CHARLES S. PARNELL.
Don't mention that I am unwell to anybody, lest it should get into the newspapers.—-C. S. P.
To all his brothers and sisters, and, most of all, to his mother, Parnell was most generous and affectionate, and of that generosity and affectionate regard I have abundant proof.
One of the last letters he wrote was to his mother:—
I am weary, dear mother, of these troubles, weary unto death; but it is all in a good cause. With health and the assistance of my friends I am confident of the result. The statements my enemies have so often made regarding my relations with you are on a par with the endless calumnies they shoot upon me from behind every bush. Let them pass. They will die of their own venom. It would indeed be dignifying them to notice their existence!
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NOTE.—Mrs. Parnell preserved a long series of letters from Captain O'Shea, dating from 1882 to 1891. The earlier ones are mainly concerned with tactical political movements, the most important of which are the conversations between O'Shea and Chamberlain, noted on page 197. Those of the 1885 period deal chiefly with O'Shea's grievance against Parnell in connexion with the Clare election. In one he complains of the "absolute baseness" of Parnell's conduct. To all who spoke to him of it he says, "I replied, 'Poor devil, he is obliged to allow himself to be kicked to the right or the left and look pleasant. But he has the consolation of having been well paid for the pain—£40,000, the tribute of the priests and people of Ireland!'" The reference was to the great Irish subscription, headed by the Archbishop of Cashel, made in order to enable Parnell to clear his estates from the mortgages which oppressed them.
The later letters, from the end of 1886 onwards, reveal the violent strain in the relations of Captain and Mrs. O'Shea. Beginning with a private letter to Mr. Stead, objecting to a statement in The Pall Mall Gazette that Parnell was staying on a visit with him, O'Shea went on to write to his wife's solicitor, Mr. H. Pym, suggesting that she should, for her children's sake, "declare her renunciation of communication with" Parnell, and then consulted Chamberlain on his difficulties.
Finally, as a Catholic, he turned to Cardinal Manning for advice. His first interview with the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England was on October 19th, 1889, when the question of separation as against divorce was discussed. A long correspondence followed. Manning was reluctant to agree to the proceedings for divorce, and delayed his decision till December 4th, when he laid down the course to be pursued, viz., (1) to collect all evidence in writing; (2) to lay it before the Bishop of the Diocese and ask for trial; (3) the latter would appoint a day for hearing; (4) judgment having been given, the case would go to Rome with a full report of the proceedings. O'Shea had already become impatient, and when, in another interview, Manning described to him the constitution of the Ecclesiastical Court which would report to Rome, he declared that he hesitated to approach a tribunal not having the right to administer the oath, and respectfully intimated his intention to take the case into the English Divorce Court.
The letters close in 1891 with a correspondence between Captain O Shea and the Primate of Ireland in which the former repudiates a suggestion made by the Bishop of Galway (Dr. MacCormack) in February of that year that "in 1886 after having failed to foist Captain O'Shea upon a neighbouring county, the then leader had the effrontery of prostituting the Galway City constituency as a hush gift to O'Shea." Describing this as a "grotesquely false" libel, Captain O'Shea details the course of events before the election, his refusal to take the Nationalist pledge, and his support by the then Bishop of Galway (Dr. Carr) and his clergy.