The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (34 page)

For now, however, Parnell and his allies had to deal with a range of political dangers: a split party, in which their majority could not yet be assured; the still-bubbling land issue, which offered both political dangers and opportunities; and a renewed attempt by Gladstone’s Liberals to connect with Irish voters as a means of re-creating the potent electoral alliance that had brought the party to power in 1868. Gladstone himself – now in opposition and restive – had visited Ireland in the cool, damp summer of 1877 in order to reconnoitre the country and his own political prospects there. He had sailed for Holyhead again in the autumn, carrying with him a sense that Ireland was relatively prosperous and settled, even if the potato yield of that year was poor; certainly the country would be able to weather a single bad year.

But the disappointing harvest of 1877 was only the beginning of a run of bad years, and agricultural prices continued to fall as vast reaches of the American and Canadian prairies continued to be opened to intensive cereal cultivation, adding to the plight of those hard-pressed small Irish farmers who relied on their cash crops. A vast charitable effort swung into action in order to head off widespread famine: a lecture tour of the United States undertaken by Parnell early in 1880 ensured publicity for the plight of Ireland and generated substantial relief funds; the US government dispatched a supply ship, which docked at Queenstown in the spring of 1880; and ships of the Royal Navy landed relief supplies along the west coast. Significantly, a flood of remittances from Irish-Americans also poured into the country, underscoring again the significant alteration in the relationship between Ireland and the world in the years since the Famine of the 1840s.

The issue of land regulation now became a crisis, for the situation in the fields had left many tenant farmers in rent arrears and liable as a result to be evicted from their homes. The response was a sharp increase in agrarian disturbance in the west, where social distress was greatest. Fenian activists assessed the situation, to see if the makings of a further revolt were present; Parnell also travelled west to address mutinous tenants at Westport in County Mayo. Gradually militancy – the beginning of what would become known as the Land War – spread across the remainder of Connacht and further afield. The National Land League of Mayo was established in August 1879, forerunner of the National Land League, founded in October and backed by a range of respectable figures, including clerics and wealthy farmers. Parnell was one such, participating on the understanding that he would act only within the law. For many other members of the new league, however, this structure was promising: it was a constitutional carapace that sheltered a Fenian presence, and it represented the beginning of a potential national revolution.

Central to the foundation of the organization was Michael Davitt, who like Parnell cut a compelling figure on the contemporary national stage. The social backgrounds of the two men could hardly have been more different: while Parnell had grown up in comfortable and wealthy surroundings, Davitt had been born in Mayo in 1846 to parents who were poor, though with a degree of education. As a small child the consequences of the Famine had driven the family to contemplate entering the local workhouse before instead choosing migration to northern England. The result was a new life in the midst of a tightly knit Irish community in the industrial heart of Lancashire; it was here that Davitt acquired the accent that remained with him throughout his life. Here too he became steeped in working-class politics at a time when the condition of this class was having an ever-greater impact on the wider public consciousness. Elizabeth Gaskell’s
Mary Barton
(1848) and
North and South
(1855), Charlotte Brontë’s
Shirley
(1849), George Eliot’s
Silas Marner
(1861) and many other such literary portrayals appeared in these years to testify to this growing attention.

A novel might have been written about the travails of Davitt’s life too. As a child he was employed in the cotton industry, working in the local mills that resounded to the din of vast and deafening spinning machines that regularly nipped off workers’ limbs and scalps; in 1857, Davitt himself lost an arm to one of these machines and was dismissed from the works without compensation. In his teens, he managed to acquire an education courtesy of a local Methodist schoolteacher – a formative experience that left him free of sectarian animosity – before going on to acquire a position in the postal service. Later still, a developing fascination with his Irish roots led him to become involved in Fenian activity: he participated in the abortive raid at Chester, and in 1870 was imprisoned in England for gun-running. His writings, detailing the harsh conditions in which prisoners were kept and the degrading work they were forced to undertake, began to find their mark in these years: Parnell and others read extracts from them in parliament so that they would be entered in the official Commons record.

When he emerged from prison in 1877, however, Davitt understood that he was living in a changing world, one in which direct but peaceful activism might bring about the changes he sought. His vision was revolutionary, encompassing an alliance of the working classes of Ireland and Britain in a struggle to overthrow the power of the propertied, sever the bond with the Crown and establish a republic. Davitt, then, was committed to a struggle that was concerned fundamentally with class rather than religion or nationality; this focus would later find expression in tours and essays exploring, for example, the more egalitarian cultures of New Zealand and Australia. And, with his intimate understanding both of agrarian conditions in the west of Ireland and of the industrial proletariat of northern England, he was also well placed to formulate a political view that connected and reconciled these ostensibly different worlds. Ironically, then, it was Davitt who persuaded a reluctant Parnell to become president of the Land League, noting that the latter was ‘an Englishman of that strongest sort moulded for an Irish purpose’. Yet Parnell the landlord’s son and Davitt the tenant’s son were hardly a unified force. For the latter, the burning issue was to enable the lower classes to own their own land. Parnell, on the other hand, was a good deal more cautious, and land reform was a means of achieving the greater goal of Home Rule.

While the Land League officially opposed violence, the organization’s leaders knew as well as had O’Connell before them the need to keep the potential for mass action, even violent action, in play – both as a means of maintaining alliances with more radical political forces and as a way of demonstrating the grassroots power of the Home Rule movement. Matters, indeed, had come to just such a head in November 1879 when the farmer and Fenian activist Anthony Dempsey was threatened with eviction from his cottage at Loonmore in Mayo. Parnell led some eight thousand men in concerted resistance to the move in which they surrounded the house and barred access to Crown forces. At the eleventh hour Parnell placed himself between his men and the authorities, thus averting a violent encounter. The authorities were obliged to withdraw; in response, Parnell declared that the massed crowd had ‘broken the back of landlordism’. Yet the story did not end there. The authorities returned a month later to carry out the eviction as planned, and the Land League was compelled to pay Dempsey’s rent to avoid leaving him homeless days before Christmas. But Parnell had set out explicitly his constitutional vision: ‘Our country is a great country, worth fighting for. We have opportunities denied to our forefathers. Remain within the law and the constitution. Let us stand, even though we have to stand on the last plank of the constitution; let us stand, until that last plank is taken from under our feet.’
⁵

When the general election of 1880 returned Gladstone’s Liberals to power at Westminster with a healthy majority, Parnell had an opportunity to take control of the Home Rule Party once and for all. He was now obliged to add his voice – for he had no choice in the matter – to a new national campaign by the Land League. The movement was bankrolled by American funds and driven by men such as Davitt himself – politically engaged individuals who were prepared to be consumed by the cause; and the league’s activities now reached into most of Ireland. The notable exception was the northeast, where the Orange Order was bitterly opposed to an organization such as the league, in which – and in spite of Davitt’s larger purpose – nationalism and Catholicism were for now inescapably intertwined.

The Land League’s new campaign was national only in the sense that agitation against landlords was widespread across the country, except in those areas where the local landlords had already taken public steps to ease the plight of their tenants; Parnell’s own estate at Avondale was one example. The nature of this agitation, however, was not consistent: in one district, tenants might refuse to pay any rent whatever to their landlord; in another, a portion of the rent would be paid, but no more. Certain methods, however, proved to be so successful that they began to be adopted universally – in particular, Davitt’s formulation of passive resistance, which had the joint merits of being perfectly legal and next to impossible to counter. Evictions of recalcitrant or destitute tenants could in this way be opposed effectively: neighbours could block the entry of the bailiffs; tenants could immediately and peacefully resume occupancy of the property, or take steps to ensure that nobody else moved in; and the league itself might take a landlord to court – a time-consuming and expensive process that would be avoided by the latter wherever possible.

The league had two especially potent weapons at its disposal. It now had the financial means to support its members in distress: in effect, the ultimate guarantee that gave many a tenant the will to resist. Davitt had also honed the idea of social ostracism of those individuals and businesses deemed to have acted against the league’s members: the so-called boycott, named after the eponymous land agent who had refused to reduce the rent paid by the tenants on Lord Erne’s lands in Mayo. Boycott’s experience illustrated the impact of a successful campaign of ostracism: local shops would not trade with him or sell him goods, his postal deliveries were stopped, and he was shunned by the entire local community. His crops could be harvested only by a contingent of Orangemen sent down from Ulster for the purpose – a ruinously expensive exercise that that had to be policed by seven thousand soldiers – and Boycott himself was eventually forced to retreat to England. But such campaigns of ostracism could not always be properly policed: on occasion, they were turned against those who had ‘grabbed’ the land of others, or failed to observe the league’s local rules; and – inevitably – they could be abused by some individuals for personal reasons, or to gain a measure of advantage over a commercial rival.

After the first shock of the land campaign, Gladstone’s new government began to put together strategies of its own: Davitt and others were arrested; and
habeas corpus
in Ireland was suspended, leaving the government free to round up suspected dissidents and imprison them indefinitely. But the administration remained on the defensive: in the Commons, Parnell’s Irish members were continuing with a policy of obstruction that undermined the government’s legislative programme; and in Ireland, the league campaign of civil disobedience made the smooth running of the country all but impossible. Finally, in April 1881, Gladstone introduced his second land bill to parliament: by the summer, it had passed into law; and a third followed in 1882. Taken together, this new legislation transformed the fortunes of many hard-pressed tenants: rents could be appealed and, when this happened, were invariably fixed much lower than before; furthermore, tenants who paid their rent could never be evicted; and tenants were now permitted to sell their lease on the open market. These acts removed the sting from the land issue: for most Irish farmers, the matter was at an end.

In October 1881, shortly after the passing of the second land bill, Parnell was locked up in Dublin’s Kilmainham Gaol, the government claiming that he had done nothing substantial to compel the Land Leaguers to keep the peace. In London, Gladstone told an audience at Guildhall that Parnell ‘has made himself beyond all others prominent in the attempt to destroy the authority of the law’; both Parnell and Davitt were held until May 1882.
⁶
Parnell’s imprisonment – he was held in comfortable conditions, although his health deteriorated during his incarceration – did his career nothing but good; furthermore, the proscription of the league itself, which soon followed, freed him from having to attend to an organization that had begun to limit his room to manoeuvre. Davitt, meanwhile, had used his time in prison to recalibrate his political vision; he concluded that Irish land must all be nationalized as a means of changing the power structure once and for all. It was a radical vision that diverged fundamentally from any mainstream views, and marked the next phase of Davitt’s own political journey. But he was a pragmatist too: in a meeting at Avondale he agreed to Parnell’s request to set aside for the moment his plans for land nationalization, which in any case had little or no popular support.

As for Parnell’s political journey, the most dramatic scenes were still to come. The immediate future seemed inauspicious, for in the same week as he and Davitt had been released from prison the Chief Secretary of Ireland, Frederick Cavendish, and his permanent under-secretary, Thomas Henry Burke, were assassinated in Dublin’s Phoenix Park – just beyond the palings of the Viceregal Lodge itself. The killings were carried out by members of yet another secret society, the Invincibles. This act had immediate political repercussions: Gladstone – who was related to Cavendish – was obliged to delay his future legislative plans for Ireland; Parnell also moderated his rhetoric as he planned his next move.

The history of these years can seem dominated by the results of United Kingdom general elections as Tory and Liberal governments chased each other in and out of power at Westminster as political fortunes shifted in Ireland and Britain, and as Home Rule bills were tabled periodically in the House of Commons. Yet Parnell and others were steadily tracing their separate paths through this morass. The Irish Home Rule Party appeared to be in the ascendant after the general election of 1885. It was a triumph for the party, which won 85 out of 103 Irish seats and even captured constituencies across Ulster; a further seat was won, spectacularly, at Liverpool. Because the Conservatives and the Liberals were relatively evenly matched, Parnell could in effect act as kingmaker. And, although Gladstone at first refused to declare publicly in favour of Home Rule, there could be no doubt that elements within the Liberal Party were moving – albeit slowly and in some quarters reluctantly – in this direction. A Liberal government – Gladstone’s third – was duly elected with Irish support in February 1886, and a Home Rule bill was brought to the Commons shortly afterwards.