Enigma
Page 26
The divorce crisis and its aftermath had no connection with the inevitability of partition. Ulster Unionists had made their opposition to Home Rule all too brutally clear some five years earlier. But it did seem to offer evidence that the Unionist case was justified after all. More important was the Irish nationalist response. Even given the distaste for the violence of Belfast Orangemen in 1886, and for Parnell himself in 1891, that existed on the nationalist side, the response to his Belfast speech was ill-considered and symptomatically sterile.
6
The Belfast speech was perhaps Parnell’s last major intervention in Irish politics. From early 1891 the anti-Parnellites gloried in his physical deterioration and hinted broadly that suicide was Parnell’s next logical move. E. S. Purcell’s Life of Cardinal Manning (1896) quotes a contemporary memorandum in which the Cardinal, who had known Henry Brooke Parnell, recalls his suicide and speculates that Parnell was now succumbing to hereditary madness.
It was an idea that occurred to Parnell also. One stormy evening after the divorce he and Katharine went for a walk along Brighton pier. Parnell suddenly lifted Katharine in his arms and said: ‘Oh, my wife, my wife, I believe I’ll jump with you and we shall be free forever.’ Katharine responded: ‘As you will, my love, but the children?’ This had the desired effect, for Parnell silently turned away and carried her back along the pier.39 One society hostess recorded: ‘Certain things he said led me to the conclusion he no longer wished to live or thought it possible to choose.’40 This writer believed that he had, in fact, committed suicide.
But there are other ways to die. In January 1891 Henry Lucy described him as ‘spruce and well dressed as if he were to become a bridegroom’.41 However, within a few short weeks everyone noticed the deterioration in Parnell’s condition. An ‘eyewitness’ at Athlone in February, for example, wrote:
Judging from the attenuated form, distracted looks, and unkempt appearance of the remnants left on a bald head, the fallen chieftain’s days this side of the Styx are numbered. His strange appearance elicited the following expression from an old Leinster man whom he recognised and shook hands with—‘Egad, Charley, you is a done cat any minute.’42
All the while he was subject to the attentions of Irish crowds—often in their most spiteful mood. A couple of incidents that occurred during his trip to Mayo a month before he died may be cited as typical examples. At Castlebar he found himself surrounded by a hostile crowd:
There was any amount of booing, hissings, calls for Kitty, Foxeen, Grouse, etc, mingled with such remarks as ‘Charley I hardly knew you,’ ‘How is Kitty?’ etc. An aged woman tried to make her way through the crowd, exclaiming ‘Let me see him.’ When her curiosity was satisfied she said ‘You are there, you ould blackguard,’ and walked away in disgust.43
At Westport things were hardly any better. The Parnellites commissioned an old fiddler to strike up ‘God Save Ireland’, but he soon broke into ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’. ‘The Chief turned up the white of his eye and said “Throw that fellow off.”’ The Connaught Telegraph concluded its report by describing him as a ‘relic . . . all but a dead man whom the fate of Castlereagh is awaiting’.44
An Irish Times reporter who covered his journey from Dublin to address a meeting on 27 September at Creggs, a remote village on the borders of Galway and Roscommon, noted that he ‘did not look at all well’ and ‘wore his arm in a sling in consequence of his suffering from a severe attack of rheumatism’. At the meeting he stated that he had disregarded his Dublin doctor’s advice to rest in bed in order to address the meeting; however, he did not think that any material damage would come to him from the meeting. Referring defiantly to the anti-Parnellite predictions of his demise, he declared that ‘they should have their enemies throwing up their hats and announcing that he was buried before he was dead, and although a man on the other side of forty could not do the things he used to do in his youth, he still intended to bury a good many of these men’.45 In fact his condition was worsened by the wetting he received at the meeting. By the time he returned home to Katharine at Brighton on 1 October he was clearly on his last legs. He died shortly before midnight on 6 October. Twenty-three years later his wife could still vividly recall the exact moment of his passing:
Late in the evening he suddenly opened his eyes and said: ‘Kiss me, sweet Wifey, and I will try to sleep a little.’ I lay down by his side, and kissed the burning lips he pressed to mind for the last time. The fire of them, fierce beyond any that I had ever felt, even in his most loving moods, startled me, and as I slipped my hand from under his head he gave a little sigh and became unconscious. The doctor came at once, but no remedies prevailed against this sudden failure of the heart’s action, and my husband died without regaining consciousness, before his last kiss was cold on my lips.46
She added: ‘He did not make any “dying speech” or refer in any way to his “colleagues and the Irish people” as was at the time erroneously reported.’ He left her his personal estate, which amounted to £11,774 7s 5d, the equivalent of £1.1 million today.47
The obituaries were predictable. Most of the English writers concentrated on the political effects of Parnell’s death. It was widely and incorrectly assumed that now that Parnell was gone, the reunification of the Irish Parliamentary Party would be rapidly achieved. In Ireland, however—although everyone made some obeisance to the chastening power of death—the tone of the recent conflict was still present. The Parnellite Augustus Moore caught his side’s sense of betrayal:
There is but one of two fates for an Irish patriot. Unlike most Irish patriots, Mr Parnell did not sell his country and his colleagues, and the result was that his colleagues sold him. . . . Mr Parnell was not a man of much invention, eloquence or resource, but he was a gentleman; he was honest, and he was earnest, which is more than can be said of the men who deserted him for Barabbas. . . . You can’t help admiring such dogged pluck as he showed in fighting, or the loyalty which he proved in marrying Mrs O’Shea.48
The author and journalist Standish James O’Grady extracted the most irony from the situation:
And surely this is a strange fact in the tragic career of the man that it was precisely the class for whom he had done most that betrayed him. ‘Will you fling me to the wolves?’ he cried, fighting his last battle, and the Irish farmers answered, ‘We will. To the wolves with you.’ The working men of the towns stood by him, and the labourers of the country, both classes which he injured, while the gentry, to whom he had been an enemy, observed a neutrality which was certainly on the whole benevolent.49
However, it was left to one of the anti-Parnellites, Jasper Tully, to provide the most dispassionate, generous and perceptive judgment:
He was our own, and his faults were those we ourselves had made for him. If he was ambitious and self-willed, it was because the Irish race spoiled and petted him as never they petted a leader before.50
* The misprint ‘majority’ which occurs at this point in the newspaper report of the speech has here been corrected.
† This slide from the term ‘majority’ to ‘minority’ is caused by the fact that Parnell moves from thinking of Irish Protestants in a north-east Ulster context, in which they are a majority, to an all-Ireland context, in which they are a minority.
Chapter 8
CONCLUSION
He is much more like a nationalist of the old type before the Union—an Orangeman of the Palace who hated England and only used the Celts as an instrument.
MR PARNELL’S TEACHING’, SPECTATOR, 2 OCTOBER l886
For some reason not easy to comprehend we hate perfection; we find it insipid, and all Parnell’s weaknesses and foibles throw into grander relief his all but sovereign power.
STANDISH JAMES O’GRADY, ‘CHARLES STEWART PARNELL’, KILKENNY MODERATOR, 1 FEBRUARY I899
1
Many contemporaries—even sober ones—saw Parnell as a neo-republican deeply embroiled in separatist designs and as a social radical totally lacking in respec
t for the rights of property. We can see that, whatever his contingent alliances, Parnell’s personal beliefs were rather different. He was, in fact, a conservative, constitutional nationalist with a radical tinge. The basis of this radicalism was Parnell’s concern with the fate of the Irish peasantry and, associated with this, his hopes for Irish industrial development.
Parnell presided over a huge moral victory for the Irish peasantry over their landlords. Let us not forget the dismay and disorientation of W. E. H. Lecky, the great Irish liberal historian of the nineteenth century. Lecky, who became a Liberal Unionist in 1886, was, above all, surprised by the unwillingness of British Liberalism—in which he had invested so much—to defend the legal rights of Irish landlords, or, indeed, as he saw it, any kind of credible economic and social order in the countryside.1
For Lecky this was a negation of the fundamental assumptions of a modern liberal society—respect for property rights and the role of the market. However, Gladstone shrewdly noted in the aftermath of his first great land act of 1870 that there was no ‘read-across’ into popular English attitudes and that it was safe to regard Ireland as a ‘place apart’, a space for policy and experiments which went against metropolitan liberal assumptions. The alternative was strong authoritarian government, and even J. A. Froude, the one intellectual who, in theory, embraced it, was, in practice, full of ambiguity. Froude had a genuine capacity for empathy2 and, indeed, inconsistency. In 1876 he attempted to reconcile with his sermonising critic, Father Burke.3 In 1880 he told the Catholic landowner Bonaparte Wyse that he may have ‘spoken too harshly’.4 In the 1870s and 1880s he also criticised the Irish land system openly.5 Nationalists began to notice this. The Fenian Denis Dowling Mulcahy was the first nationalist to employ Froude for the Irish cause.6 Parnell followed up in his American tour of 1880,7 and then other nationalists like J. G. Swift MacNeill8 and Michael Davitt9 joined in. In 1886 Froude privately told the nationalist sympathiser Wilfrid Scawen Blunt that, provided Parnell continued to give strong leadership, Home Rule was both inevitable and viable.10 Of course, in other moments Froude continued (without optimism) to call for a strong governmental hand to put down Irish popular turbulence.11 If even Froude, the arch-apologist for repression, could not consistently hold the line, what does this tell us about the likely attitudes of the rest of the English intelligentsia? Nonetheless, the change when it came was surprisingly quick. John Morley, who, as editor of the Fortnightly Review, would not publish T. P. O’Connor’s articles in the late 1870s, was in the Parnellite camp by 1882.
Morley replied on behalf of Gladstonian Liberalism to Lecky’s Unionist arguments. In his view, Lecky had implied that government should reward honesty and industry and punish the opposite vices. But who, in Ireland, were the industrious classes and who the feckless? Morley had no doubt: on Lecky’s own principle, the agrarian revolutionist was the true moralist and evangelist.12 Parnell would have taken a grim satisfaction from Morley’s verdict. ‘I wish I could do something for the Irish peasantry—they are worth helping,’ he said to Katharine. ‘I have always wished it, but there is so much between, and they suffer in silence.’13 In his last major speech at Liverpool Parnell, for example, offered a remarkable evocation of the suffering of the reclamation tenantry in Coolgreany, Co. Wexford.14 In a poem to mark the second anniversary of his death, Katharine Tynan, then a rising star of the Irish literary revival, insisted that ‘he heard the poor at his gate’.15 Sir William Butler, in a public lecture to the Parnell Memorial Committee in 1909, talked of Parnell’s ‘sympathy with suffering people’. Parnell had, he said, ‘something of the woman in man, which is a good deal of the God in man’.16 James Mullin wrote in similar vein: ‘His magnificent moral courage and indomitable will were united to a womanly tenderness.’17
Not everyone was similarly impressed. Mrs Stuart Menzies regarded Parnell as a conversationalist who was on the same level as Oscar Wilde and rather superior in this respect to the senior British statesmen of her acquaintance. But she added: ‘Charles Parnell was at his best on political subjects, and his sarcasm was entertaining; he could enlarge most feelingly on the sorrows of the poor that we always have with us, but his conversation was rather spoilt for me by not being able to get rid of the feeling that he was not quite sincere even to himself.’18
There was already another, more complex, side to his political personality. In his early career Parnell had rejected Isaac Butt’s exclusive emphasis on the small farmers. In the Land League meeting at Athlone in November 1880 an intelligent journalist picked up the tone of the prosperous farmers on the subject of Parnell: ‘He’s a good man’ and ‘the best in the world’. The cheers given to Parnell sounded ‘much the same . . . as a body of shareholders might give to a chairman of a company moving a successful dividend’.19 Serjeant Sullivan famously spoke of how Parnell had become ‘by means which were hard to understand’, the ‘hero of the bourgeoisie’.20 The Parnell tribute in 1883 was a tribute from the strong farming regions in Ireland, not the poorest. To be fair to Parnell, he retained always his special paternal interest in the poorest farmers of the west, openly stating in speech after speech that they had not enjoyed the benefits of the land war in the way that others had done.21 In the end he returned to something rather close to the traditional Isaac Butt position.
His ‘Buttite’ social conservatism was perceived by at least some of his acquaintances. Augustus Moore noticed it: ‘My Father [George Henry Moore] always was a strong Tory and a supporter of Mr Disraeli on all except Irish politics. Parnell’s policy was my Father’s policy.’22 Labouchere agreed: ‘Home Rule apart, he was himself a Tory.’23 The Spectator began to mull over these questions for the first time in 1890: ‘Born in the landlord caste, bred up in expectation of an estate and for many years a landowner, Mr Parnell can hardly like many of his colleagues hate landlordism in the abstract.’24
Was Parnell at heart, then, an Irish rebel? He certainly walked ‘on the verge of treason-felony’ in the years from 1876 to 1882; he gave good reasons for the fears of moderate Home Rulers, let alone Unionists. But even in these years of political enthusiasm, Parnell’s differences with the revolutionary agenda were clear enough. As the extremist ‘Transatlantic’ of the Irish World commented in 1881 on Parnell’s view that the younger landlords would throw their lot in with the Home Rule cause if the land question was settled by purchase: ‘Individual landlords are well fitted to take their place as leaders of the Irish nation. Who are these landlords, Mr Parnell? Except yourself, I see not one in the crowd.’25 In later years the double effect of the Phoenix Park trauma and the O’Shea affair undoubtedly reinforced the conservative side of his nature.
Unionists complained about Parnell’s betrayal of his own class. ‘Mr Parnell’, wrote the political commentator W. Hart Westcombe in 1886, ‘was compelled to join the crusade against the class to which he himself belonged. I don’t know and I don’t care whether Mr Parnell was sincere in his landlord hetze.’26 W. O’Connor Morris discussed Parnell’s conciliatory course in the later 1880s towards Irish Unionist opinion as merely a trick to lure Gladstone deeper into the Home Rule trap: ‘His success in Ireland with the classes he sought to conciliate was hopeless, because they knew him well; but Mr Gladstone and those who acted with him were deceived.’27 Three years later he softened the judgment, acknowledging that he never knew Parnell and may have done ‘less justice’ to his ‘motives’ than he deserved.28
But nationalist opinion increasingly portrayed Parnell as a patriot, but also a Tory and a landlord. With even greater insight, Francis Hackett, the son of leading Kilkenny Parnellite John Byrne Hackett (who sucked the lime out of Parnell’s eye), wrote that Parnell was ‘amenable to liberal considerations but utterly immune from liberal sympathies’.29 This catches the political temper of ‘the Chief’ exactly: the Irish ancien régime, he felt, could not survive the combination of the economic crisis of the late 1870s democratisation of the mid-1880s without drastic change. He saw it as his role to bring about that
change on the most conservative basis available. Maurice Moore, another son of the Mayo landlord and former patriot MP George Henry Moore, made the same point but more darkly: ‘Parnell appreciated the situation . . . correctly, but he was hampered by the crimes that clung around the Land League and by the opposition of the landlords, naturally exasperated by attacks on their property.’30 It is worth noting that the Irish Times went against its Tory Unionist grain and gave Parnell a most generous obituary:
It was somewhat of a phenomenon—this man stepping from the ranks of his class to champion the cause of those whom, justly or not, he considered to be the victims of the mistaken system of government and so it was that his personality became invested with a certain romance, which even the sordid and shameful incidents of later times have not wholly divested it of.31
His main disagreement with the British Conservatives was their refusal to follow a truly conservative policy on Ireland. As he claimed to Barry O’Brien, some British Tories were quite prepared to let the Irish landlords sink without trace. Parnell hoped this would not happen.
This book has been much concerned with the nature of Parnell’s political personality. The issue here is not merely of personal mystery and enigma. His perceived conservatism, especially after 1882, is the clue to the credibility, such as it was, of Gladstone’s conversion to Home Rule. The key question for those Liberals who doubted Gladstone’s new policy, is clear: ‘Is there, or is there not, any good reason to suppose that if Ireland obtains Home Rule, the new Irish legislature and administration will be controlled by moderate and sober-minded men, determined to support the union with Britain and to enforce the laws that protect property and personal freedom in Ireland?’32 Gladstone’s answer is the one that he gave to Lord Rendel—that, following Mrs O’Shea’s explanations of Parnell’s new-found moderation he (Gladstone) had ‘carefully studied Parnell and that he considered him a conservative force in Ireland’.33 For Parnell, the genuinely conservative settlement of the Irish question required a Dublin parliament. Here was a critical intersection between the thought of Parnell and Gladstone—and an explanation for the Grand Old Man’s later and apparently quirky enthusiasm for the Irish leader.34 Parnell’s perceived conservatism after 1882 was the clue to the credibility in senior Liberal circles of the Parnell–Gladstone alliance. Gladstone, for example, told Edward Hamilton that ‘he believed it was a mistake to suppose that Irishmen were imbued with real democratic tendencies. Indeed, he should not be surprised, if, when they governed themselves, they would not cut a somewhat Tory figure in the Imperial Parliament.’35 There is no evidence that Hamilton found this other than a reasonable proposition. Others were of the same opinion. ‘Set up a parliament in Dublin, and what would happen?’ asked the Rev. Malcolm McColl, another loyal Gladstone supporter. ‘Mr Parnell would be its first Prime Minister, and his interest and inclination would be to induce the gentry of Ireland to become Members of Parliament.’36