Parnell now resolved to leave the land question alone, and to confine himself to the question of Home Rule. He kept to the terms of the Kilmainham pact, although the new Crimes Act was a violation of it and had greatly exasperated popular feeling. Davitt wished him to include Land Nationalism in the programme of the party, but Parnell, who disbelieved in Land Nationalisation, declined. His discipline of his party was now very severe, and he treated his subordinates – for they could hardly be called his colleagues – in an autocratic manner. Mr Barry O’Brien records his method with them. “A Whig Home Ruler came along, and was about to pass him in the reading-room, when Parnell suddenly stopped him. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked. ‘Just into the reading-room, Mr Parnell, to skim over the evening papers.’ ‘Don’t you think you ought to be in the House?’ ‘Yes, Mr Parnell; I will return immediately.’ After a time another Irish member (a moderate Nationalist) came along. Parnell stopped him too. ‘Why have you come away?’ he asked. ‘I have just spoken, Mr Parnell,’ said the member, ‘to the motion for adjournment, and I cannot do anything until the division is taken. I cannot speak twice to the same motion.’ ‘No, but you can help to keep a House and watch what is going forward. I think you should all remain in your places.’” The inexorable Anglo-Irishman reduced the Celtic Irish to a state of servility, and it was then, and only then, that they were effective in the House of Commons. None of them, not Davitt nor Dillon nor the cleverest of them all, Tim Healy, could stand up to him. He was their master.

His health was now definitely poor. He had endured much in the dreadful year of 1882, and now suddenly came the news that his sister Fanny had died in New York. He was lying asleep at Eltham, after an all-night sitting, and Mrs O’Shea saw the announcement of Fanny’s death in a newspaper. She immediately woke him and told him what had happened. “He was terribly shocked, and I could not leave him at all that day. For a time he utterly broke down, but presently a cable arrived for him… saying that his sister’s body was to be embalmed and brought to Ireland, and his horror and indignation were extreme. He immediately wrote out a message for me to cable from London on his behalf absolutely forbidding the embalmment of his sister’s body, and saying that she was to be buried in America.”[1] He suffered from a recurrence of the nervous attacks which had afflicted his childhood and youth. “He would spring up panic-stricken out of deep sleep, and, without fully awaking, try to beat off the imaginary foe that had pressed upon him… When the attacks came on, I went into his room and held him down until he became fully conscious, for I feared that he would hurt himself. They were followed by a profuse perspiration and deep sleep of several hours.” He was worried, too, by financial troubles. All politics are costly, but Irish politics in Parnell’s time were a luxury. Isaac Butt ruined himself through his patriotism, and died in debt. He once spent a year in Kilmainham Jail for non-payment of his bills. Parnell must have expended large sums of money in helping some of his less affluent colleagues to pay their expenses. There were spongers and hangers-on waiting for some sort of reward for their services!... His sister, Mrs Dickinson, and his mother, when she was at Avondale, freely spent his money. He had to telegraph to Mrs Parnell once forbidding her to convert a newly-erected cattle-shed into a ball-room. Nominally, Parnell had an income of £4,000 per annum, but in fact he had considerably less, for his tenants were willing to do anything for him except pay their rent. When he was in Kilmainham someone asked him how the no-rent campaign was progressing. He replied: “All I know about it is that my own tenants are acting strictly upon it.” Some of them had not paid a penny for their farms for seven years, and these were probably among the most resonant of the complainants against the tyrannies of the landlords! It will easily be realised, then, that Parnell, carrying on an expensive political career – we have already noted that his first election cost him £2,000, or half his year’s income – and maintaining an extravagant household out of dwindling income, soon found himself in straits. There seems not to have been any harassment that a man can suffer absent from his life at this time, and when we consider his state of mind and health and finance, we need not feel astonished at the fact that inertia sometimes prevented him from expending his best energies for his party.

After the Phoenix Park murders and the passing of the fiftieth Coercion Act, a new political organisation had to be formed. The Land League had been suppressed by the Government, and the Ladies’ Land League had been suppressed by Parnell himself. There must, therefore, be a new organisation, and so the National League was formed on October 17, 1882. Mr Healy, quoted by Mr Barry O’Brien, tells us how he went to Morrison’s Hotel in Dublin, on the Sunday before the day on which the National League was founded, to see Parnell and draft the manifesto of the new organisation. He found his chief in bed and ill. Parnell was full of superstition. “October,” in his horoscope, “ was a month of ‘influence,’ and he always regarded it with apprehension,” and certainly the number of remarkable events, including his death, which happened to him in October is extraordinary. Mr Healy sat by his bedside drafting the constitution of the National League. Four candles stood on the table. One of them spluttered and expired. “A stir from the patient aroused me, and I looked up. With astonishment I saw that Mr Parnell had turned round, raised himself in bed, and, leaning over my table, was furiously blowing out the remaining candles. ‘What on earth is that for?’ said I, amazed at this performance. His eyes gleamed weirdly in the pale setting as he answered: ‘Don’t you know that nothing is more unlucky than to have three candles burning?’ Almost petrified, I confessed that I did not. ‘Your constitution, then, would have been very successful,’ said he with quiet sarcasm, and he turned his face to the wall again, evidently persuaded that his intervention alone had averted some political catastrophe.” The principal items in the programme of the National League were Home Rule and peasant proprietorship. Davitt had been desirous of substituting Land Nationalisation for peasant proprietorship, and Dillon had wished to carry on a more vigorous campaign against the Government; but Parnell overruled them both. Davitt submitted, and Dillon temporarily retired from politics to Colorado. Despite his ill-health and his embarrassments, he was still chief.

There was continual friction between him and the extremists, but he contrived with great dexterity to keep them from breaking with him. He was not in a position to disregard them. The bulk of the money which came from America came from sources controlled by extremists, and it was therefore essential to the efficient working of his Parliamentary machinery that he should not lose their support. This, however, was not the sole reason for his reluctance to throw them aside. It was cardinal point in his political belief that Irishmen should be united. He had made a unity, and because of that unity had achieved, and was still to achieve, much that was of immense worth to Ireland. He would not lightly, therefore, let it be destroyed. Parnell had considerable contempt for the Bishops and the priests of the Catholic Church. Some of it was probably due to his aristocratic and Protestant origin, but more of it was due to the fact that many of the Bishops and priests were contemptible persons. They, for their part, heartily disliked the idea of being led by a Protestant and a gentleman, and were biding the time when they might bring him down. For most of his political life he had to fight the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Ireland. The Vatican itself was not well disposed towards him, and was always ready to help the British Government against him. Dr Mullen, in The Story of a Toiler’s Life, says: “It appeared to me that between him and the clericals there was no love lost; they regarded him with jealousy and suspicion, and he regarded them with contempt, sometimes, but not always, thinly concealed under a mask of respect. They confronted each other like two antagonists with their hands on the hilts of the swords which they hesitated to draw, each waiting till the other would give him an opening. A high-placed ecclesiastic said to a friend of mine, ‘Parnell is now a great man, but if he makes a false step we’ll crush him with a heavy foot.’” Mr Morley, in his Life of Gladstone, states (bk. Ix., chap. V, sect. 3) that Parnell, when discussing the terms of the Home Rule Bill with him, “made one significant suggestion: he wished the Bill to impose the same disqualification upon the clergy as exists in our own Parliament. But he would have liked to see certain ecclesiastical dignitaries included by virtue of their office in the upper or protective branch.” Nevertheless, despite his ill-concealed antipathy to the priests, which was once publicly revealed in Ulster at a meeting from which he thought the reporters had departed, he would never consent to any policy which excluded the Church from a share in the national movement, nor would he permit the priests to be alienated by the party. There were occasions when he ought to have fought the hierarchy, and could have done so with success, but to have fought them would have been to break up the unity he had made; and so he declined the fight. What is true of his attitude to the Church is true also of his attitude to the Fenians. When he was asked to move a resolution condemning outrages, a resolution which must have been near to his mind, he refused. “No,” he said; “I dislike outrages as much as any man, but I am not going to act police for the English Government.” He remembered, no doubt, that Isaac Butt fell on the day when he won the applause of the House of Commons for rebuking him and Biggar.

The year 1883 opened in gloom. The executive were administering the Crimes Act with great severity, and a number of M.P.’s, including Mr Biggar, were arrested, although their prosecution was not very successful. In January the Phoenix Park murderers were seized by the police, and their trial began in February. The revelations made were startling, and there were excited hopes raised among their enemies that Parnell and his colleagues might be implicated in the crime. One of the arrested men, James Carey[2], turned informer. This was the man who had signalled to the assassins that Lord Frederick and Mr Burke were approaching them. Sir William Harcourt, who was never well disposed towards the Irish, thought that “this” would take the starch out of the boys. Mr Forster, still sore from his wounds of office, determined to avenge himself on Parnell, and he went to the House of Commons on February 22, 1883, and made a speech, very ably and passionately delivered, in which he sought to prove that Parnell, the avowed enemy of England, was the head of “a lawless and rebellious agitation aimed at the very heart of the Empire.” “My charge,” he said, “is against the honourable member for Cork… It is not that he himself directly planned or perpetrated outrages or murders, but that he either connived at them or, when warned, did not use his influence to prevent them.”

Enough is known now to compel the most bitter opponent of Parnellism to acknowledge that this charge was unfounded, that, in fact, Parnell had steadily opposed the commission of crime and outrage to the extent even of endangering his own movement; but at that time it was perfectly easy to make out a case against him. Had he himself not authorised a statement from Kilmainham that if he were speedily released from jail he would consider that the Irish people had not done their duty? But a case can be made out against any public man by an adroit and not too scrupulous choice of passages from his speeches, and Mr Forster, naturally enough, made his case without much particularity of principle. Parnell heard him without displaying a sign of feeling, except once, when, as Mr Forster reached the words “or when warned” in the passage quoted above, he fiercely interrupted him with, “It is a lie.” When the ex-Chief Secretary sat down, the House expected Parnell to reply, but he did not do so. He remained in his seat, nor would he stir, though the Commons rang with the cry, “Parnell! Parnell!” It was not until the next afternoon, in the presence of the Prince of Wales and Cardinal Manning, that he replied to his accuser, and then only at the urgent instance of his party.

It was a singular reply, one which seemed at the moment to be an appalling mistake, but proved later to be, from Parnell’s point of view, a complete success. He did not acknowledge the right of the English to interrogate him at all. His responsibility was not to the English, but to the Irish, and by the Irish alone would he be judged. He was speaking, not to exculpate himself in the eyes of the English, who, he thought, were too prejudiced to judge him fairly, but to make his position clear to the Irish people at home and abroad. He rounded on Mr Forster, and heavily raked that unhappy gentleman with fierce volleys of derision. When he sat down the House was astounded. He had not denied anything except its right to try him!... Once again Mr Forster had tried a fall with Parnell, and once again he had himself been thrown. The attempt to implicate Parnell in the Phoenix Park murders and crime generally was temporarily abandoned, although a person called Houston was ferreting about Dublin for “evidence” against him, and getting acquainted with the semi-bankrupt Piggot, who was ready for a trifle to manufacture evidence against anybody. Five of the murderers were hanged, and nine of them were sent to penal servitude. Carey, set free for informing, sailed for South Africa, and was shot on board the boat by a man called O’Donnell, who was brought back to England and hanged for his murder. Of such are the high-minded patriots. By the labours of such as these the peace of mankind continually is threatened and disturbed.

II 

The years 1883 and 1884 passed without serious incident. Parnell made a raid on Ulster during the summer of 1883. A by-election was announced at Monaghan, and Mr T.M. Healy, the adoring and brilliant lieutenant of a chief who could not return his affection, was sent up to win it, which he did by a fine majority. Here Parnell, according to Mr Healy, gave a display of his superstition by refusing to sleep in a room numbered thirteen. He felt convinced that the landlord of the hotel was a Tory and had deliberately place him in this ill-numbered room in order to injure him. When Mr Healy offered to change rooms with him, he said, “You’ll lose the election if you sleep in that room!” and went to bed full of forebodings.

After this election, Parnell himself largely withdrew from the campaign and allowed his colleagues to conduct it. Mrs O’Shea was now the recognised go-between him and Mr Gladstone, and she furnished the latter with information of the sort of measures that would be acceptable to the former. She seems to have done her work efficiently and tactfully, and to have been of immense help to Parnell, whose financial troubles about this time became acute. In 1882, when his mother, then in America, appealed to him for help, he was unable to give her any. This started the legend that he was mean to her. A mortgage for £13,000 on Avondale was foreclosed, and Parnell filed a petition for the sale of his home. When the news got into the papers, Dr Croke, the Archbishop of Cashel, a good friend to Parnell, proposed in a public letter than the Irish people should raise a fund to pay off the mortgage. When £7,688 had been raised, the Vatican made one of its inept interferences in Irish politics. On May 11, 1883, a letter, signed by Cardinal Simeoni and Monseigneur Dominico Jacobini, Prefect and Secretary respectively of the Sacred Congregration de Propaganda Fide, was sent to the Irish hierarchy, condemning the tribute and ordering them not to countenance it. The effect of this Papal letter on the people – for the priests and Bishops, of course, as was their duty, obeyed it – was that by June 19, five weeks, later, the amount of the tribute was doubled, and on December 11, 1883, it amounted to more than £37,000. “It is absurd”, said Mr Gladstone, “to suppose that the Pope exercises any influence in Irish politics.” The manner in which Mr Parnell received his sum from the Lord Mayor of Dublin at a meeting held in the Rotunda on December 11, 1883, has often been described. He put the cheque in his pocket without saying a word of thanks! But who can tell what Parnell felt on that night? There were many times in his life when emotion made him silent. This probably was one of them.

But although Parnell was “slowing down,” he was not neglecting his work. Through Mrs O’Shea he was sending material to Mr Gladstone which guided the latter towards his Home Rule Bill. It was not easy for him to keep to his plans for quietness in Irish affairs during the years 1883 and 1884, for dynamitards[sic] made various attempts to blow up public buildings in England. On January 24, 1885, these attempts culminated in one to destroy the Tower, the House of Commons, and Westminster Hall. A dynamite factory was discovered in Birmingham. The Irish World, the American organ of the extremists, publicly opposed Parnell, complaining bitterly of his “slowing-down” process. There was discontent among his colleagues. Davitt, whose mind was veering more and more towards Socialism, now began to preach his doctrine of Land Nationalisation, which Parnell, in a speech at Drogheda on April 14, 1884, denounced. Davitt immediately stayed his propaganda, and went to Egypt to rest. Parnell’s colleagues began to comment upon his inactivity; they could not believe that a man was doing anything unless he was kicking up a row. Ribald remarks were made behind his back about “Kitty O’Shea” by men who would not have dared make them to his face.

But Parnell knew what he was about. He was aware of a changing temper about Ireland in the Liberal party. He knew that some members of the Cabinet were opposed to the reimposition of Coercion, and that Mr Gladstone himself was brooding over schemes for Irish self-government. Mr Joseph Chamberlain had actually submitted a plan to the Cabinet for establishing an elective National Council in Dublin, with control over administrative boards and departments, but not over police and the administration of the law. Mr Gladstone was prepared to give the Council charge of the police. It is permissible here, although it would be more in place later, to pause for a moment to speculate on the singularity of Mr Chamberlain’s position with regard to Ireland. He was, very naturally, full of plans for the extension of local government. He had been the principal agent in creating a vigorous and highly efficient municipality in Birmingham, where reforms of a sweeping character had been made. There are few cities in the British Islands where there is so much civic pride as there is in Birmingham, and fewer still where the civic pride is based, not on empty boasting, but on actual accomplishment. Mr Chamberlain had many enemies, and was, for a period of his life, the bane of earnest and honest people; but there can be few persons left now who will deny that he was man of great gifts or that he used his gifts throughout his life for the good of his country. It is one of the calamities of the time we are now discussing that Mr Chamberlain, for whom Parnell at one time felt great respect, was unable to free his mind from its passion for local government. If he had supported Mr Gladstone when the split came in the Liberal party over the Home rule, it would not have mattered very much that that very tedious gentleman, the Marquis of Hartington, seceded. But Mr Chamberlain could not then raise his mind to the wider levels on which, in later years, he was to rest it. He was prepared to give the Irish almost all that they desired if only they would call it Local Government instead of Home Rule. He was willing to let them administer their own affairs, if only they would consent to do so, not from a Parliament, but from a National Council. They, for their part, were willing to give up this or that demand if only they were allowed to call themselves a nation and not a glorified municipality. One easily falls into the belief that a great deal of invective and passion was expended on mere matters of terminology, and that because Mr Chamberlain would say “Local Government” when the Irish insisted on saying “Parliament,” much harm and misery ensued to England and Ireland, and, perhaps, to the world. He was the one Englishman of eminence who could have influence Parnell. It is part of the tragedy we are now observing that he failed to do so.

 III 

But it is possible that Parnell’s abstention from activity in Ireland was due to a cause about which we have singularly little information. Sir Edward Clarke, who led for Captain O’Shea in the divorce proceedings, states in his autobiography [3] that Mrs O’Shea bore two daughters – one called Clare, born in March, 1883, and the other called Frances, in November, 1884 – to Parnell, in addition to the child, Claude Sophie, which was born and died in 1882. It is a strange fact that Mrs O’Shea, who almost boasts of the birth of her first baby by Parnell, makes no mention whatever of the birth of these two children in her book. Sir Edward Clarke is very positive about them. He states that “some time before the trial Parnell entertained the idea of leaving England with Mrs O’Shea, and taking the two girls, born in 1883 and 1884, who were unquestionably his daughters, and he consulted Mr Inderwick whether there was any European country in which Mrs O’Shea, in spite of the orders of an English court of law, would be able to retain the custody of these children.” We known from his letters to her how agitated Parnell was when Mrs O’Shea’s first confinement, so far as he was concerned, was approaching, and we may well believe that his anxiety about the others prevented him from carrying on propaganda work in Ireland, especially when he had able lieutenants to do the work for him, and, perhaps more importantly, his very aloofness was one of his assets.

IV 

The passage of the Reform Act of 1884, establishing household suffrage in Ireland, added greatly to Parnell’s power and considerably increased the change begun by the Land Act of 1881. The government of Ireland was passing rapidly from the hands of the landlords to the hands of the people. The Reform Act increased the Irish electorate from 200,000 to 700,000 voters. When the grand juries were abolished some years afterwards, and county government was controlled by elected County Councils, the change might also have been said to be completed. A General Election was approaching, and Parnell, heartened by the increase in the electorate, prepared himself for it. He made a short tour in the South of Ireland, delivering speeches in various places, including his own constituency, the city of Cork, where he uttered one of his most famous passages: “No man has a right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation. No man has a right to say, ‘Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther’; and we have never attempted to fix the ne plus ultra to the progress of Ireland’s nationhood, and we never shall.” The sentiment has been used be every crack-brained revolutionary who has flourished in Ireland since Parnell’s death, but it may be enough to say that if Parnell had lived to be the first Prime Minster of Ireland, he would have clapped nearly all who make oratorical capital out of his famous passage into Kilmainham. It is one of those passages which appear to mean a great deal, but mean, in fact, very little; but hundreds of professional Irishmen have used it for the befuddlement of the minds of thousands of their countrymen. Parnell was a man of Conservative character, and, like most Conservatives, he had the courage of the Liberals’ convictions. He would not endure an injustice, but neither would he tolerate a nuisance. He was not entirely jocular when he told Michael Davitt that his first act when he became Prime Minister of Ireland would be to lock him up. Mr Labouchere, in a letter to Mr Chamberlain, dated Sunday, December (? 20), 1885[4], said: “My own conviction is that if the Irish get Home Rule, they will, with the exception of the land question, surprise us by their conservatism. Their first thing will be to pass some sort of very drastic legislation against the Fenians.” Parnell in this respect was remarkably representative of his people. He would have given uncommonly short shrift to Mexican gentlemen with a passion for metaphysical hair-splitting.

The Liberal Government was now tottering to its fall, and in 1885 it collapsed. An amendment of no importance to the Budget Bill was moved by Sir Michael Hicks-Beach on June 8, and when the House divided, the Irishmen voted with the Tories, and the Government was defeated by twelve votes. Mr Gladstone immediately resigned, and Lord Salisbury became Prime Minister. The new Lord-Lieutenant, Lord Carnavon, was manifestly friendly to the Irish people, and anxious to rule by means of the ordinary law of the land. The Crimes Act, which Mr Gladstone had threatened to renew because of the epidemic of sedition, was allowed to lapse by the Conservatives. It seemed, indeed, as if the new Government, which depended for its life on Parnell, were about to do all that the Irish wanted. Parnell asked for an enquiry into the Maamtrasna murders, and got it. He asked for a new Land Act, and he got it. Lord Carnavon invited him to come and discuss Irish affairs with him, and the two men met in a house in Grosvenor Square and talked for more than an hour. The conversation resulted in some controversy afterwards, but we need not deal with it here at any length, since it is comparatively unimportant. It will be enough if we say that it revealed very plainly the sympathy which Lord Carnavon had with the aspirations of the Irish for self-government, and that there was nothing in it which was not highly creditable to him.

On August 11, 1885, Parliament was prorogued, and nine days later Parnell announced that the Irish party would fight the election on the one issue of legislative independence. When the election was over, there were eighty-six Nationalists in the House, of whom twenty-two had been in prison under the Coercion Act of 1881. When the figures for the whole House were published, it was seen that the Liberals had a majority of eighty-six over the Tories. There were 335 Liberals and 249 Tories. It was seen also that Parnell and his eighty-five supporters could throw Lord Salisbury’s Government out and put Mr Gladstone in power. The beneficent interest in Ireland manifested by the Conservatives was of brief duration. If the Irish party had been a little larger, we may not doubt that the Tories in 1886 would have given some measure of self-government in Ireland; but it did not matter to Parnell which party was in power, for he was now master of them both. He was confident in 1885 “that, whether Liberals or Tories get in, Home Rule will be granted,” according to Mr Healy, who wrote in those terms in a letter dated October 15, 1885, to Mr Labouchere.[5] On February 1, through Irish help, Mr Gladstone again became Prime Minister. His age was seventy-six; Parnell was forty. Gladstone had been in Parliament for fifty-four years; Parnell had been there for ten. Mr Gladstone immediately sat down to the devisal of his first Home Rule Bill.

V 

But the Sardonic Dramatist had not forgotten what the end of the play was to be, and in the midst of all this splendour he thrust a little scene in which preparation was made for the climax. Mr T.P. O’Connor had been elected for two constituencies at the General Election: Galway and the Scotland Division of Liverpool. He chose, very naturally, to sit for the latter, and it became necessary, therefore, to select a new candidate for Galway. Captain O’Shea, who was politically ambitious – he once asked to be made Chief Secretary of Ireland – considered that he had claims upon Parnell’s gratitude. Some said that these claims were founded upon his complacency about his wife’s infidelity, but they were, in fact, founded upon the good ground that O’Shea had rendered great service to Parnell in various political matters, but chiefly in the arrangement of the Kilmainham Treaty.

O’Shea in some respects was more of a mystery man than Parnell, but we need not make mean additions to the mystery. Probably we shall never know the truth about him, unless his son has records to publish, and he will long be a maligned man. Allusion has already been made to the legend that he deliberately used his wife as a lure to draw Parnell to his destruction. This belief was widely held at the time of the divorce, and for many years afterwards, but it cannot be based on anything but prejudice against a man whose life, indeed, made him peculiarly subject to the bias of his countrymen. He did not cut a very distinguished figure. He lived in a precarious manner. He had foppish manners and an affected accent which, by themselves, were sufficient to rouse the dislike of other Irishmen. He did not conceal his contempt for the Nationalists. He mocked their manners and their brogues, and aped their way of addressing the House. “Mishter Spaker-r-r, sorr-rr-r!” he would jeer at them, and the poor, uncouth clowns, writhing under his contempt, would let their dislike of him grow into hatred. Parnell had as much contempt for his followers as O’Shea had, but he expressed it in a different fashion. Parnell had the proud demeanour of an aristocrat: O’Shea had only the silly superciliousness of a member of the middle class; and what the Irish members were willing to endure from a gentleman they were not prepared to endure from Captain O’Shea.

It was natural, therefore, that when the calamity fell upon the party, they sought to relieve their feelings by venting some of their rage on the man who had persistently mocked and jeered at them. We will do well to remember that the legends about O’Shea’s connivance in his wife’s adultery with Parnell were based chiefly on the fact that those who spread them intensely disliked him. The legend-makers had, no doubt, difficultly in believing that what was known to them was not also known to him, and that it was impossible for Mrs O’Shea to bear three children in less than three years to Parnell without her husband suspecting that he was not the father of them. But we know enough about mankind to know that any husband, while ready enough to doubt the fidelity of another man’s wife, is rarely modest enough to admit that his wife could be unfaithful to him. The secrecy which Parnell attempted to maintain about his relations with Mrs O’Shea seems to have been successful only with her husband. His suspicions were several times aroused, but on each occasion they were dispelled by the positive protestations of Mrs O’Shea and of Parnell himself. We shall be doing no injustice to our intelligence, therefore, if we believe that Captain O’Shea, though he sometimes had trouble in dispelling his suspicions, remained unaware that his wife was his chief’s mistress until the time when he instituted proceedings for divorce. His claims on Parnell’s gratitude for political services was acknowledged by Mr Chamberlain, who agreed that Parnell was in his debt; and Parnell himself seems to have felt that there was justice in O’Shea’s claim.

But, while we acknowledge that Captain O’Shea honestly demanded a reward from Parnell, we cannot acknowledge that he displayed much intelligence in making the demand or in using the reward when he got it. We have noted that he made himself very disagreeable to the Nationalists. We have now to note a more serious fact – namely, that he resolutely declined to take the party pledge. Why this man, who was not without ability, should have imagined that he would be acceptable to a party from which he ostentatiously separated himself in the House of Commons, whose members he openly derided, whose pledge he declined to take, is a mystery. When he was elected, he did not sit with the party, nor did he vote for the Home Rule Bill. He walked out of House during the division, and soon afterwards resigned his seat. But it may be that he counted on Parnell’s mastery of the Irish members to make them accept him. The event proved that Parnell had the power to do it, but O’Shea, when in later times he surveyed the facts of his political life, could hardly have been astonished that this very circumstance was confirmation to the Irishmen of his connivance in his wife’s adultery. Why, they not unreasonably said to themselves, should Parnell run the risk of endangering his leadership for a man whom he notoriously disliked if he were not bribing him to hold his tongue? Parnell was, in fact, forcing O’Shea upon his party at the instigation of Mrs O’Shea, who wanted to provide her husband with some distraction which would keep him away from Eltham. She says his plainly enough in her book.[6] But Captain O’Shea seems to have been innocent of any other motive in this matter than the legitimate desire to fulfil his ambition to be a politician. Had he been a less obstinate and more intelligent man, he would have laid his claims to gratitude not before Parnell, but before Mr Chamberlain, whose faithful servant he was. 

Whatever the motives were, the fact remains: O’Shea was proposed by Parnell as the Nationalist candidate in succession to Mr. T. P. O’Connor. Mr O’Connor was the first person to be told of the chief’s intention, and the news dumbfounded him. It dumbfounded the party. Mr O’Connor immediately consulted Mr Biggar, who, when he was told of the choice, exploded into incoherence. They telegraphed to Mr Healy, who was in Ireland, and then caught the train at Euston, and started for Dublin. On their arrival, they found that the news of O’Shea’s candidature was in the papers! They must now fight Parnell or capitulate. Biggar, who had great affection for his leader, an affection which was returned, determined to fight. Mr O’Connor wavered, and so did the majority of the Irish members then in Dublin. But Mr Healy supported Biggar, and both of them started off to Galway to rouse the electorate against the candidate. Mr Healy plays a queer part in the drama, and from now to the end of it he will grow in importance. His behaviour is understandable, though not creditable. If there is any such thing as an “inferiority complex,” then undoubtedly Mr Healy had it. He found himself spurned by the man he was prepared to admire to the point of deep affection, and his affection turned to malignant hatred. It is a singular feature of that hatred that it was vented as much on Mrs O’Shea as on Parnell himself.

Biggar and Healy soon had Galway in an uproar. Biggar’s blunt speech and Healy’s bitter tongue between them roused the easily-excited passions of the west to a state of high fury. Biggar told the electors at a public meeting that Parnell had chosen O’Shea to be their representative because Mrs O’Shea was his mistress. He sent a telegram to Parnell himself, declaring that “Mrs O’Shea will be your ruin,”, but the wording was altered by Mr Healy to “The O’Sheas will be your ruin.” No one who knows Ireland and how little of reticence the postal officials display about the messages they dispatch, can fail to realise that Biggar’s message was soon part of the gossip of Galway. The hullabaloo raised by Biggar began to frighten his colleagues in Dublin. Mr Healy, if we are to judge him by the altered telegram, also began to be afraid. His impulsive and emotional mind – a Southern Irish mind – sent him rocketing up in a fury, but his fear of Parnell – and there is no doubt whatever that Mr Healy physically and mentally feared Parnell – soon sent him dropping down again like a stick when the force of the rocket is spent. Messages were sent to Parnell urging him to go to Galway and quell the furies, but Parnell did not answer the messages. He had a habit of not answering messages. On February 9, however, he went to Dublin, where he sent for Mr T.P. O’Connor. “I am going straight on to Galway,” he said, “and I want you to come with me.” And Mr O’Connor, who had started off to oppose Captain O’Shea’s candidature, found himself travelling to Galway to support it!

When the news reached Galway that Parnell was on his way to the town, dismay entered the heart of Mr Healy, and he went to this Ulster Presbyterian colleague demanding what was to be done. Biggar was consuming a large breakfast when the shivering Papist arrived. “What will we do with Parnell?” Mr Healy asked. “Mob him, sir,” the Protestant replied. When the train carrying Parnell and Mr O’Connor reached Galway station, a huge and angry mob was waiting for it. A roar reached the roof as the engine slowed down, but when Parnell descended from his carriage no one assailed him. They might have come to welcome him, not to mob him! Their demeanour was as mild as if they had come to present him with an illuminated address – until they saw the figure of Mr O’Connor emerging from the carriage; and then, determined that someone should suffer, but unable to raise a finger to Parnell, they rushed at their late member and severely mauled him. They might have killed him had not Parnell rescued him from them!... At the hotel Parnell, after he had tidied himself, met Biggar and Healy and others of his colleagues, and listened while they stated their case against Captain O’Shea. He replied: “Captain O’Shea was his candidate, and would not be withdrawn. A rumour has been spread,” he added, “that if Captain O’Shea is withdrawn I will retire from the party. I have no intention of resigning my position. I would not resign it if the people of Galway were to kick me through the streets today!” In that moment Mr Healy’s stick dropped prostrate at Parnell’s feet. The assembled members, with the exception of the Ulsterman, were reduced to obedience, and the crowd was told that Parnell would presently address them. He went out to the people – a restless, resentful, passionate people – and put out his left hand. “I have a Parliament for Ireland within the hollow of my hand,” he said in his short, sharp voice; and then, smashing his right hand on to his left, he added: “Destroy me, and you take away that Parliament. Reject Captain O’Shea, destroy me, and there will arise a shout from all the enemies of Ireland, ‘Parnell is beaten; Ireland has no longer a leader!’…”

VI 

On April 8, 1886, Mr Gladstone, in a speech which lasted for three and a half hours, moved the first reading of the Bill for the Amendment of the Provision for the Future Government of Ireland, which was popularly known as the Home Rule Bill. He had endured much trouble and vexation before that evening. His colleagues were divided. Lord Hartington, Mr Chamberlain, Mr Trevelyan, Mr Goschen, and Sir Henry James were all opposed to his views, so far as these were known to them. It was not easy to know what his views were, for he was a master of the invaluable Parliamentary gift of vagueness. “On January 21, 1886, Mr Gladstone delivered an eloquent speech on the Address which left the Liberals totally unable to say whether he was advocating or opposing Home Rule for Ireland. They suspected him of advocating it because of the cheers which he received from the Irish members.” But by April 8 all doubts were resolved, and none of the gentlemen whose names have been set out were now colleagues of the Premier. Mr Chamberlain was one of the last to go. He left on March 26, 1886, taking Mr Jesse Collings, Mr Trevelyan, and Mr Heneage with him

It is an odd circumstance that Parnell, whose judgement of men was seldom sound, though his judgement of a situation was rarely at fault, attached more importance to Lord Randolph Churchill than to Mr Chamberlain. He never cultivated Mr Chamberlain’s friendship, as he ought to have done, as Mr Chamberlain seems to have been willing that he should do, but he did attempt to make friends with Lord Randolph. Mr Chamberlain had established an acquaintance with Mr Healy, which may have accounted for the fact that he failed to keep or increase his friendship with Parnell; for Parnell was undeniably a jealous mean, and about this period of his life a distrustful man. It may be that Parnell warmed to Lord Randolph in a way that he could not do to Mr Chamberlain because of some similarity in their natures. Sir Edward Clarke describes Lord Randolph’s first public speech in terms that might almost be used to describe the first public speech made by Parnell. Sir Edward went to Woodstock during the General Election of 1874. “Then I met Lord Randolph Churchill, a nervous, rather awkward young man, who certainly seemed to have the most elementary ideas about current policies. We had some talk about the subjects he was going to deal with in his speech. I wrote out four or five questions which were to be put into friendly hands and asked from the back of the room, and gave Lord Randolph the answers. When we came to the meeting Lord Randolph was very nervous. He had written out his speech on small sheets of paper, and thought that if he put his hat on the table and the papers in the bottom of the hat he would be able to read them. This, of course, he could not do. There was a rather noisy audience, who gibed at him and shouted to him to take the things out of his hat, and so on, and the speech was far from being a success.”[7]

But Parnell’s faith in Lord Randolph Churchill, whatever its foundation may have been, was not justified by Lord Randolph’s behaviour during Lord Salisbury’s short-lived ministry in 1885. If there was one man in England whom Parnell should have cultivated at this time, that man was Mr Chamberlain. We may thank Parnell’s mother, who had trained her son to hate and distrust Englishmen, for the fact that Parnell failed to make friends in England or to recognise which Englishman out of group of Englishmen was the most likely to be of help to him. He regarded them all as hypocrites and schemers, and when he showed signs of liking one of them, he did so only because of some similarity of nature between them or because the Englishman was a rebel.

It may be appropriate at this point to quote an interesting comparison between the Marquis of Hartington and Mr Parnell, made by the former’s biographer. “Both Hartington and Parnell were of the positive, or realist, character; neither the one nor the other was influenced by abstract ideas, or by books, or by phrases of any kind. Neither man was in the least degree a Radical, a Sentimentalist, or an ‘Intellectual.’ Neither was swayed in his course by philosophic theory or by definite religion. Each was cool, aloof, by nature indolent, inclined to silence and averse to rhetoric, country-bred, independent, unimpassionate, self-contained, indifferent in the main to the opinions of men at large, doggedly tenacious of his own views and purpose. Both had that which Harcourt (or was it Lowe?) used to call ‘Hartington’s you-be-damnedness,’ the characteristic so striking in that mighty Anglo-Irishman, the Duke of Wellington. This quality was brought to a lofty point by the Irish squire who led, and despised, the Nationalists. Hartington and Parnell were, in fact, both of them extremely Anglo-Saxon by nature and temperament, as they mainly were by descent. Hartington himself, through the Butlers and the Boyles, may have inherited some of the Anglo-Irish temperament, which is that acquired by men of a conquering race living among the conquered.”[8]

But Parnell never paid any attention to Lord Hartington, though even he would have been better worthy of his regard than Lord Randolph Churchill. One is appalled on rising from a study of political affairs to discover how few men of eminence really base their behaviour on principles, how easily they are governed by personal feelings. If Mr Gladstone and Mr Chamberlain could have been friendlier to each other, how different might the history of England have been. If Parnell and Mr Healy could have lived on terms of kindliness, we might not now be mourning over a divided Ireland and a hate-ridden, bankrupt Irish Free State. “But ‘tis in vain, for soldiers to complain,” as Wolfe Tone continually lamented, and we must reconcile ourselves as best we may to the melancholy fact that leaders will wreck nations to gratify a private grudge. 

Eight days after the introduction of his first Home Rule Bill Mr Gladstone, on April 16, 1886, introduced a new Land Bill. This was a measure to buy out the landlords and establish a peasant proprietary. The Land Bill was designed to appease the landlords for the Home Rule Bill, but it failed to do so; and when the second reading of the latter Bill was moved, Lord Hartington, the dissenting Liberal, moved its rejection. The Opposition was hardening. Mr Bright joined it. On June 7, 1886, the debate on Lord Hartington’s motion for rejection was brought to an end. Parnell made a finely-phrased appeal for the Bill, but the appeal was not heeded, and it was defeated by 343 votes to 313. Parliament was immediately dissolved, and in July the General Election was held, the second in six months. When it was over, Mr Gladstone was out of power and Lord Salisbury was again Prime Minister. And there was no Home Rule. “Parnell,” says Mr Barry O’Brien, “was standing one day in the lobby after the General Election; Mr Chamberlain passed. ‘There goes the man,’ said Parnell, ‘who killed the Home Rule Bill.’” But it is not wise to defer the recognition of your enemy until after the battle has taken place. Mr Chamberlain might have been converted to an alliance, and the war, had this been done, would have ended in victory for Parnell. But Parnell’s mind was too full of his mother’s bitterness for him to observe the field with sufficient vision, and what was left of his mind was in the keeping of Mrs O’Shea.

VII 

Parnell was now seriously ill, and he went under a false name to consult Sir Henry Thompson about himself. Mrs O’Shea went with him. “His nerves had completely broken down, and I felt terribly worried about him.” Sir Henry told her that Mr “Stewart” must be careful to keep his feet warm, as his circulation was bad, and thereafter she made him carry spare socks in a little black bag, so that he might change into dry ones whenever there was need  to do so. The little black bag became part of the mystery which enveloped him. His colleagues were deeply concerned about him now. His family history was known, and some of them feared that he was about to lose his reason. Their fears were increased by the fact that sometimes they did not see him for several weeks together, nor had they any idea of where he was to be found. He and Mrs O’Shea shifted from place to place, invariably under assumed names – from Brighton to Eastbourne (from which he suddenly departed because he discovered that his brother Henry was living there), from Eastbourne to Herne Bay, from Herne Bay to Eltham. He took a house at Brockley, calling himself “Clement Preston,” although his identity was soon discovered. It was believed, however, that Mrs O’Shea was his sister Anna. Leaving Brockley, he went to York Terrace, Regent’s park, where his sense of solitude deepened. From this time until he died Parnell had a horror of loneliness. It was as if he feared that he might lose his mind if he were left by himself. Mrs O’Shea tells us in a poignant passage that, when she had settled him in the house at York Terrace and had returned to Eltham, she sat by the open window of her room until three in the morning brooding over her troubles. And while she sat there, a little drowsy from fatigue, she heard the clip-clap of a horse’s hooves coming towards her and the jingling of harness bells, and presently a cab appeared with Parnell in it. Unable to bear his solitude any longer, he had driven down from London in the middle of the night.

VIII 

Immediately after the General Election of 1886, which restored the Tories to power, Parnell introduced a Land Bill into the House of Commons. The tenants were again in trouble. A serious fall in prices had made the payment of the judicial rents impossible, and Parnell proposed an abatement of rents where it could be proved that the tenants were unable to pay the full amount, but were willing to pay half the amount and the arrears; the admission of leaseholders to the benefits of the Act of 1881; and the suspension of legal proceedings for the recovery of rent on payment of half the rent and the arrears. The Bill was rejected on September 21, 1886, by 297 votes to 202. It was soon after this rejection that Parnell fell seriously ill. While he was out of action his subordinates, led by Mr William O’Brien, invented the Plan of Campaign, which was put into operation in December, 1886. Parnell had warned the Government that if his Land Bill were rejected there would be a revival of agrarian outrage. They soon discovered that his prophecy was true, and they pleaded with the Irish landlords not to insist upon their legal rights in rent. But the Irish landlords were determined on their own destruction, and would not listen to appeals or to reason. They had long since abrogated their duties, and now demanded only their privileges. The end of them could not much longer be delayed, since they were so resolved to bring it about; but until it came, they were resolved to play the implacable parasite without pity or compunction. Sir Michael Hicks-Beach and Sir Redvers Buller endeavoured to dissuade the landlords from their fatuous firmness, but without success, and the Tory attempt to pacify Ireland was frustrated.

Mr William O’Brien’s Plan of Campaign was that the tenants should offer fair rents to the landlords, and then, if these were refused, bank the money with the local managing committee of the Plan of Campaign, who would now negotiate with the landlords on behalf of the tenants. If the landlords persisted in their refusal to accept the fair rent, the money banked with the committee would be used to protect the tenants from being evicted, and for the general support of tenants’ rights. Mr O’Brien endeavoured to find Parnell to discuss the plan with him, but failed to do so, and then went for advice to Mr John Dillon, who was invariably amendable to Mr O’Brien’s wishes. The plan was put into operation. Parnell, when he heard of it, was “dead against it.” He wanted peace and time to think. Mr Gladstone was now committed to self-government for Ireland, and Parnell did not wish to jeopardise the chance of getting Home Rule by a revival of peasant passions. But he was a sick man, and his grip on his party had slackened. Mr Healy, who, perhaps, was not so sapient as he thought himself, wrote to Mr Labouchere on December 18, 1885, saying that “Parnell is half mad. We always act without him. He accepts this position; if he did not, we should overlook him. Dillon, McCarthy, O’Brien, Harrington, and I settle everything. When we agree, no one can disagree.”[9] This came well from the gentleman who, three months later, was to stand shivering in his shoes before his chief in Galway town, and was to be reduced by a single sentence from that chief’s lips to a state of adoring servitude. We may doubt whether the Plan of Campaign would ever have been operated had Parnell known, before it was published in the Irish newspapers, anything about it. It provoked the usual outburst of crime and suffering, and the enactment of a perpetual Coercion Bill. It dragged on through the years 1887, 1888, and 1889, draining away the funds of the National League, as Miss Anna Parnell and her female fanatics had drained away the funds of the Land League. In 1887 Lord Salisbury, exactly one year late, ordered the Tory party to pass a Land Bill which was practically a duplicate of the Bill introduced by Parnell and rejected by the Government in 1886. “Lord Salisbury did in 1887 the precise thing which he had declared in 1886 it would not be ‘honest’ or ‘expedient’ to do.”

It was then that the period of lionising began. Parnell had passed through great unpopularity, which had reached its nadir in the closing months of 1885. He and his colleagues had endured the abuse and contempt of Parliament and press and people with fortitude, and now the reaction in their favour had set in. The neurasthenic young man from Wicklow who had incurred the contempt of Mr Henry Lucy in 1876 had become the acknowledged equal of Mr Gladstone and Lord Salisbury. Men deferred to him. A party unquestioningly obeyed him. A nation adored him. The word “adored” is not carelessly used. It is a statement of bare fact to say that the great mass of the Irish people adored Parnell at this time. There were Unionists who felt for him some of the passionate affection which the Nationalists so bountifully bestowed upon him. That affection persists to this day among those who knew him, and has made a legendary figure of him for those who did not. “I know… a rabid Unionist,” wrote a lady in 1924 to the present writer, “who to this day loves Parnell. He says that Mr Parnell was not a talkative man, but that he would chat freely and laugh heartily with the people about Avondale, and the quarrymen and the miners; but that with upstarts he would have nothing to do (Mr ----- includes the whole Parnellite party among the ‘upstarts’); that his most notable trait was his respect for women… Going into the Royal Hotel at Glendalough, eight miles from Avondale, Mr Parnell heard a commercial traveller speaking offensively to the barmaid, and straightway fought him, gave him a licking with his own fists…” Mr Barry O’Brien states that “a close alliance was now formed between Irish Nationalists and English Liberals, and the Home Rule cause entered on a new phase. Irish members, who twelve months before had been regarded as pariahs, were now welcomed on Liberal platforms and feted in Liberal drawing-rooms.”[10]

But Parnell kept himself aloof from these festivities and fetings. He accepted invitations to meetings and to parties, but did not turn up when the time came. This apparent discourtesy was entirely due to his ill-health and the inertia that was growing on him – for Parnell was not a discourteous man even to his enemies. He rarely opened letters. One had to send telegrams to him if one wished a reply from him. Formerly, he had had all the impatience of the highly-nervous man. “If he took a car he generally urged the driver to the utmost speed, and if he missed a train, or found that he would have to wait any appreciable time, he generally chartered a special, on several occasions travelling on the footplate of the engine. Delay in any form was, in fact, abhorrent to one of his highly-strung nervous temperament.” [11]But now he was lethargic and slow to move. He broke appointments on the flimsiest pretext or on no pretext at all. He would sit about in a state of languor, as if he were dazed, and could only be induced to rouse himself by accounts of metallurgy[sic]. It is very probably that his mind, though not overthrown, was dangerously tilted at this time. His bodily strength was very low, so low that a slight illness would undoubtedly have killed him. He never completely recovered his health, but that he survived at all was due to the care bestowed upon him by Mrs O’Shea. But, although he was lethargic, he still possessed the power to dominate over other men. The Liberals held a meeting in St James’s Hall in 1887, to which Mr Morley managed to take him. When it was over, an enthusiastic crowd struggled to get near him and to shake his hand. “He will soon set the English as mad as the Irish,” a bystander said, as he listened to the cheering mob.

When he walked about the streets of London, he did so in a furtive manner, partly disguised. One of his colleagues says of him at this time that “he did not like people to talk to him in the streets. He did not wish to be recognised. One day I met him in the street so wrapped up, and wearing a long, shabby coat, with his face half hidden in a big muffler, that I hardly knew him.” His colleague, full of that curiosity which followers always have about their leaders, followed him at “a respectful distance,” and saw him stop in the Strand where part of it was being repaired by workmen. “Suddenly he wheeled around and saw me. I was quite in a funk, for I was afraid he knew I had been following him all the time. He beckoned to me. I went up to him. ‘You are here too,’ he said. ‘I  like looking at these working men. A working man has a pleasant life, when he has plenty to do and is fairly treated.’ We then walked together to the House.” Mr Barry O’Brien, who tells that story, tells also another which shows how  little Parnell knew of individual members of his party. He was walking once with his secretary, an Ulsterman called Campbell, and an Irish member passed and saluted them. “Who is that?” asked Parnell. “Why, don’t you know?” Mr Campbell replied. “It is one of our party; it is Mr -----.” “Ah!” Parnell exclaimed. “I did not know that we had such an ugly man in the party.” On one occasion a new member fatuously interrupted a prominent member of the Government. Parnell, who disliked such behaviour, sent a whip to tell the man not to be “a damned fool.” The whip repeated the request exactly as Parnell had made it, and was astonished to discover that the new member was delighted at being noticed at all by his chief. He kept up his interruptions in the hope that he might be noticed again. On another occasion, when a member of his party had been guilty of some meanness, Parnell sent for him and gave him a rebuke that left him limp and almost whimpering. There can rarely have been in the world a man who exacted and received such complete obedience form his followers as Parnell exacted and received from the Irish Nationalists.

Mr Gladstone during this time was propaganding Home Rule, and Parnell, realising that such work could be better done in England by the ex-Premier than by anyone else, contented himself with pacific efforts. He could not prevent the Plan of Campaign from being used, but he could and did discourage those who used it. He made a celebrated speech to the members of the Eighty Club on May 8, 1888, in which he declared his dislike of it. “I was ill,” he said, “dangerously ill. It was an illness from which I have not entirely recovered up to this day. I was so ill that I could not put pen to paper or even read a newspaper. I knew nothing about the movement until weeks after it had started, and even then I was so feeble that for several months, absolutely up to the meeting of Parliament, I was positively unable to take part in any public matter, and was scarcely able to do so for months after. If I had been in a position to advise about it, I candidly admit to you that I should have advised against it… I considered, and still consider, that there were features in the Plan of Campaign, and in the way in which it was necessary it should be carried out, which would have had a bad effect upon the general political situation – in other words, upon the national question.” This speech dashed the enthusiasm of his auditors, but Parnell probably had no thought for them; his thought was for the old man who was to speak on the very next evening at the memorial Hall in Farringdon Street. Mr Gladstone was delighted with the speech, and said “boldly that the real authors of the Plan of Campaign are the present Government.” Wherever Mr Gladstone went, he preached the gospel of self-government for Ireland. It was Parnell’s part to provide him with support, and he could best do so by lying low. The state of his health would not have kept him low had he had cause to come out of his retreat and fight, for no illness ever kept Parnell out of the front line.

[1] Charles Stewart Parnell, by Katharine O’Shea, vol. i., p44

[2] Lady Randolf Churchill, in her Reminiscences, states that Carey occupied the cell in Kilmainham in which Parnell had been confined.

[3] The Story of My life, by the Rt. Hon. Sir Edward Clare, K.C.

[4] Life of Henry Labouchere, by A.L. Thorold, p. 253

[5] Life of Henry Labouchere, by A.L. Thorold, p.235.

[6] Charles Stewart Parnell, by Katharine O’Shea, vol.ii, p.85

[7] The Story of my Life by the Rt. Hon. Sir Edward Clarke, K.C., p 108.

[8] Life of the Duke of Devonshire, by Bernard Holland, vol. ii., p134.

[9] Life of Henry Labouchere, by A.L. Thorold, p.251.

[10] Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, voll ii, p 174

[11] Charles Stewart Parnell, by his brother, John Howard Parnell, p 182