Ireland Since Parnell | Page 6

the fact stands out with clearness that the passage
in Gladstone's "Nullity of Leadership" letter, which was the root cause
of all the trouble that followed, would never have been published were
it not that the political hacks, through motives of party expediency,
insisted on its inclusion. That plant of tender growth--the English
Nonconformist conscience--it was that decreed the fall of the mighty
Irish leader.
It is only in recent years that the full facts of what happened during
what is known as "The Parnell Split" have been made public, and these
facts make it quite clear that neither during the Divorce Court
proceedings nor subsequently had Parnell had a fair fighting chance.
Let it be remembered that no leader was ever pursued by such
malignant methods of defamation as Parnell, and it is questionable how
far the Divorce Court proceedings were not intended by his enemies as
part of this unscrupulous campaign. Replying to a letter of William
O'Brien before the trial, Parnell wrote: "You may rest quite sure that if
this proceeding ever comes to trial (which I very much doubt) it is not I
who will quit the court with discredit." And when the whole mischief
was done, and the storm raged ruthlessly around him, Parnell told
O'Brien, during the Boulogne negotiations, that he all but came to
blows with Sir Frank Lockwood (the respondent's counsel) when
insisting that he should be himself examined in the Divorce Court, and
he intimated that if he had prevailed the political complications that
followed could never have arisen. On which declaration Mr O'Brien
has this footnote: "The genial giant Sir Frank Lockwood confessed to
me in after years: 'Parnell was cruelly wronged all round. There is a
great reaction in England in his favour. I am not altogether without
remorse myself.'"
Not all at once were the flood-gates of vituperation let loose upon
Parnell. Not all at once did the question of his continued leadership
arise. He had led his people, with an incomparable skill and intrepidity,

not unequally matched with the genius of Gladstone himself, from a
position of impotence and contempt to the supreme point where success
was within their reach. A General Election, big with the fate of Ireland,
was not far off. Was the matchless leader who had led his people so far
and so well to disappear and to leave his country the prey of warring
factions--he who had established a national unity such as Ireland had
never known before? "For myself," writes William O'Brien, "I should
no more have voted Parnell's displacement on the Divorce Court
proceedings alone than England would have thought of changing the
command on the eve of the battle of Trafalgar in a holy horror of the
frailties of Lady Hamilton and her lover."
The Liberal Nonconformists, however, shrieked for his head in a real or
assumed outburst of moral frenzy, and the choice thrust upon the Irish
people and their representatives was as to whether they should remain
faithful to the alliance with the Liberal Party, to which the Irish nation
unquestionably stood pledged, or to the leader who had won so much
for them and who might win yet more if he had a united Ireland behind
him, unseduced and unterrified by the clamour of English Puritan
moralists. O'Brien and Dillon and other leading Irishmen were in
America whilst passions were being excited and events marching to
destruction over here. "The knives were out," as one fiery protagonist
of the day rather savagely declared. It is, as I have already inferred,
now made abundantly clear that Gladstone would not have included in
his letter the famous "Nullity of Leadership" passage if other counsels
had not overborne his own better judgment.
It was this letter of Gladstone which set the ball rolling against Parnell.
Up till then the members of the Irish Party and the Irish people were
solidly and, indeed, defiantly with him. No doubt Michael Davitt joined
with such zealots as the Rev. Mr Price Hughes and W.T. Stead in
demanding the deposition of Parnell, but one need not be uncharitable
in saying that Davitt had his quarrels with Parnell--and serious ones at
that--on the Land Question and other items of the national demand, and
he was, besides, a man of impetuous temperament, not overmuch given
to counting the consequences of his actions.

Then there came the famous, or infamous, according as it be viewed,
struggle in Committee Room 15 of the House of Commons, when, by a
majority of 45 to 29, it was finally decided to declare the chair vacant,
after a battle of unusual ferocity and personal bitterness. And now a
new element of complication was added to the already sufficiently
poignant tragedy by the entry of the Irish Catholic bishops on the scene.
Hitherto they