by Neil Hegarty
A novel might have been written about the travails of Davitt’s life too. As a child he was employed in the cotton industry, working in the local mills that resounded to the din of vast and deafening spinning machines that regularly nipped off workers’ limbs and scalps; in 1857, Davitt himself lost an arm to one of these machines and was dismissed from the works without compensation. In his teens, he managed to acquire an education courtesy of a local Methodist schoolteacher – a formative experience that left him free of sectarian animosity – before going on to acquire a position in the postal service. Later still, a developing fascination with his Irish roots led him to become involved in Fenian activity: he participated in the abortive raid at Chester, and in 1870 was imprisoned in England for gun-running. His writings, detailing the harsh conditions in which prisoners were kept and the degrading work they were forced to undertake, began to find their mark in these years: Parnell and others read extracts from them in parliament so that they would be entered in the official Commons record.
When he emerged from prison in 1877, however, Davitt understood that he was living in a changing world, one in which direct but peaceful activism might bring about the changes he sought. His vision was revolutionary, encompassing an alliance of the working classes of Ireland and Britain in a struggle to overthrow the power of the propertied, sever the bond with the Crown and establish a republic. Davitt, then, was committed to a struggle that was concerned fundamentally with class rather than religion or nationality; this focus would later find expression in tours and essays exploring, for example, the more egalitarian cultures of New Zealand and Australia. And, with his intimate understanding both of agrarian conditions in the west of Ireland and of the industrial proletariat of northern England, he was also well placed to formulate a political view that connected and reconciled these ostensibly different worlds. Ironically, then, it was Davitt who persuaded a reluctant Parnell to become president of the Land League, noting that the latter was ‘an Englishman of that strongest sort moulded for an Irish purpose’. Yet Parnell the landlord’s son and Davitt the tenant’s son were hardly a unified force. For the latter, the burning issue was to enable the lower classes to own their own land. Parnell, on the other hand, was a good deal more cautious, and land reform was a means of achieving the greater goal of Home Rule.
While the Land League officially opposed violence, the organization’s leaders knew as well as had O’Connell before them the need to keep the potential for mass action, even violent action, in play – both as a means of maintaining alliances with more radical political forces and as a way of demonstrating the grassroots power of the Home Rule movement. Matters, indeed, had come to just such a head in November 1879 when the farmer and Fenian activist Anthony Dempsey was threatened with eviction from his cottage at Loonmore in Mayo. Parnell led some eight thousand men in concerted resistance to the move in which they surrounded the house and barred access to Crown forces. At the eleventh hour Parnell placed himself between his men and the authorities, thus averting a violent encounter. The authorities were obliged to withdraw; in response, Parnell declared that the massed crowd had ‘broken the back of landlordism’. Yet the story did not end there. The authorities returned a month later to carry out the eviction as planned, and the Land League was compelled to pay Dempsey’s rent to avoid leaving him homeless days before Christmas. But Parnell had set out explicitly his constitutional vision: ‘Our country is a great country, worth fighting for. We have opportunities denied to our forefathers. Remain within the law and the constitution. Let us stand, even though we have to stand on the last plank of the constitution; let us stand, until that last plank is taken from under our feet.’5
When the general election of 1880 returned Gladstone’s Liberals to power at Westminster with a healthy majority, Parnell had an opportunity to take control of the Home Rule Party once and for all. He was now obliged to add his voice – for he had no choice in the matter – to a new national campaign by the Land League. The movement was bankrolled by American funds and driven by men such as Davitt himself – politically engaged individuals who were prepared to be consumed by the cause; and the league’s activities now reached into most of Ireland. The notable exception was the northeast, where the Orange Order was bitterly opposed to an organization such as the league, in which – and in spite of Davitt’s larger purpose – nationalism and Catholicism were for now inescapably intertwined.
The Land League’s new campaign was national only in the sense that agitation against landlords was widespread across the country, except in those areas where the local landlords had already taken public steps to ease the plight of their tenants; Parnell’s own estate at Avondale was one example. The nature of this agitation, however, was not consistent: in one district, tenants might refuse to pay any rent whatever to their landlord; in another, a portion of the rent would be paid, but no more. Certain methods, however, proved to be so successful that they began to be adopted universally – in particular, Davitt’s formulation of passive resistance, which had the joint merits of being perfectly legal and next to impossible to counter. Evictions of recalcitrant or destitute tenants could in this way be opposed effectively: neighbours could block the entry of the bailiffs; tenants could immediately and peacefully resume occupancy of the property, or take steps to ensure that nobody else moved in; and the league itself might take a landlord to court – a time-consuming and expensive process that would be avoided by the latter wherever possible.
The league had two especially potent weapons at its disposal. It now had the financial means to support its members in distress: in effect, the ultimate guarantee that gave many a tenant the will to resist. Davitt had also honed the idea of social ostracism of those individuals and businesses deemed to have acted against the league’s members: the so-called boycott, named after the eponymous land agent who had refused to reduce the rent paid by the tenants on Lord Erne’s lands in Mayo. Boycott’s experience illustrated the impact of a successful campaign of ostracism: local shops would not trade with him or sell him goods, his postal deliveries were stopped, and he was shunned by the entire local community. His crops could be harvested only by a contingent of Orangemen sent down from Ulster for the purpose – a ruinously expensive exercise that that had to be policed by seven thousand soldiers – and Boycott himself was eventually forced to retreat to England. But such campaigns of ostracism could not always be properly policed: on occasion, they were turned against those who had ‘grabbed’ the land of others, or failed to observe the league’s local rules; and – inevitably – they could be abused by some individuals for personal reasons, or to gain a measure of advantage over a commercial rival.
After the first shock of the land campaign, Gladstone’s new government began to put together strategies of its own: Davitt and others were arrested; and habeas corpus in Ireland was suspended, leaving the government free to round up suspected dissidents and imprison them indefinitely. But the administration remained on the defensive: in the Commons, Parnell’s Irish members were continuing with a policy of obstruction that undermined the government’s legislative programme; and in Ireland, the league campaign of civil disobedience made the smooth running of the country all but impossible. Finally, in April 1881, Gladstone introduced his second land bill to parliament: by the summer, it had passed into law; and a third followed in 1882. Taken together, this new legislation transformed the fortunes of many hard-pressed tenants: rents could be appealed and, when this happened, were invariably fixed much lower than before; furthermore, tenants who paid their rent could never be evicted; and tenants were now permitted to sell their lease on the open market. These acts removed the sting from the land issue: for most Irish farmers, the matter was at an end.
In October 1881, shortly after the passing of the second land bill, Parnell was locked up in Dublin’s Kilmainham Gaol, the government claiming that he had done nothing substantial to compel the Land Leaguers to keep the peace. In London, Gladstone told an audience at Guildhall that Parne
ll ‘has made himself beyond all others prominent in the attempt to destroy the authority of the law’; both Parnell and Davitt were held until May 1882.6 Parnell’s imprisonment – he was held in comfortable conditions, although his health deteriorated during his incarceration – did his career nothing but good; furthermore, the proscription of the league itself, which soon followed, freed him from having to attend to an organization that had begun to limit his room to manoeuvre. Davitt, meanwhile, had used his time in prison to recalibrate his political vision; he concluded that Irish land must all be nationalized as a means of changing the power structure once and for all. It was a radical vision that diverged fundamentally from any mainstream views, and marked the next phase of Davitt’s own political journey. But he was a pragmatist too: in a meeting at Avondale he agreed to Parnell’s request to set aside for the moment his plans for land nationalization, which in any case had little or no popular support.
As for Parnell’s political journey, the most dramatic scenes were still to come. The immediate future seemed inauspicious, for in the same week as he and Davitt had been released from prison the Chief Secretary of Ireland, Frederick Cavendish, and his permanent under-secretary, Thomas Henry Burke, were assassinated in Dublin’s Phoenix Park – just beyond the palings of the Viceregal Lodge itself. The killings were carried out by members of yet another secret society, the Invincibles. This act had immediate political repercussions: Gladstone – who was related to Cavendish – was obliged to delay his future legislative plans for Ireland; Parnell also moderated his rhetoric as he planned his next move.
The history of these years can seem dominated by the results of United Kingdom general elections as Tory and Liberal governments chased each other in and out of power at Westminster as political fortunes shifted in Ireland and Britain, and as Home Rule bills were tabled periodically in the House of Commons. Yet Parnell and others were steadily tracing their separate paths through this morass. The Irish Home Rule Party appeared to be in the ascendant after the general election of 1885. It was a triumph for the party, which won 85 out of 103 Irish seats and even captured constituencies across Ulster; a further seat was won, spectacularly, at Liverpool. Because the Conservatives and the Liberals were relatively evenly matched, Parnell could in effect act as kingmaker. And, although Gladstone at first refused to declare publicly in favour of Home Rule, there could be no doubt that elements within the Liberal Party were moving – albeit slowly and in some quarters reluctantly – in this direction. A Liberal government – Gladstone’s third – was duly elected with Irish support in February 1886, and a Home Rule bill was brought to the Commons shortly afterwards.
Gladstone’s public pronouncements throughout that electric political spring were listened to with fervent attention in both Britain and Ireland. He had shifted his ground markedly, from a position of reluctance to outright acceptance of the notion of Home Rule, for reasons that were both pragmatic and philosophical. And, having made this shift, he embraced his new cause fully, announcing explicitly a preference that Belfast’s Protestants embrace the Irish identity that had so marked the city’s character in the eighteenth century. To the Ulster political establishment such a plain statement came as a profound shock – and in response a series of pro-Union demonstrations gathered pace, culminating in February 1886 in a ‘monster meeting’ at Belfast’s Ulster Hall. The Tory politician Randolph Churchill had been enlisted as the rally’s chief speaker: his career was now on the wane, but at Belfast he gave a speech of masterful subtlety. He had watched the careers of O’Connell and Parnell: and as they before him had done, so now Churchill verged on – but did not quite touch – illegality, conjuring the spectre of widespread civil unrest and disorder if Protestant demands for exclusion from any Home Rule settlement were not met. Resolving that the ‘Orange card’ was the one to play, he urged the Protestant population of Ulster to prepare so that Home Rule did not come upon them ‘like a thief in the night’. The response was deafening.
The Ulster Hall meeting would emerge as a key turning point in Irish history: the moment in which Ulster unionism coalesced as a political force. Later, Churchill would coin the phrase ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right’ that dominated politics in the northeast of Ireland for generations to come. It was all a far cry from the scene in Belfast less than a century earlier, when the Presbyterian middle class had listened with approval and excitement to Wolfe Tone’s calls for revolution in Ireland. Now Presbyterian culture in general had in a matter of decades become staunchly unionist and monarchist, the exhortations of ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’ abruptly and startlingly replaced by ‘God Save the Queen’.
There were many reasons for this conversion. In part, such fervent opposition to Home Rule pivoted on urgent economic imperatives. Belfast in the closing years of the nineteenth century had become a boom town, home to a proliferation of businesses from tobacco to ship-building: and Ulster Protestants wanted to remain an intrinsic element in the world’s superpower. Belfast had also become a centre of scientific inquiry, hosting visits from eminent figures such as Charles Darwin; the Queen’s College in the south of the city was rapidly establishing a reputation for progressive thinking in the natural sciences – a state of affairs that scandalized elements of Catholic Ireland. The development of a scientific base in Belfast – the thinking went – would be placed in jeopardy if Home Rule led to a parliament in Dublin in thrall to a host of clerics.
At the heart of the debate, however, lay religion and sectarian fears. Belfast was more than ever now a city run by and for Protestants: sectarianism was increasingly fundamental to the city’s character, with members of the Catholic minority edged out of lucrative jobs in factories and shipyards. At the same time, the uneven development of Irish capitalism had created an ever-widening economic and cultural division between the northeast of Ireland and the remainder of the country. Ulster’s commercial prowess appeared all the greater when viewed relative to the economy of the rest of Ireland – and this, in the minds of an Ulster Presbyterian establishment contemptuous of the apparent backwardness they saw further south and west, was no coincidence. Gladstone’s response to this gathering debate, however, was not comforting: he argued that he could no longer stand up to the will of the Irish majority – and Protestant opinion in Ulster began its shift from bursting confidence into a state of siege.
As it turned out, that first Home Rule bill of April 1886 failed to pass. The period had seen British imperial hegemony threatened on a number of fronts, with rising nationalist sentiment in Egypt, continued strife on the northwestern frontier of the Raj and the unsatisfactory result of the First Boer War (1880–1) all contributing to a sense that the might of the Empire was under threat. Autonomy for Ireland could not be countenanced by many – including ninety-three members of Gladstone’s own Liberal Party: Gladstone’s three-and-a-half-hour speech in support of the bill could not win them over, and in June 1886 they joined the Tories in voting it out. Gladstone’s infant government fell as a result: another general election in July resulted in a crushing defeat for the Liberals, who were replaced by a Tory administration unsympathetic, as always, to the very notion of Irish self-government. Yet for Parnell this was only a temporary reversal of fortune: he spent the next few years consolidating his position in Ireland, calculating the political arithmetic at Westminster and consulting with Gladstone on the best way of resurrecting the issue of Home Rule. There seemed every possibility that, after the next election, Parnell would once again assume the role of political kingmaker. Instead, however, Parnell’s world was about to come crashing down around him.
On Christmas Eve 1889, Parnell was publicly served with papers naming him in a divorce case. Since 1880, he had been having a relationship with Katharine O’Shea, the well-connected English wife of one of his own MPs: when in England, Parnell had lived with O’Shea and in the course of these nine years had fathered three children with her. Throughout this period the O’Sheas had lived separate lives; it is evident t
hat Captain William O’Shea had used his wife’s circumstances to further his own political career; and clear too that, in political circles, the Parnell–O’Shea relationship was common knowledge. Now that the facts were public knowledge, however, the situation became a scandal with the potential to rock politics to its core. Gladstone had himself used Katharine O’Shea as an intermediary in the past – but now he let it be known that he would resign the leadership of the Liberal Party if Parnell was not removed from his post. Gladstone, indeed, had little option in this matter: his own political base would melt beneath him if he did not take a moral stand on the issue. Thus the Irish party faced a stark choice: to support Parnell and abandon the imminent prospect of Home Rule – or abandon Parnell himself, their ‘uncrowned King’.
The matter was to be decided in a series of meetings in Committee Room 15 in the Palace of Westminster, beginning on 1 December 1890. At stake was whether Parnell could pull off the biggest coup of his career. For six days he defended himself: ‘My position,’ he told his critics, ‘has been granted to me, not because I am the mere leader of the parliamentary party, but because I am the leader of the Irish nation.’7 Yet Parnell could not now depend on the support of his party. This was in part as a result of his own temperament: he had always held himself aloof from his supporters; and had instead run the organization as he saw fit. In his dealings with colleagues, he tended to be dictatorial and not infrequently arrogant; and party candidates – selection processes notwithstanding – tended to be hand-picked by Parnell himself.
In the course of that long year, moreover, the details of Parnell’s relationship with Katharine O’Shea had been raked over and his political enemies had taken the opportunity to smear his reputation. Socially conservative Ireland had watched in shock and dismay as the drama unfolded – and it was evident that Parnell’s political fate was sealed, not least because on 3 December the country’s Catholic bishops issued a statement condemning him. The long series of meetings ended in an apparent lack of conclusion: the anti-Parnell faction – the majority – withdrew from proceedings, an act that spelled the end of his leadership of the party.