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Introduction

John Redmond left no diary or volume of memoirs. Of his contemporaries who did, the two most important were also his two bitterest political foes throughout much of his career. His deputy leader, John Dillon, who led the Irish Parliamentary Party for a brief spell between Redmond’s death in March 1918 and the Party’s (and his own) political annihilation nine months later, enjoyed nine years of retirement. Had he chosen to publish his memoirs, he might have been expected to leave us an account of his relationship with Redmond – of the strengths and stresses inherent in their joint stewardship of the Party as well as of their earlier mutual hostility during the Parnell Split.

As it was, the only sympathetic memoir came from Stephen Gwynn, the Party’s MP for Galway City and one of its few members who had taken an active part in the wartime recruiting campaign with an enthusiasm approaching that of Redmond himself, enlisting, aged 51, in the 16th (Irish) Division and serving as a captain in a Connaught Rangers battalion on the Western Front. In John Redmond’s Last Years, Gwynn produced an elegiac account of his leader during the Home Rule crisis, the rebellion and its aftermath. However, Gwynn had not known Redmond in the years of the Split or the earlier period of his leadership. And, in describing Redmond’s sojourns at Aughavanagh, he may have overstated its seclusion as a place of retreat and recreation while underplaying its significance as a place of work also, a place where he kept up with his voluminous correspondence just as diligently as in London and where he received many visitors.

The memoirs came instead – and they were certainly prolific – from William O’Brien and Timothy Michael Healy. Both were former colleagues of Redmond who had parted company with him in the Split, then become embroiled in a bitter feud of their own that lasted over a decade before finally reconciling sufficiently to dog the steps of the Party leadership, united by a common hatred of Dillon and a common contempt for Redmond. Both men’s trajectories ended in an abandonment of constitutional nationalism and an embrace of Sinn Féin.

O’Brien produced three sets of memoirs, published in 1905, 1910 and 1920, each offering a different perspective on his changing relationship with Redmond. Healy produced, in 1928, as he was about to retire after six years as Governor General of the Irish Free State, a two-volume set of extracts from his own correspondence with commentary justifying his own actions and judging his contemporaries over four decades.

Much of the caricature of Redmond that has come down to us from the Sinn Féin-permeated political culture that later wrote him out of history – out of touch with the Irish people and Irish culture, too much time spent in London, too trusting of British politicians, his tendency to ‘compliance’ where Parnell had embodied ‘defiance’ – had originated in the writings of O’Brien and Healy.

However, although Redmond left no published testament, he did leave a body of finely crafted speeches and, being a prolific letter-writer who answered almost all his correspondents within a day or two, a vast correspondence amassed over four decades. Fortunately, the bulk of the latter is available to us in the collections held at the National Library of Ireland and Trinity College Dublin. The aim of this edited selection of extracts from that correspondence, apart from bringing to life many of the episodes of the vibrant political life of a period which Irish people were long assured by the educational curriculum was politically barren, is to give Redmond his own voice, to allow him to speak directly to us over a century, and, in doing so, to correct some of the elements of that caricature.

Any fair-minded reading of these letters cannot fail to register the toughness displayed in Redmond’s exchanges with British politicians. Whether he is lobbying Asquith for a satisfactory Home Rule declaration in late 1909, setting forth his ‘No Veto, No Budget’ ultimatum to the Government in 1910, warning it against partition proposals in 1913, urging his proposals for wartime Irish recruiting on the Prime Minister and Lord Kitchener or importuning Lloyd George to act to save the Irish Convention, there is throughout a gravity, a frankness, an urgency of tone and a persistence, sometimes to the point of tedious repetition, that are very far from the distorted image of the biddable lackey.

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The letters in general are courteously businesslike in style and content, conveying, in their neatness of handwriting and conciseness of style (a sharp contrast to the letter-writing style of Dillon), a strong impression of self-discipline. Little emotion is revealed. His commonest expression of feeling is ‘unease’ or ‘anxiety’, but stronger sentiments break through at moments of historic import or crisis. His letter to the American supporter John O’Callaghan in April 1901 conveys a real pride in what he has achieved in binding the wounds of the Split. There is nervous anticipation in his letter to William O’Brien of 20 January 1903, as the two men wait for the Land Bill which Chief Secretary George Wyndham had promised to base on the report of the Land Conference in which they had participated, with the aim of carrying out land purchase on ‘a much larger scale than ever before attempted’. A few years later, with the Liberals in power and the Home Rule ship still becalmed, he tries to assuage Alderman O’Mara’s impatience (‘You take too gloomy a view’) and to focus his attention on the Party’s programme of legislative reform. Excitement flashes through his cable to T.P. O’Connor in November 1909, telling of the imminent clash between the Houses of Parliament over the Lords’ veto and its implications for Ireland. There is a manifesto-like confidence in his public message to John Muldoon in July 1911: ‘I fear no rock ahead.’ For a defence of his actions in August–September 1914 at the outbreak of the Great War, it would be hard to equal his spirited communication to T.B. Fitzpatrick in Boston that recounts the ‘considerations of honour’ which had motivated him. A sense of vindication informs his letter to Alice Stopford Green following the split in the Volunteers in October 1914, as he asserts that the dissidents must be fought ‘vigorously and remorselessly’. A year later, after months of being flayed by the Irish Independent, which used the space created by the suspension of the Home Rule Act to discredit the Act and portray him and Dillon as weak leaders who have surrendered the Party’s independence, the tone has become rueful. He tells his old friend Fr Patrick Kavanagh ‘I have acquired a very thick skin. Otherwise I would be dead long ago.’

As might be expected in correspondence extending over such a long period, the letters cover a vast range of subjects and personalities. Those from his first decade breathe the excitement of the new MP for New Ross, pitched headlong into the white heat of Parliamentary battle in 1881 at a climactic moment in the Land League struggle, when uproar followed the arrest of Michael Davitt, and Redmond found himself taking his seat, making his first utterance and being ejected from the House, all within 24 hours. His relish for the fight with ‘Buckshot’ Forster over the coercion Bill is balanced by a surprisingly clear-eyed perception of Parnell and a mature assessment of Gladstone’s Land Bill and the Irish Party’s tactics in regard to it. In May 1886, there is his anxiety over the imminent fate of the first Home Rule Bill, instantly dismissed with the thought that, anyway, ‘success in the near future is assured’.

The letters from the Parnell Split show another side: an anguished but far from fanatical supporter of the Chief whose main concern is to create the possibility for him to retire with dignity, with adequate recognition for his great contribution in advancing the nationalist cause. As for his helping to keep the Split alive after the leader’s death, something often held against him in the 1890s, we are given clues to his motives in his indignation at having his attempts to secure Parnell’s voluntary retirement misrepresented by O’Brien as ‘betraying Parnell’.

Redmond’s correspondence of 1892 with the Liberal MP William Mather reveals him as having already thought deeply about the subtleties of the future constitutional relationship between Ireland and Great Britain under Home Rule. The following year, as the second Home Rule Bill was progressing through the Commons, this concern had expanded to the financial sphere. In letters written to Chief Secretary John Morley, we find him rejecting as ‘unjust and humiliating in the last degree’ the fiscal provision to deprive the Irish Parliament, not merely of the imposition of all taxes, but even of their collection, a measure that would cause him and his followers to vote against the Bill. This was not simply a pose adopted to please the Fenian rump who had attached themselves to Parnell and were now counted among his own following. There is a consistency of tone between this criticism and his representations to Asquith in 1912 over the proposal in Committee of the third Home Rule Bill to deprive the Irish Parliament of control of the Post Office as a concession to unionism. Although he was never dogmatic, as others were, on the question of fiscal autonomy, there were irreducible minimum demands he would not surrender. As in all the areas of politics he touched, cool-headed pragmatism and moderation characterised his ideas and actions.

As might be expected in a movement in which religion and nationalism merged seamlessly, a theme that emerges early on and recurs in these letters is that of relations with the Catholic Church and its sometimes turbulent clerics. The latter make appearances in different roles all through Redmond’s career – from the New Ross priest, Father Patrick Furlong, his first political sponsor, estranged ten years later by the Parnell crisis, to Bishop Patrick O’Donnell of Raphoe, who enjoyed excellent working relations with Redmond as one of the trustees of the Party’s Parliamentary Fund until, only weeks from the end of Redmond’s life, he parted company with him on the issue of fiscal autonomy at the Irish Convention, thus ensuring the Convention’s failure. In between there was Archbishop William Walsh of Dublin, from whom he secured a statement during the Split that it was not sinful to vote for a Parnellite and that the issue was a purely political one, but who nevertheless refused Redmond’s request to allow his priests permission to canvass on behalf of the Parnellite candidate in the 1895 general election. From this derived Redmond’s comment to O’Brien very early in his leadership of the reunited Party, that ‘it would be absurd to suppose that the priests can accept me without some heartburning’. There was Cardinal Logue, who in 1902 had to be placated over the Irish Party’s decision to absent itself from the later stages of the English Education Bill. There was the mercurial Bishop O’Dwyer of Limerick whose public call on Redmond in August 1915 to use his influence to bring the War to an end received a curt reply. And there were the eighteen Catholic (and three Protestant) bishops who intervened in the closely fought Longford South by-election in April 1917 at the last moment (Archbishop Walsh, one of the signatories, also published a letter of his own) with an anti-partition manifesto that was probably decisive in swinging the vote against the Irish Party and to Sinn Féin.

Catholic clerics had long formed a significant part of the membership of the Land League and National League, and supplied many of its prominent personalities. But it had been understood since O’Connell’s time that, while Catholic nationalists would accept the guidance of Rome in spiritual matters, they would not allow it to dictate their politics. However, the boundaries between temporal and spiritual jurisdictions became embarrassingly blurred in the Parnell Split when two results in the 1892 general election were overturned on petition on the grounds of gross spiritual intimidation by the Bishop of Meath, Dr Nulty, giving much ammunition to Protestant opponents of Home Rule. The same question was raised again in 1911–12 when Pope Pius X issued his decree Quantavis Diligentia, claiming to exempt clerics from civil action in the courts, only a few years after the Ne Temere decree had laid down the obligation of the Catholic parent in a mixed marriage to ensure that the children were raised Catholic. Redmond knew the potential of these Papal rulings to fuel new arguments against Home Rule: writing to Dillon late in 1911, he calls the Quantavis affair ‘a horrible business’. Publicly, he could only respond that they were already in existence under British rule and would gain no added force under Home Rule, and that he personally would resist them to the death.

The modern tendency to see the Church’s role in the Home Rule movement solely through the prism of its intrusion in the secular sphere, turning Home Rule into Rome Rule, should be tempered by the realisation that the relationship was symbiotic. If the bishops expected the Party to agitate for educational and other policies of which they approved, the social discipline imposed by the Church kept the lid on the secret societies throughout most of the nineteenth century, creating an indispensable peaceful space in which constitutional politics could function.

Given his clear delineation of the boundary between secular and spiritual, and his marriage to a Protestant second wife, it is something of a shock to find his personal Catholicism infused with a positively Spartan sense of religious duty in his dealings with his nephew Louis Redmond-Howard, who had joined the Benedictines as a youth of 17 and, having taken final vows six years later, wished to renounce his vocation (Chapter 17). Redmond’s response as seen in these letters was much harsher than that of the lad’s religious superiors.

Redmond’s relations with Fenians in the 1890s, and his efforts on behalf of IRB members (though Invincibles were beyond the pale) serving long sentences for explosives offences (in particular John Daly and Thomas Clarke) supply an interesting background to his reactions to the rebellion of Easter 1916. It is arguable that it was his very closeness to the physical force partisans in the 90s – the ‘coexistence’ evident at the Independent office where Fred Allan managed newspaper and Fenian business simultaneously – that led him to underestimate the determination of Clarke and the other plotters to stage a violent rebellion. That, and a complacency about the power of democratic majorities to deter highly-motivated militant minorities from setting the agenda, may explain how, in spite of his statement to Stopford Green that the extremists deserved ‘no mercy’, he failed to act on the very credible warning of Bernard MacGillian a month before the rebellion.

One stereotype these letters will confound is that Redmond cared nothing for the Irish language or culture. His correspondence with Archbishop Walsh in 1901 on matters concerning the National Education Board, and his later correspondence with the Gaelic League founder, Douglas Hyde, should dispel that impression. The letters do not tell all. At the 1909 National Convention when the motion to make Gaelic a compulsory subject for matriculation to the newly founded National University was debated, it was Redmond, for better or worse, who was closer to the popular will in supporting it, and Dillon who had to endure catcalls for his opposition.

The correspondence of autumn 1903 with O’Brien and Dillon illustrates vividly the dilemma that confronted Redmond at that point: whether to continue with the policy of conference and conciliation – the doctrine being propounded with a convert’s zeal by O’Brien – that had broken the logjam of twenty years in winning effective land purchase legislation for tenant farmers, or to risk the nightmare of a new split by alienating Dillon and his supporters in the strong agrarian wing of the Party, which resented the financial incentives being paid to the landlords. In opting for Party unity over conferences with unionists, did he make the right choice? One thing is certain: those who say that the conference route would have averted the Home Rule crisis and, ultimately, partition, take insufficient account of the differences between southern and Ulster unionism, a distinction that Redmond himself grasped imperfectly as late as the debates at the Irish Convention.

One of the consequences of O’Brien’s break with Redmond emerges in the letters between Redmond and Dillon over the following four years: their differing approaches to bringing an end to the breach. The peculiar flavour of the two men’s correspondence noted by F.S.L. Lyons is at its most piquant here: Redmond refusing to believe the breach was permanent and remaining always open to possibilities of rapprochement; Dillon gloomily badgering him to give no quarter to O’Brien, fearing the harm he and Healy could jointly do to the movement. Cassandra in the legend was right, and Dillon in that role turned out to be right too, as Redmond finally realised in early 1909, after the brief one-year return of O’Brien and Healy to the Party, by which time the pair’s mutual gravitational pull had created a malign binary star that would pursue the Party to its doom.

The Redmond–Dillon correspondence becomes particularly intense in the prologue to the 1907 Irish Council Bill, the devolution measure promised by Liberal Prime Minister Campbell-Bannerman, which had the effect of a primed hand grenade rolled slowly into the Irish Party camp. Both men are aware from the beginning of its potential to damage the movement, yet seem mesmerised and unable to avert the danger by lowering the expectations of their followers.

The years of the Liberal ‘landslide’ government of 1906–9 were years of frustration and disappointment at the seeming postponement of Home Rule to a distant future, and the discontent festering in the Party and the country is documented in the letters of Chapter 7. But if these were doldrum years for Home Rule, they were also fertile ones for reforming legislation, especially 1908, with legislation passed for agricultural labourers, evicted tenants, town tenants and the working classes in towns, as well as the final resolution of the university question, as Redmond pointed out to Alderman O’Mara, the American John O’Callaghan and others.

With the final estrangement of O’Brien at the February 1909 ‘Baton’ Convention, followed by his foundation of the All for Ireland League, the Irish Independent, owned by William Martin Murphy, passed from the role of loyal opposition to that of destructive critic and even enemy, a role it would maintain for the rest of Redmond’s life (Chapter 12). The Party thereafter received much censure for its faults and little credit for its achievements. However, the withering attacks coming from the paper, augmented by those of Healy (theoretically still a Party member), could not prevent the veto crisis and Asquith’s declaration on Home Rule at the Albert Hall in late 1909 from elevating Redmond to a pivotal position in both British and Irish politics.

Redmond’s lobbying of Morley in advance of Asquith’s declaration, and the memorandum of his meeting with the Master of Elibank, show a new confidence and resolve. His reports to Dillon in early 1910 show a sure-footed exploitation of his leverage in the game of bluff he had to play with Lloyd George; the election had given the Irish Party the balance of power but both knew that Redmond could hardly use it against the Liberals without putting back the Home Rule cause for many years.

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Where in these letters does Redmond look weakest? Most obviously, it is in his forced acquiescence in the early Ulster exclusion proposals of the Liberal government in March 1914 (Chapter 10). In the space of five months he had had to abandon the stance taken in his uncompromising speech at Limerick, declaring that nationalists would never assent to the ‘mutilation of the nation’, and to assent to the principle of partition for the first time. His earlier meeting with Asquith on 2 February, when the Prime Minister told him he would have to make an offer to the Ulster unionists, was a seismic moment. We have a record of Redmond’s reaction to the news. ‘My visitor shivered visibly and was a good deal perturbed,’ Asquith confided to his diary. This acquiescence would become an effective weapon of his enemies against him then and later. It would form the first indictment against him (even ahead of his call on Irishmen to take their place in the firing line) from the IRB-controlled Irish Volunteers following their split from the larger Volunteer body in September 1914. The Irish Independent would never let him forget his ‘mutilation’ vow.

Even for a large body of the Party’s moderate supporters, Conor Cruise O’Brien has written, ‘The source of the anguish was not the “loss” of eastern Ulster … [but the] tragic and unexpected flaw that became apparent at the very moment of the seeming triumph of the Home Rule cause.’1 To the Independent leader-writers, Redmond was guilty of weak-minded capitulation to a Cabinet that had itself succumbed to threats of violence from the ‘Orangemen’. They failed, however, to take account of the realities of the power play. The offer of six-year exclusion based on county plebiscites was, of course, insufficient for the Ulster unionists. It seems possible, however, that a similar offer, without the time limit, would have been much more difficult for them to reject, especially in the period before the events at the Curragh and Larne had strengthened their position. (In late July, after the failure of the Buckingham Palace Conference, Redmond would prepare to take this further step, only to be forestalled by the onset of war.) Yet, in March, even the temporary partition offer entailed ‘enormous risks’, as he told Asquith on 2 March, which is why he felt he could endorse it only (i) without a vote, (ii) at the last moment in the debate and (iii) ‘as the price of peace’. In other words, his only chance of winning his followers’ acceptance of the concession was to couch it as an act of magnanimity made in the moment of victory.

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Every consideration of Redmond’s tragedy must return to the causes of his downfall. Nationalist historians continue to place the blame for the failure of Home Rule solely on Ulster unionism and its Conservative allies. The late Professor Ronan Fanning, writing of Redmond’s compromise proposal in September 1914 to suspend the operation of the Home Rule Act until the Amending Bill became law, correctly criticises the ‘Irish Party’s refusal to come to grips with the Ulster unionists’ right to self-determination’, thus encouraging ‘the nationalist delusion that the partition of Ireland was avoidable’ (pp. 133–4). Yet, a few pages later, he writes of the Unionist ‘stranglehold’ on the Government’s Irish policy (he uses the word several times, expanding on it as ‘tantamount to a power of veto’), as if Unionist policy aimed at denying Home Rule to Ireland in toto.2 This ignores the fact that, since the autumn of 1913, Unionists had abandoned blanket opposition to the Home Rule Bill and sought an agreed settlement in which the two peoples of the island would be granted their respective wishes as far as was possible by excluding Ulster, or a part of it, from the Bill.

Prof. Donal McCartney, reviewing Chris Dooley’s Redmond: A Life Undone in 2015, encourages a related delusion in suggesting that the ‘slippage’ towards partition was a result of the fact that Asquith and Lloyd George lacked Gladstone’s ‘missionary commitment’ to Home Rule and that Redmond lacked Parnell’s charisma.3 It is surely speculative (as well as wishful thinking) to assume that Parnell’s charisma, or his credentials as a southern Protestant landlord, would have carried sufficient weight with the industrial workers of the north-east or the Presbyterian farmers of rural Ulster to disarm their outright opposition to the prospect of rule by a Home Rule Dublin parliament. We will never know how he would have faced that opposition. We do know that Gladstone, in 1886 and again in 1893, not only hinted in Parliament at the possible need for some form of exclusion of Ulster, but, on the second occasion, stated that Parnell had been willing in 1886 to allow the north-east corner of Ireland to be excluded from Home Rule if its people so desired.

The reality is that Parnell never came to close quarters with the problem because his Home Rule efforts did not progress as far as Redmond’s. The non-possumus, the refusal to coerce Ulster to accept Home Rule, with which Asquith confronted Redmond in 1914, and with which Lloyd George would confront him again in 1916 and 1917, was one which neither O’Connell nor Parnell had had to face – simply because they had never advanced to the point where the legislation for a self-governing Ireland was about to be passed into law. It was Redmond’s bad luck to lead Irish nationalism at the first moment when the conflict between its aspirations and those of Irish loyalism demanded resolution in territorial form.

Nor did Parnell have to face the malign narrowing of political options brought about by an armed rebellion in his capital city. Such room for manoeuvre as allowed Redmond and his colleagues to agree, however reluctantly, to pre-war partition schemes had shrunk by October 1916 to the point where T.P. O’Connor had to confine his pro-partition opinions to a private letter: ‘of course you and I know that no settlement is possible in any period which we can see clearly ahead that does not involve the partition of Ulster’. Likewise the evolution of the fiscal autonomy question, from the elasticity of view evident in the correspondence of 1911–12 to its status by 1918 as a ‘red line’ issue that would cause close colleagues to abandon Redmond and bring down the Irish Convention.

Yet it was the same non-possumus, undented by the 1916 rebellion, with which Lloyd George confronted the Sinn Féin negotiators of the Treaty in 1921, and the same which has confronted every government of independent Ireland to this day. It is the same reality that the electorate of the Irish Republic finally voted in 1998 to recognise – by 94 per cent on a turnout of 56 per cent – by removing the territorial imperative of Article 2 of the constitution and accepting the principle of consent.