Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (61 page)

From his window, then, Lord Spencer looked out into the evening—a summer Saturday evening, warm, with a polo match in progress on the green, and the park full of strollers, picnickers and cyclists: and he noticed on the Grand Avenue, the thoroughfare which ran beyond the Viceregal ha-ha, what appeared to be a scuffle among a few men on the pavement. Drunks, he thought, and turned his attention elsewhere. Others assumed it to be one of the impromptu pavement wrestling matches to which Irishmen were addicted, and two cyclists rode by without taking a second look. What in feet was happening, though, was that Lord Spencer’s
dinner guests were being murdered. They were stabbed to death by seven members of a secret revolutionary society, the Invincibles, as they walked the last hundred yards to their dinner. Burke was the planned victim, and the murderers did not know who Cavendish was: but they cut both men’s throats anyway, as they lay dying from their stab wounds, before vanishing from Phoenix Park into the city.

Gladstone was not deterred from his grand design. ‘Be assured it will not be in vain,’ he told Lady Frederick Cavendish, and she responded in kind: ‘across all my agony,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘there fell a bright ray of hope, and I saw in a vision Ireland at peace, and my darling’s life blood accepted as a sacrifice….’ Assured still of Parnell’s support, Gladstone proceeded from land reform towards Home Rule—domestic autonomy, that is, within a federal arrangement. Though he was briefly out of office in 1885, in 1886 he was returned again, and presented his first Home Rule Bill to Parliament. It split the nation.
1
Conservatives declared it a gross betrayal of the Anglo-Irish, especially the Protestant majority of Ulster in the north—‘essentially like the English people’, cried Lord Randolph Churchill, ‘a dominant, imperial caste…. It is only Mr Gladstone who would imagine for a moment that the Protestants of Ireland could recognize the power or satisfy the demands of a Parliament in Dublin’. The idea of separating the home islands seemed to stand against the trend of the times, the growing awareness of Empire and the rising aspiration towards imperial unity. Disraeli was dead, but Gladstone was more than ever the
bête
noire
of the imperialists, and most of the London Press, now half-way to an imperialist conversion, was vehemently against the bill. Even the intellectuals opposed it, and its defeat became inevitable when Gladstone was deserted by the most brilliant of his younger lieutenants, Joseph Chamberlain—the very man who had, by his negotiations with Parnell in Kilmainham Jail, made the bill a political possibility.

Chamberlain, who was presently to be the grand entrepreneur of the imperial climax, clearly sensed the coming blaze of Empire, and decided to warm his hands at it. He also coveted the leadership of the Liberal Party. He defected to the Opposition with enough fellow-Liberals to defeat the bill and bring down the Government. At the ensuing general election the Tories came back with a new title, the Conservative and Unionist Party—with a new group of allies, the Liberal-Unionists under Chamberlain—and with a new Irish policy, based upon Churchill’s perception that the close-knit Protestant community of Ulster was the strongest justification for British rule in Ireland. ‘Ulster will fight,’ ran the new slogan, ‘and Ulster will be right—Home Rule is Rome Rule.’

Now Parnell’s position in Parliament was more equivocal than ever. He was equivocal about Home Rule, for he might never have accepted the limitations of Gladstone’s bill. He was equivocal about his relationship with the Liberals. Above all he was equivocal about violence—‘the English’, he once said, ‘murder and plunder all over the earth and they howl when somebody is killed in Ireland’. Five men had been hanged for the Phoenix Park murders, but still a slight haze of suspicion connected The Chief himself with the tragedy.
1
Publicly he had condemned it, but when openly accused of complicity in the Commons, he scornfully declined to defend himself. On the whole, perhaps, most of the country believed in his innocence. The Liberal Party clearly still did, as did Mr Gladstone himself. There was no hard evidence against him, only a miasma of distrust.

But in the same month as the presentation of the Home Rule Bill, April 1886, a young Irishman named Edward Houston presented himself at the office of
The
Times
, in the tiny private courtyard which the paper then occupied at Blackfriars in the City.
The
Times
was at the apogee of its power, and Printing House Square was rather like a very worldly Oxford college, with its elegant dining-room, its wine waiter, its discreet but intimate contacts with the
sources of power, and its traditions of gentlemanly scholarship and enterprise. Into this dignified milieu Houston cast a sensational proposition. He was in a position to prove, he told the Editor, that Parnell was directly connected with the Phoenix Park murders; and asking merely for his own expenses, for he was, he said, concerned only for the well-being and good name of his country, he produced a series of ten letters, five of them apparently from Parnell, which seemed to show that the Land League had financed the murders, and that The Chief had personally approved of them. Here is the most damning of the letters, No 2:

Dear Sir, I am not surprised at your friend’s offer, but be and you should know that to denounce the murders was the only course open to us. To do that promptly was plainly the only course and our best policy. But you can tell him, and all others concerned, that though I regret the accident of Lord F. Cavendish’s death I cannot refuse to admit that Burke got no more than his deserts. You are at liberty to show him this, and others who you can trust also, but let not my address be known. He can write to the House of Commons. Yours very truly, Chas. s. Parnell.

Only the signature was apparently in Parnell’s handwriting, and
The
Times
responded cautiously. The paper was fiercely opposed to Home Rule, but decided to fly a legal kite by publishing first a series of articles,
Parnellism and Crime,
implying in general terms that the Irish Nationalist Party and the Land League were implicated in Irish violence. When no writs followed, on April 18, 1887, the paper published letter No 2. Never in the history of
The
Times
had a scoop been launched, with such drama. For the first time the newspaper carried a double-column headline; beneath it the letter was reproduced in facsimile, in the centre of the editorial page. On the streets posters appeared bearing in enormous letters the words:
‘The
Phoenix
Park
Murders:
Facsimile
of
a
Letter
from
Mr
Parnell
Excusing
His
Public
Condemnation
of
the
Crime.’
The
Times
was satisfied, said an editorial, that the evidence was ‘quite authentic … we invite Mr Parnell to explain how his signature has become attached to such a letter’.

It was four years since the murders in the park, but the public reaction was intense. A Special Commission of Inquiry was set up to investigate the whole question of collusion in Irish violence. This
was in effect a State Trial of Parnell The three judges of the Commission were all well-known opponents of Home Rule, and all the resources of the State were applied to the exposure of Parnell and his colleagues. But it proved an astonishing triumph for The Chief. After months of inquiries, some 150,000 questions, and 445 witnesses there appeared in the stand a disreputable Irish journalist named Richard Piggott, described as having ‘the general appearance of a coarsely composed and rather cheapened Father Christmas’, who was very soon forced into the admission that he had forged the Parnell letters. Parnell was cleared absolutely. Piggott went to Paris and killed himself.

Parnell’s mercurial career thus reached a climax of unexampled success. He was 42, and a hero not only in Ireland, where people often fell to their knees in his presence, but in England too. The Liberals fulsomely made amends for public suspicions—when Parnell entered the Commons for the first time after his vindication, the Liberal members rose to their feet, and Mr Gladstone bowed. He was elected a life member of the Liberal Club, publicly shook hands with Lord Spencer the Lord Lieutenant, was fêted at soirées and waved at by doting progressive ladies. Gladstone’s daughter Mary, thought he exhibited ‘all the fruits of the Spirit, love, patience, gentleness, forebearance, long-suffering meekness. His personality takes hold of one, the refined delicate face, illuminating smile, fire-darting eyes … Loved Parnell’s spiritual face, only one’s heart ached over his awfully delicate frame and looks’.

We are told that he accepted it all sceptically. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ somebody said to him after his return to the House. ‘Yes wonderful,’ he replied, ‘but how much more pleased they would have been if the forgery had proved genuine!’ But he attached the greatest importance to his alliance with Gladstone, and as the 1880s passed, and the Liberals regained their strength in opposition, so it seemed that these two extraordinary men, backed by the combined energies of English liberalism and Irish patriotism, would in the end achieve the autonomy of Ireland. ‘Think not for the moment’,
Gladstone had told the House when he presented his Home Rule Bill, ‘but for the years that are to come’: an election was due in 1892, and this time, it seemed, Home Rule for Ireland was almost a certainty.

But now the last catastrophe occurred. In the culminating irony of Parnell’s ironic life, at the threshold of his greatest triumph, he was ruined. He had never married, but for years he had enjoyed a mistress, Katherine O’Shea, who was the wife of one of Parnell’s own followers, Captain William O’Shea, MP for Galway. O’Shea was a feckless adventurer, formerly of the 18th Hussars, who had survived phases of bankruptcy, been a mine manager in Spain and a stud farmer in Hertfordshire, and had virtually forced his Parliamentary nomination out of Parnell’s gift, in return for Kitty’s favours. Throughout the dramatic fluctuations of Parnell’s political fortune, this poignant affair had nagged at his emotions. Mrs O’Shea was his only lover, and he was faithful to her for life. He had loved her at first sight: a rose she accidentally dropped in 1880 was found among his papers when he died, and was placed over his heart in his coffin. He called her ‘Queenie’ or ‘Wifie’, and she bore him at least two children. If he was away from her for more than two days, he sent her two telegrams daily, and one letter.

Yet this child-like love affair was, by the conventions of the time, wrapped up in squalor. Many people knew about it, perhaps including Gladstone himself, yet it was made sordid with furtive deceit. For Parnell it became a crippling obsession, more important even than the future of Ireland, so that his friends accused him of neglect, and his enemies of hypocrisy. In December 1889, Captain O’Shea treacherously brought it into the open by suing for divorce, and instantly Parnell’s career was shattered. Gladstone himself, obeying the nonconformist conscience of his party, demanded Parnell’s immediate resignation from the leadership of the Irish Nationalists, and the whole tentative structure of Irish emancipation evolved so painstakingly out of the Kilmainham Treaty, was ignominiously demolished. Some say O’Shea sued for divorce at the instigation of Chamberlain, who foresaw in the affair the defeat of Home Rule and the end of the Liberal Party. Certainly Gladstone had little choice but to disown Parnell, for the news of the divorce horrified most of
his own supporters, and he threatened to resign himself from the leadership of the Liberals if the Irish Nationalists would not renounce Parnell.

For a week, in December 1890, the Irish members debated the issue in Committee Room 15 at Westminster. The debate, even the number of the room, has gone into Irish history. If the party had unanimously decided to keep Parnell as its leader, Ireland would have followed a very different path to freedom, and the whole course of Empire might have been altered: if it had unanimously asked Parnell to resign, Home Rule might have come thirty years earlier than it did. Parnell presided over the meeting himself, and used all his well-tried tactics of obstruction to delay a conclusion. But the magic had gone. Dazed perhaps by the suddenness of events, uncertain of loyalties and resentful of betrayals, quibbled at by party factions, excoriated by rivals, unsure even of the support of the Irish people, to whom the idea of divorce, and divorce of a prince at that, was still anathema—deprived of his own sure touch, he seemed bewildered, perhaps even a little mad. His fascination remained, but it had become a more peculiar allure, haggard and bizarre—he was like a poet, one of his colleagues wrote, ‘plunged in some divine anguish, or a mad scientist mourning over the fate of some forlorn invention’. After days of sad acrimony, the debate came to a ragged conclusion when forty-six members of the party left Room 15 in silence, thereby renouncing Parnell’s leadership, to leave only twenty-seven at his side.

He flatly refused to resign and let the furore die—‘Resign—Marry—Return’, as Cecil Rhodes the imperialist financier succinctly advised by cable from South Africa. Instead he issued a manifesto to the Irish people, denouncing Gladstone’s conception of Home Rule as a feeble half-measure, and thus ending his alliance with the Liberals on a note of sour desperation. ‘Blot out his name!’ wrote Mary Gladstone now, and the Queen was appalled. ‘Not only a man of very bad character,’ she wrote, ‘but a liar and devoid of all sense of honour or any sort of principle.’ The Home Rule cause was discredited. When Gladstone in due time returned to power, and introduced his second Home Rule Bill in 1893, it scraped through the Commons but was contemptuously rejected by the Lords.
Gladstone, old, deaf, half-blind and discouraged, retired from public life, offering a despondent valediction to the perennial Irish debate: ‘There can be no more melancholy, nor in the last result, no more degrading spectacle on earth than the spectacle of oppression, or of wrong in whatever form, inflicted by the deliberate act of a nation upon another nation, especially by the deliberate act of such a country as Great Britain upon such a country as Ireland’.