It is unnecessarily melodramatic to suggest that any man in history may have been indispensable to events. By the time Parnell appeared on the scene a new economic inexorability was at work in Irish politics which would have brought about great political changes whatever the personalities involved. Yet to match that inexorability history could hardly have timed a better manipulator of events than Charles Stewart Parnell. It is relatively easy to see how other men who played important roles in the next decade could have been duplicated, even men of the stature of Michael Davitt and John Devoy. Parnell alone dominated events, forging from them a political movement from which there eventually grew at last a modern popular Irish nationalism.
1877 was a key year in the gradual revolution on which Ireland, thanks to Gladstone and the impact of the Fenians, was now embarked. Politically it saw a wider use of obstructionist methods in Parliament by that very small group of Irish MPs who were trying to draw forcible attention to the demand for Home Rule – methods of which Butt, the party’s nominal leader, increasingly disapproved. Joseph Biggar and F. H. O’Donnell, the erratic and irascible member for Dungarvan, had been the pioneers of obstruction, but the new member for Meath, Charles Stewart Parnell, with an iron stamina, a cool indifference to the clubman’s atmosphere of the House of Commons, and his concern only for the way in which what was said there would strike people in Ireland, soon made himself a master of the technique.
Descended on his father’s side from a Protestant Irish patriot of the eighteenth century, a strain which in any case conferred a certain remoteness from the Ireland of his own day, Parnell had an American mother whose dislike of the British had not prevented her from having her daughters presented at Queen Victoria’s court, or sending him to Cambridge. Her own father, Charles Stewart, nicknamed ‘Old Ironsides’, had been an American admiral and a scourge of the British in the war of 1812. And it was Parnell’s emotional detachment from both England and in a way Ireland, too, that was to be his chief strength as an Irish politician. His least favourite colour was green: and during one critical period of three years in the next decade he never even visited Ireland at all. He had incorporated early into a natural aloofness a sympathy for the Irish peasantry in their distress and having once engaged in politics on their behalf treated the subsequent problems which arose rather like problems in engineering or science, of which he was an enthusiastic amateur.1 He made inscrutability and unpredictability into political techniques which baffled colleagues and opponents alike. ‘We feared him,’ an English viceroy was to say, ‘because we never knew what he was up to.’
Never before had there been a man who thus deployed the essentially English qualities of inborn superiority and arrogance in the cause of the Irish peasant. For this his colleagues forgave him much and his countrymen, after his tragic death, everything. ‘An Englishman of the strongest type moulded for an Irish purpose’, the Fenian Michael Davitt called him when he first met him in 1877.2 And so he was to prove.
Not the least of Parnell’s political merits was that he felt under no obligation towards any form of Irish national dogma. His definition of the Irish national goal was constantly criticized by Englishmen as equivocal, but that was its virtue: it was wholly pragmatic. ‘I’m not sure he knows exactly where he is going,’ observed another Fenian early in Parnell’s career while saying that he had qualities which should endear him to Fenians.3 Irish nationalism did not know where it was going either and had suffered from too many people trying to force it to go where it could not. Parnell never worried about where he was going. ‘None of us,’ he once said, ‘whether we are in America or Ireland, or wherever we may be, will be satisfied until we have destroyed the last link which keeps Ireland bound to England.’ But he was also quite happy to deny that he ever said it.**4 He subsequently often categorically rejected a separatist republican goal but never made it clear whether he did so as a matter of principle or policy. In so far as he had a basic national position it was the infinitely flexible one now inscribed on his monument in O’Connell Street, Dublin: ‘… no man has the right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation. No man has the right to say to this country “Thus far shalt thou go and no further”, and we have never attempted to fix the ne plus ultra to the progress of Ireland’s nationhood and we never shall.’5
‘They will do what we can make them do,’ he said once of the British Government, and this was the only national principle on which he operated.6
In the summer of 1877, taking advantage of the generous rules of debate and the latitude then given by gentlemanly custom to individual members to assert their rights against the government machine, Parnell and his small group of half a dozen or so supporters began holding up government business to a point where ministers desperately sought the help of Butt himself in restraining them.
‘I regret,’ said Butt, dragged in from the smoking-room on the night of 12 April 1877 when Parnell was holding up the passage of the Mutiny Bill with innumerable amendments and unnecessary divisions, ‘I regret that the time of the House has been wasted in this miserable and wretched discussion …. I am not responsible for the member for Meath and cannot control him. I have, however, a duty to discharge to the great nation of Ireland and I think I should discharge it best when I say I disapprove entirely of the conduct of the honourable member for Meath.’7
Though the House itself rang with cheers,8 Butt could hardly have struck a more unsuitable note for Ireland. He was in fact sounding his own political death-knell. For while throughout that summer Parnell and his friends, equally contemptuous of Butt and the House of Commons, persisted in their obstruction, forcing the House on 31 July 1877 into its longest ever continuous session of twenty-six hours over the South Africa Bill, an agricultural slump was looming in Ireland and an imperative need was arising that the always discordant voice of the Irish peasant should be properly heard. The tenant farmers faced their gravest crisis since the great famine of the forties. To take political charge in such a crisis Parnell was ideally suited.
The season of 1877 had been disastrously wet in Ireland but a deeper economic cause underlay the Irish tenant farmer’s troubles. The opening up of the corn-growing areas of the American West, together with the development of efficient transport by rail and fast steamship across the Atlantic, was flooding Europe with cheap grain with which the United Kingdom could not compete. Prices began to fall and with them went the Irish farmer’s ability to pay his rent. Evictions loomed. The wet summer, and a consequent reduction in the potato crop to less than half the value of the previous year, complicated the prospect with the additional threat of famine.9 The number of evictions more than doubled in 1878 to the highest figure for over a decade.10 By 1880 they had more than doubled again and literally half the population of Ireland was living on private charity, with the proportion in the south-west of the country as high as nine-tenths.11 ‘Charity alone,’ the Lord Mayor of Dublin’s Mansion House Committee was later to report, ‘stood between the vast masses of the population and a terrible death … a Famine … was stayed by the hand of private charity …’12 As in the forties much of the private charity came from England. But that after eighty years of the Union the vast majority of the population should still be ultimately dependent for survival only on private charity, from whatever source, was a terrible condemnation of government, if not of the Union itself, and certainly of that mood of civilized self-satisfaction at Westminster which Parnell and his supporters had been so busily disturbing.
As early as August 1877 a natural Irish political alliance had begun to suggest itself. There were only two positive national forces in Irish politics: those extreme nationalist elements in Ireland represented by the IRB, isolated as they were from the great body of Irish opinion by their obsession with the dogma of armed national revolt, and the new force in the constitutional sphere first created by Butt but active only in the small group round Parnell.
The Irish Republican Brotherhood had been reorganized in 1873 under the leadership of the deaf and almost blind novelist Charles Kickham, who as a young man had observed Smith O’Brien’s trance-like perambulations in Tipperary. But remoteness from political reality was now the IRB’s own chief characteristic. Most of those IRB men, who had been at first prepared to cooperate with Butt, were disillusioned with the experiment. One critic had expressed his disappointment in Butt graphically but unkindly by saying he ‘would not give the snuff of a farthing candlelight for all the nationality that existed in that man’.13 The IRB leadership itself therefore had deduced that only total abstinence in future from any such parliamentary compromise could guarantee the purity of the republican separatist doctrine. But it was not unreasonable to question the point of preserving such a doctrine, however pure, in totally ineffective isolation.
Joseph Biggar and another Fenian member of Parliament, John O’Connor Power, together with other members of the Supreme Council of the IRB, recognized the absurdity of such an attitude and decided to continue to work through Parliament as the only avenue available. They were consequently expelled or forced to resign from the IRB for their heresy. But more and more former Fenians were, like them, becoming impatient with classical Fenian orthodoxy and looking round for ways in which they could at least be active. And though Fenians of any sort were relatively few, their political significance in Irish politics was always out of proportion to their numbers. The total membership of the IRB in Ireland in 1877 was only about nineteen thousand,14 but because of their close affiliation with the wealthy Irish revolutionary organizations in the United States they were a political force which any more practical political operator in Ireland had to take seriously into account.
In the summer of 1877 an Irish-American journalist named James J. O’Kelly, a close friend of the exiled Fenian John Devoy who was now the most effective figure in Irish-American politics, came on a visit to Europe and, in the course of it, held two long conversations with Parnell. In the first of these Parnell told O’Kelly that he was thinking in terms of some political collaboration between the radical extremists and constitutional nationalists. O’Kelly, writing to John Devoy in August, commented approvingly: ‘With the right kind of support behind him and a band of real nationalists in the House of Commons he would so remould Irish public opinion as to clear away many of the stumbling blocks in the way of progressive action.’15
The next month Parnell himself, speaking to one of those members of the Supreme Council of the IRB who had just been expelled from the organization, used a phrase which was soon to become famous. ‘I think there must be quite a new departure in our party,’ he said. ‘We are only at the beginning of an active forward policy but it must be pushed to extremes. A few men in the House of Commons can do nothing unless they are well-supported in the country …’16
The New Departure’ was the term soon to be given by extremist republicans in the United States, headed by Devoy, to a new public policy of their own. This consisted of temporarily shelving the single uncompromising goal of an Irish Republic to be won by force of arms, and substituting a more gradualist approach of short-term objectives to be won at Westminster under the leadership of Parnell. The theory was that this would help activate popular nationalist feeling, and parliamentarians were in turn to accept as a final goal a totally independent Ireland.
To make this compromise and work with parliamentarians demanded considerable heart-searching on the part of former Fenians. The IRB itself, under the leadership of Kickham, could not bring itself to do so and this in turn led to its further ineffectualness and a further splintering off of its members into would-be more active groups. Devoy, however, who had received favourable personal reports on Parnell and his attitude not only from his journalist friend J. J. O’Kelly, but also from his chief revolutionary collaborator in the States, Dr William Carroll, who saw Parnell during a long visit to Europe in 1878, finally swung the full force of his Irish-American organization, the Clan-na-Gael, over to the principle of such an alliance. He himself referred to it as a New Departure when he published details of a proposed offer of collaboration with Parnell in his paper the New York Herald on 26 October 1878. The chief terms were named as the substitution of ‘a general declaration in favour of self-government’ for the federal demand of Home Rule, and ‘vigorous agitation of the land question on the basis of a peasant proprietary, while accepting concessions tending to abolish arbitrary eviction’.
Soon afterwards Devoy himself visited Europe, and in two meetings with Parnell came to an unwritten understanding about the sort of way in which the new alliance should work. It seems fairly clear that Devoy, who had also been corresponding with the old Fenian John O’Leary on the matter, thought of the alliance as soon leading to some sort of practical nationalist climax, if possible to coincide with the centenary of the 1782 meeting of the Protestant Volunteers at Dungannon.** It also seems fairly clear that Parnell, making use throughout his life of any effective instrument to further immediate political advantages, encouraged Devoy to think in such ambitious terms, though his own eye was in fact set on down-to-earth political objectives. Later in his career it was to be in Parnell’s interest to play down any suggestion that he had originally entered into collaboration with revolutionaries for revolutionary aims. But contemporary evidence suggests that at the time of the new departure, and even as late as 1881, to keep the extreme revolutionaries working for him, he certainly allowed them to think that he worked for the same goal of total separation as themselves.
According to Devoy, part of the undertaking agreed at his own meeting with Parnell was that the direction of their combined energies into the land crisis should not prevent preparations for an armed uprising from going forward. Dr Carroll in a later description of his first 1878 interview with Parnell wrote: ‘I asked him if he was in favour of the absolute independence of Ireland. He replied that he was and that as soon as the people so declared he would go with them …. I met him several times afterwards in London, always on the most friendly terms and with the same understanding.’17 And a contemporary letter of Carroll’s to Clan-na-Gael, dated March 1878, seems to confirm this, saying that Parnell and his friends expressed themselves ‘at the firm’s service for anything they can do in their line’.18 As late as February 1881, William Lomasney, a former Fenian who had helped capture Ballyknockane barracks in the ’67 rising and within a few years was to blow himself up with dynamite in an attempt to destroy London Bridge, met Parnell in Paris. He wrote to Devoy that Parnell meant to go as far as both of them ‘in pushing the business’ of national independence, and that Parnell had told O’Leary ‘as soon as he secured the means he would start in business with us and smash up the opposition firm’.19 Finally, in June of this same year, 1881, Parnell was seen at the House of Commons by an Englishman living in America named Thomas Beach. Beach called himself Henri Le Caron, which was the name under which for years he had been posing as a French-American Fenian and supplying information to the British Government about American-Irish revolutionary circles, with which he had the highest contacts. He had been instrumental in frustrating the Fenian raid into Canada in 1868. Now, in 1881, writing to Devoy, he passed on to him a reassuring message from Parnell (having first passed it on to the British Government), to the effect that an armed rising was still his (Parnell’s) ultimate goal.20 Parnell, in fact, was having difficulty with the IRB in Ireland at the time and needed Devoy’s and the Clan-na-Gael’s support in preventing their hostility.
Such was the nature of Parnell’s political pragmatism that it is of little value to try to assess how far he may or may not have meant what he said in such conversations. He himself avoided the need to inquire into his own sincerity. He was already making a political art out of not knowing precisely where he was going provided he went in a direction which he thought would help Ireland. He was content in his active plans to have his hands full with immediate political objectives. By instinct rather than by well-calculated intent he made use of the revolutionary extremists at this period as he was later to make use of both the great English parties, Liberal and Conservative, and, in the end, turn back again to make use of ‘the hillside men’ with whom he had begun.
Whatever the degree of sincerity with which Parnell had managed to secure the support both of Devoy and his American financial resources, and that of many dissident IRB men in Ireland, two salient facts emerge in retrospect. First, he did secure their support, and, second he put it to a purpose which, whatever his continued assurances, reversed the priority of the terms on which the New Departure had been formally based. In those terms agitation on the land had been seen as a means to the end of fairly immediate nationalist revolution. What Parnell did was to turn the policy inside out. He used the energies of idealist nationalists to work the land problem into an urgent and overriding political consideration in national life. This he did, not out of any particular principle, but because to a politician like himself looking for an area in which to be effective, the land situation clearly presented itself as the more promising. Effectiveness alone was Parnell’s political criterion; when he could not be effective he did nothing.
Much of his political skill lay in his ability to master forces which others had set in motion. It was largely thanks to the efforts of another man altogether that he found the critical situation on the land politically so promising: that very Fenian who, meeting Parnell in December 1877, had seen in him ‘an Englishman of the strongest type moulded for an Irish purpose’. His name was Michael Davitt, and he had then just been released on ticket of leave from Dartmoor after seven years in prison.
Davitt had been born at the height of the famine and his mother and father had been evicted from their smallholding in County Mayo in 1852 when he was five. They had emigrated to Lancashire where, as a boy of eleven, he had lost an arm in a factory accident. Almost inevitably in such circumstances, being a young man of spirit and feeling, he had become a Fenian. He had gone to Chester on the morning of 11 February 1867 to take part in McCafferty’s abortive raid on the castle. Later he had helped to run rifles and revolvers to Ireland, and in 1870 had been sentenced to fifteen years’ penal servitude for his alleged part in an assassination plot. In prison, handicapped in his ability to work in the stone quarries by his one arm, he had been harnessed to a cart like an animal. He had thought much about the future of Ireland. Recognizing realistically, on his emergence from prison, that ‘the vast mass of our population had grown politically indifferent or apathetic’21 and that the Irish revolutionary movement as represented by the IRB needed a new outlook, Davitt felt immediately drawn towards Parnell, whom he actually asked to join the IRB of which he himself remained for a time a member. Parnell refused. But he expressed much sympathy with Davitt’s general ideas for future action, which largely coincided with his own, and included a proposal that a new type of parliamentary party drawn from men of strong nationalist convictions should make a reasoned demand in Parliament for Repeal of the Union and, if this was refused, withdraw in a body and form a national assembly in Ireland. Parnell immediately endorsed the proposal in a public speech.22
On a visit to America soon afterwards Davitt discussed at length with Devoy the prospects of future collaboration with Parnell. But Davitt was not himself party to the formal inauguration of Devoy’s new departure, being apprehensive that too public an identification of Parnell with extremists might prejudice Parnell’s opportunities for effectiveness. Davitt’s own political preoccupation was with the relationship between nationalism and the problem of the land; and he was to become increasingly obsessed with land reform as an end in itself. Now, in a speech in Boston in December 1878, he had publicly asked himself the pertinent question: ‘Why is the Irish farmer not an active nationalist?’ and replied on behalf of that farmer: ‘If the nationalists want me to believe in and labour a little for independence, they must first show themselves willing and strong enough to stand between me and the power which a single Englishman, a landlord, wields over me.’23 With the reservation that the landlord was in fact far more likely to be an Irishman and that the nationalist element in the tenant farmer’s mind was therefore even more remote than Davitt postulated, this was a reasonable diagnosis.
Back in Ireland in 1879 Davitt found that in his own home county of Mayo the situation on the land was nearing desperation. Under the pressure of the agricultural crisis the peasantry confronted the classical pattern of disaster. Unable to pay their rents because of the slump in prices they were threatened with eviction. There was nowhere for them to go except out of the country. Simultaneously, the failure of the potato crop meant that there was nothing to eat. The spectre of the Great Famine, for thirty years never far from the back of any Irish peasant’s mind, was suddenly out in the open again.
The protection from eviction supposed to have been conferred on the tenant by Gladstone’s Land Act of 1870 was revealed as useless. The would-be deterrent effect on the landlord of having to pay compensation for eviction did not apply because, under the Act, compensation only applied to cases of non-payment of rent where the rent demanded was ‘exorbitant’, and the tenant could not now pay even a normal rent.
On one estate in County Mayo administered by an Irish Catholic priest, Canon Burke, the tenants made a stand and called a protest meeting at Irishtown near Claremorris on 20 April 1879. The meeting, which Davitt himself helped to organize, demanded a general reduction of rents and denounced the landlord system. It had an immediate local effect, for the priest, Canon Burke, reduced his rents by twenty-five per cent within a few days. It also set the pattern for a whole new land agitation in the rest of Ireland where similar conditions of hardship were soon experienced.
Davitt proceeded to extend the Irishtown principles on a national scale. When he organized a similar meeting to take place at Westport, County Mayo, on 8 June 1879, he secured Parnell’s promise to speak at it. Parnell, carefully weighing up the situation, had recognized the vast social forces that now stood ready to be harnessed to a political movement.
Intimidation and agrarian violence of the traditional Irish secret society type had already begun to manifest themselves. This was intensified by the participation of former Fenians who on the principle of the new departure now became active in the land movement. Because of this the venerable Archbishop of Tuam, John MacHale, O’Connell’s former supporter, felt obliged publicly to criticize Parnell’s decision to speak at the Westport meeting. Parnell displayed that bland indifference with which he was to confront all opposition whether from Church, State, Liberal, Conservative or his own party for the next eleven years.
‘Will I attend?’ he said to Davitt who went to see him at his Dublin hotel the day before the meeting and the day after the publication of the Archbishop’s pronouncement. ‘Certainly! Why not? I have promised to be there and you can count on me keeping that promise.’24
At the meeting itself he set the tone of the whole subsequent Land League agitation.
‘A fair rent,’ he declared, ‘is a rent the tenant can reasonably afford to pay according to the times, but in bad times a tenant cannot be expected to pay as much as he did in good times …. Now, what must we do in order to induce the landlords to see the position? You must show them that you intend to hold a firm grip of your homesteads and lands. You must not allow yourselves to be dispossessed as your fathers were dispossessed in 1847 …. I hope … that on those properties where the rents are out of all proportion to the times a reduction may be made and that immediately. If not, you must help yourselves, and the public opinion of the world will stand by you and support you in your struggle to defend your homesteads.’25
He was as good as his word. In August Davitt summoned an assembly of 150 tenant farmers of Mayo who founded the Land League of Mayo with no less an ultimate objective than the transference of the ownership of the soil from the landlords to the cultivators, with compensation payable to the landlord. It was the first open convention in Ireland for eighty-five years, for the Convention Act of 1793 had just been repealed. And that autumn, while men with blackened faces were increasingly shooting at or otherwise intimidating landlords and their agents – more particularly terrorizing those Irishmen who were prepared to occupy land from which another had been evicted – and while threatening letters were being received, signed this time not by Captain Right or Captain Rock but by Rory of the Hills (‘who always warns before he kills’), the National Land League of Ireland was founded on 21 October 1879 with, as its president, Charles Stewart Parnell.
The Land League’s object was, by promoting the organization of the tenant farmers, to bring about a reduction in rents, protect those threatened with eviction, and finally obtain ‘such reform in the laws relating to the land as will enable every tenant to become the owner of his holding by paying a fair rent for a limited number of years’.26
This latter objective enshrined the principle known as ‘land purchase’ by which, in the course of the next fifty years, a complete transfer of the land-ownership of Ireland was to be brought about.
The principle of land purchase had been first introduced by Gladstone in his Church Disestablishment Act of 1869 and Land Act of 1870. Land purchase clauses in these acts made it possible for tenants to buy their holdings by putting up a proportion of the purchase price and paying off the remainder in annual instalments over a period of years, the whole of that remainder being meanwhile advanced to the landlord by the State. Little advantage had, however, so far been taken of these provisions because the proportion of the price which the tenant had to put up – as much as a third – was far beyond the means of the average Irish tenant, and the period over which repayment was to be made too short. But an extension of the principle on more and more generous terms over the fifty years that followed the foundation of the Land League meant that by the time of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921 out of 470,000 holdings, 400,000 were owned by their occupiers, who were paying off the purchase price by an annual sum considerably less than their rent would have been and for a limited period only.**
However, this goal of full Irish peasant proprietorship seemed almost utopian at the time it was first formulated by the Land League in 1879. Starvation and large-scale evictions were then the immediate order of the day, and concessions to prevent these were the immediate objectives. Final victory on the land was only achieved after a so-called Land War which the Land League then inaugurated, and which was to be fought out in spasms for more than twenty years. Though it was to be fought out in many phases and by organizations with different names it was fought in the first formative and crucial phase by Parnell and Davitt, with twin offensives on the land in Ireland and in Parliament at Westminster.
A new generation of polite society had now to be reminded of what eviction meant in Ireland. An Irish Member of Parliament recalled a sight witnessed long ago by the Roman Catholic Bishop of Meath, who had seen seven hundred people evicted in one day with winnowing sheets placed over the forms of sick and unconscious people lying in bed while the roof was pulled down over their heads.27 Nothing now prevented a repetition of such things for, as no less a patrician figure than Lord Hartington told the House, the exceptional circumstances of the time had placed in the hands of a bad landlord a power which enabled him absolutely to defeat the purpose of the Land Act of 1870. If he wanted to clear his estate, now was the time to do it without pecuniary loss.28 The report of a Quaker committee from the West of Ireland insisted that it was absolute poverty alone that prevented payment of rent, for many of the people there had even pawned their shawls and were without any other food than that supplied by charity.29 A case was cited of a small farmer in Kerry who in 1854 had been threatened with eviction if he did not take an additional ten acres of marsh land, and had agreed to do so. He had drained and fenced this land and for twenty-three years had regularly paid the rent but now, hit by the slump, had been unable to pay for two years and had been evicted. He and his wife and five children had taken shelter with a neighbour, but the landlord’s agent then threatened the neighbour with eviction for sheltering them. Whereupon the man and his family in desperation had returned to the house from which they had been evicted and two days later had had the roof pulled down over their heads.30
A letter quoted in The Times in 1880 from that pillar of Empire, General Gordon himself, described the prevailing condition of the Irish peasantry in terms uncannily reminiscent of other witnesses over two centuries. He found them ‘patient beyond belief …. Loyal, but at the same time broken-spirited and desperate, living on the verge of starvation in places where we would not keep our cattle …. The Bulgarians, Anatolians, Chinese and Indians are better off than many of them are …’31
Loyal, in a constitutional sense, most of them were, but this time they were not taking things lying down.
The popular power of the Land League, organized in Ireland largely by ex-Fenians, spread rapidly throughout the country. Mass demonstrations to secure reductions of rents were successfully mobilized. Many evictions were physically prevented. Where they could not be prevented, victims of eviction were sheltered and supported while private charity kept the majority of the people fed. The Land League operated by a combination of above-ground official action and underground violence. On the one hand there were the meetings, the speeches, even official Land League Courts replacing the normal administration of justice in some parts of the country – all largely financed by Devoy from America under the working of the New Departure. On the other hand there were the shots fired into windows, the threatening letters and the visits in the dead of night to those paying rents which the League regarded as excessive or taking holdings from which another had been evicted. Sometimes shots were fired into their thighs or pieces of ear removed from them or other physical torture applied. In this traditional agrarian activism many rank-and-file ex-Fenians of the New Departure school could now take part in the rather blurred conviction that they were in some way promoting that national uprising to which their original creed had been dedicated. On the official level, both the Secretary of the Land League, Thomas Brennan, and the Treasurer, Patrick Egan, were ex-Fenians.
The leadership of the Land League officially deplored violence, as of course did Parnell from his position in Parliament. But it was often a case of the Land League’s right hand not being particular to inquire what its left hand was doing. And Parnell’s ally in Parliament, the outspoken member for Belfast, Joseph Biggar, crudely summarized something of this ambivalent attitude when he opposed the shooting of landlords on the grounds that it was wrong because the assailant frequently missed and hit someone else. At the same time, the officially correct character of the movement, with its determination to right the poor man’s wrongs, made it possible for the Land League to enlist that support of the parish priests without which no movement in Ireland could flourish. The priests worked almost to a man to help their people fight a possible repetition of the 1840s. Even some of the Catholic hierarchy and in particular the popular Archbishop Croke of Cashel proclaimed the Land League’s principles of justice to the tenant to be moral and right. And the official organ of the Vatican itself declared that ‘in consequence of the unsupportable state of the Irish peasantry the people must shake off their oppression. The crimes committed in Ireland are not attributable to the Land League …’32
By 1880 there were parts of Ireland where the queen’s writ no longer ran. Reductions of rent from between ten and fifty per cent had been forced from many landlords, and where landlords refused to yield to pressure or to their own moral promptings in face of the Irish peasant’s distress, it was made often physically impossible for them to carry out an eviction at all. The Irish correspondent of The Times described the Land League as ‘a very distinct and potent government which is rapidly superseding the Imperial government …. It rules with an iron hand and with a promptitude which enforces instant obedience. Its code is clear, its executive resolute, its machinery complete and its action uniform. There is a Government de facto and a Government de jure – the former wielding a power which is felt and feared, the latter exhibiting the paraphernalia and pomp, but little of the reality of power.’33
This was the situation which Parnell now exploited to maximum political advantage in the British Parliament, elevating the Irish question to that Parliament’s chief preoccupation for the first time since the Union, so that as one member complained soon it was ‘occupying all minds to the exclusion of everything else’.34