Enigma
Page 10
Parnell was proposed by the oldest member of the party, The O’Gorman Mahon. He urged the members ‘not to be led by the right or by the left, by Whig or Tory’. Biggar seconded, pointing out quite fairly that, while a number of candidates had been elected on the basis of their support for Parnell, he was not aware that any member of the party had told his constituents he came forward as a supporter of Mr Shaw.30 On 17 May he was elected leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, but by a mere 23 votes to 18. There were, it should be remembered, a total of 59 nominal Home Rule MPs.
Parnell emerged from the election with his support increased, but there is no sense in which we can speak of a general mandate for his policies. Even in those areas where he or his supporters were victorious, there was substantial evidence of resistance from local elites. At Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, and Mohill, Co. Leitrim, these forces were even able to mobilise hostile mobs.
Parnell’s own selection for a Cork constituency provides an illustration of this general point. The fact that the new militant leader should sit for ‘rebel’ Cork has seemed to require no further comment. But, in fact, Parnell’s selection for Cork was a fraught affair. The Cork Farmers’ Club set the ball rolling by declaring their dissatisfaction with the sitting MPs. However, although some members favoured Parnell on account of the ‘services’ he was then performing in America, the majority were less enthusiastic about these same services. The choice was therefore postponed for a week. Before the decision of the Farmers’ Club was taken the Cork licensed traders met and made clear their preference for ‘Nick Dan’ Murphy as against Parnell. The outcome was therefore still undecided as Parnell docked in Cork on his return from America.
He was met by warmly enthusiastic crowds, a reception which must have disconcerted the smaller cliques which were trying to oppose him. Nevertheless, on 28 March the adjourned meeting of the Cork Farmers’ Club was held and they still refused to support ‘the Chief’. On 31 March, however, Parnell suddenly determined to stand for the city. Even the Rev. J. O’Mahony, who had signed his nomination papers, wrote defensively that he did not thereby express agreement with the ‘peculiar’ views of Parnell or his claims to leadership. He need not have worried: Parnell obtained 1,505 votes, which was enough for election to the second of the two Cork City seats.31
On 5 April, the day of Parnell’s return for Cork City, his nomination papers for yet another parliamentary seat, Mayo, were signed. Parnell, according to Tim Healy, became a candidate ‘nominally against George Ekins Browne [the conservative Home Ruler, married to the sister of George Henry Moore] but in reality against O’Connor Power on whom he wished to be revenged’. Parnell had, indeed, sufficient reason to wish to defeat O’Connor Power; Power had ambitions of his own to lead the Irish Party, he was jealous of Parnell’s rise and had shown no inclination to be a loyal lieutenant. Power had initiated the trial of strength by rejecting Parnell’s apparent candidate, J. J. Loudon. Somewhat to Parnell’s chagrin, Power topped the poll, but Parnell, in a brief campaign, demonstrated that he had sufficient prestige to win the second parliamentary seat in Mayo, despite a short campaign and considerable opposition.32
Another of Parnell’s victories in April 1880 occurred in Roscommon. It was, in fact, unintentional. The incident reveals much—both about the Irish leader’s private disposition (as opposed to his public rhetoric) and about the mood of public opinion in, at any rate, the more radicalised regions of Ireland. Eleven years afterwards, following the divorce crisis and the ‘split’, it emerged, in the words of Jasper Tully, the anti-Parnellite editor of the radical Roscommon Herald, that ‘Mr Parnell, who is a landlord himself, made a secret treaty or bargain with that great landlord leader and chief, The O’Conor Don, to have him returned for this county as the representative of the tenant farmers.’ The anti-Parnellite James Kilmartin revealed—and the Parnellite James J. O’Kelly did not deny—that Parnell had made a secret compact to have The O’Conor Don returned unopposed in Roscommon. O’Kelly’s initial impulse was to obey Parnell on this matter, but at the last—influenced by the obvious strength of popular feeling in the area—he entered the lists.33 O’Kelly, of course, was victorious. The incident is a curious one. It reveals the unreliability of an over-literal interpretation of Parnell’s more pugnaciously nationalist platform rhetoric in this period. For when The O’Conor Don—whom he had sought to save—was defeated, Parnell was quick to claim a great triumph. Denunciations of The O’Conor Don as a ‘West Briton’ and his supporters as traitors to Ireland were soon heard on his lips.
Immediately after the election Parnell gave further proof of the difference between the public orator and the practical politician. Probably worried by the revolutionary implications which the peasant proprietorship slogan had for the neo-Fenians—though not for him—he suggested that the ‘three Fs’ be once again made the prime objective of the agitation. This was not acceptable to the rest of the Land League leadership, and Parnell promptly dropped the idea. Instead a land conference was called in Dublin at the end of April which reaffirmed the Land League’s commitment to the total abolition of landlordism.
In truth, this conference was a confused affair, characterised by conflicting and cross-cutting comments. For the first time the representatives of the strong farmers in the south and east appeared in significant numbers. They argued that the League was too obsessed with the plight of small farmers—for example, the Land League called for a two-year moratorium on ejectments on holdings valued at £10 or under. More importantly, the money raised in America was being used in the Connacht law courts to exploit provisions in the 1870 Land Act designed to protect smallholders only.
Lying behind this debate was a profound question: how was the Land League to become a truly national movement and expand outside its western small farming base? Even a western militant like Malachi O’Sullivan acknowledged that this was a strategic issue; but when it came under debate in April, his neo-Fenian colleague Matthew Harris refused any alliance with stronger farmers, which he memorably characterised as ‘the union of the shark with the prey’. Harris was, in the course of the next year, to alter his position radically before returning to his more traditional line.
Nevertheless, the moderate wing of Irish nationalism took little comfort from the confusions of the land conference. For example, on 30 April 1880 the Freeman’s Journal editorial reiterated its opposition to the League proposal for peasant proprietorship. At the rate of compensation proposed by the Land League, the scheme, it was argued, would cost £224 million. Neither Ireland nor Britain could afford to pay such a price. It added explicitly: ‘The details of this scheme could never be carried save by revolution, and the details in this case mean everything.’34
Parnell was also now identified not only with the idea of peasant proprietorship but also with the idea of land redistribution: as were his neo-Fenian allies in the west such as P. J. Gordon and P. J. Sheridan. In his article ‘The Irish Land Question’ (actually written by his sister Fanny) for the North American Review, Parnell had recalled the Cromwellian cry of ‘To Hell or Connacht’. Now, it was time to reverse that policy. ‘One of our principal aims is to cause a return movement and this can only be produced by causing large quantities of grazing land, in the middle and eastern counties, to be thrown upon the market and by facilitating the purchase of it by the western peasantry.’35 The Freeman’s Journal was unimpressed: ‘This no doubt would be desirable if we were parcelling out a new country, but how is it in practice to be effected, or whether the occupiers of the fertile lands in question, who are themselves mostly tenants expecting to benefit by the Bright clauses when amended, would not very strenuously resist any attempt of this kind is the question; and until Mr Parnell tells us how the process of transferring the cottier tenants of Connemara to the grazing lands of Meath is to be carried out we cannot express any confidence in such a proposal being practicable.’36
At this point Parnell renewed his discussions with Andrew Kettle on the land question. Parnell fou
nd Kettle’s views soothing. Although he sought peasant proprietorship, he also shared Parnell’s ultimate political objective. It is worth reading Kettle’s words:
I told him that the agricultural depression was so acute that no normal remedy would be able to meet it. . . . I said that I thought we could find a way out of the difficulty. ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘my plan will at first sight look far-fetched and impracticable, but it may prove to be otherwise’. I said, ‘I have been a close student of O’Neill Daunt and Sir Joseph McKenna, and according to their contentions we have been overtaxed to an enormous amount, at least £100,000,000 sterling. Now we must claim as much of that money as will let the landlords out and the tenants in on workable terms. By this course you will settle the Land Question and draw the landlords to your side on the national question [my italics].’ He listened very attentively to this new view of the situation. ‘McKenna’, he says, ‘has been pressing his case about the overtaxation of Ireland on me, but I never felt the importance of the question so much before. I must go through the matter with him the first chance I can get. Yours would be a complete course of procedure if we could follow it.’37
This passage indicates clearly Parnell’s own position on peasant proprietorship. His hesitations on the subject were nothing to do with any reservation about the principle. He was merely concerned that in the circumstances of the day his neo-Fenian colleagues would use the peasant proprietorship slogan to achieve an immediate national uprising of some kind. However, talking to a man like Kettle, he was greatly reassured. Here was a route to the desired end that was, in Parnell’s view, decidedly non-revolutionary. Parnell, having listened ‘very attentively’ to this argument, told Kettle that he would take up the matter with O’Neill Daunt and McKenna, which, in fact, he did.38
Of course, not everybody shared Parnell’s sanguine hope that the issue could be lifted out of the grasp of revolutionary politicians. Edmund Dwyer Gray, editor and proprietor of the vastly influential Freeman’s Journal, was one such sceptic. Kettle recorded an encounter with Gray, ‘who jokingly asked me if I wanted only 200 million that I might as well ask for three or four hundred, as I might have some left to subsidise the newspapers’. Gray’s disbelief is the clue to a very important but neglected phenomenon. It explains why even moderate nationalist opinion—let alone Irish Tories and Liberals—saw Parnell as an extremist. He seemed, in their eyes, to be hopelessly entangled in dangerous and speculative projects that no British government could possibly accept. Again and again in this period the Freeman’s Journal editorials pressed home this point.
However, despite these worrying criticisms from moderate opinion, Parnell was now in a position in which he had to attempt to persuade the Irish Party to accept the Land League programme and policies which had been affirmed by the Dublin land conference. These proposals were too radical for much of the party—indeed, Parnell himself had his doubts—and they were particularly alarmed by what they saw as the ulterior motives of Fenian agrarian agitators. But Parnell made a brave effort to convince the party, falling back as so often on his most basic beliefs:
Now there is another and greater reason why the reformers ought to strike at the root of the land evil and the system of landlordism. . . . The greatest reason why the upper and middle class—and he spoke more especially of the Protestants to which he himself belonged—had remained aloof from the national aspirations of Ireland and had refused to give them any assistance had been the institution of landlordism. They could not expect the landlords of Ireland to work for the good of Ireland as long as they supplied the landlords with every inducement for the maintenance of the English system of government (hear, hear). Would they proceed to ask for a Bill which in order to give the tenant the first claim to this right makes it necessary for him to go against the landlord? The Land League had been charged with setting class against class. He took it as no surer way of perpetuating the system which England had introduced into this country, viz of setting class against class, could be desired than Mr Butt’s proposal (hear, hear). He for one believed that they would never obtain the national rights of the country until they united all classes in support of those rights.39
This was a very personal view, and it was not a way of looking at the problem which commended itself au fond to the majority of Irish landlords or tenants. But on the other hand, such a theme was not politically ineffective. It was wonderfully reassuring to the moderates in the party and the country. Surely a man—so the reasoning went—so desirous of bringing over the landlords to the national side and therefore so obviously conservative in his outlook could not agree with those militant radicals with whom he shared the Land League leadership. And at the same time these radicals themselves found it difficult to criticise anything that smacked of their ideal of non-sectarian nationalism.
But the fact that his views were so individualistic was also Parnell’s weakness. He could not mobilise substantial forces behind his own ideals and objectives. He had to go with one faction or another; and in late April and May 1880 he seemed to show every sign of wanting to go with the party moderates rather than the League militants.
Whether such an inclination would have borne fruit is hard to judge, for events in the summer of 1880 were to make Parnell’s drift towards moderation in the spring completely irrelevant. The Land League which had had some difficulty in maintaining itself even in its stronghold, Connacht, was suddenly transformed—by the agency of the British parliament’s clumsiness—into a nationwide movement. In August 1880 the House of Lords seemed to set its face against even mild reform by rejecting a very moderate Compensation for Disturbance Bill proposed by the new Chief Secretary, W. E. Forster, which had also faced a significant revolt by conservative Whig MPs in the Commons. The Spectator’s summary of the consequences was a powerful one: Parnell ‘will urge and with truth’ that, when on the authority of the imperial parliament and the request of the Irish government, ‘the gravest interference with personal liberty was proposed, the House of Lords agreed to it without question, but when on the same authority, and with equally grave demands of responsibility, an almost infinitesimal interference with the rights of property was proposed, the House of Lords absolutely refused to accord to the Irish government what it had demanded as necessary to preserve peace and order in that country’.40 Ireland prepared for a turbulent winter. The scene was set for the League’s expansion into the more prosperous regions of Leinster and Munster.
3
In the midst of all this, Parnell began his fateful liaison with the wife of a somewhat ‘Whiggish’ member of the Home Rule Party, Captain William Henry O’Shea. Katharine O’Shea and her husband had been effectively living apart since 1875, and there is no doubt that she set her cap at Parnell. He was at that moment a considerable catch. The thirty-five-year-old Englishwoman seems to have made an immediate impression. She has romantically recorded their first meeting in July 1880:
In leaning forward to say good-bye a rose I was wearing in my bodice fell out on my skirt. He picked it up and touching it lightly with his lips placed it in his button-hole. This rose I found long years afterwards done up in an envelope, with my name and the date, among his most private papers, and when he died I laid it upon his heart.41
By 17 October Parnell was writing to Katharine as ‘My dearest love’.
There is an interpretation of these events which treats Parnell as a rather passive partner in all this. This interpretation has its most extreme expression in the idea that Katharine was an English spy who trapped a naïve and relatively innocent young Irishman. In fact nothing is more striking than the ease and assurance with which Parnell won Katharine over and entered this adulterous relationship. He was well aware of his attractiveness to women—on one of his public appearances ‘a young woman was so carried away by her feelings and having nothing handy with which to illustrate them, waved her unhappy baby backwards and forwards in the air—a sort of dot and dash signal business. He was obliged to smile, a gentle relaxed action of t
he muscles of his mouth.’42 Few men were subject to such female adulation, and he was well aware of it.
At about this time or shortly after a Walsall solicitor, W. H. Duignan, asked Parnell why ‘he did not get married, and his reply was “I am married—to my Country and can best serve as I am.”’ Duignan added: ‘Ireland may say to him as Hamlet said to Horatio: “Give me the man that is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him in my heart’s core—ay, in my heart of hearts—as I do thee.”’43 The irony of Duignan’s eulogy, which was published in 1886 when Parnell’s power was at its height, requires no stress. Even many of Parnell’s most sympathetic supporters were to find it hard to forgive the liaison with Mrs O’Shea. It seemed to put a great political cause at the mercy of that lady’s unscrupulous husband. All the historian can do is to reconstruct Parnell’s view of the situation. The O’Shea affair revealed Parnell’s indifference to the social and sexual mores of his day; however, if he had not been so indifferent—so much his own man in this sense—he would not have been the leader of Irish nationalism in the first place.
In Parnell’s view, the lady in question had been deserted by her husband for several years. The O’Shea marriage was a fiction—though Mrs O’Shea continued to visit her husband in his London flat for some time after the liaison with Parnell began. T. P. O’Connor refers to this as part of the inevitable ambiguity of a married woman having an affair. On the other hand, Parnell as a lonely, sensitive man who hated ‘social life’ found himself in the midst of a storm of greater proportions than he could possibly have expected when he entered politics. Augustus Moore, who lived in the same house in Keppel Street, recorded Parnell returning—armed with a pistol—from bitter parliamentary conflicts and then seeking relaxation from the stresses of the day by playing with a boy’s train set.44