Parnell became key to this. After all, he was the one who had famously said, “No man has the right to set the boundary to the march of a nation.”
Throughout his public life he pursued a policy of obstructionism. Resorting to all-night filibusters, he attacked existing legislation, and then joined the major Irish land reform movements. Hundreds of thousands of people turned out to hear him speak at rallies all over the country.
His stature began to worry the London authorities. They tried to silence him; for his encouragement of—and active part in—violations of the existing land laws, he was jailed.
He had the political astuteness to use the moment as a way of turning up the heat; from prison he told Irish tenants to stop paying their rents. The government made a deal; if Parnell would stop advocating such resistance—which had begun to cause violence—they would release him.
The militants, though, had momentum. Even though Parnell kept his side of the bargain, the killing began to spread. By an unfortunate coincidence it culminated in a major assassination. In 1882, in the Phoenix Park, near Dublin, the Irish Invincibles, an armed secret society, killed Lord Frederick Charles Cavendish and Thomas Burke, respectively chief secretary and undersecretary for Ireland.
Parnell denounced the killers—but he couldn't stop them. The Irish Party, which he led, had habitually voted with the government, keeping it in power. When the government extended tough Irish anti-terrorist laws in response to the assassinations, Parnell and his colleagues voted against them and, in 1885, brought down the government. This gave Parnell a power like no other member of Parliament, and he and the government knew it.
Then came scandal.
That night in London, I visited my cousin in Farringdon. Edward Goldsmith worked as a barrister at the Inns of Court and knew many people. We dined in a chophouse near his rooms, amid a great crowd. Though he is senior to me by several years, he and I have always liked each other; the fact that he near-worships my father would have made us friends in any case. Edward had long professed an admiration for the letters I wrote to him, and he had suggested many times that I work for newspapers. Now he raised it again.
“I know so many people here who would find such an erudite correspondent in Ireland rather appealing. Good Lord, look at the news from Ireland; look at the need for us all to be informed as to what is occurring there daily.”
“This afternoon,” I said, “I took tea with the leading actor in the drama.”
“You mean whom?” Edward put down his chop, which he had held by the lug of the bone.
“And his wife.”
“Whose wife?”
“Mr. Parnell's.”
“Parnell doesn't have a wife.”
“He does. She's named Katharine. I met her today.” And I showed him the sketch, now much improved.
Somebody called his name; and Edward—still startled at my information—looked across the room. He waved and leaned forward to me.
“Now, here's a man who will take an interest in you.”
A lean, pale individual came and stood by us; his black eyebrows met.
“Billy, this is my cousin from Ireland, Charles O'Brien—a writer-in-waiting, if ever there was one.”
“Billy” looked at me down a long length of nose.
“What have you written?”
“Only my Journal,” I said.
“He's just met Parnell.” Edward beamed. “Show Billy the portrait.”
Billy, had he been sitting down, would have jumped up. He snatched the drawing from my hand.
“Write about this. It will make a nifty page. When do you go back to Ireland?”
“Saturday.”
“Come to my office tomorrow and I will pay you well.”
It has to be said that my account of meeting Parnell caused a sensation. It appeared—with the excellently printed portrait—in The Chronicle (where Billy worked as a senior editor) on the Thursday. Edward had arranged for us to dine again at the same chophouse; and I, flush with guineas from my writing (and a separate fee for the sketch), anticipated the pleasure of returning his hospitality. I had not, however, prepared for the merriment and celebration directed at me when I arrived.
It seemed as though hordes of people thronged the old place. As I entered, I saw Edward straightaway, and he roared, “Here's the chap! Here's my cousin! Welcome, Charles O'Brien!” A great cheer rose, and Billy stepped forward.
“Thank you, old man. Wonderful day for us.”
Apparently, my article had become the talk of London. I knew that I had been bold; for example, I had written, “May I beg to differ from those detractors who call Mr. Parnell ‘arrogant’ and ‘conceited’ and ‘pig-headed’ and ‘contemptuous’ and ‘boring’ and ‘politically unskilled.’ I spent four hours in his company this Monday past and found him a delight. His demeanor may be called all the more pleasant, since he had but minutes earlier risen from an afternoon sleep with his charming wife, Katharine, and many men who have just awakened require time to adjust their temperament to the world at large. Not so Mr. Parnell—and I may add that his husbandly attentions exhibited the utmost tenderness of affection. And of course I saw them reciprocated.”
(As I'd written these sentences in Billy's office, he'd praised me over and over, and I'd pronounced myself gratified that this new way of writing about great figures had found a home.)
How we ate and drank that night! Many arms wrapped themselves about my shoulders, many hands thrust ale and spirits at me, and I might have eaten ten—or fifty—dinners for all the food I was offered. I said to Edward, “If this be journalism, I'm game for it.”
Next day, I called to see my other old tutor in the area, Mr. Halloran. He worked in great offices within an eye's blink of Westminster and Parliament. Once, I should have been intimidated by such a powerful building, with its crests and escutcheons and marble and panels. Now, a new man, I sat in the hallway as a lackey took my card to Mr. Halloran's office.
Soon a lady approached me, dignified and quiet. “Mr. O'Brien?”
I rose, expecting to accompany her.
“I have a letter from Mr. Halloran”—and she handed it to me. With pleasure, I recognized the tight, formed hand—but the pleasure ended.
“I am too distressed today at what you have done,” said the note, with no address, no familiar greeting, “and so we may not meet.”
That was all.
“Oh, dear,” I said to the bearer, “I wish him better. Will you tell him that from me?”
She nodded and departed, and I reflected how easily distress used to visit Mr. Halloran when he lived under our roof.
I caught the boat train. My crossing took all night, and I slept on deck, in a chair, knowing I should never have such air again for some time. I awoke after some hours with a feeling of great unease. “At what you have done”—what had Mr. Halloran meant? Thinking on, I began to ask myself if I had somehow been duped by the London crowd. Their jubilation seemed excessive: Why should they have so relished my account of Mr. Parnell if they professed him their foe? Was there something in all this of which I had no knowledge—some nuance that I did not understand?
When we docked at Kingstown, I longed for hot tea and great slices of bread with bacon. As I left the gangplank and began to walk the short quayside to the street, a man ran after me from the ship; I had seen him speaking with the purser and they had been looking at me, but I knew not why and thought nothing of it.
“Are you O'Brien?” he asked—very rough, I thought.
“Yes. Charles O'Brien.”
“You bastard! You yellow-haired, treacherous bastard!” he accused, and he reached to hit me. I easily controlled him, since he stood no more than five feet eight or so, but he began to shout in a most unpleasant manner.
“This is him! This is him! This is the bastard who wrote about Parnell!”
Others began to collect, and I must say that I ran—and swiftly enough to outpace them all. Not until I met Mr. Egan again next day did I
discover the reasons for this unpleasantness. Mr. Parnell had no wife, and his lady, “Katharine,” bore the name of her husband, another Member of Parliament—one Captain Willie O'shea, who had now begun divorce proceedings. All commentary suggested that this scandal would bring about Mr. Parnell's political downfall.
As it did. The Catholics of Ireland could not accept leadership from a man who consorted illicitly with another man's wife. Parnell lost his Irish Party, his place in the world, his repute. He and Kitty O'shea became the major scandal figures of the day and the decade—even though the world of politics had long known of their relationship. She had been Parnell's mistress for years, and had borne him daughters.
Captain O'shea got his divorce, Parnell married Kitty, and they went away to live quietly on the south coast of England. Less than two years later, he died of pneumonia, the “lost leader,” whose spirit, they say, was broken in his fall from grace.
In October 1891, I became part of the largest crowd that I have ever seen or expect to see. Today, Ireland buried Charles Stewart Parnell, under dark skies. Although the funeral was timed for the light of day, the people in the cortege continued to walk to Glasnevin Cemetery all night long. Yesterday, I went to the grave-digging, where I stayed, my hat pulled low over my face. Many came to me and asked my business there and I said, “A family mourner,” and they departed, satisfied with my answer. I told no lie; my purpose transcended that of all save Mr. Parnell's family.
For a number of years I had attempted to reach Mr. Parnell or—as she became—Mrs. Parnell. All efforts had been rebuffed; notwithstanding my lingering for hours on the porch of his house in Brighton or under the portico of lovely Avondale in the county Wicklow, Mr. Parnell's reserve did not melt. I believed that he accused me of “heavy irony” in the article that I wrote. Now I hoped that my presence at the funeral might cause his wife to unbend in forgiveness.
We rarely see our hopes fulfilled—but I did today. Repelling all entreaties to move aside, I remained as if a stone on that spot. They carried the coffin to the graveside; and I approached the figure in black.
“Mrs. Parnell,” I said. “I am Charles O'Brien, the man who—”
“Oh, I know full well who you are. I remember our tea.” She did not raise her black veil.
“I never meant anything but well. Think of how respectfully my account was couched.”
Mrs. Parnell laid her hand upon my arm. “I told my husband so. Many times.”
“But they say that the rejection of the people broke his heart. And I fear that I brought it about.” I was near to tears.
“Mr. O'Brien, our love had long been known. Nobody else had the respect to write about it with tenderness—and they had not the courage to write about it disrespectfully. Nor could they allege my adultery without being subject to a lawsuit. But they were able and pleased to print your piece because it was so beautifully couched—and they knew that we would feel unable to sue for libel.”
I stepped back, struck, as it were, by a light dawning.
“Oh. I never knew.”
“I thought not. You are forgiven—there is nothing harsh in me toward you. I merely wish you the fortune of a good woman to guide you—as my husband believed I guided him.”
So overcome did I feel that I could not stay there for Mr. Parnell's burial.
By the time Parnell died, at the too young age of forty-five, the Irish farmers had achieved their Three F's: Fixity of Tenure, Fair Rent, and Free Sale. And even though he had not been the author of the legislation, there seems no doubt that his great agitations helped to bring it about; and he also came within votes of having generated self-government.
So, every sixth of October I wear in my buttonhole an ivy leaf, Mr. Parnell's symbol, and I mourn our uncrowned king, this landowning gentleman of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy.
My heart ached that night, sore again from the damage that I had done to Mr. Parnell, and hurting even more deeply from the kindness of Mrs. Parnell. I found lodgings in the home of an old friend near Glasnevin Cemetery, Tom Childs, a man of kindness and decency. His peaceful house (assailed only by his occasional rants against his “hound” of a brother, Sammy) gave me a bed for the night and, mercifully, nothing to drink. I lay awake for many hours, hearing the footsteps of the mourners returning from Mr. Parnell's funeral. At about five o'clock in the morning, I drifted to sleep.
Next day, I set out upon the best cure that I know for grief and remorse: a journey; Ireland's hedges and streams are filled with balm for the spirit, and I was back at my healing trade. My first assignment required me to cure corns—and I all but wept once more as I advised and then put the measure into practice: bind tightly the toe with an ivy leaf.
Parnell's funeral went on for days. People from all over Ireland insisted on being able to get to the graveside long after the burial. Estimates of the crowd run to over a million people. By then the full story of Kitty O'shea had become a tragic Irish romance, eventually visited by Hollywood, and television drama. It still engrosses historians and biographers.
The entire matter was a morass of hypocrisy. Long before it became public, Captain O'shea had tacitly sanctioned the relationship. He had even been sponsored into politics by Parnell, who went against the members of his Irish Party to secure his cuckold a seat in Parliament. But when it looked as though Parnell's strength was becoming unstoppable, his political opponents decided to try to harness this open secret. Plotters close to the establishment paid O'shea to issue divorce papers. Ireland, with its newfound Catholic zeal, would never vote for a Parnellite again.
The impact of the “uncrowned king's” fall reverberated in Ireland for almost a century; only recently have the last wearers of the ivy leaf died out. And nowhere in the Parnell canon of history or biography does the name of Charles O'Brien appear.
In my zeal to examine the arrival of April Burke in my life, I have insufficiently reported in my History, I feel, many of the experiences I saw with Mr. Egan. We rode together through the country, as close as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, as Robin Hood and Little John. I can see us now, as we came down the hill into a place that expected us. He had a small roan mare, Teresa, and I had Della, the bigger horse for the bigger man. We carried packs behind our saddles, with all our boxes of powders, our bottles of potions, our salves and ointments, and our clothes. He had a flat black hat, I wore a wider brim—he told me that I looked like a musketeer; I told him that he looked like a preacher.
We traveled well together. Since he made a great deal of money, and my father had provided me with an income, our food and accommodations proved more than satisfactory. We never quarreled, never disagreed; now and again he fell quiet in himself, reflective, contemplating a recent patient, thinking out an improvement to a cure; and he complimented me many times for not intruding upon such moments. Usually we talked easily or had pleasant mutual silences.
Remarkable were the impressions that we captured of life in Ireland, in city, town, village, and parish. We met huntsmen and hawkers, ladies and louts; we met plowmen and poachers, girls and grocers. Mr. Egan always addressed me as “Mr. O'Brien”; we were, he said, “professional gentlemen, and we must behave as such” and, after every discussion of a patient, he had the habit of saying, “But, Mr. O'Brien, all people are equal until we discover that they're not.”
I do not need to search my memory for the more unusual events that we saw together; they seem to have occurred at the numerous fairs where we most successfully plied ourselves. We saw cattle fairs and horse fairs, where men made many bargains or none at all, but always there was the joy of livestock. And, with a notable absence of joy, we saw hiring fairs.
My first hiring fair was witnessed on the bridge at Golden, right by the old Norman castle, a few miles from my own home. I had heard of such events many times and had often wondered why my father never frequented them, even when he found himself a number of men short at a harvest or in the lambing times. Soon, I understood.
I had been with Mr. Egan a
little over two years and, after some days of mixing his herb mixtures at his home, we had come up from his house near Bansha to visit a woman in Mantle Hill who had damaged a leg in a fall in her yard and had been unable to recover its use. Our way, we found, was blocked when we came to the river and, indeed, the entire winding street of the village thronged with people.
On one side of the thoroughfare (if I may call it that; this is not a large village) little rude platforms had been arranged; onto these stepped a variety of men. Many had red faces, all had loud voices, and they shouted their names and their places of origin: “John-Joe Kelly from Limerick itself” or “James Prendergast all the way from Clare.” Having secured an audience, each of these shouters then made way for a succession of diffident people, who stepped onto the podium and waited until told by their barker to step down again. These were the men and women, boys and girls who offered themselves for hire.
Some attracted no interest. If a man seemed unusually strong, a voice called, “Why aren't you working already?” Or someone would step from the crowd and begin a physical inspection—he would check the poor fellow's hands, feel his legs, open his mouth, look at his teeth.
“They don't want to hire someone who's sickening for something,” said Mr. Egan, beside me.
“This is humiliating,” I said.
“Wait a minute and you'll see worse,” said Mr. Egan.
The candidates stepped on, stepped off again. Once or twice, a boy of fourteen or fifteen attracted attention; I observed two such, and both had abundant hair. The farmers who showed an interest poked and prodded. One man hired one boy; the other lad drifted loose.
Then came the women and the girls. Fewer in number, some quite lovely, they stood there, eyes downcast, evidently poor, as their barker shouted their experience: “Worked for a farmer's wife over near Charleville” or “Was eight years with a lady called MacMahon in Clare until the lady died.”
Once or twice, men fortified with drink stepped up and began an inspection. No man actually put his hands lasciviously on any woman (some constables lingered near), but they leered to the onlookers, and curved shapes in the air with their hands, and turned the poor creatures this way and that.
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