Enigma

by Paul Bew

  Mitchell Henry, a moderate nationalist political opponent, told O’Neill Daunt the same thing—that Parnell was motivated by hatred of England, not love of Ireland (‘I could tell you some conversations I had with him’).19 Be that as it may, Parnell enjoyed a more than friendly relationship with his Magdalene counterparts, and there is no contemporary evidence that he took much notice of Fenianism in the 1860s. Yet others felt sure that he disliked the English: ‘He hated the English character for its innate assumption of superiority and its hypocritical pretensions to honesty and goodness.’20 One society hostess declared: ‘Although not quite convinced of his true feelings concerning the Irish, I was never in any doubt about his feelings for the English. He hated them all.’21 Perhaps—but he fell in love with an English woman, the niece of the Whig grandee Lord Hatherly and sister of the distinguished soldier Sir Evelyn Wood. Parnell’s enemies like to draw attention to an irony: his rise owed much to hatred, his fall owed much to love. There was certainly something in the English character which irritated Parnell, but hatred is too strong a word. In a discussion of this aspect of Parnell’s personality, the Spectator mused that it had much in common with other types of white colonial resentment and noted wryly that the English would be made to pay a heavy price for an element of superciliousness in the national character.22

  After this negative and intellectually fruitless experience at Cambridge he returned to Ireland to take up again the pursuits of the Irish country gentleman. His prowess as a cricketer, grouse-shooter and estate-improver marked him out as an ideal candidate for the comfortable but active life of a Wicklow country squire. The Avondale estate was situated in the ancient gold-bearing region of Ireland, and although the gold deposits had been practically exhausted in prehistoric times, the possibility of further discoveries remained a lifelong dream with Parnell and led to numerous prospecting operations on his part. In general, he seems to have relished the pastimes of the Irish country gentleman and to have fitted in well. Thus did affairs proceed—pleasantly enough but lethargically by any standards.

  He was a well-made, handsome young man and this helped in the evolution of a political personality which was held to be both manly, dignified and restrained as well as calmly rebellious.23 Parnell was, in his youth, very conscious of his appearance. In early 1877, finding his hair was thinning, he was advised to shave the upper portion of his scalp, which he dutifully did.24 (Most observers were impressed by the power of his soulful brown eyes except for Labouchere, who described them as ‘fishy’, and J. F. X. O’Brien, who was decidedly unimpressed.) He was capable of exercising considerable charm when he wished to do so. He may have thought that these advantages, combined with his social position, guaranteed him an interesting and successful life. If so, he was soon to receive a rude surprise.

  In 1871 Parnell spent a few months in America, where he wooed a certain Miss Woods. In his last years he commended those English aristocrats—like Randolph Churchill, Moreton Frewen and Jack Leslie—who had married ‘clever American women’. However, unlike his father, he himself failed in this project (one of the classic survival strategies of the straitened landed classes).25 After some early success he was rebuffed. He was to tell the House of Commons on 7 March 1879 that ‘young ladies are sometimes not very particular’ in the methods they employed to carry ‘their aims and objectives’. Once again, as in Cambridge, the world had shown itself to be less than overwhelmed by the young Wicklow squire. His brother, John Howard Parnell, often a sound judge, noted: ‘His jilting undoubtedly helped to drive his energies into politics, for he was deeply hurt at the idea of being considered a country gentleman without any special abilities.’26 Charles decided to draw on the family inheritance—which meant exploiting its social position and reputation for patriotism. The Ballot Act of 1872 decreased the costs of political campaigning, and the possibility that he might enter politics began to crop up for discussion in the family circle. Suddenly, in 1874, a bored and restless Parnell took the decision and sought out the leaders of the Home Rule movement. The moment had arrived for Parnell’s prolonged, if pleasant, adolescence to come to an end. He introduced himself to the organisation’s leader, Isaac Butt, who was well aware of the political history of his family and was delighted to promote him.

  Isaac Butt introduced Parnell to his new friends in typical flowery style: ‘Mr Parnell came forward, there was seen a young man, with dark brown eyes, who gazed intently at the crowded house before him, as if his soul was in the glance that scanned that sea of faces—grave and pensive, with light brown full beard and tall slender figure which appeared slightly stooped.’27 When Butt lauded the well-known nationalists who were present, Parnell appeared, for a moment, to be cynically unimpressed by the exaggerated praise: ‘A quick smile was seen for an instant on the young man’s face which disappeared quickly. His eyes evinced no corresponding sympathy; they looked coldly and inquiringly around.’28

  His early ventures were hardly a success. He had to put up his brother John for Wicklow in the 1874 general election, as his own position as High Sheriff of the county ruled out his candidature there. John was, however, defeated. Charles himself stood in Dublin County in a by-election later in 1874 and was also defeated—though not because he had not applied himself. His friends, including Andrew Kettle, took care to ensure that the powerful Cardinal Cullen had no objection to his campaign. The ultra-Tory Dublin Evening Mail hailed Parnell’s defeat as a sign that ‘those having a stake in the City and County . . . of every form of religious belief’ were rallying to Conservatism against ‘the wild and extravagant agitation that imperils property and brings the worst elements of society to the surface . . . an unregulated and dangerous enthusiasm evoked on behalf of an utter stranger’.29 In fact, as the more moderately Conservative Irish Times noted, Parnell did clearly push up the Home Rule vote against a strong Conservative candidate.

  Parnell made one important long-term friend during this campaign. Andrew Kettle was the first name on Parnell’s nomination papers;30 he was to be a loyal ally until the end. Very different was Parnell’s relationship with another early supporter, Philip Callan (1837–1902), one of nine members of the parliamentary committee of the Home Rule Party which had just been established, and who was very active on Parnell’s behalf on polling day. This was not, however, to be a long-term friendship: Parnell feared Callan’s local popularity and, more particularly, his tendency to gossip in an indiscreet way. In 1885 Parnell was to go out of his way to extinguish Callan’s parliamentary career. But this was to be the action of the ‘uncrowned King’ of Irish politics. At this moment in 1874 Parnell had proved nothing except his energy. One sub-editor, working late at night, found Parnell at his door:

  It was not without difficulty that I got out of him the object of his visit, simple though it was, namely to arrange for the insertion of his address to the electors of some constituency. He managed to make himself intelligible at last, and the matter was ended by his handing me the advertisement, which I sent up to the printers. I could not help, in later years, contrasting the diffidence of Mr Parnell on that occasion with his fluency of speech and his dictatorial manner when he had acquired greater self-confidence.31

  Interestingly, Parnell went to the local Catholic priest in Rathdrum and asked for a character reference in support of his new political career. The priest, Father Richard Galvin, was only too happy to oblige. He sent a glowing private letter on 9 March 1874 to fellow priests in Dublin. Parnell’s mother was described warmly (inaccurately) as a descendant ‘I think . . . of the royal Stuart line’. In fact, as John Redmond later pointed out, the Stewarts were Ulster Presbyterians. Even so, Katharine Tynan recalled that, in the years of his eminence, the romanticised image of the lost Stuart cause was invoked by Parnell’s followers to gild his defiance of the administration of Queen Victoria: ‘“Charlie is our darling”, we would say, as we lived over again our Jacobite passion for our born King of Men.’32 More cogently, Father Galvin added: ‘I have never heard a cas
e of oppression or extermination attributed to him or to his family.’ The priest concluded: ‘He is a young gentleman of great promise, great shrewdness and sound judgement. You may absolutely rely on his honour and integrity. Such is the decided conviction of his parish priest, who ought to know him well.’33 But there is a sense in which his local priest’s language was entirely natural. Parnell’s childhood had been characterised by a close intimacy with, and emotional reliance upon, the Catholic servants at Avondale: an intimacy which was, if anything, deepened by the coldness so evident in the later phases, at least, of his parents’ marriage. Even in the last years of his life, Parnell remained addicted to the folk remedies of Catholic Ireland—‘he accepted the peasant lore of Ireland with the simplicity of a child’34 and remained affectionate and close to Susan Gaffney, the Avondale housekeeper.

  Parnell was at this time a synodsman of the Church of Ireland, which makes Galvin’s warm-hearted ecumenical reference—which could only have had a positive impact on Catholic voters as suggesting a genuine intimacy—all the more striking.

  3

  The decision to enter politics had its bad side. Parnell’s family had a reputation for mental disorder as well as patriotism. He was more than aware of this. ‘Madness’, he often said, was not a word the Parnells used lightly. The effort of self-control required was enormous. He was at first a wretched public speaker—the possessor, incidentally, of a strong English accent. He was to be embarrassed on a Liverpool platform in 1877 when another speaker attacked those Irish politicians who lost their accents in London—a cynical journalist noted that Parnell had no accent to lose.35 After his first unsuccessful campaign for Dublin Parnell collapsed with a nervous illness for six weeks. His closest colleagues noted a tendency to clench his fists so hard while speaking as to leave the marks of his nails. Moreover, all this was compounded by the fact that Parnell was intensely superstitious. One part of his superstition was a loathing for the colour green. This was obviously not an advantage for an Irish leader who frequently had to speak from public platforms draped with green flags and decorations. (The House of Commons, it should not be forgotten, was upholstered in the same offensive hue.)

  William O’Brien recorded: ‘“How could you expect a country to have luck that has green for its colour?” he once said. When I reminded him that green, as the national colour, dated no further back than the United Irishmen, and that until then the Irish Ensign was supposed to be blue, he responded, smiling: “It’s just the same—blue is more than half green.”’ O’Brien continued: ‘A lady worked for him while he was in prison a superb eiderdown quilt, covered with green satin, with his monogram working in gold bullion—a present worthy of a king. I am sure he must have sent a polite and gracious acknowledgement but the gorgeous quilt never rested on his bed.’36

  O’Brien noted that his objection to the colour green was due to a fear of arsenic poisoning. This certainly fits with Katharine O’Shea’s story of having to send a patch of (entirely innocent) green carpet to London for analysis because Parnell felt it was making him ill. O’Brien also noted that ‘lady devotees’ sent him innumerable other marks of homage worked in the dangerous colour—embroidered smoking-caps, tea-cosies and even bright green hosiery. The latter he resolutely insisted on destroying; the others he insisted be distributed freely among his brother prisoners, until almost every man in the prison, except himself, had his green tasselled turban hats and green woollen vests.

  Apart from the colour green, the number 13 was also a problem. When still in Kilmainham, Maurice Healy visited him to consult about the bill to amend the Land Act of 1881. Parnell counted the clauses and then threw the papers on the table as if he had been stung. ‘“What is the matter?” asked the solicitor Healy in alarm. “There are 13 clauses;” said Parnell, “we cannot have 13 clauses.” That bill with 13 clauses was got over by the addition of another one, which Parnell had first opposed.’37

  William O’Brien also noted the fear of the number 13. ‘His objection to travelling in a railway carriage number 13, or any multiple of 13, would undoubtedly have caused him to prefer travelling in a third class of an unobjectionable number to travelling in a first class with the brand of ill luck.’ But O’Brien made an important point, which places all these eccentricities in a context: ‘Parnell’s superstitions have been frequently and unduly dwelt upon. They always seemed to me to be whimsicalities that amused him rather than beliefs that had any real influence.’38 In other words, Parnell moved from first- to a third-class carriage to avoid the number 13, but he would under any circumstances—‘any possible combination of 13s’—complete the journey. In short, Parnell appeared to be a bundle of barely controlled contradictions. He was febrile, tense, and yet withal assertive. Above all, the fact that he hated the colour green did not prevent him from leading Irish nationalism.

  Over time, Parnell achieved a considerable measure of self-control; at least to the point where he could conceal the obvious signs of nervousness which marked his early entry into politics. But it is worth noting that this self-control—easily enough summoned up for many a set-piece political occasion—was not absolute. As one keen observer noted:

  While so composed outwardly, I believe inwardly Mr Parnell was consumed with intense feeling, an ever-abiding excitement, and that was what made him always in a hurry; he could never wait for anything; to wait for a train was anguish to him, he would have liked a special always and to travel at the rate of 60 miles an hour. He never wrote letters if he could help it, but sent telegrams, bundles of telegrams. In the same way if people wrote letters to him, they were laid on one side, but a telegram was attended to on the spot. I once received three telegrams from him in as many hours, and none of them of any consequence.39

  When he first moved in with Mrs O’Shea in 1880, he was still prone to sleep-walking and night tremors—‘He would spring up panic-stricken out of deep sleep and try to beat off the imaginary foe that pressed upon him.’40 Parnell was so afraid of his own sleep-walking in hotels that he carried everywhere a special spring lock to secure the door of his room. But in public it was a different matter. Katharine O’Shea acknowledged: ‘He was so absolutely self-controlled and few knew of the volcanic force and fire that burned beneath his icy exterior.’41

  We should not forget his already evident strength of will: to emphasise only the neurotic aspects of Parnell’s personality is a great mistake. He seems to have regarded his public nervousness as merely something that had to be overcome. There is no sign that he was given to agonising bouts of self-appraisal. Indeed, his colleagues marvelled at his apparent lack of self-consciousness. In 1887 T. P. O’Connor described him as neither ‘expansive nor introspective. It is one of the strongest and most curious peculiarities of Mr Parnell not merely that he rarely, if ever, speaks of himself but that he rarely, if ever, gives any indication of having studied himself. . . . It is a joke among his intimates that to Mr Parnell the being Parnell does not exist.’42 Parnell, it should be stressed, was an upper-class country gentleman, with much of the assurance—and occasional toughness—of his class. Sir William Butler’s public lecture on Parnell contains one particularly revealing anecdote. Riding with Parnell near Aughavanagh, the latter’s shooting lodge and—as Parnell told John Morley—his favourite place in the world, they encountered ‘a group of persons’, one of whom began to behave with great ‘demonstrativeness’ and obsequiousness. Parnell rode on, paying absolutely no attention. Butler later heard a story that this was one of Parnell’s tenants who had paid no rent for years; but, he added, regardless of this fact, Parnell’s behaviour would have been unchanged.43 Labouchere’s obituary is worth recalling:

  A selfish man Parnell certainly was, but he was good-naturedly selfish. If anyone stood in his way, he would sacrifice him without a moment’s hesitation, nor would he go greatly out of his way to serve a friend. When, however, his own interest was not concerned, he would not put himself out to do either friend or foe an injury. Politeness has been defined as go
od nature in little things, and this sort of good nature he had.44

  Parnell offended James Mullin by telling him a clearly untrue story about the arrangements for his next engagement, but then softened the effect by playing amicably with Mullin’s child. He offended T. P. O’Connor by the brutality of his reference to the death of Isaac Butt, but then softened the effect by ensuring that a hungry O’Connor, not yet an MP, was served a meal in the terrace of the House of Commons.

  James Bryce agreed with Labouchere’s verdict: ‘Spontaneous kindliness was never ascribed to him; nor had he, so far as could be known, a single intimate friend.’45 Parnell, he said, had a perception of what ‘pleases or offends mankind’, but no inner integrity. He added: ‘A revolution may extenuate some sins, but even in a revolution there are men (and sometimes the strongest men) whose moral excellence shines through the smoke of conflict and the mists of detractors. In Mr Parnell’s nature the moral element was imperfectly developed.’46 Parnell insisted, Bryce said, upon being treated as a gentleman; he had the outer properties of a gentleman but disregarded ‘the inner and higher standard of gentlemanly conduct’ whenever it suited him. Even an ardent English Home Ruler like Frederic Harrison could be unnerved: he saw Parnell as the ‘most elegant and distinguished public figure of his time’, but noted also a ‘superhuman satanic pride and thirst for personal victory’.47 In 1925 David Leslie Murray, the Times Literary Supplement reviewer of St John Ervine’s Parnell, saw him as simply ‘a monster’.48 When we swim with Parnell, we often swim in the cold waters of icy, egotistical calculation. Nothing is more striking, for example, or was felt as more hurtful, than the way in which T. D. Sullivan, whose weekly paper The Nation had up to that point been Parnell’s most loyal supporter in the Irish press, was pushed ruthlessly aside in 1881 in favour of William O’Brien and United Ireland; years of loyal support were forgotten in favour of the new rising star.