Enigma

by Paul Bew

  ENIGMA

  A New Life of Charles Stewart Parnell

  PAUL BEW

  Gill & Macmillan

  What were the motives that brought this human enigma to espouse the cause of the Irish tenants?

  SIR WILLIAM BUTLER, THE LIGHT OF THE WEST (1909)

  The last, or almost the last words that my lamented friend . . . Mr Biggar said to me were ‘I wonder what were Parnell’s real politics.’

  T. M. HEALY, 15 MARCH 1891

  What would home rule affect? What does it mean? It means honour to England, honour to Ireland, the Union of the sister-islands on the basis of mutual respect and goodwill, the loyal allegiance of a gratified and contented people, the reduction of absenteeism, that cruel curse of Ireland, to a minimum, a resident nobility and gentry who will be proud as heretofore of their nationality, revival of commercial prosperity in every phase.

  WHAT IS HOME RULE? BY A WOULD-BE HOME RULER (1879)

  PREFACE

  One of the opening sequences of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia shows attendees at his funeral arguing amongst themselves about who he really was; as the film unfolds, the answers offered by these characters are shown to owe more to their own circumstances than to any understanding of Lawrence, who remains unknowable even to himself. It would be unfair to draw too close a parallel between Parnell and Lawrence as neurotic descendants of Anglo-Irish gentry; as a politician and parliamentarian, inhabiting a largely anglophone world, Parnell’s situation was very different from that of Lawrence, and despite his neurotic qualities the Chief’s semi-clandestine domesticity with Katharine O’Shea displays a personality more capable of contentment and close interpersonal relations than the self-tormenting Lawrence. Yet Parnell too has provoked many debates about his ‘true’ identity; and the debaters are equally prone to reveal more about themselves than about their subject, without producing consensus as to any aspect of Parnell’s politics or personality.

  Parnell is an enigma for historians. But he was not necessarily so for contemporaries—many of whom felt they knew him and had penetrated to his essence. The trouble for the historian lies in the fact that these same contemporaries all disagreed as to what that essence was. Many, such as Henry Harrison, emphasised his self-possessed calmness: ‘I never knew a less self-conscious man; no one who gave me the impression more strongly that he was at peace with himself.’1 Others, such as the London hostess Mrs Stuart Menzies, regarded him as visibly uncontrolled and noted his habit of compulsively firing off unnecessary telegrams.

  As for Parnell’s religious views, most believe that he veered between agnosticism and mainstream Anglicanism while always maintaining a certain sympathy for Catholicism, but Tim Healy insisted that he was actually influenced by the fundamentalist Plymouth Brethren sect, which found early patrons among the Wicklow gentry. In fact, while Healy is right to believe that Parnell inherited his superstitious outlook—especially on the subject of the number 13—from his mother,2 there is no real evidence of Parnell inheriting an intolerant strain of Protestantism.

  Then there is the vexed question of his relationship with the media. In contrast to William O’Brien’s statement that ‘He never courted a newspaper and was so insensible to the arts now represented by the Kodak or the kinema, before which no King or prime minister dares veil his face, that he did the world the real wrong of evading the requests for a sitting for an immortal painting and sculpture at the hands of the most remarkable Victorian men of genius,’3 many journalists at the time found Parnell unusually accessible, often travelling long distances with him to cover political meetings.4 In fact there is a growing view that one of the ways in which Parnell was a new politician was in his sensitivity to and deployment of the media to project himself as a heroic figure before Irish public opinion.5

  Then there is the matter of his relationships with women. Jasper Tully, as ardent a clerical nationalist as Healy, denied that Parnell was a loose liver and argued that it was because of his inexperience that he was beguiled by ‘the wiles of an old harridan like Mrs O’Shea’.6 (Tully believed that Mrs O’Shea was ‘a much older person’; in fact she was only a year older than Parnell.) Tim Healy, on the other hand, insisted that Parnell’s relationship with Mrs O’Shea was merely the culmination of a series of irregular sexual liaisons with younger women.

  Of course, the greatest difficulty lies in the assessment of Parnell’s political thought—in particular, how far should he be viewed as a traitor to his own class and ‘people’? Was he an unprincipled adventurer, or did he possess a core of coherent beliefs? Parnell’s most interesting private letters—those sent to Katharine O’Shea from Kilmainham Jail—are written under constrained circumstances, and he may even have calculated that they were likely to be read by the authorities. The scholar Tony Claydon has written:

  Trying to discover the true political ideals of Parnell can resemble a parlour game. When faced with a man who espoused so many varied solutions to the Irish question, and who appealed at different times to Gladstone, Fenians, tenant farmers, the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and the English working class, historians might feel tempted to ask the ‘real’ Charles Stewart Parnell to stand up. The politician left few clues to resolve his biographers’ dilemma. He was not given to introspection. He wrote no books, kept no diary, engaged in little enlightening correspondence. All that survives are his speeches, altering considerably in tone and content, according to their audience and the course of events. So slippery was Parnell that some commentators have doubted whether he had any underlying political principles. F. S. L. Lyons has argued that Parnell’s great achievement was not in ideas, but in methodology. His central idea was simply to balance moral and physical force.7

  In 1977 F. S. L. Lyons published his magisterial biography, Charles Stewart Parnell, which was essentially devoted to the exposition of this thesis. In 1976 Roy Foster published his important volume Charles Stewart Parnell: The Man and his Family, which brought out both the family and the Wicklow influence on a wide range of Parnell’s social and political beliefs. Building in part on Foster’s argument that Parnell never seems to have returned the intensity of landlord hatred which he became the object of during the land war, the present writer in Land and the National Question (1978) and C. S. Parnell (1980) presented a new interpretation which insisted that Parnell should not be seen as a mere technician of power but that he actually made a significant contribution to Irish political debate. This new interpretation placed Parnell firmly in the context of the political strategy of radical republicans in his era. For moderate nationalists, Parnell’s close involvement with such men provoked two fears. Firstly, they feared that he might countenance the exploitation of the land issue in such a way as to provoke either a ‘spontaneous’ insurrection or an Irish withdrawal from the Westminster parliament. Moderate nationalists felt sure that such a course could only culminate in disaster. Secondly, they feared the social radicalism of the neo-Fenian elites which threatened not only the interests of the landlord class but also those of Catholic strong farmers all over Ireland. Did the naïve young Anglo-Irish gentleman not realise he was playing with fire, they asked themselves. In fact Parnell always retained a more cautious element in his political disposition—a caution which intensified after 1882. He sensed that the English parliament would be flexible enough on the land issue, and anyway he preferred to see the issue resolved before the achievement of Home Rule—if only because that would make it easier for the Anglo-Irish gentry to engage as individuals in national politics. There was a significant element of social conservatism in his vision. In the last year of his political life Parnell also made some interesting and suggestive interventions on the relationship between northern Protestants/Unionists and Irish nationalism.8 The full-length biography produced by Robert Kee in 1993 was not un
sympathetic to this analysis.

  Nevertheless, such an interpretation will always—rightly—remain a contested one. More recently, however, in 2005 Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh commented: ‘On Parnell and Parnellism, it seems fair to say that the essence of Paul Bew’s characterisation of Parnell’s politics still largely holds the field.’9 Still more recently, Russell Rees has echoed others in asking whether ‘Bew’s argument . . . ignores the extent to which the pragmatic Parnell had alienated his own class during the land war with his repeated attacks on landlordism’.10

  The most important contributions throughout the 1980s and 1990s came from Alan O’Day. He produced a short life of Parnell in the Historical Association of Ireland’s ‘Life and Times’ series as well as Parnell and the First Home Rule Episode (Dublin, 1986), Irish Home Rule, 1867–1921 (Manchester, 1998), and a historiographical essay on F. S. L. Lyons in Walter L. Arnstein (ed.), Recent Historians of Great Britain: Essays on the Post-1945 Generation (Iowa State Press, 1990). In particular, O’Day edited the very valuable collection of essays Parnell in Perspective (with D. George Boyce) in 1991. One key essay here, that by Tony Claydon, argues that Parnell’s political thought should be seen in terms of his inheritance of Atlantic principles in political thought—the so-called ‘Country’ tradition, which rested on the notion of the perverting effects of centralised power. This civic humanist tradition had the ironic effect, suggests Claydon, of blinding him to the extent of cultural nationalism and sectarianism within his own movement. Dr O’Day has also worked to produce a full collection of Parnell’s speeches, now deposited for the use of scholars in the Henry Collection in the Library of Queen’s University Belfast.

  A major recent contribution to Parnell scholarship was made by Frank Callanan, whose work combines a remarkable depth of research with an oblique approach in which Parnell is played off against T. M. Healy. From the mid-1940s scholars such as Conor Cruise O’Brien, Emmet Larkin and F. S. L. Lyons had challenged the ‘Parnell myth’ familiar to readers of Yeats and Joyce—a heroic Parnell betrayed by servile craw-thumpers at the behest of scheming bishops and hypocritical British Liberals—by pointing out that there was a clear political rationale for maintaining the Gladstonian alliance, that some of Parnell’s opponents (such as John Dillon, William O’Brien, and Archbishops Croke and Walsh) made genuine attempts to secure a compromise settlement, and that Parnell’s resistance could reasonably be interpreted as reckless refusal to accept the majority decision and a self-serving abandonment of some of his own greatest achievements (the Liberal alliance and the displacement of physical-force nationalism by a thriving parliamentary movement). This rehabilitation of anti-Parnellism tended to produce an emphasis on the ‘reasonable’ anti-Parnellism of Dillon and O’Brien and to obscure the significance (or even the existence) of Healy’s vituperative and sectarian mob-oratory in Parnell’s downfall. Callanan re-establishes both the sheer political competence which Parnell displayed in outmanoeuvring his opponents during the last battle (recognition of this competence underpinned much of the continuing support for him as ‘the only possible leader’) and the crucial importance of Healy in recognising that Parnell could only be destroyed by shattering his air of invulnerability through personal ridicule and abuse, consolidating a version of nationalism defined by a vindictive and self-righteous strong-farmer and middle-class Catholicism. Callanan’s view that in his last months Parnell’s primary motivation was to assemble a counter-coalition of groups excluded by this idea of Irishness may or may not elevate tactical manoeuvres to a longer-term grand strategy, but Callanan’s work leaves no doubt that both Parnell and his vindictive nemesis have been underestimated.

  This new book takes as its starting-point the new material which has come to light in recent years. While it builds on the much shorter volume published in 1980, it contains important new research on Parnell’s family background, intellectual formation and early career inside and outside parliament. It contains much new detail on Parnell’s relationship with revolutionary conspiracy and the ‘hard men’ close to violence. This does not undermine the emphasis on the conservative aspect of Parnell’s political mindset. It simply brings out more fully the drama of his career and the ways in which he forced the British political elite to rethink radically its policy towards Ireland. There were, of course, limitations to his success—some scholars, such as Margaret O’Callaghan, argue that even without the divorce case Home Rule would have remained out of reach, as the Unionist government had succeeded in convincing the majority of the British electorate that Parnell and his followers were dangerously subversive and that Gladstonian Home Rule was a gamble too far.11 Today we associate the Special Commission on Parnellism and crime with the exposure of the Pigott forgeries and the subsequent sanctification of Parnell within British Liberalism and even a section of guilty Toryism; we forget the verdict of the Spectator on the final report of the Special Commission ‘that it will leave little doubt in the minds of open-minded readers that the popular party in Ireland has been controlled, is controlled, and will be controlled by moral forces radically opposed to a true union with England and to any sincere respect for the personal rights of Irishmen who are not disposed to accept the dictation of the Irish Party’.12 But to acknowledge such a sentiment and its force is merely to underline the importance of Parnell, because he was the one Irish leader who had the capacity to deflect it and dilute it. As James Loughlin points out, Gladstone saw a Home Rule solution to the Irish problem in conservative terms, as he hoped that the landlord class would be able to operate as natural political leaders in a new Dublin assembly.13 In this theory, a Parnellite settlement was the best method of preventing the triumph of radical republican nationalism in Ireland.

  FOREWORD

  There have been three great epochs of crisis in Anglo-Irish relations since the Great Famine. These were the agrarian revolution and Home Rule crises of the 1880s; the period from the Easter Rising of 1916 to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921; and the Northern Ireland ‘troubles’, which erupted in 1968 and are still not entirely extinguished. Yet only one of these was dominated by one Irish politician—the nationalist leader of the 1880s, Charles Stewart Parnell, whose fall in 1891 significantly altered the content of the ‘Irish question’ as it existed in his time.

  Only John Hume’s role in the Northern Ireland troubles is in any way comparable to that of Parnell. Parnell, in fact, is a particular hero of John Hume. It is no surprise that Hume was a key figure in the successful 1980s campaign to place the Parnell bust—by the Breton sculptor Yann Goulet—in the palace of Westminster. Hume has explicitly identified himself with the Parnellite themes of reconciliation and the need to bring together the different sections of the Irish people. In 1988, in the course of his (subsequently published) dialogue with Sinn Féin, the SDLP leader made much use of Parnell’s Belfast speech of May 1891.

  Parnell’s career was marked by a dramatic contrast. In 1885–6 he played a decisive role in bringing about the conversion of the British premier, W. E. Gladstone, to the cause of Home Rule for Ireland. This development was almost inconceivable when Parnell entered parliament in 1875. The great analyst of British politics, Walter Bagehot, conceded Gladstone’s characteristic slipperiness, but added that opposition to Irish Home Rule was the one issue on which Gladstone would never change his mind.1 In 1879 the well-connected Liberal commentator Wemyss Reid wrote of Parnell in a not unsympathetic portrait: ‘He is one of the men who cherish the hopeless vision of a restoration of the Irish parliament sitting in Dublin.’2 As late as March 1880 the Spectator could accurately observe that no ‘English Liberal of today has supported the land agitation as led by Mr Parnell’, nor had any English Liberal advocated any concession which would weaken the competences of the imperial parliament upon all matters of political importance (although a few, mostly MPs with significant Irish populations in their constituencies, had flirted with Home Rule). Yet by February 1882 Gladstone, the Prime Minister, was already offering a not so oblique endorsement of the
principles of Irish Home Rule in public, while senior Tories were supporting peasant proprietorship, the main demand of the Land League movement. On 18 February 1882 Lord Derby wrote in his diary: ‘The political excitement at the moment is Gladstone’s unlucky speech, understood by many people as in favour of some form of Home Rule.’3 A few days later, on 6 March 1882, he recorded senior Tory sentiment in favour of peasant proprietorship.4 In 1886 the Liberal Prime Minister took the most dramatic British political decision of the era, the decision to introduce a Home Rule bill for Ireland. By the end of October 1886 Gladstone was declaring: ‘The relations of England to Ireland have, as a whole, perhaps been more profoundly disgraced by cruelty and by fraud than those between any other nation in the entire history of Christendom.’5 Parnell was perceived to have played the decisive role in bringing about this transformation. By early 1891 Parnell’s tremendous prestige had crashed following the revelations of a divorce court hearing. Yet in both moments—in defeat as in victory—Parnell displayed the same basic quality: remarkable tenacity of purpose.

  This quality was displayed in his active promotion of the land and Home Rule movements. It was displayed also in the tragic conflict following the O’Shea divorce suit, which ended his career. It was, indeed, precisely the same element of his character that enabled him to raise the Home Rule movement to a pitch of unprecedented success as made it possible for him, in the last few months, to face undaunted disasters and humiliations of the most excruciating kind. Defeat and death did not come before it was clear that Parnell had rendered significant services to the cause of Irish nationalism.

  Ever since his death Parnell has remained a remarkably potent symbol, particularly in times of crisis and conflict in Ireland. The myth has obscured the man and makes it difficult for us to see Parnell as he really was. The difficulty has, if anything, increased with the passage of time, for the old myth has been assailed by the creation of a new one, so that Parnell requires a double demythologising. For some time now he has been rescued, and rightly so, from those who, like Pádraig Pearse, the insurrectionary leader of 1916, sought to link him with the separatist tradition. In particular, the work of Conor Cruise O’Brien places Parnell firmly within the context of his party: a hard-headed leader but one imbued with constitutionalism. However, this has been done at the price of neglecting significant aspects of Parnell’s early political strategy, which alarmed not only Unionists but also moderate Home Rulers.