by Roy Jenkins
Parnell next experienced a brief period when he was almost beatified in Liberal circles, while his Unionist enemies, from the Attorney- General (Sir Richard Webster), who had been pressurized by the Prime Minister ingloriously to appear for The Times, to Joseph Chamberlain, who had become Parnell’s dedicated foe and had done much to push the government into setting up the prejudiced enquiry, were temporarily too demoralized to stand against the tide. A week after his vindication (and at just about the hour, as it happened, that Pigott was blowing his brains out at the Hotel Embajadores in Madrid) Parnell went to the House of Commons to make a speech in the general debate at the opening of the new session. He was greeted with an extraordinary standing ovation from the Liberal and Irish benches, led by Gladstone. Edward Hamilton described it as ‘unprecedented’ and ‘rather overstepping the bounds of decorum’.
A month later Parnell dined with the Gladstones in a party of ten. Gladstone described the occasion as ‘a Parnell entertainment’4 and was reported as being ‘much pleased’ with him. This led on to the apogee of the partnership, which was Parnell’s overnight visit to Hawarden on 18 December. He and Gladstone had four hours’ solid bilateral conversation, partly that evening and partly the next morning. In addition to that and the normal meals, he was taken round the ruined castle by Gladstone and accompanied the two younger sons on a shooting expedition. He could hardly have made a more favourable impression, political and social. Gladstone wrote: ‘He is certainly one of the very best people to deal with that I have ever known. . . . He seems to notice and appreciate everything.’5 So, it might cynically be commented, do the needs of political alliance, if not frustrated by antipathy, cast a roseate glow over even the most experienced of politicians. Parnell, for his part, went from Hawarden to Liverpool after luncheon on the 19th and there commented, in public, and with almost equal enthusiasm on the talks.
What was just as exceptional as the House of Commons ovation was the complete indifference with which Parnell treated it. He sat impassively until it subsided, and then rose and made a run-of-the-mill speech without any reference to the demonstration. His cold composure made a particular impression across the House on the Tory Solicitor-General, Sir Edward Clarke. Clarke thought the scene ‘might have disturbed the balance of mind of a smaller man’.6 His admiration for Parnell’s stature did not, however, cause him to pull any punches when, twenty months later, he appeared as counsel for O’Shea in his divorce suit against his wife and led the Captain through the most damaging and often untrue but uncontradicted allegations against Parnell as co-respondent.
They were uncontradicted because Parnell, after assuring both his own followers and John Morley as the principal Liberal liaison officer that nothing damaging would come out, seemed to have become indifferent to everything except Mrs O’Shea’s freedom to become his wife, and he did not take the trouble to be represented by counsel or to instruct Mrs O’Shea’s QC to cross-examine her husband on any of his allegations, several of which could easily have been disproved or at least severely shaken. On the day of the hearing Parnell remained at Brighton with Mrs O’Shea, simply saying, when she urged him to go to London and the Law Courts: ‘What’s the use, we want the divorce. . . .’7 The case moved to a conclusion with the extraordinary spectacle of one of the jurors expressing his disquietude at this absence of cross-examination, asking for O’Shea to be recalled, and himself attempting to do the job in an amateur and unprepared way.
This quietism in the face of the charges terminated Parnell’s prospects of constructive statesmanship. Until the second trial he seemed set upon a classic path: an organizer of intransigence who, after a qualifying period in gaol, became a moderate, even a conservative founder of a new polity, a Nelson Mandela of a hundred years earlier. When the divorce-court verdict was given, on 18 November 1890, it did not exactly destroy his influence, for that remained immanent in Irish politics for many decades after both his ‘disgrace’ and his death eleven months later. Henceforward however he became a divisive rather than the unifying factor which he had hitherto been.
It was the ridicule to which he allowed O’Shea and Clarke to expose him, even more than the alleged moral turpitude, which was destructive. He was suddenly changed from the remote leader who had stalked with equal and godlike indifference through the corridors of the House of Commons and the market towns of Ireland into the co-respondent who, when O’Shea had unexpectedly arrived, had shinned down the fire-escape of a Brighton lodgings in order that he might deceptively represent himself at the front door a few minutes later.
In fact the ‘fire escape’ evidence was doubtful and could have been largely destroyed by any competent cross-examination of the uncorroborated servant who gave it. But as Parnell did not take the trouble to do this, it damagingly stuck. It was however in no way the decisive factor which led Gladstone to repudiate him, and by so doing to stultify the end of his own political life as well as to turn Parnell from a (superficially at least) disciplined and dedicated ally into a wildly destructive force.
Did Gladstone have any practical alternative? He never moralized about the case. Indeed he declined to do so in the most explicit terms. He was recorded by Morley (who when writing of this stage of Gladstone’s life did so as his closest parliamentary colleague as well as his biographer) as saying: ‘What, because a man is called leader of a party, does that constitute him a censor and a judge of faith and morals? I will not accept it. It would make life intolerable.’8 Gladstone could often be self-righteous and sometimes priggish, but he was not a hypocrite, and he had seen too much of life and enjoyed the company of too many women whose virtue was not perfect for a straightforward even if long-standing case of adultery to cause him moral revulsion. Furthermore, he must have been uneasily aware of how often he had heard rumour or more of Parnell’s relationship with Mrs O’Shea without it causing him either to decline dealings with the Irish leader or to avoid Mrs O’Shea herself as an occasional go-between.128 As soon as the outcome of the divorce case was known, Gladstone took his stand on the likely political consequences and not on morals. And to this position he stuck.
The nearest he ever got to making a moral as opposed to a tactical judgement was when he wrote to Morley on the eve of the annual meeting of the National Liberal Federation, which took place at Sheffield on 20–21 November. Morley had written asking for guidance on what he should say. Gladstone replied that ‘abstractly it was for the Irish to decide whether or not Parnell remained their leader’. Then he referred to Parnell’s ‘enormous services – he has done for Home Rule something like what Cobden did for free trade, set the argument on its legs’. He concluded, however, that although the Liberal leaders must for the moment ‘be passive, must wait and watch’, he could not avoid saying to himself ‘I mean in the interior and silent forum, “It’ll na dee.”’9
He was more disposed to be tolerant than either of his principal lieutenants, partly because of his instinctive liking for Parnell, which was there before they broke, and which resurfaced, despite the virulence of Parnell’s ‘rat-in-the-corner’ attacks upon him, after the latter’s death in October 1891. Morley, in spite of his commitment to Gladstone and to Home Rule, never fully appreciated Parnell’s quality of non-intellectual grandeur, and Harcourt simply did not like him, as indeed he disliked the Irish as a whole, even if they were Protestant and landed.
There were, however, plenty of Liberal supporters who were disposed to make up for any eschewal of moralizing by Gladstone, and to go far beyond Morley or Harcourt. Gladstone’s problem must be seen against the background of the immensely difficult feat of political engineering to which he had set his hand, which was to concentrate the main political energies of the heavily Nonconformist Liberal party on the handing over of Ireland to a regime which would be dominantly Catholic and might result in a confessional state. This delicate alliance was peculiarly liable to be upset by any issue of sexual morality which could set both sides off on a ‘holier-than-thou’ competition.
; Thus the Irish prelates, after a momentary pause for breath, turned solidly against the leader. Dr Croke of Cashel, the most nationalist of the four Catholic archbishops, threw out a bust of Parnell from his palace. Dr Walsh of Dublin demanded his resignation. The Bishop of Ardagh said that no man false to God and friendship could be true to his country, ‘especially that country being Catholic Ireland’.10 From London Cardinal Manning lobbied Gladstone, the Pope and the Irish hierarchy against Parnell.
Despite this, the barrage from the other side of the religious divide contained plenty of anti-Catholic feeling. The Times, hardly a Nonconformist organ but certainly a Protestant one and with a heavy anti-Parnell score to pay off, managed a comment which was as skilful in mobilizing favourite British anti-French prejudices as it was inapposite to what had by any standards been one of the most dominating and persistent love affairs ever to impinge on British political history. It described the Parnell–Mrs O’Shea relationship as ‘a story of dull ignoble infidelity, untouched, so far as can be seen, by a single ray of sentiment, a single flash of passion, and comparable only to the dreary monotony of French middle-class vice, over which M. Zola’s scalpel so lovingly lingers’.
The Nonconformist divines did not allow themselves to be out-thundered by ‘The Thunderer’. The Revd Hugh Price Hughes of the West London Methodist Mission produced some of the most extreme anti-Irish invective. ‘We do not hesitate to say’, he wrote:
that if the Irish race deliberately select as their recognized representative an adulterer of Mr Parnell’s type they are as incapable of self-government as their bitterest enemies have asserted. So obscene a race in those circumstances they would prove themselves to be would obviously be unfit for anything except a military despotism.11
A week later, lest anyone had found his previous meaning too delicate to be fully grasped, and worried by any sullying of the innocence of his seventy-one-year-old sovereign, he told a St James’s Hall meeting that ‘it would be an infamous thing for any Englishman to compel his chaste and virtuous Queen to receive as her first Irish Prime Minister an adulterer of this type’. Dr John Clifford of the Praed Street Baptist Church, and so unflagging a Nonconformist controversialist that he survived first to figure in ‘Chuck it Smith’, Chesterton’s immortal 1912 poetic satire, and then to be made a Companion of Honour by Lloyd George in 1921, was not disposed to lag behind the Methodists, and added to the spate of denunciation. There was also a strong barrage from the Liberal press, although it was by no means unanimous.
Could and should Gladstone have resisted the Nonconformist clamour? J. L. Hammond, who remains the most penetrating historian of Gladstone’s relations with Ireland, thought that he could not. When he had last ignored Nonconformist opinion over the Education Bill of 1870 this had led to the disastrous general election of 1874. A repeat of that experience would be a roadblock insurmountable in Gladstone’s lifetime. Given the certain hostility of the House of Lords the only hope of carrying Home Rule lay in securing a massive Liberal majority at the next general election which, with the support of over eighty Irish MPs, could steamroller the remaining Unionist members and intimidate the Unionist peers. Before the Parnell divorce trial the by-elections suggested that such a result was likely. But if the Nonconformists stood off there was no hope in achieving it.
On the other hand there is in the view of Francis Birrell,129 whose 1933 biographical essay on the Grand Old Man is one of the best things in the whole enormous Gladstone bibliography. It was highly praised by Hammond, even though they differed in conclusion on this point. Birrell thought it a tragedy that, among the triumvirate composed of the Anglo-Catholic Gladstone, the Erastian Harcourt and the agnostic Morley, there was no one with any inside knowledge of Nonconformity. As a result they took its fulminations too seriously. A Lloyd George, even a Bright, ‘might have taken the bluster at its proper value’.12
Birrell puts the main blame on Morley and Harcourt, and Hammond agrees with him to the extent of writing: ‘Harcourt’s influence at this time was a calamity.’13 Between them Morley and Harcourt played a key role in getting Gladstone to write his unfortunate, even disastrous letter of 24 November 1890. This was addressed to Morley, although since much of it was written by Morley himself this was a convoluted exercise. Gladstone’s letter was designed to prevent the continuation of Parnell as Irish leader. Its key phrase, a Morley insertion (although with Gladstone’s reluctant approval) was that ‘the continuance I speak of [that is, Parnell at the head of the Irish party] . . . would render my retention of the leadership of the Liberal party, based as it has been mainly upon the prosecution of the Irish cause, almost a nullity’.14
The purpose of the letter was for Morley to show it to Parnell before the meeting of the Irish parliamentary party fixed for 25 November. Such a tactic ignored Parnell’s well-known elusiveness. His capacity for going to ground was formidable. For years previously, at least since 1883 or 1884, his colleagues had often been out of contact with him for months at a time. And at this crucial phase he had no intention of making himself available to unwelcome influence. The nearest that anyone got to him before the meeting was his deputy, Justin McCarthy, cultivated and amiable but hardly forceful, who was briefed by Morley and who caught up with Parnell at the House of Commons post office where he was collecting his mail before proceeding to the meeting. McCarthy then trotted beside him to the upstairs committee room but failed to divert his attention from the opening of letters, which included nothing from Gladstone or Morley. The meeting, still rather in a trance like an equally supine one in the Leinster Hall in Dublin five days earlier, and ignorant of Gladstone’s letter, proceeded to re-elect him as leader with only one semi-dissentient.
As Parnell walked away from this scene of superficial endorsement, Morley at last fell in with him and read him Gladstone’s letter. Parnell took it with some equanimity, being able to inform Morley in return of his re-election and thus hardly needing to say that the letter had become otiose. So as an appeal it had, but not as an excommunication, into which the triumvirate proceeded to turn it. Within an hour or so it was given to the press and became the major political sensation of the next few days. There was, perhaps inevitably, some dispute about who among the three cried forward and who cried back.
What is more certain is that publication turned Parnell from a disciplined auxiliary of Gladstone into a bitter enemy (within a fortnight he was referring to him as ‘an unrivalled sophist’, and denouncing the unsatisfactory form of Home Rule which, Parnell suddenly claimed, was all that he had been offered during the Hawarden visit). He also set himself up as henceforward the firm foe of any British political alliance. Anglo-Irish trust was dead. The virulence of Parnell’s reaction was no doubt made the greater by the highly unbalanced state to which his ill health (he was to be dead within a year) and his other vicissitudes, all playing on an inherently unstable personality, had reduced him.
There may also have been a more subtle factor at work. F. S. L. Lyons thought that by 1890, independently of the divorce case and indeed before its impact, Parnell’s position ‘in his own country and even in his own party had begun . . . to exhibit ominous signs of deterioration’.15 His absorption with Mrs O’Shea (and maybe other features of his character) had led to his taking for granted both his nation and his colleagues. It was, amazingly, five years since he had made a speech in Ireland, and at least two years since he had played any effective role in Parliament. He had stood back completely from the Plan of Campaign which Dillon and William O’Brien had launched in the autumn of 1886 and which for the closing years of the decade had been the main form of on-the-ground protest in Ireland. The effect of this disdainful neglect produced only a gradual and tentative alienation. On a person of Parnell’s temperament, however, any slow recognition of this was likely to make him more and not less imperious, and his judgement worse and not better.
The publication of the Gladstone–Morley letter also had the effect of throwing a burning brand into the tinder box of the
Irish parliamentary party. They had been bounced into agreeing to Parnell’s re-election, but they were far from willing to follow him in a repudiation of the Liberal alliance which had brought them almost within sight of the promised land. It was Parnell himself who had taught them that the constitutional route was the correct one, and the wrench at the last stage of falling back on the violence of the ‘hillside men’ was more than most of them could contemplate, agonizing though was the conflict of loyalties. They were also no doubt influenced, to greater or lesser extents according to their individual positions, by the solidifying of the Catholic hierarchy against Parnell.