by Paul Bew
Formally, Parnell eschewed empty filibustering, arguing on 26 March that the action of the obstructionists should be the action of the bayonet, ‘short, sharp and decisive’. There was a certain humanitarian logic to his remarks—‘even a garrotter ought not to be whipped’, he declared on 16 April, when talking about the case of the whipping of a soldier for drunkenness. But inevitably he did not live by his own high standard. He spoke nineteen times on the prison bill alone, and during April Isaac Butt’s anguish and public disapproval became more and more marked. Butt believed in the quality of parliamentary argument. Parnell was not entirely confined to his Irish friends for support: Edward Jenkins—the Liberal MP for Dundee who had a significant Irish vote—was sometimes an ally. This alliance with Jenkins had its farcical side; Parnell’s decision to shave his head (in an effort to ward off incipient baldness) had created a situation where many MPs could not tell him apart from Jenkins, such was their superficial resemblance.
The point about an aggressive policy of obstruction such as that pursued by Parnell and Biggar is that it required not only nerve but knowledge. Parnell was remarkably good at irritating his opponents in the House to the extent that they did his work by making angry interruptions and thus prolonging the debate. But effective obstruction required at least some basic knowledge of the issues, whether foreign like South Africa or domestic like prison reform, which Parnell and Biggar thought fit for opposition. Neither man was an intellectual. Frank Hugh O’Donnell’s later reminiscences laid great stress on Parnell’s ignorance of all broader political matters.24 O’Donnell wrote as an embittered man jealous of Parnell’s subsequent success, but he is fully supported by Parnell’s brother John: ‘He [Parnell] often expressed to me his regret that he had not devoted himself with more application to such opportunities as he had for study.’25 Even T. P. O’Connor, who rather disliked O’Donnell, conceded that he had played a significant role in educating Parnell.
Of necessity, Frank Hugh O’Donnell—after January 1877 the MP for Dungarvan—assembled a team to support Parnell. They included Sheridan Knowles and Baker Greene of the Morning Post, both practised observers of the parliamentary scene as well as the literate and energetic O’Donnell. Sheridan Knowles—the son of a famous Irish actor-dramatist—for example, provided all the amendments on the prisons bill.26 They also gave Parnell that knowledge of the rules of the House which so impressed political opinion.
Parnell needed those good tutors to carry the act. He had, however, to have other qualities of his own. The London Echo paid full tribute to Parnell’s toughness: ‘Ninety-nine members out of a hundred, finding that they can not get a hearing, are content to accept the inevitable. Not so Mr Parnell. Under a slim and almost effeminate exterior, he has an iron will.’27 In June 1877 Parnell told a meeting in the schoolroom adjoining the Catholic church in Hatton Garden that the ‘Speaker (Henry Brand) was a man of great ability but he looked upon Home Rule members much as a trapper would look upon vermin’.28 Here Parnell sounded on the defensive, but it is worth noting that within three years the London press was saying that his grasp of the rules of procedure was ‘better than that of the Speaker’.29
In the summer of 1877 the Disraeli government introduced a South African Confederation Bill. Parnell was one of seven Irish MPs who decided to obstruct the passage of the bill. The seven spoke in relays, culminating in a marathon session lasting from 5.15 p.m. on 31 July to 2.10 p.m. on 1 August 1877. As ever, O’Donnell’s account insists on his own personal leadership—‘I believe Parnell hardly knew that South Africa was outside Europe’—but Parnell was the great winner. He outwitted attempts to have him ejected from the chamber, forced a modification of the rules of debate in the Commons and thus became an ogre in English public opinion. In reaction, of course, he became a hero in Irish public opinion.30 Soon he felt able to patronise the English on their lack of international knowledge: ‘One of your leading statesmen confessed not long ago that he had not been taught geography and did not know where the Philippine Islands were.’31
Parnell’s opposition to the Confederation Bill had been grounded principally on his championship of the Boers’ rights as free men. He was violently attacked in the press, except by O’Donnell’s friend R. H. Hutton at the Spectator.32 He denounced this ‘deliberate intimidation’: ‘As long as I have a seat in this House, I shall not allow myself to be prevented from speaking what I think is necessary to speak, or from taking such steps as I think it necessary to take.’33 For an Irish nationalist audience this was a resonant and inspiring stand. As O’Donnell pointed out, the obstructionists had shown that the ‘children of a subject race’ could intervene in the very arcane and central organisation of the Empire.34
By the late summer of 1877 the British press lamented the fate which had befallen parliament. The Pall Mall Gazette pointed out that the great authority on parliamentary procedure, Sir Erskine May, had merely devoted a ‘brief and casual reference’35 to obstruction. The bitter reality was that the proper functioning of parliamentary conduct depended on the tacit acceptance of certain gentlemanly codes and traditions. The cabinet itself discussed the matter but did not know how to react. There were precedents for passing a resolution against the offending members personally, but as these precedents were two hundred years old, it was felt that, in effect, any such proceeding would practically ‘be a new one’.36 The Saturday Review concluded that Biggar and Parnell may be ‘considered the successes of the session. . . . No man except Mr Parnell has maintained a point of order against the chairman of the committees, the sense of the House, and the plain facts of the case, and ended by getting an amendment accepted by the government’.37 In Ireland there were some loyal Buttite supporters such as the Dundalk Democrat, but The Nation, very popular with the middle classes as Parnell well knew, gave support to radical obstruction and the Freeman’s London correspondent Adam Kernoghan, an Ulster Presbyterian, was tacitly sympathetic. Most importantly of all, perhaps, was T. D. Sullivan’s widely sung ditty ‘The Tone of the House’:
Long life and good health to Parnell and Biggar
For they have not hearts like the heart of a mouse;
They’re fighting for Ireland with courage and vigour,
And don’t care a hang for the tone of the House.
And whether the Minister is frowning or smiling,
They change not their ways for his praise or his blame,
For Hartington’s hints as for Hardy’s reviling;
They know what they’re at, and they play the game.
So here’s good health to Parnell and Biggar,
For they have not hearts like the heart of a mouse;
They’re fighting for Ireland with courage and vigour,
And don’t care a hang for the tone of the House.38
Not everyone was equally impressed. An experienced Liverpool journalist saw a young man so ‘entirely English both in bearing and pronunciation’ that it seemed hard on him when other platform speakers denounced the Irish MPs who lost their Irish accent at Westminster—for Parnell had no such accent to lose. The well-dressed, well-groomed, slender young man was every inch a gentleman: ‘Other Englishmen can understand him.’ Somehow he appeared disconnected from the passions being expressed all around him. His popularity was all the more surprising because ‘this fragile looking quiet gentleman is obviously intended by nature for a very modest place in the background’.39
Perhaps in reaction to this put-down, at a Scottish meeting a few days later in September 1877 at Dumbarton, Parnell’s attitude was notably militant. A leading militant republican revolutionary, John Daly, led a group who attempted to break up the gathering of ‘constitutionalists’. There was very considerable uproar; but, as William O’Malley later recalled, ‘Parnell calmly looked on, and turning to an Irish priest beside him and myself, remarked, “Perhaps Daly is right”, meaning that possibly physical force would be the best means to secure Irish freedom.’40
In fact Parnell’s public remarks were just a
s striking. Parnell said: ‘He recognised Mr Daly as one who had helped put down West Britishness in Ireland, he liked to have such a man on his side, but if he were an opponent, he would be a fair one.’ He presented Home Rule as a step towards separation: ‘If they gained their own legislature—they would have gained the right to have volunteers on their soil—a right which England would never allow. They would also have their militia under their control.’41
Thanks to such work, it was clear by mid-1877 that Parnell was the effective leader of the Irish in England and Scotland. His deposition of Butt as President of the Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain in the autumn merely ratified this situation. It is often suggested that Parnell’s reaction to Butt’s fall was somewhat cold-hearted. But the political commentator Roman Zubof wrote: ‘I have been told by Mr John Ferguson of Glasgow, an intimate friend of Mr Parnell’s . . . that when the old organiser of Home Rule, broken-hearted, walked out of the room . . . there was not a man there more touched than Mr Parnell.’42 Maybe so, but Parnell’s relentless crushing of the sickly figure of Butt, who had sacrificed much personal gain for the Irish cause, had an element of sadistic cruelty about it.43 Parnell made it a point never to allow personal emotion for others to interfere in his politics. As Andrew Kettle explained: ‘I might mention . . . that we both agreed from the beginning of our acquaintance that all men and all things were to be used in the most impersonal manner to work out the desired end.’44 From the moment of Parnell’s arrival as a major force in political life it was clear that Butt’s role in Irish politics was over and that the Home Rule movement had lost its way. If the movement was to cease being an ineffectual force, the fall of Butt was a political necessity.
It should also be noted that in the summer of 1877 Parnell’s work in parliament began to pay off at home. In August 1877 we find a really vigorous demonstration for Parnell in Ireland. At a meeting in Dublin, Parnell ‘was received with extraordinary enthusiasm. The whole audience rose to their feet, with waving of hats and handkerchiefs, and the cheering was repeated again and again for nearly ten minutes.’45 Parnell had definitely arrived. It was the beginning of a rapport with Dublin nationalists which was broken only by his death.
3
It is interesting also to gauge the reaction within rural Ireland to the policy of obstruction in parliament. The first public body to support this policy was the Ballinasloe Tenants’ Defence Association—very much an association of small farmers with a strong tendency to engage in anti-grazier, anti-rancher rhetoric.46 On the other hand, bodies like the Limerick Farmers’ Club, whose members were proud to call themselves ‘big graziers’, tended to be lukewarm in their attitude to militant nationalist politics and deeply suspicious of the organised activities of small farmers. Accordingly, their initial sympathies lay with Butt,47 who, it was assumed, would eventually tackle the question of land reform at some future date; however, partly as a result of the deteriorating agricultural conditions after 1878, even this affluent class of tenants belatedly came to support the policy of obstruction. It helped also that in 1877–8 Butt seemed willing to neglect their specific interests in his land reform proposals.
Parnell, naturally enough, was drawn towards those who had first given him support in Ireland. He began to take a lively interest in the problems of the smaller tenantry. At the end of 1877 Parnell made a trip to Mayo in the company of his fellow obstructionist O’Connor Power. This visit has received scant attention from historians, but it was nevertheless of some significance. For although the meeting he addressed was not particularly well attended, the particular attitudes and problems of Mayo impressed themselves firmly on his mind. He gained a general assurance of support but also a sense of particular regional grievances. James Daly, the locality’s leading journalist, recorded: ‘Mr Parnell left Mayo deeply impressed that [his] Parliamentary policy was endorsed by the people of Mayo and also that the land bill was required to give the tenantry some stability in the soil as well as to encourage the reclamation of the waste lands of Ireland [my italics].’48 Parnell later recalled: ‘From the first I ever came to the West of Ireland, I have been taught valuable and immortal lessons.’49
This emphasis on reclamation is important because it indicates Parnell’s early awareness of a problem that was to play a very significant role in his politics in later years. The west required not only ‘fixity of tenure’—the normal measure of land reform required for the rest of Ireland—it required also reclamation of waste lands. This indicates the nature of the crucial problem for many tenants in the west: what they needed was not a reduction of rent on their pitifully small and barren holdings but more land. (Even a large rent reduction would only be a sop.) Only such a measure would really solve the social question in the west. The only means of indicating this in 1877 was to advocate reclamation of waste lands. In the more hopeful atmosphere generated by the Land League in 1880, these tenants were prepared to demand explicitly the redistribution of the large grazing holdings in the area.
Parnell’s public flirtation with Fenianism was linked to a series of private meetings with Irish republican leaders. As early as August 1877 he had contrived to make a very favourable impression on a prominent figure, James J. O’Kelly, who declared to John Devoy: ‘He has many of the qualities of leadership—and time will give him more. He is cool—extremely so and resolute.’50 By the beginning of 1878 he had managed to convince Dr William Carroll, another leader, of his adherence to the principle of absolute independence while avoiding any commitment to the Fenian movement as such. In fact the increasing hopelessness of the traditional militarist dream of an armed uprising to drive out the English predisposed the more realistic separatists to give Parnell a good hearing. Not that he was saying much. At a second meeting in March 1878 he remained largely silent. He could afford to. The separatists were gradually dropping the idea of making Parnell one of their number. Instead they were beginning to think in terms of how they could most profitably assist Parnell.
In February 1878 Parnell, in parliament, denounced English Liberal moral hypocrisy on the subject of the so-called ‘Bulgarian atrocities’: ‘The English had done worse in the past in Ireland than the Turks to the Bulgarians.’ On the other hand, he condemned the British for being traditionally unfair to the Russians. In other words, whatever they did, the British could do no right. There is a perfect contrast with Butt, who at this very moment was privately offering the government support on foreign policy.51 Later that month a jingoistic crowd attacked Gladstone’s London house, infuriated by his moralistic campaign on behalf of the Bulgarian Christians. Years later T. P. O’Connor recalled: ‘I may add the curious fact that among the crowd who came with stones in their pockets to join in the window-breaking were two young Irish people; one was Parnell, and the other was one of his sisters, Anna, the fiercest amongst them and the one most like him in appearance and character.’52 O’Connor (who established himself as a journalist with a hostile 1878 biography of Disraeli written in support of Gladstone’s Bulgarian campaign) saw it as an early sign of an antipathy towards Gladstone which Parnell never fully overcame—even in later, more auspicious, times—but this was hardly the sort of consideration to worry a man like John Devoy.
Isaac Butt, in the meantime, continued to weaken. Parnell talked of his need for ‘steel’ in the fight against Butt; in truth, there was little need. On 4 July 1878 Butt confided to his doctor that he was suffering from heart palpitations and bouts of mental confusion: ‘Now surely, my dear friend, it is useless to say that this is of no consequence. Is it not better to accept the truth that it is the knell of the curfew telling us that the hour is come when the fire must be put out and the light quenched?’53 Butt was right—he had only a few months to live. The ‘Buttites’ were not even unified. Mitchell Henry’s version of Home Rule explicitly left all economic power in London, while Butt, at least, believed that an Irish parliament should be able to deal with customs duties. Henry, on the other hand, believed that Butt and his party should be mo
re active in parliament.54
In his imagined dialogue between the ghosts of Parnell and Butt, H. D. Traill has Parnell deny that he ‘went out of his way’ to destroy Butt. Butt’s ghost is incredulous: ‘Out of your way?’ Parnell replied: ‘No, I never had to.’ Butt responded: ‘I was in your path and your path lay over my body.’ Parnell concluded: ‘Say rather that you were an obstacle to the path of advocacy that I had chosen, and that I, as the chosen leader of the Irish people, swept you aside.’55
John Devoy, the most capable and serious of the Irish-American militants, made the new, more assertive mood clear in a telegram on 25 October 1878 when he offered Parnell the ‘New Departure’ package. Parnell had just been re-elected President of the Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain with Fenian support and Devoy felt—wrongly, as it turned out—that this was a moment of crucial importance. However, the important thing to note is that he offered Parnell the support of American militants on certain conditions:
(1) Abandonment of the federal demand [Butt’s definition of Home Rule, which explicitly accepted that an Irish parliament would be subordinate to Westminster] and substitution of a general demand in favour of self-government.
(2) Vigorous agitation of the land question on the basis of a peasant proprietary, while accepting concessions tending to abolish arbitrary eviction.
(3) Exclusion of all sectarian issues from the platform.
(4) Party members to vote together on all imperial and home questions, adopt an aggressive policy and energetically resist coercive legislation.
(5) Advocacy of all struggling nationalities in the British Empire or elsewhere.