Home Rule had really only acquired a true dynamic force in the mid-eighties under Parnell. It was easy for this to fade again in face of rebuff or the distraction of other matters. History written from a later separatist premise has sometimes implied that the eventual Irish disillusionment with Home Rule arose from the inadequacy of the national demand Home Rule made. But from 1886 to the passing of a Home Rule Act in 1914 few, apart from the usual tiny minority of Fenians, ever suggested that Home Rule was an inadequate national demand. All the public emphasis was the other way: that it was totally adequate. The real truth was that even for such a limited national demand, there was not, when things turned difficult, the enthusiasm to make it a cause of overriding, compelling urgency.
Certainly, the Irish Parliamentary Party and their full-time professional and amateur adherents had nailed their colours unequivocally to the Home Rule mast. And the people followed and voted for it because it was the only political avenue there was. But it became a cause of routine orthodoxy, not of burning enthusiasm. After all, there was no real prospect of Home Rule’s success for nearly two decades after the failure of Gladstone’s second bill, and yet Ireland was quieter during most of that time than ever before in her history; such disturbances as occurred centred as usual around the land and not around the national issue at all.
In fact, so unexciting did the political avenue become that even intellectual interest in nationalism began to turn more and more down non-political avenues altogether – into a study and attempted revival of Gaelic, the ‘national’ language, and Gaelic sports, into an interest in being Irish and culturally different for its own sake, as an escape from the monolithic advance of European materialist culture. In the Irish language, in Irish literature and a new Irish theatre many sought an ‘Irishness’ which as a personal characteristic would give them more dignity than any political creed. Of course, even this new development was the activity of a minority, just as political ‘Irishness’ had been. Most people, as throughout Irish history, remained interested only in their material relationship with the land. This, however, was becoming tolerable at last.
When the House of Commons rejected Gladstone’s first Home Rule Bill on its second reading, the Land War itself was by no means over, though in retrospect it is possible to see that the path of development down which the Land Act of 1881 had set the land system was irreversible. There remained, however, technical problems which were to cause severe recurrences of disorder and repression, though never on such a scale as had masked the days of the Land League. Though the principle, at least, of security of tenure had been won, it was soon to be replaced as the chief agrarian issue by that of actual ownership. The peasant wanted to become not just the secure tenant, but the owner of the soil. The financial terms on which he was to do so under land-purchase arrangements, including whether or not such sale through land-purchase arrangements was to be made a compulsory obligation on the landlord, were to become a new source of agrarian dispute in Ireland. Even after a further Land Purchase Act of 1886, only 73,868 holdings altogether out of a total of something like 500,000 had come under land-purchase arrangements since the idea had been first introduced. And it was not until the Land Purchase Act of 1903, to be followed by another even more comprehensive, in 1909, that really large-scale transfers of ownership from tenant to landlord took place.
Meanwhile, however, many difficulties of the old rent-paying tenant–landlord relationship survived to give trouble. Though the Land Act of 1881 had been a success in its most important aspect – the control of rents – there was one major flaw in it as a solution to the land problem, quite apart from the arrears detail which had had to be cleared up after Kilmainham. This flaw in the rent-fixing arrangements under the Act was that they made no allowance for bad harvests and for the consequent variable ability of tenants to pay even the new fixed rents. The years immediately after the Land Act saw good harvests, but when prices turned down again in the mid-eighties tenants were once again faced with the age-old dilemma of being unable to pay their rents in bad times, and thus vulnerable to the most terrible fate which could threaten the Irish peasant: eviction.
By the time this further renewal of the land crisis developed, Parnell’s political mind was concentrated on the Home Rule issue, which was in a state of deadlock. After the heroic failure of the bill he had fallen back on one of his chief political tactics, which was to do nothing when there seemed nothing very obvious to do. It was also a time in his life when personal considerations, centring round his clandestine life with his English mistress in the south of England, pulled strongly against his involvement in day-to-day Irish matters. Captain O’Shea, husband of Parnell’s mistress, whatever his attitude to the liaison may have been in the past, and whatever his reason may now have been, had decided to try to break it up and was putting strong pressure on his wife to leave Parnell.1
A political consideration was that, since on the Home Rule front Parnell had achieved the remarkable success of bringing one of the two political parties respectably on to his side, he was unwilling to involve himself in a land situation to any degree, which by its lack of respectability might prejudice that alliance. He therefore took a guarded and equivocal attitude to the land war, which in this second phase was run almost entirely by John Dillon and Parnell’s own one-time acolyte, the journalist William O’Brien.
Dillon and O’Brien’s offensive weapon, which epitomized this phase of the land war, was the so-called Plan of Campaign, an ingenious device by which tenants on estates where evictions were being carried out calculated what they could afford to pay in rent, offered this to the landlord, and if it was refused paid the money into a fund which was then used to defend and protect those threatened by eviction. The stir which this bitter and violent campaign, lasting several years, caused in the life of the country and on the British political scene was out of proportion to the actual number of holdings involved, which were only 116. Of these the landlords on sixty gave in at once, and on twenty-four more after a struggle; on fifteen they held out and won, while on the remaining seventeen the disputes were still unsettled by 1893.2 But the political impact was considerable. The campaign was resisted by the new Conservative Chief Secretary for Ireland, Arthur Balfour, with unexpected toughness and severity, and Dillon, O’Brien and their henchmen, who often included parish priests, more than once landed in prison where they enjoyed no special privileges as political prisoners and were even forced to wear convict clothes.
As usual the land war had a two-way significance as regards Irish nationalism. On the one hand it showed how the everyday issue of the land, a social issue, took precedence in Irishmen’s minds over the political national issue. No one, after all, took to violence or incurred prison sentences in protest against the rejection of Home Rule. On the other hand the bitterness of each phase of the land war consolidated emotional feeling against the government and indirectly strengthened general ‘national’ feelings. The Plan of Campaign was organized by the party organization, the National League, whose overall demand for Home Rule was strengthened by the bitterness aroused.
In such circumstances Home Rule might indeed have continued the dynamic it had developed in 1886 but for other special factors which intervened. One was the conscious Conservative policy of ‘killing Home Rule by kindness’, that is to say, combining coercive toughness against agrarian disorders with real concessions such as further Land Purchase Acts (in 1891 and 1896) and – a truly revolutionary measure for Ireland – the Local Government Act of 1898. This for the first time gave the Irish people a direct share in their own administration, taking local government power out of the hands of the old property-controlled grand juries and placing it in the hands of elective county councils. And though such measures did not in the end succeed in killing Home Rule they certainly did much to sap its immediate vitality. But a surprise event did more than Conservative policy to cause Home Rule to fade as a dynamic issue. This was the loss to the Irish Parliamentary Party by his death in 1891 of Charles Stewart Parnell, as the result of a most dramatic development.
Parnell’s love affair with Katharine O’Shea had been going on since before the days of the Kilmainham Treaty. Their relationship had undoubtedly by the late eighties acquired in all but name that depth and significance of a true marriage which Parnell himself liked to claim for it. She had borne him two more children after the first child which had died in infancy soon after his release from Kilmainham, and in their letters the two old-established lovers liked to address each other as husband and wife. The only trouble with this ‘marriage’ of Parnell was that his wife was married to someone else for eight of the nine years it lasted, and that, since early in 1886 at any rate, her legal husband had been trying to get her to give her lover up. It was very typical of Parnell, and illustrative of that natural haughtiness which he often turned to such effective use in politics, that neither of these facts seems to have worried him unduly and he therefore assumed that they need worry no one else. It seems certain, admittedly, that Katharine O’Shea convinced Parnell early on that O’Shea was a complaisant husband and her marriage with him one in name only. A complicating factor was the need to keep the situation concealed from an old rich aunt of Mrs O’Shea’s, a Mrs Benjamin Wood, who intended to leave her a fortune. It is possible that Katharine O’Shea may have successfully concealed from Parnell for some time after 1886 the fact that Captain O’Shea was by then insisting on the affair being broken up. But even if Parnell could have pleaded the total complaisance of Captain O’Shea it was a situation unlikely to commend itself to the moral outlook of either Liberal nonconformist England or of Catholic Ireland.
Early in 1886 O’Shea seems to have got wind of charges then being prepared in certain Conservative quarters and subsequently to be ventilated in The Times newspaper, to the effect that Parnell had written a clandestine letter of sympathy to the Phoenix Park murderers after that gruesome event in 1882,** assuring them that his denunciation of them had been merely for show. Thereafter, O’Shea developed something of a frenzy in his efforts to get his wife and Parnell to separate. This seems to substantiate the contention that his chief objection to the affair was fear of the loss of the Wood fortune, for if he already dreaded Mrs Wood getting wind of her favourite niece’s intimate association with Parnell – and we know he did – how much more disastrous would have been the consequences if she had discovered that such an intimate association was with an accessory after the fact to a particularly appalling political murder?
In 1889 the rich aunt, Mrs Wood, died. Later that year O’Shea brought proceedings for divorce. He cited only the period from 1886, thus making Parnell look particularly guilty, however much complaisance may or may not have been an earlier feature of the affair, for letters produced in court proved clearly that ever since that date O’Shea had been trying to persuade his wife to leave Parnell.
Parnell’s personal standing with the British and Irish public had been particularly high when the divorce action broke; his fall now was to be all the greater. Only a year before he had been personally cleared of the Phoenix Park charges by a specially-appointed Government Commission. The allegedly incriminating letter, which had been reproduced in The Times, was found to have been forged by a nationalist journalist, Richard Piggott, a man at one time of some consequence in near-Fenian quarters but whom personal insolvency had increasingly obliged to exploit nationalism for financial advantage.
Right up to the hearing of the divorce case Parnell seems to have been confident that its revelations could do him no harm, and during the year that had elapsed between the serving of the divorce papers and the action’s hearing he had continually reassured his colleagues and associates that it would not affect his political career. His confidence seems to have been based at least partly on his conviction of the utter moral propriety of his own behaviour. Partly, however, it was also based on the belief that O’Shea could be bought off, for Mrs Wood had duly bequeathed Mrs O’Shea the expected fortune. But the Wood family had disputed the will and at the last minute neither Mrs O’Shea nor Parnell could lay their hands on the necessary £20,000 which O’Shea seems to have been demanding.
The humiliating details of deception and dissimulation by Parnell – false names and other ruses traditional in such triangular situations – duly emerged in the courts. Parnell to the end maintained a defiant confidence that by character and political strength he could brazen the thing through. In this he proved wrong and received the only major political setback of his life, though if he had lived it is not inconceivable that he would have been proved right in the end.
For a moment, even so, it seemed that his strength might triumph. Immediately after the result of the divorce case the Irish party passed a unanimous vote of confidence in Parnell’s leadership. But then something happened to turn the name of Mrs O’Shea into more than a mere cause of scandal in Irish history. Gladstone, though he personally had almost certainly known of the liaison between Mrs O’Shea and Parnell for many years, was made aware of such strong feeling of revulsion over the divorce details from his nonconformist supporters in the country that he issued a statement of the most profound importance. Parnell’s continued leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party, he said, was likely to render his own leadership of the Liberal Party ‘almost a nullity’. In other words, the Irish must choose between Parnell’s continued leadership of the Irish party and the party’s continued alliance with Gladstone in the cause of Home Rule.
Frightened by this the party, after a long and agonizing debate full of mutual invective in Committee Room 15 of the House of Commons, went back on its original unanimous decision and voted 45–29 against Parnell’s continued leadership. Though Parnell refused to accept this result, nominal leadership of the majority of the party now passed to Justin McCarthy, a pleasant but uncommanding figure more at ease in literature than politics. The most effective character on the anti-Parnell side had been Tim Healy. Healy it was who in reply to a Parnellite supporter’s interjection that Gladstone seemed to be the master of the party, called out viciously in front of Parnell, ‘Who is to be the mistress of the party?’
Blows were nearly struck in Committee Room 15 and certainly were struck in the succession of bitter by-election battles that soon followed in Ireland between Parnellite and anti-Parnellite nationalists. Much of the newly mobilized national energy of the Home Rule movement now drained away into this dismal and vindictive quarrel between the two halves of the great national party which Parnell had brought so high.
Having, in his day, fought the House of Commons to a standstill on behalf of Ireland, Parnell was suddenly now at bay in his own country, taking on the greater part of his own party and the enormously powerful political influence, previously on his side, of the Catholic Church. His principal tactic had been from the first one of breath-taking arrogance, but of the sort that might have been expected of him, and well designed to appeal again to his earlier allies, the ‘hillside’ men and so-called ‘ribbon-Fenians’. He seized on that aspect of Gladstone’s statement which could be expected to divert attention from his own personal behaviour and indignantly challenged on behalf of Ireland the right of any English politician to lay down to Irishmen who should or should not be their leader, simultaneously vilifying any Irishmen who might slavishly acquiesce in such dictation. At the same time, he magnificently confused the issue by suddenly purporting to reveal that when he had stayed at Gladstone’s home at Hawarden in Yorkshire some months earlier and had discussed with the Grand Old Man the terms of the next Home Rule Bill which a Liberal government would introduce when next returned to power, these had turned out to be humiliating to Ireland and a retreat on the provisions of the 1886 bill.
The obvious retort to this – and one that was made by Healy and co. – was to ask why such an important fact had not been revealed before, and Gladstone himself issued a denial of the conversations as recounted by Parnell. But drawing once again on the full force of his political strength, Parnell swept such objections and all references to his personal conduct aside, and continued to try and fight on the ground of his own choosing, namely, whether or not the Liberal alliance should be supported if the price was to be English dictatorship on terms detrimental to a good Home Rule Bill. It was a political manoeuvre and tour de force of astonishing daring but of no avail. Making the laborious journey to Ireland via Euston and Holyhead from Brighton where he lived with the former Katharine O’Shea, now his legal wife, he campaigned week after week in support of his own candidates in three consecutive by-elections, all of which he decisively lost. At one of them lime was thrown in his eyes. He fought on more savagely than ever.
On Sunday, 27 September 1891, he spoke at a meeting in pouring rain in County Galway, bareheaded and with one arm, crippled by rheumatism, in a sling. The change of clothes which Katharine Parnell had packed for him was somehow mislaid and he sat about for several hours in his wet suit. He then went to Dublin where he spent a few days before leaving for England on Wednesday, 30 September, saying he would be back on ‘Saturday week’. He was a few hours out in his forecast. He died at Brighton with his wife by his side on 10 October, and his body was brought into Kingstown harbour on Sunday morning, 11 October, and buried in Glasnevin cemetery. The chances of Home Rule for the next twenty years were buried with him.
The split in the party caused by the O’Shea divorce was damaging enough while Parnell was still alive. But he was at least a political giant, a man who, so long as he remained upon the scene, might have achieved anything. With his sudden death, which shocked both friends and enemies equally, as if all recognized the profound change in the quality of political life it heralded, the dispute between them degenerated into a squalid and sterile internecine warfare that lasted the better part of ten years. Most of the energies which needed to be devoted to the Home Rule cause, if it was to be pursued successfully in the extremely difficult English political situation of the day, were turned inwards in this self-consuming Irish quarrel. And the dynamic of the relatively new nationalist movement which had survived the rejection of the first Home Rule Bill with such self-confidence failed to develop properly under the effects of such an apparently insatiable cancer.
The period that followed the death of Parnell in 1891 is often described as a political vacuum. In one sense this is accurate. Politically, there had been only two giants in Ireland in the nineteenth century: O’Connell and Parnell. Now Parnell was gone, and it was not so much the split in the party that was the cause of the vacuum after his death as the fact that there was no man on either side of the split to make Home Rule the vital issue Parnell could have continued to make it.
What is unsatisfactory about the vacuum description is the argument for which it has sometimes been made the premise: namely, that the Parliamentary Party was itself now a meaningless and vacuous institution and its final demise inevitable. This was by no means so. Home Rule remained the only viable national ideal for the vast majority of the Irish people and the party’s collapse when it came many years later was in fact quite sudden and, until 1916, not even seriously expected. It was the men who proved inadequate – not the cause.