)

  Such speculation usually rests on the possibility of Captain O’Shea’s dying or being bought off; Mulhall’s postulation of an American marriage in 1880 is unusual, and perhaps less satisfactory because it introduces a new range of imponderables. Might marriage to a woman less maternal and more assertive than Katharine O’Shea, perhaps involving publicly acknowledged children, have blunted Parnell’s mystique? By 1880 Parnell’s political position was too firmly established to make it likely that he would have left politics for some other sphere (perhaps undertaking mining speculation in ‘Gilded Age’ America with his wife’s money, like his brother John Howard Parnell with his Georgia peach orchards) or that he would have failed to become Irish Party leader. Leaving aside such intriguing possibilities as whether an American wife might have intensified Parnell’s anglophobia or developed social ambitions, passing over possible marital incompatibility and a divorce suit brought by Mrs Parnell (perhaps with Katharine O’Shea as co-respondent), it may be best to discuss this counterfactual on the basis of the Parnell split being averted by the convenient demise of Captain O’Shea at some point before 1890. For one thing, this avoids the question of how Parnell might have negotiated the ‘Kilmainham Treaty’ in the absence of the O’Sheas as intermediaries. Let us further suppose, for the sake of argument, that Parnell had the same lifespan as O’Connell, dying at the age of seventy-two—that is, in 1918.

  Let us suppose, then, that at some point in 1887 Captain O’Shea, crossing a London street, is struck and killed by some horse-drawn vehicle. So far as the general public is concerned, after a decent interval of mourning for his deceased friend, the Irish leader consoles the grieving widow. Liberal and Nationalist political insiders congratulate themselves on the defusing of this potential bombshell, and some of the more aggressive Unionist humorists make cryptic references which are decoded by those in the know. Parnell’s affection for his younger stepchildren is noted (as was that of Lord Palmerston for his wife’s children by her first marriage under similar circumstances); some decades later his official biographer follows the example of the official biographer of the Duke of Devonshire (Lord Hartington) who records his subject’s marriage to the widowed Duchess of Manchester without mentioning that the Duchess had been his mistress for years before the death of her husband.1 What next?

  It is extremely unlikely that even without the Parnell split Gladstone could have delivered Home Rule in 1893; by the time of the split the Plan of Campaign land agitation had failed in its objective of making Ireland ungovernable and was bogged down in financial and political difficulties, while the realignment of British politics around socio-economic issues, with most of the Whig aristocracy defecting to the Tories and Conservative support increasing in suburbia, make it unlikely that Gladstone could have secured the electoral mandate needed to overawe the House of Lords into passing Home Rule. Perhaps without the Irish débâcle the Liberals might have secured a few more seats. In 1893 Gladstone proposed a new general election on the Home Rule issue after the bill was thrown out by the Lords, but was overruled by his cabinet colleagues; would Parnell have backed up Gladstone by threatening to bring down the government, thereby precipitating a general election which the Liberals would probably have lost?

  Presumably the extent to which Parnell continued to resent and distrust Gladstone (who had, after all, imprisoned him in 1881–2) might never have found public expression. The Grand Old Man would have retired with a final blessing on Parnell as the leader of a people rightly struggling to be free, expressing his confidence in the eventual success of the cause. The Irish leader, however he might grit his teeth, would return his compliments to the enlightened friend of Ireland; and whatever might be the impact of subsequent divisions within the Liberal Party on Irish opinion, without the denunciations of the ‘Grand Old Spider’ voiced by Parnell and his followers during the split, Gladstone would have been regarded much less ambivalently by Irish nationalist opinion as a friend and benefactor who had devoted his last years to seeking justice for Ireland. There might have been an occasional courtesy visit by Parnell to Gladstone in retirement at his home in Hawarden (North Wales), and after Gladstone’s death in 1898 the unveiling of a statue of Gladstone on the site of the present-day Parnell memorial, with Parnell’s speech on the occasion a masterpiece of equivocation, praising Gladstone on Home Rule while hinting at his personal dissatisfaction with the old man.2 (In real life, a proposal to erect a Gladstone statue in Dublin was defeated by Parnellite councillors who blamed Gladstone for Parnell’s downfall; the statue intended for Dublin now stands outside the Gladstone Memorial Library at Hawarden.)

  One reason why the majority of Liberals supported Gladstone’s Home Rule policy was that the party suffered deep internal divisions, and personal loyalty to Gladstone was its main unifying factor. After Gladstone’s retirement the Liberal Party’s divisions came to the surface. ‘Liberal Imperialists’ saw Home Rule as a political liability to be minimised or discarded altogether, while others continued to support it from loyalty to Gladstone’s memory or as part of a wider democratic agenda; some Liberals maintained the Gladstonian vision of a low-taxing small government, while others favoured a more expansive role for government and the expansion of state welfare, and the growth of government functions made it necessary to tap new sources of revenue.

  Gladstone’s 1892 election victory was partly secured by offering a number of social reform measures, the Newcastle Programme, and in real life the cabinet’s refusal to support Gladstone in calling an election was followed by a strategy of passing reform measures through the Commons in the hope that by defeating them the Lords would arouse popular fury. (The Lords defeated this strategy by passing those reforms they thought too popular to oppose.) The 1894 Liberal budget marked the beginning of a switch towards redistributive taxation which was never reversed and laid the foundations for Lloyd George’s later legislation (and which was also criticised by Irish nationalists because it fell disproportionately on Ireland). In our counterfactual scenario, the Liberals’ limited reform achievements never happened, because the government fell in 1893. How far would the introduction of the British welfare state have been delayed (or perhaps implemented in more limited form and with a more ‘social imperialist’ ethos by the Unionists, who had themselves passed some social reforms in the 1870s and 1880s)?3 Would hostility towards Home Rule as a political liability have been more widespread among radicals if the Newcastle Programme had been so visibly sacrificed to Home Rule? Would this in turn have influenced some Irish Home Rulers, such as Michael Davitt, who saw British radicals as Ireland’s natural allies, presented Home Rule as part of a wider reform agenda in which Ireland shared a common cause with the ‘British democracy’, and suspected that Parnell was at heart a cynical conservative principally concerned with self-aggrandisement?4

  How might Irish nationalism have developed in the 1890s without the Parnell split? To begin with, although the defeat of the second Home Rule Bill would have encouraged the view in some quarters that parliamentarianism had been discredited, the sense, deriving from the split, that the failure had been utterly disgraceful would have been absent. Without Parnell’s appeal to the ‘hillside men’ and the emergence of the posthumous myth of Parnell as honorary Fenian, the IRB subculture might have been more clearly differentiated from parliamentarianism than was in fact the case. The overlap with Parnellite parliamentarianism would not have been there, and Arthur Griffith’s ‘Hungarian policy’ (in which the Hungarian statesman Francis Deák is presented as a proxy Parnell) might have been stated differently. American support, nostalgia for Fenian heroism, and social discontent would have kept separatism alive, but it might have renewed itself mo
re slowly. Under Parnell’s leadership, the Irish Party might have opposed the Boer War, but in a manner more akin to that of the British ‘pro-Boers’, with fewer separatist overtones and less injudicious rejoicing at British defeats.5

  To some extent the Parnell split represented the breaking into the open of existing discontent with Parnell; these discontents would have surfaced, but more slowly and on a smaller scale. Without the divorce case, T. M. Healy’s career would never have had its defining moment; his extended family connection would have received less clerical support than it actually did, and would probably have been driven from parliament by Parnell in the mid-1890s, with Healy retreating to a legal career.6 Without the Parnell split, the Freeman’s Journal would have remained the dominant newspaper of nationalist Ireland, since it was the damage inflicted by the split that crippled it and subjected it to politically motivated proprietors who were outflanked when William Martin Murphy applied the techniques of the ‘new journalism’ to the Irish Independent. Under the continued proprietorship of the Gray dynasty, the Freeman’s Journal would have maintained a wary and limited autonomy within the nationalist movement; perhaps, instead of losing his inheritance and emigrating to pursue a political career in Tasmania, the youthful Edmund Gray (1870–1945) might have emerged as one of Parnell’s chief lieutenants? On the other hand, it is unlikely that John Redmond would ever have become party leader if it had not been for the fact that Parnell’s chief lieutenants all opposed him in the split, leaving Redmond to emerge as the Chief’s dashing principal champion. Perhaps a likelier role for him would have been as discreet and loyal chief whip, delivering eloquently worded appeals to the party rank and file to trust their inspired leader.