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CURIOSITIES OF POLITICS II.— PARNELL

CURIOSITIES OF POLITICS

A series of monographs on re¬ markable personalities of the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries. Edited by PHILIP GUEDALLA

Already -published

ROBERT OWEN. By G. D. H. Cole

In preparation

PALMERSTON. By Philip Guedalla

DISRAELI. By D, L. Murray

GEORGE III. By R. R. Sedgwick

JOHN STUART MILL. By W. L. Piercy

GEORGE IV. By Shane Leslie

CHARLES STEWART PARNELL

PARNELL

By ST. JOHN ERVINE

Judge them not harshly in a love Whose hold on them was strong;

Sorrow therein they tasted of,

And deeply, and too long.”

Merlin's prologue to The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Corn¬ wall, by Thomas Hardy.

BOSTON

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

J925

Printed in the United States of America

TO

J. L. GARVIN

4

Biography, although we might be pardoned for forgetting it, is the painting of portraits ♦ Such portraits, always of a man, are sometimes also of a place and time ; and since they are pictures, it is, I fear, impossible to paint them without a touch of art ♦ A depressing convention has made us more familiar with the mechanical exercise, which casts a death-mask and calls it a Memoir ; and some inexplicable courtesy continues to multiply those dismal products in which the official biographer vies with the monumental mason . But our own time has seen a welcome revival of the art, as distinct from the industry, of biography ; and it is the pur¬ pose of the present gallery to bring together a few portraits from competent hands . The subjects have been chosen from the incomparable procession of English public life in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries . One or two are unrecorded ; some have already received memorial treatment ; but of all, I think, our memory would be the better for a portrait in true perspective, painted, as such things should be, from the life, executed in colour, and finding room for an appropriate background .

PHILIP GU ED ALLA.

Vil

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I AM deeply indebted to Mrs. J. Howard Parnell, the widow of Parnell's elder brother, and to Major Alfred Tudor Mac- Dermott, Parnell's nephew, for help and information freely given to me in writing this book. I owe much to Miss K. E. Younge, of Queen's County; to Mr. Robert Johnston, of Belfast; to Dr. J. G. Crone, Mr. J. R. Fisher, and Mr. G. W. Davis, of London, for assistance of the most varied and valuable character, without which the book could not have been written.

The following is a list of books which have been consulted :

Life of Charles Stewart Parnell . By Thomas Sherlock.

(Dublin: T. D. Sullivan. 1880.)

Parnell and the Parnells . By R. Johnston. (London : Simpkin, Marshall and Co. 1888.)

The Parnell Movement . By T. P. O'Connor, M.P. (London: T. Fisher Unwin. 1889.)

Under which Flag? or, Is Parnell to be the Leader of the Irish People? By a “ Gutter Sparrow.'' (Dublin : J. J. Lalor. 1890.)

The Discrowned King of Ireland. By W. T. Stead. (London: ** Review of Reviews." 1890.)

Life of Charles Stewart Parnell. By T. P. O'Connor, M.P.

(London: Ward, Lock, Bowden and Co. 1891.)

Life of Charles Stewart Parnell. By R. Barry O'Brien. (Two vols. London : Smith, Elder and Co. 1899.)

A Patriot's Mistake. By Emily Monroe Dickinson. (Dublin:

Hodges, Figgis and Co. 1905.)

Charles Stewart Parnell. By Katharine O’Shea. (Two vols.

London: Cassell and Co. 1914O Charles Stewart Parnell. By his brother, John Howard Parnell. (London: Constable and Co. 1916.)

Chief and Tribune : Parnell and Davitt. By M. M. O’Hara. (Dublin: Maunsell and Co. 1919.)

IX

Author’s Note

I have also consulted a variety of biographies, which are noted in the text, and many English and Irish newspapers.

I may, perhaps, here intrude a personal note. I began to write this book with a feeling of prejudice against Parnell. I ended it with a feeling of deep affection for him.

Cannes,

1924-1925.

ST. JOHN ERVINE.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER !♦ HIS FAMILY -	-	-	PAGE 13
ii.	HIS CHILDHOOD AN^ YOUTH	-	-	48
m.	HIS ENTRY INTO POLITICS	-	-	90
IV.	HIS POLICY OF OBSTRUCTION	-	-	IOO
V.	HE BECOMES LEADER OF THE IRISH	PARTY	-	128
VI.	THE LAND LEAGUE; THE BOYCOTT; AND MRS. O’SHEA	149
VII.	THE PHCENIX PARK MURDERS	-	-	191
VIII.	THE FIRST HOME RULE BILL	-	-	207
IX.	THE PIGOTT FORGERIES	-	-	240
X.	THE DIVORCE SUIT	-	-	269
XI.	DEATH OF PARNELL	-	-	302
XII.	THE END OF AVONDALE	-	-	319
	INDEX -	-	-	329

xi

PARNELL

CHAPTER I HI'S FAMILY

I

About the year 1863, a tall, intense, and handsome girl, with dark hair and hazel eyes, used occasionally to walk, heavily veiled, from her mother's town house at 14, Upper Temple Street, Dublin, to an office near to Dublin Castle, where a Fenian newspaper, founded in that year by John O'Leary, was published. Her serious manner and studious looks were surprisingly accompanied by a witty tongue, for it is not common for a woman to be both witty in her speech and serious in her behaviour, but she showed none of her wit when she entered the office of the Irish People . As a rule she made these visits to newspaper offices alone — she afterwards contributed poems and articles to the Nation and the United Irishman— but sometimes her elder brother, a tall, lanky, stammering, handsome youth of nineteen, went with her. They would enter the editor's office, where the girl would place a manuscript, generally of a poem, in the editor's hands, and then, as silently and as unobtrusively as they had entered, she and her brother would withdraw. The poems and articles were signed “ Aleria," and they had a finer quality than is commonly to be found in poems full of political passion. Had she been less engaged in argument and controversy and patriotic propaganda, she would probably have become a distinguished writer; but she belonged to a country which has always turned its poets into politicians, and she was governed by a mother who made her diversion from poetry to politics unavoidable. Her name was Fanny Parnell, and her age was fourteen. Her brother, John Howard Parnell,

13

Parnell

vaguely sympathised with her views on the government of Ireland, but her second brother, to whom she was devoted, and by whom she was deeply loved, neither sympathised with her views nor would he ever accompany her on her missions to the Fenian papers. When she shyly showed him her poems, he laughed at her.

Ireland, at that time, was full of Fenians from America. These men had fought in the Civil War, and, remeftibering their nationality when it was over, decided to declare war on England, so that they might set Ireland free. Some of them made an abortive raid into Canada; others enlisted in Irish regiments quartered in Ireland and tried to convert their comrades to sedition (in which they were so successful that the alarmed authorities transferred the troops to England and to India) ; others took part in dynamite conspiracies to blow up the Houses of Parliament and public buildings in England; and some were merely spongers on the movement. These last, for the most part, and a few that were honest, discovered that Mrs. Parnell would open her purse and home to them, and it soon became common for a procession of dishevelled men, professing the highest patriotism and the most noble sentiments, to call at 14, Upper Temple Street for nourish¬ ment and money. The sight was obnoxious to the authorities, who noted in their dossiers the singular fact that a lady of the land-owning class was toying with treason; but it was still more obnoxious to the lady’s second son, Charles Stewart Parnell, a young militia officer, who bluntly asserted that the patriots were tramps. His disgust with them was such that he used to lie in wait for them behind the hall door, and, directly it was open, make a rush for them and kick them down the steps.1 His dislike of the Fenians was as strong as his sister’s affection for them, and since his temper was quick and fierce and sometimes uncontrollable, he caused dismay among 1 Charles Stewart Parnell, by his brother, John Howard Parnell, p. 70.

14

His Family

the patriots who thronged about his mother's doon This house was so divided against itself that the Fenians had to be careful how they approached it in search of sustenance and charity.

Matters went on in this bickering way until the authorities, thoroughly frightened, decided to suppress the Fenian papers and arrest the editors. The Irish People and the United Irishman were raided and put down. John O'Leary, Thomas Clarke Luby, Charles Kickham, and O'Donovan Rossa were tried for treason and sent to penal servitude for twenty years. That was in the year 1865. Fanny Parnell, feeling that she, too, if she had her rights, would be in the dock by O'Donovan Rossa's side, attended every day at his trial, with her elder brother, and was so moved by his courageous demeanour that she persuaded John to buy a bouquet of flowers which they purposed to throw to him in court. But the majesty of the law overawed them, and the flowers withered in their hands. The authorities, having disposed of the major culprits, now prepared to teach a lesson to the minor ones. Mrs. Parnell had not only encouraged suspicious characters to assemble at her house for food and money, despite the efforts of her second son to kick them from it, but had even enabled a Fenian named John Murphy, who was involved in a dynamite outrage in Manchester, to escape in female clothing to America. The police obtained a search warrant, and entered her house, which they ransacked from cellar to attic. They found militia uniforms belonging to John Howard, who was in the Armagh Light Infantry, and Charles, who was in the Wicklow Rifles, and — such is the intelligence of the police — mistook them for Fenian regimentals, and carried them away ! There was a scene of anger when Charles discovered that his uniform and sword had been seized in the belief that they were emblems of sedition, and he darkly murmured that he would one day give the police something better to do than turning his sister

*5

Parnell

into the street.1 This was Fanny, who, scorning the enemies of her country, refused to stay under the same roof with them, and abruptly departed for Hood's Hotel, in Great Brunswick Street.

When his rage had abated, he began to tease his mother, and to warn her that her Fenian sympathies might yet bring her into grave trouble ; but it was apparent that the feeling of anger remained, despite his teasing, and it was revived when, a short time after the seizure, an invitation to a levee at the Castle came from the Viceroy, Lord Carlisle, who was a close personal friend of Mrs. Parnell. The young militia officers were eager to attend the levee, but, alas ! their uniforms were possessed by the police. The fact that they were treated as Fenian uniforms seemed extraordinarily to irritate Charles, who was proud of his commission in the Queen’s army, and resented being regarded as a Fenian. “ This preyed upon his mind,” says his brother John,2 “ and he finally declared that he would leave the house if anything more was said about the Fenians.” It will seem a trifling matter for a man to brood upon, but when one realises what the temper of the time was, and the class to which Charles Parnell belonged, the matter becomes less trifling than it now seems. Moreover, he had a proud and sensitive nature, and he could not easily endure the chaff from his brother officers in the Wicklow Rifles which he was ready enough to scatter over his mother.

II

Fanny Parnell’s poems, wherever they appeared, were identical in tone : they sounded a loud note of love for Ireland and a louder note of hatred for England. She scourged her countrymen with her pen, incessantly urging them to re-

1 Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, by R. Barry O'Brien, vol. i., p. 47.

2 Charles Stewart Parnell, by John Howard Parnell.

16

His Family

member their manhood and to prepare themselves for what¬ soever hardship they might have. to endure in the deliverance of their country. “ The birds of prey," she wrote:

The birds of prey are hovering round, the vultures wheel and swoop — They come, the coroneted ghouls, with drum-beat and with troop — They come to fatten on your flesh, your children’s and your wives’; Ye die but once — hold fast your lands, and if you can, your lives.

And when she had done with these descriptions of her own relations, she turned to the Irish and made her appeals to them in terms which were not innocent of contempt:

Oh, by the God who made us all — the seignor and the serf.

Rise up ! and swear this day to hold your own green Irish turf ;

Rise up 1 and plant your feet as men where now you crawl as slaves. And make your harvest-fields your camps, or make of them your graves.

The verses she was writing for the Irish People were not so accomplished as those, but they were equally fiery, and they were meat and drink to the Fenians, who printed them with pride and pleasure. If she were writing like this in her green youth, what would she be writing in her maturity ! The small knowledge they had of her must have stimulated their minds, for she was an aristocrat and a member of a wealthy, land-owning family with an honourable record in Irish affairs. If a sense of humour had been a Southern Irish possession, the Fenians might have found cause for ironic comment in the spectacle of this girl describing a considerable number of her relatives as “ coroneted ghouls," but since a sense of humour has been denied by heaven to the Southern Irish, they thought only of the singular fact that not once, but many times, in the history of Ireland had a leader of rebels against England come from the families of the Ascendancy, and they may have entertained their thoughts with the dream that this young, girl would fearlessly follow in the footsteps of Lord Edward Fitzgerald. The B 17

Parnell

founders of the Irish People and the majority of its readers desired to sever the connection between England and Ireland. They dreamt of an Irish Republic, and were so intent on its establishment that they would not willingly listen to anyone who suggested that some ameliorative work of an immedi¬ ately necessary sort should be done. They had as much contempt for reforms effected through the agency of the English Parliament as a Marxian Socialist has for palliatives. Give the slum-dweller a better house, says the Marxian, and he will refuse to fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat. He will become contented. Therefore, let him fester in his slum until he can endure it no longer, and rises up and slays some very rich person. Give the farmer better conditions of tenure, said the Fenian, and he will become so reconciled to his lot that he will refuse to fight for the establishment of a free and independent republic in Ireland ! . . . Such are the arguments of the logical and the fatuous. A republic or nothing was the demand made by the Fenians. All else must wait until that supreme demand had been satisfied j and so they declined to engage in the promotion of laws to lighten the load under which the farmer staggered towards a livelihood.

No one can properly appreciate the present state of Ireland who does not know its history between the years 1845 and 1865. This is not the place in which to set it out, but the reader will do well to remember that he cannot begin to understand many contemporary events of an appalling character until he has made himself acquainted with the history of those twenty years. It is told, with a wealth of detail, in Mr. T. P. O'Connor’s invaluable book. The Parnell Movement, the first half of which should be made a compulsory subject of study for every Englishman engaged in public affairs. A Conservative ceases to be a Conservative and becomes a public danger when he puts a passion for personal

His Family

advantage in place of a passion for public service, and forgets that his first duty is, not the conserving of himself and his class, but the conserving of the community. Almost the whole of the Conservatives of Ireland were especially engaged during those twenty ye^rs in the grossest form of self-pre¬ servation, that which will not cease from any cruelty which will bring immediate profit; and we are entitled to say that our forefathers, who shamefully misused their power in those twenty years, are directly chargeable with all the miseries and misfortunes, the barbarities and sickening atrocities, which, since then, have made Ireland notorious among nations.

The record which Mr. O'Connor sets out in his book makes terrible reading. Less than eighty years separate us from that time, yet it seems such misrule and tyranny could only have happened in the Dark Ages, In twenty-one years, 1849-1870, nearly two and a half millions of people fled from Ireland to America and Australia, of whom seventy-five per cent, were between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five. In seven months of the year 1863, 80,000 persons, mostly young men and women with strong limbs and stout hearts, left Ireland probably for ever, leaving behind them the ailing, the weak, and the aged. And they took with them bitter memories of suffering and wrong that have raised almost insuperable barriers for English welfare in many parts of the world. Thousands of men and women, of all ages, were evicted from their homes at a moment's notice in the interests of a theory of political economy.

Nassau Senior was the apostle of pastures and fat beeves and muttons, and his statistical soul rejoiced as the records of emigration grew. There was more joy in his heart over one bullock than over thirty men, and he sighed for the day when he might journey through the country and see herds of cattle and hardly a man. Ireland was then, and probably

19

Parnell

still is, over-populated. It is a small island, sixty miles shorter than one of the great lakes (Michigan) of America, and large tracts of its surface are occupied by mountains, bogs, and water; but between the years 1785 and 1845 its population rose from 2,845,932 to 8,295,061, most of the increase taking place after the Union. This great increase of people was a misfortune, for, as Professor Allison Phillips states in the first chapter of The Revolution of Ireland, “ the dampness and uncertainty of the climate, while producing magnificent pasture, make the growing of cereal crops a precarious undertaking over large parts of the island." If men had been bullocks or sheep, without passions or attach¬ ments, the principles advocated by Nassau Senior might have been practised swiftly and without hardship; but men are not bullocks, though they sometimes seem to be sheep, and it is undeniable that Irish landlords, greedy for large and quick returns for their money, performed acts of gross and unbelievable barbarity in turning tillage into pasture. The evicted farmer, as he watched the roof being removed from his cabin, had no knowledge which enabled him to share in the rejoicing of Nassau Senior: he had only the peasant’s hungry love of his home. These men, unskilled in books and economical arguments, remembered in America what they had seen in Ireland, and there grew from their loins a race of people, American bred, who had heard from their infancy of an Ireland, reputed to be flowing with milk and honey, from which their parents were brutally ejected by savage and rapacious Englishmen. It was the descendants of these evicted men and women who made the times of terror forty and eighty years later. In 1846 the Great Hunger occurred. Famines have been frequent in Ireland before that year and since, but this was the worst of them all. People died by the roadside or starved in their cabins. They ate grass; they devoured seaweed; they gnawed the very earth.

His Family

There was even a horrible rumour that a demented woman had eaten her dead child ! . . . In that most terrible year, when the soul of Ireland was seared, Charles Stewart Parnell was born.

One would hardly have expected to find support for the Fenians in a family which would certainly have suffered financial embarrassment if the Fenians had had their way, unless one were aware of the fact that the Celtic Irish have found their leaders less often among themselves than among the Anglo-Irish. Their distrust of each other makes them reluctant to accept a commander from their own ranks, and their instinctive love of aristocracy makes them look for a leader to the high ranks above them. Very rarely a Daniel O'Connell comes from the cabins; very often a Fitzgerald, a Wolfe Tone, a Robert Emmet, a Charles Stewart Parnell comes from the demesnes or from the class of the demesnes. Michael Davitt, unmistakably a Gael and an Irishman, who had suffered terribly for his country, said with bitterness unusual in him, “ The Irish would never accept me as a leader because I belong to the ranks of the people.”1

But perhaps a profounder reason accounts for the fact that the Irish in their struggles against the English have almost always found their leaders in the camps of their enemies. The ability to lead is not commonly found among the Celtic or Firbolgian Irish, who have, however, an ability to follow and to endure and suffer which is unmatchable. “ The Celt knows his need,” said Mr. J. L. Garvin in a brilliant criticism of Mr. Barry O’Brien's biography. " He is re¬ bellious to symbolic title. He never acknowledged succession through minors and women. He craves for actual discipline and a real dictator. The only political institution of the Celt is the chief. Mr. John Hill Burton observes it in his History of Scotland. Mr. Bodley maintains it in his book on

1 Chief and Tribune : Parnell and Davitt, by M. M. O'Hara, p. 224.

21

Parnell

France. Mr. Barry O'Brien proves it in his Life of Charles Stewart Parnell \tn One may be pardoned for wondering whether the Irish Celtic civilisation could have survived by itself when one observes how strained and attenuated it has become. One fact beyond all dispute emerges from the clouds of controversy which hang about the Irish firmament, and that is that the whole of what is commonly called Irish culture to-day is Anglo-Irish culture. The great names which illuminate the pages of Irish history for seven centuries past are Anglo-Irish names. This fact is especially observable in literature. Berkeley, Swift, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Burke, Wilde, Moore, Shaw, Synge, Yeats, Russell, James Stephens, Lennox Robinson — all these definitely and undeniably belong to the Anglo-Irish group. In rebellious politics, as we have seen, the Anglo-Irish outnumbered the Celtic Irish among the leaders. It is only in journalism that the Celtic Irish achieve distinction, for journalism is primarily a matter of gossip, and the Celtic Irish talk well.

It has sometimes been observed, not without astonishment, that Englishmen who settle in Ireland become more Irish than the Irish themselves, and a wonder has filled the minds of many persons at the spectacle of men and women of un¬ doubted English origin manifesting a fierce and uncontrollable hatred against England, and making themselves busy and prominent among her enemies. John Mitchel, the author of the Jail Journal , could not have hated England more if he had not had a drop of English blood in his body. Dean Swift, although he had no very great affection for Ireland, had less, if he had any at all, for England. John Millington Synge, who, like Parnell, was descended from a Cheshire family, professed an inability to live with any content among the English. Parnell himself, for the greater part of his

1 Parnell and his Power, by J. L. Garvin, Fortnightly Review, Decem¬ ber, 1898.

22

His Family

mature life, showed a hatred for England which was almost a mania. Many of the leaders of the Sinn Fein rising in 1916 were of English origin, while the more extreme of their successors, those who seceded from the Free State to the Irregular or Republican' section of Sinn Fein, were almost all English in origin or English in themselves. The irre¬ concilable enemies of England in Ireland have rarely had Irish blood. The Parnells had no Irish blood at all. Their pedigree shows no record of intermarriage with the “ native ” or Firbolgian Irish. They married, as did most of their class, within the ranks of the Anglo-Irish or among their kinsmen in England. The Anglo-Irish, in short, formed a compact and distinct group in Ireland, as easily distinguish¬ able in feature and fortune and behaviour from the 11 Irish " Irish as a Provengal is from an Alsatian.

It has been said, but without warrant, that the ** Irish," whatever that expression may mean, have always absorbed their conquerors, but the assertion is false so far as the Anglo- Irish are concerned. Differences of class, of religion, of social habit, of culture, and of condition made any such absorption difficult, if not actually impossible. There is always intermarriage to some extent, even in countries where the differences cited are increased by the difference of colour, but there was far less intermarriage in Ireland than is commonly and sentimentally believed. The Anglo-Irish invariably married among the Anglo-Irish; the Celtic Irish invariably married among the Celtic Irish; and so it happened that two groups of people grew up in Ireland who were definitely divisible from each other in nearly every respect. The Parnells had married among the Howards (the family name of the Earls of Wicklow), and the Brookes (the Irish branch of an old Cheshire family), and the Wards of County Down, and the Whitsheds, none of whom was Irish in any sense pleasing to a devout member of the Gaelic League.

Parnell

Mr. J. R. Fisher, in an interval from his labours on the Boundary Commission, kindly prepared for me some genea¬ logical notes, taken from the Hamilton Manuscripts, which show that Charles Stewart Parnell, the present Marquis of Dufferin and Ava, and the present Viscount Bangor are all ninth in descent from Hans Hamilton (a descendant of the Dukes of Hamilton), who was minister of Dunlop in Ayrshire. The minister's son, James, came over to Dublin, as con¬ fidential agent of James VI. of Scotland, to make sure of his becoming James I. of England and Ireland. Through this descent, Parnell was remotely related to Robert Emmet, and could claim kinship with a host of lords — Carrick, Roden, Claremont, Clanbrassil, Limerick, and others.

On their mother's side, the young Parnells were descended from an Ulster-Scottish family which had emigrated from Belfast to Philadelphia during a time of persecution in the middle of the eighteenth century, taking with them a sense of wrong and injustice which rankled in their minds and filled them with a hatred of England which was transmitted to their descendants, becoming more bitter and ferocious as it became more academic and remote from personal fact, until at last it became a madness in the mind of Delia Tudor Stewart, who met and married John Henry Parnell in 1834. Many thousands of Ulster Presbyterians fled to America between the years 1728 and 1770, and these were among the stoutest and most determined of those who fought against the English in 1775 and won the War of Independence.

Miss Stewart's father. Commodore Charles Stewart, of the American Navy, was a famous and remarkable man, who performed many daring and audacious feats in various wars fought by the United States, particularly those against England. He had a genius in seafaring which enabled him to attack and defeat enemies as brave as himself, even when they were superior to him in numbers. He was the first

24

His Family

American to bear the title of “ Admiral/' but it was by one more affectionate, that of “ Old Ironsides," that he was known to the majority of his countrymen. Mr. Barry O'Brien1 quotes this description of him: ** Commodore Stewart was about five feet nine inches, and of a dignified and engaging presence. His complexion was fair, his hair chestnut, eyes blue, large, penetrating, and intelligent. The cast of his countenance was Roman, bold, strong, and commanding, and his head finely formed. His command of his passions was truly surprising, and under the most irritating circum¬ stances his oldest seamen never saw a ray of anger flash from his eyes. His kindness, benevolence, and humanity were proverbial; but his sense of justice and the requisitions of duty were as unbending as fate. In the moment of great stress and danger he was cool and quick in judgment, as he was utterly ignorant of fear. His mind was acute and powerful, grasping the greatest or smallest subjects with the intuitive mastery of genius." His wife, a beautiful Boston woman, and the daughter of Judge William Tudor, who fought against the English in the War of Independence, ultimately refused to live with him for what his granddaughter calls “ domestic reasons."2 These reasons are not described in any detail, but as “ an illegitimate relation,” after the death of “ Old Ironsides," instituted a lawsuit3 against Mrs. Parnell, on the plea that her property really belonged to him, “ in spite of his bar-sinister," we may conclude what they were. At all events, when the old Admiral offered to adopt Emily Parnell, after she had been disinherited by her father, her uncle, Mr. Wigram, a member of the sect of Plymouth Brethren, with which the Parnells hid several associations, paid the sum necessary to get her made a ward in Chancery

1 Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, by R. Barry O’Brien, vol. i., p. 28.

a A Patriot’s Mistake, by Emily Monroe Dickinson, p. 10.

3 Idem, p. 210.

25

Parnell

rather than permit her to “ live in such a questionable atmosphere."1

Accounts of a man’s ancestry have become unfashionable in modern biography, but we cannot safely dispense with an account of the Parnells’ pedigree, since we find in it much that enables us to comprehend the character and conduct of Charles Stewart Parnell. The swiftness of judgment and grasp of detail which were notable in Parnell, exciting the admiration and wonder of his contemporaries, were clearly inherited from “ Old Ironsides,’’ and perhaps also his susceptibility to the love of women. One sees in the eyes of Parnell s mother a strong, lustful look, and we may believe that Parnell's highly sexual nature was derived by him from the distaff side. Admiral Stewart died in his house on a high bluff of the Delaware, south of Black’s Creek, at Bordens- town. New Jersey, on November 6, 1869. We are given no account of the relations between him and his Irish grand¬ children, nor do we know whether he ever saw any of them, except John; but his blood unmistakably flowed through the veins of one of them, and " Old Ironsides,’’ had he lived long enough, might have seen himself renewed in his grand¬ son, Charles.

Ill

We begin to discover the sources from which some of the young Parnells drew their singular antipathy to England. The immediate and main source of it, as shall presently be shown, was Mrs. Parnell, but there were other sources which went to augment the swollen stream which poured from her. It is unnecessary, and perhaps impossible, to describe all of them; but one, which affected them as much through their mother as through their father, has to do with the peculiar nature of the English people, who are so restive under any

A Patriot s Mistake, by Emily Monroe Dickinson, p. 37,

26

His Family

authority than that of themselves that, when they quit their country, they will not tolerate the tyranny, however benev¬ olent it may be, of even their own kin who remain at home. It was mostly men of English and Ulster origin who made the Revolution which separated England and America; and some of the most bitter and narrow-minded Anglophobes in the United States can say that they have no other blood than English. The late Henry Cabot Lodge misspent a long life in obstinate antagonism to England because he had inherited a hatred of it so fierce and fanatical that, when he was a young man, merely to read a newspaper account of a fight between two pugilists, Sayers and Heenan, was sufficient to fill him with rage against a people and a country of which at that time he had no personal knowledge. Yet Henry Cabot Lodge sprang from an English family. It has been remarked that Canada remains within the British Commonwealth of nations because most of its English-speaking pioneers were clan-loving Scotsmen, while America broke away from England because most of its English-speaking pioneers were Englishmen. The English settlers in Ireland soon displayed the English characteristic of rebellion against home authority, with the result that nearly all the anti-British movements in Ireland for seven centuries past have been led by men of English origin. The Parnells had been in Ireland for less than two centuries when Delia Stewart began to bear children to John Henry Parnell, but in that time they had given more than their share of able and eminent men to the ranks of those who were prepared to defend Ireland against the assaults of England.

The first of the Parnells of whom we have accurate knowledge was Thomas, a mercer and draper in the town of Congleton in Cheshire. He was a substantial citizen, and became mayor of his town in the reign of James I. His son, Richard, also became mayor of Congleton on three separate occasions. His

27

Parnell

fourth son, Tobias, who was a gilder and decorative painter, became the father of Thomas Parnell, the third known to us of that name, who founded the Irish family. This Parnell purchased an estate in Queen's County after the restoration of the Stuarts to the English throne, probably because his Cromwellian activities had rendered him obnoxious to the restored monarchy, and he rightly imagined that life would be more comfortable at a distance from the Royalists. He had inherited his family’s thrift and industry, and soon became a prosperous Irish land-owner. When he died in 1685 he left two sons — Thomas, a clergyman, and John, a lawyer. Thomas, who is better known as a poet than as a priest, was the first of the Parnells to be born in Ireland. His birth took place in Dublin in 1669, and he was educated at Trinity College. In 1703 he was ordained, and two years later was appointed, his age being twenty-seven, to the archdeaconry of Clogher. This rapid preferment to archi- diaconal rank, however, was due less to devotion or doctrinal distinction than to family influence, for his heart was in literature and not in theology. In those days there was more nepotism than godliness in the Church of Ireland, and young men of family were frequently to be found in possession of handsome revenues from a cure of souls in which the souls were far to seek. Dean Swift himself at Laracor one morning began his sermon, not with “ Dearly beloved brethren,” but with “ Dearly beloved Roger,” for Roger, his parish clerk, was the sole person present to hear him.

Archdeacon Parnell was oftener in London than was consistent with the proper discharge of his light duties in the diocese of Clogher, and, when there, was more frequently seen in the society of wits and poets than of clerics. It is probable that the only Dean he gladly endured was Swift, who, like Alexander Pope, was especially his friend. He must have had considerable personal charm, for at a time when

28

His Family

political feeling ran high he contrived to be on terras of intimate friendship with both Whigs and Tories, and could count on the affection of Swift, Addison, Steele, Congreve, Pope, and Gay. Yet he was moody, either in a state of elation or of depression : “ the -most capable man/' wrote Oliver Goldsmith in his Life, “ to make the happiness of those whom he conversed with, and the least able to secure his own." His wife, a beautiful and amiable lady, died when he was thirty-two years of age, and thereafter a melancholia settled upon him, and he became mentally disordered. He suddenly died at Chester in 1717, when on his way from London to Ireland, and was buried there, in his thirty-eighth year, having been predeceased by his two sons. Thus perished the first of the Irish Parnells.

“ His work," says a writer in the Dictionary of National Biography, ** is marked by sweetness, refined sensibility, musical and fluent versification, and high moral tone." His Life of Homer was prefixed to Pope's translation of the Iliad, and Pope was indebted to him for much assistance in his own work, a debt which he discharged by editing an edition of his poems. Dr. Johnson discreetly, perhaps reluctantly, praised him, saying, ** He is sprightly without effort, and always delights, though he never ravishes." u It is impossible to say whether they [his poems] are the pro¬ ductions of nature so excellent as not to want the help of art, or of art so refined as to resemble nature." The poet's property in Queen's County, as well as some that he had in England, now passed into the possession of his brother, John, the lawyer, who had settled at Rathleague in Queen's County. He was “ a man of great integrity and most amiable character," and though he achieved no personal distinction, he was the progenitor of several distinguished men, to whom he did the important service of leaving his fortunes in better condition than they were when he received them.

29

Parnell

The Parnells, as has already been hinted, had more nota¬ bilities among them than are common in one family. Be¬ tween the Cecil who was Queen Elizabeth's counsellor and the Cecil who, as Marquis of Salisbury, became Prime Minister of England under Queen Victoria there stretches a long list of totally undistinguished persons; but between the Parnell who was mayor of Congleton and the Parnell who became “ the uncrowned King of Ireland ” there are at least three notable names, the first belonging to the poet. The second distinguished Parnell was Sir John, the second baronet, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Irish Parliament in 1787 — a brave and honourable man who, in a time when nepotism was accounted almost a virtue and a sign of parental solicitude, resolutely refrained from using his public power for the betterment of his family. He resisted the dissolution of the Irish Parliament and the Union with England, and was dismissed from his high office and accused of treason by Castlereagh. The fight he fought was a lost fight before it began, but he came out of it with an unshakable reputation for just and fair dealing. He is described as a man of “ blunt honesty, a strong, discriminating mind, and good talents." He died in 1801, leaving five sons and one daughter, of whom the eldest, John Augustus, was a deaf and dumb imbecile.1 Because of this son's afflictions, a special Act of Parliament was passed in 1789 to enable Sir John's second son, Henry, to succeed to his father's property and title. Henry was, perhaps, the most generally distinguished of all the Parnells, though he was to be outdone in particular distinction by his grand-nephew. He became Secretary of State for War in Lord Grey s Ministry, but was dismissed from his office because he was not amenable to authority. In 1835 he became Paymaster-General of the Forces in the Melbourne

1 John Augustus, Henry, William, Thomas, Arthur, and Sophia. The last named became Mrs. Evans. See pp. 33, 42 and 77.

30

His Family

Ministry, and kept his office until he was made a peer under the title of Lord Congleton in 1841. He did not long survive his ennoblement. He lost his health, and hanged himself at the age of sixty-six on June 8, 1842, in his house at Cadogan Place, Chelsea. *

Lord Congleton was a very able and astute man, ready, like his father, to defend Ireland whenever it was assailed. He might, indeed, have enjoyed longer spells of higher office had he been more accommodating in the matter of misusing Catholics, but he persisted in protecting them whenever he could, and for that cause was unpopular with his colleagues, to whom the defence of unimportant and powerless people was probably a sign of perversity and sheer silliness. He had a high reputation as a political economist and writer on finance. “ Among the projects he advocated in the British House of Commons were the abolition of all laws restricting either labour or capital, including the abolition of the Corn Laws, which made the food of the people dear; the removal of all unequal taxes, and the substitution of a property tax; the shortening of the term for which members of Parliament are elected, so that constituencies could sooner deal with those who misrepresent them; an extension of the franchise; the introduction of the ballot for the protection of voters from intimidation ; and the abolition of flogging in the army and navy, and of impressment in the latter/'1 In a treatise entitled Financial Reform , he laid before his countrymen the financial and fiscal policy which was later on to be carried out by Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Gladstone. One of his books, A History of the Penal Laws against the Irish Catholics from 1689 to the Union, is considered to be the best on its subject. An account of him,2 quoted by Mr. Barry O'Brien

1 The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, M.P., by Thomas Sherlock, p. 1 1 .

2 This and the other accounts of the Parnells are taken from The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, by R. Barry O'Brien, vol. i., pp. 1-20.

31

Parnell

from one of his contemporaries, is interesting because of some points of resemblance it contains between him and his

grand-nephew, Charles Stewart Parnell:

\

** Sir Henry Parnell is a respectable, but by no means a superior speaker. He has a fine clear voice, but he never varies the key in which he commences. He is, however, audible in all parts of the House. His utterance is well timed, and he appears to speak with great ease. He delivers his speeches in much the same way as if he were repeating some pieces of writing he had committed to his memory in his schoolboy years. His gesticulation is a great deal too tame for his speeches to produce any effect. He stands stock still except when he occasionally raises and lets fall his right hand. ♦ . **

He was, as Mr. O’Brien points out, an opponent of the use of the lash nearly half a century before Charles Parnell took a powerful part in the agitation against flogging in the services. One may compare this account of Lord Congleton with that of his grand-nephew, given by his brother: “ He was always afraid of lapsing into an error of grammar or spelling, and for a considerable time wrote out his speeches word for word, and carefully corrected them before delivery.”1

“ When speaking in public he stood up rather stiffly, with his arms folded loosely in front of him, though very occasion¬ ally I have seen him with them clasped behind his back. . . . He spoke in a rather low voice, but slowly and very distinctly, making every word tell. He rarely emphasised any point, however important, by raising his voice or by gesticulating in any way with his arms. As a matter of fact, he always had a horror, even in private life, of speaking loudly. I remember an instance of this one time when we were together at Avondale. We were walking down the road to the saw¬ mills, when I noticed that some of his men working on a field near-by were taking things very easily, even for Irish labourers.

1 Charles Stewart Parnell, by John Howard Parnell, p. 53.

32

His Family

I said to him : ' Why don’t you call out to those fellows, Charley, and get them to hurry up ? They look like being all day over that field, if they go on like that.’ He replied, with a shrug of his shoulders: * I know that; but if I wanted to make them hear I should have to shout, and I dislike shouting.’ ”x 4

We may here note that the melancholia which haunted the whole of the Parnells, ranged in Lord Congleton’s generation from imbecility in the eldest son, through madness, terminating in suicide, in the second son, to extreme eccentricity in the fourth son, Thomas, who was familiarly known in Dublin as “ old Tom Parnell,” and marked oddity in their sister, Sophia, who married a member of Parliament called George Hampden Evans. “ Old Tom Parnell,” says Miss Frances Power Cobbe:2

“ * Old Tom Parnell ’ had a huge, ungainly figure like Dr. Johnson’s, and one of the sweetest, softest faces ever worn by mortal man. He had, at some remote and long- forgotten period, been seized with a fervent and self-denying religious enthusiasm of the ultra-Protestant type; and this had somehow given birth in his brain to a scheme for arranging texts of the Bible in a mysterious order which, when com¬ pleted, should afford infallible answers to every question of the human mind ! To construct the interminable tables required for this wonderful plan, poor Tom Parnell devoted his life and fortune. For years, which must have amounted to many decades, he laboured at the work in a bare, gloomy, dusty room in what was called a * Protestant office in Sackville Street. Money went speedily to clerks and printers ; and no doubt the good man (who himself lived, as he used to say laughingly, on a ‘ second-hand bone ’) gave money also freely in alms. One way or another, Mr. Parnell grew poorer and more poor, his coat looked shabbier, and his beautiful long white hair more obviously in need of a barber. Once or

1 Charles Stewart Parnell, by John Howard Parnell, p. 175*

* The Life of Frances Power Cobbe, by herself, vol. i., p. igx.

Parnell

twice every summer he was prevailed upon by his sister [Mrs. Evans] to tear himself from his work and pay her a few weeks' visit in the country at Portrane; and to her and to all her visitors he preached incessantly his monotonous appeal:

Repent ; and cease to eat good dinners, and devote yourselves to compiling texts !' . . . At last one day, late in the autumnal twilight, the porter, whose duty it was to shut up the office, entered the room and found the old man sitting quietly in his chair where he had laboured so long , . . fallen into the last long sleep . .

with his texts still incompletely arranged and the solution of all the questions that vex the human mind undiscovered. We shall have occasion to refer to Mrs. Evans in the second chapter, but we may here note that Lord Congleton's heir, the second peer, carried on the Parnell tendency to eccentric behaviour by leading the Plymouth Brethren in Ireland, and that Charles Stewart Parnell himself was for a short period attracted by the dismal doctrines of that singular society of Christians. " I like their quietness," he said to Mr. T. P. O'Connor.

The third of Sir John Parnell's sons was William, the grandfather of Charles Stewart Parnell.1 He was the first of his family to live at Avondale, which had been settled on Sir John by one of his friends and admirers, Colonel Samuel Hayes, a barrister-at-law. "The will of Colonel Hayes contained a curious provision that the estate of Avondale should always pass to a younger member of the family (it being considered, no doubt, that the older members would be sufficiently provided for out of the ancestral estates in the counties of Armagh and Queen's); and it also stipulated that the owners of Avondale should take the name of Hayes, or Parnell-Hayes. My grandfather was known as William Parnell-Hayes, but the name Hayes has for some reason been

1 Arthur, of whom we have no other information, was the youngest.

34

His Family

dropped by the subsequent heirs of the property/'1 William Parnell-Hayes lived the life of a quiet, studious, country gentleman, interested mainly in his books, his neighbours, and his estate, and took no active part in politics, although he was an enemy of the Union and sufficiently interested in public affairs to publish in 1805 a pamphlet entitled An Enquiry into the Causes of Popular Discontent , in which he displayed deep sympathy with the persecuted Papists. He also published a book entitled An Historical Apology for the Irish Catholics, in which this sympathy was manifested at greater length. The Parnells had always been known for their defence of the misused Catholics, and it was the reputation of his ancestors in this respect which secured friendly con¬ sideration for Charles Stewart Parnell when, seemingly a stuttering, stupid young man, he offered himself to the Nationalists as a political candidate. William Parnell-Hayes, despite his affection for his life at Avondale, was persuaded to enter Parliament as member for Wicklow in 1817, but he did not long remain there, for he died on January 2, 1821, in his forty-fourth year, leaving a ten-year-old son, John Henry, and a daughter, Catherine. Avondale now became the property of the latter, who had married a Mr. Wigram.

John Henry Parnell, since he was not the owner of Avondale, did not retain the surname of Hayes, and no provision had been made for its adoption by a female heir on her marriage. The ** Hayes," therefore, was dropped. John Henry, now owner of Collure in Armagh and Clonmore in Carlow, decided, after the death of his father, to go on a long tour in America and Mexico with his cousin, Lord Powerscourt. He, like his father, was more ambitious to lead the life of a country gentleman than to lead the life of a politician, and his tastes, too, were literary. He was not yet twenty-one when Powers- 1 See Appendix G, p. 302, Charles Stewart Parnell, by John Howard Parnell.

35

Parnell

court and he set off on their travels. Soon after they arrived in America they met in Washington Miss Delia Tudor Stewart, a tall, handsome, vivacious girl of seventeen, with dark hair and blue eyes, an unusually oval face and pale complexion, who talked politics to them, and was conspicuous in the social and public life of her neighbourhood. Each of them fell in love with her, and it seemed as if the superior social position of Lord Powerscourt would enable him to win her from young Parnell. But the latter's sister, Mrs. Wigram, hearing of the affair, determined to help her brother, and she gave him Avondale in return for a mortgage of £10,000 bearing interest at five per cent.1 This gift seems to have settled Lord Powerscourt's chances, and in 1834 she married his cousin in New York. “ This," says Mr. Barry O'Brien, ** was the one notable event in the life of John Henry Parnell." He was twenty-one and she was barely eighteen when he took her to Avondale,

IV

The Parnells had always offered resistance to English misgovernment of Ireland, but they had never hated England. They remained on terms of friendship and even of intimacy with their kinsmen in the larger island. Much of their time was spent in England. They sent their children to English schools and universities. They regarded themselves as the English in Ireland, and, although they would not permit, if they could help it, the English to bully or tyrannise over them, they yet considered themselves important members of the English family. When one of them was raised to the peerage he took, as we have seen, his territorial title, not from Ireland, but from Congleton, the town in Cheshire where

1 Charles Stewart Parnell, by his brother, John Howard Parnell, Appendix G, p. 303.

36

His Family

his family was founded. But with the advent of Miss Delia Tudor Stewart to Avondale, as the new Mrs. Parnell, a change began. This lady, who seems to have been one of those outspoken, strong-minded, silly women, commoner now, perhaps, in America than anywhere else, who have been so admirably exposed by Mr. Bernard Shaw in the characters of Mrs. Clandon in You Never Can Tell and Lady Britomart Undershaft in Major Barbara, set herself* almost from the beginning of her life at Avondale, to the mean mischief of making bitterness and wrath between her husband's family and their countrymen in England. She is not the only American woman who, having married into an Anglo- Irish family, has wrought incalculable harm to her adopted country and people by importing into it an entirely artificial hatred of England, founded on the fact that the English English and the American English fought against each other more than a century ago with much of the bitterness which is commonly to be found in family feuds. The legend is that the American English were entirely virtuous on that occasion, while the English English were entirely villainous, but verity obliges us to believe that there were faults on both sides. Mrs. Parnell had no doubts on the matter : the English English were miscreants of an unusually foul sort, while the American English were possessed of a nobility which placed them a little higher than the angels. Her husband, an easy-going man, endeavoured, but without success, to make a reasonable woman of her, but it seems that he soon despaired of doing so, for there came a time when he absolutely forbade political discussions. “ At Avondale politics were tabooed."1

The death of her husband in 1859, at the age of forty-eight, removed all restraint from her, and she soon began to take part in extreme politics. She hated England and the English with a ferocity so outrageous as to leave us wondering whether

1 Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, by R. Barry O'Brien, vol. i., p. 43*

37

Parnell

or not the poor lady was right in her head. Whenever she met an Englishman, in her own house or in his, she took advantage of her sex to insult his country and his race. Her guests, remembering that she was their hostess, though she rarely remembered that fact herself, good-temperedly laughed at her tirades, although some of them must at times have thought that she passed beyond the bounds of decency and decorum. She retained, oddly enough, a strong affection for the English throne. “ Our mother," says her son, John Howard Parnell, “ though American to the core, a burning enthusiast in the cause of Irish liberty, and possessed of an inveterate hatred of England ... yet always instilled into her children the principles of personal loyalty to their Sovereign, which she held not to be inconsistent with in¬ dividual liberty." He quotes an extract from a letter which she wrote to him while he was a member of Parliament, “containing an exhortation which she must often have addressed to Charley as well during his lifetime:"

“ How the Queen must despise low, mean, mischief¬ making extremists ! They get money by rousing passions and exaggerating aims. If they succeed, rebellion and anarchy will run riot in Europe. ... The Queen is wise and good; find out her intentions. Her ministers are not in¬ fallible."1

She urged her son to attend the levees and Court functions, and was, when she lived in Dublin, herself assiduous in attending at the Viceregal Court. Lord Carlisle, the Viceroy, was her personal friend, and had given instructions to his officials that she and her children were to be included in the list of guests to be invited to all the functions either at the Lodge or the Castle. One who knew the Parnells and

1 Charles Stewart Parnell, by his brother, John Howard Parnell p. 128. '

38

His Family

Avondale tells me that Mrs* Parnell was considered by the people about the estate to be a “ flighty " woman. They said that her husband “ was a clever man, but drifted along, and allowed his wife to manage everything about their children. She was ‘ bpd all along, and mad in the end.' She would go away and not see her husband for near a year again." Mr. Barry O'Brien, her son's biographer, met her in 1896, two years before she died of burns at Avondale. She was then about eighty years of age, and “ animated by one fixed idea, a rooted hatred of England; or rather, as she herself put it, of * English dominion.' " When Mr. O'Brien enquired of her why her son had such an antipathy to England, she replied, “ Why should he not ? Have not his ancestors always been opposed to England ? My grand¬ father Tudor fought against the English in the War of In¬ dependence. My father fought against the English in the year 1812, and I suppose the Parnells had no great love for them. ... It was very natural for Charles to dislike the English ; but it is not the English whom we dislike, or whom he disliked. We have no objection to the English people; we object to the English dominion. We would not have it in America. Why should they have it in Ireland ? Why are the English so jealous of outside interference in their affairs, and why are they always trying to dip their fingers in every¬ body's pie ? The English are hated in America for their grasping policy; they are hated everywhere for their arro¬ gance, greed, cant, and hypocrisy. No country must have national rights or national aspirations but England. That is the English creed. Well, other people don't see it; and the English are astonished. They want us all to think they are so goody-goody. They are simply thieves."1

It is difficult to understand how Mrs. Parnell managed to distinguish, in her hatred, between the policy of these fright- 1 Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, by R. Barry O'Brien, vol. i., p. 29.

39

Parnell

ful people and the people themselves. A man who is a greedy, arrogant, canting, hypocritical thief must surely be as hateful as are greed, arrogance, cant, hypocrisy, and theft ? One might excuse and forgive this incoherent, contradictory, and fatuous stuff if it were merely the utterance of an aged lady, somewhat deranged1 and on the verge of death, but it is typical of the sort of stuff she had been accustomed to talk wherever she went in England or in Ireland from the day she arrived at Avondale. One who was at Chipping Norton, where her sons, John and Charles, were at school, states in a passage quoted by Mr. O'Brien2 that he well remembered “ the day the Parnells came to school" for the first time. 44 Their mother brought them. She wore a green dress "—a colour which her son Charles had not yet discovered to be unlucky —

“ and Wishaw came to me and said, 4 I say, D - , I have

met one of the most extraordinary women I have ever seen — the mother of the Parnells. She is a regular rebel. I have never heard such treason in my life. Without a note of warning she opened fire on the British Government, and, by Jove, she gave it us hot. I have asked her to come for a drive to show her the country, and you must come too for pro¬ tection. When Lord Carlisle dined at her house or she dined at the Viceregal Lodge, for she loved the assemblies of the rich and influential, she lashed him with her tongue, but he appears to have treated her unseemly talk as the bibble-babble of a pretty young woman whose passion for disrupting conversation must be indulged by elderly gentle¬ men. Officers visiting Avondale to play cricket, a game of which both her husband and her son Charles were fond, were

1 She had been violently assaulted on the head in America by a man with a grievance against her a short while before Mr. O'Brien met her. See A Patriot’s Mistake, by her daughter, Mrs. Emily Monroe Dickin¬ son, p. 204 et seq.

* Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, by R. Barry O’Brien, vol. i., p. 29.

40

His Family

generally treated to a piece of her mind on a subject which seemed never to be off her tongue. Those who suffered from this abuse seldom believed that she was in earnest. That was the age — as, indeed, this is too — when a woman could be as abusive and ill-bred as she pleased provided she had first taken the precaution to be good-looking. It was only pretty Fanny's way. But Mrs. Parnell's mania was no laughing matter, and when her husband was no longer alive to control her, she contrived to raise a horrid crop of hatred in the minds of her younger children; for it is significant that those of them who manifested this hatred were all under the age of fourteen when their father suddenly expired in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin. Charles Stewart was thirteen, Fanny was ten, and Anna was seven years of age in the year of his death, 1859.

These three, especially Fanny, were more successfully trained by her to hate England and the English than their brothers and sisters. The resentment which Charles as a young man felt against his mother because of her association with the Fenians was not due to affection for England, but to pure snobbery. The Fenians were common people, unkempt and poor, and Parnell did not care to mix with persons of no social distinction. This snobbery lasted with him for the length of his life. When he went to America for the first time, at the age of twenty-five, he was ** greatly afraid of being mistaken for the usual Irish emigrant, the only class of our countrymen to be found in these parts, and before we went round to Colonel Powell he said to me: ‘ For God's sake, John, don't tell him we are from Ireland, as they have never seen a real Irish gentleman, and wouldn't know one if they did. . ♦ .' "* When John Parnell suggested to him one day that he should enter Parliament, he curtly replied, “ * I could not, because I would not join that set.’ His pride, 1 Charles Stewart Parnell, by his brother, John Howard Parnell, p. 91 .

, 41

Parnell

in other words, prevented him from moving with the Home Rulers of that time, because they were beneath him in station."1 His mother shared his feelings in these matters, for she wrote to her son John, after her son Charles’s downfall : “ Your brother is the only gentleman in the whole set — so high-principled, so strictly delicate and correct-minded."2

Miss Frances Power Cobbe, in her Life from which quota¬ tion has already been made, has the following passage :

“ Mrs. Evans, nee Sophia Parnell . ♦ . and a great-aunt of Charles Stewart Parnell . . . often spoke to me of the Avondale branch of her family, and more than once said: ‘ There is mischief brewing ! I am troubled at what is going on in Avondale. My nephew’s wife ’ (the American lady, Delia Stewart) ‘ has a hatred of England, and is educating my nephew, like a little Hannibal, to hate it too !' "3

The octogenarian Mrs. Parnell, when she tried to account to Mr. O'Brien for her son's singular antipathy to the race from which he had sprung, omitted to inform him that she had deliberately misshaped her son's mind, and had reared him and his brothers and sisters in a rage which could not end otherwise than in the ruin of those whom it racked. Her daughter Fanny, while still a young girl, was composing poems of which this mania was the motive. Her son Charles, although he was English even to his accent, professed and felt a personal hatred for England and the English people which seriously affected his political relations with them and prevented him from attempting to understand them or to make them understand him or his countrymen. He would not willingly associate with them on any other terms than those of enmity, and he forbade his subordinates in Parliament

1 Charles Stewart Parnell, by his brother, John Howard Parnell, p. 131* 2 Ibid.., p. 132.

J The Life of Frances Power Cobbe, by herself, vol. i., p. 186.

42

His Family

to do so.1 He was devoted to his mother, despite the in¬ sinuations made towards the end of his life that he had treated her shabbily, and he was responsive to her suggestions. The seeds of antipathy which she sowed in his mind did not spring up at once, but vyhen they did spring up they became unrootable. He always “ distrusted " the English, and reviled them as hypocrites. They were “ wolves," dishonest, self- seeking, full of machiavellian plots, treacherous. He would not deign to “ explain " himself to them, and was with difficulty persuaded by Justin McCarthy and Michael Davitt to pay for propaganda in England to educate the English electorate in the meaning of the Irish movement. Once, while delivering an address before a Convention in Dublin, he suddenly dropped his theme and threw off some of his anti-English sentiments. ** The great thing, in my opinion," he said in a passage containing more venom than sense, “ is to resolve that we shall use no articles of English manufacture whatever. Buy in any other market that you please if you cannot buy in any Irish market, and there are undoubtedly many things which are not provided well in Ireland or which are not produced at all in Ireland. These things we ought to buy anywhere but in England. . . ." He paused for a moment, and then repeated the last words, “ anywhere but in England."2

Dean Swift, during a period of mental disturbance, said this more wittily, though not any more sensibly, when he advised the Irish people to burn everything from England except coal. The voice was the voice of Parnell, but the words came straight from the mind of his mother. They

1 On one occasion, Mr. T. M. Healy, now Governor-General of the Irish Free State, asked for permission to dine with Mr. Joseph Chamber- lain, and was angrily refused. See Life, by R. Barry O'Brien, vol. ii., P-45*

2 Chief and Tribune : Parnell and Davitt, by M. M. O’Hara, p. 181.

43

Parnell

could not have come from the mind of a statesman. Mr. R. B. Cunninghame Graham, as aristocratic as Parnell and as unhappy as he in the House of Commons, had some friendship with him. Writing in a defunct Irish review called Dana , he said of Parnell that, “ above all, he hated England and her ways. With what a seething coldness, as of ice upon the edges of a crater, he would say 1 your country or your queen/ Even the House of Commons, stupid as it was, would shiver, and red-faced Tory squires and Noncon¬ formists, reared on seed-cake and lemonade, would rise in their seats, shaking their mottled or their plebeian fists at his calm, smiling face. . . . No one, I think, was ever hated by the House as was Parnell, and he returned its hate a hundredfold, taking delight in gibing at it and making it absurd. Nothing offended him so much as when some hypocritical * Noncon.,' whom he and Gladstone had kicked round into Home Rule, would talk about the * union of our hearts/ and prophesy that soon all differences of race would be obliterated. Then, as he ground his teeth and his pale cheeks grew white with rage, he sometimes muttered, * Damn them I* with so much unction and such fervency that one felt sure his prayer, if not immediately vouchsafed, would yet be taken ad avizandum , as the lawyers say, and perhaps be of avail/'1 Mr. Cunninghame Graham, wishing to praise Parnell, leaves us with the uncomfortable feeling that his hero's mind was unsound, since no human being can hate a race, as Parnell is here reported to have hated England, and remain in possession of his senses. Mr. Graham’s casual reference to the foam which gathered about Parnell's mouth when he was in one of his rages adds to the discomfort.

It was in this atmosphere of insane hatreds that the young

1 From an article entitled An Tighearna : A Memory of Parnell, by R. B. Cunninghame Graham, published in Dana, November, 1904, p. 193.

44

His Family

Parnells grew up. Charles, whose mentality was slow, took longer than his younger sisters, Fanny and Anna, to produce the fine flowers of Mrs. Parnell's hatred, but when they came they were immense. Fanny's hatred never dwindled; it steadily increased. Her dabblings in spiritualism did not diminish it, and what little we know of her shows that she retained, in all its intensity, her loathing of the English to the day of her death. In 1877, when she was twenty- eight, she sat for twenty-six continuous hours, exalted, no doubt, by the discomfiture of the Saxons, in the Ladies' Gallery while her brother and his followers held up the business of the House of Commons. It was she who founded the American Ladies' Land League, which was the fore¬ runner of the Irish Ladies' Land League, founded by her sister Anna in Dublin, and afterwards ruthlessly suppressed by Parnell when he emerged from Kilmainham Prison.1 The last glimpse we get of her is through the eyes of the late William Redmond.2 She and her mother were then living, in 1882, at the house bequeathed to Mrs. Parnell by her father — Ironsides, Bordenstown, near New York. Redmond and Michael Davitt had been conducting an Irish mission in America, and Davitt was about to depart for Ireland. A reception was held in New York in his honour, and Mrs. Parnell read a poem about him which Fanny had composed. Davitt departed, and shortly afterwards Redmond went out

1 “ The work of the suppressed Land League was carried on by the Ladies' Land League under the presidency of Parnell’s sister. The ladies, if they did not actually stimulate crime, did little to suppress it. When Parnell eventually emerged from Kilmainham, he was furious with them, both on account of their policy and their extravagance. Outrages had increased, and they had spent £ 70,000 during the seven months of his incarceration.”— The Life of Henry Labouchere, by Algar Labouchere Thorold, p. 157*

2 See footnote on p. 373, vol. i., of The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, by R. Barry O’Brien,

45

Parnell

to Ironsides to see the Parnells. Fanny was not at home. “ She returned in a great state of excitement with a copy of the New York Herald in her hand. It was the time of the Egyptian War, and there was a rumour of an English defeat. I remember well seeing Fanny burst into the drawing-room, waving the paper over her head, and saying : * Oh, mother, there is an Egyptian victory. Arabi has whipped the Britishers. It is grand/ That was the last time I saw Fanny Parnell alive. Next day, she died quite suddenly." She was found dead in her bed on the morning after Redmond's visit. Like many members of her family, including her father and brother Charles, she suffered from a weak heart, and probably the shock of discovering that Arabi had not whipped the Britishers, killed her. She was Charles Parnell's favourite sister and companion, and the news of her death deeply distressed him. When Anna heard of it, she “ fell into a fit which very nearly proved fatal."1

Fanny Parnell was, perhaps, of all her family, the most fervently devoted to Ireland. Her passion for her country had a quality of fierce virgin affection which was not to be found even in her brother Charles's feeling for it. The best of her poems is one entitled “ After Death," in which this affection is abundantly made manifest :

Shall mine eyes behold thy glory, O my country? Shall mine eyes behold thy glory ?

Or shall the darkness close around them, ere the sunblaze break at last upon thy story ?

When the nations ope for thee their queenly circle, as a sweet new sister hail thee.

Shall these lips be sealed in callous death and silence, that have known but to bewail thee ?

1 Charles Stewart Parnell, by his brother, John Howard Parnell,

p. 211.

46

His Family

Shall the ear be deaf that only loved thy praises, when all men their tribute bring thee ?

Shall the mouth be clay that sang thee in thy squalor, when all poets’ mouths shall sing thee ?

Ah ! the harpings and the salvos and the shoutings of thy exiled sons returning ! *

I should hear, tho' dead and mouldered, and the grave-damps should not chill my bosom's burning.

Ah ! the tramp of feet victorious ! I should hear them 'mid the sham¬ rocks and the mosses,

And my heart should toss within the shroud and quiver as a captive dreamer tosses.

I should turn and rend the cere-clothes round me, giant sinews I should borrow —

Crying “ O, my brothers, I have also loved her in her loneliness and sorrow !”

“ Let me join with you the jubilant procession: let me chant with you her story;

Then contented I shall go back to the shamrocks, now mine eyes have seen her glory J”

V

It has been necessary to make these plunges backwards and forwards into the history of the Parnells to create for the reader the atmosphere in which the young Parnells grew. They had a distinguished ancestry on their father’s side and on their mother’s side, but they had inherited from it a physical weakness and a strongly emotional and morbid nature which impelled some of them dangerously near to lunacy. It was their misfortune that their easily-disturbed minds should have been dominated, during their most impressionable years, by a mother who could give them no better purpose in life than to “ hate England,” and was herself mentally unbalanced.

47

CHAPTER II

HIS CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

I

John Henry and Delia Tudor Parnell had twelve children in nineteen years. One of them, a boy, was stillborn. There is no record of the date of this child's birth, but there is reason to suppose that he was the first of the Parnell babies. It is difficult to prepare an accurate account of these children, chiefly because there were no official records kept of births and deaths in Ireland prior to 1864. Mr. Parnell's dates, in the table given in the first chapter of his Life of his brother, are drawn from an admittedly defective memory— he wrote the book when he was seventy-three — and some of them are demonstrably inaccurate. He gives the year of his sister Delia's death as 1881, but we know that her only son, Henry, died in 1882, and that the cause of her death, which occurred in America, was grief at his loss. The year of his sister Sophia's death is inaccurately given as 1875 : it should be 1877. Death certificates do not assist the enquirer, probably because the age of the deceased is frequently a matter of conjecture rather than of knowledge. But, correcting Mr. Parnell's dates where this is possible, the following is a short account of the eleven children of Mr. and Mrs. Parnell who were born alive :

William Tudor, born in 1837 and died in 1838.

Delia, born in 1838 and married on June 11, 1859, in which year her father died, to James Livingston Thomson, an American millionaire. She died in America soon after the death of her only child, Henry, took place in Paris in 1882. He was twenty-one when he died.

1 Mr. Barry O'Brien seems not to have known of his birth, for he states in the Life that Mr. and Mrs. Parnell had eleven children (vol. i., p. 30), but Mr. John Parnell mentions it on p. 11 of his book on his brother.

48

His Childhood and Youth

Hayes, born in 1839 and died, as the result of an accident in the hunting-field, at the age of sixteen, in 1855.

Emily, born in 1841 and married in 1864 to Captain Arthur Dickinson, by whom she had one daughter, Delia Tudor. This daughter survives. Captain Dickinson died in Brussels, and his widow, some years after his death, married an Englishman, Captain Ricketts. She died in the South Dublin Union Infirmary on May 18, 1918, her age being certified as eighty, but this was probably conjectured.

John Howard, born in 1843 and married on June 13, 1907, to Olivia, eldest daughter of Colonel James Smyth and widow of Archibald Mateer. He held the post of City Marshal of Dublin, and died at Sion House, Glenageary, Co. Dublin, on May 3, 1923. He had no children.

Sophia Katherine, born in 1845 and married at the age of sixteen, in the Scottish fashion, to Alfred MacDermott, a Dublin solicitor. This marriage was never publicly acknowledged, and as Sophia was a ward in Chancery, her husband decided to have a public marriage in Ireland, when she had attained her majority, without letting the Lord Chancellor know of the Scottish ceremony. . The second marriage took place on May 22, 1866, in St. George’s Church, Dublin. She died at 43, Fitswilliam Square, Dublin, on February 17, 1877, her age being given as thirty-three. She had four children, of whom three survive.

Charles Stewart, born on June 27, 1846, and married on June 25, 1891, to Katharine O’Shea, daughter of the Rev. Sir John Page Wood and divorced wife of Captain William Henry O’Shea. He had three daughters by Mrs. O’Shea while she was still Captain O'Shea’s wife. One was born in 1882, and died nine weeks after her birth. The second was born in 1883, and the third in 1884. One of these two married a doctor, and died in childbirth. The other is unmarried, and survives. Charles Stewart Parnell died at 9, Walsingham Terrace, West Brighton, on October 6, 1891, at the age of forty-five. His widow died at 39/ East Ham Road, Littlehampton, on February 5, 1921, at the age of

49

D

Parnell

seventy-six. Captain O’Shea died at 19, Lansdowne Place, Hove, on April 22, 1905, at the. age of sixty-five. Mrs. O'Shea had three children by him — one son and two daughters. She had six children in all.

Fanny, born in 1849 and died, unmarried, at Ironsides, Bordenstown, New Jersey, on July 20, 1882. .

Henry Tudor, born in Paris in 1851 and married in 1882 to Penelope Jane, daughter of the Rev. Thomas Luby, D.D., of Trinity College, Dublin. He had two sons and one daughter, all of whom are alive. He died in Lausanne in November, 1915.

Anna Catherine, born in 1852 and drowned at the Tunnel Baths, Ilfracombe, on September 20, 1911. She was unmarried.

Theodosia Tudor Stewart, born in 1853 and married on July 21, 1880, in Paris to Commander Claude Paget, R.N. She died on March 17, 1920, at 38, Denbigh Street, Pimlico, London, her age being certified at sixty-four, which would make the year of her birth 1856. She had one child, a son, who survives.

II

All the Parnell children, with the exception of Henry Tudor, were born at Avondale, in the lovely Avonmore Valley, near the village of Rathdrum, County Wicklow.1 Trees are not plentiful in Ireland, but they grow abundantly in Avonmore, and some of the finest beech, elm, and silver fir trees in Ireland surrounded the Avondale lawn. A fine avenue of beech-trees lead from the turreted gate-house to the mansion, a squarely-built house planned in 1777 by an architect who

1 Mr. T. P. O'Connor, in his Life of Parnell, states that Mr. Parnell himself told him that he was born at Brighton. There was probably some misunderstanding here. At all events, he was baptised in Rath- drum Parish Church on August 9, 1846, by the Rev. W. Pakenham Walsh, who was afterwards Bishop of Ossory. It is, of course, quite possible that Parnell was born at Brighton — for which he had great liking — but his family have always given his birthplace as Avondale.

50

His Childhood and Youth

had no regard for beauty of design. Avondale, however, stands on a high hill in beautiful country above the River Avon, about two miles from “ The Meeting of the Waters/' which is celebrated in a popular poem by Thomas Moore :

There is not in this wide world a valley so sweet

As that vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet.

The house is entered by a granite porch supported by granite pillars, giving immediately on to a large, high hall, M capacious enough," according to Mrs. Dickinson, “ to drive a coach and four round,” and “ taking up," says her brother, John Howard Parnell, “ at least one-third of the whole area " of the house. Huge wood fires generously roared up its chimneys, and in it most of the family life, especially of the children, was spent. There was a carved oak musician's gallery at the upper end of the hall, the railing of which was hung with memorials and relics of the Parnells' ancestors. The walls bore the heads of deer and a variety of religious inscriptions, the colours of the Irish Volunteers, some souvenirs of trips to Canada and other countries, and the antlers of the largest elk in existence. The remains of this elk were found in one of the bogs on the estate. Here, too, was a large billiard-table. Italian ornaments were in this and all the other, rooms of the house. The library, plentifully furnished with books, the dining-room, and the drawing-room were all large, and, since they opened on to each other, could be converted into a single room suitable for the balls and parties in which the Parnells delighted. The drawing-room contained a marble chimney-piece, bearing inlaid inscriptions made by the Italian painter Bossi, and valued, so it was said, at £ 1,000. In all these rooms, texts from the Scriptures were lavishly displayed. The stables were large and contained many horses, for Mr. Parnell was Master of the Hounds and kept the kennels at Avondale. He was a fairly rich man, the

5i

Parnell

owner of three estates, and he lived in the extravagant fashion which was traditional in his class. His children were expensively, though not very efficiently, educated. The girls were sent to schools in England and in France, and the boys, with the exception of John Howard, were sent to Cambridge. It is the custom now among Irish intellectuals to deride the novels of Charles Lever, and to deny that they offer a veracious picture of the Irish people. Nevertheless, Lever was a faithful chronicler of his times, and his portraits of the Anglo- Irish and their retainers among the Celtic Irish were true. The gay and extravagant households where the men were bold and brave and drunken, and the women were beautiful and sometimes indiscreet, existed. The Anglo-Irish morally and spiritually ceased to exist on the day that the Union between England and Ireland was made. Their lives there¬ after were passed in a rapid process of degeneration. They might have recovered themselves had they lived on better terms with their tenants, but they abandoned their respon¬ sibilities and demanded only their privileges. If the gentle¬ men of Ireland a hundred years ago had accepted the obliga¬ tions of their class, we probably would not now be lamenting the lapse of Ireland into a slough of despond from which she will be slow to emerge. The signs were plentiful. Maria Edgeworth plainly portrayed the end in Castle Rackrent. Lever, too, had they read him with penetration, must have made them realise that their career was downwards, that soon all they had would be lost, and aristocracy would perish out of Ireland, leaving in its place a ruck of greedy peasants whose sons would turn easily to murder in the pretence that they were performing deeds of patriotism. Lord Castle- reagh had better have cut his throat before he did than live the year or two longer which enabled him to destroy the Irish Parliament and make himself the spiritual ancestor of the Sinn Fein gunman. But the gentlemen of Ireland 52

His Childhood and Youth

denied their breeding, misused their lands and their tenants, and forced a naturally subservient and lord-loving people into positions of defence which presently became positions of offence. And the end of that misery is not yet.

The Parnells and their neighbours might have stepped out of the novels of Lever. Wicklow, like other Irish counties, was inhabited by a hard-living, hard-drinking set which loved hunting and gambling and loud, lavish hospitality. Mr. Parnell's affection for books kept him from the rougher life of his neighbours, such as the Dickinsons, but his children fell into it as if by instinct. His daughter Emily, whom he disinherited because he suspected her of having schemes to elope with Captain Arthur Dickinson, a representative Lever soldier, gives an account of her up¬ bringing in A Patriot’s Mistake, which shows that the Lever Ireland, though it no longer exists, certainly existed in the middle of the nineteenth century. She describes an incident in her own life which is remarkably like one described in Charles O’Malley . After her father's death and her mar¬ riage to Captain Dickinson, she was riding round the west corner of Stephen's Green on her horse, “ Royal," when a donkey-cart, driven by an old woman, got in their way. The horse jumped clean over the cart, clearing the head of the terrified old woman by a couple of inches. The feat was loudly cheered by jarveys standing by.1 When Charles O'Malley, who had just landed in Lisbon during the Penin¬ sular War, was riding towards the Plaza, his horse became unmanageable, and to avoid riding down a Portuguese girl, he put it at a mule and cart, and cleared them amid the cheers of the onlookers.2

Mr. Parnell engaged in agriculture, concerning which he was considered to be an expert, and he employed people in

1 A Patriot's Mistake, by Emily Monroe Dickinson, p. 83.

* Charles O’Malley, by Charles Lever, chap, xxxvii.

53

Parnell

reclaiming land about Avondale. He was a magistrate and a Deputy-Lieutenant for Wicklow. He liked hunting and shooting, but was fonder still of cricket, which he played very well. His liking for this English game was so great that he maintained a cricket club at his own charge. He was a quiet man on most occasions, although his temper was high when he was roused, and he had an obstinate strain in him which made him difficult to deal with. A rumour that Emily had run away with Captain Dickinson was sufficient to make him alter his will, leaving her out of it, although the rumour was not true. But he greatly disliked the Dickinson family, and was determined, if he could, to prevent a marriage between one of them and his daughter. It seemed to him that he could most easily do this by disinheriting Emily. The event proved that he was wrong, but it would have been better for her if it had proved him right. He insisted, against his doctor's advice, in going up to Dublin from Avondale to play in a cricket match between the Leinster and the Phoenix teams. He had been “ suffering from rheumatism of the stomach, and had been warned by Sir Frederick Marsh not to indulge in violent exercise. But he had a determined will, and, like Charley, when he had made up his mind to a thing, carried it out at all cost. The result was that, although in a high fever, he insisted on playing in the match. He felt worse on his return to the Shelbourne Hotel, and sent for a doctor; but it was too late, and he died next day."1 Mrs. Dickinson says that he went “ straight from the cricket match to his solicitor’s to make his will," and presumably to dis¬ inherit her.2

His love of country life was not shared by his young wife, who found Avondale dull after the excitements of New York; but as her babies came, she found herself fully occupied with

1 Charles Stewart Parnell, by his brother, John Howard Parnell, p. 38.

2 A Patriot’s Mistake, by Emily Monroe Dickinson, p. 31.

54

His Childhood and Youth

them and with the hospitalities of her home. She was about thirty years of age when Charles Stewart, her eighth child, was born, but was still a little feather-brained, for one day, when she was nursing him, and a visitor was unexpectedly announced, she put him into “ the drawer of a large press, which she closed withoufrthinking, and hurried to the drawing¬ room. When the visitor left, about half an hour later, she found that she had clean forgotten what she had done with Charley, and a frantic search was made, until muffled yells from the drawer where he was imprisoned resulted in his release."1 Six of her eight children were then alive, one of them, the eldest girl, Delia, being extraordinarily beautiful.

Delia was a dark-haired, dark-skinned girl of medium height and exquisite figure. Her eyes were soft and dark and sad, and her normal mien was melancholy, except when she flushed, and then there was a radiant look on her face. When she had finished her schooling in Paris, she was sent to stay with her uncle and aunt, Sir Ralph and Lady Howard, in Belgrave Square, and for three seasons she was a popular beauty. She was an ambitious, calculating girl, resolved on making a fine marriage, and so, when a young American millionaire of family, who had been educated in Paris, pro¬ posed to her, she accepted him, although she told him frankly enough that she did not love him and was marrying him for his money. But Mr. Livingston Thomson was infatuated with the lovely girl, and took her on her own terms. He did not long abide by them. He became insanely jealous, and, both at their hotel in Paris and their country house at St. Germains, manifested his jealousy in a way which made him publicly ridiculous. He accompanied her to afternoon receptions, which, it seemed, was not the custom in Paris. He objected to other men putting her cloak about her shoulders, and insisted that this should be done only by himself. Since 1 Charles Stewart Parnell, by his brother, John Howard Parnell, p. 19.

55

Parnell

he did not ride, he forbade her, who loved riding and was an accomplished horsewoman, to do so. He rarely left her alone, a sign of devotion which was considered in France to be a sign of insanity. He remembered too well that his beautiful and admired wife had married him without feeling any affection for him, and he was haunted by the unhappy thought that in the crowd of gay and handsome gentlemen who thronged around her in the theatre, at the opera, at receptions, in the Bois, wherever she went, some luckier lover than himself would appear. His jealousy increased as he grew older, and after the birth of their son, Henry, he became morbidly jealous. He informed his wife that they would not have any other children, and banished the boy and his nurse to the extreme end of the house. Her beautiful Russian horses were taken from her, and she was permitted no other exercise than sedate saunters along the terrace of her home at St. Germains in the oppressive company of her hus¬ band. She appealed to him to be allowed to ride again, and when he declined to let her, she swallowed a poison and nearly died. Anna Parnell was staying with her then. Mrs. Thom¬ son, horrified by her own act, hurried to her sister's room and told her of what she had done, and Anna, distraught with fear, rushed to her brother-in-law and roused him from his sleep. A doctor was called, and Delia's life was saved. Thereafter, the repentant Mr. Thomson mitigated some of the rigours of his affection for his wife, and she was allowed to ride about the country round St. Germains, accompanied on a bicycle by her delicate son, who suffered from some spinal trouble and was forbidden by the doctors to ride on horses.

All the Parnells were handsome, despite, or perhaps because of, a look of delicacy which they all had. Emily was a pretty, dark girl, fond of music and an accomplished pianist. Sophia was tall and graceful and very lovely. She 56

His Childhood and Youth

had large, dark blue eyes and a mass of fair hair, which, like Portia’s, hung “ about her temples like a golden fleece.” Her delicate pink complexion made a singular contrast with the dark, ivory skin of her eldest sister and the brightly pretty, fragile looks of her second sister, Emily. Fanny, Anna, and Theodosia were dark and attractive, especially Theodosia, the youngest of the Parnell children, but had not the loveliness of their two elder sisters, Delia and Sophia. Hayes and John Howard and Charles Stewart and Henry Tudor were all handsome men. The family was a talented one. Anna painted tolerably well, Fanny wrote good verse, Emily had some reputation as a musician, and the sons had various abilities, mostly in mechanics. But all of them, including Charles, were unable to make the most of their abilities because of some inertia in them which was due, no doubt, to their delicacy. John Howard Parnell was fecund in ideas of value, but never contrived to bring any of them to a successful conclusion because of a failure of staying power. He was the first man to bring fresh peaches from America to Ireland, and might, if he could have formed a partnership with some more practically-minded man, have created profitable industries in Ireland and have made a fortune for himself. But money dribbled away from him, as it dribbled from his brothers and sisters, because neither he nor they could assemble their thoughts long enough to keep it secure.

Ill

Charles easily became the leader of his brothers and sisters. He was a delicate, yet wiry boy, and was so small for his age, though he afterwards grew tall, that his family nicknamed him “ Tom Thumb.” He was a difficult child, headstrong and self-willed and rude, with a jealous and distrustful nature. The suspicions which he frequently felt in his

57

Parnell

nursery were to remain with him for the whole of his life, increasing as he grew older. He was a mischievous boy, determined to have his own way, and not always too scrupulous about the manner in which he got it. Fanny was his favourite sister, and he and she would shut themselves in an attic, where they would play interminable games of soldiers and retell the tales they had heard from the peasants about their father s estate. There is a familiar story of the way in which he defeated Fanny’s soldiers in one of their battles. The armies were drawn up against each other, and the commanders took turn about in trundling a ball against the enemy or assailing them through a pea-shooter. Fanny’s men fell in batches, but Charley’s soldiers, even when they were struck by the ball, remained upright. Then she discovered that her ingenious brother had carefully glued his men to the ground before the battle began! His turbulent temper interfered with his education, for neither governesses nor tutors would put up with him, and he suffered throughout his life from extensive ignorance. But he had force and determina¬ tion, and was able to establish his authority at Avondale mainly by demanding the obedience of his brothers and sisters and of the servants. When he could not immediately exact obedience from them, he used to butt them round the room with his head, as if he were a goat, and for this reason got his second nickname, " Butt-head.” No one, seemingly, had power to control him, except his nurse, an Englishwoman with the engaging De-la-Mareish name of Mrs. Twopenny, who sometimes slapped him, though she rarely had to punish him at all, so fond was he of her, so fond was she of him. His brother, John Howard, was his chief companion out of doors, but although he felt for him, as he felt for his whole family, a strong love, he seems strangely to have been irritated by him. John asserted that Charley was jealous of him, and perhaps he was, though there seemed to be no occasion for 58

His Childhood and Youth

jealousy, unless it were the fact that the elder brother was popular, while Charles, because of his reserve and coldness with strangers, was not. Whatever the cause of the irritation may have been, the fact remains that Charles rarely neglected to inflict some insult or injury on John. The elder boy stammered badly, and Charles mimicked him so successfully that he contracted a stammer of his own. “ He was very fond of fighting/' John said to Mr. Barry O'Brien, “ and would fight with me if he had nobody else."1 When John and he went out as retrievers with the guns, and John fetched back more birds than he, he would fly into a violent passion. “ When we were playing hockey, I had to keep a sharp look-out for my shins, because Charley always tried to go for me."2 Throughout Mr. Parnell's account of his brother we find passages in which he narrates some instance of this odd irritation, which frequently ended in blows, immediately followed by contrition. It was, perhaps, the result of a highly-nervous temperament in contact with a slower nature, or of the jealousy to which John Parnell himself attributed it, but it was not enough to cause dislike between the brothers, who remained throughout their lives on terms of affection, despite the fact that their father bequeathed Avondale to the younger of the two.

The relationship between Irish children and their servants is more intimate and familiar than that between English children and their servants, and the young Parnells heard in the kitchen and the stables of Avondale many stories of persecutions, which were increased by others which they heard during their rambles round the country. These tales, more, perhaps, than anything else, influenced Charles Parnell in his politics. One of them, indeed, stirred the mind and imagina¬ tion of this nervous boy, who suffered from somnambulism and

1 Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, by R. Barry O'Brien, vol. i., p. 37,

* Charles Stewart Parnell, by his brother, John Howard Parnell, p. 35,

59

Parnell

nightmares, to such an extent that when he became a member of Parliament he offered inflexible opposition to punishment by flogging in the army and navy. The story was that a rebel in the Rebellion of 1798, was arrested by English soldiers and sentenced by a dourt-martial to be whipped to death. The lashes were inflicted, not on the man's back, as was commonly done, but on his belly, and the poor wretch, shrieking with agony, fell bleeding and lacerated to the ground and died. This horrible scene had been witnessed by an old lodge-keeper at Avondale, who must many times have told the story of it to the young boy from “ the big house.” It was a story which could not fail to affect the thoughts of a sensitive lad who detested cruelty of all sorts, whether to animals or to men.

When he was six years old, his father resolved to send him to an English school, partly because he wished him to learn something of English life, partly to put him into a quieter and less nervous environment than he had at home, and partly to separate him from his elder brother, whose stammer¬ ing he was so dangerously imitating. The school selected for him was at Yeovil, in Somersetshire, and he was admitted to it as a great favour, for it was a girls' school, and not even little boys were accepted there as pupils. He dis¬ liked being sent to this school, because “ it was not manly ” for a boy to be at a school for girls, but he went to it with the intention of making himself master of the place. He seems to have been happy here, for the principal, Miss Marly, became attached to him, and nursed him, during his second term, through an illness of typhoid fever. His intention to domineer over the girl pupils was frustrated by them, for they all made love to him, and, as he told his brother after¬ wards, “ bothered him out of his life.” His turbulence of temper seemed to subside at Yeovil. He got good conduct marks, and when he returned to Avondale his family observed 60

His Childhood and Youth

that he no longer “ bossed ” them as he had done before he went away. His stay at Yeovil terminated immediately after his recovery from the fever, which had affected his mind to some extent, and for a while he was under the care of Dr. Forbes Winslow.1 His education was continued at home under his sisters’ goverpess, and then, because of his fierce objection to being instructed by a woman, under a tutor, who, however, made no greater success of his education than the unhappy young lady who had preceded him. A clergyman, the Rev. Henry Galbraith, the rector of Rathdrum, was engaged to instruct him in religion, but the clergyman soon ceased to wrestle with his soul when he found himself made the boy’s butt.

He was now eight years old, and rapidly becoming un¬ manageable, and his parents resolved to send him to another English school, kept by the Rev. Mr. Barton, at Kirk Langley, in Derbyshire, where, despite some displays of obstinate temper, he spent a short but happy time, although he neither liked nor was liked by his school-fellows. His idleness and resistance to authority probably caused Mr. Barton to ask Mr. and Mrs. Parnell not to send him back again to Kirk Langley, and he spent the next few years, until his father’s death, at Avondale, picking up scraps of knowledge rather reluctantly, roaming the country with his brother or Mrs. Twopenny, and playing cricket, of which he was fond, although he did not play it well. His nervousness and reserve were increasing. “ Even at that time, during the cricket matches, I used to notice Charley’s extreme nervousness. His fingers twitched nervously, even while he was watching the match, and I know that in after-days he was just as nervous, though perhaps he did not show it to outsiders. . . .”2 His outbursts of temper continued. When a clumsy house-

1 Charles Stewart Parnell, by his brother, John Howard Parnell, p. 28.

2 Ibid.,, p. 31.

61

Parnell

maid accidentally smashed some of his collection of eggs, he u flew into a violent passion, and threatened to smash her head, so much so that she ran away and hid in the servants quarters/'1

In this rough-and-ready way he spent his boyhood. His careless, casual upbringing made him a half-educated and wholly imperious man, immensely sure of himself, but insufficiently armed with knowledge to be able to use his assurance discreetly. He had a remarkable amount of country lore, sometimes astonishing his relatives by his knowledge of things of which they had supposed him to be ignorant; and he had an uncanny gift, derived, no doubt, from his grandfather, “ Old Ironsides " Stewart, of concen¬ trating his thoughts on the essential matter and disregarding all else. He knew very little of his country's history, except what he had heard in Wicklow cottages, but that little lasted. One might suppose that his ignorance of Irish affairs he knew nothing whatever in his youth of his famous ancestors — was due to his father's ban on political arguments at Avondale, but the supposition would be wrong, for Mr. Parnell died when his son was thirteen, and the ban on political discussions was then raised and never reimposed. He was not the sort of boy who cared about learning. He rarely read books. “ The only book I ever saw him read," said a member of his family, ** was Youatt's The Horse, and he knew that very well."2 Mr. Daniel Horgan, his host in Cork on many occasions, told Mr. O'Brien that when Parnell had to deliver a lecture on Ireland and her Parliament to the Cork Young Ireland Society, he said : " I really do not know anything about Irish history. Have you got any books I can read?" Mr. Horgan, who knew as little about the subject as Parnell did, found some books for him. “ The day of the lecture came.

1 Charles Stewart Parnell, by his brother, John Howard Parnell, p. 33.

2 Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, by R. Barry O'Brien, vol, i., p. 53.

62

His Childhood and Youth

The hour fixed was 8 p,m. We dined a little earlier than usual. 4 Now/ said Parnell, rising from the table, 4 I must read up the history. Will you give me a pen and ink, and some note-paper ?’ I put him into a room by himself, with pen, ink, and paper, and the books. I came back about a quarter to nine. He looked up smiling, and said, 4 I’m ready !' He had made notes in big handwriting on the paper — about three notes on each sheet. * I think I will be able to say something now/ he said. . . /n

The lecture appears to have been an enormous success, but more, perhaps, on account of the lecturer than on account of the lecture; for at that time the Irish people would have cheered him all night if he had merely repeated the alphabet to them.

Except for the periods when he was at Yeovil and Kirk Langley, he received no real or continuous education until he was seventeen. The Parnells seem to have spent more thought on the education of their daughters than they spent on the education of their sons, possibly because they con¬ cluded that their sons, since they were to inherit landed estates and to lead the lives of Irish country gentlemen, would not require much education, whereas their daughters, poorly dowered, would require all the aids to fine marriages that teachers and professors could give them. This was strictly in accordance with tradition. Irish gentlemen did not feel themselves obliged to spend much thought on the education of their sons who were to inherit landed property. Education, it seemed, was unnecessary for a man who was to live on rent and interest. Thady Quirk, in Miss Maria Edgeworth's invaluable account of eighteenth-century Irish life, Castle Rackrent, says of Sir Condy Rackrent, who un¬ expectedly succeeded to the Rackrent property and title, that he attended college until he was nineteen, 44 for, as he was not 1 Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, by R. Barry O’Brien, vol. ii., p. 39.

63

Parnell

born to an estate, his friends thought it incumbent upon them to give him the best education which could be had for love or money. . . The elder girls were sent to Paris to be “ finished/’ and when they had acquired all the accomplish¬ ments that the French could bestow upon them, they went for “ the season ” to the house of their uncle and aunt, Sir Ralph and Lady Howard, where they whirled through balls and sat through plays and operas and were seen in the Park. They bobbed before the Queen at Buckingham Palace, and went through the whole of the elaborate ritual which was prescribed for the well-bred Victorian young woman who earnestly endeavoured to secure a rich and, if possible, handsome husband. Delia and Emily had already curtsied to Queen Victoria and made some sensation, especially the first, with their good looks, and the Parnells were anticipating the time when the lovely Sophia would also be presented at Court. If Delia had astounded London by her beauty, how much more would Sophia, with her golden hair and deep, dark blue eyes, and blush-rose complexion, astound it ? The girls were all to marry well. Delia had done so, and was now richly and magnificently established in Paris, delighting the French by her beauty and tormenting her husband by the admiration which it excited. Emily, though not so handsome as her elder sister, would no doubt marry as well, although she was causing her parents some distress by her persistent affection for a really dreadful young man called Dickinson. But a season with the Howards would cure Emily of her girlish romance ! . ♦ .

On June n, 1859, Delia married Mr. Thomson. A few weeks later, her father suddenly died. All of his family, except Charles, were in Paris or at school, and when he was buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery, he was followed to his grave only by his thirteen-year-old son. Neither Mrs. Parnell nor her son John nor his sisters, who were in Paris, returned

64

His Childhood and Youth

to Dublin until after the funeral. They took lodgings near Gardiner Street, and in these lodgings Mr. Parnell's will was read. Avondale was left to his second son, Charles; the Carlow property at Clonmore was left to the third son, Henry Tudor ; and only the Armagh estate, Collure, burdened by a head rent of £1,100 per annum payable to Trinity College, Dublin, and annuities to each of his sisters, except Emily, was left to the eldest son, John Howard. Mr. Parnell disinherited his daughter for reasons already given, and he omitted to make any provision for his wife.1 The will caused consternation among his children. It seemed as if the eldest son had been harshly treated by his father without having done anything to deserve harsh treatment; but after¬ wards the family discovered that Sir Ralph Howard had promised to make John his heir, and Mr. Parnell, relying on this promise, passed him over in favour of his second and third sons, so that they might all be equally well off. Sir Ralph did not fulfil his promise, but he left John shares in Welsh iron and coal mines which were estimated to bring him £4,000 per annum; he also left him the liability to pay for future calls in this unlimited company. John had to pay the calls or forfeit the shares, which, perhaps, he would have been wiser to have done ; for when he had received one dividend amounting to £1,500, the company went bankrupt. The Avondale estate had a free rent-roll, and was worth about £4,000 per annum. The Carlow property brought £2,000 per annum to Henry Tudor Parnell. When John Howard had paid the head rent to Trinity College and the annuities to his sisters, there was nothing left for him.

1 Charles Stewart Parnell, by his brother, John Howard Parnell, p. 61.

E

65

Parnell

IV

And now life changed for the Parnells. Whatever discipline they had had to endure while their father was alive, they no longer endured. Mrs. Parnell promptly had them made wards in Chancery. This was done on the advice of their guardians, Sir Ralph Howard, Bart., and Mr. Johnson, chiefly because Sir Ralph was annoyed at finding himself joined in guardianship to them with Mr. Johnson, a Scotch agricul¬ tural expert who was an old friend of Mr. Parnell. The Court appointed Mr. Alfred MacDermott, a solicitor, to manage their affairs, and Mr. MacDermott directed Mrs. Parnell to conduct her children to Avondale, whither he also went to examine the family's affairs, which were in a state of con¬ fusion. Economy was urged upon them, advice which was very disagreeable to the widow. A number of unnecessary workmen were dismissed from the estate, and a quantity of live stock and farming implements was sold by auction. It was an expensive matter, even in those times, to be Master of the Hounds, to provide lavish hospitality for hunting neighbours, and to find funds for “ finishing ” daughters in Paris ; and Mr. Parnell, living like a lord, managed to load his estate with debt. Avondale was let, and the Parnells removed to a house named Khyber Pass in Dalkey. Here a desultory attempt, under a tutor, was made to educate the elder sons. Mr. MacDermott, while engaged in straightening out his clients' affairs, decided to offer his hand to Emily Parnell, although he knew that she was secretly engaged to Captain Dickinson. She declined it, but, undaunted, he turned to her sister, Sophia, now about sixteen, and wooed her so ardently that she eloped to Scotland with him, where they were married after the custom of Scotland. Mrs. Parnell was ill at this time, and knew nothing of the affair, nor did Mr. MacDermott make any announcement of it, for to have 66

His Childhood and Youth

done so would have been to expose himself to the wrath of the Lord Chancellor, and the pains and penalties of the law.1 The young Sophia, now a married woman, returned to her mother's house and Remained there, apparently a maid, until she came of age and was dismissed as a ward of Chancery. Mr. MacDermott, being expert in the law, decided when his wife attained her majority that it would be better for her and him to remarry and say nothing about the Scottish ceremony, since the Lord Chancellor, if he were a testy-tempered man, might still punish him for running away with his ward.2

In the meantime, Mrs. Parnell and her family had removed from Dalkey, first to the O'Conor Don's house, near Clarinda Park, Kingstown, and then, a year later, to 14, Upper Temple Street, Dublin, from whence Fanny Parnell used sometimes to walk with a poem in her pocket to the office of the Irish People . The elder girls — Emily, Sophy, and Fanny — con¬ tinued their education, learning Italian and German, while John attended at the School of Mining in Stephen's Green for the study of mining and geology. Then Mrs. Parnell, tardily realising that her sons were ill-educated, decided to prepare them for Cambridge, where so many of their ancestors had been, by sending them to a school at Chipping Norton, in Oxfordshire, kept by the Rev. John Wishaw. John, who had never been to school except in Paris, was backward in English, and probably his deficiencies in his own language were too great to enable him to matriculate, for he did not accompany his brother to Cambridge.3 In spite of Charley's argumentativeness, which involved him in frequent conflicts with the under-masters, and his deep unpopularity with his

1 A Patriot's Mistake, by Emily Monroe Dickinson, p. 35.

2 Ibid., p. 61.

3 His spelling remained throughout his life remarkably poor. I have seen manuscripts in his handwriting which were hopelessly misspelt. His grammar was as weak as his spelling (St. J. E.).

67

Parnell

school-fellows, his terms at Chipping Norton were happy enough, for ** being a good dancer, Charley was invited out a great deal, and was £ thorough favourite with the girls.”1 He was self-opinionated and irascible. Once, when con¬ struing a Greek play, he mistranslated a word. When Mr. Wishaw corrected him, he argued the point, and, after he had looked in the lexicon and found that it supported his master, coolly asserted, “ Well, the lexicon says what you say, but I expect the lexicon is wrong.” A special coach had been engaged to prepare him for Cambridge, a clever, slightly deformed man, with whom he could not agree on anything. Parnell objected to the master’s method of teaching, and continually quarrelled with him, until at last their disagreement terminated in a terrible row. “ I can see my brother now, his face aflame with passion, and his mouth twitching nervously, while he denounced the teacher and his methods. Mr. Wishaw had to interfere, and told Charley that if he did not apologise he would be sent home. The apology was finally forthcoming, but it was a very reluctant and grudging one, as Charley fully believed that he was in the right. The result was that he could never endure this teacher afterwards, and his studies suffered considerably in consequence.”2 However, he was happy enough with his riding, hunting, cricket, dancing, and love-making.

It was here that his first love affair took place. This was no more than a boy-and-girl courtship, but he brought to it the intensity of affection and devotion which he was to bring to all his love affairs. It resembled all that followed it in this respect, that it drew him away from his work and left him little time for anything else. His brother, who was as popular with his school-fellows as Charles was unpopular, used continually to see him and the bright, pretty girl he was

1 Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, by his brother, John Howard Parnell, p. 5a. 2 Ibid., p. 49.

68

His Childhood and Youth

courting about the roads and lanes of Chipping Norton, but “ never joined them, as Charley was very jealous of any other fellow, especially of me.” The affair ended when the girl departed from the neighbourhood, and he returned to his studies, determined to Inaster them and qualify himself for the university. His nervous disorder had not abated, and he suffered greatly, during his stay with Mr. Wishaw, from attacks of nerves and somnambulism. About this time he had begun to be superstitious. Signs and portents seriously affected him. When he first appeared at the Chipping Norton Rectory and saw a graveyard before it, his face fell. “ I say, John," he said to his brother, “ I don’t quite like this; I hope I won't get into any rows here." Hardly had he spoken, when he slipped and almost crashed through the glass panel, an accident which immediately became for him confirmation of his fears.

He left Mr. Wishaw's school in 1865, and went up to Cambridge in the same year, entering as a pensioner at Magdalene. Mr. A. C. Benson’s refining influence had not yet been exercised to make Magdalene seemly, and it was then essentially a sporting and somewhat rowdy college. Most of the men hunted. The authorities were astounded when a Magdalene man took a degree, and it is probable that among themselves the men considered such an act as slightly disgraceful. Parnell did not increase the reputation of his college for scholarship. The account of his time at Cambridge is obscure. His sister Emily devotes a chapter of her book, A Patriot’s Mistake, to a painful episode in his university life which is not recorded either in his brother John's Life or in the official biography by Mr. Barry O'Brien. Mrs. Dickinson, who had married Captain Dickinson by the time her brother entered Magdalene, was the member of his family who was most constantly with him. She shared with Fanny the first place in his family affections, and she lived with him

69

Parnell

at Avondale for a considerable part of her married life, and for a long time after her husband died. Doubt has been cast upon her veracity in connection with this episode, but I am assured by John Howard Parnell's widow that the story is “ quite true." Mrs. Dickinson, or, rather, Mrs. Ricketts, for she married a second time, after the publication of her book, took few pains with A Patriot's Mistake . It is ill- written and incoherent. Dates are either missing or in¬ accurate. Names are incorrectly given. She states that the episode to be narrated was the cause of her brother being sent down from his college, when, in fact, he was sent down for a comparatively trivial offence. Nevertheless, she is, I think, to be trusted in this matter. She would hardly have invented a story which did no credit to her beloved brother, and if she had, in some access of insanity, done so, there were several of her relatives and also Mr. Barry O'Brien alive to deny her story when it was published, if it were untrue.

IV

The story is that, when he was nineteen, he used very frequently to boat on the Cam. About a couple of miles along the river from the town was a farm, with a fruit garden sloping down to the water, where Parnell often observed a girl of sixteen, named Daisy, the daughter of the farmer, picking fruit. She was a pretty, fair-haired girl, with an innocent expression, and Parnell seems immediately to have fallen in love with her. He contrived an accident to one of his oars, and requested the girl to get some cord for him so that he might repair it. He then arranged to meet her again, enjoining secrecy upon her, lest their affair should come to the knowledge of his college authorities. “ He knew it was impossible to marry Daisy, lovely and innocent though she was, as he was under age and a ward in Chancery," says

70

His Childhood and Youth

Mrs. Dickinson, but we may doubt whether the Lord Chancellor's embargo counted for much with Parnell. All of his family had great self-respect, as the Irish call it, or, as others would say, family pride or, perhaps, self-satisfaction. “ If the King came t<5 Avondale," said one who knew them well, ** they would make no change for him, believing that no one was better than the Parnells." The right of the lord to the young girls on his land was maintained to a later date in Ireland than, perhaps, any other Western European country, and Parnell must have heard many stories of the raping as a right of peasant women by lustful landlords. He was a chivalrous man in his relation with women, especially after he had left Cambridge, but this chivalry is not incom¬ patible with a belief that a gentleman is entitled to take his pleasure among the women of the lower class without being excessively sensitive about it or keeping the affair long on his conscience. The tone of Magdalene at that time probably encouraged him to hold this belief. If the girl on whom the young gentleman fixed his fancy had a child by him, a present of a pound or two would amply compensate her, might even be a blessing to her, for it was likely that a girl of proved fecundity, with a handsome sum of money in her pocket, would, despite the encumbrance of a child, prove irresistibly attractive to some far-seeing, thrifty, unparticular country¬ man. We need not, therefore, believe that Parnell would have married the fruit-farmer's daughter had he not been in awe of the Lord Chancellor. It is nearly certain that the idea of marrying her never entered his mind. The Parnells would have been horrified if it had. What would their feelings have been, had the owner of Avondale married a peasant girl, when they were dismayed at the marriage of the lovely Sophia to a lawyer ? Charles himself, while still a minor, successfully objected to the engagement of his sister Fanny to Mr. Catterson Smith, the artist, on the ground that he had

7i

Parnell

not yet reached a position which would entitle him to marry a Parnell. It is a proof of his masterfulness that he was able to make Fanny obedient to him, but he did her a disservice, as he himself subsequently realised, for she died a spinster, unsought again by Mr. Smith or by anyone else.

When the girl Daisy had yielded to him, and he was satisfied, coldness came between them. The end of the love-making was that the poor girl drowned herself. Parnell, according to his sister, came round a bend of the river at the very moment that her body was drawn from the water, and the sight of her drove him almost demented. He was a witness, says Mrs. Dickinson, at the inquest, and u while shielding the girl’s name from slander . . . admitted having a great admiration and friendship for her, and the shock which her death gave him.”1 Mrs. Dickinson becomes inventive after this account. She begins by declaring that her brother’s name 44 was formally removed from the books of his university ” because the heads of his college had heard “ various versions of his acquaintance with the dead girl,” but, as we shall immediately see, his sequestration was due to another cause. She asserts that he manifested 44 frenzied grief ” and remorse, and was 44 the frequent victim of violent nervous attacks,” during which he had appalling visions of 44 the dripping white-clad form ” standing at the foot of his bed. His family did not discover that he suffered in this way until several years after Daisy's death. Captain Dickinson had one night to share a room with him at Avondale, and on the following morning he went to his wife and said of Parnell, “ He has been disturbing me half the night, moaning and calling out about some Daisy, and at one time he got so frenzied with a vision at the foot of the bed that I had to hold him. ... I will never forget his face when he said, pointing to the foot of the bed, 4 Daisy is there.’ ”

1 A Patriot’s Mistake, by Emily Monroe Dickinson, p. 56.

72

His Childhood and Youth

V

His stay at Cambridge was terminated by trouble in the town. The circumstances of his being “ sent down " were authoritatively described to Mr. Barry O’Brien by Mr. Wilfred A. Gill, a Fellow and Tutor of Magdalene, and may be baldly summarised here. Parnell and three friends were returning about half-past ten at night from the station restaurant, where they had been lightly refreshing them¬ selves. Parnell and one of his friends sat down to wait while the other two went off in search of a fly. The state¬ ments as to what happened next conflict, but apparently two men were intoxicated and unable to walk home. An offer of assistance was offensively declined, and in a few moments a fight was taking place. Parnell interposed, and was struck for his pains. He promptly knocked his assailant, one Hamilton, down, and then knocked Hamilton's friend after him. A policeman swore that Parnell was sober when the assault took place, but was not believed by the magistrates. Hamilton took an action against Parnell, and was awarded damages amounting to twenty guineas. “ On May 26, 1869, a college meeting was convened, at which it was resolved to send down Parnell for the remainder of the term in consequence of the misconduct proved against him. There being only two weeks before the end of the term, the actual punishment was not a severe one, and, had Parnell wished it, there was nothing to prevent his resuming residence in the following term. He did not, however, return to Cambridge."1 He stayed at Avondale, hunting, playing cricket, idling after the fashion of the young country gentle¬ man, dancing and going to parties. His mother was living at Upper Temple Street, Dublin, where she frequently

1 Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, by R. Barry O'Brien, vol. i., p. 43.

73

Parnell

gave entertainments, at which her son invariably attended. “ Charles/' says his brother John, ** was very popular in society, going to all the dances and parties. He used to admire and dance with all the pretty girls at the balls given by Lord Carlisle, then Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland." He joined the militia, and took his training at the Royal Barracks in Dublin. When he was free of his soldiering and his mother's parties, he went down to Avondale, where he dabbled in mining and mathematics. His nervousness continued. His sleep¬ walking did not cease. His delicacy of health troubled him. But, apart from the poignant remembrances of the girl Daisy, his life was placid now as it had never been before, as it was never again to be. He was approaching his majority, and would soon be the uncontrolled master of a handsome property in a beautiful country. There was no immediate thought of marriage in his head, although there had been expectations of a marriage between him and a lady named Gun-Cunningham. But others thought of marriage for him. His neighbours, some of whom were his kinsmen, such as Lord Carysfort and the Earl of Wicklow, were willing that this rich, if queer, young bachelor should take a wife from among them; and they frequently invited him to their entertainments of all kinds. But he did not get engaged to be married. And here we may note the singular fact that no Irish woman ever succeeded in making Parnell love her. It was an English girl who first roused real love in him ; it was an American girl who jilted him; and it was an English woman who married him. He gladly attended the dances and hunts and parties, because, no doubt, they distracted his tormented thoughts; and he engaged in experiments in and about Avondale by means of which he hoped to establish profitable industries. He built a saw-mill, where the timber from his estate was taken to be sawn. His interest in mineralogy occupied much of his time. But his interests, as diversified as they were, did not 74

His Childhood and Youth

include politics or Ireland. He would have called himself a Conservative, perhaps even a Unionist, had he troubled to call himself anything. He did what his class did : hunted, joined the militia, attended levees at the Castle or the Lodge, danced, dined, developed his property, and conserved the interests of his family. His income was large, but the demands on it were also large. He had to maintain his mother, to whom his father had not bequeathed a penny-piece, and to make additional provision for his sisters, who had only the small annuities due to them from the property of their elder brother, John; and the evidence shows that he did not stint them, although he was reputed to be close with money. The legend of his unsociable character is not supported by the facts of his youth or the testimony of his neighbours, rich or poor. He certainly was unpopular in England, whether at school or at Cambridge or in Parliament, but much of this unpopularity was due to his excessively shy and nervous nature, which made him awkward and uncouth in the company of strangers. Some of it was undoubtedly due to his deliber¬ ate policy: he did not desire to get on terms of intimacy or kindliness with Englishmen, because he feared that if he were to do so he would be unable to carry on his political campaign as effectively as he could on terms of open enmity. We shall shortly see why he held this belief; it was, I think, erroneous, but not ill-founded. But he was not unpopular in his own place. Servants loved him; the Wicklow gentry continued to like him, even after he had joined the Nation¬ alists — a very striking testimony to his likeability when it is remembered what passions were provoked by the politics of that time ; and the peasants were always his friends.

He began to dominate his family's affairs as he had tried to dominate his brothers and sisters in the nursery, and his control of the purse enabled him to do so. Three of his sisters — Delia, Emily, and Sophia — were now married, and,

75

Parnell

with the exception of Emily, well-to-do. Emily had married her father's bane, Captain Arthur Dickinson, who had retired in a more or less penniless condition from the army, and was now endeavouring to get an income in a gentlemanly, but not too exacting, fashion. Parnell persuaded his brother John, who had resolved to try his fortune in America, to appoint Captain Dickinson agent for the Collure estate, and John, in this, as in all else, easily influenced by his younger brother, agreed to do so. He would have saved money if he had maintained his brother-in-law in idleness. Captain Dickinson seems to have had peculiar ideas about the duties of an agent. Mainly he drew his salary, but did not do any work for it. Rent easily fell into arrear in those days, but Mr. John Parnell's tenants received no incentive from his agent to pay any; and there came a time when this singularly incompetent and drunken military gentleman had to be re¬ lieved, not of his duties, for he did not perform them, but of his salary. Parnell was wise enough not to employ Captain Dickinson in any capacity, but he made him free of Avondale and probably allowed him the use of his purse. It was Captain Dickinson who proposed that Parnell’s coming-of-age should be celebrated in the real old-fashioned, Leverish, Irish gentlemanly way. It may be said that the eighteenth century lasted in Ireland for a hundred and eighty years. The nineteenth began on the day when Mr. Gladstone intro¬ duced his first Home Rule Bill into the House of Commons in 1886. It has not yet ended. The life at Avondale, when the young squire came of age, was the sort of life that was customary in England when Sheridan was alive. Practical joking and large, rowdy hospitality were its main characteristics. The peasant's dream of Paradise as a place where there were 44 lashin's of atein' an' drinkin’ " was realised in the home of his landlord. Heaven, for the poor Irishman, was a place like Avondale.

76

His Childhood and Youth

We may learn something of the manners of the Irish aristocracy of this time from an account of Parnell's great- aunt, Mrs. Sophia Evan§, given by Miss Frances Power Cobbe.1 Mrs. Evans, who was sister to the first Lord Congleton and “ old Tom Parnell '' and William Parnell, the grandfather of Parnell, had the habits of her generation and the oddity of her family. On the shore below her deer-park, under lofty black cliffs, were several very imposing caverns. ** In the largest of these, which is lighted from above by a shaft, Mrs. Evans on one occasion gave a great luncheon party, at which I was present. The company were all in high spirits and thoroughly enjoying the pigeon pies and champagne, when someone observed that the tide might soon be rising. Mrs. Evans replied that it was all right, there was plenty of time, and the festival proceeded for another half- hour, when somebody rose and strolled to the mouth of the cavern and soon uttered a cry of alarm. The tide had risen and was already beating at a formidable depth against both sides of the rocks which shut in the cave. A night spent in the further recesses of that damp hole, even supposing the tide did not reach the end (which was very doubtful), afforded anything but a cheerful prospect. Could anyone get up through the shaft to the upper cliff ? Certainly, if they had a long ladder. But there were no ladders lying about the cave; and, finally, everybody stood mournfully watching the rising waters at the mouth of their prison. Mrs. Evans all this time appeared singularly calm, and administered a little encouragement to some of the fainting ladies. When the panic was at its climax, Mrs. Evans's own large boat was seen quietly rounding the projecting rocks, and was soon comfortably pushed up to the feet of the imprisoned party, who had nothing to do but to embark in two or three detachments and be safely landed in the bay 1 Life of Frances Power Cobbe, by herself, vol. i., p. 184.

77

Parnell

outside, beyond the reach of the sea. The whole incident, it is to be suspected, had been arranged by the hostess to infuse a little wholesome excitement among her country guests. . . .”

Miss Cobbe continues her account of Mrs. Evans with this story of her church-going:

“ Our small village church at Donabate was not often honoured by this lady’s presence, but one Sunday she saw fit to attend service with some visitors; and a big dog unluckily followed her into the pew and lay extended on the floor, which he proceeded to beat with his tail after the manner of impatient dogs under durance. This disturbance was too much for the poor parson, who did not love Mrs. Evans. As he proceeded with the service, and the rappings were repeated again and again, his patience gave way, and he read out this extraordinary lesson to his astonished congregation:

‘ The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself. Turn out that dog, if you please ! It’s extremely wrong to bring a dog into church 1' ”

Mrs. Dickinson gives an account of a groom at Avondale, called James, which might have been lifted from Lever. This man was of drunken habits, and had, after giving much cause for complaint, been told that he must either sign the pledge or leave his employment. He elected to sign the pledge. “ One morning the party was assembled at eight o’clock in the dining-room for breakfast, both ladies and gentlemen in hunting costume, prior to starting for the day’s sport. James knocked at the door, and on being told to come in, entered. In plain and forcible language he informed the company in general, and me in particular, that he was too ‘ intoxicated ’ to ride after me that day. He said he thought it best to let me know beforehand, as if he were to mount a horse in his condition some irremediable mischief might ensue. Moreover, like a true son of Adam, he blamed

78

His Childhood and Youth

his wife for the unlucky occurrence, as she had been so in* considerate as to present him during the night with a sixth baby, a piece of bad lucfc:, in his opinion, which he evidently considered an ample excuse for his incapable state/'1

In the spirit of Mrs. Evans and the drunken groom, Parnell's attainment of his majority was celebrated. A three-days' cricket match was arranged between the officers of the garrison in Dublin and the Wicklow team. The officers were to be housed at Avondale. A military band was brought from Dublin and lodged at the local hotel. Captain Dickinson was put in charge of the catering, and, as he was given carte-blanche and felt that he had to uphold the credit of the army, he spent his brother-in-law's money in a very lavish manner. A great many people from the county and the capital were present at the luncheon, after which the cricket was less enthusiastically played than it had been before. Dining and dancing and supping kept the house alive until almost dawn. On the second day the cricket match was resumed, and more guests came down from Dublin, including a pretty widow who was to be put up for the night. The match went on well enough until after luncheon, when, in spite of Parnell's attempts to hold the team together, the soldiers declined to play any longer, preferring to wander in the woods with the women.

44 Now commenced a scene of fun and flirtation which surpasses description, and which had probably never before been equalled in the old haunts of Avondale.” Parnell, following the custom, went off with a lady who was minded to marry him, though he was not minded to marry her; and Mrs. Dickinson, temporarily discarded by her husband for the company of the widow, paired off with a young politician,

Mr. Frederick C - , who, she avers, was fond of her, but

had hitherto treated her with respect. 44 On this occasion, 1 A Patriot's Mistake, by Emily Monroe Dickinson, p. 145.

79

Parnell

however, having, in common with the rest, shown due appreciation of his host’s excellent champagne, he rashly declared his love, but was quickly recalled to his senses when, turning on him like a little fury and stamping my foot, I demanded how he dared insult me. ‘ Oh !’ moaned poor Frederick, 4 now I have vexed you, and you won't be friends with me any more.’ Overcome with emotion, he threw himself on the grass and sobbed like a child. This novel spectacle brought all the cows round in wondering surprise to gaze at him. * Get up,’ I told him hard-heartedly, still too indignant for a softer mood; 4 the cows are laughing at you ’ ; whereupon Frederick arose, made his peace with me, and we both entered into a compact of friendship which lasted for years.”1

After dinner that night there was a quarrel between

Captain Dickinson and Major G - . The latter, having

been conquered by Mrs. Dickinson’s charms, conceived a feeling of hostility for her husband, which Captain Dickinson reciprocated. 44 Arthur approached and demanded of

Major G - , 4 What the devil do you mean by dancing

so often with my wife ?’ 4 What’s that to you ? Mind your

own business,' retorted Major G - ,” and was immediately

challenged to fight it out on the lawn. But the quarrel was composed by Parnell, and the angry, drink-sodden warriors were persuaded to keep the peace. The women went to bed, after the problem of finding a room for the widow was solved by putting her into one which had been occupied on the previous night by two officers. There was no key to the door of this room, so the widow was advised to push a chest of drawers against it to keep out intruders, if there should be any. When the men ascended the stairs to their beds, the two officers who had previously slept in the widow's room went, in the company of some others, to sleep 1 A Patriot's Mistake, by Emily Monroe Dickinson, p. 72.

80

His Childhood and Youth

in it again. “ Finding the door barricaded, they hurled them¬ selves against it, and upsetting with a crash the chest of drawers, entered the room. * I say, there's room for us all here,' one called out. The startled widow, on hearing this, slipped out of bed and escaped. Three more of the hilarious party ensconced themselves in the linen-press, which they mistook for their beds, another installed himself cosily in the shower-bath, and a fifth made frantic attempts to get up the chimney. . . The cricket match ended in confusion on the third day, and the guests departed. “ The county families also bade hostess and host good-night, expressing with seeming sincerity grateful thanks for the pleasant time they had had, but, notwithstanding that they had partaken of Charley's hospitality and enjoyed themselves immensely, afterwards professed themselves much shocked, and abused the whole entertainment soundly."

Parnell was twenty-three years of age when he left Cam¬ bridge in 1869. During the whole of his life up to that time, and for several years afterwards, he manifested no interest in Irish affairs, other than impatience with his mother's fantastic interference in them, except on one occasion. In September, 1867, two Fenian leaders, Kelly and Deasy, were arrested in Manchester, and their comrades resolved to rescue them. An attack was made on the prison van containing them while it was on the way to the prison at Bellevue. Kelly and Deasy were liberated after a policeman, Sergeant Brett, had been killed. The manner of this policeman's death was thus : He was seated inside the van guarding the prisoners, and was called upon to deliver up the keys, but refused. One of the Fenians, named Allen, then fired a revolver into the lock to force it, and Sergeant Brett, who had bent down to look through the keyhole, received the bullet in his head. Allen, Larkin, Condon, and O'Brien, four of the Fenians, were arrested, tried, and sentenced to death, although Allen,

Parnell

who fired the shot, passionately protested that he had had no intention of killing the unfortunate policeman, but was merely trying to blow off the lock of the van door. A police constable, named Shaw, swore at the trial that in his opinion Allen fired, as he said, to dislodge the lock. It is incon¬ ceivable that these men would have been found guilty of murder in a less anxious time. The crime was one of man¬ slaughter, and Allen alone was guilty of it. John Bright, nine years later, said, “ I believe that the three men were hanged because it was a political offence, and not because it was an ordinary murder of one man, committed by one man, and by one shot. I believe it was a great mistake." But Allen, Larkin, and O'Brien were hanged in front of Salford Jail on the morning of November 23, 1867. Condon was reprieved.

The execution of these men, which at the moment excited great jubilation in England, filled Ireland with sorrow. A commemorative funeral, in which 150,000 persons partici¬ pated, either as followers or onlookers, was held in Dublin. “ As the three hearses, bearing the names of the executed men, passed through the streets, the multitudes that lined the streets fell on their knees, every head was bared, and not a sound was heard save the solemn notes of the Dead March * in Saul ' from the bands, or the sobs that burst occasionally from the crowd."1 The feeling in Ireland was not confined to Fenians or their friends: it was shared by many Unionists. Parnell himself, despite his indignation with his mother because of her sympathy with the Fenians, was moved by the fate of ** The Manchester Martyrs," as they have ever since been known.

Some of his biographers have dated his interest in Irish politics from the day on which Allen and Larkin and O'Brien

1 Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, by R. Barry O'Brien, vol. i. p. 50.

82

His Childhood and Youth

were hanged, but it seems more likely that it was only one of a series of events which finally landed him in the leadership of the Irish party. The stories which he had heard in Wicklow cabins of the cruelties practised towards the peasants in 1798 were undoubtedly tht beginning of the influence. His mother’s fierce and unreasonable antipathy to England was a powerful part of it. His beloved sister, Fanny, must have shaken his thoughts on the subject, though he mocked at her poems. And the fate of “ The Manchester Martyrs ” undoubtedly affected him in the way in which he had been affected by the story of the rebel who was flogged on the belly by the orders of a foul ruffian, called Colonel Yeo, until he dropped dead and almost in pieces.

But immediately the execution of ** The Manchester Martyrs ” did no more than rouse his detestation of an act of injustice. What he felt then was what any honourable man might have felt, and it certainly did not divert him from the traditions in which he was born and brought up. We have already noted how strongly he disliked his mother’s activities in Fenian affairs, and that he threatened, after she had har¬ boured one of the men implicated in this very Manchester crime and helped him to escape to America, “ that he would leave the house if anything more was said about the Fenians.” He was still a Conservative, still an Irish landlord, still con¬ temptuous of the people who composed the Irish party. Whatever his emotion was when 44 The Manchester Martyrs ” were hanged, it did not prevent him, when he left Cambridge, from joining the militia and taking an oath to serve the Queen, which might have compelled him to fire on his own country¬ men had there been occasion to do so. In that state of mind he remained for five years after he was sent down.

It was not, according to his brother John, until he had been lightly jilted by an American girl that he sought for some distraction in political affairs. Between the years 1869 and

83

Parnell

1871 he very frequently went to Paris, where his mother, incapable of resting long in one place, now lived with her younger daughters, who were permitted to go there by the Lord Chancellor. Mrs. Parnell's eldest daughter, Delia Thomson, as well as her mother, Mrs. Stewart, now definitely separated from “ Old Ironsides," and her brother. Colonel Stewart, who had made a large fortune out of the sale of timber to the French Government during the Second Empire, were also living in Paris. Parnell had, therefore, as many ties in Paris as he had in Ireland, and he “ thought nothing of making a flying trip to France to attend one " of the balls given at the British Embassy, to all of which he was invited. It was while he was in Paris, staying with his brother at their uncle’s flat in the Champs Elysees, that he met a very beauti¬ ful, fair-haired, vivacious, and wealthy American girl, called Miss Woods. They immediately fell in love with each other — all of Parnell's love affairs were instantaneous — and became engaged to be married.1 They were seen about in Paris a great deal, and were widely congratulated by their friends. When Miss Woods and her parents suddenly decided to go to Rome, Parnell followed them there, and, although Mr. and Mrs. Woods were noticeably uneffusive in their reception of him, their daughter greeted him as affec¬ tionately as ever. He remained in Rome, mostly in Miss Woods’s company, until his uncle warned him that the season of the Roman fever was approaching. He had always been afraid of illness, and was terrified of death, so, despite his love for Miss Woods, he resolved to leave Italy. He returned to Avondale and busied himself about his property until he went back to Paris, where Miss Woods was again living. Their affection seemed to have increased, and when he left Paris for

1 Mrs. Dickinson's account of this affair in A Patriot’s Mistake is almost entirely inaccurate. Mr. O’Hara’s reference to it in Chief and Tribune is partly inaccurate.

84

His Childhood and Youth

Avondale in the spring of 1871, it was for the purpose of preparing his home for his bride.

Hardly had he arrived at Avondale when he received a letter from the lady, announcing in terse terms that she and her parents were returning to their home at Newport, Rhode Island. She did not refer to her engagement, nor did she express any regret at her departure without seeing him again. Parnell, naturally, was dumbfounded by this singular missive. He hurried to Paris, only to discover that Miss Woods had already sailed for the United States. He determined to follow her, and on his arrival in America immediately went to Newport to see her. This odd young woman received him with affection, and allowed him to believe that the engage¬ ment still existed, but in the end she capriciously announced that she could not marry him because he was “ only an Irish gentleman/' without any distinction or public name. The lady was romantic, and demanded some celebrity with her husband. Parnell, it seemed, had nothing but his gentility to offer her, and that, though highly esteemed in Ireland, cut no ice in America. His efforts to change her decision were desperate, and at last he left Newport and journeyed to Alabama, where his brother John was growing cotton and peaches.

His misery was acute, and he sought distraction from it in visiting mines and mills, where he hoped to gain knowledge and experience by which he could profit at home ; and in time his pain subsided, though it had effects upon him which were to last for the rest of his life. Mr. John Parnell asserts that his decision to enter Irish politics was due to his desire to occupy his thoughts with other matters than his rejection by Miss Woods. This is not improbable. He was excessively proud, and Miss Woods had wounded his pride. She had jilted him because he was only an Irish estate-owner, and had filled him with mortification by her announcement that this

85

Parnell

fact, by itself, was unimportant. He was twenty-five years of age, but he had “ done nothing ” and showed no signs of ever doing anything. He had been reared in the belief that to be a Parnell was enough, and now he was told that it was not. He seemed suddenly, while half-aazed by the blow he had received from Miss Woods, to see every¬ where signs of contempt for Irishmen; and his feelings ranged from shame of acknowledging that he was Irish to a fierce assertion of his race. Already we have noted how he urged his brother not to inform Colonel Powell that they were Irish.1 After they had been to see a State Governor, Charles surprised John by saying, “ You see that fellow despises us because we are Irish. But the Irish can make themselves felt everywhere if they are self-reliant and stick to each other. Just think of that fellow. Where has he come from ? And yet he despises the Irish.”2 That is a significant speech. It contains the whole of Parnell's policy as a statesman: self-reliance and unity; and it was on that policy that he brought the Irish people within reach of their deep-rooted desire. We will find that his political life was dominated by the belief that “ the Irish can make themselves felt everywhere if they are self-reliant and stick to each other,” and that he, alone in Ireland, was able to make them self- reliant and united. We will find, too, that when he died, disunion among the Irish became a sort of anarchy.

The idea which was to send him rocketing up to the apex of authority was in his mind, growing almost without his knowledge, certainly without his desire. But now he was no more than a jilted young man, whose love and vanity had been abased by a pretty and capricious girl. He became ill-tempered and quarrelsome, and was full of complaints about the people, the place, the food, the negroes, and the

1 Ante, p. 41.

2 Charles Stewart Parnell, by R. Barry O'Brien, vol. i., p. 54.

86

His Childhood and Youth

rough way in which his brother lived. He disliked the blacks and despised the whites. The greasy Southern cooking sickened him. Nervous irritability again possessed him, and his digestion, always poor, rendered him ill to live with. A peach-farm in Alabama was no place for a Parnell, he said, and so he repeatedly urged his brother to return to Ireland, which John, who loved his life in Alabama, was reluctant to do. His ill-temper increased and involved him in several rows, and almost brought him into collision with the law. When an Ulsterman, named Joseph Field, for whom John was building a house, asserted with some rudeness that the house was not fit for him, “ Charley lost his temper, and cried, ‘ It is too good for you V This led to angry words, and very nearly to blows, Charley having actually taken off his coat with the intention of thrashing Mr. Field when I separated them/'1 The quarrel ended as quickly as it had begun, the friendship was repaired, and Mr. Field kept Parnell in warm remembrance ever afterwards. He had the ability to create kindly feeling for himself out of the rags of his wrath.

This visit to America lasted for a year, and was notable, apart from the dismal conclusion to his engagement to Miss Woods, for the fact that he and John were nearly killed in a railway accident. John was the more seriously injured of the two, and he tells us that “ Charley was the only nurse I had, though he also was suffering from his injuries. He attended to my wants better and more tenderly than any woman could have done, and was most anxious about me, never leaving me. . . It was after this disaster that Parnell succeeded in persuading his brother to return to Ireland, and on New Year's Day, 1872, they sailed for home from New York.

1 Charles Stewart Parnell, by his brother, John Howard Parnell, p. 106.

2 Ibid., p. 102.

87

Parnell

Soon after their arrival, Sir Ralph Howard died in London, leaving the bequest to John which has already been noted, and Colonel Stewart died in Rome of the Roman fever against which he had warned his nephew a year or two earlier. He left the whole of his large fortune in Southern Railroad bonds and shares to Mrs. Parnell, and made her practically a millionairess.

Fortune was favouring the Parnells. They were handsome and highly esteemed, and had inherited great possessions. They could move freely in the finest company in England, France, Ireland, and America. Their health, indeed, was poor, and the darkness of another inheritance than that of wealth and beauty hung above their heads. Delia, despite her riches and her Russian horses, was yielding to the melan¬ choly in her eyes, and Anna was ominously prone to fits. There were times when Charles himself terribly felt the burden of his tormented nerves. Nevertheless, in 1872 the world looked very well to the Parnells. John and Charles had four thousand pounds a year apiece and property. Their younger brother, Henry, now at Cambridge, had an estate worth two thousand pounds a year. Mrs. Parnell was immensely rich, and could afford to give large allowances to her daughters. In that sunniness of fortune they could forget the dark shadow lying over them, and they did not delay to enjoy their prosperity. John and Charles spent their time in pleasant occupations — hunting and shooting and pleasuring of all sorts. The supervision of his beautiful estate provided Charles with serious occupation, and it seemed that he was settling down to the ordained life of a country gentleman. He was appointed High Sheriff of his county and a synodsman of the Church of Ireland. He had only to marry a suitable girl and beget children by her, and his career as a landed proprietor would be established. There was quiet in his life. Nothing of notable importance happened to him 88

His Childhood and Youth

between the years 1871 and 1874, except, perhaps, that another beautiful American woman met him in Paris and passionately pursued him with her affection. Beautiful American women were not then to his liking, and he fled from France to escape fjom this pertinacious and too demon¬ strative lady, who actually proposed marriage to him. But although nothing of notable importance happened to him, the roots of the idea were spreading. Mr. Isaac Butt, the Protestant leader of the Catholic Irish party, was then dis¬ coursing in his large, eloquent, amiable, Micawber-like manner on the rights of tenant farmers, a matter which nearly concerned the Parnells, since they were landlords. It very especially concerned John Parnell, whose rack-rented and heavily-mortgaged estate in Armagh caused trouble between him and his tenants. Mr. Butt's eloquence was impressive, but totally uninfluential. The English Parliamentarians loved to listen to him, but they never thought of heeding him. It was in 1874 that Charles Stewart Parnell, then twenty- eight years of age, began for the first time in his career to think seriously about politics. In that year he started his political life.

89

CHAPTER III HIS ENTRY INTO POLITICS

I

It began with a quarrel with a cabman. Captain and Mis. Dickinson had invited John and Charles Parnell to dine with them. He had been in Cork, and, on his arrival at Kingsbridge Station, found that he was likely to be late for dinner, so he jumped on to a jaunting car, and said to the jarvey, 1 11 give you half a crown if you get me to 22, Lower Pembroke Street by seven o'clock, or nothing at all if you are a minute after that." The jarvey agreed to the terms proposed, but failed to get his passenger to the Dickinsons' house until just after seven. He lost his temper, demanded his fare, and used language such as only a practising Catholic can use. But Parnell held him to his bargain, and left him on the pave¬ ment, calling on the saints in heaven to avenge him. The incident was, perhaps, hardly as creditable to Parnell as he imagined, but the jarvey might have got his money if he had kept a civil tongue in his head. It was this affair which provided most of the talk at the table. Never was there a company less likely to discourse on politics in a solemn fashion. But when the cabman's behaviour had been discussed until they were all tired of hearing about it, the conversation vaguely veered towards the rights of tenant farmers and Mr. Butt's whole political proposals. Most of the talking was done by John Parnell and his brother-in-law, Charles contenting himself with listening. When the subj ect had been well argued, Charles suddenly announced that Mr. Butt's movement would be “ a grand opening for me to enter politics." The announcement startled his auditors, who had never heard him express any political opinions before. If they had thought of him as a political candidate, they would probably have thought of him as a Conservative. But 90

His Entry into Politics

he was proposing to join the Nationalists. Hardly had they realised what his proposal was, when he daunted them with the suggestion that they should accompany him that very minute to the offices of the Freeman's Journal, where he proposed to announce his adhesion to the Irish party to Mr. Gray, the editors John declined to go, but Captain Dickinson went with him.1 They did not return to Lower Pembroke Street until two in the morning. Parnell had been rebuffed. Mr. Gray had reminded him that he was High Sheriff of Wicklow, and informed him that he could not become a candidate for Parliament until his resignation had been tendered to, and accepted by, the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. To a man of swift decisions this technical dis¬ ability was excessively annoying.

On the following morning he hurried off to the Viceregal Lodge and offered his resignation to the Viceroy, Lord Spencer, who, however, could not immediately accept it because certain formalities had first to be concluded. The delay meant that he would be too late for nomination for the vacant constituency of Wicklow. Here was something to gall the impatient Parnell. Miserable technicalities prevented him from fulfilling his desire ! He resented the Lord-Lieutenant’s refusal to set him free immediately from his shrieval duties, and was in such a state of mind about it that he persuaded himself to believe that the technicalities were devised to frus¬ trate him. He had been slighted by the Lord-Lieutenant ! The thought, says his brother, “ stung Charley deeply, and left him with a feeling of resentment against the English

1 There is a slight discrepancy between the account of this incident given by Mr. Barry O'Brien and that given by Mr. John Parnell. Mr. O'Brien, who received his account from Mr. John Parnell, states in the Life that the two brothers went to see Mr. Gray, but Mr. Parnell himself, in his book, states that Captain Dickinson went with Charles, he, John, declining to do so. The Parnells had defective memories, but it is probable that the account in Mr. Parnell’s book is accurate.

91

Parnell

Government which quickly became a rooted portion of his character/’ The cause of the offence seems as trivial as the cause of that which he took when the police impounded his regimentals} but this insubordinate* quick-tempered young man was in the mood to suspect that anything which opposed his will was malignantly-minded. But it was useless to repine. The law was clear. A High Sheriff, who had duties to perform in a Parliamentary election, could not himself be a candidate at that election, nor could he be replaced at a moment’s notice. At dinner on the night of the day when he had interviewed the Viceroy, Parnell an¬ nounced a new decision. If he could not stand for Wicklow, his brother could, and before the abashed John, whose heart was in his Alabama peach-farm, could successfully marshal his objections to the proposals, he found himself consenting to be the candidate and reading his election address, which Charles drew up. Once more the elder brother, against his wish, was directed by the younger . As it had been in Alabama, so it was now in Wicklow, and was to be until the younger brother died. The address was short and full of point, and read well. It was Charles Parnell’s first political document, and on that account must here be reproduced.

II

To the Electors of the County Wicklow .

Gentlemen,

Believing that the time has arrived for all true Irish¬ men to unite in the spontaneous demand for justice from England that is now convulsing the country, I have determined to offer myself for the honour of representing you in Parlia¬ ment.

The principles for which my ancestor, Sir John Parnell, then Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer, refused the peerage from an English Government are still mine, and the cause

92

His Entry into Politics

of the Repeal of the Union under its new name of Home Rule will always find in me a firm and honest supporter.

My experience of the working of the Ulster system of Land Tenure in the North convinces me that there is no other remedy for the unfortunate relations existing between landlord and tenant in other parts of Ireland than the legalisation through the whole of the country of the Ulster Tenant Right, which is practically Fixture of Tenure, or some equivalent or extension of a custom which has so increased the pros¬ perity of the thriving North.

A residence of several years in America, where Religious and Secular Education are combined, has assured me that the attempt to deprive the youth of the country of spiritual instruction must be put down, and I shall give my support to the Denominational System in connection both with the University and the Primary branches.

Owing to the great tranquillity of the Country, I think it would now be a graceful act to extend the Clemency of the Crown to the remaining Political Prisoners.

My grandfather and uncle represented this County for many years, and as you have experienced their trustworthi¬ ness, so I also hope you will believe in mine.

I am, gentlemen,

Yours truly,

John Howard Parnell.

Ill

Charles did not permit the grass to grow under his feet. The other candidates were already in the field, and their election addresses were before the constituents. The Parnells must move very quickly if they were to make any impression at all. John found himself hurried to the hustings in a way which made him long more ardently than ever for the leisurely life of Alabama. Charles delivered his first political speech on a barrel in the market-place of Rathdrum during a fair, and was suspiciously received by the assembled electors. What, thought they, were these wild, whirling,

93

Parnell

Nationalist words doing in the mouth of a landlord generally regarded as a staunch Conservative ? Had it not been for the support he received from the parish priest, Father Galvin, he might have been thrown from his barrel ; and if he had, may we not imagine, knowing what his proud nature was, that his career as a Nationalist would there and then have ended ? He was to be assailed a few years later in Enniscorthy, but by that time he had established himself in Nationalism and could see the leadership of the Irish people well in sight. These are the singular accidents of fortune. Had Miss Woods been less assiduous in the reading of romantic litera¬ ture, she might not have demanded distinction in her husband, and would, perhaps, have married Parnell and have settled him in an agreeable life in Wicklow, with frequent visits to Newport and Paris and London. Had some lout, inflamed as much by patriotism as by porter, flung a damaged apple or a rotten egg at Parnell, gesticulating on his barrel in the market-place of Rathdrum, he might have altered the history of England and Ireland. But these are idle speculations which may not profitably be pursued.

The organisation of John's candidature was swift and efficient. When the bashful and reluctant candidate descended from the train at Rathdrum, he found himself surrounded by a reception committee of priests, 44 most of whom did not know either Charley or myself." A band was strenuously perform¬ ing patriotic airs, and as soon as the introductions had been made, the candidate, led by his brother and the hypnotised priests, formed a procession behind the robust musicians and marched off, followed by a large crowd, to Father Galvin's presbytery, where an enthusiastic conference was held. On the next day Charles hurled himself into Hacketstown and West Wicklow, where he was uncivilly received. He did everything that a High Sheriff ought not to do during an election, even registering his vote, which was disallowed, 94

His Entry into Politics

and when he was warned that his conduct would probably result in his dismissal from his office, he retorted that that was exactly what he wanted to happen. He was astute enough to know that a little martyrdom would be useful to him when he offered himself for -election. When, in his capacity as High Sheriff, he declared the result of the poll, his brother was found to be at the bottom of it. There can be few men in this world who have so thoroughly enjoyed being defeated as John Parnell did, and he took himself as quickly as he could to America away from the dangerous company of his brother. His journey there, however, was saddened by the fact that Mrs. Parnell had lost nearly all her inheritance from her brother in the Black Friday Panic which swept over the American stock markets. She had enjoyed its possession, in theory rather than in fact, for little more than a year.

Soon after his departure, Colonel Taylor, one of the members for the county of Dublin, was appointed by Disraeli to the Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster, and had to seek re-election. Charles Parnell had joined the Home Rule League, which was anxious to contest the seat, despite the fact that Colonel Taylor was certain to be re-elected, but had difficulty in finding a candidate to fight so forlorn a hope. He offered himself as the Home Rule candidate, but was not received with enthusiasm. Mr. Butt, when the young landlord had gone to him proposing to join the League, had been delighted with him. ** My dear boy/' he exclaimed to one of his friends, ** we have got a splendid recruit, an historic name, my friend, young Parnell, of Wicklow; and unless I am mistaken, the Saxon will find him an ugly customer, though he is a good-looking fellow." Mr. Butt himself was to find him an ugly customer five years after their first encounter, for by that time the tongue-tied, singularly un¬ informed stripling from Wicklow had ejected Mr. Butt from his leadership and landed him with a broken heart in his

95

Parnell

grave. Mr. Butt’s enthusiasm for Parnell was not felt by the Home Rule League. The young man undoubtedly had merits. He was able to pay his own election expenses, a fact which probably turned the scales in his favour, and he was a landlord, a Protestant, and an aristocrat.

But he was barely known to the members of the League. Those of them who had met him disesteemed him. His diffidence; his reticence, so unlike the large, lavish manner of Mr. Butt; his complete ignorance of political affairs and seeming inaptitude for them — all these made the Home Rule Leaguers reluctant to accept him as their candidate. If they were to make a demonstration, even in a hopeless constituency, they must make one which would not cover them with ridicule. That was the fate they feared. Mr. Parnell s political stock-in-trade seemed to consist solely of references to “The Manchester Martyrs.” He talked of them in stutters, and could not talk of anything else. It was as if he thought he had only to mention “ The Manchester Martyrs three times and he had formulated a policy. The Leaguers debated about him. Was he a twister ? What guarantee had they that this young landlord was not about to play some crooked game with them ? “ If he gives his word,”

said Mr. John Martin, an old and respected Nationalist, “ I will trust him. I would trust any of the Parnells.” But even the support of Mr. Martin did not incline the others towards him. They called him into the conference-room, so that they might inspect and examine him, and he entered, a tall, thin, handsome, delicate young man, with eyes that seemed remote until he was roused, when fires kindled in them, brown fires that scorched those who beheld them. We do not know what he said or did during that period of probation, but we do know that, when it was over, he was the Home Rule candidate for the county of Dublin.

His first public meeting was a terrible failure. It was held

96

His Entry into Politics

in the Rotunda, Dublin, in the afternoon of March 9, 1874, under the chairmanship of the O'Gorman Mahon, an old soldier of fortune who took to politics when duelling went out of fashion, and was destined a few years later, by the malignancy of fate, to introduce his friend, Captain O'Shea, to the young man now standing, trembling and white-lipped, by his side. Although the hour was early, a large crowd, drawn by the knowledge that he was one of the Parnells, had assembled to hear him, and the platform was occupied by men long seasoned in Nationalist politics. Honest John Martin, who had testified to the trustworthiness of his family, Isaac Butt, A. M. Sullivan, Mitchell Henry, and Richard O'Shaughnessy, names that are now rarely remembered, but belonging to men of high reputation in their time, came to listen to the squire of Avondale making his adoption speech. Mr. Sullivan proposed the resolution that Mr. Parnell should be their candidate, and while he was speaking the candidate came into the hall. He was unknown to nearly every person in the hall, but a singular enthusiasm took hold of the audience, and even before they were certain that this was indeed the candidate, they were on their feet cheering him. Parnell never enjoyed public meetings. To the end of his life he shrank from them, and suffered agonies of nervousness while he was speechifying. He would clench his hands behind his back so tightly that his nails would lacerate his palms, and would leave the platform in a state of exhaustion. On this afternoon in March his nerves overpowered him. When he was called upon to speak, he rose amidst a cheering crowd which liked his good looks and remembered his honourable ancestors. He advanced to the front of the platform, and the expectant crowd ceased to cheer and prepared to listen. He opened his parched lips, and with difficulty said, “ Gentlemen, I am a candidate for the representation of the county of Dublin ! . . ." Then he became silent. He tried again, G 97

Parnell

faltered, paused, stumbled on, became horribly confused, and finally broke down. Such a conclusion to a speech would have been bad anywhere, but it was appalling in Ireland, where oratory is the principal accomplishment of the majority of the people, and at that time, and perhaps still, was the principal occupation of many. The kindly audience cheered sympathetically, but departed full of doubt. This was not the stuff of which statesmen were made. Even Honest John Martin, who so warmly supported his candida¬ ture, must have wondered whether he had done wisely. When the poll, was declared, Colonel Taylor was found to have received 2,122 votes, while Parnell received only 1,141, leaving him in a minority of 981. That, it seemed to many, was the end of young Mr. Parnell. He made the worst possible impression both on the electors and on the leaders of his party, one of whom, in London, explained the severe defeat with the words, “ And no wonder 1 If you'd seen the bloody fool we had for a candidate ! . . The election cost him £2,000. The Home Rule League found £300 towards his expenses, but he generously returned it to them, and bore the whole cost himself. It was during this election that his opponents accused him of dealing harshly with his tenants, but they had mistaken him for his brother, Henry Tudor, the owner of Clonmore in Carlow, who had no sympathy whatever with his elder brother's new politics, and was, and continued for the whole of his life, a Tory.

Parnell remained quiet after this election until the sudden death on March 29, 1875, of Honest John Martin, who was one of the members for Meath. Parnell was adopted as a candidate in opposition to two other candidates — Mr. J. L. Naper, a Tory, and Mr. J. T. Hinds, an independent Home Ruler. The poll was declared on April 19, 1875, and Parnell was at the top of it. He received 1,771 votes, as against 902 for Mr. Naper and 138 for Mr. Hinds. One who heard him

98

His Entry into Politics

speaking at Navan during this election says the chairman had to lead him off the platform when he finished his speech, as he was completely dazed, apparently unable to find his way down, and his hands were so tightly clenched behind his back that the nails almost cut the palms of his hands.

IV

Five years later, “ the bloody fool ” had driven Mr. Butt from authority to the grave, and was the master of Ireland. Eleven years later he was master of the House of Commons, with Mr. Gladstone and Lord Salisbury openly or covertly seeking his suffrages. Sixteen years later he was dead.

99

CHAPTER IV

HIS POLICY OF OBSTRUCTION

I

The Fenians resembled their modern successors, the Sinn Feiners, in this, among other respects, that they did not believe in Parliamentary action. It was part of their creed that Irish freedom would be won only by means of physical force, and, since it was inconceivable that Ireland would ever be in a position to raise an army which would be capable of defeating England in the field, methods of terrorism would have to be adopted. The Fenians ranged from men of high and noble character such as John O'Leary, to ruffians such as “ the Invincibles," to whom patriotism was merely an excuse for gratifying their blood-lust. Fenians like O'Leary would not acknowledge common cut-throats like Brady, the Invincible, as Fenians at all ; but they were all members of the physical force party. When we resolve to journey along a road, we cannot limit our companions to those who think and act as we do. The physical force party was numerically small. It flourished in America rather than in Ireland. It had against it the generality of the people, to whom murder does not cease to be murder when it is committed with the best intentions or for propaganda purposes; the Catholic Church; and, of course, the Unionists. The opposition to the Fenians, apart from that of the Unionists, took the form of constitutional agitation. The Irish party, as it was called, believed that Irish freedom could be won by argument in the House of Commons. A modern analogy for the Fenians and the Nationalists could be found in the Women's Social and Political Union, led by the Pankhursts, and the Con¬ stitutional Women's Suffrage Societies, led by Mrs. Fawcett.

Mr. Isaac Butt, a benign and eloquent lawyer, with an

ioo

His Policy of Obstruction

unusually expansive manner, was the leader of the con¬ stitutional party. He was a very amiable man, who had won the regard, though not the service, of the Fenians by the devotion with which he had defended some of them during periods of persecution. He liked comfort and ease, and was anxious not to upset or disturb anyone. He had a passion, if one can describe his kindly feelings by such a word, for gentlemanly persuasion. It was true that the House of Commons listened to his eloquent periods as if they were part of a treat organised by the kind Government for the tired rank and file of the parties; it was true that no Govern¬ ment, Liberal or Tory, ever thought for a moment of taking Mr. Butt or his colleagues seriously ; it was true that there were times when even Mr. Butt himself felt aggrieved at the indiffer¬ ence with which his really magnificent oratory was received; but never should it be charged against him that he had done or said anything that was not entirely nice and gentlemanly.

When some earnest-minded person protested to him that there was indignity in the spectacle of Irishmen vainly asking the English for consideration for their country's troubles, Mr. Butt would open wide his arms and exclaim in his rich, honied, abundant voice, “ My dear boy !" as if the earnest- minded and importunate person were the child of his bosom and must immediately be clasped to it. He would remind him of the popularity of the party with some of the most refined persons in England. Their amusing manners and droll conversation and quaint brogues made them very serviceable to hostesses hard up for means of entertaining their guests. When English society had been thoroughly permeated by Irish charm and Irish reasonableness, then, said Mr. Butt, the revolution in Ireland would take place without the effu¬ sion of anyone's blood or the fracture of a single friendship. “ My dear boy !" Mr. Butt would say benignly, not without a note of reproach in his tone, and the earnest-minded and

IOI

Parnell

importunate person would depart, whatever his own con¬ clusions might be, convinced that the Irish leader was a very nice old gentleman. And, indeed, it was impossible to dislike Mr. Butt. That w^s his misfortune. Successful leaders are not made out of men who cannot be disliked by anyone. The House of Commons loved Mr. Butt, and laughed at him. It hated Parnell, and obeyed him.

The Fenians had been very active in England and in Ireland for about ten years before Parnell took his seat in the House of Commons on April 22, 1875, and the Government had dealt with them in a swift and severe manner. Many of their leaders were sentenced to long terms of penal servi¬ tude. A young man named Michael Davitt, who was born on March 25, 1846, exactly three months before Parnell, had been arrested at Paddington Station soon after Parnell had been sent down from Cambridge. He had £150 in his possession, which, the police alleged, was to have been paid by him to a man named Wilson, arrested with him, who had in his possession fifty revolvers. Davitt was the son of peasants who had emigrated from Mayo, after eviction, to Haslingden, in Lancashire. The record of his life is most pitiful and moving. Hardship dogged him. The young Parnell was reared in wilful luxury: the young Davitt was reared in suffering and hunger. When the young Parnell was fighting with his tutors at Kirk Langley, the young Davitt was earning a few shillings a week in a mill at Baxenden, where one morning, six weeks after he had started to work, he was caught in a machine and so badly injured that one of his arms had to be amputated. Parnell rarely read books, and strenuously resisted all attempts to educate him: Davitt was an inveterate reader, and made gigantic efforts to get himself educated. Parnell had strong sexual impulses: Davitt was unusually chaste. They disliked each other, though their dislike was tempered with respect. One was 102

His Policy of Obstruction

an aristocrat from tip to toe: the other was a peasant in his marrow.

Davitt, after a trial manifestly unfair, was sent to prison for fifteen years. That was in July, 1870. His imprison¬ ment began in Millbank — Westminster Catholic Cathedral now stands on its site — and was continued at Dartmoor, where, in circumstances of exceptional severity, he remained until he was released in December, 1877. The measures taken against the Fenians temporarily eclipsed them, and the constitutional movement momentarily was all that was left of the Irish agitation for self-government. The Tories were in power when Parnell was elected to the Commons, and Disraeli was Prime Minister. The Chief Secretary for Ireland was Sir Michael Hicks-Beach. Ireland seemed unusually quiet, and the Dublin correspondent of The Times was able to inform his readers that “ at no period of her history did she appear more tranquil, more free from serious crime, more prosperous and contented/'1 Nevertheless, on Parnell's first night in Parliament another of the nearly innumerable Coercion Bills was being discussed.

There were fifty-nine Home Rulers in that Parliament, most of them holding opinions similar to those of Mr. Butt. Two of them, however, dissented from their leader's policy, one cynically, the other violently. Mr. Joseph Ronayne, who had fled to America from Ireland to escape from imprisonment, had returned to his native country with a handsome competence made out of engineer¬ ing. “ He had just been elected for the city of Cork as an old-time patriot who had never compromised with his principles in the long period between the death of O'Connell and the rise of Butt, during which all the political spirit of Ireland had been directed either into the selfish and dishonest pursuit of place and power, or into the wild and terrible 1 Quoted by Mr. Barry O'Brien in his Life of Parnell, vol. i., p. 87.

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Parnell

experiences of revolutionary effort. Honest Joe Ronayne, he used to be called. He was a very sincere, and a very serious, and also towards the end — from ill-health — a rather melancholy man. But like many men of such a temperament, he was very witty. Just before his death his leg had to be amputated. ‘ I shan't be able to comply with the Standing Orders of the House/ was his comment.”1 This dying man was the originator of the policy of obstruction which was to be perfected by Parnell. He was too ill and, as he said, too old, although he was only fifty-four, to use his own weapon, but he passed it on to the other Home Ruler in the House of Commons who disapproved of Mr. Butt's policy, Mr. Joseph Gillis Biggar, the member for Cavan. Mr. Ronayne and Mr. Biggar agreed that no good would ever accrue to Ireland from the policy of amiable coaxing. Biggar, who had a sort of half-intelligence, realised that Mr. Butt’s policy was useless, in which belief Mr. Ronayne joined him, but it was not until the member for Cork told the member for Cavan what to do that Mr. Biggar could get beyond the stage of impotent complaints against his leader. The thing was simple. “ The English stop our Bills. Why don't we stop their Bills ? That's the thing to do. No Irish Bills; but stop English Bills. No legislation; that's the policy, sir — that’s the policy. Butt's a fool — too gentlemanly; we’re all too gentlemanly.”2 The Irish party, with the exception of Mr. Biggar, would not listen to Mr. Ronayne. Mr. Butt almost became angry about the proposal. What 1 sacrifice his reputation for niceness and gentility and good fellowship ! Poor Ronayne's health must be worse than they imagined ! , . ♦ Mr. Biggar resolved to practise what Mr. Ronayne

1 Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, by T. P. O’Connor, M.P., p. 39.

2 Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, by R. Barry O'Brien, vol. i., p. 92.

104

His Policy of Obstruction

preached. It was on the night of Parnell's first appearance in the House of Commons that Mr. Biggar made his first effort at obstruction.

' II

Joseph Gillis Biggar was, perhaps, the most remarkable member of the Home Rule party. He was a Presbyterian pork- curer from Belfast, where he was born in August, 1828. He was a rough, ugly-looking man — Mr. Barry O'Brien describes him as “uncouth and brutal," and Mr. T. P. O'Connor as “ a peculiarly aggravating obstructive " — who might fairly have been given the nickname of Caliban. Disraeli, when he saw him for the first time, regarded him through his eyeglass, and said, “ Is he a leprechaun? " His business ability was considerable, and he made a fortune out of pigs. How this Presbyterian became infected with Nationalist politics to the extent of consorting habitually with Papists is hard to say, but his morals, which were as uncouth as his looks, were not such as would be considered commendable either in Geneva or in Rome. He was an avowed and unashamed sinner. In 1883 an Irish lady living in Paris sued him for breach of promise, and succeeded in mulcting him in damages to the extent of £400. It is clear from the evidence that Mr. Biggar desired the lady for his concubine, but that she preferred to be his wife. As she was getting on in years, she rightly considered that she would be safer married to him than she would be kept by him. Quite casually, in the course of his cross-examination, Mr. Biggar informed the court that he was the father of two natural children, a boy and a girl, each by a different mother. He frequently corresponded with the mother of one of these children, but could not say for certain whether the mother of the second was alive or dead ! He was especially fond of

105

Parnell

barmaids, and had, it appeared, a strong desire to beget children by them.

A stronger contrast to Parnell than Joseph Biggar could not have been imagined. The ugly and misshapen pork- curer seemed more like Caliban than ever when he stood by the side of the tall, slim, handsome, well-dressed young aristocrat from Wicklow, who instantly suggested Ferdinand to the mind. Parnell shyly sat down on the Irish benches and listened to Biggar’s speech. Mr. Butt wanted the Coer¬ cion Bill delayed, so he instructed Biggar to talk at large about it. Biggar, so different from Parnell in all else, resembled him in two things: he was badly educated and he hated making speeches. But this order from Butt was welcome to him, for it enabled him to put into practice the idea which Mr. Ronayne had planted in his mind. He spoke for three hours and fifty-five minutes, and contrived, according to Mr. O’Connor, who heard the speech, to drag into the dis¬ cussion on Coercion a denunciation of Ritualism, which might have been regarded by some of his colleagues as a backhander at Popery itself. He read lengthy extracts from Blue Books until his voice became so tired that the Speaker, hoping to shut him up, complained of being unable to hear him. Mr. Biggar, affecting the utmost concern for the Speaker, declared that they were too far away from each other, and immediately moved from his place to one nearer the Chair, where he resumed his reading of the Blue Books. The exasperated House could do nothing with Mr. Biggar, and had to bear with what fortitude it could his deliberate waste of its time. His colleagues, jealous of their reputation for gentlemanly, reasonable behaviour, were shocked by his conduct — all of them, except Mr. Ronayne and the young member for Meath, who had taken his seat that afternoon. Parnell listened to Mr. Biggar as if he were listening to the voice of God. ... He did not make any sign to show that 106

His Policy of Obstruction

he had resolved on the policy of obstruction which Biggar was now so clumsily practising. He had yet to learn his way about this singular House. But the idea of obstruction was moving uneasily in his thoughts, and it was expressed at first in shy suggestions to older members which must have made some of them regard him as a madman. Mr. T. P. O'Connor says in his Life of Charles Stewart Parnell : “ I have heard O'Connor Power tell the story of an extraordinary project which Parnell imparted to him a short time after his entrance into Parliament. It was to come down to the House some night in fantastic costume, to provoke a collision with the Speaker, and by some such means to draw attention to the grievances of Ireland."

Four days after his introduction to the Speaker he made his maiden speech. “ It was short, modest, spoken in a thin voice and with manifest nervousness." He declared that Ireland was not a geographical fragment of England, but a nation. For the rest of the year 1875 he remained mostly an onlooker, though he spoke at intervals and asked questions. Mr. Barry O'Brien has culled two short passages from speeches which he delivered in Ireland about this time. ** We do not want speakers in the House of Commons, but men who will vote right." ** The Irish people should watch the conduct of their representatives in the House of Commons." He was evolving the form and discipline of his party. He had told his brother in America that “ the Irish can make themselves felt everywhere if they are self-reliant and stick to each other," and now he was announcing the need for a well-governed voting machine. There is something astounding in the spectacle of this stammering and singularly uninformed young man, who knew so little of Parliamentary procedure or, in¬ deed, of the ordinary routine of life that he naively enquired of a colleague how one got the material for a question to the Speaker, finding in flashes of intuition the means whereby the

107

Parnell

dreams and desires of generations of Irishmen were to be fulfilled. One imagines the amused scorn with which his colleague informed him that one got the material for questions “ from the newspapers, from our constituents, from many sources,” and heard him reply, “ Ah, I must try and ask a question myself one day.” Yet this simpleton, as he seemed, was to acquire a dominion over that man and his comrades within five years such as no other man in the political history of Great Britain and Ireland has ever possessed. For his was the simplicity of the man of genius, the simplicity which cannot be put to shame. It has been said of him by many persons that he had no original ideas. Mr. John Morley, describing him, said: “ Of constructive faculty he never showed a trace. He was a man of temperament, of will, of authority, of power; not of ideas or ideals, or knowledge, or political maxims, or even of practical reason in its higher senses, as Hamilton, Madison, or Jefferson had practical reason. But he knew what he wanted.”1 He knew more than that — he knew what he wanted, and he knew how to get it. He did not invent his methods, but he had the ability to recognise a useful method the moment he saw it. He was rarely indecisive. We shall see later how, when The Times attempted to implicate him in the Phoenix Park murders, he startled and even outraged his friends by pointing to the S in his signature and saying, “ I did not make an S like that since 1878 !” That, seemingly, was all he had to say when accused of complicity in a horrible assassination, and there were many who were shocked by what they considered a mad triviality. Yet that S was the marrow of the matter, and Parnell, with his uncanny power of seizing upon the essential fact, did not waste time in displays of indignation when his business was to discover who had copied his 1878 S, and by what means he had acquired the original of it. Dis- 1 Life of Gladstone, bk. ix., chap, v., sect. 3.

108

His Policy of Obstruction

coverers seldom use, or make the best use of, their discoveries. If the effective use of obstruction had depended upon Joseph Ronayne, there would not have been any obstruction. The weapon would have rusted into ruin. It is, indeed, a nice point to decide which of the two is the greater, the man who thinks of the way in which to So things or the man who does them ; but we may safely conclude that the inventor and the exploiter are necessary to each other, since the one without the other would be useless.

Parnell, then, in his first Parliamentary session, during which he was disregarded by his colleagues, some of whom thought him half-witted, was creating in his mind the basis and the shape of the political machine which he was to drive with unprecedented vigour and success.

It was not until June 30, 1876, that he said anything in the House of Commons which drew public attention to himself. Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, speaking on Mr. Butt's motion for an enquiry into the demand for Home Rule, referred to u The Manchester Martyrs " as “ the Manchester murderers." It was probably an uncalculated description, but it had an immediate and infuriating effect on one member of the House. Parnell, whose sole political argument at the County Dublin by- election seemed to be concerned with the execution of Allen, Larkin, and O'Brien, startled a somnolent assembly by shouting in sharp accents, “ No ! no !" Black Michael glanced about him in astonishment, and then, fixing his gaze upon the young nervous Nationalist, icily said, ** I regret to hear that there is an honourable member in this House who will apologise for murder." Cries of “ Withdraw ! With¬ draw ! " were addressed to Parnell by indignant members in every part of the Commons, and men looked to see if the foolish interrupter were