by Paul Bew
This anecdote of Zubof notwithstanding, Parnell’s behaviour was, in fact, a little strange. Sir Robert Anderson, a senior policeman, reported: ‘His habit of midnight prowling, his renting houses under unusual names, and other like ways and deeds, gave rise to sinister suspicions of one kind or another.’ Anderson added: ‘But all such suspicions were baseless. The man was eccentric.’6 Such an atmosphere—as well as his own deepest convictions—must have predisposed Parnell against taking an active role in agrarian agitation. It was no surprise to him that the winter of 1886–7 saw an upsurge in the Irish land war. All the political and economic indicators pointed that way. However, he made a point of remaining aloof from the new form of agrarian class struggle, known as the Plan of Campaign. The ploy here was that dissatisfied tenants on particular estates were to combine to offer the landlord their notion of a fair rent. If this was refused, they paid him nothing; instead they contributed the proposed sum to an estate fund which would be employed for the protection of tenants in the event of landlord retaliation.
In December 1886, when the Plan of Campaign was still in its infancy, Parnell summoned William O’Brien. The two men met behind Greenwich Observatory, which was cloaked in thick fog. Parnell pointed out to O’Brien the risks involved in the Plan and suggested that he limit it to the estates where it was already in operation. Coercion of the Plan might create some bad publicity for the Conservative government, but it was far more likely that an intensive anti-rent agitation would place great strain on the Liberal–Nationalist alliance. In fact Parnell probably overstated the dangers; the Liberals, it soon became clear, wanted evidence that Ireland was ungovernable sans Home Rule. In the immediate aftermath of the defeat of the Home Rule Bill, Gladstone was claiming to his colleagues that Ireland could only be governed as a ‘crown colony’. Tacitly, the Liberals expected the Parnellites to provide evidence of this assessment. Parnell was aware of this sentiment—and was less than impressed by it. The general drift of Parnell’s remarks made it clear that, as far as he was concerned, the political objective of Home Rule was far more important than any agrarian considerations. It should be stressed that Parnell’s underlying assumptions about the new phase of agrarianism were by no means unreasonable.
In the spring of 1888 Parnell met John Morley at Morley’s house in Elm Park Gardens. His cynical summary of the conversation is rather revealing: ‘“We can never satisfy English politicians! They imprisoned me for causing agitation in Ireland, and now they want agitation, if not outrage.” Morley said to me: “The people must be made to wake up a bit; can’t you do anything to stir them up?” Then, with a laugh: “If they knew how easy it was for me to stir Ireland up, and how confoundedly difficult I have found it to quiet her down again, they would be careful before giving me such an invitation.”’7
Nonetheless, Parnell’s ‘brusque treatment’ of John Dillon and O’Brien made him ‘enemies where he ought to have had friends’.8 At the least, he might have done more to avoid giving the impression that he was arrogantly and gratuitously keeping personal control of the funds. The Law and the League, an Irish Loyal and Patriotic Union (ILPU) pamphlet, noted that ‘Mr Parnell became as invisible, as inarticulate and unapproachable as the veiled prophet of Khorassan.’ (In Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh the veiled prophet is a ‘false chief’ who revealed his malevolent, hideous face to his deluded followers only at the moment of their destruction.) The ILPU opined confidently: ‘Mr Parnell knew all about the plan, disapproved of it, but feared to say.’9
The Plan of Campaign was to be associated with a new and more drastic method of coercion launched by the new Chief Secretary, Salisbury’s nephew, Arthur Balfour. It also occasioned the futile condemnation of the Pope and certain Irish bishops in May 1888. Nevertheless, the Plan was never anything like as important as the Land League. It was limited to a very much smaller area of the country. It seems to have appealed most to the numerically smaller group of stronger farmers. (If Parnell did neglect any aspect of agrarian reality in this period, it was his neglect of small farmers which was most fatal.) But in spite of its restricted area of operation, the Plan of Campaign did give John Dillon and William O’Brien a new political influence which, at a crucial moment after the split, they were to turn against Parnell himself. But as Parnell (or Parnellites) were then quick to point out, Dillon had absented himself from Irish politics on health grounds in the far more trying circumstances of 1882–5, and he and William O’Brien had been at best slow to see the significance of the original Land League movement.
Parnell’s position appeared to moderate in other ways. In late October 1887 one of Parnell’s MPs, J. G. Swift MacNeill, told him that the South African mining magnate, Cecil Rhodes, was willing to give the Irish Party £10,000 (£1 million at today’s values) if they would agree to the retention of Irish members at Westminster.10 Rhodes had a scheme for imperial federation. He wanted Irish MPs to remain at Westminster after Home Rule had been adopted, a feature which had not been included in the abortive 1886 Home Rule Bill. This inclusion would then act as a model for the rest of the self-governing Empire, which, Rhodes hoped, would then be allowed to send representation to the House of Commons. Parnell did not formally agree to oppose a Home Rule bill which did not include retention of Irish MPs, but he did agree that he would ‘cheerfully concur’ if a bill included such a clause. It has recently been argued that the private handwritten letters between the two men are significantly different from the public texts of agreement published by the two men in The Times on 9 July 1888: Dr Elaine Byrne has claimed that Parnell was, in effect, taking a ‘bribe’ to amend the Home Rule Bill.11
It has to be accepted that Parnell’s views on the retention of Irish MPs at Westminster had veered from open-mindedness in 1884 to outright hostility in 1886 before his effective embrace of the principle in 1888. In 1884 his ‘Proposed Constitution for Ireland’ declared: ‘The representation of Ireland in the Imperial Parliament might be retained or might be given up. If it be retained, the Speaker might have the power of deciding what questions the Irish members might take part in as Imperial questions if this limitation were thought desirable.’12 Two years later his tone had changed: ‘Parnell is very much opposed to the retention. He puts his opposition upon the difficulty of getting Irishmen to come over. He asks whether there are to be two separate elections or only one. In the first place, he complains of the expense and of the difficulty of finding men, in the second he asks how men can sit and vote in both parliaments when they are both sitting at the same time?’13 In 1888—with £10,000 in the bank—he had ‘cheerfully’ changed his mind again.
It is the obvious and correct deduction from such moves that Parnell was determined to be the patron of the union of hearts and minds with the Liberals. His public utterances in this period make this clear. In this he succeeded all too well from the point of view of his ultimate political survival. By the autumn of 1887 Irish audiences reacted with impatience to Nationalist platform speakers and demanded to hear the Liberal speakers. The nationalist press was particularly sedulous in building up the image of the Liberal leadership and it should not have been a surprise, as it was for foreign visitors, to find Gladstone’s portrait beside that of Parnell in many Irish homes.14
3
But Parnell’s moderation and relative inactivity were no protection against his enemies. They were determined to link him with the unacceptable violent face of Irish nationalism. On 7 February 1887 Parnell had opposed Balfour’s new coercion bill in parliament. Parnell’s speech recalled the fate of Lord Spencer’s policies, applied as they were with great vigour in a period of revived agricultural prosperity. Even so,
Dynamite was repeatedly exploded in the crowded streets of your city, your public buildings were also threatened, and attempts were made to destroy them. Even in this House the Ministers of the day were not safe from violent attack and attempts to assassinate by the discharge of explosive bombs from the Strangers’ Gallery, and exasperation and international animosity rea
ched a most deplorable height, of which, I think, you would have to go back to 1798 to find any example.
There can be no betwixt and between in this matter, and the Right Hon. gentleman may depend upon it, that, although he may get his Coercion Act to strike down his chief political opponents, he will not be able to stop murder.15
Parnell may have felt himself to be going through the motions—but his English critics felt certain that the speech was an implicit threat, calling on Irish America to thwart the will of the British parliament. The Times, in particular, was furious. The atmosphere of politics became even more strained.
In the spring of 1887 the attack came. On 18 April The Times published in facsimile a letter purporting to have been written by Parnell, seeking to excuse, under the plea of necessity, his public condemnation of the Phoenix Park murders. The amazing document, dated 15 May 1882, ran as follows:
Dear Sir,
I am not surprised at your friend’s anger but he and you should know that to denounce the murders was the only course open to us. To do that promptly was plainly our best policy.
But you can tell him and all others concerned that though I regret the accident of Lord F. Cavendish’s death I cannot refuse to admit that Burke got no more than his deserts.
You are at liberty to show him this, and others whom you can trust also, but let not my address be known. He can write to House of Commons.
Yours very truly,
Chas S. Parnell
Parnell read The Times at Mrs O’Shea’s breakfast table. This gave him a few hours to compose himself before arriving at the House of Commons. The result was one of his most celebrated displays of nonchalance under pressure. As Timothy Harrington, who told him the news, recalled to Barry O’Brien:
I thought he would burst into some indignant exclamation, say, ‘What damned scoundrels! What a vile forgery!’ but not a bit of it. He put his finger on the S of the signature and said quite calmly as if it were a matter of the utmost indifference, ‘I did not make an S like that since 1878.’ ‘My God,’ I thought, ‘if this is the way he is going to deal with the letter in the House, there is not an Englishman who will not believe that he wrote it.’16
The Irish leader exhibited a kind of calm indignation which was peculiarly his own. ‘Do you think,’ he said finally to J. M. Tuohy of the Freeman’s Journal, ‘apart from any other consideration, that I would be so great a fool as to write such a letter as that at a time when the Government were seeking by every possible means to get me into their power.’17
Parnell’s course was to issue a denial. At one o’clock in the morning of 19 April he denounced the letter as a ‘villainous and bare-faced forgery . . . an audacious and unblushing fabrication’.18 This was accepted by his political allies but rejected by his opponents. One of his followers in the parliamentary party, J. R. Cox, reported in the Roscommon Herald:
The scene when Mr Parnell stood up to refer to The Times forgery was truly striking and magnificently explained the hold the man has on men’s minds, even how he enchains his enemies. When the Irish leader rose, immediately there was the most dead silence, not a sound, not a voice broke the stillness, as with a scarcely suppressed passion he exposed and reprobated the infamous charges. He looked to me . . . like a lion-tamer curbing into silence and submission a kennel of mongrel curs. . . . Two men in particular I noted because of the eager intensity with which they followed the burning words of the speaker. . . . They were Lord Spencer [Lord Lieutenant of Ireland at the time of the Phoenix Park murders] . . . and Mr Gladstone.19
Leonard Courtney, a radical Liberal, though nonetheless opposed to Home Rule, was one of the few British politicians to discuss the allegations in a detached fashion. If Parnell was proved to be the letter’s author, his character for veracity would be gone and he would be ruined; but the question, however it was answered, had no bearing on the merits and demerits of Home Rule.20 Gladstone took the opposite view to that of Courtney: he felt the whole case for Home Rule depended on disproving the authenticity of the Times letter. In the short term, of course, the status of Parnell as leader was of considerably more importance than the abstract case for or against Home Rule. It seemed, however, that the real truth would never be known. The Liberals, in fact, were rather worried and perhaps less sure of their ground than their Irish friends had hoped.
There was, however, to be one moment of significant consternation for Parnell. When his allies became aware that The Times was negotiating with P. J. Sheridan on the basis that he might support their allegations,21 Parnell was, for the first time, seriously alarmed. After all, the informer James Carey had explicitly named Sheridan as one of the Phoenix Park conspirators. At a minimum, Sheridan was capable of saying—whether true or not—that he had sworn Parnell into the IRB on the eve of the Phoenix Park murders. According to Matthew O’Brien, a double agent of note and Michael Davitt’s associate, Parnell demanded that a message be sent on to Patrick Egan in Nebraska to the effect that Sheridan was to be prevented ‘at all cost’ from testifying for the newspaper. O’Brien insisted that Parnell intended Sheridan to be killed if he attempted to travel to London; there was great relief all round when Sheridan claimed to have been merely spoofing The Times.22
Taking the advice of the somewhat unnerved Liberal politician, John Morley, Parnell did not actively sue The Times. Frank Hugh O’Donnell, however, a former colleague of Parnell’s, considered himself to have been smeared by the Times allegations. He launched a libel action against the newspaper, though it was not to come to court until mid-1888.
It was a dangerous crisis in Parnell’s career, yet Parnell’s response was amazingly relaxed. In the early days, when the chance of being able to expose the forgeries seemed faint indeed, he never lost hope and maintained a serene and imperturbable calm of mind that made his friends marvel. He discussed the conspiracy with detachment as if it concerned some third party and as though he took only an academic interest in it. The Irish leader took up detective fiction with enthusiasm. Parnell was even spotted at the Lyceum Theatre watching a melodramatic crime play. It was reported that he hugely enjoyed the unmasking of the unfortunate fictional forger! It is almost as though, having lived in fear of an attack, Parnell was relieved when it actually came. He was put out of his suspense at least temporarily. There was the bonus that, as the attack was based on insubstantial charges, there was every possibility of turning the enemy’s flank. Moreover, Parnell had immediately jumped to the conclusion that the forger was O’Shea. What a glorious vista this supposition opened up! Not only would he crush The Times and the Tories, but he would also finish off the man who was a nagging thorn in his flesh.
A few days after the Times attack, Parnell dropped out of sight by departing to Ireland. When he returned to Westminster towards the end of May 1887 his health had obviously deteriorated drastically. Alfred Robbins diagnosed that he was suffering from Bright’s disease. On 21 May J. R. Cox MP reported in the Roscommon Herald:
I sadly regret to say that his haggard and almost emaciated appearance has given rise to the most serious apprehensions in the minds of his followers. If a speedy change in his health does not ensue, grave fears may be entertained for even more than his physical capacity to conduct the party during the remainder of the session.23
Yet despite his physical weakness, Parnell’s morale was good. In July he delivered an address at a banquet at the National Liberal Club in which he urged restraint on the Irish people. It was a significant move; it was clear that his Irish trip had not brought him any closer to the Plan of Campaign.
However, Parnell was not able to control events on the ground. At Mitchelstown, Co. Cork, on 9 September 1887 the panic-stricken police fired on a crowd of angry, stone-throwing demonstrators and killed three of them. Such developments only made Parnell’s life more difficult. Violence in Ireland, Parnell thought at this point—wherever it came from—endangered the progress of the constitutional agitation for Home Rule. He seems to have been driven to dissociate himself m
ore explicitly from the Plan.
In November 1887 he broke silence and gave an interview to the press. His coolness towards the Plan was obvious. He had not been consulted when it started, he claimed (probably untruthfully), and its conduct was now entirely up to those on the spot. The Irish nationalist press desperately tried to cover up by stressing Parnell’s general mood of opposition to the Salisbury government; but John Dillon, one of the two main agrarian leaders, did not deceive himself that he was carrying Parnell with him. Parnell went on to scotch rumours that his health had improved. He cited his doctor’s advice that he required a period of recuperation. He was also careful to stress that, as his interviewer reported, ‘Mr Parnell has not been staying at Eltham for a long time, neither is it true that he keeps horses there or that he has been seen riding or living in the locality.’24 This interview reflects all of Parnell’s current anxieties. He was unsympathetic to the Plan of Campaign and yet concerned lest the Irish people believed he was malingering. More importantly, he was anxious to scout suggestions that he was spending his time at Mrs O’Shea’s Eltham home. Particularly since the Galway election of 1886, insinuations on this point were always just below the surface of political life.
Parnell’s explicit disavowal of social conflict in Ireland served to strengthen his position in the eyes of the British public. On 8 May 1888 he addressed a meeting of English Liberal sympathisers with Home Rule at the Eighty Club in London. He dismissed as irrelevant the recent papal rescript condemning the Plan, while at the same time repeating his own unenthusiastic attitude towards it. He was making it clear that the Liberal alliance was still the cornerstone of his policy and that Home Rule was still his fundamental objective. Parnell must have been well pleased by the satisfactory reaction to his speech.