Butt had died in 1879, and his place as leader of the Home Rule party had been temporarily taken by another moderate, William Shaw. But a general election took place in April 1880 in which significantly it was not the still rather abstract question of Home Rule but that of the land that was the issue. This was the first election fought with the principles of the New Departure in operation, and former Fenians with advanced ideas sympathetic to Parnell not only took part in the electoral campaign but were elected in some constituencies. Joining Biggar and O’Connor Power in Parliament were now other former Fenians, such as John Barry, Thomas Sexton and T. P. O’Connor, together with other radicals of a new type, of whom the most striking was John Dillon, the son of the Young Ireland founder of The Nation, and already a pillar of the Land League. Though it was not until the election of 1885 that the Irish Party finally became a closely-knit and efficient radical machine with strict party discipline and officially paid members, yet some suggestion at least of this new radical phenomenon was felt after the election of 1880 and was almost immediately signalized by the election of Parnell himself to be the party’s leader in May 1880. A few of its members had even probably received some clandestine financial support from Land League funds.1 By the end of the year the party under Parnell had already taken the decision to sit in opposition to Gladstone’s new Liberal government – itself a striking departure from the traditional Irish parliamentary practice of looking for what crumbs might come Ireland’s way at the Liberals’ table.
Yet at this stage Parnell’s real source of strength was still the extent to which the Land League in Ireland was making Ireland ungovernable. And here he walked a political tightrope.
The parliamentary party was a relatively moderate force, and even the decision to sit in opposition to Gladstone had led to a rupture within it. Yet on his other wing, the Land League with its neo-Fenian elements and extravagant aims was a remarkably independent organization. And the most delicate consideration of all in the balance of forces he commanded was this: the government he was fighting was led by a man who in the past decade had shown a genuine concern to solve the problems of Ireland equitably. While pressing Gladstone, therefore, to do much more for Ireland than Gladstone saw his way clear to do, Parnell had to remember that up to a point Gladstone was a potential ally. Only while Gladstone did nothing but introduce special repressive legislation against the Land League, and before the good intent in his mind had had a chance to show itself, was an outright challenge to his safe tactics.
In such a situation, Parnell, while identifying himself with Land League policy, had to be careful to deplore violence in itself, merely explaining crimes where necessary, as the Vatican did, as the inevitably evil products of an evil system. In fact, the most extreme offensive measure which either he or the Land League ever officially sanctioned was the one he proposed in a famous speech at Ennis, in September 1880: that ‘species of moral Coventry’, as he called it, into which a proclaimed enemy of the Land League was to be placed by a rigid denial of all social or commercial contact on the part of his neighbours. The policy itself was not new and had been advocated as Land League technique by John Dillon in 1879. But its endorsement by the new leader in graphic phrases about isolating such a man from his kind ‘as if he were a leper of old’ and showing him ‘your detestation of the crime he has committed’ in bidding for a farm from which his neighbour had been evicted, gave Irishmen a firm new spirit of self-respect with which to gird themselves. The next month the technique was employed against a man whose name is still identified with it all over the world, a much disliked but courageous evicting land agent on Lough Mask, County Mayo, named Captain Boycott. Fifty volunteer Orangemen from Ulster crossed Ireland to help harvest Captain Boycott’s crops when no one else would touch them, and seven thousand men, one-sixth of the entire British military force in Ireland, was required to protect them. It was, said a local carman, ‘the queerest menagerie that ever came into Connaught’.2 Boycott’s crops were saved, but there was no slackening of the campaign against him, and when he tried to retire to a hotel in Dublin even the proprietor there refused to let him stay, and he had to withdraw temporarily from Ireland altogether.
But for all the Irish popularity Parnell won by speeches endorsing boycotting, the balance of forces he had to manipulate was soon to become almost intolerably delicate. The Land League agitation emboldened by success was growing increasingly wilder and demanding nothing less than the total compulsory buying-out, on terms favourable to the tenantry, of all landlords.
Gladstone’s method of dealing with the crisis, which reached its climax in the winter of 1880–81, was to introduce a severe Coercion Bill to restore law and order before any land reform. Parnell and his supporters fought the Coercion Bill in the House of Commons with all the persistence and ingenuity in obstruction which past experience gave them, and his supporters were now many more than in the previous Parliament.
On the night of 31 January 1881 they far outdid the previous record of 1877, by forcing the House into a continuous session of forty-one hours in an attempt to hold up the Coercion Bill. Whereupon the Speaker on his own initiative arbitrarily suspended the time-honoured rules of the House and forced the closure of the debate. This called the bluff of obstruction, and a formal reorganization of the House’s rules later in the year confirmed the eclipse of obstruction as an effective technique. But meanwhile, after a last gesture of defiance on the day following the Speaker’s historic ruling, Parnell and thirty-five other Irish members were suspended from the House of Commons and temporarily ejected from the Chamber.
A situation had come about as envisaged in Parnell’s conversation with Davitt a few years before, when the possibility of a withdrawal from the British Parliament altogether and the establishment of some self-styled national assembly in Ireland discussed.** The decision Parnell now took against this was epoch-making one, though it would have been out of character if he had thought of it as such. It was based on a firm grasp of political realities: chief of which was the fact that at most one-third of the party would have followed him to Ireland.3 While keeping the radical wing among his New Departure supporters in the Land League as happy as possible, by being, as one historian has put it, ‘adept at the cape-work of the pseudo-revolutionary gesture’,4 Parnell directed his mind towards the future which included the all-important question of Gladstone’s new Land Bill.
Two Royal Commissions on the tenure of land in Ireland had just reported. These were the Bessborough Commission, appointed by Gladstone himself to inquire into the working of the 1870 Land Act, and the Richmond Commission, appointed in the previous administration of Disraeli, to inquire into agricultural conditions in Great Britain and Ireland. In the light of these, quite apart from the pressure of the present crisis, the argument for some new measure to regulate relations between landlord and tenant was unanswerable. Gladstone’s first attempt to devise one, a relatively tame affair, the principle of which was expressed in its title, the Compensation for Disturbance Bill, was thrown out by the House of Lords in August 1880.
Any land reform short of the total abolition of landlordism was going to dissatisfy the extremists among the Land League organizers. But their persisting intransigence made it easier for Gladstone to present and eventually get accepted by Parliament a Land Bill that was of much more revolutionary dimensions than the Compensation for Disturbance Bill and yet which could by then seem, if not moderate, at least acceptable by contrast with the Land League’s increasingly violent demands. The new bill became the Land Act in August 1881.
Basically it granted the three F’s, long demanded by tenant righters from the days of Sharman Crawford and O’Connell: fixity of tenure, provided the rent was paid; free sale by the tenant of the tenant’s interest and improvements in a holding on his vacating it; but above all, fair rents. The Act laid down that the definition of a fair rent no longer rested ultimately with the landlord but with a government Land Court to be especially appointed for the purpose. Given the prevailing notions of the rights of property, it was in the context of its time perhaps the most revolutionary social legislation any British Government has ever introduced.
Parnell, confronted with what he knew to be a relatively excellent measure, had to reconcile this with the knowledge that it would not satisfy his extreme friends in Ireland who wanted a total transfer of the land to the people. Above all, it would not satisfy his New Departure supporters in America with their all-important financial resources, who wanted an independent Irish republic. They, after all, had embarked on the New Departure intending land reform to be only a secondary consideration, the means by which the temperature was to be raised to white hot national heat. The temperature had in fact been raised to white heat but to fashion not a nationalist revolt but land reform. Nationalism, though thus partly aroused, was still a long way secondary in the peasantry’s mind to concern for their own economic situation. How was Parnell to welcome and rest on the major success he and his supporters had won from Gladstone without giving many of those supporters the feeling that they had been sold or at least cynically exploited?
At first, in public and in the House of Commons, he refused to support the bill, on the grounds of its inadequacy, thereby going so far to please his extreme supporters that his more conservative supporters began to doubt his political wisdom. But he knew that while the Land League and even the more iconoclastic land reformers among his parliamentary group, like John Dillon, were assailing the bill for not abolishing the landlords outright, the benefits of the Act would be extended to Ireland whether he opposed it or not.
In fact, he played a classical political game of keeping the movement together by not altogether satisfying either wing. Croke, the nationalist Archbishop of Cashel, condemned Parnell’s decision not to support the bill, and almost a third of the Home Rule members in the House of Commons even voted for Gladstone. Parnell, replying to the Archbishop’s public criticism of himself, maintained that there had been a need to mark the imperfections of the bill by ‘making a demonstration … which … will not affect the division’.5 Those on the left, who rightly suspected from such remarks that Parnell was at heart inclining towards moderation and some eventual compromise with Gladstonian policy, were partly placated by his launching at this time a new newspaper, United Ireland, under the editorship of the ex-Fenian, William O’Brien. In United Ireland, O’Brien unleashed the wild and colourful verbal violence in which his journalistic talent revelled, backing the stern public policy of Parnell with papery battle cries and trumpet calls which were almost a parody of traditional Irish revolutionary language. The working of the Coercion Act, with sporadic arrests of prominent land leaguers like Dillon for rash speech-making, made this sort of reaction obligatory. But reality in the form of the passing of the Land Act and the practical prospect which this opened to tenant farmers of lowered rents secured through government Land Courts was an equally obligatory consideration. Parnell, a politician interested in concrete results, had to take up a concrete position. He finally devised the masterly formula of ‘testing the Act’, or letting the Land League put forward a number of selected cases to see what sort of reduction in rents the government was really prepared to give, thus skilfully placing the onus of cooperation on the government rather than on the Land League.
To the extremists, however, particularly in America, who thought the only policy for the tenant was to hold the harvest and refuse to pay rent until the government abandoned coercion altogether and transferred the land to the tenant, ‘testing the Act’ was a dangerously soft attitude. Parnell typically did his best to reassure them by the toughness of his speeches in Ireland. He talked of the hollowness of the Act and used increasingly militant language to denounce the British Government, reminding them that behind all this lay Ireland’s national aspirations. Things were made easier for him by attacks on him from England, particularly a famous speech of Gladstone’s at Leeds in October 1881 in which the Prime Minister reminded Parnell that ‘the resources of civilization in Ireland were not yet exhausted’.
Finally, Gladstone rescued Parnell from his awkward spot altogether by putting the resources of civilization into action. As the contemporary ballad-maker had it:
… Before this wrong all other wrongs of Ireland do grow pale,
For they’ve clapped the pride of Erin’s isle into cold Kilmainham jail.
Parnell was arrested.
It was the best thing that could have happened to him. William O’Brien, John Dillon and others prominent in the Land League agitation were soon in Kilmainham gaol with him. From there they issued at last a desperate and often envisaged call for ‘a general strike against rent’ in the form of a ‘No Rent Manifesto’. On 20 October the government suppressed the Land League.
To subscribe to this No Rent Manifesto was in many ways Parnell’s master-stroke. It was to make things impossibly difficult for his opponents on both sides: his own and the government’s. It did so at the very moment he was himself withdrawn from the scene, thereby suggesting his own in-dispensability and the need for both sides to take him on something like his own terms. Parnell had already said that Captain Moonlight would replace him if he were imprisoned, meaning that the time-honoured methods of the secret societies, always at the back of the Land League agitation, would take over completely. And Captain Moonlight, unlike Parnell, was inaccessible to the government and could be dealt with only by unpopular methods of repression, leading to further bitterness and chaos. At the same time Captain Moonlight would not in fact get the average tenant farmer anywhere, for the resources of civilization were indeed quite adequate to deal with him, particularly since they also included the advantages of the new Land Act. Parnell ‘on the shelf’** automatically became a catalyst who could make things easier for everyone.
In a private letter on the day he was imprisoned Parnell admitted that the Land League movement was already breaking up fast. The principal cause of this was the success of the new Land Act. Though he later blamed the clumsy repressive measures of the government for giving the agitation a longer lease of life than it would otherwise have had, the tenants were soon obtaining substantial reductions of rent from the Land Courts and often getting a fairer deal than many of them had dreamt of as possible. The extremists in Ireland and America were thus increasingly isolated from the majority of Irish opinion and Parnell could more cavalierly afford to disregard them. One practical problem remained. It concerned holdings on which considerable arrears of rent had accumulated. The Act had failed to make adequate allowance for such cases, and the need for further legislation on this score became an important item in the clandestine and unofficial negotiations between Parnell in Kilmainham and Gladstone, which were first tentatively entered into as early as November 1881†† and seriously taken up in the New Year.
These negotiations were carried on through two sets of intermediaries. On Gladstone’s side was Joseph Chamberlain, the young radical Birmingham politician who was one of the Liberal leader’s brilliant young supporters. On Parnell’s side there were two intermediaries. One was Captain Willie O’Shea, formerly of the 18th Hussars and now Liberal Home Rule MP for County Clare. O’Shea was a dashing and feckless character who hoped to achieve through politics that worldly wealth and influence which had so far eluded him in bloodstock breeding and company promotion. The other intermediary on this side was O’Shea’s wife, Katharine, who had been carrying on a passionate love affair with Parnell since the winter of 1880. She was, in April 1882, about to bear him his first child.
The extent to which Captain O’Shea was or was not a complaisant husband at this stage is a complex one of considerable human interest but of no immediate significance to Irish history. Parnell’s own personal involvement is more relevant.
The extent to which any personal considerations affect the decisions of professional politicians must always be difficult to assess. But the strength of Parnell’s attachment to Mrs O’Shea and the fact that she was about to bear him a child must have made it at least easier for him to continue in the political direction in which he was already moving, and have confirmed an inclination away from revolutionary politics towards some sort of understanding with Gladstone.
The understanding eventually arrived at became known as the Kilmainham Treaty, though there was no document or even formal agreement of any sort. The terms were that in return for legislation to protect tenants with heavy arrears from eviction and a repeal of the Coercion Act together with the release of Parnell and his fellow detainees Parnell should call off the agitation on the land and cooperate in working the Land Act. The further implications of the understanding were that Parnell should in future use his strength in Ireland and in the House of Commons to collaborate with the Liberals in continuing Gladstone’s whole policy of ‘justice to Ireland’. And since the Irish party was after all a Home Rule party, even though the land and not Home Rule had so far been its chief preoccupation under Parnell’s leadership, ‘justice to Ireland’ would inevitably one day include some recognition as yet unspecified by Gladstone of Ireland’s aspiration to self-government.
The situation within the Liberal party on the one hand, and between Parnell and his extremist supporters on the other, was still much too delicate for any such prospective final development to be aired. But a grim fortuitous event occurred within a few days of Parnell’s release to complicate and considerably set back the implementation of the new alliance at all levels.
The Chief Secretary for Ireland, W. E. ‘Buckshot’ Forster, had felt betrayed by Gladstone’s decision to release Parnell and had resigned.** When Gladstone told the House of Commons that his place was to be taken by Lord Frederick Cavendish, younger brother of Lord Hartington and his own nephew by marriage, the announcement was greeted with jeers and laughter. Though an agreeable and intelligent man, Cavendish had hardly made the sort of mark on politics that seemed to qualify him for such a post. ‘We will tear him in pieces within a fortnight,’ jocularly commented one of the Irish party’s brightest newcomers, Tim Healy.6 Before the week was out Cavendish was found at about half past seven on the evening of his arrival in Dublin lying outside the vice-regal lodge in Phoenix Park, hacked to death by twelve-inch long surgical knives. Killed with him was the Under-Secretary, a diligent Catholic Irishman named Thomas Burke. Their assassins, who had earlier hoped to kill Forster, were members of a recently formed secret society named the Irish National Invincibles. This was composed mostly of former IRB men operating independently of the IRB in the general atmosphere of the New Departure, though they seem to have modelled themselves on the IRB assassination committees for dealing with traitors, and the IRB itself issued a statement after the deed that the men who had carried out ‘this execution … deserve well of their country’.7 The Invincibles’ leader was the Irish-American ex-Fenian, McCafferty, who had made the attempt on Chester Castle. As head of the Invincibles he had the connivance of senior officials of the Land League itself, principally an organizer named P. J. Sheridan, the Treasurer Patrick Egan, and the Secretary, Frank Byrne. The man given the job of supervising the Dublin end of the operations, a commercial traveller named Tynan, had been recruited by Byrne in the Chambers in Westminster which the Land League shared with the Irish party.8 The surgical knives for the deed had been purchased in Bond Street and brought over to Dublin by Mrs Byrne, then seven months pregnant, in her skirts.9
The Invincibles and their leaders in the Land League represented that very strain of idealist extremism from which Parnell was trying to extricate himself before embarking on the new phase of collaboration with Gladstone. In this respect the assassination could not have come at a worse time and Parnell’s immediate reaction was one of political despair. He thought for a moment of resigning his leadership of the Irish party, but was dissuaded by Gladstone himself. Parnell’s denunciation of the murder – sincere enough because it made his own political task so very much more difficult – had on the whole a convincing effect on English opinion at the time, and was echoed from almost all quarters in Ireland except the IRB. But the murders postponed the day when Gladstone and the majority of the Liberals on the one hand and Parnell and his party on the other could finally present a united front on Home Rule. Gladstone’s first preoccupation inevitably was to appease English opinion. This meant further coercion which Parnell equally inevitably had to oppose. Even without the consequent delay there were in any case considerable internal difficulties to be resolved on the Liberal side before the full alliance implicit in the Kilmainham Treaty could be implemented. Gladstone, at the time of Kilmainham, was in his mind moving in the general direction of Home Rule, but he was much too skilled a politician to be explicit even to himself on such a point when finding himself, as he did, so far ahead of his own party. His final public commitment to Home Rule did not in any case come about until Parnell had once again applied considerable political pressure.
In order to force Gladstone to realize his good intentions over the land, Parnell had made use of crude violence in Ireland. The form of pressure which he continually applied to help Gladstone manifest his conversion to Home Rule was subtler and played out on the parliamentary scene in England.
No attempt was made to resurrect the suppressed Land League. Instead, in October 1882, Parnell founded the Irish National League, the object of which, now that the agricultural crisis had temporarily subsided, was no longer agrarian but specifically national. It expressed a popular national demand for Home Rule, which had been considerably stimulated by the general anti-government feeling aroused during the recent land agitation. The importance of the new National League in practical terms was that it gave the Irish party for the first time its own national structure at constituency level, and with this structure the party went into the General Election of 1885.
This election of 1885 was the first fought with the new enlarged electorate introduced by the Franchise Act of the year before, which had granted household suffrage to the country as well as the towns. It was also the first election fought in Ireland mainly on the issue of Home Rule. From it Parnell emerged triumphant, with Home Rulers victorious in 85 out of 103 Irish seats, including an actual majority of 17 to 16 in Ulster itself. He also now had at his disposal in the Irish Parliamentary Party a far more tightly disciplined and effectively fashioned instrument than ever before. It was the first British democratic political machine of modern times.
In Parliament in the months before the election Parnell had manoeuvred with tactical ingenuity. He had put the ultimate logical pressure on Gladstone by actually voting with the Conservatives to turn him out of office, thus demonstrating to the Liberals that they could hardly afford in the end not to implement the full implications of the Kilmainham Treaty. For seven months of minority government the Conservatives under Lord Salisbury, dependent on the Irish, themselves flirted obscurely with Parnell through their Viceroy Carnarvon, a personal but unrepresentative convert to the idea of self-government for Ireland. Deftly Parnell had suddenly made Home Rule the principal issue in English politics.
At the General Election Parnell had called on his supporters in England to vote for the Conservatives. It is reckoned that this cost the Liberals some twenty seats. But the final result was ideally calculated to make Gladstone commit himself. The Conservatives won 249 seats, the Liberals 335 and the balance was held by 86 Irish Home Rulers.**
Gladstone, adroitly blending true statesmanship with political interest, had hoped that the Conservatives might raise Home Rule above party politics altogether, and would have supported them in conceding it. Quite apart from allowing Parliament to devote its time to other issues in the national interest, this would have spared himself the awkward task of trying to make Home Rule the special cause of his own party. Both the right wing of the Liberals, represented by the Whig Lord Hartington, and the left wing, represented by the radical Joseph Chamberlain, were deeply uneasy about Home Rule though prepared to concede a limited form of local government. But given the Conservatives’ natural leanings towards imperial grandeur the chances of any agreed solution between the two parties was remote. The Conservatives were in any case at this time looking round for an issue on which to mould an effective political identity, and were soon to realize that they had found a good one in ‘patriotic’ opposition to Home Rule.
Gladstone, seeing the balance held in the Commons by the Irish and feeling in his own conscience the need for Home Rule, inevitably played for Irish support and introduced a bill to grant it. The Conservatives gratefully made the most of the role with which he had presented them. Quite apart from the solution to their identity problem it gave the Conservatives the immediate prospect of a return to power in alliance with the dissident Liberals, those followers of Hartington and Chamberlain who opposed Home Rule and were soon to be known as Liberal Unionists. When the vote came on the Home Rule Bill’s second reading in June 1886, Hartington, Chamberlain and 91 other Liberals voted against it and the measure was rejected by 341–311. A new General Election followed and a Conservative-Liberal-Unionist alliance then held power for the next six years.
Paradoxically, this defeat of the first Home Rule Bill in the House of Commons was of less moment than the great victory which its introduction marked for Irish nationalism. It was the climax of a great achievement engineered by Parnell. He had not only effectively coordinated Irish nationalists feelings into a wide popular movement for the first time since O’Connell but, unlike O’Connell, had succeeded in securing for it at the centre of political power the nominal adherence of one of the great English parties.
The mood in Ireland, immediately after the defeat, did not reflect despair but rather a proud recognition of what had been achieved. The reaction of the Cork Examiner was typical:
‘The progress of the cause of Irish Nationalism,’ it wrote, ‘has suffered a check, but it has at the same time reached a point at which five years ago it would have been deemed simply impossible to reach within that period of time. The Irish question now is to the forefront of politics and the defeat of last night cannot relegate it to a minor place.’10
Ten days later the paper was talking about nationalists being actually ‘on the eve of the triumph of their principles’.11 Parnell, speaking at Manchester in the election campaign that followed Gladstone’s inevitable dissolution of Parliament, spoke of the Irish having ‘nothing before them now but the prospect of hope’.12 Even when the new election results began to come in, showing a marked swing away from the Liberals in England, there was no Irish despondency. Tim Healy, the member for Cork and, together with John Dillon, one of Parnell’s two most able lieutenants, declared the results ‘a mere temporary set back’.13 The general feeling was that a Conservative government could hardly last and that every effort must be concentrated on another great battle in a few months’ time.14
Both inside and outside Parliament Irishmen went out of their way to emphasize that they were prepared to accept Home Rule as a full and final settlement of the national question. What then exactly did Home Rule mean?
Like the three subsequent Home Rule Bills which were to follow it over the course of the next thirty-five years, the first Home Rule Bill offered Ireland no more than a domestic legislature and executive for Irish affairs only, with such legislature and executive itself expressly subject to the supremacy of the British Parliament. In addition to this latter overall constitutional limitation, all matters affecting peace or war, foreign affairs or even customs and excise were specifically excluded from the Irish Parliament’s powers.** Ireland was to have no army or navy of its own and even control of the police was reserved to the Imperial Parliament for a certain period. Unionist opponents of the bill who were worried that Ireland might nevertheless at some future date raise a body of Volunteers through her own legislature were immediately reassured that this would be a specific occasion for the Imperial Parliament to assert its supremacy. What the Imperial Parliament had granted, it was proclaimed by the bill’s promoters, the Imperial Parliament could also take away.
This was a puny position compared with the aspirations of the United Irishmen or the Fenians or even the Young Irelanders of 1848. Much of the Unionist criticism of the bill was in fact based on the argument that it was so inadequate a fulfilment of the Irish national demands that Irishmen could not possibly accept it as a final settlement. Joseph Chamberlain taunted Gladstone and Parnell simultaneously by recalling a speech of Parnell’s in which he had said he would never be satisfied until Ireland took her full place among the nations of the world. ‘How can Ireland,’ asked Chamberlain, ‘take her place among the nations of the world when her mouth is closed on every international question? Ireland is to have no part in the arrangement of Commercial Treaties by which her interests may be seriously affected … and Irishmen under this scheme are to be content to be sent to battle and to death for matters in which Irish members are to have no voice in discussing or determining. I say that Ireland under this scheme is asked to occupy a position of degradation.’15 Lord Wolmer said he could not believe that a proud nation like Ireland ‘would accept a back-seat like that’;16 while Lord Randolph Churchill declared that if he were an Irishman he ‘would be deeply wounded and affronted’.17
And yet Irishman after Irishman got up in the House of Commons and solemnly declared that subject to such minor modifications as he hoped to gain in committee he did accept this bill in principle as a final settlement. ‘We look upon the provisions of this bill,’ said Parnell, ‘as a final settlement of this question and I believe that the Irish people have accepted it as such a settlement …. Not a single dissentient voice has been raised against the bill by any Irishman … holding national opinions,’18 J. F. X. O’Brien, who less than twenty years previously had been sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered for his attack on Ballyknockane barracks, County Cork, in the Fenian rising, assured the House that the bill would be ‘loyally accepted as a settlement by the vast majority of the Irish people at home and abroad and will put an end to the strife of centuries’.19 Another Irish member who had been a Fenian as a very young man, William O’Brien, the editor of United Ireland, was even more impressive by being more realistic. They did not pretend for an instant, he said, that the bill would satisfy every man of Irish race. O’Donovan Rossa, for instance, didn’t like it and they did not altogether hope to conquer his objection. ‘We do not even promise,’ he said, ‘that by any incantation you can eradicate the feelings [which were] the growth of many a sad year and many a sad century.’ But he did think that the Irish people had never been so united or unanimous as in acceptance of the bill.20 Ireland itself, both through the voice of the Church and of the Irish popular press, bore him out. O’Brien’s own fiery paper United Ireland raised its circulation some thirty per cent in one week by presenting its readers with a coloured portrait of Gladstone.21
Many Unionists maintained that what was said in Parliament by the Irish party was simply a tactical device and that the Gladstonians were being deceived into allowing the thin end of the wedge of separation. Even those who were prepared to accept that the Irish party were acting in good faith expected to see its members swept aside in any Irish Parliament as part of a great wave of national disappointment with absurdly exaggerated hopes.22 But experienced Irish politicians like Parnell, O’Brien and Healy would never have said the sort of things they were saying in the Commons if there had been any danger of that. The whole success of the Parnellite movement was based on its acute sense of what would or would not go down well in Ireland. In any case, such a supposition quite misread the history of the development of Irish nationalism. The really remarkable thing was not so much that the majority of the Irish people could now accept so little in the way of a national demand, but that they had again been sufficiently well-organized to make any coherent national demand at all.
For, unlike O’Connell’s Repeal, the attraction of Home Rule did not lie principally in any economic panacea it seemed to offer, but in a pure if unambitious demand for national self-respect. As far as economic conditions were concerned, the Imperial Government itself had long ago begun reforms. A major breach in the injustice of the land system had been made by the Land Act of 1881 with its concession of the principle of protection from eviction and fair rents. Fair rents were actually being applied in practice by the Land Court. It was true that in times of bad harvest, such as those which once again visited Ireland in the mid-eighties, the inflexibility of the rents adjusted by the Land Courts could and did lead to hardship and exposed some tenants once again to the horrors of eviction; and undoubtedly it was believed that under an Irish Parliament such things would all be much easier. But it had been proved already that such battles could be fought out successfully by a combination of action on the land itself and action in the British Parliament. Equally, the principle of land purchase by which the State bought out the landlords and the tenant was enabled to buy the land from the State by a series of annual mortgage payments, though not yet operating to any large extent, had been established and was being slowly extended. This meant that ‘national independence’ was no longer an indispensable prerequisite if the tenant farmer was to obtain ownership of the land. Nationalism was thus to a considerable extent deprived of the force which had given it its vague dynamic. Left to itself it amounted to nothing very remarkable – a reasoned if not impassioned demand that Irish identity should to a limited extent be recognized in some political form.
Unionists were unable to realize what had happened. For decades they had consistently underestimated the demands of the common people of Ireland. Now they exaggerated them. For the greater part of the Union’s history English Unionists had been content to know little about Ireland, dismissing its persistent calls for special attention as either irritating or mischievous. Similar ignorance now dominated their excessive attention to Home Rule. Appalled by the Fenians, Land League agitators and American-based dynamiters who had been the superficial product of the country’s long neglect, they saw in Irish nationalism little else. For the thirty years in which Home Rule remained the Irish national demand, the majority of Unionists allowed themselves to be hypnotized by almost nameless fears of what would happen if Home Rule were granted. Predictions of inevitable calamity and disaster multiplied each time the subject came under debate.
Certainly it was understandable that, for many people, the Irish ‘national’ position should seem menacing. Irish politicians who had so often used wild, green-flag oratory about freedom in the past were themselves largely to blame for this. It needed a knowledge of the balance of political forces between the party and its American supporters and an appreciation of the need actually to work up emotive feeling for Home Rule in Ireland to fathom the currents of Irish political language. In the circumstances it was largely a question of personal political temperament whether an Englishman decided that Home Rule was likely to be the final goal of Irish nationalism or the beginning of something which would lead to the ‘separation condemned by all parties’.
Joseph Chamberlain in 1884, while still a radical, had understandably confessed himself bewildered by the term Irish nationalist as then in use. ‘I should like to know clearly what this word means’, he wrote to a friend. He could not, he said, regard the Irish people as having the separate rights of an absolutely independent community any more than he could the people of Scotland or Wales … ‘or to take still more extreme instances, of Sussex, or of London’. Rather than agree to separation he would ‘govern Ireland by force to the end of the chapter. But if nationalism means home rule I have no objection to grant it in principle, and am only anxious to find out what it means.’23 Curiously, having found out that it did not mean separation, his fears of separation assumed precedence and he opposed it in principle and practice to the end at least of his own chapter.
Even accepting the good faith of the Irish, there was certainly a logical argument to be made that separation might be the final result. Parnell himself had said that no man ‘could set a boundary to the march of a nation’. There was no knowing what might happen in future generations. In the light of our own knowledge of subsequent colonial and commonwealth development the possibility that Home Rule might eventually have led to separation can by no means be discounted. Chamberlain and other Unionists had a valid constitutional point when they met reassurances about the reserve supremacy of the Imperial Parliament with the objection that such supremacy was at that time still retained by the British Parliament over Canada, but that no one would ever realistically think of trying to assert it.24
Nevertheless, it is difficult now not to regard the failure to grant Home Rule in 1886 and for the next thirty years as a tragedy for both the Irish and the British peoples. Given the undoubted acceptance of Home Rule at the time by the great majority of Irishmen as a satisfaction of national demands, and given the continuing extension over the next thirty years of social and administrative reforms which did at times, in the Tory phrase, almost kill even the demand for Home Rule by kindness, it now seems probable that extreme separatist nationalism – so totally unrepresentative at the time – would certainly have been killed, and that Home Rule would have kept Ireland a part of the United Kingdom rather than have taken her or the greater part of her outside it. All a historian can definitely say, however, is that, whether or not Home Rule would in the end have led to separation, the refusal to grant it over the next thirty years certainly did so.