by Paul Bew
This was a fine statement but, of course, it ignored another key feature of the Irish agrarian situation. Some of the most prominent leaders of the new Mayo agitation rented large grazing farms: already at public meetings more radical activists such as P. J. Gordon were calling for more farms to be broken up and distributed to the rural poor.9 In short, on even the most casual inspection, the Mayo Land League presented a picture of turmoil and conflicting ambitions at the social level: at the political level, there was the glaring problem of the role of a revolutionary conspiracy with strong roots in the country.
Parnell was visibly nervous and felt the need to reassure both himself and others. He told a Home Rule meeting in the Rotunda in Dublin on 22 August 1879:
Of course, it is our duty—the duty of those men who believe and think with me—to do our very best until we are beaten. Of course, if we find that we can not bring the country with us, if we find that we can not get a sufficient force of men to carry out our ideas, it will be our duty to give up parliamentary agitation altogether, but when I give up parliamentary agitation I don’t propose to take up any other agitation.10
A month later he returned to the fray.
Even then he was not fully committed. Parnell nervously attempted to develop a calibrated tone which was acceptable to militants and moderates alike. On the last Sunday in September he drove from Avondale to Tullow in Carlow, accompanied by the Hacketstown band and some two hundred people from Wicklow. There he addressed a massive crowd of some 15,000: he began by giving an example of landlord arrogance. ‘He ought to be shot,’ a voice in the crowd replied. Parnell was quick to say that in Ireland there were good landlords—he mentioned the Earl of Bessborough, an important figure in the locality: ‘It is not against the good landlord we have to meet together and take precaution in self-defence.’ But what was to be done about the bad landlord? ‘Shoot him,’ came the reply. Parnell’s response was firm:
No, no, I do not recommend that. Fortunately, it is not necessary because I tell this man’s poor tenant that if he holds hard, and if the tenantry of the country hold hard, you will triumph over the landlord. . . . It is utterly impossible that the rack-renting landlords can obtain the rents they have obtained during the last few years. The American competition of which we have heard so much is only beginning.11
Parnell still had much to consider. There was a distinctly religious dimension to popular enthusiasm in the west. On 21 August 1879 a small group in the village of Knock claimed to have seen a vision of the Blessed Virgin: ‘a vision to the dispossessed’.12 Soon there was a miracle cure—that of Delia Gordon, daughter of P. J. Gordon, a former papal soldier and Fenian turned Land League activist (his wife, along with Mrs P. J. Sheridan, had designed the ‘Land for the People’ banner for that first meeting at Irishtown). Delia’s miracle cure from severe earache or a limp—contemporary reports vary—was a key moment in turning Knock into an Irish Lourdes as visitors flooded in the hope of release from various ailments. For Gordon, there was a business opportunity—he provided the cars which transported passengers from the Claremorris railway station to Knock.
Parnell knew P. J. Gordon as a League activist. What did he think of all this? At the beginning of August he had been publicly accused of calling some of his critics in the Home Rule parliamentary party ‘papist rats’. Parnell was deeply upset by this attempt—as he saw it—to lower his standing among Irish Catholics13 and more or less won a battle of claim and counterclaim for this incident. If he was in any way surprised or irritated by the willingness of prominent Land Leaguers such as P. J. Gordon, Thomas Sexton or T. D. Sullivan to promote the Knock phenomenon—the subject of much mainstream Protestant derision in Ireland and Britain—he could hardly afford to show it. James Redpath, the American radical journalist, once asked him: ‘Have you ever opposed the priests?’ His reply is most instructive: ‘I am afraid we are getting on to delicate ground. There can be no principle of opposition between the Irish popular party and a patriotic body of men like the clergy of Ireland.’14
In October 1879 Parnell addressed the nationalists of Belfast in St Mary’s Hall. He found them in good heart, and this led him to say that a united Ireland was closer than many supposed it to be. Parnell urged that Irish patriots should not divide over the definition of self-government:
Whether they were to have the restoration of the Irish parliament of 1782, and whether they were to have a plan of federalism such as that which was formulated by the great Isaac Butt (cheers) or whether, in the course of years and the march of events, the Irish nation should achieve for itself a complete separation of Ireland from England (loud cheers) . . . must be left to the course of events for solution. He himself believed that England and Ireland must live together in amity, connected only by the link of the crown.15
This speech hardly met with the strict New Departure criteria but, on the other hand, it could hardly be defined as strict federalism either. In fact it was not until early November, some days after the Irish National Land League was set up in Dublin on 21 October 1879, that Parnell, as the new organisation’s president, committed himself fully. He did this by signing a Land League address which left no doubt that he stood with the new movement.
Parnell proposed the key motion at the Dublin meeting:
That the object of the League can best be obtained by promoting organisation among the tenant farmers; by defending those who may be threatened with eviction for refusing to pay unjust rents; by facilitating the working of the Bright clauses of the Land Act during the winter; and by obtaining such a reform in the laws relating to land as to enable every tenant to become the owner of his holding by paying a fair rent for a limited number of years.16
The language of the new agrarian reformers was rather careful: the reference to the utilisation of the Bright clauses of the 1870 Land Act, while almost entirely without practical substance, added a certain sense of legality to the motion. Parnell’s main disappointment lay elsewhere. He failed to convince the League’s organisers that money raised for the cause could be used to support campaigns for election to parliament. Nevertheless, Parnell was probably broadly satisfied by the relative moderation of the agreed programme. Five years later Davitt acknowledged:
The principle upon which the Land League was founded is, as a matter of course, subject for dispute and difference of opinion, and the programme which was drawn up by the persons named, and embodied in resolutions of the Conference of 21 October 1879 (inasmuch as it did not comprise any demand for self-government) cannot be credited with containing the whole ‘principle’ upon which the Land League was founded. The organisers of the Conference had to consider the advisability of framing such a programme as would not ‘scare’ any timid land reformer away from the projected movement, and it was further considered necessary to render it eminently constitutional for the double purpose of legal protection against the Castle, and to enable members of Parliament to defend it within the House of Commons. What, then, was the principle upon which the Land League was founded? I maintain that it was the complete destruction of Irish landlordism: first, as the system which was responsible for the poverty and periodical famines which have decimated Ireland; and, secondly, because landlordism was a British garrison, which barred the way to national independence.17
Parnell tried to engage his fellow MPs to join the new body. He received one particularly interesting response from Richard O’Shaughnessy, the Limerick MP. O’Shaughnessy, educated at Clongowes Wood and Stonyhurst, a Catholic who had graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1874, was a typical product of the educated Irish Catholic bourgeoisie, politically Liberal but not radically averse to the charms of government patronage. He would have been regarded as a good catch for the movement. O’Shaughnessy replied that he could not accept the League programme because he was not in favour of the compulsory expropriation of all landlords, good, bad or indifferent. His own view was the Ulster custom ought to be extended to the whole island—‘a land policy’ noted a visiting A
merican scholar, quite different from that which the Fenian party were advocating.18 Parnell replied that, in his view, the League programme did not bind itself to the compulsory expropriation of all landlords, good, bad and indifferent.19
Parnell was, however, to be pushed against the new movement by events. On 19 November the Tory government decided to act against the new movement. Three leading activists—Michael Davitt, James Daly and James Bryce Killen—were arrested on a charge of sedition. It was an important moment for Parnell. After all his rhetoric, all his insistence on not bowing the knee to the power of Britain, he had to find a way of showing that he was not cowed.
The pivotal moment in Parnell’s early association with the Land League radicals came on 22 November 1879: the planned eviction of Anthony Dempsey, a veteran of the 1867 rising and a tenant farmer on Loonamore mountain on the Blosse-Lynch estate. It coincided with a major League rally planned for the locality; it coincided also with a Fenian rally to celebrate the anniversary of the Manchester Martyrs. The scene was set for a trial of strength.
As the ‘crowbar brigade’, with a strong police escort, climbed the mountain, they were accompanied by a crowd of thousands, headed by Parnell and other League leaders, including Thomas Brennan. The crowd was organised by parish contingents in military style: the Aughamore contingent surrounded the house while the Knock men occupied the only available cover. The crown forces were left surrounded, exposed to massively superior numbers, and humiliatingly dependent on the League leaders for permission to withdraw from the scene.20 ‘Many felt that only Parnell’s intervention had prevented serious violence.’21 Even those militants, who were later to be disappointed by Parnell, admitted that he displayed courage on the day.22
In fact Parnell’s claim to have broken the back of landlordism was quite false. The mobilisation of 22 November 1879 was unrepeatable. On 10 December the forces of the state returned and successfully carried out the eviction. The Land League then paid Anthony Dempsey’s rent and costs in order to prevent the demoralising effect of having the Dempsey family out of their house over the Christmas period.
The rather prosaic counterpoint to the exciting scenes on Loonamore mountain is highly revealing. Without large sums of money, the League was impotent. With money, it could fight legal battles and pay for organisers; without money, it was doomed to be outflanked.
Many reasons have been advanced for Parnell’s caution and indecision in the summer and autumn of 1879. Fear of a storm of clerical disapproval certainly played some part. Parnell also took good care to find out the views of ‘respectable’ strong farmers in other parts of the country before committing himself to an agitation which was largely, at that time, based on smallholders. It was surely a basic precaution for Parnell to determine the depth of discontent among the stronger men. Such solicitude paid off. Parnell’s concern ensured that any potential alliance between moderate Home Rulers and the stronger farmers of the regional Farmers’ Clubs failed to materialise.
But the most profound cause of Parnell’s hesitation lay in a basic political difference with some key Land League leaders. Parnell did not see the land question as eventually leading to a peasant nationalist insurrection. His long-term hope is clear: a socially stable partnership between ‘reformed’ landlords and a ‘satiated’ class of peasants. This pan-class solidarity would increase the potential of nationalism. As he put it at Liverpool at the end of November 1879: ‘Deprive this class [the landlords] of their privileges, show them that they must cast themselves in with the rest of their countrymen . . . [and] the last knell of English power . . . in Ireland has been sounded.’ He spoke of the unity of ‘all classes and creeds’; ‘a very important beginning in that direction had been made by Mr Gladstone when he disestablished the English Church in Ireland’. This unity had last been seen in 1782; its return would compel the end of English rule in Ireland. Rather nervously, Parnell concluded: ‘There are men in this land movement who consider that the free rights of Ireland must be won by the bloody battlefield and by the sword. But these men do not take part in this movement for the purpose of carrying out these ideas; they take part and help to win peaceably the solution of the land question.’23
It will be said that this assessment of Parnell’s was naïve, and in a certain sense it was. Many members of the Irish landlord class bitterly spurned his blandishments. Yet eleven years later, near the end of his career, he still clung tenaciously to his beliefs:
We do not want to exterminate the residential Irish landlords (hear, hear), we have never felt any ill-will towards individual landlords (hear, hear). We have successfully abolished the system; we have put an end to the power of those owners—many of them victims of circumstances—to oppress and rack-rent their tenantry (hear, hear). With a suitable solution of the land question we should gladly welcome the continued presence of those gentlemen in Ireland (hear, hear). We should gladly see them taking their part for which they are fitted in the future social regeneration of this country (hear, hear), in the future direction of its affairs and in the future national life of Ireland (hear, hear).24
On this theoretical basis, then, Parnell committed himself to the Land League. One thing the League needed as quickly as possible was money. There was only one way of obtaining it—and that was to send its new leader to America. Before Parnell left for America in December 1879 there were fears that his aristocratic ancestry and relatively moderate policies made him an unsuitable figure to appeal to Irish-Americans. In actual fact Parnell turned out to be ideal for the purpose. Wealthy and prominent Irish-Americans who had spurned the Fenian Brotherhood were attracted by Parnell’s very respectability. In New York city and Boston, where a well-to-do Irish stratum was firmly established, Parnell was gradually able to win most of this group to financial support of the Land League. This required an early moderation of tone. In New York in particular he was forced to lay emphasis on the need to collect money for relief rather than for political purposes. But this soft-pedalling approach was not necessary in other parts of the country. ‘Yielding to the tone of the New York Herald and of Fifth Avenue opinion,’ wrote the Irish Times special reporter covering the tour, ‘Mr Parnell had begun to relegate the reform part of his programme from the first to the second place of importance in his speeches. Beyond New York there is a different state of things. It is evident that American views are really centred upon the land reform as the object of chief importance.’25 The more typical Irish-Americans—in Philadelphia and Chicago, where the middle class was weaker, or in the militant mining regions of Pennsylvania and the western states, or in the smaller industrial centres—were passionately pro-Land League. They needed little persuasion to put their dollars at the new movement’s disposal. Parnell was deeply impressed by this commitment and was later to compare it unfavourably with that of the Irish farmers themselves. He was to refer pointedly to his experience in America, where ‘the hard-working Irish and American people, many of whom work ten times as hard as many Irish farmers’, showed a much greater commitment to the cause. Significantly also, as the tour progressed, Parnell’s views became more and more revolutionary. Most ominously, as far as moderate land reform opinion at home was concerned, Parnell even became identified with a scheme for settling some of the surplus western population on eastern grasslands. This seemed to presage an alliance between Parnell and agrarian extremism at home.
Hardly surprisingly, Parnell had allowed himself a few rhetorical flourishes: most notably in a speech delivered in Cincinnati on 20 February, when he spoke of breaking the ‘last link which keeps Ireland bound to England’.26 He never embraced revolutionary methods, but he came rather close. In respectable Boston he declared he was not in favour of revolutionary methods, provided other means worked. In more radical Rochester he said he was in favour of revolutionary methods, provided other means did not work.27 In later years he recalled this tour with loathing, and by implication discounted much of the rhetoric. At the time, however, his motives were clear enough: in a conversa
tion with a New York journalist on the outward voyage Parnell made it clear that, while personally he could not join a secret society, he nonetheless needed the support of Fenianism.
In two months in the USA Parnell visited sixty-two cities and spoke alongside innumerable local worthies. He also made a major speech before (a poorly attended) House of Representatives. For the first time people began to call him the ‘uncrowned King of Ireland’.
Nevertheless, even the most intelligent and best informed sections of the London press did not fully comprehend the Parnell phenomenon. In April 1880 the Spectator was still deceiving itself:
Those who have watched his career attentively have always thought that he would be much more powerful in the House of Commons than in Ireland. He has much tenacity, some power of speech, great knowledge of parliamentary forms and a fund of bitterness which has some of the effect of energy, but he lacks the qualities which make up a great Irish agitator. His power of speech, though considerable, is not of the electrifying kind and his tenacity often degenerates into obstinacy.28
Over the next few months, Parnell was to prove this verdict false.
2
The announcement of the general election of April 1880 brought Parnell’s labours in America to an abrupt end. He quickly hurried home. Overall, the election saw the triumph of Gladstone’s Liberal Party over the Conservative government. Parnell achieved the personal triumph of being returned for three seats, in Cork, Mayo and Meath. However, most of the notable successes for Parnell’s supporters were obtained in the province of Connacht. It was clearly revealed—as the Poor Law union contests of March had presaged29—that the Land League was still very much a Connacht phenomenon and that, while Parnell had a personal influence in the other provinces, it was still limited. Did he now have the votes to lead the Irish Party and defeat William Shaw, his moderate opponent?