Charles Stewart Parnell
Charles Stewart Parnell was an Irish nationalist politician who served as a leader of the Home Rule League from 1880 to 1882, and then of the Irish Parliamentary Party from 1882 to 1891, holding the balance of power in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom during the Home Rule debates of 1885–1886. He was a Member of Parliament from 1875 to 1891. He fell from power following revelations of a long-term affair, and died at age 45.
Born into a powerful Anglo-Irish Protestant landowning family in County Wicklow, he was a land reform agitator and founder of the Irish National Land League in 1879. He became leader of the Home Rule League, operating independently of the Liberal Party, winning great influence by his balancing of constitutional, radical, and economic issues, and by his skilful use of parliamentary procedure.
He was imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin, in 1882, but he was released when he renounced violent extra-parliamentary action. The same year, he reformed the Home Rule League as the Irish Parliamentary Party, which he controlled minutely as Britain's first disciplined democratic party..
The hung parliament after the 1885 general election saw him hold the balance of power between William Gladstone's Liberal Party and Lord Salisbury's Conservative Party. His power was one factor in Gladstone's adoption of Home Rule as the central tenet of the Liberal Party. Parnell's reputation peaked from 1889 to 1890, after letters published in The Times, linking him to the Phoenix Park killings of 1882, were shown to have been forged by Richard Pigott.
In 1890, he was a co-respondent in divorce proceedings due to his long relationship with Katherine O'Shea. This led many British Liberals, many of whom were Nonconformists, to refuse to work with him, and to a split in the Irish Parliamentary Party split, and engendering strong opposition from Catholic bishops. He headed a small minority faction until his death in 1891.
Parnell's funeral was attended by 200,000, and the day of his death is remembered as Ivy Day. Parnell Square and Parnell Street in Dublin are named after him, and he is celebrated as the best organiser of an Irish political party up to that time, and one of the most formidable figures in parliamentary history.
Early life
Charles Stewart Parnell was born in Avondale House, County Wicklow. He was the third son and seventh child of John Henry Parnell, a wealthy Anglo-Irish Anglican landowner, and his American wife Delia Tudor Stewart of Bordentown, New Jersey, daughter of the American naval hero Admiral Charles Stewart. There were eleven children in all: five boys and six girls. Admiral Stewart's mother, Parnell's great-grandmother, belonged to the Tudor family, so Parnell had a distant relationship with the British royal family. John Henry Parnell himself was a cousin of one of Ireland's leading aristocrats, Viscount Powerscourt, and also the grandson of a Chancellor of the Exchequer in Grattan's Parliament, Sir John Parnell, who lost office in 1799, when he opposed the Act of Union.The Parnells of Avondale were descended from a Protestant English merchant family, which came to prominence in Congleton, Cheshire, early in the 17th century where two generations held the office of Mayor of Congleton before moving to Ireland. The family produced a number of notable figures, including Thomas Parnell, the Irish poet, and Henry Parnell, 1st Baron Congleton, the Irish politician. Parnell's grandfather William Parnell, who inherited the Avondale Estate in 1795, was an Irish liberal Party MP for Wicklow from 1817 to 1820. Thus, from birth, Charles Stewart Parnell possessed an extraordinary number of links to many elements of society; he was linked to the old Irish Parliamentary tradition via his great-grandfather and grandfather, to the American War of Independence via his grandfather, to the War of 1812. Parnell belonged to the Church of Ireland, disestablished in 1868 though in later years he began to drop away from formal church attendance; and he was connected with the aristocracy through the Powerscourts. Yet it was as a leader of Irish Nationalism that Parnell established his fame.
Parnell's parents separated when he was six, and as a boy, he was sent to different schools in England, where he spent an unhappy youth. His father died in 1859 and he inherited the Avondale estate, while his older brother John inherited another estate in County Armagh. He then lived for a period at 14 Upper Temple Street, Dublin. The young Parnell studied at Magdalene College, Cambridge but, due to the troubled financial circumstances of the estate he inherited, he was absent a great deal and never completed his degree. In 1871, he joined his elder brother John Howard Parnell, who farmed in Alabama, on an extended tour of the United States. Their travels took them mostly through the South and apparently, the brothers neither spent much time in centres of Irish immigration nor sought out Irish-Americans.
In 1874, he became High Sheriff of Wicklow, his home county in which he was also an officer in the Wicklow Militia. He was noted as an improving landowner who played an important part in opening the south Wicklow area to industrialisation. His attention was drawn to the theme dominating the Irish political scene of the mid-1870s, Isaac Butt's Home Rule League formed in 1873 to campaign for a moderate degree of self-government. It was in support of this movement that Parnell first tried to stand for election in Wicklow, but as high sheriff was disqualified. He was unsuccessful as a home rule candidate in the 1874 County Dublin by-election.
Rise to political power
On 17 April 1875, Parnell was first elected to the House of Commons in a by-election for Meath, as a Home Rule League MP, backed by Fenian Patrick Egan. He replaced the deceased League MP, veteran Young Irelander John Martin. Parnell later sat for the constituency of Cork City, from 1880 until 1891.During his first year as an MP, Parnell remained a reserved observer of parliamentary proceedings. He first came to attention in the public eye in 1876, when he claimed in the House of Commons that he did not believe that any murder had been committed by Fenians in Manchester. That drew the interest of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a physical force Irish organisation that had staged a rebellion in 1867. Parnell made it his business to cultivate Fenian sentiments both in Britain and Ireland and became associated with the more radical wing of the Home Rule League, which included Joseph Biggar, John O'Connor Power , Edmund Dwyer-Gray, and Frank Hugh O'Donnell. He engaged with them and played a leading role in a policy of obstructionism to force the House to pay more attention to Irish issues, which had previously been ignored. Obstruction involved giving lengthy speeches which were largely irrelevant to the topic at hand. This behaviour was opposed by the less aggressive chairman of the Home Rule League, Isaac Butt.
Parnell visited the United States that year, accompanied by O'Connor Power. The question of Parnell's closeness to the IRB, and whether indeed he ever joined the organisation, has been a matter of academic debate for a century. The evidence suggests that later, following the signing of the Kilmainham Treaty, Parnell did take the IRB oath, possibly for tactical reasons. What is known is that IRB involvement in the League's sister organisation, the Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain, led to the moderate Butt's ousting from its presidency and the election of Parnell in his place, on 28 August 1877. Parnell was a restrained speaker in the House of Commons, but his organisational, analytical and tactical skills earned wide praise, enabling him to take on the presidency of the British organisation. Butt died in 1879, and was replaced as chairman of the Home Rule League by the Whig-oriented William Shaw. Shaw's victory was only temporary.
New departure
From August 1877, Parnell held a number of private meetings with prominent Fenian leaders. He visited Paris where he met John O'Leary and J. J. O'Kelly both of whom were impressed by him and reported positively to the most capable and militant Leader of the American republican Clan na Gael organisation, John Devoy. In December 1877, at a reception for Michael Davitt on his release from prison, he met William Carrol who assured him of Clan na Gael's support in the struggle for Irish self-government. This led to a meeting in March 1878 between influential constitutionalists, Parnell and Frank Hugh O'Donnell, and leading Fenians O'Kelly, O'Leary and Carroll. This was followed by a telegram from John Devoy in October 1878 which offered Parnell a "New Departure" deal of separating militancy from the constitutional movement as a path to all-Ireland self-government, under certain conditions: abandonment of a federal solution in favour of separatist self-government, vigorous agitation in the land question on the basis of peasant proprietorship, exclusion of all sectarian issues, collective voting by party members and energetic resistance to coercive legislation.Parnell preferred to keep all options open without clearly committing himself when he spoke in 1879 before Irish Tenant Defence Associations at Ballinasloe and Tralee. It was not until Davitt persuaded him to address a second meeting at Westport, County Mayo in June that he began to grasp the potential of the land reform movement. At a national level, several approaches were made which eventually produced the "New Departure" of June 1879, endorsing the foregone informal agreement which asserted an understanding binding them to mutual support and a shared political agenda. In addition, the New Departure endorsed the Fenian movement and its armed strategies. Working together with Davitt he now took on the role of leader of the New Departure, holding platform meeting after platform meeting around the country. Throughout the autumn of 1879, he repeated the message to tenants, after the long depression had left them without income for rent: