Enigma

by Paul Bew

  A combination of boredom and disappointment seems to have pushed Parnell into politics. Once involved, he brought to bear considerable qualities of determination, though not, it is said, imagination. ‘The strength of Parnell was character rather than intellect,’ wrote T. P. O’Connor in a typical phrase.49 John Morley, in a similar fashion, called him a ‘man of temperament, of will, of authority, of power, not of ideas or ideals, or knowledge or political maxims, or even of practical reason in its higher senses’.50 Morley, in fact, regarded Parnell as ‘a second-rate man’: ‘It was absurd to compare him with other Irish leaders like Grattan and O’Connell to whom he could not hold a candle.’51 It is true that Parnell was no intellectual in the way that T.P. or Morley were. He avoided the ‘arts’ and much preferred dogs, horses and the sports and pastimes of the countryside as a means of relaxation. His pleasures were as uncomplicated as those of any country squire. Those who remained loyal to him in the last desperate months of his life were disproportionately those colleagues who had shared those pleasures with him—the Redmond brothers, W. J. Corbet and J. C. McCoan. It is hard to imagine a man more different from those who were to be his principal lieutenants: Justin McCarthy, Tim Healy, T. P. O’Connor, Thomas Sexton, John Dillon and William O’Brien, all of whom opposed him in the final crisis. While they were sociable, articulate speakers and inveterate scribblers, Parnell was the reverse. O’Connor admitted:

  This lack of anything literary was partly the result of a very decided bent towards science and mechanics. If you met him on a Saturday you generally saw a copy of Engineering or some such journal under his arm. He was always trying experiments on the metals in some mines on his property and projecting schemes for their development—which came to nothing. He had also, I have heard, some aptitude for the study of such commercial problems as the development of railways, and he could give an accurate and penetrating account of the financial position of the great railroads of the United States. I never saw any sign that he had ever read a single novel or a single drama.52

  In fact Katharine O’Shea was to reveal that there was one exception to this general rule. She recorded that he loved Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland—which she used to read to him—and appeared to take it rather seriously, with great literalness. (It may be relevant that the book’s apparent whimsy was devised by a professional logician.)

  Parnell was in so many ways the direct opposite of his colleagues. And yet, for all that, Parnell was no intellectual in this conventional sense, he was not, as is so often suggested, a mere technician of power. He made a contribution to Irish political debate which was as important as it was unique.

  To understand this we have to understand that Parnell had a particular view of the Anglo-Irish dilemma and that this view conditioned his politics in the strongest possible way. It was not a sentimental or idealised view of his ‘own people’. Parnell once said to William O’Brien: ‘The only good thing the Irish landlords have to show for themselves are their hounds and perhaps, in the Roscommon country, their horses.’53 But as Harold Spender put it: ‘Right through the heart of the nationalist fight, Parnell was always held back by a strain of sympathy for the landlords.’54 Parnell, always said to be the most ‘pragmatic’ of politicians, is not fully explicable without reference to this ideological ‘afterthought’. In short, he did not quite do all of his thinking on his feet.

  The idea that Parnell lacked a notion of the Anglo-Irish past—which is not, of course, the same thing as precise historical knowledge—has been an essential part of the picture constructed by those who see him as a ‘hollow man’ or an empty vessel. Deprived of his assumptions about this aspect of Irish history—and most importantly, of his sense of his own place and role in its unfolding—Parnell is easily distorted. His success becomes largely a matter of good fortune. It is child’s play then to interpret his career as the sacked Cambridge undergraduate indulging his bile against the English who have failed to treat him with due regard.

  There were indeed many at the time who saw Parnell as purely opportunistically activated by a hatred for England rather than a love for Ireland. There is even an element of truth in this picture. After his adoption of a firm nationalist political stance, Parnell began to emphasise certain aspects of his experience that were to hand—‘patriotic’ ancestors, Wicklow stories of English atrocities in 1798, the meaning of the Fenian rising of 1867—in a novel way. But for a long time these influences had lain dormant in his psyche. After his decision to enter politics he made use of them to create an almost poetically satisfying effect. We need not accept all the elements of the Parnell myth. It has to be said that some of these stories seem a little overwritten: Sir John Parnell, sponsor both of the young Castlereagh and of Arthur Wellesley, later to be the Duke of Wellington, was hardly a sneaking regarder of the ‘98 insurrection; it is true that he opposed the Union as did many other Protestant reactionaries, but he had time before his death to make his peace with it in public. But to treat Charles Stewart Parnell simply as a man who used politics as a means of expression for his personal resentments is grossly unfair. This can be seen clearly when his attitude to the Anglo-Irish tradition is explored.

  Parnell made not the slightest effort to hide his lack of enthusiasm for Gaelic culture.55 One visitor to Avondale confirmed the existence of a beautiful well-stocked library, but noted acutely there was ‘scarcely a modern work among them’.56 An American reporter who visited him in the last year of his life recorded of his library: ‘Very few political works are to be seen. Metallurgy, geology and astronomy are his chief delights.’57 T. H. Escott, somewhat fancifully, saw Parnell as the exemplary figure of the post-Disraeli generation—where once there had been literary politicians, now political leaders were scientific practical men.58

  The broad picture is clear enough. Parnell was not and did not consider himself to be a serious historical scholar. But, as Roy Foster has pointed out, ‘one thing is certain—he must have read the works of his grandfather’.59 Patrick Maume has noted that the journalist Michael MacDonagh, who visited Parnell at Avondale, confirmed that this was indeed the case.60 What message did Parnell take from his grandfather’s work? An American reviewer noted of William Parnell: ‘The object of his lucubrations is professed to be of a patriotic nature; to exhibit Ireland as she deserves to be shown in an amicable point of view; to reconcile differences between the Catholics and Protestants.’61 Charles Stewart Parnell appears to have shared this approach in its essentials.

  Parnell had an acute insight into the split loyalties which characterised the Anglo-Irish tradition. They were a privileged minority, separated by race and religion from those whose land their ancestors had sought. They still looked to England as their ultimate protector and regarded themselves as members of an empire which they were proud to serve. At the same time, they felt themselves to be Irish. This divided loyalty led them eventually into the characteristic predicament of a colonial governing class, torn between their country of origin and their country of settlement. This was the essence of the Anglo-Irish heritage, of which Parnell was so intensely aware. It determined his view of the past; more importantly, it shaped his hopes for the future.

  4

  Parnell was remarkably consistent in his appraisal of the Irish question. Considering it, naturally enough, from a specifically Anglo-Irish standpoint, not only was he conscious of the part played by his own class in the evolution of the problem, but he was also convinced that this class had an important role to play in its solution. The Act of Union had created an incentive for landlords to look to England to maintain their dominant and yet precarious position in Irish society. Parnell did not hold, as his Catholic lieutenants tended to, that the landlord class was in any literal sense a garrison class; it had ceased in realistic terms to have any such claims before 1850, though the term was still occasionally invoked by Unionist orators. Revealingly, when Parnell used the term ‘garrison’ in parliament on 11 June 1877, he was referring simply to those Irish Tory hacks a
nd opportunists who helped prop up the government of the day. But he did hold that the landlords looked to England as the guarantor of their exalted status and that it was in consequence of this that they opposed nationalist politics. The way forward was to fight for progressive reforms, particularly land reforms, which removed the privileges of the Irish landlords and removed simultaneously the barrier to their association in the Home Rule movement. The disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, which seemed to prompt some degree of Protestant involvement in the Home Rule agitation in the early 1870s, seemed to be a proof of Parnell’s general case.

  In 1877 at Navan, at the heart of his own constituency, he was asked to give a lecture on the subject of the ‘Irish parliament, past, present and future’. He admitted frankly that the prospect of giving such a talk was an ‘alarming one’. He did commit one major howler by declaring that Lucas and Duffy founded the Independent Irish Party in 1842 rather than 1852, though this may have been a slip of the tongue. More important is his revealing language about Grattan’s Parliament—‘though imperfect on many occasions, it displayed great heroism’.62

  In a hastily researched address to the Young Ireland Society in Cork in 1885, he considered what Ireland had suffered in the nineteenth century as a result of the loss of her native parliament. He argued that had Grattan’s Parliament been retained, a number of benefits would have followed:

  It would also have been better for both people and the owners of the land—the landowners in Ireland. They would have been taught to conciliate the people towards them; they would have learned to govern the people justly and uprightly, and to give them by degrees those larger privileges, the extension of the franchise to the masses of the people, the right for all sections to vote and take their places as members for constituencies which it has taken eighty-four years of struggling to obtain (hear, hear). I cannot doubt that much mischief would have been spared, and that instead of occupying the humiliating position which the landlord class now do, they would have a better and happier one.63

  Parnell’s view of the history of the relations between the owners and occupiers of land during the nineteenth century clearly implied that the landlords were an exposed body. He felt that they ought to reach a rapprochement with the Irish democracy before it was too late and that such a rapprochement should of necessity include a general measure of land reform. His conspectus therefore inclined him towards a radical position on the land question.

  And here a matter of personal history has to be entered into the record. As early as 1871 Parnell was not really the well-to-do country gentleman of appearances. His affairs were, in fact, running towards an increasing debt. His recently discovered letters for the period 1875–8 reveal him as an exceptionally benevolent landlord, but they also further display the chaotic state of his personal finances.64 Parnell’s readiness to accept changes in the old land system is surely linked to the fact that it had never proved profitable in his own case. Of course, many Irish landlords, similarly burdened by mortgages, fought passionately to maintain the old society, but why they did so—as the memoirs of Parnell’s sister Anna mordantly testify—remained something of a mystery to the Parnell family. Parnell was convinced that it was better for everyone, landlords and tenants alike, if the land system was reformed. The changes in the world economy militated strongly against the survival of the Irish ancien régime. Parnell was well aware of the alleged impact of American competition: the American competition, he said, ‘has shown the tenants they cannot continue to pay rack rents without facing ruin’.65 In fact the obsession with American competition may, in the end, have been overdone; it is not quite clear how much real impact it had on the price of beef in the 1880s.66 But Parnell’s frequent allusions to it make it clear that he shared the conventional view that it spelled the end for the traditional landlord system in Ireland. In fact it is probably more correct to stress the role of Irish America as opposed to American competition in such a context. Irish America not only provided the cash for agitation and even terror; it also infused Irish political society with a democratic ethos.

  The irony of a Protestant landlord leading a militantly anti-landlord movement composed of the Catholic democracy was not lost on contemporaries. Parnell’s advocacy of land reform and Home Rule led many landed families to see him as a traitor. For his part, Parnell felt that Ireland should be governed in significant degree by the men of substance who lived in it. In this sense, he was indeed perhaps the last representative of those Protestant gentlemen who had appealed for an autonomous Ireland in the age of Grattan. ‘On one occasion, when I spent a night at his house in Avondale,’ recalled T. P. O’Connor, ‘I could not help remarking on the tattered banners that hung from the ceiling of the lofty hall, all belonging to the period and struggles that immediately preceded the destruction of the Irish Parliament in 1800.’67

  Other visitors noted these banners and the pride Parnell took in them. These banners, ‘somewhat torn and disfigured’, belonged to Parnell’s great-grandfather who had been a colonel in the Wicklow Volunteer regiment. One of the ensigns bore the inscription ‘Independent Wicklow’ with the motto ‘Velox et acer at fidelis amicio’ and an Irish wolfhound for a crest.68

  Parnell’s ‘Grattanism’ naturally disturbed some of his colleagues. Did he not fully understand it was the parliament of Protestant ascendancy, under British control? John O’Connor Power was disturbingly explicit:

  There is no subject upon which Mr Parnell is so indifferent as that of Irish history, and his contempt for books is strikingly shown in his reference to Grattan’s parliament. Mr Parnell deceives himself, through sheer indifference to history and a dislike of the trouble of enquiring into facts, when he tells us he wants Grattan’s parliament. Does Mr Parnell want a parliament in Dublin controlled by a few nominees of the British Cabinet, who, under the Viceroy, constitute an Irish government in no way responsible to the Irish House of Commons? If not, then it is not Grattan’s parliament he wants, and it is not Grattan’s parliament he should ask for. Under Grattan’s parliament there was no Irish administration responsible to Irish opinion. The Irish government consisted of the Viceroy and his Secretary and their subordinates.69

  Parnell, of course, shrugged aside such criticisms as historical pedantry.

  Parnell was undoubtedly a liberalised scion of this ‘Grattanist’ tradition. But how was he to reconcile the claims of a nationalism backed by the Catholic democracy with his implicit, if sometimes suppressed, conservatism? This was to be the basic underlying question of Parnell’s career.

  Parnell’s utilisation of Grattan had other critics outside nationalist ranks. In his ‘Parnell and Grattan: A Dialogue’ the Unionist intellectual H. D. Traill argued that Parnell had no right to appropriate Grattan’s name and prestige: in particular, he drew attention to the difference between the character of Parnell’s followers and those of Grattan. He denied that he made this invidious distinction—to the disfavour of the Parnellites—on the grounds of social snobbery, but actually social snobbery does creep into what is admittedly also a denunciation made on wider grounds. Traill has Grattan describe Parnell’s ‘followers’ thus:

  With the exception of one or two of them whom literature has humanised, or a certain kindly nature redeems, are they in any way worthy representatives of a generous high-spirited nation? I say nothing of their origin and station, I trust I am superior to prejudice of that sort, though . . . I would prefer they . . . had the advantage of the birth and education of a gentleman. But of that I say nothing. I am thinking of the higher courtesy which depends not upon the refinement of manners but upon the mansuetude [gentleness] of the heart, I am thinking of inward and spiritual urbanity.70

  Parnell’s ‘reply’ in this constructed dialogue was tough-minded and to the point. Grattan’s followers were, in fact, a fairly rough-spoken and rowdy lot. They were in no way a collective model: this was a mere illusion of a ‘golden age’. H. D. Traill’s Parnell told Grattan that he regretted his lack of enthusiasm
for Parnellism, but it would make no material difference to his plans. In this respect, Traill probably read Parnell’s mind fairly accurately.

  Chapter 2

  ‘ON THE VERGE OF TREASON-FELONY’

  He saw as if by instinct that Fenianism was the key of Irish nationality. . . . We shall therefore see him as the years roll by standing on the verge of treason-felony.

  R. BARRY O’BRIEN (1898) ON PARNELL IN I875