Charles Stewart Parnell, A Biography

The Definitive Biography of the Uncrowned King of Ireland

F.S.L. Lyons

• Publisher: Gill Books
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780717139392
• eBook ISBN: 9780717163960
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

In this masterly biography, F.S.L. Lyons tackles the life and times of one of the greatest Irish statesmen of modern times. One of modern Irish biography's great triumphs, Charles Stewart Parnell has never been approached or surpassed. Charles Stewart Parnell, an enigmatic, icy aristocrat, was the unlikely and unchallenged leader of Irish nationalism from the mid-1870s, in its early heroic phase. Without him, Home Rule would not have become the formidable cause that it was. Daniel O'Connell first articulated modern Irish nationalism; Parnell first organised it. As leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party from 1875 until his death in 1891, Parnell became a figurehead for Irish nationalist ambition and used his influence to further the cause of Irish independence in the British parliament. Parnell not only mobilised nationalist Ireland, exploiting discontent with the land system and a desire for political autonomy, he also subverted the usages of nineteenth-century British politics by supporting the introduction of the filibuster into the House of Commons. He divided Gladstone's Liberal party between those who supported Home Rule and those who opposed it and generally forced the Irish question to the heart of British politics where it remained until 1922. Even today, the continuing uncertainty over the future of Northern Ireland is a remote legacy of Parnell. Parnell's fall – the product of his doomed and passionate love affair with Katharine O'Shea – was the most traumatic moment in nationalist history before 1916. It divided a generation. The passions it gave rise to, brilliantly recalled in the Christmas dinner scene of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, are fully explored in this magnificent work of scholarship.

Charles Stewart Parnell: Table of Contents

• The Meeting of the Waters
• Apprenticeship
• Rising High
• Crisis
• In the Eye of the Storm
• Kilmainham
• The New Course
• Gathering Pace
• Towards the Fulcrum
• The Galway 'Mutiny'
• The View from Pisgah
• In the Shadows
• Ireland in the Strand
• Apotheosis
• The Crash
• Confrontation
• Breaking-Point
• A Time of Rending
• Last Chance
• La Commedia è Finita
• Myth and Reality

Chapter 1

The Meeting of the Waters

‘An Englishman of the strongest type, moulded for an Irish purpose.’

(Michael Davitt, The fall of feudalism in Ireland, p. 110.)

‘. . . above all, Mr Parnell was an Irishman, Irish bred, Irish born, “racy of the soil”, knowing its history, devoted to its interests.’

(Drogheda Argus, 24 April 1875, celebrating Parnell’s election to parliament.)

‘I have always held that both in appearance and to a large extent in character Parnell was much more American than either English or Irish.’

(T. P. O’Connor, Memoirs of an old parliamentarian, i, 97.)

I

All the roads that lead from Dublin to the county Wicklow are beautiful. But if there is one more beautiful than the others it is surely the road which rises steeply from Rathfarnham, skirts the head of Glencree where the Sugarloaf mountain floats in the distance, and then, at Sally Gap, follows the route driven through the wilderness by the military after the rising of 1798, until it comes out at Laragh, just above Glendalough. From Laragh it traces the winding course of the little river Avon, through the quiet woods of Clara vale, until it reaches Rathdrum, perched like an Italian hill-town, with its grey and pink and blue houses, on a high ridge looking down on Avoca and ‘the meeting of the waters’. There, in the family house of Avondale, Charles Stewart Parnell was born on 27 June 1846.¹

When Charles was born the Parnells were comparative newcomers to Wicklow, and indeed to Ireland. The family emerged from obscurity only in the seventeenth century. The first of whom any substantial information survives was Thomas Parnell, a mercer and draper in the town of Congleton in Cheshire, of which town he became mayor in the reign of James I. He had four sons of whom one, Richard, was also mayor on several occasions, and the youngest, Tobias, was a gilder and painter. They appear to have been stout parliament men during the Civil War and this may have helped to persuade Tobias’s son, Thomas, to move to Ireland soon after the Restoration. He was far from a penniless émigré however, and took with him enough funds to purchase an estate in Queen’s county where he settled comfortably into the routine of a prosperous landowner. He was the father of two sons through whom the name of Parnell first began to be known outside the family circle.

The elder of these, also Thomas, was born in 1679, entering Trinity College, Dublin, when only fourteen. Graduating in 1697, he was ordained in 1703 and two years later was appointed Archdeacon of Clogher at the age of twenty-six. Like many eighteenth-century Anglican clergy he was a frequent absentee, preferring literary London to rural Ulster. A quietly persistent poet, not much of his verse has survived the test of time, perhaps because the very qualities a later biographer detected in it reflect equally the limitations of the age, of the genre and of the man. ‘His work’, says this writer, ‘is marked by sweetness, refined sensibility, musical and fluent versification, and high moral tone.’² Dr Johnson’s verdict is untypically cautious. ‘He is sprightly without effort, and always delights, though he never ravishes.’ And of the poems he observes: ‘It is impossible to say whether they are the productions of nature so excellent as not to want the help of art, or of art so refined as to resemble nature.’³

Perhaps, after all, it was the nature that was excellent, for Thomas Parnell had many friends. They included Addison, Steele, Congreve and Gay, but especially Swift and Pope; it says much for him that both these notoriously difficult individuals held him in high affection. Yet his life was short and marked by tragedy. He married Anne Minchin of Tipperary, to whom he was deeply attached, and he never really recovered from her early death in 1711. Oliver Goldsmith, who wrote a life of him, called him ‘the most capable man to make the happiness of those whom he conversed with, and the least able to secure his own’.⁴ He lost not only his wife, but also his two sons, began to drink heavily and showed marked manic-depressive tendencies – the first known appearance in the family of a strain of mental instability that was to recur more than once thereafter. He died suddenly at Chester on his way to Ireland in 1717 in his thirty-eighth year, leaving behind him a memory which the family at least kept green. Even his remote descendant, Charles, than whom no man who ever lived had less poetic sensibility, could refer knowledgeably to his ancestor and on one occasion went so far as to write a verse which he claimed, wrongly, to be ‘as good as any of Tom Parnell’s stuff’.*

The death of Thomas Parnell meant that the Queen’s county property fell to his brother John, a barrister who sat in the Irish House of Commons, married the sister of a Lord Chief Justice, and became a judge himself. Dying in 1727 he left a son, John, who also sat for an Irish constituency and was created a baronet in 1766. He married the daughter of a judge of the King’s Bench, Anne Ward of Castle Ward in county Down. Their son, the second Sir John, born on Christmas Day 1744, was the first of his line to reach the front rank in politics and since his reputation was to open some important doors for Charles a century later, it is worth looking at that reputation a little more closely.

At first glance, it is certainly impressive. Entering the Irish parliament in 1776, when the American Revolution was creating a favourable opportunity for the Anglo-Irish ‘patriots’ to free themselves from the close control of the British parliament, Sir John commanded a corps in the Volunteers whose mere existence helped to win ‘the constitution of 1782’ to which Charles was later to look back as his prime model for Home Rule. But that constitution was a defective instrument. It did not really break the English stranglehold on the Dublin government, because that government was appointed by, and responsible to, ministers in London, not to the parliament on College Green. The parliament itself, moreover, remained unrepresentative, consisting essentially of Anglo-Irish Protestants who were imbued not with anything resembling modern nationalism, but with the irritation and frustration of a colonial elite, determined to assert itself against the metropolitan power, yet not daring to go too far lest it should have to admit the Catholic majority to the jobs and pensions and ‘connexions’ which so faithfully mirrored the grander political world across the Irish Sea.

Some of the ‘patriots’, it is true, were prepared to move decorously and cautiously towards a progressive emancipation of Catholics. Gradually most of their legal disabilities were removed, until the Irish parliament found itself facing the biggest questions of all – whether Irish Catholics should be given the vote and whether, once enfranchised, they should themselves be eligible for election to parliament. On these vexed questions (the first of which was decided in favour of the Catholics in 1793, the second of which had not been solved when the Irish parliament ceased to exist in 1800) Sir John Parnell – he had succeeded his father to the baronetcy in 1782 – held distinctly conservative opinions. Although the contemporary view of him as an able and, within the elastic eighteenth-century definition of the term, an honest man, may have been justified, those who knew him well found him mentally lazy and firmly anchored to the status quo.⁵ Not surprisingly, since he found life comfortable enough as it was, he came out as an opponent of emancipation, deploying with considerable skill and frequent reiteration the classic conservative argument that he considered ‘the moment ill-chosen and the experiment dangerous to do away at once the principle of a century’.⁶

The possession of such views did not, of course, prevent him from climbing the ladder of success. In 1785 he followed his friend John Foster as Chancellor of the Exchequer and in 1786 he became a Privy Councillor. During his fourteen years as Chancellor he did much to reorganize Irish governmental finance on the English model, but the permanence of his work, as of the constitution of 1782 itself, was always in jeopardy because of the impending possibility of a legislative union between Britain and Ireland. This, long contemplated, was hastened on by the threat to established order posed by the ‘98 rising. After intensive pressure and substantial inducement in the form of grants, pensions and titles, the Irish parliament was persuaded in 1800 to consent to its own extinction. After some initial hesitation, Sir John Parnell came out strongly against the Union and in 1799 was dismissed from office for his pains. But this martyrdom, in which Charles was later to invest considerable political capital, was the gesture of a ‘patriot’ in much the same sense in which the Irish parliament itself was a ‘patriot’ parliament. When Sir John told Pitt that a union was ‘very dangerous and not necessary’, what he was objecting to was the destruction of a system of government which had preserved for him and men like him a Protestant ascendancy with all the fruits and pleasures which flowed from a monopoly of political power.⁷ He was dubious also, it must in fairness be said, about the possible effects of a union on Irish trade, on the influx of capital, on land prices and even on the future relations between Protestants and Catholics.⁸ In the end, he was out-manoeuvred and out-voted, and although the pangs of defeat were sweetened by a payment of £7500 in compensation for the suppression of the family pocket-borough, he survived the Act of Union by only a few months, dying in 1801.⁹

It was left to his descendants to act on a wider stage a part more distinguished than any he had played in the little arena of Dublin. By his marriage to Letitia Charlotte Brooke of Fermanagh Sir John had six children. One of these, Henry, after education at Eton and Cambridge (where, however, he did not take his degree), had entered the Irish House of Commons in 1797 just in time to share his father’s last-ditch stand against the Union. Although not the eldest son, he succeeded to the family estates in 1801; these had been settled on him in anticipation by a private act of parliament of 1789, because the eldest son, John Augustus, was a deaf and dumb imbecile. Henry entered the British parliament briefly in 1802 and on a longer tenure in 1806, when he was returned for Queen’s county. From the outset he distinguished himself as a proponent of Catholic emancipation (which had originally been proposed as part of the Union settlement, but which Pitt had failed to carry in face of George III’s veto) and, with his lively and incisive mind, interested himself in many other topics. He was not only active in the House of Commons but, a rarity in his family, wrote with authority on questions of the day. He maintained the family interest in Irish affairs, producing in 1808 a well-informed History of the penal laws. He also wrote voluminously on the Corn Laws, banking and taxation, and his Financial reform (1830) anticipated some of the fiscal innovations later carried out by Peel and Gladstone. Like Charles later, he was a clear but somewhat wooden speaker, with little variety of tone and almost no animation of gesture. He achieved office as Secretary for War in Earl Grey’s reform ministry of 1830, but disagreed with his colleagues on several issues and was dismissed in 1832. He came back to power as a Paymaster-General of the Forces under Melbourne in 1835 and kept his post until raised to the peerage as Baron Congleton in 1841. At that point he lost his health, became deranged (that fatal strain again) and in June 1842 hanged himself at the age of sixty-six.¹⁰

Henry was the second of five brothers. The first, as we saw, was mentally and physically handicapped. Of the fifth, Arthur, little significant is known. The fourth, Thomas, was a saintly eccentric who succumbed to religious mania and for many years spent his share of the family fortune in a so-called ‘Protestant Office’ in Sackville Street (O’Connell Street) in Dublin.¹¹ Nor was he the only one of his family to stray from the Anglican via media. The second Lord Congleton, possibly under the influence of his uncle Thomas, became much involved with the Plymouth Brethren. After establishing them at Aungier Street in Dublin, he vainly attempted to repeat this success in the more exotic purlieus of Baghdad and also extended his missionary enterprise as far as India. Charles, too, in later life admitted at least twice to a tenderness for the sect, and though one of these occasions need not be taken too seriously – it was an election speech at Plymouth in 1886 – his remark to T. P. O’Connor, when they were travelling to Galway for the famous by-election earlier that year, that he liked their ‘quietness’, has the ring of truth about it.¹²

It was from the third of Sir John Parnell’s sons that Charles himself was descended. This was William, who was born in 1777 and was the first of the family to live at Avondale. The estate of about 4,500 acres (later reduced to under 4,000) passed to Sir John in 1795 on the death of his friend and probable first cousin, Samuel Hayes, as the result of intermarriage between the two families. William Parnell seems to have aspired no higher than the role of country gentleman, which he filled with modest success, preserving his property intact and maintaining good relations with his tenants, both difficult feats in the early years of the nineteenth century when agricultural distress and unrest were almost endemic. He had two further claims to fame. The first was that, like his brother Henry, he gave much thought to the situation created in Ireland by the Union and, like him, was prepared to venture his views in print, publishing a pamphlet in 1805 entitled An enquiry into the causes of popular discontents in Ireland, and following this two years later with the more substantial Historical apology for Irish Catholics. In his pamphlet he put his finger unerringly on some of the factors which were still to be dominant when his grandson came upon the scene some sixty years later – the race memory of the Irish, the friction between different religious denominations, the degraded condition of the peasantry, the influence of republicanism and, of course, the Union itself.¹³ But in analysing these factors he confined himself to theory, and although he represented Wicklow in the House of Commons in 1817 and 1819–20, his impact was virtually nil. His other achievement, if that is the right word, was his friendship with the then fashionable poet, Thomas Moore. It was when staying at Avondale that Moore visited the Vale of Avoca and wrote ‘The Meeting of the Waters’, though William could never persuade the poet to divulge exactly where it was that he composed what Moore himself complacently described as ‘the now memorable song’.¹⁴

William’s life was blameless but it was also brief. He died in 1821 in his early forties, leaving two children, Catherine and John Henry. By his marriage into the Howard family (to which the Earls of Wicklow belonged) he had in his twenty years in the county already put down roots in local society which broadened and deepened in the next generation, so that we hear of the Powerscourts and the Carysforts as being, with the Wicklows, part of the Parnell circle of friends and relations. The name Parnell-Hayes, used by William to commemorate the earlier owner of Avondale, was dropped in the next generation. Of William’s two children, Catherine was endowed with £10,000, a portion which was to be a burden on the Avondale estate for a long time to come. John Henry inherited Avondale itself, as well as land at Collure in county Armagh, acquired towards the end of his life by that inveterate collector of property, Sir John Parnell, on long lease from Trinity College, Dublin. John Henry also went in for land speculation, but with much less success, buying from his uncle, Sir Ralph Howard, the estate of Clonmore in Carlow for the very large sum of £69,469. This he did in 1858 and it helps to explain why, when he died only a year later, he left his affairs in considerable disorder.† Like his father, John Henry took naturally to the life of a country gentleman, acting right by his tenants and playing his part as a squire of the manor in the duties, as well as the pleasures, of the countryside.

II

Yet it was this quiet, conventional landowner who introduced into the beautiful but reticent countryside of Wicklow a flaring exotic. At the age of twenty he set out on a trip to America with one of his cousins, the young Powerscourt. Together they met, and together they wooed a young American girl, Delia Tudor Stewart. Tall, vivacious, striking with her oval face, her dark hair and her blue eyes, she was the remarkable daughter of a remarkable man whose family had taken a prominent part in American public life since the Revolution.

Two strands, each unusual, went to the making of the Stewarts. About the middle of the eighteenth century the founder of the family fortunes, Charles Stewart, emigrated from Belfast to America with his wife (nee Sarah Ford). There were eight children of this marriage, the youngest, Charles, having been born in 1778. His father died when he was only two years old and soon afterwards his mother remarried, her second husband being a Captain Britton, commander of Washington’s bodyguard. The young Charles had a passion for the sea and, at the age of thirteen, dealt with parental opposition by the simple expedient of run...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: The Meeting of the Waters
• Chapter 2: Apprenticeship
• Chapter 3: Rising High
• Chapter 4: Crisis
• Chapter 5: In the Eye of the Storm
• Chapter 6: Kilmainham
• Chapter 7: The New Course
• Chapter 8: Gathering Pace
• Chapter 9: Towards the Fulcrum
• Chapter 10: The Galway 'Mutiny'
• Chapter 11: The View from Pisgah
• Chapter 12: In the Shadows
• Chapter 13: Ireland in the Strand
• Chapter 14: Apotheosis
• Chapter 15: The Crash
• Chapter 16: Confrontation
• Chapter 17: Breaking-Point
• Chapter 18: A Time of Rending
• Chapter 19: Last Chance
• Chapter 20: La Commedia è Finita
• Chapter 21: Myth and Reality
• Notes
• Bibliographical Note
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright
• About the Author
• About Gill & Macmillan