They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  ‘Truth is the Law of God,’ wrote Confucius. ‘Acquired Truth is the Law of Man. Being indestructible it is eternal. Being self-existent, it is infinite.’

  For myself, I haven’t got much of a God, and certainly no religion. Crack open a falcon’s egg and that slime knows all the laws of aerodynamics a thousand millennia before Christ. Is that God? I really couldn’t say. But I hope there’s a deity somewhere, some indestructible truth, that these men who countenanced such evil might face the justice of the angels.

  * See Appendix II, ‘A Very Curious Letter’.

  Appendix I

  The Parnell Frame-Up

  Although born in Dublin, Robert Anderson despised the Irish, or rather any Irishman who wasn’t a Conservative Unionist. ‘He belonged to one of those Irish Protestant families who had the fiercest hatred and dread of the purposes of the majority of their countrymen.’ He was the younger son of a family ‘who for at least two generations had given their zealous and effective support to the open and secret forces that were arrayed against the Nationalists and the Nationalist Party’. Anderson wanted to be an Englishman, and the closest he could get was slavish subservience to English interests. ‘No one could suppose,’ he wrote, ‘[that] the United Kingdom will tamely consent to be swamped by a horde of [Irish] paupers and agitators.’

  His father was Crown Solicitor at Dublin, his brother Samuel a solicitor in the Crown Prosecution Department, and Anderson himself a rising star in the political police. All three operated out of Dublin Castle, which throughout Victoria’s reign was one of the world’s great citadels of despotic repression. It was from the Castle that Anderson ran his network of intrigue, agents provocateurs and coppers’ narks.

  Business was always brisk. Over a million Irish people had died in the great famine of 1846, and three million had been forced to emigrate. ‘Ireland is boiling over and the scum flows across the Atlantic,’ was a typical comment from the British press of the day. They took their tears and their hatred with them, and occasionally they came back with dynamite. The British had created what they most feared. Half of Ireland’s population were now out of their control. In the slums of Baltimore and Boston young Irishmen with revenge in mind formed secret societies. Wilful government blindness empowered these ‘Fenian’ outrages, when the solution was timeless, universal, and simple: if you want to stop terrorism, get out of their fucking country.

  Ireland was an imperial adjunct in a state of permanent defeat; law was whatever came out of a soldier’s mouth. What resistance there was, was quelled without quarter, its patriots arrested, incarcerated, sometimes tortured and not infrequently hanged. Since the time of Oliver Cromwell, Ireland had been a de facto police state. Nascent hopes of independence were crushed in an ‘orgy of corruption’ when in 1800 the Irish were traduced into an act of permanent union with Great Britain. Byron called it ‘the Union of a shark with its prey’, and half a lifetime later Prime Minister William Gladstone agreed: ‘There is no crime recorded in history which will compare for a moment with the means by which the Union was brought about.’ Thereafter cordial relations were sustained by the enduring presence of 35,000 British bayonets.

  For most of his political career Gladstone had supported the imperial presence. But in 1886 he had a change of mind and declared himself in favour of Home Rule (i.e. the government of Ireland by the Irish). A frisson of horror ran through the moneyed classes, their anguish in direct correlation to their wealth. Salisbury called it ‘the greatest threat to Empire since Napoleon’, and Victoria fouled her corset. The name of the game was acquiring countries, not giving them up. Gladstone was ‘plunging a knife into the heart of the British Empire’. She already loathed him – ‘a dangerous old fanatic’ – and since the Fenians had tried to dynamite a statue of her dead husband in Dublin, she similarly despised the Irish. ‘No one would go to Ireland,’ she gawped; ‘people only go there when they have their estates to attend to.’

  Her point of view was precisely the Irish point of view, but from a rather different perspective. Over the centuries land grabs had created vast estates, with palatial houses built for migrating English aristocrats. They stole the best of it. The Irish got the rocks and the bogs. No one had ever pretended any subtlety of intention: rip off the real estate, then rent an acre or two to the people who had owned it – and if they couldn’t pay, or wouldn’t pay, kick their arses off, demolish their hovels, and let them starve. ‘I have seen the Indian in his forest, and the Negro in his chains,’ wrote a French traveller, Gustave de Beaumont, ‘and I thought then I beheld the lowest terms of human misery, but I did not know the lot of Ireland.’

  A minute more of the British was a minute too many, and for the first time in decades there seemed to be a reason for the Irish to hope.

  The Act of Union had furnished seats in the Westminster Parliament for Irish Nationalists. In 1886 there were fifty-seven of them, led by a forty-year-old enigma called Charles Stewart Parnell. Resistance to British rule was defined by this indefatigable Irishman. His political genius was acknowledged by all, but fathomable by nobody. ‘He achieved his unique success by the possession of a unique capacity of holding his tongue,’ was the judgement of W.T. Stead. Parnell was a man sparse of words, ‘but when he spoke he was obeyed’.

  Parnell put an end to Fenian violence, depriving his Conservative opponents of a staple of condemnation. He fought the Rt Honourable Gents on their own terms. In debate he was ‘Invincible’, wrote the Irish historian Shane Lesley: ‘more than a politician, he was a Principle, and Principles are not easily broken’.

  The fifty-seven Nationalist MPs held the balance of power in a precarious Parliament, and Parnell made no secret of his indifference to the asinine squabbling of British party politics. He would side with anyone, Tory or Liberal, if there was a deal to be done on the side of Ireland. His association with Gladstone over Home Rule was a catastrophe for the Conservatives. The London Stock Exchange lost a quarter of its value, bleeding £4 million, an astronomical hit for the 1880s, but mere pocket money compared to the £100 million sterling the City and its bandits had leaning on the security of Irish real estate.

  Salisbury, who replaced Gladstone as Prime Minister in July 1886, knew very well that he couldn’t counter Home Rule by parliamentary means. Forget democracy – democracy wasn’t up to the crisis. Voting was all very well when you knew you were going to win, but worthless in these circumstances. Something more exotic was required. They were going to have to devise a way to eradicate the mad old idiot Gladstone, and to neutralise Home Rule in the process. In short, they were going to have to fit Parnell up.

  By now Anderson had quit Dublin, and was operating out of London. He’d brought his Bible with him. When he wasn’t pawing through it he was preaching from his local pulpit, putting himself about like some sort of secretary to the late Jesus Christ. Years later, when he was finally rumbled for the viper he was, the contemporary verdict was harsh. He had ‘violated the traditions of the high position he held’, and was a man of ‘violent political prejudices’ so all-consuming ‘that they often blind him to the difference between what is right and what is wrong’.

  The Right Hon. Viscount Lord Salisbury had once remarked, ‘Ireland awoke the slumbering genius of British Imperialism.’ It was wide awake now, and seeing it controlled a quarter of the land surface of the earth, Charles Parnell was about to discover that he had something to worry about.

  On 21 December 1886, somebody placed an advertisement in The Times:

  AUTOGRAPHS WANTED – TEN POUNDS will be given by the advertiser for a collection of not less than TWENTY AUTOGRAPHS of distinguished PARLIAMENTARY LEADERS … To include: Mr Gladstone, Lord Hartington, Sir William Harcourt, Mr Bright, Mr Chamberlain, Lord Salisbury, Lord Randolph Churchill, Mr Parnell, Mr Sexton, and Sir M. Hicks-Beach, must be supplied within the next fortnight.

  This seemingly innocuous ad was in fact the precursor of one of the filthiest conspiracies in British parliamentary history. Every department
of state was marshalled as required in the plot against Parnell, and that included the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard.

  Throughout the latter period of 1888, the government conspiracy ran in parallel with the Ripper – uncannily so, almost on a day-to-day basis. Anderson had ‘gone on holiday’ on the day Polly Nichols was murdered, and returned to London on the day of the ‘Double Event’. Anyone who believed he was genuinely vacationing in France might not quite have a grip on what was going on. The two chiefs of Metropolitan Police, (Sir) Robert Anderson and Sir Charles Warren, were respectively concocting evidence in order to destroy Parnell, and destroying evidence in order to protect the Ripper.

  In both cases the motivation of these God-sodden zealots was to safeguard the perceived interests of Her Majesty’s ruling elite. The House of Commons looked like what it was, a museum of Conservative well-being. Indifferent to anything but its own self-interest, Parliament belonged to wealth and was rotten to its sanctimonious marrow. Arthur Balfour, promoted by his uncle, Salisbury, to Secretary of State for Ireland in 1887, famously said, ‘It doesn’t matter which party is in office, the Conservatives are always in power,’ and nobody was arguing with that.

  Balfour quickly established his credentials as a dictatorial bitch. Known in some quarters as ‘Pretty Fanny’, he soon acquired a change of name in Ireland, where he was known as ‘Bloody Balfour’. His complicity in the Parnell conspiracy was already well advanced. Most of it was conducted in secret, but as an overt element, he was poised to introduce a new ‘Coercion Act’ that would practically make it illegal to be Irish, or more specifically, an Irish Nationalist. Under these new statutes, any person could be arrested for any reason, or without any reason, and imprisoned indefinitely without trial. Protest was irrelevant, as the protection promised in Habeas Corpus was no longer applicable. Viscount Salisbury had written, ‘A more arbitrary government, that was not squeamish about forms of law, or particularly about hanging the wrong man occasionally, might succeed where previous legislation has failed.’

  Cunningly synchronised to coincide with the introduction of ‘Fanny’s Act’, something of equal odium was on its way out of Fleet Street. On 18 March 1887 The Times printed the first of a series of seven articles titled ‘Parnellism and Crime’. Authored anonymously with escalating venom, and published between March and May, their litany of accusation caused the required sensation, stunning Parnell’s friends and delighting his foes. It was no accident that The Times had been selected as the vehicle for the destruction of the Irish leader. If something was in ‘the world’s greatest newspaper’ it had to be true, and on that chill London morning as Parliament assembled, it looked as if the game for Home Rule was up.

  Parnell’s domestic organisation was known as the Land League, and out of it had evolved the Plan of Campaign. Both outfits were dedicated to ameliorating the lot of Ireland’s agricultural workers, resisting the imposition of punitive rents and summary evictions (by the thousands) of those who couldn’t pay. Both were popular with the people, and although they achieved only minimal reform, they were rather too successful for those with their hands in the Irish till. With spectacular hypocrisy, Balfour declared the Plan of Campaign a ‘criminal conspiracy’, then nipped down to Fleet Street to organise his own. The first instalment of ‘Parnellism and Crime’ was an omen of the ill to come. Dismissing whatever legitimate advances the Land League had made, The Times put its spite in like a hooligan’s boot. It was a tirade of libel designed to force Parnell into one of Salisbury’s courts. If he sued, he’d lose; if he didn’t, he was guilty: ‘Be the ultimate goal of these men what it will,’ squawked The Times, ‘they are content to march toward it in the company of murderers. Murderers provide their funds, murderers share their inmost councils, murderers have gone forth from the League offices to set their bloody work afoot and have presently returned to consult their constitutional leaders in the advancement of their cause.’

  Over the next eight weeks ‘Parnellism and Crime’ continued to bludgeon the public with ever more ferocious propaganda. It would accuse Parnell of every conceivable felony; every violence he abhorred and struggled to rectify he was now blamed for, impugned as its instigator down to the last renegade bullet. ‘That worthless man,’ Victoria called him, ‘who had to answer for so many lives lost’ (indifferent to the million Irish dead on her own rap sheet).

  Yelling ‘Murderer’ in Parnell’s face and goading him to sue, The Times was anxious to keep a focus on the slanders. ‘Unless further steps are taken to bring the matter before a court of law,’ it proclaimed with bogus rectitude, ‘it is difficult to see what more we can do to prove our own good faith, and the charges we believe to be true.’

  No deal from Parnell, who would put the faith of a tapeworm before that of The Times, knowing full well that in respect of Ireland there wasn’t a judge in the kingdom who wouldn’t pimp for Salisbury and his government.

  Lack of traction caused The Times to change tack, switching from Ireland to the supposed terrorist contacts Parnell maintained in the United States. The last three articles in the series were titled ‘Behind the Scenes in America’, and were compositions of unleashed bigotry. When the first of the articles appeared it was accompanied by the facsimile of a letter, claimed by The Times as part of its as yet unpublished evidence, ‘which has a most serious bearing on the Parnellite conspiracy. We publish one such document in facsimile today, and invite Mr Parnell to explain how his signature has become attached to such a letter … written a week after the Phoenix Park murders, excusing his public condemnation of the crime, and distinctly condoning if not approving of the murder of Mr Burke.’

  The assassination of Thomas Burke, together with Lord Frederick Cavendish, in Phoenix Park, Dublin, on 6 May 1882, was one of the most infamous murders in all Ireland’s history. Burke was Permanent Under Secretary at Dublin Castle, and had acquired the hazardous reputation of being ‘a devoted and most fearless servant of the Crown’. It was for precisely that reason that an extreme faction of the Fenians known as ‘the Invincibles’ had an ‘order of execution’ on the ‘Castle Rat’. The unfortunate Cavendish, who had been newly appointed Viceroy, happened to be walking with him as the Invincibles struck. Both were slashed to pieces with surgical knives. What made the event particularly tragic, and fuel for the screech of the newspapers, was that Cavendish was a benevolent and compassionate man, whose plans for reform would have brought glad tidings to Ireland. Instead the nation stood accused, energising Conservative fury for ever more repression. With customary venom The Times sank to the occasion, recommending that the innocent Irish population of England ‘should be massacred’, and Irish leaders blamed for an outrage at which they despaired.

  Although Parnell was in prison under Gladstonian edict at the time of the murders, he was blamed then, and in The Times’s rhetoric five years later, he was guilty of complicity now. Repackaging him with the Invincibles, who incidentally spat the name Parnell, condemning his constitutional efforts as a waste of air, ‘Parnellism and Crime’ all but put a bloody knife in his hand.

  Such outrageous accusations had been rebutted by Parnell as ‘a cold and frigid lie’. But The Times didn’t want denials, it wanted him in court, and claimed that its latest public fiction, substantiating the facsimile letter, was ‘in harmony with the language of some of his allies beyond the Atlantic’: ‘We have in our possession several undoubted examples of Mr Parnell’s signature [obtained by means of the cunning ad requesting autographs] and there can be no doubt of the genuineness of the letter … If these charges are false, Mr Parnell and his friends can resort to an easy and effectual remedy. The courts of law are open to them [and] they would have an opportunity of proving that the whole story of their association with [various Fenians here named] had been fabricated in the offices of this journal.’

  At least something these hyenas wrote was accurate. The whole story had essentially been fabricated in the offices of The Times. It’s easy to forget that this
rubbish had little to do with Irish terrorism, and everything to do with British cash. Meanwhile, its mouthpiece Salisbury was on his feet taunting Gladstone at a Conservative assembly, informing his audience that from the dawn of Parliament they would never find a prime minister countenancing an ally ‘tainted with a strong presumption of connivance at assassination, which has been accepted by Mr Gladstone’. His speech was made within twenty-four hours of publication of the facsimile letter, and is as apt an explanation as any of why Parnell would not bring an action in an English court.

  If the Prime Minister had already expressed his conviction of Parnell’s guilt, what hope did he have in front of one of those carcasses from the Athenaeum? But so far so good for the government. By now various Irish MPs were in prison for sedition, and Parnell’s political stock was crashing. He had but one defence, of scant consequence to the conspiracy mobilising against him, and that was the truth.

  The facsimile letter was a forgery, and as always the ominous presence of Robert Anderson was in the vicinity. He had had a clandestine hand in framing some of the ‘Coercion Acts’, underpinning much of the venom that went into ‘Parnellism and Crime’. But it was this counterfeit letter that rose above the general feculence. The letter and a dozen like it had been procured via the services of an ‘intimate personal friend’ of Anderson with whom he was oft to pray. His Christian sidekick was a young Dublin journalist and son of a prison officer called Edward Caulfield Houston. As manic as his pal in the political police, Houston was secretary to ‘the Irish Loyal and Patriotic Union’, an ultra-conservative outfit that, according to one contemporary observer, was ‘composed of the lineal descendants of degenerates who had betrayed their country for peerages and monetary reward, of grasping lawyers on the make, and academic gentlemen on the look out for jobs’. Considering this was the opinion of William Joyce, a police official at Dublin Castle and ostensibly on the same ticket, these anti-Home Rule fanatics were unquestionably bad news.