(An important text from a critical period in Irish nationa...)
An important text from a critical period in Irish nationalist politics. Published in 1892, shortly after Charles Stewart Parnell's death, it is a collection of extracts from his speeches, including all of the best-known ones. There is an unmistakeable, political even, propagandist dimension to the publication. It was written for a nationalist audience and particularly for followers of Parnell. Wyse-Power explains in her preface that the purpose of her 'humble memento' was to keep the principles that Parnell enunciated before the minds of Irish Nationalists. ""Reissued with illuminating new introduction as a part of the Classics of Irish History series published by UCD Press, one of the most admirable endeavors in recent Irish publishing history.""-Irish Literary Supplement
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Charles Stewart Parnell was born on June 27, 1846 in Avondale, County Wicklow, Ireland. His father, John Henry Parnell, was a country gentleman of strong Nationalist and Liberal sympathies. His American mother, Delia Tudor, was the daughter of Admiral Charles Stewart. Parnell inherited his family's devotion to Irish interests.
Parnell went to three English boarding schools, where he seemed to have been unhappy, and to Cambridge, where in 1869 he was suspended for a relatively minor breach of discipline and decided not to return.
Parnell entered politics as a member of Parliament from Meath in 1875, when he attached himself to Isaac Butt's Home Rule League, then striving by strictly peaceful means to obtain local self-government for Ireland. Two years later he joined Joseph Biggar in systematic obstruction of British legislation. Described by Parnell as an active parliamentary policy, obstruction was a reaction to British indifference to Irish problems, to the cautious and conciliatory parliamentary tactics and leadership of Isaac Butt – father of home rule and chairman of the Irish party – and to the growing cynicism of Irish opinion toward nationalist politics.
Butt joined outraged British politicians and journalists in denouncing the "barbarian" tactics of Parnell and Biggar, claiming they had damaged home rule by alienating British opinion. Parnell insisted that the achievement of home rule depended on the determination of Irish nationalist members of Parliament to demonstrate that the union could be as unpleasant for the British as it was for the Irish.
Avoiding a direct challenge to Butt's control over the moribund Irish party or the impoverished Home Rule League, Parnell awaited the next general election. He used obstruction to attract notice and favor, courting Irish opinion at home and in the ghettos of Britain and the United States. In 1879 Parnell accepted the presidency of the National Land League, a New Departure instrument designed by Irish-Americans to bring republicans into contact with the Irish peasant masses. Financed by Irish-American dollars, the Land League demanded the end of landlordism, but it was prepared to accept agrarian reform along the way.
The results of the general elections of 1880 gave Parnell the votes to command the Irish party. William Gladstone, the prime minister, responded to the near-revolutionary Land League agitation with a mixed coercion-conciliation policy. The 1881 Land Act gave Irish tenant farmers secure tenures at fair rents, freeing them from serfdom. But Parnell rejected the act as inadequate, and the government imprisoned him for encouraging agrarian disturbances. He was released in 1882 after promising to accept government improvements in the Land Act in exchange for Irish party support of future Liberal efforts to solve the Irish question. The truce was known as the Kilmainham Treaty.
After 1882 Parnell concentrated on building an effective Irish party to promote home rule. Instead of reviving the outlawed Land League, he used Irish-American money to pay the expenses of talented and sincere nationalists prepared to stand for Parliament. Parnell's genius, Irish-American dollars, and the Reform Bill of 1884 gave the Irish party more than 80 members in the House of Commons.
With an effective party behind him, Parnell in 1885 played balance-of-power politics in the House of Commons, forcing both Liberals and Conservatives to bid for Irish votes. Gladstone made the highest offer: home rule. The Irish then turned the Conservatives out of office and installed the Liberals. In 1886 Gladstone introduced a home-rule bill which was defeated by defections in Liberal ranks.
In 1887 London newspaper The Times accused Parnell of being connected with Irish terrorism and printed facsimiles of letters allegedly in Parnell's own handwriting. Parnell and his party were cleared of the main charges against them, and he reached the peak of his popularity in England. At the beginning of December 1889, Parnell was the unchallenged master of Irish nationalism. He dominated Irish opinion, bringing extremist types into the mainstream of constitutional nationalism. He commanded Irish-American financial resources, and he had captured the Liberal party for home rule. This height of popularity was followed by swift disaster.
The tides of Parnell's fortune began to recede when Captain William O'Shea submitted a petition suing his wife, Katherine, for divorce, naming Parnell as correspondent. Irish nationalists assumed that Parnell would emerge from the courtroom an honorable man. Parnell, however, anxious to marry Katherine O'Shea who had been his mistress since 1880, decided not to contest William O'Shea's charges, and his image was tarnished by the captain's testimony. Although the Irish party reelected Parnell its chairman in November 1890 – just after the divorce – the breaking-point came when Gladstone let it be known that Ireland must choose between the man and the cause, between Parnell and Liberal support for Home Rule.
The Irish Party debated the dilemma for a whole week before it split in two on December 6, 1890; the majority subsequently voted for Parnell's deposition from the chairmanship. Parnell, a supreme egotist, refused to accept the realities of the Liberal alliance. He appealed to the Irish people in three by-election contests. Opposed by the Catholic hierarchy and clergy, Parnell lost the by-elections and his health in the process. He died of rheumatic fever on October 6, 1891.
Parnell became a symbol of resistance to British dictation, clericalism, and inhibiting Victorian and Irish Catholic moralities. His political achievements were remarkable: the creation of an extraordinarily effective parliamentary party and the bringing of both the land question and Home Rule into the sphere of practical politics.
(An important text from a critical period in Irish nationa...)
Quotations:
"No man has a right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation; no man has a right to say to his country - thus far shalt thou go and no further. "
"Why should Ireland be treated as a geographical fragment of England - Ireland is not a geographical fragment, but a nation. "
"No man has the right to say to his country. "
"Do what is beyond your strength even should you fail sometimes. "
"You must show him, by leaving him severely alone. "
"Get the advice of everybody whose advice is worth having - they are very few - and then do what you think best yourself. "
Although Parnell was educated in England, used English speech patterns, and possessed the aloof manner associated with the English establishment, he inherited his family's devotion to Irish interests.
In 1891 Parnell married Katherine O’Shea, the daughter of Sir John Page Wood. They had three children, including two daughters, Clare and Katie Parnell.
She was a passionate Anglophobe.
The illicit liaison between Parnell and O'Shea, a poorly kept secret from the start, destroyed Parnell's career.
