Mr. Gladstone's ceaseless attention to the many phases of the struggle that was now the centre of his public life, was especially engaged on what remains the most amazing of them. I wish it were possible to pass it over, or throw it into a secondary place; but it is too closely connected with the progress of Mr. Gladstone's Irish policy in British opinion at a critical stage, and it is still the subject of too many perversions that affect his name. Transactions are to be found in our annals where wrong was done by government to individuals on a greater scale, where a powerful majority devised engines for the proscription of a weak minority with deadlier aim, and where the omnipotence of parliament was abused for the purpose of faction with more ruthless result. But whether we look at the squalid fraud in which the incident began, or at the tortuous parliamentary pretences by which it was worked out, or at the perversion of fundamental principles of legal administration involved in sending men to answer the gravest charges before a tribunal specially constituted at the absolute discretion of their bitterest political opponents—at the moment engaged in a fierce contest with them in another field—from whatever point of view we approach, the erection of the Special Commission of 1888 stands out as one of the ugliest things done in the name and under the forms of law in this island during the century.
The Facsimile Letter
In the spring of 1887 the conductors of The Times, intending to strengthen the hands of the government in their new and doubtful struggle, published a series of articles, in which old charges against the Irish leader and his men were served up with fresh and fiery condiments. The allegations of crime were almost all indefinite; the method was by allusion, suggestion, innuendo, and the combination of ingeniously selected pieces, to form a crude and hideous mosaic. Partly from its extravagance, partly because it was in substance stale, the thing missed fire.
On the day on which the division was to be taken on the second reading of the Coercion bill, a more formidable bolt was shot. On that morning (April 18th, 1887), there appeared in the newspaper, with all the fascination of facsimile, a letter alleged to be written by Mr. Parnell. It was dated nine days after the murders in the Phœnix Park, and purported to be an apology, presumably to some violent confederate, for having as a matter of expediency openly condemned the murders, though in truth the writer thought that one of the murdered men deserved his fate.[244] Special point was given to the letter by a terrible charge, somewhat obliquely but still unmistakably made, in an article five or six weeks before, that Mr. Parnell closely consorted with the leading Invincibles when he was released on parole in April 1882; that he probably learned from them what they were about; and that he recognised the murders in the Phœnix Park as their handiwork.[245] The significance of the letter therefore was that, knowing the bloody deed to be theirs, he wrote for his own safety to qualify, recall, and make a humble apology for the condemnation which he had thought it politic publicly to pronounce. The town was [pg 392] thrown into a great ferment. At the political clubs and in the lobbies, all was complacent jubilation on the one side, and consternation on the other. Even people with whom politics were a minor interest were shocked by such an exposure of the grievous depravity of man.
Mr. Parnell did not speak until one o'clock in the morning, immediately before the division on the second reading of the bill. He began amid the deepest silence. His denial was scornful but explicit. The letter, he said, was an audacious fabrication. It is fair to admit that the ministerialists were not without some excuse of a sort for the incredulous laughter with which they received this repudiation. They put their trust in the most serious, the most powerful, the most responsible, newspaper in the world; greatest in resources, in authority, in universal renown. Neglect of any possible precaution against fraud and forgery in a document to be used for the purpose of blasting a great political opponent would be culpable in no common degree. Of this neglect people can hardly be blamed for thinking that the men of business, men of the world, and men of honour who were masters of the Times, must be held absolutely incapable.
Those who took this view were encouraged in it by the prime minister. Within four-and-twenty hours he publicly took the truth of the story, with all its worst innuendoes, entirely for granted. He went with rapid stride from possibility to probability, and from probability to certainty. In a speech, of which precipitate credulity was not the only fault, Lord Salisbury let fall the sentence: “When men who knew gentlemen who intimately knew Mr. Parnell murdered Mr. Burke.” He denounced Mr. Gladstone for making a trusted friend of such a man—one who had “mixed on terms of intimacy with those whose advocacy of assassination was well known.” Then he went further. “You may go back,” he said, “to the beginning of British government, you may go back from decade to decade, and from leader to leader, but you will never find a man who has accepted a position, in reference to an ally tainted with the strong presumption of conniving at assassination, which [pg 393] has been accepted by Mr. Gladstone at the present time.”[246] Seldom has party spirit led eminent personages to greater lengths of dishonouring absurdity.
Now and afterwards people asked why Mr. Parnell did not promptly bring his libellers before a court of law. The answer was simple. The case would naturally have been tried in London. In other words, not only the plaintiff's own character, but the whole movement that he represented, would have been submitted to a Middlesex jury, with all the national and political prejudices inevitable in such a body, and with all the twelve chances of a disagreement, that would be almost as disastrous to Mr. Parnell as an actual verdict for his assailants. The issues were too great to be exposed to the hazards of a cast of the die. Then, why not lay the venue in Ireland? It was true that a favourable verdict might just as reasonably be expected from the prepossessions of Dublin, as an unfavourable one from the prepossessions of London. But the moral effect of an Irish verdict upon English opinion would be exactly as worthless, as the effect of an English verdict in a political or international case would be upon the judgment and feeling of Ireland. To procure a condemnation of the Times at the Four Courts, as a means of affecting English opinion, would not be worth a single guinea. Undoubtedly the subsequent course of this strange history fully justified the advice that Mr. Parnell received in this matter from the three persons in the House of Commons with whom on this point he took counsel.
II
The prudent decision against bringing a fierce political controversy before an English judge and jury was in a few months brought to nought, from motives that have remained obscure, and with results that nobody could foresee. The next act in the drama was the institution of proceedings for libel against the Times in November 1887, by an Irishman who had formerly sat in parliament as a political follower of Mr. Parnell. The newspaper met him by denying that the articles on Parnellism and Crime related to him. [pg 394] It went on to plead that the statements in the articles were true in substance and in fact. The action was tried before Lord Coleridge in July 1888, and the newspaper was represented by the advocate who happened to be the principal law officer of the crown. The plaintiff's counsel picked out certain passages, said that his client was one of the persons intended to be libelled, and claimed damages. He was held to have made an undoubted prima facie case on the two libels in which he had been specifically named. This gave the enemy his chance. The attorney general, speaking for three days, opened the whole case for the newspaper; repeated and enlarged upon the charges and allegations in its articles; stated the facts which he proposed to give in evidence; sought to establish that the fac-simile letter was really signed by Mr. Parnell; and finally put forward other letters, now produced for the first time, which carried complicity and connivance to a further point. These charges he said that he should prove. On the third day he entirely changed his tack. Having launched this mass of criminating imputation, he then suddenly bethought him, so he said, of the hardships which his course would entail upon the Irishmen, and asked that in that action he should not be called upon to prove anything at all. The Irishmen and their leader remained under a load of odium that the law officer of the crown had cast upon them, and declined to substantiate.
The production of this further batch of letters stirred Mr. Parnell from his usual impassiveness. His former determination to sit still was shaken. The day after the attorney general's speech, he came to the present writer to say that he thought of sending a paragraph to the newspapers that night, with an announcement of his intention to bring an action against the Times, narrowed to the issue of the letters. The old arguments against an action were again pressed upon him. He insisted, on the other side, that he was not afraid of cross-examination; that they might cross-examine as much as ever they pleased, either about the doings of the land league or the letters; that his hands would be found to be clean, and the letters to be gross [pg 395]