At a Glance
The Protestant Who Led Catholic Ireland
Charles Stewart Parnell was born in 1846 at Avondale House in County Wicklow — a Protestant landlord of Anglo-Irish stock, educated at Cambridge, with a family background that included American Revolutionary connections through his maternal grandfather, the Commodore Charles Stewart who had commanded the USS Constitution in the War of 1812. Nothing in his background obviously predicted that he would become the most powerful Irish nationalist politician of his century, the man who came closer than anyone before him to achieving Irish self-government through parliamentary means.
He entered Parliament in 1875 as MP for Meath, a largely Catholic constituency — an unusual choice by a Protestant landlord that indicated either strategic calculation, genuine identification with Irish nationalism, or both. He brought to Westminster something that Irish MPs had not previously possessed in sufficient quantity: a complete indifference to British parliamentary norms, conventions, and social pressures, a willingness to be thoroughly disliked by English politicians of all parties if Irish interests required it, and a cold analytical intelligence that understood how parliamentary procedures could be used as weapons by a determined minority.
The obstructionist tactics he developed — using the parliamentary rules to delay, frustrate, and wear down the legislative business of the House of Commons, forcing attention onto Irish issues by making it impossible to ignore them — were at once infuriating to the British political establishment and genuinely effective. He was suspended, criticised, socially ostracised, and continued regardless. His manner was that of a man who had calculated that the good opinion of the people he was obstructing was not worth having on the terms on which it was offered.
The Land League and the Alliance with Davitt
The Land League — founded by Michael Davitt in 1879 to organise tenant farmers against the rack-renting and eviction policies of Irish landlords — provided Parnell with the mass base that his parliamentary strategy needed but could not on its own generate. He became President of the Land League, linking his Home Rule political project to the land agitation that was convulsing rural Ireland, and the alliance transformed both movements. The Land League gained the political credibility and parliamentary leverage that Parnell's organisation could provide; Parnell gained the mass popular mobilisation that the Land League represented.
It was during the Land League campaign that the term "boycott" entered the English language — derived from the organised social ostracism of Captain Boycott, a land agent in County Mayo, that the League employed against those who took evicted tenants' land. The tactic was Parnell's as much as Davitt's: the application of social and economic pressure through organised collective action as an alternative to individual violence, combining the moral authority of non-violent resistance with the practical effectiveness of disrupting the economic relationships on which landlord power depended.
He was arrested and imprisoned in Kilmainham Jail in October 1881 under the Protection of Person and Property Act, which the British government had introduced to suppress the Land League agitation. The imprisonment made him a martyr and enhanced his standing enormously. From his cell he issued the No-Rent Manifesto, calling on Irish tenant farmers to withhold all rents from landlords — an escalation that the British government found sufficiently alarming to prompt the Kilmainham Treaty of April 1882, in which the government effectively agreed to address key Land League grievances in exchange for Parnell's release and his cooperation in reducing agrarian violence. The episode demonstrated his mastery of the political leverage that his position gave him.
"No man has the right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation. No man has the right to say to his country: 'Thus far shalt thou go and no further.' We have never attempted to fix the ne plus ultra to the progress of Ireland's nationhood, and we never shall."
The Conversion of Gladstone and the First Home Rule Bill
The general election of 1885 produced a result that briefly gave Parnell's Irish Parliamentary Party — now 86 MPs strong, disciplined, pledged to vote together, and constituting the balance of power between Liberals and Conservatives in the House of Commons — an extraordinary leverage over British politics. Gladstone, who had been moving toward Home Rule for years, declared for it publicly in December 1885, and the First Home Rule Bill was introduced in April 1886.
The Bill failed — defeated in the Commons by a combination of Conservatives and Liberal Unionists who broke from Gladstone on the Irish question — but its introduction was itself a remarkable achievement. Parnell had taken the cause of Irish self-government from the fringes of British political life to the centre, had persuaded the greatest British statesman of the age that it was both just and necessary, and had come within a parliamentary vote of achieving what centuries of Irish resistance had not. The failure was bitter, but the scale of what had been attempted was without precedent in Irish political history.
The subsequent years brought further attempts to destroy him through other means. In 1887 The Times published letters purportedly written by Parnell that connected him to the Phoenix Park murders of 1882 — the assassination of the Chief Secretary and Under-Secretary for Ireland by a republican splinter group. The letters were forgeries, produced by a journalist named Richard Pigott, and Parnell's cross-examination of Pigott before a Parliamentary Commission in 1889 — methodically exposing misspellings in the forged letters that proved they could not have been written by Parnell — was one of the great parliamentary triumphs of his career. His standing, temporarily damaged by the allegations, was restored and enhanced.
The O'Shea Scandal and the Fall
What his political enemies had failed to achieve, his personal life accomplished. For years Parnell had been in a relationship with Katharine O'Shea, the wife of Captain William O'Shea, a former Irish MP. The relationship was not a secret among political insiders, and Captain O'Shea had tolerated it — apparently for reasons that included financial calculations related to Katharine's inheritance prospects. When those calculations failed in 1890, O'Shea filed for divorce, naming Parnell as co-respondent.
The divorce proceedings, reported in detail in the British press in November 1890, devastated Parnell's political position. Gladstone, under pressure from Nonconformist Liberal opinion which found the scandal morally intolerable, informed the Irish Party that he could not continue the Liberal-Irish alliance if Parnell remained leader. The Irish Parliamentary Party split: a majority, under the influence of the Catholic Church and pragmatic calculation about Liberal alliance, turned against Parnell and deposed him as leader. A minority remained loyal. Irish nationalism was fractured along lines that would take a generation to heal.
Parnell fought back with extraordinary energy for a man whose health was clearly failing. He campaigned through three bitter by-elections in 1891, touring Ireland in all weathers to rally support, delivering speeches that grew in passion and desperation as the political ground shifted against him. He married Katharine O'Shea in June 1891 — a gesture of personal loyalty that impressed even some of his opponents. He died on 6 October 1891, in Brighton, aged 45. The cause of death was officially pneumonia, but those who had watched his final months understood that a man who had driven himself as he had, through the winter campaigns of 1890–91, had not so much died of illness as of what the illness found when it arrived.
The Uncrowned King and His Unfinished Kingdom
The generation that came after Parnell — the generation of the Easter Rising — grew up in the shadow of his fall. Yeats, who wrote several of his most powerful poems about Parnell's fate, saw in it the definitive statement of how Ireland treated those who served it most faithfully: with betrayal, with clerical denunciation, with the abandonment of the man who had given everything for a cause that then rejected him for the sake of British Liberal support. The bitterness of that lesson was not forgotten by the men who concluded, in 1916, that parliamentary methods had been exhausted.
Yet Parnell's achievement was real and substantial, and its influence extended beyond his death in ways that his immediate successors sometimes failed to acknowledge. The disciplined parliamentary party he created was the model that John Redmond tried to use to extract Home Rule from the British government in the years before 1914 — and very nearly succeeded. The Land Acts that followed the Land League campaign transformed Irish rural society, gradually transferring land ownership from landlords to tenant farmers in one of the most significant redistributions of property in modern Irish history. The expectation of self-government that he had made mainstream in Irish political culture was not destroyed by his fall — it continued, was frustrated, and eventually exploded in 1916 and after.
He was carried to his grave in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, in driving rain, before a crowd estimated at 200,000 people. The split he had presided over did not end with his death. Ireland, as he had understood better than most, was not an easy country to lead — and the men who tried to lead it after him found that the divisions he had managed by force of personality and political genius were not easily managed by anyone else. He remains, in Irish political memory, the greatest might-have-been: the man who came closest, through purely constitutional means, to achieving the Irish self-government that eventually required revolution and partition to arrive at, incompletely and at enormous cost.