Charles Stewart Parnell

Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1891), Irish nationalist and statesman who led the fight for Irish home rule in the 1880s.

Parnell was born June 27, 1846, in Avondale, and educated at the University of Cambridge. In his youth and early adulthood he was comparatively uninterested in politics, but he eventually became a supporter of Isaac Butt, the founder of the Irish home rule movement. In 1875 Parnell was elected to the British Parliament. During his term of office he pursued a policy of obstructionism, resorting to all-night filibusters to draw attention to the severity of the Irish problem. In 1878 he became an active opponent of the Irish land laws, and in 1879 he was elected president of the newly founded National Land League. In 1880 he visited the U.S. and succeeded in gaining both funds and support for his cause.

In the elections of 1880, Parnell supported the Liberal Party leader, William Gladstone, but when Gladstone sponsored the Land Act, which fell far short of nationalists' demands, he joined the opposition. At his direction, the Land League planned to commit a number of deliberate violations of the Land Act in order to test it in the courts. In 1881 Parnell encouraged boycott as a means of influencing landlords and land agents. The promulgation of these policies led to the jailing of Parnell and several of his principal followers at Kilmainham prison and to the suppression of the league. One of Parnell's first acts after entering prison was to issue a manifesto calling upon the Irish peasants not to pay their rents. Soon afterward Parnell and Gladstone reached an agreement, known as the Kilmainham Treaty, whereby Parnell abandoned the “no-rent” policy and urged his followers to avoid physical violence. In return for these compromises he was released. Parnell's peaceful policy was completely shattered, however, by the murder of Lord Frederick Charles Cavendish and Thomas Burke, chief secretary and undersecretary for Ireland, respectively, at Phoenix Park, Dublin, by the Irish Invincibles, a militant terrorist group. He strongly denounced this act, but was unable to prevent a wave of terrorism that caused the enactment of new coercive legislation. In 1885, when the Gladstone government moved to extend these laws past their expiration date, Parnell, whose party held the balance of power in Parliament, voted against Gladstone, bringing about the fall of Gladstone's ministry.

Parnell's influence among the Irish people and among many of his English supporters began to decline in 1889, when William Henry O'Shea, formerly one of his most loyal lieutenants, filed a suit for divorce charging that Parnell had committed adultery with his wife. No defense was offered, as Katherine O'Shea had indeed been Parnell's mistress for some years; they were married several months after the divorce was granted. The resulting scandal precipitated a split within the Irish Nationalist League (which replaced the dissolved National Land League), with the majority of the members turning against Parnell. From this time until his death, at Brighton, on October 6, 1891, Parnell waged a vain struggle to reunite the nationalists. The schism lasted for several years after his death and was one of the principal factors that delayed Irish home rule until after World War I.