The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  But first, let us consider the figure of Bradlaugh. He had neither the gloss of the patrician Liberal Charles Dilke nor the flashiness of Chamberlain, the businessman who had transformed Birmingham. Charles Bradlaugh’s background was that of a minor character in Dickens – his father a lawyer’s clerk, his mother a nursemaid from Hoxton, now a London district combining working class and designer chic, sandwiched between the City Road and Shoreditch, but in 1833, when he was born, a village. Bradlaugh belongs to the good old English political tradition of cussedness, and could as well have ended up a Tory of the Colonel Sibthorp school as a Radical in the manner of Cobbet. He stood for the little man being allowed to speak his mind, and for the poor man having as much say in the scheme of things as the rich. He was a quintessential English protestant, small p, allowing his questioning of any established authority to lead him to virulent atheism. He was also a republican. From the 1850s onwards, he had identified with the Polish nationalists against the Russians, the Italian nationalists against the Austrians and the pope, and the Irish nationalists.

  He was also a keen Malthusian, but unlike the Reverend Thomas Malthus, Bradlaugh saw that the logic of attributing all social ills to overpopulation was to advocate birth control. In 1877 the British government decided to prosecute the English publisher of an American book – The Fruits of Philosophy – written by a physician named Knowlton and advocating birth control. Together with his friend Annie Besant, the runaway wife of an Anglican vicar and at that stage an unbeliever, Bradlaugh produced a new version of the book and after an absurd trial the jury decided, ‘We are unanimously of opinion that the book in question is calculated to deprave public morals, but at the same time we entirely exonerate the defendants’ – Bradlaugh and Besant – ‘from any corrupt motives in publishing it.’ They were sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and fined £200 each, but the Court of Appeal quashed these sentences on a legal technicality.19

  So this was the man who in the election of 1880 stood as a Radical candidate for Parliament for the seat of Northampton. He was elected – and Henry Labouchere, moderate Liberal, was elected for the other Northampton seat. Labouchere is perhaps a notorious figure nowadays, since in 1885 when Parliament was debating homosexuality he proposed a clause in the Criminal Law Amendment Act which made all forms of male homosexual activity, and not just buggery, illegal. It seems likely that Labouchere did this to demonstrate the absurdity of the law, but the effect of his amendment was, among other things, to send Oscar Wilde to prison ten years later.20 His other claim to fame, perhaps more cheerful, is the quip, ‘I do not mind Mr Gladstone having an ace up his sleeve, but I do object to his always saying that Providence put it there.’ To Bradlaugh, a man utterly different in background and outlook, he was a loyal parliamentary friend.

  Bradlaugh arrived at Westminster in 1880 and refused to take the oath required of all sitting MPs. The idiotic Speaker of the House, Sir Henry Brand, could have easily allowed Bradlaugh to affirm, rather than take an oath, with a warning that he might be liable to prosecution. As it was, he referred the matter to the House – then to a private committee. At one crazy moment Bradlaugh was imprisoned in the Clock Tower by some arcane piece of medieval law. Meanwhile the Tories could make capital from the episode and waste hours and hours of parliamentary time, worrying the Irish members and many of Gladstone’s Northern Methodist grocers with the imputation that the Liberal government was a Radical atheist sham.

  It was an occasion which brought out the best in Gladstone, from the point of view of parliamentary theatre. He made one of the greatest speeches of his career rebutting the young Tory firebrands such as Lord Randolph Churchill and A.J. Balfour. Gladstone saw Bradlaugh as a ‘parliamentary impediment’. Each time the House rejected him, the good people of Northampton re-elected him. Eventually, in spite of the vociferous extra-parliamentary intrigues of Cardinal Manning, the opposition of most of the Anglican bishops and the blustering fury of the Tories (Churchill said Bradlaugh – ‘a seditious blasphemer’ – was supported by ‘mob scum and dregs’),21 Bradlaugh was allowed to affirm rather than take an oath involving the mention of a God in whom he did not believe. He had won his case, and made a point, but it is questionable how far Bradlaugh had helped those who were, in political terms, his primary concern – the poor.

  Bradlaugh deeply resented the notion that their cause was best advanced by the socialists, or by any form of agitation which involved violence. He believed that just as the spread of collectivist ideas in Ireland had engendered violence, forcing the British government to reintroduce coercion, so the result of socialism would also be violent: ‘You are driving poor people into danger,’ he told the followers of Marx, ‘you are giving excuses for coercion, you are trying to lead my people wrong, and therefore I bar your way.’22 He was bitterly hurt when Annie Besant joined the socialists in 1885.

  The Irish situation, from the very beginning of Gladstone’s second Parliament, dominated domestic politics. To write separate chapters about Ireland and England, as historians of the period tend to do, makes for clarity and convenience; but it begs a number of questions – chief of which is the notion that ‘Irish nationalism’ is detachable from the matters we have been so far discussing in this chapter. If peasant-farmers in County Cavan had grown as rich over the previous forty years as certain Birmingham businessmen they might have been as passionate for the United Kingdom as Joseph Chamberlain. But because of the history of Ireland since the famine – the religious differences, the poverty, the articulate anti-British witness of Australian and American Irish – the cause had become both nationalistic and every bit as violent as the nihilists in Dostoyevsky’s nightmares. It was also just as vague, in terms of its actual, concrete, political definitions. R.F. Foster provides the verdict: ‘Dazzling as the political structure of Parnellism had been, it had never really defined what Home Rule meant.’23

  30

  The Rise of Parnell

  IN JANUARY 1880 a correspondent from the Daily Telegraph – in those days a Liberal newspaper – visited Connemara and was shown round by the parish priest of a place called Ernlaghmore. Father Flannery pointed to a mound of rubbish by the roadside – heaps of soil, trash, a few domestic items. From this mound a little column of smoke emanated. The rubbish was inhabited by a man who had been evicted by his landlord. The journalist was amazed when, from this hole in the ground, a fine-looking woman emerged, holding a baby. A little way down the shore, Father Flannery found for the Englishman a small cave whose mouth had been stopped by a lobster pot from whose aperture, once more, a trail of smoke proceeded.1

  Stories such as this could be replicated all over rural Ireland at the time – in Galway, in Connemara, in the Ballina district of Co. Mayo, where small tenant-farmers had been driven off their land by high rents. An average of 200 per week were leaving the port of Larne alone for the United States, and hundreds were crossing the Irish Channel for Liverpool or Glasgow.

  It is to such poor people as these on 21 August 1879 that Our Lady, St Joseph and St John the Evangelist appeared over the south gable of the church at Knock,fn1 2 in South Mayo. Perhaps the vision ‘inspired’ the Apparitions at Llanthony the next summer, mentioned at the beginning of Part V.3 Some, including the Daily Telegraph, opined that the figures had been projected through magic lantern by a hoaxer on the gable of the church – just such a theory has been advanced to explain the Llanthony apparitions. Meanwhile, one of the children who saw the vision at Knock was able to describe in punctilious detail the book being held by St John the Evangelist, the rose on Our Lady’s brow and the featheriness of the angels’ wings. The Welsh Appearances – though there is a small annual pilgrimage to commemorate them to this day – were, so to say, sui generis. The monk in whose rhubarb patch they occurred was rejected by the Church of his baptism and eventually sought ordination from a ‘wandering bishop’ of no Church. The event did not resonate with the almost entirely chapel-going Welsh – even though Father Ignatius, also known as Dewi H
onddu, was a keen Welshman by adoption, and a nationalist. Wales in the 1870s and 1880s knew great hardships, and the farmers, especially when non-churchmen, strongly objected to paying tithes – i.e. a tenth of their income – to the local Anglican parson. (The Church in Wales was still the Established Church.)

  Wales had escaped famine – unlike Ireland and Scotland. On the other hand, unlike these lands, it had a living language spoken by a significant proportion of the population, it had suffered from bullying landlords and agricultural depression and – in the winter of 1887–8 – the Hussars were used to quell Welsh riots.4 But though resentment against the English would continue to be felt to this day by the Welsh, for a number of legitimate grievances, the separatist movement would never be so strong as to lead to the creation of a Welsh Free State or a Welsh Republic. Rather, within the United Kingdom, the Welsh would establish their distinct identity by cultural and linguistic means, and by identifying, when the Labour Movement took shape, with the left wing of socialist political programmes.

  In Ireland things were otherwise, where ‘Mary the Mother of God comes from heaven, to console and strengthen her children. They are in dire need of a helping hand.’5 ‘Whatever public spirit exists in Ireland just now,’ the MP and historian W.J. O’Neill Daunt had written in his Journal in 1859, ‘is rather religious than political.’6 But, as in Poland, it is difficult to distinguish between piety and patriotism: the two go together, and the multitudes who made their pilgrimages to Knock, wishing for cures and blessings, were caught up in an atmosphere in which something more than the purely rational was in the air. There was poverty, and hunger, and rage: there were the memories, folk memories and actual, of the Famine: there were the Fenians – a Gaelic brotherhood naming themselves after the Fianna army in the medieval saga of Fionn MacCumhail: there were also the murderers, the professional malcontents, the anarchists.

  Michael Davitt’s (1846–1906) Land League, heavily subsidized from America, was a pivotal agent in the story. Born during the Great Famine, Davitt had been evicted, with his father and mother, from a smallholding in Co. Mayo when still a boy. They emigrated to Lancashire, where he was put to work in a factory and lost an arm aged eleven. Unsurprisingly, when he grew up, he had taken part in the unsuccessful raid on Chester Castle and became involved in gun-running, for which he was sentenced to grim treatment in Dartmoor jail. Because he could not as a one-armed man break stones on the moor he had been harnessed to a cart like an animal.7

  Captain Moonlight was a truly Dostoyevskian ‘horror’. It was the codename of the Land League, and it meant what happened to tenants who did not conform to the Land League’s patriotically rebellious attitude to landlords. Ricks were burned, cattle maimed, houses and barns torched – all at night by Captain Moonlight. Anyone taking a farm from which a tenant had been evicted was to be ‘isolated from his kind as if he were a leper of old’.

  The first man to do so was, in his rashness, to add a word to the English vocabulary. When Captain Boycott took over a farm in Co. Mayo not far from Knock, he was besieged by angry expelled tenants who henceforth refused to work or trade with him. An expedition of Ulster Protestants marched to rescue him. The first Boycott in history had taken place. Captain Moonlight dug graves beside traitors’ back doors but at first there were no actual murders – at first.8

  In 1882 the viceroy, Lord Cowper, and William Forster, the chief secretary, resigned and were replaced by Lord Spencer and the Duke of Devonshire’s brother, Lord Frederick Cavendish. On 6 May Cavendish and an undersecretary, T.H. Burke, were walking in Phoenix Park in Dublin when a murder gang – the ‘Invincibles’9 – sprang out and hacked them to death with twelve-inch surgical knives. Even the Fenians were shocked by the brutality and brazenness of the outrages. The leader of the Invincibles was an Irish American, Edward McCaffrey. To murder anyone is undesirable: the murder of an amiable young man like Lord Frederick who had only just arrived in Ireland sent a good indication to the politicians that they had to deal here with something rather more formidable than the Welsh nationalists. In January 1881 a Fenian bomb had injured three people in Salford (Manchester); an unexploded bomb was found in the Mansion House in March; and again in the May of the following year. In 1883 bombs exploded in Glasgow and London, and the next year four London railway stations were closed because of terrorists, Irish conspirators attempted to blow up London Bridge, and the newly opened Underground Railway was closed by bombers.

  It was against this background of anarchic violence that we are to understand Mr Gladstone’s conversion to Home Rule for Ireland – just after the election of 1885 – as well as the extraordinary political career of Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–91), whose name, incidentally, was pronounced not Parn-elle but Parn-ull, with emphasis on the first syllable.

  Parnell, a young Protestant landlord from Avondale, Co. Wicklow, was destined to die in his wife’s arms in Brighton, in 1891, aged forty-five. It is hard for any British or Irish person to contemplate his early end, and his failure, without intense emotion; for we have lived through thirty and more disgraceful years at the end of the twentieth century in which the government of Ireland, in accordance with the wishes of its inhabitants, has been perceived, or made into, an intractable problem by generations of politicians and pundits. The nature of ‘the Irish problem’ in our time has been what to do about Ulster, prompting the question, had Parnell any idea of the strength of resistance to his Home Rule scheme which would have come from the hard-core Scottish Protestants of four Ulster counties?

  We shall never know the answer to that. It was never put to the test. The story of Ireland, and of Parnell, dominates the 1880s, and this political genius, this inspired visionary, seems all the more impressive with the perspective of the years. His very great achievement was double-handed. First – and this was the real tribute to his finely attuned political intelligence and quite extraordinary charismatic gifts, still felt at this distance as one reads about him – he persuaded the Irish nationalists, old and new-style, to rally behind his very conservative and in some respects ambiguous programme of Home Rule. That is, Ireland would have its own parliament, but remain part of the British Empire.

  The finer details – who would appoint the police, or the judges? would Irish MPs – any of them – sit in Westminster? could Britain declare war on another country and Ireland remain neutral? – were never fully worked out. Great disputes with the British Liberal Party went on regarding these issues, even when Home Rule was a going concern. The point was that even ‘Land Leaguers’ such as Davitt joined up behind Parnell, and in the course of the 1880s not only the ‘Irish party’ at Westminster but in effect the whole Irish nation united behind him. This was never to happen again, with any other figure on the Irish scene, however skilled or attractive to his followers.

  It would be out of place to tell the whole story at once, but it is necessary to realize that within a remarkably short space of time Parnell and his parliamentary party had moved from being imprisoned outlaws to coming within a whisker of ‘pacifying Ireland’ – Gladstone’s long-cherished dream. It was indeed said that for the twelvemonth of 1884–5, ‘for over a year, in a manner almost unbelievable today – Salisbury and Churchill being Parnell’s dependants first, Gladstone and Morley afterwards – the uncrowned king of Ireland had been a dictator in British politics’.10

  Parnell held on to his own revolutionary wing, his Captain Moonlight practitioners, his American desperado friends and potential bomb-makers, not by theatricality but by a genuinely radical attitude to the Land Act, brought in by Gladstone in 1881. He did not believe it went nearly far enough, and he was arrested and imprisoned at Kilmainham for urging Irish tenants to disregard it and withhold rents. It is perhaps necessary to labour the obvious and remind readers who presumably would not be holding this book in their hands if they were not comfortable and well-fed of the troglodyte existence forced upon Irish people by obdurate landlordism – described here. The harvests of the late Seventies, so ruinous t
o many English agrarian workers, threatened in Ireland a repetition of the Great Famine. Parnell was not putting on an act to win over the Fenians when he resisted the Land Bill and landlordism. He defied it with every ounce of his political blood – which is largely why landlordism was defeated, even though he himself died a failure. After the Liberal government did him the favour of locking him up in prison, the Irish felt they could trust Parnell, Protestant and landlord though he be.

  Partly through his own skill, partly as a matter of electoral good fortune, Parnell held a balance of power, both during Gladstone’s second administration of 1880–5 and, after the 1885 election, during Salisbury’s brief minority government (June 1885 to the beginning of 1886). After the election of 1880 the Liberals held 354 seats, the Conservatives 238 and the Home Rulers 65 seats; after the election of 1885, the Home Rulers had 86 seats; the Liberals 335 and the Tories 249.

  But it was at the end of 1885 and during that election that Parnell’s most outstanding political achievement was, as we should say, ‘leaked’ to the public. That is, he had converted Gladstone himself to an out-and-out commitment to Home Rule. The ‘leak’ occurred in a characteristically eccentric fashion. Just before Christmas Gladstone’s son Herbert (also his secretary) told several newspaper editors, and the National Press Agency, of his father’s conversion.11

  The timing of the ‘Hawarden Kite’, as this leak was dubbed – some say the coinage was Salisbury’s – was perhaps designed to cheer up the Irish voters, and to flush out the Tories as proponents of coercion: that is forcing tenant farmers to either pay their rents or take to the hedgerows. But it was a bold move, the beginning of the boldest and noblest phase and aspect of Gladstone’s career. Though we may think harshly of Gladstone the Christian hermit of Hawarden, the penny-pinching economic liberal who allowed the English poor to fester in their slums through four administrations; though his theatrical piety and hammy rhetoric may impress us as little as his impertinent belief that he could ‘improve’ prostitutes by talking to them for hours on end, then whipping himself with thongs given to him by Dr Pusey; though some of his foreign policy seems dictated by a need to strike moral poses while the rest was forced upon him by events; though in short we might share the personal aversion from Gladstone felt by many of his contemporaries, in his Irish policy he was more enlightened than any British leader before or since. In 1930 King George V said to his prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, ‘What fools we were not to have accepted Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill. The Empire now would not have had the Irish Free State giving us so much trouble and pulling us to pieces.’12