Heaven’s Command

by Jan Morris

  In all this Parnell enjoyed the support of the Fenians, and in 1879 he capped his preeminence by becoming president of a new body, the Irish National Land League, concerned with the rural grievances of Ireland. The winter of 1878 had been brutal for the peasantry-heavy rains, crop failures, falling prices. Thousands had gone bankrupt. Thousands more had lost their homes. The eviction of peasants had been a commonplace of Irish life since the beginnings of English rule, but this was the period in which the image of Irish eviction impressed itself upon the imagination of the world. There we can see it all still, in faded sepia: the shabby whitewashed cottage behind, with its tufted thatch and tumble-down outbuildings, and the bowler-hatted landlord’s agent with his stick, and the helmeted constables lounging with rifles behind walls, as though about to take part in street fighting. There is no sign of the unfortunate tenants themselves, but a few pathetic scraps of furniture have been thrown out through the open door, and one policeman thoughtfully looks through the window, suggesting melancholy despairs inside. Through the Land League Parnell ruthlessly exploited the symbolism of the classic scene, and made the pathos of the Irish countryside the permanent backdrop of his drama.

  The Irish had recovered some of their spirit since the demoralizing years of the Famine, and the ‘Land War’ now became a mass movement. For the first time the tenant-farmers as a class dared defy the Anglo-Irish. When a tenant was evicted, huge crowds of Irishmen gathered at his cottage to demonstrate in his support, and take his family off to shelter. Nobody would move into his farm, and the offending land agent was sent to Coventry—it was the terrible ostracization of Captain Charles Boycott, Lord Erne’s haughty agent in County Mayo, which gave his name to the English language.2 The Land League became almost a rival Government, setting up its own courts and making its own laws, and half Ireland was in a tumult of agitation. ‘Captain Moonlight’ made his terrifying appearance as agent of the Irish revenge, and landlords everywhere received threatening letters—‘Yo will be treated like a mad dog that is quartered and Berried under ground and that is the death yo must get’—‘the time has come that by God we don’t care for man or the divil’—‘we are the lads that dis not feare to do you….’ There were nineteen separate attempts upon the life of W. E. (‘Buckshot’) Forster, Chief Secretary of Ireland, and crime of every sort stalked the island horribly.

  Parnell threw himself into this campaign with his usual ambiguous grace. He apparently welcomed a degree of violence—not enough to bring the full power of the Empire storming into Ireland, but enough to convince Westminster that Ireland could not be ruled by coercion. ‘Hold the harvest!’ the Land League exhorted the peasants, urging them not to hand over their crops to the landlords, and in Massachusetts Parnell’s eldest sister Fanny interpreted the phrase in a stirring nationalist poem, published in the Boston Pilot, an old enemy of Empire, and soon immensely popular among Irishmen all over the world:

  Ob by the God Who mode us all, the seigneur and the serf,

  Rise up and swear this day to hold your own green Irish turf.

  Rise up and plant your feet as men where now you crawl as slaves,

  And make your harvest fields your camp, or make of them your graves.

  6

  When, in 1868, a telegram arriving at Hawarden had told Gladstone he was to be Prime Minister for the first time, he was cutting down a tree in the park: and pausing for a moment from his work, he remarked to his companion: ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland’. In 1880, when he was called to office for the second time, he was still preoccupied with the island. First, he was persuaded, he must restore law and order there, and within a few months he had introduced severe measures of coercion. In particular, he suspended habeas corpus so that the Land League agitators including Parnell, could be imprisoned without trial—for no Irish jury would have convicted The Chief, whatever the charge.

  This led to the most spectacular of all Parnell’s Parliamentary displays. So incessant and relentless was the opposition of the Irish members that it took 46 hours of unbroken debate to force the coercion bill through. Parnell’s men filibustered in relays, taking it in turns to snatch a few hours’ sleep in the lobby, and constantly nagged by their leader to go back and keep talking—hour after hour, day after day, to the impotent frustration of Liberals and Tories alike. The House was baffled by this culminating impertinence. The principle of free speech seemed to be at stake—the English constitution turned topsy-turvy in the interests of Irish separatism. After forty hours of it the House presented a scene of squalid exhaustion. The dishevelled members sat about pale and testy, some of them in rumpled evening clothes from the night before last. The galleries were packed by successions of visitors. The Irishmen were all alone on one side of the house, about 100 Englishmen generally sat on the other. Every speech was interrupted by abuse, jeering and sarcasm, until at last, at nine in the morning of the third day, the Speaker interrupted the debate. He was Henry Brand, second son of the 21st Baron Dacre, who was no man to be trifled with by enemies of England. Since the days of Oliver Cromwell no single man had ever arbitrarily closed a debate in the House, and it was disputable whether the Speaker had a right to: but choosing a moment when Parnell was out of the chamber, and reading from a paper which trembled visibly in his hand, Brand now declared on his own responsibility, in defiance of the ancient customs of the House, that the debate must end.

  It did. The British members cheered with relief. The Irish members, nonplussed in the absence of Parnell, walked out of the House in a body, shouting ‘Privilege! Privilege!’ as the Parliamentarians had cried it when Charles I invaded the Commons. The Coercion Bill was carried, and Gladstone now felt the decks clear for progress. He had Parnell and most of his principal lieutenants arrested, and locked up on suspicion of subversion in Kilmainham Jail—a grim old fortress above the Liffey in Dublin which was the traditional place of incarceration for Irish patriots. Having proved his readiness to quell violence by force, he promptly put through a grandly conciliatory land reform bill, assuring the Irish tenants fair rents and fixed tenures.

  Then, in a political act of great imagination, he persuaded the imprisoned Parnell to help him implement these reforms. ‘The Chief’ was offered his release if he would use his influence to calm the country, and see the Land Act safely through. Agreement was surreptitiously reached through intermediaries, and in March 1882 Parnell and his colleagues were released under the so-called Kilmainham Treaty, The first reactions were predictable—the Irish extremists accused Parnell of selling out to the English, the English reactionaries accused Gladstone of compromising with traitors. ‘Buckshot’ Forster resigned in protest, and the Queen herself was inexpressibly shocked. But the anger died, Parnell seemed ready to honour his word, the Land Act went ahead, and Gladstone’s favourite nephew, Lord Frederick Cavendish, sailed over to Dublin as a new and more liberal Chief Secretary and a precursor of better times. Barring unforeseeable setbacks, it seemed, the way to Home Rule in Ireland was open at last.

  But as usual in Ireland, the unforeseeable almost immediately occurred.

  7

  The Viceregal Lodge, the Viceroy’s second residence, was a pleasant Georgian mansion surrounded by gardens and a ha-ha in the middle of Phoenix Park, one of the most beautiful parks in Europe. From his upstairs window the Viceroy could look across the grand green expanse of the park—1,750 acres, seven miles around, like a slab of open country on the flank of the capital—to the distant chequered pattern of the Wicklow mountains, generally blurred and hazy in the soft Irish light. Horsemen rode in the morning across the downlands of this paradise; street urchins threw sticks for conkers in the long lush avenues of horse-chestnuts; on Sunday afternoons music echoed faintly from The Hollow, where the St James Brass and Reed Band, the Father Mathew Band, or the heavily escorted Glencree Reformatory Band, played boisterous marches to huge jolly audiences. Away to the left Robert Smirke’s immense monument to the greatest Anglo-Irishman, the Duke of Wellington, was embellished with iro
n sculptures made from the metal of captured cannon.

  On the evening of May 6, 1882, the Viceroy, Lord Spencer, who had just returned to Dublin for a second term, was looking at this fine view out of his window. He had been sworn in that morning in the customary ornate ceremonies at the Castle, with his Chief Secretary, Lord Frederick Cavendish. Now he was awaiting the arrival of Cavendish as his dinner guest, together with Thomas Burke the Under-Secretary. They had already spent the afternoon together, discussing Gladstone’s plans for Ireland: Spencer had returned to the Lodge by carriage, his guests were following on foot. They would make an odd dinner trio. Spencer was a hospitable man who owned 26,000 acres of the English Midlands, but who had been an active politician all his life, and was known as the Red Earl because of his flaming beard. Cavendish was the second son of the Duke of Devonshire, a diligent but unexciting man, who had been Gladstone’s private secretary, had married the Prime Minister’s niece, and had risen steadily in the Liberal ranks. Burke, from Galway, had spent his life in the Irish administration: he was a Catholic, a nephew of Cardinal Wiseman, but was a stern law-and-order man, and was particularly loathed by the extreme nationalists. The three men were doubtless expecting a sombre business dinner. Times were crucial in Ireland, Spencer and Cavendish had assumed office at an especially demanding moment, Burke would probably find his brains picked all evening.

  From his window, then, Lord Spencer looked out into the evening—a summer Saturday evening, warm, with a polo match in progress on the green, and the park full of strollers, picnickers and cyclists: and he noticed on the Grand Avenue, the thoroughfare which ran beyond the Viceregal ha-ha, what appeared to be a scuffle among a few men on the pavement. Drunks, he thought, and turned his attention elsewhere. Others assumed it to be one of the impromptu pavement wrestling matches to which Irishmen were addicted, and two cyclists rode by without taking a second look. What in feet was happening, though, was that Lord Spencer’s dinner guests were being murdered. They were stabbed to death by seven members of a secret revolutionary society, the Invincibles, as they walked the last hundred yards to their dinner. Burke was the planned victim, and the murderers did not know who Cavendish was: but they cut both men’s throats anyway, as they lay dying from their stab wounds, before vanishing from Phoenix Park into the city.

  8

  Gladstone was not deterred from his grand design. ‘Be assured it will not be in vain,’ he told Lady Frederick Cavendish, and she responded in kind: ‘across all my agony,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘there fell a bright ray of hope, and I saw in a vision Ireland at peace, and my darling’s life blood accepted as a sacrifice….’ Assured still of Parnell’s support, Gladstone proceeded from land reform towards Home Rule—domestic autonomy, that is, within a federal arrangement. Though he was briefly out of office in 1885, in 1886 he was returned again, and presented his first Home Rule Bill to Parliament. It split the nation.1 Conservatives declared it a gross betrayal of the Anglo-Irish, especially the Protestant majority of Ulster in the north—‘essentially like the English people’, cried Lord Randolph Churchill, ‘a dominant, imperial caste…. It is only Mr Gladstone who would imagine for a moment that the Protestants of Ireland could recognize the power or satisfy the demands of a Parliament in Dublin’. The idea of separating the home islands seemed to stand against the trend of the times, the growing awareness of Empire and the rising aspiration towards imperial unity. Disraeli was dead, but Gladstone was more than ever the bête noire of the imperialists, and most of the London Press, now half-way to an imperialist conversion, was vehemently against the bill. Even the intellectuals opposed it, and its defeat became inevitable when Gladstone was deserted by the most brilliant of his younger lieutenants, Joseph Chamberlain—the very man who had, by his negotiations with Parnell in Kilmainham Jail, made the bill a political possibility.

  Chamberlain, who was presently to be the grand entrepreneur of the imperial climax, clearly sensed the coming blaze of Empire, and decided to warm his hands at it. He also coveted the leadership of the Liberal Party. He defected to the Opposition with enough fellow-Liberals to defeat the bill and bring down the Government. At the ensuing general election the Tories came back with a new title, the Conservative and Unionist Party—with a new group of allies, the Liberal-Unionists under Chamberlain—and with a new Irish policy, based upon Churchill’s perception that the close-knit Protestant community of Ulster was the strongest justification for British rule in Ireland. ‘Ulster will fight,’ ran the new slogan, ‘and Ulster will be right—Home Rule is Rome Rule.’

  Now Parnell’s position in Parliament was more equivocal than ever. He was equivocal about Home Rule, for he might never have accepted the limitations of Gladstone’s bill. He was equivocal about his relationship with the Liberals. Above all he was equivocal about violence—‘the English’, he once said, ‘murder and plunder all over the earth and they howl when somebody is killed in Ireland’. Five men had been hanged for the Phoenix Park murders, but still a slight haze of suspicion connected The Chief himself with the tragedy.1 Publicly he had condemned it, but when openly accused of complicity in the Commons, he scornfully declined to defend himself. On the whole, perhaps, most of the country believed in his innocence. The Liberal Party clearly still did, as did Mr Gladstone himself. There was no hard evidence against him, only a miasma of distrust.

  But in the same month as the presentation of the Home Rule Bill, April 1886, a young Irishman named Edward Houston presented himself at the office of The Times, in the tiny private courtyard which the paper then occupied at Blackfriars in the City. The Times was at the apogee of its power, and Printing House Square was rather like a very worldly Oxford college, with its elegant dining-room, its wine waiter, its discreet but intimate contacts with the sources of power, and its traditions of gentlemanly scholarship and enterprise. Into this dignified milieu Houston cast a sensational proposition. He was in a position to prove, he told the Editor, that Parnell was directly connected with the Phoenix Park murders; and asking merely for his own expenses, for he was, he said, concerned only for the well-being and good name of his country, he produced a series of ten letters, five of them apparently from Parnell, which seemed to show that the Land League had financed the murders, and that The Chief had personally approved of them. Here is the most damning of the letters, No 2:

  Dear Sir, I am not surprised at your friend’s offer, but be and you should know that to denounce the murders was the only course open to us. To do that promptly was plainly the only course and our best policy. But you can tell him, and all others concerned, that though I regret the accident of Lord F. Cavendish’s death I cannot refuse to admit that Burke got no more than his deserts. You are at liberty to show him this, and others who you can trust also, but let not my address be known. He can write to the House of Commons. Yours very truly, Chas. s. Parnell.

  Only the signature was apparently in Parnell’s handwriting, and The Times responded cautiously. The paper was fiercely opposed to Home Rule, but decided to fly a legal kite by publishing first a series of articles, Parnellism and Crime, implying in general terms that the Irish Nationalist Party and the Land League were implicated in Irish violence. When no writs followed, on April 18, 1887, the paper published letter No 2. Never in the history of The Times had a scoop been launched, with such drama. For the first time the newspaper carried a double-column headline; beneath it the letter was reproduced in facsimile, in the centre of the editorial page. On the streets posters appeared bearing in enormous letters the words: ‘The Phoenix Park Murders: Facsimile of a Letter from Mr Parnell Excusing His Public Condemnation of the Crime.’ The Times was satisfied, said an editorial, that the evidence was ‘quite authentic … we invite Mr Parnell to explain how his signature has become attached to such a letter’.

  It was four years since the murders in the park, but the public reaction was intense. A Special Commission of Inquiry was set up to investigate the whole question of collusion in Irish violence. This was in effect a State Tri
al of Parnell The three judges of the Commission were all well-known opponents of Home Rule, and all the resources of the State were applied to the exposure of Parnell and his colleagues. But it proved an astonishing triumph for The Chief. After months of inquiries, some 150,000 questions, and 445 witnesses there appeared in the stand a disreputable Irish journalist named Richard Piggott, described as having ‘the general appearance of a coarsely composed and rather cheapened Father Christmas’, who was very soon forced into the admission that he had forged the Parnell letters. Parnell was cleared absolutely. Piggott went to Paris and killed himself.

  9

  Parnell’s mercurial career thus reached a climax of unexampled success. He was 42, and a hero not only in Ireland, where people often fell to their knees in his presence, but in England too. The Liberals fulsomely made amends for public suspicions—when Parnell entered the Commons for the first time after his vindication, the Liberal members rose to their feet, and Mr Gladstone bowed. He was elected a life member of the Liberal Club, publicly shook hands with Lord Spencer the Lord Lieutenant, was fêted at soirées and waved at by doting progressive ladies. Gladstone’s daughter Mary, thought he exhibited ‘all the fruits of the Spirit, love, patience, gentleness, forebearance, long-suffering meekness. His personality takes hold of one, the refined delicate face, illuminating smile, fire-darting eyes … Loved Parnell’s spiritual face, only one’s heart ached over his awfully delicate frame and looks’.