Katharine Wood was born into a titled family in Essex, England, and married Captain William O’Shea in 1867. After leaving the army, Willie O’Shea displayed a complete ineptitude with money and was unable to make any success of the several businesses he started. From 1874 onwards, it fell to Katharine to support them and their three children by taking a job as a paid companion to her rich Aunt Ben. Although the O’Sheas grew apart over the years and Willie kept his own private apartment in London, they shared an official family residence with Aunt Ben at Eltham, Surrey.
Katharine was very pretty, bright and headstrong. She had an interest in politics stemming from her husband’s attempts to forge a career in that direction. In 1880, the year Willie O’Shea first entered Parliament as MP for Clare (where he owned land), Katharine sought out Charles Stewart Parnell, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, with a view to advancing her husband’s career. At that first meeting, the attraction was immediate and she developed a fascination with the charismatic Charles. Within a few months, the two had embarked on a passionate love affair.
Instead of meeting clandestinely in hotels, Katharine and Charles arranged matters between them less conventionally, but more conveniently, by having Charles to stay – as a guest of both Mr and Mrs O’Shea – at Eltham. Their cover was that Willie had a political relationship with Charles and acted as a mediator between him and prime minister, William Gladstone, on the thorny Home Rule issue. In return for Willie’s compliance, Charles helped him to a position as the MP for Galway in 1886 – an act that would come back to haunt him.
In 1881, while Charles was in prison for ‘conspiring to defraud landlords of rents’ – a charge arising from his work as president of the Land League – Katharine gave birth to his daughter, but the baby died soon afterwards. She was to have two more children by Charles, in 1883 and 1884, but all were registered under the name of O’Shea. Willie, apparently hoping for political advancement from Charles, seemed to turn a blind eye to what was going on, even through Katharine’s pregnancies.
This civilised arrangement fell apart on Christmas Eve 1889 when, at the height of Charles Stewart Parnell’s career and just when it seemed he had brought Home Rule within Ireland’s grasp, O’Shea petitioned for divorce. He was backed by Katharine’s family, all of whom were furious at not receiving anything in Aunt Ben’s will. (Ben had died in 1887.) Willie made the unlikely claim that he had known nothing of his wife’s nine-year affair, and he named Charles as co-respondent in the action; because he wanted to marry Katharine, Charles refused to defend himself. Despite attempts by Katharine to buy off her husband by promising him most of Aunt Ben’s money, the divorce was finalised in autumn 1890 and the ensuing scandal destroyed Charles’s parliamentary career.
The Irish Parliamentary Party split into pro- and anti-Parnellites, and their leader was accused of living under the thumb of a scheming, immoral Englishwoman. He was also accused of bribing O’Shea with the Galway parliamentary seat in 1886. In by-election after by-election, Charles fought the gossip and innuendo to retain pro-Parnellite candidates and keep the leadership of the party.
In June 1891, Charles and Katharine were married in an English registry office. This only made matters worse in the Irish press, which unanimously refused to refer to ‘Kitty’, as they called Katharine, by her new married name of Mrs Parnell. After the wedding, Charles went straight back to work, but it was clear to everyone that he was a broken man. Crippled with rheumatism and suffering from stress and exhaustion, Charles Stewart Parnell died in Brighton in October 1891. After his death his widow suffered the first of several nervous breakdowns, but she outlived him by another thirty years. Katharine never visited nor showed any further interest in Ireland.