The Parnell Movement, with a sketch of Irish parties from 1843

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WI I II A SKETCH OF IRISH PARTIES From 1843 BY T. P. O'CONNOR, M.P. AUTHOR OF »*- /C LORD BEACONSFIELD, A BIOGRAPHY' 'GLADSTONE'S HOUSE OF COMMONS' ETC. LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, & CO., i PATERNOSTER SQUARE ( The rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved) CONTENTS CHAPTER . PAGE I. THE FALL OF O'CONNELL I II. THE COMING OF THE FAMINE ... . . l6 III. THE FAMINE 40 IV. THE GREAT CLEARANCES 66 V. THE GREAT BETRAYAL 1 26 VI. RUIN AND RABAGAS 168 VII. REVOLUTION 205 VIII. ISAAC BUTT 22g IX. FAMINE AGAIN ! 287 X. THE LAND LEAGUE 315 XL THE COERCION STRUGGLE . 407 XII. THE IRISH NEMESIS 472 XIII. THE GENERAL ELECTION 542 INDEX

Chapter I. The Fall Of O'connell

The main purpose of these pages is to describe the movement which is associated with the name of Mr. Parnell. That movement cannot, however, be understood without some acquaintance with other movements, of which it is the child and successor. To the history of events in our own day, I have thought it best, accordingly, to prefix a sketch of some of the events by which they were preceded and prepared. For various reasons I have deemed it sufficient to start at the year 1843. The Irish people may well be excused for the honour they paid to O'Connell after he had won for them Catholic Emanci pation. When he arose, they were literally aliens in their own country. They could not hold land ; they could not take office ; they could only obtain education in the hedge school or on the Continent. At one sweep, O'Connell had dashed all these shackles from their limbs.

The passionate prejudices of the greater and stronger nation were against the Catholics ; the Protestant section of their own countrymen held all the land and all the positions of trust and power ; they were unarmed, and opposed to them were all the resources by land and sea of one of the world's greatest empires : and against all this, O'Connell, by the sheer force of his intellect and with no 1; other weapon than his voice, had succeeded. He was pro claimed the Liberator of his country ; all other forces in the nation and all other men were overshadowed by his single name ; and he established, without the assistance of a bayonet or of a musket, an omnipotence over the democracy as un questioned and unquestionable as that of a Czar with millions of soldiers behind him. It was not long before O'Connell and the nation found that the glories of Catholic Emancipation were but a mockery and an illusion.

He had calculated that with this lever he would have been able to wring with promptitude all the other reforms which he deemed necessary ; and the evils for which he demanded redress were sufficiently pressing. The tithes still existed ; and the clergymen of the opulent Protestant Establishment gathered their dues of wheat from a poverty stricken Catholic peasantry, backed by soldiers and police and guns, and sometimes amid scenes of mad passion and much bloodshed. O'Connell, in order to gain Emancipation, had committed the terrible mistake of consenting to the abolition of the forty-shilling freeholder : and this had taken away from the landlords one of the most effective reasons for sparin° the tenant at will ; and evictions were perpetrated on an un usually large scale. In short, the material condition of Ireland was worse in the years succeeding to what it had been for several years before the Act of Emancipation.

O'Connell's attempts to change all this through the Im perial Parliament proved miserably abortive ; he determined to enter on a new agitation — this time the. object beinothe Repeal of the Act of Union : and this brought the second of his great disillusions. He had throughout his career been the staunchest of Liberals : to every measure of Liberal reform he had given his passionate adhesion ; of the Reform Act of 1832 he was one of the most effective advocates : and now the Liberal Party failed him. He had no sooner entered upon the agitation for Repeal of the Union than he came into collision with the representatives of English Liberalism in Ireland. The association which he founded was declared to be illegal ; the Marquis of Anglesey, the Liberal Lord-Lieu tenant, proclaimed his meetings ; his letters were opened by the hands of Liberals in the Post Office ' ; and he was finally brought by Liberal law-officers before an Orange judge and a packed Orange jury.

Declining to plead, he was convicted ; but was never called up for judgment. It was under the ex asperation caused by these high-handed acts that he hurled at the then Liberal Administration the words which have often since been quoted with rare delight by Irish speakers. He spoke of the Ministry as the ' base, brutal, and bloody Whigs.' But these experiences had their effect upon him ; and still more the bitter experiences he had in Parliament. He brought forward his motion (April 23, 1834) in favour of Repeal of the Union ; it was laughed at by both sides of the House ; and when he went into the lobby, he was supported by but 40 votes. Then he made, perhaps, one of the worst, though one of the most natural, mistakes of his life. Instead of keeping the attention of his countrymen and of the Legislature fixed upon Repeal — which, if granted, involved the redress of every other grievance — he determined to reverse the process.

He tried to make the removal of other grievances the stepping-stone to gaining Repeal, instead of standing by Repeals the be-all and end-all of national rights. He had an additional reason for hoping for the redress of grievances, in the promises of the Liberal statesmen of the period. They had declared over and over again their readiness to place Ireland on a perfect equality with England; and O'Connell, before long, got strong evidence 1 During the fierce exenement caused in 1845 by the opening of the letters of the Brotheis Bandiera to Mazzini by Sir James Graham, a Parliamentary Return was ordered of the various ministers who had exercised the power of opening the letters of private persons. According to this return, Mr. Secretary Littleton (afterwards Lord Hatherton) had done so in 1834, and Lord Mulgrave (afterwards Marquis of Normanby) in 1835.

In 1836 the same noble marquis inspected private Irish correspondence, with the assistance of Mr. Drummond, the Irish Secretary. In 1837 Mr. O'Connell's private letters to his friends were opened by order of Lord Chancellor Plunket and Dr. Whately, Archbishop of Dublin and a Member of the Privy Council, the seals or envelopes being softened by the application of steam, and skilfully re-sealed after the letters had been copied. In 1838 the same sort of espionage was carried on by Lord Morpeth (afterwards Lord Carlisle), in 1839 by Lords Normanby and Ebrington and General Sir T. Blakeney, and again by Lord Ebrington in 1840.— (Parliamentary Return, Session of 1845. Papers relating to Mazzini.) B os the reality of the promise. In spite of continued opposition by the Conservatives and of repeated rejections by the House of Lords, an Act was passed which threw open the municipal councils of Ireland to the Catholics ; and which enabled O'Connell himself to be elected Lord Mayor of Dublin.

The spectacle of their great leader clothed in the robes of the chief magistrate of the metropolis was a sight that proved delightful to the Catholics of Ireland at that period, in a way that few people can now understand. The Corporation of Dublin had been the great home of Orange Conservatism ; and its alder men were among the most prominent spokesmen of the in sulting and maddening creed of Protestant ascendency. To see O'Connell in the seat that up to this time had been uninterruptedly occupied by one of their bitterest enemies appeared to the people the visible sign of a momentous triumph. But here again a great concession was accompanied by a villainous proviso. Neither O'Connell nor the people, in their enthusiastic welcome of municipal reform, attached much importance to the condition that the appointment of the high sheriff should rest in the hands of the Crown.

By and-by the importance of the provision was brought home to O'Connell when he was placed on his trial ; and the high sheriff of Dublin, as the man charged with the impanelling of the jury, held O'Connell, and through O'Connell, the fate of all Ireland, in his grip. The grant of municipal reform by the Whigs once more threw O'Connell into their hands ; and he trusted that other reforms would follow. He spoke warmly on behalf of the ministry of Lord Melbourne; and called upon the Irish people to rally around it. But in 1841 the period of Liberal ascendency came to an end ; and Sir Robert Peel— the bitter and uncompromising enemy of all Irish Reform— came to the head of the Government with a huge majority behind him O'Connell lost all hope of redress from Parliament, and once more started the Repeal agitation.

O'Connell's first move was to raise a debate on Repeal in the Corporation of Dublin. His speech on the occasion is regarded by competent critics as perhaps one of the finest of his whole life. It may still be read with advantage as an epitome of the case against the Union and as a syllabus of the hideous ruin which that ill-starred Act has inflicted upon the Irish people. A full and interesting description of it will be found in Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's ' Young Ireland ' (pp. 191-207). The chief antagonist of O'Connell on this occasion was a man who afterwards played an important part in Irish history and who will often appear in these pages. Isaac Butt, at this time a young man of thirty years of age, was the rising hope of the Irish Orange party, and was thought of so highly as to be put forward as protagonist to the great agitator.

O'Connell's motion was carried by 45 votes to 15. This debate gave the new agitation an extraordinary stimulus. The subscriptions rushed up from 239/. in March, the week after the debate, to 683/. in the beginning of May ; many classes of the population which had held back, flocked in ; a number of the bishops gave their adhesion to the movement either openly or silently ; and as time went on Repeal of the Union was the passionate cry of a unanimous nation. Doubt is still felt in many minds whether when he first started on this new enterprise, O'Connell really meant to per severe with it ; or whether he intended to use the larger demand of Repeal as a lever for obtaining the smaller reforms of tenant right, the disestablishment of the Irish Church, and other reforms. Whatever his original motives, the story of the Repeal agitation, which he now started, was that it was strong almost from the very commencement ; that its strength increased in geometrical progression ; and that finally it reached proportions so gigantic that it controlled its leader instead of being controlled by him.

The most significant and imposing sign of the hold which the new agitation took upon the country were the popular gatherings. These, from the immense numbers that attended them, came to be known as the ' monster meetings,' and pro bably were the largest assemblages of human beings that a political cause ever drew together in the history of the world. These meetings were held in almost every part of Ireland, and gathered volume as they went along ; until at Tara, sacred with the most ancient and proud memories of the Irish nation, there was a demonstration which numbered half a million of human beings. The assembling together of so many hundreds of thou sands of people, all inspired by the same thought, excited something like a national frenzy. The country was quivering in every nerve, and there was a state of excitement that made everybody anticipate a morrow either of complete victory or of an outbreak of baffled hate.

The condition of England was one of excitement almost as intense. The attention of Sir Robert Peel was called in Parliament to these meetings by some of his Irish Orange followers ; and, after a certain amount of shillyshallying, he had distinctly pledged himself that these meetings were seditious, and that the agitation for the Repeal of the Union should, if necessary, be drowned in blood. ' I am prepared,' he said, ' to make the declaration which was made, and nobly made, by my predecessor, Lord Althorp, that, deprecating as I do all war, but above all civil war, yet there is no alternative which I do not think preferable to the dismemberment of this Empire.' The effect of these words was to exasperate public opinion on both sides of the Channel. It roused by insult the anger of the Irish people, and by provocation the anger of the Eng lish.

The two nations stood, in fact, opposed to each other, maddened by all the fierce national passions" that immediately precede sanguinary warfare. It is O'Connell's action at this hour that has given rise to the most frequent and bitter controversies over his career. His enemies and many of his warmest admirers have ever since declared that he proved unequal to the situation ; that he had victory in his own hand, and threw it away, from want of courage and want of insight. He would be a very unsympathetic or a very unimagi native man who would not pity the great agitator at this supreme crisis of his career. Never, perhaps, had a political leader graver difficulties, more perplexing problems— a responsibility so vast, so overwhelming, so undivided. On the one side he saw the great resources of the Empire arrayed against him : and Peel and the Duke of Wellington had taken care that the reality of these resources should be brought home to the mind of O'Connell and the Irish nation in a manner the most galling and the most palpable.

Troops were poured into the country until there were no less than 35,000 men in Ireland ; and there were ships of war around the whole coast. O'Connell knew that to all this force he had nothing to oppose but the bare breasts of a brave but also an unarmed and an undisciplined people. On the other hand, there was the whole nation, with strained eye and ear, wanting something they knew not what — filled with wild hopes and passions, longings, and dreams. And high up lifted above all these surging and strained millions he stood : worshipped as an inspired and resistless prophet ; omnipotent over their destinies, their hearts, their lives ; gigantic, solitary, most miserable. For it is now certain that at this period O'Connell knew moments of perhaps deeper anxiety than ever he had experienced during the many chequered years of his previous life.

When the last shout had died away ; when he had been pro claimed, amid such tumults of cheers, the uncrowned King of Ireland, and he found himself once more with a single com panion to whom he could show the nudity of his soul, he fre quently uttered in a cry of anguish and despair, ' My God, my God ! what am I to do with this people ? ' His habits at this period throw a considerable light on his motives and on the history of his country. In spite of occasional laxity of moral conduct, he was all his life a devoted member of the Catholic Church ; and towards the end of his days, his daily life was that rather of an anchorite in a state of ecstasy than of a fierce politician in the midst of a raging and relentless struggle. He used not only to attend mass, but also to receive Holy Communion every morning of his life ; and it was marked as indicative of his whole theory of political duty, that he always wore on these occasions a black glove on his right hand — the hand that, having shed the blood of D'Esterre in a duel, was unworthy to touch even the drapery associated with the mysteries of his religion.

On the other hand, there was the fierce democracy demand ing excitement, encouragement, inspiration ; and O'Connell would have been more than human if the fumes of this incense from millions did not occasionally disturb his brain, and if he were not now and then carried away on the spring tide of so vast and enthusiastic a movement. Finally, O'Connell's hot language was often the outcome of the cold calculation of a most astute, experienced, and successful politician. For Peel he had a feeling of both loathing and contempt. He thought him at once a hypocrite and a coward. His smile, he used to say, was like the silver plate on a coffin. With Peel and Wellington a bold game had been played before ; and had forced Catholic Emancipation, with hundreds of broken promises and abandoned principles, down their throats.

The tactics that had won Emancipation, might win Repeal. These are the various considerations that account for the strange inconsistency of O'Connell's language and acts during this momentous time. At one meeting he spoke in terms of enthusiastic loyalty — indeed, he never was anything but loyal in his language to the throne — and he preached the doctrine that he would not purchase the freedom of Ireland by shed ding one drop of human blood. Soon after, stung by some insult from the authorities to the people, he burst forth in language of vehement defiance. There was one speech of the latter kind which especially attracted notice, and afterwards was used against him with much effect. Speaking at the banquet in the evening after a meeting in Mallow, he used these remark able words : ' Do you know,' said O'Connell, 'I never felt such a loathing for speechifying as I do at present.

The time is coming when we must be doing. Gentlemen, you may learn the alternative to live as slaves or die as freemen. No ; you will not be freemen if you be not perfectly in the right and your enemies in the wrong. I think I see a fixed disposition on the part of our Saxon traducers to put us to the test. The efforts already made by them have been most abortive and ridiculous. In the midst of peace and tranquillity they are covering our land with troops. Yes, I speak with the awful determination with which I commenced my address, in con sequence of news received this day. There was no House of Commons on Thursday, for the Cabinet were considering what they should do, not for Ireland, but against her. But, gentle men, as long as they leave us a rag of the Constitution we will stand on it.

We will violate no law, we will assail no enemy ; but you are much mistaken if you think others will not assail you.' (A voice, ' We are ready to meet them.') ' To be sure you are. Do you think I suppose you to be cowards or fools ? ' And a little later on in the speech he used almost the best remembered words of his life : ' What are Irishmen,' he asked, ' that they should be denied an equal privilege ? Have we the ordinary courage of Englishmen ? Are we to be called slaves ? Are we to be trampled under foot ? Oh, they shall never trample me — at least (no, no), I say they may trample me, but it will be my dead body they will trample on, not the living man ! ' Whatever O'Connell may have meant by these words, the interpretation put upon them by at least all the young and enthusiastic and brave men of the country was that they were meant to be a threat of violence in answer to Peel's threat of violence.

The Repeal movement was a constitutional move ment, conducted by legal and constitutional methods, and if an attempt were made to deprive Irish citizens of their con stitutional right of public meeting for advancing this movement, the attempt would be resisted by force. Meantime O'Connell's words became bolder and more encouraging as he went along. He declared at the monster meeting in Roscommon that the close of the struggle had almost come. 'The hour,' he said, ' is approaching, the day is near, the period is fast coming, when — believe me who never deceived you — your country shall be a nation once more.' ' ' And this poetry of the orator,' sardonically adds Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, ' was translated into unequivocal prose by Mr. John O'Connell at the next meeting of the association. " The Repeal of the Union," he declared, " could not be delayed longer than eight or ten months." ' 2 The moment at last came when O'Connell's power and determination were to be put to the test.

A meeting was announced for Sunday, October 5, at Clontarf— a suburb of 1 Gavan Duffy, Young Ireland, p. 349. * Ib. Dublin made glorious in Irish hearts by the decisive victory of Brian Boru over the Danish invaders. The Ministry made up their minds to strike the blow which they had been long preparing : they proclaimed the meeting ; took every means to carry out their order by force— or, as some people even said, to provoke violence in order to make bloodshed inevitable. The meeting had been in preparation for weeks ; but it was not until half-past three o'clock on the Saturday before the meeting that the proclamation was issued. It was only by the despatch of special mounted messengers that the people, who were swarming in from the surrounding country, were told of the action of the Government.

There had already grown within the ranks of O'Connell's own following a section which bitterly differed from his policy and in time broke his power. The ' Nation ' newspaper had been founded in October 1842 by Mr., now Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, and he had among his assistants Thomas Davis, John Dillon, and subsequently John Mitchel. The Young Irelanders, as they were called, represented an entirely new phase in Irish politics. The 'Nation' for the first time presented the Irish people with a journal of real literary merit ; and the writers acquired an influence over the popular mind hitherto unknown in Irish journalism. Even in those days of high-priced newspapers and ill-de veloped communication, it circulated largely in the remotest towns in Ireland. It was devoured, not read. It convinced ; it inspired ; it roused loftiest hopes and fiercest passions.

The writers, joining the Repeal Association of O'Connell, soon brought a new force into its councils. In the first place they were determined not to submit with the same passiveness as was generally the custom to the dictatorship of O'Connell. This brought them into collision not only with O'Connell himself but with the formidable group of men he had gathered around him. Many of these intimates of the great agitator were broken in health and fortune and character ; but O'Connell stood by them with the natural constancy of a man of keen affections to old retainers ; and one of the bitterest quarrels between him and the Young Irelanders was for the continuance in salaried positions of these men. The Young Irelanders made demands for the publication of accounts, which, though accompanied by strong professions of loyalty to O'Connell himself, produced, not unnaturally, irritation in his mind.

In short, for the first time in his life, the experienced veteran found himself face to face with young foes who had not the same regard as their elders for his past services, who depended not on his will, and who wielded an influence outside his control. There was in addition to these causes of personal difference a more important and funda mental difference of principle. The Young Irelanders maintain that they were pushed by other forces, and especially by O'Connell himself, into the doctrine of physical force: at this moment the struggle over that question had not arisen. There was, however, the difference in the preference of the younger section for resolute, and of the older for moderate courses. John Mitchel, one of the Young Irelanders, writing many years after O'Connell's death, and in another land, deliberately repeated the opinion he held at the time as to O'Connell's duty on this day. ' If I am asked,' he writes, ' what would have been the very best thing O'Connell could do on that day at Clontarf, I answer : To let the people of the country come to Clontarf — to meet them there himself, as he had invited them ; but, the troops being almost all drawn out of the city, to keep the Dublin Repealers at home, to give them a commission to take the Castle and all the barracks, and to break down the canal bridge and barricade the streets leading to Clontarf.

The whole garrison and police were 5,000. The city had a population of 250,000. The multitudes coming in from the country would, probably, have amounted to almost as many. . . . There would have been horrible slaughter of the unarmed people without, if the troops would fire on them — a very doubtful matter — and O'Connell himself might have fallen. . . . It were well for his fame if he had ; and the deaths of five or ten thousand that day might have saved Ireland the slaughter by famine of a hundred times as many.' These words represent the gospel of a large section of Irishmen for many a day afterwards ; they led to the almost contemptuous tone in which O'Connell's memory was treated by a vast number of his countrymen during a considerable period after the first outburst of worship after his death ; they formed the fundamental idea of the love of revolutionary methods and the hatred of Parliamentary leaders which is the undercurrent of much of the Irish history that followed ; above all, they added to the hideous disaster of 1846 and 1847, another element of woe in the thought of what might have been.

The immediate consequence was the break-up of O'Con nell's mighty movement. He himself and several of his col leagues were immediately afterwards prosecuted ; and the most shameful methods were adopted for obtaining a conviction. Out of the entire panel one slip, containing mostly Catholic names, was lost ; when finally there were left eleven Catholics out of a panel of twenty-four, the Crown used their full power of challenge, and every single one of the eleven was driven from the box ; and the jury consisted exclusively of Orange Conservatives, who were as impartial in deciding the case of O'Connell in these days as would be a jury of Southern slave-holders in the case of an Abolitionist immediately before the civil war in America. Then the judges were notoriously partisan. An accidental phrase is still remembered which brought this out in full relief.

Chief Justice Pennefather, in alluding to the counsel for the defence, spoke of them as ' the other side.' Of course, before such a judge and such a jury, conviction was a foregone conclusion. Everybody cried out shame on the iniquitous proceedings ; O'Connell walked into the House of Commons amid the debate upon the trial, which was at the moment being denounced by English Liberals as vehemently as it could have been by himself. It was generally expected that the verdict would be reversed on appeal — as it was ; and an effort was made to have a bill passed which would have allowed O'Connell to remain out on bail until the case was finally decided. But the bill was rejected principally through the efforts of Brougham, who had a violent hatred of O'Connell ; and the end of it all was that O'Connell had to go to gaol.

This was the beginning of the end. But it did not look so at the time. In his prison O'Con nell held levees more like those of a prince than the unofficial head of a democracy ; bishops, priests, town councillors, rushed to see him from all parts of Ireland. ' Here,' writes Mitchel of the imprisonment of O'Connell and his companions in Richmond, ' they rusticated for three months, holding levees in an elegant marquee in the garden ; addressed by bishops ; complimented by Americans ; bored by deputations ; sere naded by bands ; comforted by ladies ; half smothered with roses ; half drowned in champagne.' ' And when the case w*as brought before the Court of Appeal, the verdict was re versed ; Chief Justice Denman denounced the proceedings of the law officers as reducing trial by jury to a ' mockery, a de lusion, and a snare ' : and O'Connell was released from prison amid circumstances of wild triumph.

But all the same, the fact remained that O'Connell's con viction broke up his movement. The mighty dictator — to whom millions of men looked up, for whom thousands would have willingly died — had been dragged at the tail of a police man ; and the hero of a thousand fights had been beaten for the first time in his life. The prestige of unbroken victory was gone. ' The Repeal year,' as Mitchel pointedly puts it, ' had con ducted, not to a parliament in College Green, but to a peniten tiary in Richmond.' O'Connell, too, left the prison physically and mentally a broken man. It was discovered after his death that he had been for years suffering from softening of the brain, and the date generally assigned for the first appearance of the disease was that of his imprisonment. He was besides, as we have since learned, involved in domestic trouble.2 When the fearful excitement of the Repeal agitation had broken down his robust frame, he remained still the same to the people.