John Redmond; a biography

Front matter

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

Prefatory Note

rpHE sources upon which I have drawn in writing this book are, for the most part, acknowledged in the body of it. I have found the character-study, John Redmond, by his nephew, Mr. L. G. Redmond-Howard, a handy source of summaries and quotations. I wish to express my great indebtedness to Mr. J. M. Hone (' N. Marlowe '), my collaborator in earher books, for his assistance in the preparation of this book.

WARRE B. WELLS.

Contents

INTRODUCTION .

I. THE LEADER AND THE MAN II. ANCESTRY AND YOUTH

III. EARLY POLITICAL LIFE

Introduction

THE BACKGROUND OF HISTORY

npHE publishers of this book have suggested -■- that it should be prefaced with a brief synopsis of Irish history since 1798, to provide, as it were, a background against which the life of John Redmond may be set. To write such a synopsis is a task less easy than it inight appear. The very date selected as its startmg-point is challenging. It invites a begging of the whole ' Irish question.' Did the Rebelhon of 1798, as Unionists assert, justify the Act of Legislative Union between Ireland and Great Britain ? Or was that Rebelhon, as Nationalists reply, dehberately provoked with the object of providing a specious pretence of justification for the Union ? It is, in fact, impossible that any survey of Irish history, however brief, should be taken up arbitrarily from the date of 1798 without reference to what went before it.

For the purposes with which we are concerned here the politicjil history of modern Ireland may best be treated from the point of view of the interaction between what may be called, in the most general terms, constitutional and revolutionary movements for Irish reform ; and it is from that point of view that I propose to treat it in this Introduction. It is an interaction which may be traced through the whole course of modern Irish political history. It

A emerged sharply in the last years of John Redmond's life, with disastrous influence upon his own pohtical fortunes.

The name of John Redmond stands in the past generation for the constitutional movement for Irish self -government known as Home Rule. The famihar phrase implies both something more and something less than mere repeal of the Act of Union. It implies something less because the Irish ParUament, as it existed immediately before the Act of Union, was technically— but only technically — co-equal in sovereign power with the British Parliament. In 1494 ' Poyning's Law,' enacted by Henry vn.'s Parhament at Drogheda, made the Irish Parhament, — ^then only the Parliament of the Enghsh Pale — a mere shadow, entirely dependent on the Enghsh King and Council. It did not give the Enghsh Parliament, however, the power of legislating for Ireland. That power was finally asserted when, in 1719, quarrels between the Parhaments culminated in the Act known as ' the Sixth of George I.,' which completely took away the independence of the Irish Parhament. But in 1782 this Act was repealed, and in the following year the Act of Remmciation declared that Ireland's right to be bound only by the laws made by the King and the Irish Parhament was ' estabUshed for ever, and shall at no time hereafter be questioned or questionable.' ' Grattan's Parhament,' therefore, during its brief existence from 1782 down to the Act of Union, enjoyed a technical position of sovereign independence — a position to which the Home Rule movement of our time made no claim.

But, on the other hand, Home Rule implies something more than mere repeal of the Act of Union ; for the Irish Parliament never represented the nation, did not even represent the Protestant people, and was thoroughly corrupt. Since the Treaty of Limerick, which closed the War of the Revolution, the Government of Ireland had been completely in the hands of the small Protestant minority, who also possessed almost the whole of the land of the country and held aU the offices of trust and emolument ; and this ' Protestant ascendancy,' as it was called, was confirmed by the Penal Laws directed against the Irish Catholics. The proceedings of the Irish Parliament and the political history of the country during the eighteenth century have reference wholly to the Protestant colony. The struggles of the Irish Legislature for independence, culminating in Grattan's Parhament of 1782, were the struggles of the Protestants ; the CathoUcs had no pohtical existence, and could have no part in any of these contests. The Home Rule movement, of course, postulates a ParUament elected by equal, direct, and secret suffrage, together with an Executive responsible to it, which the Executive in the days of Grattan's Parliament was not.

The efforts of Grattan and Flood and their ' Patriot Party ' to secure legislative independence, it is germane to the thesis of this Introduction to observe, were crowned with success only when they were backed by the power of the Irish Volunteers, first formed about 1779, after the exploits of American privateers off the Irish coasts suggested the possibihty of foreign invasion. (It was to this period that Mr. Redmond referred in his famous speech in the House of Commons on the outbreak of war.)

The ' Patriot Party ' secured legislative independence with the power of " the Volunteers behind them. They failed to secure redress of the three outstanding questions without which that success was barren — Parliamentary reform ; the removal of the restrictions imposed on Irish commerce ; and CathoMc emancipation. They failed because the leaders of the Volunteers shrank from challenging a conflict with the Government. Constitutional action proved impotent to secure redress of grievances ; and the Volunteers, deserted by their leaders, formed democratic associations . and drifted towards revolutionary action. There is a constant recurrence of such developments in Irish poUtical history.

The RebeUion of 1798 arose out of the exasperation and desperation induced by the failure of constitutional action to relieve the numerous causes of distress and discontent — the Penal Laws against the CathoUcs ; the commercial restrictions, imposed and maintained in England's interests, which strangled Irish industry and commerce ; the extortionate system of ' r&ck-rents,' under which farmers held their land from absentee landlords. Wolfe Tone, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and its other leaders drew their inspiration largely from the French Revolution. The outbreak of the Rebellion was precipitated by the excesses of the soldiers billeted on the people throughout the country. It was marked on the insurgent side by many atrocious incidents, and it was suppressed by the Government with the utmost ferocity.

The suppression of the Rebellion was followed by the passing of the Act of Union, justified by Pitt on the plea of ' military necessity.' Its passage through the Irish Parliament was secured by wholesale bribery and corruption. The proprietors of ' rotten boroughs ' — over 200 out of 300 in all — ^were bought with a sum aggregating one and a quarter milUon pounds, which was added, with a supreme touch of cynicism, to the Irish national debt ; to purchase the votes of individual members and the favour of certain influential outsiders, nuihbers of peerages were created ; and there were besides great numbers of bribes in the shape of preferments, pensions, and direct cash. So perished the corrupt Irish Parhament in an orgy of corruption in the Act of Union, which came into force on January 1, 1801. The articles of Union placed all subjects of the United Kingdom under the same regulations as to trade and commerce ; but the promise of Catholic emancipation was not fulfilled.

Apart from the futile insurrection of Emmet in 1803, no real movement for repeal, constitutional or revolutionary, made its appearance for a full generation after the Act of Union. At this period the country was in a deplorable state. The conclusion of the Napoleonic wars was followed by stagnation in trade and great distress ; the people lost all hope of relief ; there were secret societies ; and outrages were frequent. In 1806 Grattan became a member of the United Kingdom Parliament, and devoted himself almost exclusively to the cause of Irish CathoUc Emancipation. At his death in 1820, however, emancipation was still withheld.

It was ultimately achieved chiefly through the agency of the CathoUc Association, founded in 1823 by Daniel G'Connell, ' the Liberator ' (who had already come into prominence in Ireland as an advocate of emancipation) and by Richard Lalor Shiel. Its expenses were defrayed chiefly by a subscription from the people of a penny a week, known as ' CathoUc rent,' and it was the means of estabhshing a free Press and creating a healthy pubhc opinion. The Association was frequently suppressed by the Government, and as often reconstructed with great astuteness by O'ConneU. Finally the Clare election, successfully contested by O'Connell with the object of bringing home to the British people the absurdity of disfranchising a constituency because the chosen member refused to take an oath that his own religion was false, aroused sympathy aU through England for the Irish Catholics. The Government, thoroughly alarmed by the preparations of the CathoUc Association to return Cathohc members throughout Ireland, passed Cathohc Emancipation in 1829, after Wellington had declared in the House of Lords that the alternatives were emancipation or civil war.

O'Connell may be said to have founded in Ireland the system of peaceful, persevering, popular agitation against poHtical grievances, keeping within the letter of the law, but not within its spirit. ' Monster meetings ' were an outstanding feature of an agitation constitutional in aim, but rather revolutionary in method. After the passage of emancipation, O'Connell continued his agitation on the same lines for Repeal. His revival of it in 1830 coincided with the outbreak of the ' tithe war,' in which a general movement of the CathoUc peasantry arose against the payment of tithes for the upkeep of the estab- Ushed Protestant Church, and many fatal encounters took place between peasants and poUce. The Repeal agitation, which had existed ineffectively since 1810, came to a head in 1840, when O'Connell founded the Repeal Association and organised a great series of ' monster meetings ' — at one of which, held at Tara, a quarter of a milUon people were estimated to be present — during the following years. Finally, in October 1843, the Government 'proclaimed ' a ' monster meeting ' at Clontarf , near Dublin. 0' Connell did not take up the Government' s challenge, and dispersed the meeting ; he was, nevertheless, arrested, tried, and convicted, but soon released on a point of law.

O'ConneU's action in connection with the Clontarf ' monster meeting ' virtually ended the Repeal agitation. A number of his younger followers, losing faith in his method, separated from him and formed the ' Young Ireland Party,' which, by contrast with O'ConneU's ' Old Ireland Party,' an almost exclusively Cathohc organisation, aimed at embracing the whole people of Ireland. One of its most briUiant, and most violent, members was John Mitchel, an Ulster Protestant. O'Connell died at Genoa on his way to Rome in 1846, when his pohcy had been largely superseded by that of the Young Irelanders. This pohcy tended more and more towards revolutionary doctrines. It was given an immense stimulus by the great potato famine of 1846 and 1847, during which the people died by hundreds of thousands of starvation and hungerfamine, while day after day corn enough to feed the whole country was exported in shiploads, with the peasantry dying of himger. In 1848 the Yoimg Irelanders determined to attempt revolution. The Government, however, was prepared. Mitchel,

Smith O'Brien, Meagher, and the other leaders were arrested and sentenced to transportation ; and the Young Ireland movement collapsed in what has been aptly called a 'swift, tiny, and impossible appeal to the sword.'

The movement— essentially a 'literary' movement — had for a time infused new life and energy into Irish Nationahsm ; but the suppression of the movement following upon the exhaustion of the famine left it for some years at a very low ebb. About 1862, James Stephens founded the Society of the Fenian Brotherhood, a secret oath-bound society, with the object of bringing about the independence of Ireland by force of arms. This new movement issued in 1867 in another rising, which was easily suppressed, and in dynamite outrages in England and Ireland. Fenianism, however, survived the suppression of the rising as an active agent in Irish poUtical life.

The failure of the Fenian movement was not absolute. It was largely responsible for Gladstone's attempt at reforms in Ireland, especially, in 1869, the disestabhshment of the Irish Protestant Church, which was shown in ParUament to have been unable to carty out the intention for which it was originally estabhshed — the conversion of the Irish Cathohcs. The disestabhshment of the Protestant Church in turn contributed indirectly to the estabUshment of the Home Rule movement, with which many prominent Protestants associated themselves in protest against the action of the Imperial Parhament in connection with their Church.

The term ' Home Rule ' was coined by Isaac Butt, perhaps the most gifted intellectually of the Irish leaders of the nineteenth centuty — a great advocate, a philosopher, a highly educated man of much personal charm, loose in morals, always in debt. He had been a Unionist and an opponent of O'ConneU's Repeal movement ; while still a Unionist he defended the Fenian prisoners. His Home Rule movement, estabhshed in 1873, is important as marking the end of the idea of simple Repeal. - Before his time there had been some discussion of Federalism as an alternative to Repeal. Home Rule as he conceived it seems to have been a sort of compromise between the two. From his point of view it did not necessarily impair the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament. At the same time it did not deliberately propose a federal system (though Butt himself personally favoured a United Kingdom federalism). The contrast between O'ConneU and Butt is notable. Both professed a decided loyalty to the Empire, together with devotion to the rights of property. The former, however, was an agitator constitutional in aim but scarcely in action ; the latter was constitutional both in aim and action. Butt, in whose movement John Redmond's father played a part, proposed to convert Enghsh parties to Home Rule by reason.

Butt's Home Rule movement — chiefly composed of gentry and professional men — is important as marking a stage in the evolution of Irish political ideas. It achieved, however, little practical result in itself. The driving-force of economic discontent needed to be added to the aspiration for self-government before great progress was to be made. This combination was achieved when, in 1879, Charles Stewart Parnell, a young Irish squire, was elected leader of the Irish Party, immediately after the formation by Michael Davitt of the Land League, which was subsequently to exercise great influence in the country and in Parliament. Davitt was a thorough-going democrajt, who beheved in the nationalisation of the land and in other theories of the Sociahst State. The winter of the same year brought a great failure of crops in Ireland, leading to a terrible distress among the tenant-farmers.

Thus everything conspired to encourage the success of what was called ' The New Departure,' namely, an alliance of the most embittered extremists with the left or PameUite wing of the parhamentary Home Rulers. Ideahsts among the Fenians like John O'Leary, who still beheved in open insurrection, refused their support to the Land League, which, on the other hand, appealed to large masses of the more practical kind of revolutionists, especially' in America. Devoy, the Irish-American leader, declared, however, that the real object of the ' New Departure ' was the recovery of national independence. This, too, was ParneU's view, although he preferred to borrow Butt's more ambiguous phrase of Home Rule.

But, whatever might be the mixed purposes of the combination, it was clear in 1880 that the Irish people had once again definitely abandoned arms for policy. The character of the period with which the subject of this book was identified cotdd not be better summed up than it was in a recent manifesto of the Irish Party (October 11, 1918). It is the period of ' the pohcy which was laid before Ireland in 1878, under the name of the " New Departure," put into practice imder ParneU and Davitt, and which, under their leadership, secured the support of all that was best in the ranks of the physical force men of '67, and forged for Ireland the most formidable and effective weapon placed in her hand throughout the whole of her history, set free the land of Ireland, destroyed the long impregnable fortress of landlordism, extracted right after right from successive British Governments, and finally, imder the leadership of John Redmond, removed the British opposition to Irish freedom, and brought Ireland to the very threshold of final victory.'

Chapter I

THE life-story of John Redmond, is the record of one of the most remarkable paradoxes in the political history of the United Kingdom in modem times. No field of study, perhaps, offers more pitfaUs than Irish poUtics in the making of broad generahsations. But, expressed briefly and in the most general terms, and without any of those necessary reserves and qualifications which will be given their due weight in the proper place in the course of this narrative, the paradox of John Redmond's career may be stated thus. It was his mission in poUtical life to recommend to the British democracy by constitutional means the Irish demand for national self-government. He brought that mission to the immediate eve of success. He brought it to the immediate eve of success so far as the British democracy was concerned ; and simultaneously he fotind the whole basis of the constitutional claim largely repudiated by the Irish people. He died, a convinced constitutionalist, at a moment when the constitutional movement, and with it his hope of a peaceful settlement of the Anglo-Irish quarrel, seemed to be submerged in a relapse into revolutionary methods.

To write of the life of John Redmond is necessarily, in efEect, to write of the history of Irish poHtics during the past generation; and politics, the sum of the conflict of human passions, noble and ignoble, the movement of tendencies in mass psychology, present themselves to the historical student with a certain aspect of impersonahty. But in the record of the paradox of John Redmond's career, it is apparent, we are deahng essentially with the material of a personal tragedy — a personal tragedy of its kind scarcely less poignant than that of his_ predecessor in the Irish national leadership, Charles Stewart Parnell. One may , very properly, therefore, preface the record of his public life with some study of what manner of man it was to whom this tragedy befell.

A very brief and superficial review, at the outset, of his political career, with one or two outstanding incidents in it, and of the political material with which he had to deal, will give us some insight into the personal character of the man. John Redmond was not an initiator of political action. He introduced no new methods, either of agitation at home or of strategy at Westminster, but endeavoured rather to perfect the system which he had inherited from Parnell. It was ever his proudest boast that he stood for the policy of Parnell. PameU's methods were : (a) passive resistance in Ireland against certain laws, particularly those relating to the land, which national sentiment regarded as inimical ; (6) obstruction in the British Parliament. The British Government broke the weapon of pbstruction by altering the Parliamentary rules of procedure, whereupon Parnell made it his chief aim to seciire the balance of power at Westminster, urging that one of the two great English parties would, for the sake of power, purchase the Irish vote by the offer of Home Rule.

Mr. Redmond, as we know, did acquire the balance of power in 1910, with the result that the Liberal Party, which after its return to office by a huge independent majority in 1905 had ignored Home Rule, immediately attacked the veto of the House of Lords and proposed a measure of Irish self-government. Sinn Feiners have asserted that Redmond ' betrayed ' the poUcy of ParneU. They urge that Pamell, had he Hved, would soon have abandoned Westminster, and quote a speech which he deUvered at Limerick in November 1880. Parnell then said that he did not beUeve in the permanence of an Irish Party at Westminster, for ' sooner or later the influence which every English Government had at its command would sap the best of Irish parties.' John Redmond did, however, succeed in maintaining the independence of the Nationahst Parhamentary Party, and, in effect, he disproved Pamell's doubts of Irish stabihty. In 1910 — thirty years after Parnell's speech at Limerick — an independent Irish Party held the British party system at its mercy, and was able to force the Government not only to put Home Rule in the forefront of its programme, but to demand from the King himself guarantees against obstructive action on the part of the House of Lords.

Yet when he died, seven years later. Home Rule, though an Act, seemed further than ever from being a fact. Where, then, had been Mr. Redmond's error of judgment ? The Irish Party under his leadership could show a record of definite Parhamentary achievement unequalled by any other minority party in the House of Commons. But Parliamentary achievement was not enough, and what John Redmond, like other politicians, failed to realise was that the machine itself had broken down. Pohtical democracy in the years 1912-1914 was an impolite fiction. Mr. Redmond might dominate Parhament ; but what was the use of that when people were losing their habit of obedience and respect towards ParUament ? Such an event as a ' loyahst ' insurrection against law like the Ulster Unionist movement would have been inconceivable in the United Kingdom of Parnell's days. There was more than a little truth in' the Sinn Feiners^ contention of the futUity of ParUamentarism. But the fault did not He, as they alleged, in any particular corruption of the Irish representatives. John Redmond's own position was one of the greatest honour, and he kept aloof more than any contemporary pohtician from the intrigues of the placehunters.

Mr. Redmond almost to the end maintained Parnell's idea of the need of keeping Irishmen together even at some cost of apparent inconsistency. To different audiences he could talk differently. When in America, for instance, he would not estrange the support of the extremists from himself by laying stress on his own belief that the Irish national claim might be satisfied within the Empire. What he aimed at was Home Rule, and, if Repubhcans chose to assist a Home Rule movement, should he reject their aid ? He agreed with Pamell that no man may set bounds to the march of a nation. In England he declared that separation was impossible and undesirable.

Was there here any real inconsistency ? That no man may set bounds to the march of a nation is, in reaUty, a truism. Mr. Redmond's personal opinion was that Irishmen, once they possessed a wide measure of self-government, would be happy in their place within the Empire. Other Irishmen — supporters of the Parhamentary movement too — looked on Home Rule as a stepping-stone towards separation. It would have been foohsh of Mr. Redmond to have rejected the friendship of such Irishmen simply because he differed from them as to what might happen to an Ireland of the future. Of this, however, we may be certain — ^namely, that Mr. Redmond, once seH-govemraent had been estab- Ushed by constitutional means and agreement with England, would have stood apart from, or indeed firmly resisted, all attempts to move in the separatist direction. His attitude on the war is a final proof of this.

In August 1914, John Redmond broke with the separatists once and for aU. Principle and expediency met in a fatal clash, and he knew it would be no longer possible for him to work with men who believed that the reduction of the Briti^ Empire was an Irish interest. The issue was forced, as it were, prematurely and in circumstances that were unfavourable to Mr. Redmond. Could he have come to Ireland in August 1914, to be Prime Minister of a new Irish Parhament — ^his own achievement — and to conduct recruiting on Irish lines, the magnitude of his supremacy as against the separatists would not have been in doubt. We know how far otherwise were the circumstances in which he declared the true faith which was in him. His

THE LEADER AND TliE MAN 17

speech in the House of Commons at the outbreak of the war, when he offered Irish support to the Government, was deMvered entirely on his own initiative. He acted then under stress of personal emotion, and even — so we have been told — ^without consulting his principal colleague. Whoever reads the story of John Redmond's poUtical career will observe that there were several occasions on which, for the sake of maintaining Irish unity, he compromised with his inner natural inclinations and adopted opinions which were not entirely his own. But his action in regard to the European struggle never varied, and, the stronger his opponents of the Sinn Fein party became, the stiflEer grew his own attitude of loyalty to the British cause.

At the same time he forcibly resented what seemed to him to be an inexcusable stupidity of the British war-policy in Ireland. ' John Redmond,' says an Enghsh friend, ' broke his heart because he tried to stand between the two forces. His passion for the war against Germany was absolutely sincere. It was partly the passion of a CathoUc who saw a CathoUc country being ravaged and CathoUcs being slaughtered by a great Protestant Power. It was partly the sympathy of a chivalric man for a Uttle nation. In any case no one who knew him could doubt that it was fiercely honest and passionate — so passionate that for the moment he was carried off his feet and carried out of that calm, calculating mood which had hitherto made him infinitely cautious in all his dealings with Englishmen. For once he let himseK go. He trusted England. He showed, what all his friends laiew, that at heart he was a simple-minded man.'

B

But, this intimate observer adds, ' complete as his confidence was in British sympathy at that high moment, absolute as was his trust, just so deep and so wrathful was his passion of resentment when England failed to respond. In October 1916, some time after the Irish Rebellion, I spent a long morning with him at his flat, and heard from his mouth, in the form of a criticism of the War Office in its dealings with Ireland since 1914, one of the most scathing indictments of otir rtde in Ireland that, I suppose, he ever uttered. He repeated this indictment in the House of Commons some little time afterwards, but in a far more moderate form. In private life he gave fuU rein to his vehement and passionate anger. As I listened to his full and detailed narrative of the follies of the War Office in dealing with that great Irish ofEer to help us in the German War, I wondered whether in the history of Great Britain so great an opportunity had ever been so foolishly thrown away. It was aU very well for British Ministers in the House of Commons afterwards to condemn the blunders that had been perpetrated. But the pity of it was that it was Mr. John Redmond who had to bear the whole penalty. For he, at that moment, stood between England and Ireland as the one statesman who took on his shoulders all the crimes and follies of both.' 1

John Redmond's personal life was a quiet and imeventful one. It was, in spite of the deeply felt loss

1 Mr. Harold Spender, Oo»fe)»pomry JSemew, April 1918. In regard to other aspects of Mr. Redmond's leadership, Mr. Spender points out very truly that he was selected as a leader of the constitutional type, subject to the advice of the Irish Party and the national organisation. ' Every act of policy was discussed by the Irish party. Every speaker was chosen by the party. That party could by its decision even impose of his first wife, a happy one on the whole. He had all the Irish domestic virtues, and his second marriage, like his first, was of the most devoted kind. His best friends were drawn from among his relatives. He dehghted in the ardent character and irrepressible humour of his famous brother ' WiUie,' who predeceased him by a few months only. He and his brother Wilham had married, when they were still almost boys, two Australian sisters. His son, who is now a captain in the army and also member of Parliament for Waterford City, was a great source of pride. He greatly resembles his father in appearance and inherits the political interest of the family. John Redmond had three children by his first marriage, none by his second. One daughter recently died in America. The second, Johanna, who is married to Mr. Max Green, of the Irish Prisons Board, is greatly talented as an author.

In eaxly manhood John Redmond was accounted handsome. To the end of his life he remained what the Irish call ' a fine figure of a man.' The red-haired Celt and the blonde Scandinavian had evidently contributed largely to his making. One could not mistake him for anything but an Irishman, and yet his was not a type of face that is particularly characteristic either of the East or West of Ireland. There was certainly nothing in hiih of the Iberian of the Western Coast, whose race is ' Mediterranean.' He had, however, the prominent light blue eyes