Gladstone: A Biography (87 page)

To balance this misfortune Gladstone reaped considerable benefit from his wisdom in giving himself a second string to the Compensation for Disturbance Bill by setting up in the summer of 1880
the Bessborough commission of enquiry into Irish land tenure. Bessborough (the sixth earl) was one of the most enlightened of the landowners with large Irish holdings. He was quick as well as
enlightened and produced his report by January 1881. It provided a more solid basis on which to get a land bill through both Cabinet and Parliament, and this was successfully achieved in the
session of 1881. But it had to be run in double harness with coercion, which indeed was given first legislative priority, with land coming only second. This was the most which was acceptable to the
Cabinet. But it was not a happy combination, for while the Cabinet
would accept land reform only if it was accompanied by coercion, the Irish party would not try to make it
work if it was.

The 1881 Land Act therefore, while a considerable measure with far-reaching and beneficial long-term effects, could not hope, because of its companion, to produce a dramatic relaxation of
tension and a new mood in Anglo-Irish relations. The Act broadly conceded the famous Three Fs, Fair Rent, Fixity of Tenure and Free Sale (of tenant right). There were some limitations, particularly
those which excluded leaseholders and tenants who were already in arrears with their rent, and several further amending measures were required before the Act reached its full effect. It was also
subject to some fluctuation of judicial interpretation, although the specially created Irish Land Commission, with the status of a High Court, established a good general reputation for consistent
justice. The Act eventually affected tenure in 65 per cent of the land of Ireland and therein permanently destroyed both the absolute power of the landlord and the doctrine of free contract in
rents. Although its provisions for tenant proprietorship (raising the proportion of the purchase price which the state could advance from two-thirds to three-quarters) had little direct effect, the
indirect effect over a period was considerable. The restrictions on rent-fixing and evictions made many estate owners eager to divest themselves of their land, and the new mood of withdrawal
encouraged the Conservative party towards land-purchase schemes for Ireland which started with the Ashbourne Act of 1885 and continued during its twenty-year post-1886 hegemony.

The 1881 Act was both positively and negatively seminal. Positively it sowed the slow-ripening seeds of a prosperous peasant agriculture in Ireland, although ninety years and Ireland’s
enthusiastic entry into the European Community were required before that could fully mature. Negatively the Act marked the beginning of the end of the Peelite-Whig Liberal party which Palmerston
and Russell had created in 1859. The 1881 Act made a perforation along which it was easy for the Home Rule issue to tear in 1886. In no way, however, could that Act be regarded as a minor or
ephemeral piece of legislation.

Despite its far-reaching nature this 1881 measure had a happier parliamentary experience than its 1880 predecessor. This was partly because of the Bessborough report and partly because it was
much more Gladstone’s measure, whereas the other had been more Forster’s. The Prime Minister fought the bill through an unenthusiastic Cabinet, and then steered it with a mixture of
patience, courtesy, command of detail and unflagging energy through thirty-two days (many of them extending
deep into the night) of committee stage. It would have been an
unusual feat of knowledge and stamina for a young Cabinet minister trying to make his name with a piece of departmental legislation on which he was paid to be an expert. What was unique was for a
Prime Minister aged seventy-one to display a mixture of towering authority and grinding application to detail. Although endless objections had been repetitiously deployed during this committee
marathon, the third reading was carried virtually by default on 29 July. Only 14 voted against (and 220 for). This weak adverse vote, taking the sting out of the opposition, was a powerful factor
in getting the bill through the Lords on 16 August.

Had this measure been accompanied, as Gladstone had proposed in the autumn of 1880, by some opening towards greater Irish control over Irish affairs, it might have met with more Irish response.
It is unlikely that the particular scheme then advocated by Gladstone, which provided for the devolution to Grand Committees of the House of Commons of most purely domestic legislation, not only
for Ireland but also for Scotland and England, would have satisfied Irish aspirations. It might have been more successful in reducing filibustering on the floor of the House (which the Parnellites
were then developing into an art form) than in taking the edge off their nationalism. But at least it would have been a more hopeful companion for the Land Act than the two Irish Crimes Acts which
were the other main legislative hauls of the session. Gladstone, however, allowed the devolution scheme to be killed in the Cabinet. Chamberlain, a counter-productive advocate, had been his only
enthusiastic supporter. It was not the greatest tribute to the Prime Minister’s foresight or boldness in Cabinet-making.

As it was, the unfortunate juxtaposition between reform and the taking of arbitrary powers was underlined by the government deciding, within eight weeks of the Land Act becoming law, to lock up
Parnell and two other recalcitrant Nationalist MPs in Kilmainham Gaol. No charge or process of law was involved, merely a unilateral decision of the Irish executive. The arrest in these
circumstances of the leader of a parliamentary group of more than forty members (soon to be one of more than eighty) who was rapidly becoming, to put it at its lowest, one of the half-dozen
dominating House of Commons personalities of the century was a strenuous step for any government to take, particularly as it was based on little more than the hope that it might reduce agrarian
crime.

Furthermore the next ten years, from that autumn of 1881 to Parnell’s death in October 1891, although this prospect was only dimly perceivable
at the beginning, were
to make Gladstone’s relations with the Irish leader still more important to his political successes or failures than had been those with Peel in the 1840s, with Aberdeen in the 1850s, with
Palmerston in the 1860s and with Disraeli in the 1870s. With Parnell however the relations were much more personally distant, and followed a more fluctuating course, than with any of these four
statesmen. Peel and Aberdeen, despite occasional hiccups, were always admired chiefs to Gladstone. With Palmerston the partnership, as has been described,
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was mostly a hostile one, although remarkably free from venom in the circumstances. With Disraeli there was never either alliance or much mutual admiration, although plenty of symbiosis.

With Parnell there was little intimate contact. Even in the late 1880s, when the ‘union of hearts’ became the phrase which for a time epitomized the relations between the Liberals
and the Irish Nationalists, direct encounters were limited to three or four long business meetings, a dinner with the Gladstones in London and, at the apex, a twenty-hour Parnell visit to Hawarden.
But that was well in the future in 1881–2. At this period Gladstone’s encounters with Parnell were effectively confined to seeing him across the floor of the House of Commons and
engaging in parliamentary exchanges, mostly unfriendly, with him. In his great Leeds oratorical jamboree of October 1881, Gladstone spoke more hostilely of Parnell than he was to do on any other
occasion. ‘He desires to arrest the operation of the Land Act,’ the Prime Minister said; ‘to stand as Moses stood between the living and the dead; to stand there, not as Moses
stood, to arrest, but to spread the plague.’ And he continued:

Parnell replied at Wexford with an equally memorable phrase, denouncing Gladstone as ‘this masquerading knight errant, this pretending champion of the rights of every nation except those
of the Irish nation’. A week later, on the recommendation of Forster, but with Gladstone’s full approval, Parnell was arrested in his bedroom at Morrison’s Hotel, Dublin, and held
in protective custody for the next
six months. His conditions of imprisonment were not severe. Kilmainham Gaol, on the Phoenix Park edge of central Dublin, was convenient for
visitors, and he had plenty of them, as well as books, writing material, no prison work (as indeed would have been wholly inappropriate for an uncharged and unconvicted prisoner), and a sitting
room with two armchairs and a good fire. Nonetheless the six months of incarceration were a heavy deprivation for Parnell, for he was in the early stages of his famous passion for Katherine
O’Shea.

He had first met her in July 1880 and they appear to have become lovers in October of the same year. He was thirty-four at the time, nearly forty years Gladstone’s junior, and she was
thirty-five. In the previous May, he had been elected chairman of the then loose-knit Irish Home Rule party, displacing William Shaw, the previous chairman, by a vote of twenty-three to eighteen.
Possibly after an earlier miscarriage, Mrs O’Shea was by the time of Parnell’s arrest pregnant by him, and this child, who lived only a couple of months, was born in February 1882.

At the time of the death Parnell was present at Eltham, Mrs O’Shea’s house on the south-eastern edge of London. He was on his way back from a parole visit to Paris to attend his
nephew’s funeral, but he had to return almost immediately to Dublin to fulfil the conditions of his parole, which he scrupulously did. (Mrs O’Shea’s child was not of course
acknowledged as his, not even by Captain O’Shea, so that he gained no further privilege by this second death.)

The strength and constancy of Parnell’s commitment to Mrs O’Shea was never in doubt from 1880 until his death eleven years later. In the spring of 1882 his desire for freedom was
therefore intense. To add to his emotional involvements, he could see the control of events in Ireland slipping away from him and into less disciplined and more violent hands. The Ribbonmen and
other secret societies were gaining ground and ‘Captain Moonlight’ (an evocative portmanteau name, probably Parnell’s invention, for the organizers of agrarian crime) stalked the
countryside. Gladstone also came increasingly to desire Parnell’s release. The Irish leader had been put in prison, not as the result of a judicial decision, but because of executive
judgement that his being there would reduce agrarian crime. It did nothing of the sort. The reverse happened. And there was evidence that Parnell had moved to a position in which he was prepared
both to advocate giving the Land Act (of 1881) a trial and to denounce violence. The main conduit through which this (broadly accurate) information came was the unfortunate one of Captain
O’Shea, the detached but nonetheless intermittently conjugal husband of Katherine.

William O’Shea, who was at that time MP for County Clare, was a classically unsatisfactory figure. He believed, without any foundation, other than that of having held a commission in the
Hussars, he was too much of a gentleman for the Irish parliamentary party, and he was as shifty and self-seeking as he was vain, always looking to exaggerate his own importance and to gain benefits
for himself. In other words he was the worst possible go-between. Parnell, perhaps for obvious reasons, was well aware of this and tried to replace him with Justin McCarthy as negotiator. Gladstone
was less suspicious,
¹¹⁰
but it was Chamberlain who at this stage reposed most faith in O’Shea. And Chamberlain was important, because Gladstone in the
run-up to that year’s budget on 24 April (again the albatross of carrying the Exchequer as well as the premiership) left most of the discussions to him.

The bungling of these intermediaries may have led to the missing of one of the great opportunities in Anglo-Irish history. J. L. Hammond thought that a major settlement between Parnell and the
British government might have been achieved if O’Shea had not been so officiously self-promoting and Chamberlain less brash. Whether or not such a utopian outcome was a real possibility, it
did not happen. But the Cabinet, on 2 May, did decide that Parnell (and two other prisoners) should be released. He was out of Kilmainham that afternoon and on the following day Forster, who had
been the sole opponent of release in the Cabinet, was out of the government. The former Irish Secretary was making his damaging resignation statement in the House of Commons on the Thursday
afternoon (4 May) when Parnell arrived, penetrated a small crowd of members at the bar of the House and strode impassively to his seat.

From Forster’s resignation there followed the tragedy of Lord Frederick Cavendish. Gladstone caused surprise by appointing his amiable nephew by marriage to the vacant place. Cavendish
made his first journey as Chief Secretary to Dublin overnight on Friday, 5 May and was assassinated in Phoenix Park on the evening of Saturday, 6 May,
only three days after
Parnell’s release. Parnell denounced the outrage with conviction, dismay and, according to Chamberlain and Dilke, vivid fear for his own life – as a result of the unleashing of a
general bloodbath. Despite these protestations the juxtaposition was clearly fatal for any early development of a ‘union of hearts’ atmosphere.

Gladstone–Parnell relations then entered a three-year period in which they were better than at the time of the Leeds–Wexford exchange of imprecations while remaining well short of
the warmth which came in the late 1880s and 1890. What did Gladstone think of Parnell during this relatively calm midstream interlude? In June 1883, Hamilton (always a very good source) reported
him as saying that he found the Irish leader ‘still a sphinx who probably works for and with the law as far as he dare, and who possibly does not in his heart of hearts hate the
Government’. By February of the next year he had retrogressed to the extent of stating that ‘he felt towards Sir S. Northcote much the same as he did towards Parnell. Neither of them
were really big men or pleasant antagonists; but their places might be taken by worse men, and therefore he preferred keeping them.’ In October 1884 he was back to expressing a
‘sneaking likeness [
sic
]’ for Parnell, to which Hamilton added ‘as frequently happens with him when he had an opportunity’.
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