Enigma

by Paul Bew

  36. Freeman’s Journal, 22 Apr. 1880.

  37. Kettle, Material for Victory, pp 35–6.

  38. W. J. O’Neill Daunt, A Life Spent for Ireland: From the Memoirs of O’Neill Daunt, edited by his Daughter (London, 1896), p. 396 (Daunt’s diary, 2 Apr. 1885); Thomas Kennedy, A History of the Irish Protest against Overtaxation, 1883 to 1897 (Dublin, 1897), p. 104.

  39. Freeman’s Journal, 19 May 1880.

  40. Spectator, 31 July 1880.

  41. O’Shea, Parnell, i, 136.

  42. [Menzies], Memories Discreet and Indiscreet, p. 273.

  43. The Nation, 2 Jan. 1886.

  44. Augustus Moore, ‘Parnell and George Henry Moore’, Tuam Herald, 17 Oct. 1891.

  45. O’Donnell, Irish Parliamentary Party, i, 191.

  46. O’Connor, Memoirs of an Old Parliamentarian, i, 99.

  47. The Nation, 4 Dec. 1880.

  48. Daily Mail, 18 May 1914.

  49. Henry Harrison, Parnell Vindicated: The Lifting of the Veil (London, 1931), p. 123.

  50. O’Donnell, Irish Parliamentary Party, i, 456.

  51. The Nation, 2 Oct. 1880.

  52. Ibid.

  53. Ibid.

  54. Freeman’s Journal, 27 Sept. 1880.

  55. Kilkenny Moderator, 13 Aug. 1898. O’Grady (1846–1928), youngest son of a Church of Ireland cleric whose wife owned a small estate in west Cork, combined from an early stage of the land war an acute awareness of the extent to which Irish landlords had become superfluous to the requirements of British statesmen and Irish peasants, a scathing analysis of how little Irish labourers and smallholders stood to gain from the replacement of landlords by peasant proprietorship, and a fanciful belief that through Carlylean charismatic leadership an Irish form of ‘Tory Democracy’ might still reverse the encroachments of modernity. See Patrick Maume, ‘Standish James O’Grady’, Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge, 2009); idem, ‘Standish O’Grady: Between Imperial Romance and Irish Revival’, Éire–Ireland, xxxix: 1–2 (spring–summer 2004), pp 11–35.

  56. Liam Kennedy, ‘The Economic Thought of the Nation’s Lost Leader: Charles Stewart Parnell’ in D. G. Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds), Gladstone and Ireland: Politics, Religion and Nationality in the Victorian Age (London, 2010), p. 180.

  57. Spectator, 9 Oct. 1880.

  58. Lord George Hamilton, Parliamentary Reminiscences and Reflections, 1866–1885 (London, 1916), p. 193.

  59. Frank Callanan, Tim Healy (Cork, 1996), p. 52.

  60. Kettle, Material for Victory, p. 97.

  61. See the interesting correspondence between the moderate Nationalist MP A. M. Sullivan and the Ulster Liberal MP J. N. Richardson, a friend of W. E. Forster (PRONI, D/1006/3/1/9).

  62. Robert Kee, The Laurel and the Ivy (London, 1993), p. 361.

  63. Irish World, 1 June 1881 (cabled 23 May); Patrick Geoghegan, ‘Thomas Mooney, c. 1798–1888’, Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge, 2009).

  64. Gladstone to Forster, 8 Sept. 1881 (BL, Gladstone Papers, Add. MS 44545, f. 20).

  65. Gladstone to Givan, 10 Sept. 1881 (ibid., f. 22).

  66. Gladstone to Bright, 29 Sept. 1881 (BL, Gladstone Papers, Add. MS 43385, f. 298.

  67. W. O’Brien, Parnell of Real Life, p. 16.

  68. W. O’Brien, Recollections, p. 330.

  69. T. W. Moody and R. A. J. Hawkins (eds), Florence Arnold-Forster’s Irish Journal (Oxford, 1988), pp 256–7.

  70. The Times, 8 Oct. 1881.

  71. Ibid., quoted in J. L. Hammond, Gladstone and the Irish Nation (London, 1938), p. 249.

  72. Irish Times, 8 Oct. 1881, for the whole speech.

  73. W. O’Brien, Parnell of Real Life, p. 21.

  74. Ibid., p. 22.

  75. Ibid., p. 23.

  76. For the relationship between Ferguson and Parnell see Glasgow Star, 11 Apr. 1903. For the general context see E. W. McFarland, John Ferguson (1836–1906): Irish Issues in Scottish Politics (East Linton, 2003).

  77. Truth, 15 Oct. 1891.

  78. Donal P. McCracken, Inspector Mallon: Buying Irish Patriotism for a Five-Pound Note (Dublin, 2009), p. 56.

  79. Parnell to K. O’Shea, 13 Oct. 1881 (O’Shea, Parnell, i, 207).

  80. McCracken, Inspector Mallon, p. 56.

  Chapter 4: ‘A Certain Value to Parliamentary Action’

  1. Davitt, Fall of Feudalism, pp 335–7.

  2. Irish Times, 18 Dec. 1882.

  3. Munster Express, 8 Oct. 1881.

  4. Dana Hearne (ed.), Anna Parnell: The Tale of a Great Sham (Dublin, 1986), p. 104.

  5. Davitt, Fall of Feudalism, p. 481.

  6. O’Donnell, Irish Parliamentary Party, ii, 131.

  7. ‘The New Temper of Irishmen’, Spectator, 4 Mar. 1882.

  8. Moody and Hawkins (eds), Florence Arnold-Forster’s Irish Journal, pp 392–5.

  9. ‘The Irish Jacquerie’, Spectator, 8 Apr. 1882.

  10. Sir Herbert Maxwell, Life and Times of Rt Hon. W. H. Smith MP (2 vols, Edinburgh & London, 1897), ii, 61.

  11. A. B. Cooke and J. R. Vincent (eds), ‘Herbert Gladstone, Forster and Ireland, 1881–2’, pt 2, Irish Historical Studies, xviii, no. 69 (Mar. 1972), p. 77.

  12. Moody and Hawkins (eds), Florence Arnold-Forster’s Irish Journal, p. 438.

  13. J. R. Vincent (ed.), The Diaries of Edward Henry Stanley, 15th Earl of Derby, between 1878 and 1893 (Oxford, 2003), p. 420.

  14. Lyons, Parnell, pp 199–200.

  15. Ibid., pp 201–2.

  16. Spectator, 13 Feb. 1885.

  17. Enoch Powell, ‘Kilmainham—the Treaty that Never Was’, Historical Journal, xxi, no. 4 (1978).

  18. The Nation, 13 May 1882.

  19. Ibid.

  20. ‘Memories of Kilmainham’, An Phoblacht, 8 Mar. 1930. The present author drew attention to this article in 1987: see Paul Bew, Conflict and Conciliation in Ireland: Parnellites and Radical Agrarians, 1890–1910 (Oxford, 1987), p. 2 n. 4.

  21. Owen McGee, ‘Patrick Joseph Sheridan’, Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge, 2009).

  22. Patrick Maume, ‘Parnell and the IRB Oath’, Irish Historical Studies, xxix, no. 115 (May 1995), pp 363–70.

  23. Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries, x (Oxford, 1990), p. 252 (5 May 1882).

  24. See Le Caron’s report for London, dated 10 Dec. 1888, in the possession of Peter Rowan, the Belfast antiquarian bookseller.

  25. Spectator, 13 May 1882.

  26. J. Hall Richardson, From the City to Fleet Street (London, 1927), pp 181–3 (diary, 7 May 1882).

  27. T. D. Sullivan, Recollections of Troubled Times (Dublin, 1905), p. 201.

  28. Roscommon Messenger, 3 Oct. 1891.

  29. R. B. O’Brien, Parnell, ii, 132.

  30. Dungan, The Captain and the King, p. 129.

  31. Jasper Tully, ‘How Parnell was Entangled with Mrs O’Shea’, Roscommon Herald, 6 Jan. 1940.

  32. Richardson, From the City to Fleet Street, pp 185–6.

  33. Owen McGee, ‘Patrick Joseph Sheridan’; idem, ‘Patrick Egan’; Desmond McCabe and Owen McGee, ‘Thomas Brennan’ in Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge, 2009).

  34. Scott Molloy, Irish Titan, Irish Toilers: Joseph Banigan and Nineteenth-Century New England Labor (Lebanon, New Hampshire, 2008), p. 251.

  35. Sir John Robinson, Fifty Years of Fleet Street (London, 1904), p. 105.

  36. Vincent (ed.), Derby Diaries, p. 433 (10 May 1882).

  37. The Nation, 27 May 1882.

  38. DMP Report, 18 May 1882 (NAI, B9).

  39. Stephen Ball (ed.), Dublin Castle and the First Home Rule Crisis: The Political Journal of Sir George Fottrell, 1884–1887 (Cambridge, 2008), p. 217.

  40. Leon Ó Broin, The Prime Informer (Dublin, 1971), p. 33.

  41. The Nation, 10 June 1882.

  42. Spec. Comm. Proc. v, 15; Irish Times, 9 May 1883.

  43. Irish Times, 9 May 1883.

  44. Labouchere to Chamberlain, 22 May 1882 (Algar Labouchere Thorold, The Life of Henry Labouchere (London, 1913), p. 163).

/>   45. Labouchere to Chamberlain, 9 June 1882 (ibid., p. 166).

  46. ‘An Irish Nationalist’ [Richard Pigott?], Parnellism (Dublin, 1885), p. 22.

  47. Irish Times, 16 Oct. 1882.

  48. See Peter Gray, ‘“Ireland’s Last Fetter Struck Off”: The Lord Lieutenancy Debate, 1800–1867’ in Terence McDonough (ed.), Was Ireland a Colony? Economics, Politics and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 2005), pp 87–101.

  49. Irish Times, 18 Oct. 1882; Spectator, 2 Oct. 1882.

  50. Spectator, 3, 17 Mar. 1883.

  51. Donald Jordan, ‘The Irish National League and the “Unwritten Law”: Rural Protest and Nation-Building in Ireland, 1882–1890’, Past & Present, no. 158 (1998), p. 164.

  52. ‘The Times’, The Parnellite Split (London, 1891), p. 49.

  53. ‘An Irish Nationalist’ [Pigott?], Parnellism, p. 47.

  54. A. M. Sullivan, Old Ireland: Reminiscences of an Irish KC (London, 1927), p. 47.

  55. Marie-Louise Legg (ed.), Alfred Webb: The Autobiography of a Quaker Nationalist (Cork, 1999), p. 49.

  56. Dundalk Democrat, 30 June 1883; see also People’s Advocate (Monaghan), 7 July 1883.

  57. Evening Standard, 20 May 1886.

  58. ‘The Invasion of Ulster by the Parnellites’, Spectator, 29 Sept. 1883.

  59. K. O’Shea to Gladstone, 19 July 1883 (BL, Gladstone Papers, Add. MS 44420).

  60. Spectator, 18 Aug. 1883.

  61. ‘Parnell and Davitt’, ibid., 30 Aug. 1884.

  62. Freeman’s Journal, 31 May 1884.

  63. Tuam News, 25 Apr., 16, 30 May 1884.

  64. The Nation, 30 May 1885.

  65. This did not stop Chamberlain exploiting the issue in a speech at Coleraine, Co. Londonderry: ‘But unfortunately Mr Parnell’s Land Migration Company has been a dismal failure . . . and yet these men, who have completely broken down in attempts successfully to manage an enterprise which only required an investment of a few thousands of pounds … claim to have the privilege of governing the people of the most prosperous portion of Ireland’ (Coleraine Constitution, 15 Oct. 1887).

  66. Spectator, 18 Aug. 1883.

  67. See the excellent discussion of these issues in R. F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London, 1993), ch. 7.

  68. O’Connor, Memoirs of an Old Parliamentarian, i, 228.

  Chapter 5: ‘He Knew What He Wanted’: Home Rule in 1886

  1. Truth, 15 Oct. 1891.

  2. Spectator, 18 Aug. 1883.

  3. Ibid., 15 Dec. 1883.

  4. Northern Whig, 17 Apr. 1884.

  5. Such an assessment could only have been strengthened by Parnell’s willingness to appear in court to defend an action he had taken against a tenant for nonpayment of £165 rent. The tenant’s lawyer made a point of stressing how stringent Parnell’s lease in this case had been. (This affair was the endnote in Parnell’s personally difficult relationship with his late land agent.)

  6. Cork Free Press, 11 June 1910.

  7. Henry Lucy, The Diary of a Journalist (3 vols, London, 1920–23), iii, 187.

  8. Sullivan, Old Ireland, p. 46.

  9. O’Shea, Parnell, ii, 79.

  10. M. J. F. McCarthy, Priests and People in Ireland (Dublin, 1902), pp 363–4.

  11. Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre (ed.), For the Liberty of Ireland at Home and Abroad: The Autobiography of J. F. X. O’Brien (Dublin, 2010), p. 149.

  12. Freeman’s Journal, 10 Dec. 1885.

  13. The Nation, 31 Jan. 1885.

  14. St John Ervine, Parnell (London, 1925), p. 219.

  15. The Nation, 21 Jan. 1885.

  16. O’Shea, Parnell, ii, 290–91.

  17. Evening Standard, 12 June 1886. The best scholarly discussion remains that of L. P. Curtis, Coercion and Conciliation in Ireland, 1880–1892 (Princeton, 1963), pp 50–53.

  18. Ibid.

  19. William O’Brien, Evening Memories (Dublin & London, 1920), p. 90.

  20. W. S. Churchill, Lord Randolph Churchill (2 vols, London, 1906), i, 395.

  21. See O’Connor’s speech in parliament on 3 June 1886 (Hansard 3, cccvi, 847ff).

  22. Kettle, Material for Victory, pp 63–4.

  23. Ibid., p. 64.

  24. Tuam Herald, 17 Oct. 1891.

  25. R. B. O’Brien, Parnell, ii, 104.

  26. J. P. Loughlin, Gladstone, Home Rule and the Ulster Question, 1882–1893 (Dublin, 1986), pp 44–5.

  27. O’Connor, Memoirs of an Old Parliamentarian, i, 48. This is a rather drôle comment, as T. P. was an expert adulterer himself.

  28. W. H. Hurlbert, Ireland under Coercion (Edinburgh, 1889), p. 55.

  29. Hammond, Gladstone and the Irish Nation, p. 515.

  30. J. J. Shaw, Mr Gladstone’s Two Irish Policies: 1868 and 1886 (Belfast, 1888), p. 37.

  31. J. P. Loughlin, ‘Anglo-Saxonism and the Home Rule Debate in 1886’, Retrospect (1979), p. 31.

  32. The Nation, 17 Oct. 1885.

  33. Parnell to K. O’Shea, 6 Jan. 1886 (BL, Gladstone Papers, Add. MS 44629); see also Parnell to E. D. Gray, 3 Jan. 1885 (NLI, MS 15735).

  34. Quoted in T. J. Dunne, ‘The Political Ideology of Home Rule’ (MA thesis, University College Dublin, 1972), pp 209–10; see also J. R. Vincent, Gladstone and Ireland (London, 1979).

  35. Gladstone to Harcourt, 12 Feb. 1886 (Bodl., Harcourt Papers, deposit box 10).

  36. See Northern Whig, 16, 17 Apr. 1886, for a useful discussion of these points.

  37. Ibid.

  38. O’Connor, Memoirs of an Old Parliamentarian, ii, 109.

  39. Spectator, 10 Apr. 1886.

  40. Bernard Holland, The Duke of Devonshire (2 vols, London, 1911), ii, 115.

  41. Evening Standard, 8 June 1886.

  42. Paul Bew, ‘Britishness and the Irish Question’ in Matthew D’Ancona (ed.), Being British (Edinburgh & London, 2009), p. 261.

  43. Gladstone to Hutton, 24 May 1886 (Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries, xi (Oxford, 1990), p. 560). For a recent sustained meditation on this theme see Richard Shannon, Gladstone: God and Politics (London, 2007).

  44. Gladstone to Hutton, 24 May 1886 (Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries, xi (Oxford, 1990), p. 560).

  45. Andrew Roberts, Salisbury: Victorian Titan (London, 1999), p. 384.

  46. Thorold, Labouchere, p. 316.

  47. George C. Brodrick, Political Studies (London, 1879), p. 393.

  48. See Philip Walker, ‘George Charles Brodrick’, Oxford DNB.

  49. Peter Gordon (ed.), Earl of Carnarvon: Political Diaries, 1857–1890 (Cambridge, 2009), p. 427 (4 June 1886).

  50. Spectator, 22 May 1886.

  51. Ibid., 12 June 1886.

  52. The Nation, 27 May 1886.

  53. Spectator, 5 June 1886.

  54. ‘Mr Parnell and Lord Hartington’, Evening Standard, 14 July 1886.

  55. Roman Zubof, ‘A Glance at Parnell’, repr. in Tuam Herald, 7 Mar. 1891.

  56. Hansard 3, cccvi, 1168ff (7 June 1886).

  57. Dungan, The Captain and the King, pp 272–3.

  58. J. L. Garvin, The Life of Joseph Chamberlain (2 vols, London, 1932–3), ii, 382.

  59. Hansard 3, cccvi, 847ff (3 June 1886).

  60. Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries, xi, 565 (3 June 1886).

  61. W. O’Brien, Evening Memories, p. 121.

  62. Sir Richard Temple, Letters and Character Sketches from the House of Commons (London, 1912), p. 97.

  63. Niamh O’Sullivan, Aloysius O’Kelly: Art, Nation, Empire (Dublin, 2010), p. 199.

  64. O’Connor, Memoirs of an Old Parliamentarian, ii, 44.

  65. Freeman’s Journal. 22 Apr. 1880.

  66. The Nation, 28 Aug. 1886.

  67. According to William O’Brien, ‘The only mystery he [Parnell] practised was the endeavour to conceal his address, which was one of his shrewd precautions against assassination as well as a defence, such as it was , against the blackmailers and the newspaper moralists who thought it decent to spy upon his private life’ (O’Brien, Parnell
of Real Life, p. 182).

  68. John J. Horgan, Parnell to Pearse, ed. John Horgan (Dublin, 2009), pp 39–40.

  Chapter 6: ‘The Bitterness of Party Conflict’: ‘Parnellism and Crime’

  1. Sir Alfred Robbins, Parnell: The Last Five Years (London, 1926), p. 36.

  2. Ibid., p. 39.

  3. O’Connor, Memoirs of an Old Parliamentarian, ii, 109.

  4. [Mrs Stuart Menzies], Memories Discreet and Indiscreet by a Woman of No Importance (London, 1917), p. 273.

  5. Roman Zubof, ‘A Glance at Parnell’, repr. Tuam Herald, 7 Mar. 1891.

  6. Sir Robert Anderson, Sidelights on the Home Rule Movement (London, 1906), pp 135–47.

  7. O’Shea, Parnell, ii, 43.

  8. Michael Keyes, ‘Parnellism: The Role of Funding on the Journey from the Semi-Revolutionary to the Purely Constitutional’ in Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid and Colin Reid (eds), From Parnell to Paisley: Constitutional and Revolutionary Politics in Northern Ireland (Dublin, 2010), p. 30. Keyes argues that Parnell failed to convey the difficult state of the party’s finances.

  9. Paul Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity, 1789–2006 (Oxford, 2007), pp 353–4.

  10. Donal McCracken, ‘Parnell and the South African Connection’ in idem (ed.), Parnell: The Politics of Power (Dublin, 1991), p. 129.

  11. Elaine Byrne, Irish Times, 10 Aug. 2010.

  12. O’Shea, Parnell, ii, 20.

  13. Thorold, Labouchere, p. 301.

  14. D. W. Bebbington, ‘The Union of Hearts Depicted: Gladstone, Home Rule and United Ireland’ in D. G. Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds), Gladstone and Ireland: Politics, Religion and Nationality in the Victorian Age (London, 2010).

  15. Hansard 3, cccx, 774ff (7 Feb. 1887).

  16. R. B. O’Brien, Parnell, ii, 198–9.

  17. Freeman’s Journal, 8 Oct. 1891.

  18. Lyons, Parnell, p. 388.

  19. Roscommon Herald, 23 Apr. 1887.

  20. G. P. Gooch, Life of Lord Courtney (London, 1920), p. 281.

  21. Christy Campbell, Fenian Fire (London, 2003), pp 341–2.

  22. Dungan, The Captain and the King, pp 320–21.

  23. Roscommon Herald, 21 May 1887.

  24. Munster Express, 26 Nov. 1887.

  25. Conor Cruise O’Brien, Parnell and his Party, 1880–90 (Oxford, 1957).

  26. Lyons, Parnell, p. 397.

  27. L. M. Geary, The Plan of Campaign (Cork, 1986), p. 92.