Following his studies at Cambridge , Parnell was elected as Member of Parliament for Meath in 1875.
Early Days
Initially a reluctant speaker due to a stammer, Parnell quickly became recognized as a remarkable politician. Isaac Butt, a Protestant lawyer from Dublin had set up the Home Government Association to negotiate for Irish Home Rule. On meeting Parnell he had this to say, “We have a splendid recruit…..young Parnell of Wicklow and unless I am mistaken, the Saxon will find him an ugly customer, though he is very good-looking.”
Young Parnell found that peaceful negotiations in an attempt to obtain Home Rule for Ireland were not working. He became President of the Nationalist Party in 1877 and favoured more disruptive and 'strong-arm' tactics.
The Land League
Along with Michael Davitt, (an ex-'Fenian' - rebel Irish Republican), Parnell founded the Land League in 1879. The three main tenets of the Land League were the three Fs for tenants; Fixity of tenure, Fair Rents and Freedom to sell.
Irish tenant farmers were still suffering from ever increasing rents from absentee landlords and evictions. One such famous case led to a new word being introduced into the English language.
Captain Boycott
Captain Boycott was a former British army officer who was appointed agent for the Lough Mask estate near Ballinrobe of the absentee landlord Lord Erne. Erne kept increasing rents and soon eviction notices were served on eleven families. In 1880, the Land League organised a campaign against Boycott. He discovered he could not hire anyone to work for him, no shop would supply Lough Mask house with food and the servants left, blacksmiths refused to shoe Boycott's horse and the crops were rotting in the fields.
Orange Lodges from Cavan and Monaghan sent men to help harvest his crops but the cost was prohibitive and he was forced to leave Ireland. James Redpath, an American journalist who reported on the campaign, coined a new word for the English language: Boycott.
Jailed in Kilmainham
Parnell was jailed in Kilmainham in 1881 for his continued disruption of Parliament but because of the uproar caused in Ireland he was released in 1882 by William Gladstone with the signing of the Kilmainham Treaty. Much was made of the word Treaty by Parnell because Treaties are signed between two countries and he believed this could lead to Ireland being recognised as a separate nation. Parnell went from being the Leader of a Parliamentary Party to becoming a National Hero;
‘the uncrowned King of Ireland ’.
He overcame false accusations of supporting the Phoenix Park Murders of Lord Cavendish and his Under Secretary T.H.Burke in1882.
Kitty O'Shea
What finally brought Parnell down from power and split the party was his long standing relationship with a married woman, Kitty O’Shea with whom he had three children and for being named in the divorce papers as correspondent.
The Catholic Church denounced the affair as a scandal and Parnell fell from grace, dying in Brighton on the 6th of October 1891 at 45 , some say of a broken heart for his beloved Ireland.
His funeral cortege passed through Dublin accompanied by an estimated 150,000 people and with the true ambiguity of the Irish race, there stands a magnificent monument at one end of O’Connell Street which was unveiled 10 years after his death, in 1911, to the champion of Home Rule.
Parnell is still remembered on October 6th with people wearing a sprig of ivy in their lapel.
Sources:
The Fall of Parnell 1890-91( London 1960) F.S. L. Lyons
Charles Stewart Parnell and Irish Nationalism ( London 1993) Robert Kee
Irish Home Rule 1867-1921 ( Manchester 1998) Alan O'Day
The Parnell Myth and Irish Politics 1891-1956 ( New York) 1986) William Michael Murphy
Michael Durkin - I hold a BA Degree from Queen's University Belfast and an MBA from the University of Ulster. Whilst at Queen's , I was President of the ...
