Charles Stewart Parnell: His Love Story and Political Life

by Kitty O'Shea

This paragraph appeared in the Nation early in 1880. On the 8th March of that year, the Disraeli Parliament dissolved, and on the 29th April Mr. Gladstone formed his Ministry.

In the Disraeli Parliament Mr. Parnell was the actual, though Mr. Shaw had been the nominal, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party since the death of Mr. Isaac Butt in 1879. Shaw continued the Butt tradition of moderation and conciliation which had made the Irish Party an unconsidered fraction in British politics. Parnell represented the new attitude of uncompromising hostility to all British parties and of unceasing opposition to all their measures until the grievances of Ireland were redressed. He carried the majority of his Party with him, and in Ireland he was already the people's hero.

Born in June, 1846, Parnell was still a young man. He came of a fine race; he was a member of the same family as the famous poet, Thomas Parnell, as Lord Congleton, Radical reformer and statesman, and, above all, Sir John Parnell, who sat and worked with Grattan in Ireland's Great Parliament and shared with him the bitter fight against the Union. On his mother's side he was the grandson of the famous Commodore Charles Stewart, of the American Navy, whose bravery and success in the War of Independence are well known. It was natural that a man of such ancestry should become a champion of the rights of his native land.

Yet though in 1879 he was the virtual chief of the Irish Party, eight years before he was an Irish country gentleman, living quietly on his estates at Avondale in County Wicklow.

It is a mistake to say that his mother "planted his hatred of England in him," as she so seldom saw him as a boy. He was sent to school in England at six years old, and he used to tell me how his father—who died when he (Charles S. Parnell) was twelve years old—would send for him to come to Ireland to see him. His mother, Mrs. Delia Parnell, lived chiefly in America, going over to Avondale that her children might be born in Ireland, and returning as soon as possible to America. After her husband's death she only visited the place occasionally, and altogether saw very little of her son Charles. He often told me how well he remembered being sent for in his father's last illness to go to him at Dublin, and the last journey with his dying father back to Avondale. His father had made him his heir and a ward of Court.

In reality Parnell's hatred of England arose when he began to study the records of England's misgovernment in Ireland, and of the barbarities that were inflicted upon her peasantry in the name of England's authority.

For years before he left the seclusion of Avondale this hatred had been growing. He followed the Fenian movement with the liveliest interest, and he often accompanied his sister Fanny when she took her verses to the offices of the Irish World. The sufferings of the Fenian prisoners, so courageously borne, stirred his blood and awakened his imagination. It can be imagined with what inward anger the young man heard of the detective raid on his mother's house in Temple Street, Dublin—when they found and impounded the sword he was privileged to wear as an officer of the Wicklow Militia.

But it was the Manchester affair of 1867 and the execution of Allen, Larkin and O'Brien which crystallized his hatred of England. From that moment he was only biding his time. Yet he was slow to move, and loath to speak his mind, and, until he went to America in 1871, he was better known for his cricketing and his autumn shooting than for his politics. When he returned to Avondale with his brother John in 1872 the Ballot Act had just been passed, and it was the consciousness of the possibilities of the secret vote as a weapon against England that finally persuaded him to be a politician.

But, though he joined the newly formed Home Rule League, it was not until 1874 that he stood for Parliament in Dublin County. He came out at the bottom of the poll. The election cost him £2,000; the £300 which he had received from the Home Rule League he handed back to them. In April, 1875, he stood for Meath and was placed at the top of the poll.

When he entered Parliament the Irish Party, as I have said, was of little account. The case for Ireland was argued by Isaac Butt with fine reasonableness and forensic skill, but it produced absolutely no effect. The English parties smiled and patted the Irish indulgently on the head. In Ireland all the more resolute and enthusiastic spirits had an utter contempt for their Parliamentary representatives; from the machine nothing was to be hoped. It was the mission of Parnell to change all that, to unite all the warring elements of the Nationalist movements into one force to be hurled against England.