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RECONSTRUCTION

As long as you deprive Ireland of the substance of constitutional government and preserve the empty form by bringing us here to this Parliament… you will have in your midst… a body of men who are with you, but not of you… a body of men who regard this House and this Parliament simply as instruments for the oppression of their country….

– Redmond in the House of Commons, 7 March 1901.

Mr Redmond’s election renders it impossible for Irishmen who believe in the re-establishment of their country as an independent nation to give support of any kind, in the future, to the party of which he is now the leader….

– Arthur Griffith in United Irishman, 10 Feb. 1900.

I

Early one May morning in 1901, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was walking in Rotten Row, near Hyde Park in London, when he was confronted by a rider bearing, he thought, the face and figure of a Roman emperor, seated on a huge dray-horse. The English Catholic diarist, veteran supporter of the Irish Home Rule and land struggles and cousin of the recently appointed Tory Chief Secretary for Ireland, George Wyndham, recognized John Redmond, MP for Waterford City, elected the previous year as chairman of the reunited Irish Parliamentary Party. The two had last met in 1888, when both had served prison sentences arising from the Irish land agitation known as the Plan of Campaign. Redmond was cordial in his greeting, and Blunt, aware of his new eminence at Westminster, was able ‘most truthfully to congratulate him on the position of Irish affairs, which have never been so hopeful since Parnell died….’1

Redmond, now in his forty-fifth year, was taking exercise before travelling the short distance to the House of Commons, having left the small apartment he shared with his wife Ada – known within the Redmond family as ‘Amy’, as he was known as ‘Jack’ – at Wynnstay Gardens, off Kensington High Street, which became his permanent home in London during parliamentary sessions. They had married in December 1899, exactly ten years after the death of Johanna, Redmond’s first wife and the mother of his three children, and less than two months before his election to the leadership that sealed the reunification of the party, which had been divided for the nine years following the fall of Parnell. Differences in age – she thirteen years younger than he– and in religion – she from a Protestant Leamington Spa family, he a devout Irish Catholic, albeit with a capacity, as Parnellite leader in the fraught years of the split, to resist clerical interference in politics – did not prevent the marriage being a happy one.

Away from Parliament, Amy was his constant companion, travelling with him to political campaign meetings everywhere in the two islands. Letters between them are consequently scarce: two from him, from Donegal in 1903 and from France in 1915, address her as ‘sweetheart’.2 At Aughavanagh, the former barracks in the Wicklow Mountains that Redmond first leased from the Parnell family as a shooting lodge and later converted into his permanent Irish residence, she immersed herself in her husband’s leisure pursuits, even catering for guests in his absence. A note from Redmond to William O’Brien in August 1901 conveys his regret that she could not accept his invitation to accompany Redmond to Westport: ‘She is doing the housekeeping here for a party of shooters and cannot stir’.3 Amy gave a singular insight into her philosophy of marriage when interviewed by a New York newspaper in 1908 on one of Redmond’s US visits. The writer noted that ‘She follows his work to its very core, thinks as he does about it, but declares herself to be “… not a worker, you know, merely a silent sympathizer… I don’t believe I have a fad in the world, except to make my husband comfortable”’.4 In 1914, when a group of Belfast nationalist women made her a presentation during a wartime recruiting visit, Redmond took a rare chance to pay public tribute to her, speaking touchingly of the fourteen years during which she had given him ‘peace, happiness and love’.5

A close friend and political associate described Redmond as an enthusiastic huntsman, ‘a good shot’ and ‘a capital fencer’ since youth, who had also played cricket and still attended big matches whenever possible. Regarded as one of the best-dressed men in the House of Commons, and fond of wearing a violet in his lapel, he was a charming conversationalist on a great variety of subjects who ‘… smokes, plays billiards and rides – all three well’. Fond of the theatre, he attended as many first nights as possible and, remembering his own acting days at Clongowes, was especially attracted to amateur productions of Shakespeare.6 That was the public side. Another colleague who became a friend rounded out this picture by describing his reserve, his modesty and his love of seclusion and privacy.7 Prolific in letter-writing and speech-making, Redmond yet seemed unconcerned for his own reputation. He was the only one of the protagonists of the turbulent nationalist politics of the 1890s who left no memoir of the period. Neither did he leave any record of his interior or emotional life. Whether Redmond, during his youthful travels in Australasia and America, underwent anything like the experience of John Dillon, who recorded in his diary the effect of the sight of naked Maori girls diving for coins, we will never know.8 We know almost nothing of his relations with women during his decade of widowerhood. There is only the hint in the poet Katherine Tynan’s recollection that ‘he had always been something of “a dog with the girls”… in a perfectly innocent flitting from flower to flower way… and while the girls had some delicious pangs, I don’t know that there was much serious harm done’.9 Similarly, we have no clue as to why no offspring issued from the second marriage. It is possible that some of the missing information was among the large quantity of Redmond’s papers that disappeared from Aughavanagh sometime after the unexpected death of his son in 1932.10 It is more likely, however, that his need for self-expression was satisfied in the meticulous composition of his wide-ranging speeches. With political associates, his letter-writing was concise and formal rather than expansive; even to close confidants, he invariably signed off with ‘Yours very truly’.11

At the Kensington flat, Redmond and his wife lived quietly, following the nationalist practice established by Parnell of avoiding the social round of the London political elite, refusing private hospitality from Tory opponents and Liberal allies alike. It was likewise in Dublin, where, until they made Aughavanagh their permanent Irish home in 1908, they lived at the house of Redmond’s brother William Hoey Kearney (‘Willie’) Redmond, MP for East Clare, at 8 Leeson Park. This austere social code reflected the ethos of the pledge-bound Irish Party: the safeguarding of its political independence ruled out personal intimacy with British politicians and its attendant opportunities for personal advancement. His position as nationalist leader already entailed the sacrifice of his potential for high office as a gifted parliamentarian, not to mention the success he could easily have attained in his profession of barrister. To this was added the sacrifice of the natural taste for hospitality that underlay his reserve. His real social life was confined to a few trusted friends in the Irish Party. Even there, as he told his supporter John J. Horgan, ‘I am a crank on the question of staying with friends. I always stay at an hotel’.12 Only at Aughavanagh, among family and his small band of intimates, could he slip the public restraints and liberate his true self.

At the time of his second marriage, Redmond’s two daughters, Esther (‘Essie’), aged fifteen, and Johanna (‘Joey’), aged twelve, were boarders at Mount Anville, the south Dublin secondary school for middle-class girls run by nuns of the Sacred Heart order. His son, William Archer (‘Billie’), aged thirteen, following the male family tradition, was boarded at Clongowes. William’s health was a source of concern that, by the autumn of 1902, left Redmond deeply worried.13 The malady is left unnamed in his correspondence, but can be deduced to have been epilepsy. Redmond took the boy with him to the October 1902 Boston UIL Convention and wrote to O’Brien on his return that he was ‘in great trouble about my boy’, and afraid that he would have to ‘send him away for a year or two to the West of America or Australia….’ A specialist in New York had recommended the ‘ranch’ as treatment.14 William was hospitalized in London, and discharged just after Christmas, when Redmond took a day between meetings of the Land Conference to convey him to Portsalon, Co. Donegal, where he left him with the family of Col. Barton, a local landlord and hotelier, for a month.15 He received advice and offers of help from several sources. His old colleague from Parnellite days, Pierce Mahony (now O’Mahony), offered a rest cure for William at his own estate at Grange Con in west Wicklow.16 It seems likely that William was sent to the US. The following September, his father wrote to O’Brien from Aughavanagh to turn down an urgent request to meet in Dublin because ‘My boy is coming up here for a few days and as I have not had him with me for nearly a year I want to stay’.17 William’s disorder seems to have resolved itself gradually, as Redmond left him at Aughavanagh in the summer of 1907, after which he began law studies.18 Three years later, William was called to the Irish Bar and was ready to start his own political career.

Redmond’s personal ethos of fidelity to political and religious duty showed its less attractive side in his harsh response to the failed religious vocation of his nephew Louis Redmond-Howard, the orphaned son of his sister Dorothea. Louis’ father had died when he was one year old, his mother when he was fourteen, and he had joined the Benedictine monastery at Great Malvern, Worcestershire, at the age of seventeen. In the summer of 1907, then aged twenty-three and having just taken final vows, Louis wrote to Redmond that he realized that he had made a great mistake, had undergone a severe mental crisis and was applying to Rome to be released from his vows. His hope to explain matters in person was rebuffed by Redmond, whose response was far less sympathetic than that of the lad’s religious superiors, who approved his petition for a dispensation. Refusing to believe that Louis had not understood the irrevocability of the vows he had taken, Redmond wrote that his behaviour had been ‘deceitful, ungrateful to the Order which has done so much for him and therefore disgraceful’. He would not intervene when Louis wished to reclaim the small property inheritance from his mother that he had allowed to pass to his sister Dora (now Dame Therese, a Benedictine nun at Ypres) who had donated it to the order. By March 1908, Louis had received his dispensation from Rome and wished to begin law studies in London immediately. In urgent need of money, he indirectly approached Redmond about the possibility of his purchasing his inheritance. Redmond was unrelenting, refusing all appeals for an allowance for Louis or the purchase of his property. As far as he and his family were concerned, Louis would have to ‘face the world alone’.19

II

Redmond’s election as leader of the Irish Party – ‘that curious blend of Trollopian fixers, political journalists, respectable ex-Fenians and closet imperialists’20 – was a chance affair, a planetary conjunction of individuals whose diverse trajectories brought them to his support at the right moment. As John Dillon’s biographer, the late F.S.L. Lyons, pointed out, all knew that it was not a genuine union of hearts.21 The first year of reunion had been overshadowed by the persistence of conflict, not between former Parnellites and anti-Parnellites, but between three of the leading former anti-Parnellites. William O’Brien, the former anti-Parnellite MP for Cork City, had founded the United Irish League in 1898 with the dual purpose of reviving land reform agitation and ending the split. With the second goal achieved, O’Brien campaigned to have the UIL become the controlling force in the reunited party. This struggle won him the support of Dillon, the deputy leader and MP for East Mayo, but pitted both against Tim Healy, MP for North Louth. The latter saw in UIL dominance a vehicle for O’Brien’s vanity and dictatorial tendencies, while O’Brien portrayed Healy as the perpetuator of the factionalism that had plagued the 1890s. Redmond, concerned above all as new leader to prevent a new division, proved to be too weak politically to repress the conflict, which ended in what Redmond called ‘making peace with a hatchet’: the expulsion of Healy at the December 1900 UIL convention.22

O’Brien’s metaphor for Healy’s presence in the party as a ‘poisoned bullet’ proved apposite. The removal of Healy at last allowed the healing process begun a year earlier to take effect. The sudden end of bitter, personal in-fighting liberated the energies of the party and allowed it to function with a coherence of purpose and an efficiency that had not been seen since pre-split days. Redmond’s adroit handling of the December convention had averted another bifurcation. Opposed to Healy’s exclusion, yet aware of how marginal his position had become, he was determined to put the interests of the reunited party above all other considerations. In navigating a safe course through the clashes of giant egos, he was always vulnerable to the charge, from one side, of failing to ‘stand up to’ the other. Just as O’Brien in a later crisis would damn him with faint praise for his ‘accommodating opinions’, Healy would complain in his memoirs that Redmond had ‘feebly opposed’ his expulsion.23

The key to Redmond’s ability to heal the wounds of the Parnell split, and, ultimately, to his longevity as party leader, lies in the combination of his personal characteristics with his particular political strengths and weaknesses. Of the prominent men who might have become leader in 1900, and given that Dillon had already given up the leadership of the anti-Parnellites, it is inconceivable that O’Brien, with his bursts of manic energy punctuated by long periods of exhaustion, or Healy, with his acid tongue and inability to work with colleagues, could have healed the divisions in the party at that time. Redmond’s ‘accommodating opinions’ and evenness of temper, on the other hand, allowed him to work with people to whom he had been opposed for a decade. His personal reserve superficially resembled that of Parnell, but he lacked what Horgan called ‘that daemonic spirit which frightens as well as inspires and which made Parnell a great leader of men’.24 Instead, he was noted for kindliness, courtesy and tact, as well as a fine sense of humour. There were none of the mystifying disappearances that had characterized Parnell in his later years. His scrupulous attention to work and punctilious attendance at Parliament – described as ‘almost mechanically systematic and punctual’ – soon won all-round admiration, all the more for the obvious self-discipline involved, since some old friends remembered him as ‘rather fond of his ease’.25 The results were soon obvious, as he told an American correspondent in April 1901:

There is not a trace, as far as I can observe, of bitterness or ill-feeling arising out of the old Parnellite and anti-Parnellite split. Nothing could be better, or, indeed, more generous than the manner in which I have been treated by the entire party… this includes every man in the party, from Mr Dillon downwards.26

Redmond’s qualifications for leadership were considered to be his judgment, his superb oratorical powers and his unrivalled grasp of parliamentary procedure, traits that would continue to win him general acceptance as the best advocate of the Home Rule cause at Westminster. They helped to overcome the distrust felt by many former opponents, especially those close to Dillon, who saw him as unsound on the agrarian issue. However, his inclusive, Parnellite rhetoric, sailing above the ethnic demagoguery of some colleagues, left Irish audiences with feelings of admiration rather than visceral fire. The lack of a fanatical personal following in turn dealt him one of his failings as leader: an underestimation of his powers and a failure to assert his own political ideas that would undermine him at crucial moments in later years.27

In reality, Redmond’s powers as leader were greatly circumscribed in comparison with those of Parnell. Under the UIL principles imposed on the party by O’Brien, control of candidate selection had moved from the leader and party caucuses to the League’s constituency organization. This shifted significantly the balance of power within the national organization from headquarters to the counties. Local disputes took on a different character, and resolving them would prove challenging. Examples included the leadership’s failed attempts to impose John Muldoon on two constituencies in the 1906 General Election, as well as Redmond’s relaxing his opposition to the candidacy of the flamboyant Arthur Lynch in the 1909 West Clare by-election, fearing a local revolt.28 The same powerlessness allowed him to stand aloof from the grittier realities of Irish politics, such as the violence used against Sinn Féin supporters in Leitrim in 1908 by Joe Devlin’s Belfast enforcers (Padraig Yeates is correct to say that Redmond was incapable of confronting his own party machine in Ulster29), or the underhanded trick played against John Howard Parnell in South Meath in 1900 to deprive him of the seat by a technicality. The Irish Party at local level was, in Patrick Maume’s words, ‘a loose network… centred on nuclei based around the individual leaders, each of whom had an inner core of confidants and an outer ring of followers’, held together by the coolly polite Redmond–Dillon relationship.30 Lyons, in his detailed study of the post-Parnell Irish Party, noted the shift in its social-class composition brought about by the democratization of its selection machinery. The effect was a gradual increase in the number of MPs drawn from the lower-middle classes such as shopkeepers, farmers and salaried workers at the expense of merchants, landowners and professionals, combined with a sharp rise in the proportions of MPs representing their native localities and living in their constituencies when not at Westminster. This shift, wrote Lyons, created a valuable bloc of experienced and reliable members who, though of limited education and not often heard, became the party’s voting backbone in the House of Commons.31 However, the greater powers of the grass roots in the party’s national organization were offset by the fact that few of their representatives were ever admitted to the leadership core, where day-to-day decisions on party policy at Westminster were made. Although the average age of MPs rose only slowly after 1900, such decisions continued to reside with the ageing veterans of the Parnell era, of whom Redmond himself was the youngest. Here was an imbalance that would later loosen the party’s hold on a rising generation.32

One thing was clear to Redmond in 1901: the party had rid itself of the demoralization that had been the despair of Dillon as anti-Parnellite leader in the later 1890s. His opinion of his troops was high:

The new men are a great improvement on the old. We now have no drinking brigade. The party is made up of steady, sober, thoroughly decent and capable men. We have no galaxy of genius, no men likely to turn out as brilliant as Sexton and a few others did in Parnell’s time, but I believe we have a better average of talent in the party than ever we had.33

Such was the eighty-one-strong force out of which, as the 1901 session began, Redmond began to forge a political weapon, independent of both British parties, to win Irish self-government. Not only did he need to restore the dissipated credit of constitutional politicians and win back the confidence of an electorate lost to scepticism and apathy during a decade of wrangling; he had also to advance nationalist Irish interests just when the October 1900 General Election had given the Conservative–Liberal Unionist coalition a second term in office, making Home Rule legislation a distant prospect.

At home, the chief threat to his influence lay in the prolific propaganda of the small separatist group centred on the Dublin journalist Arthur Griffith and the London-born beauty Maud Gonne, who had adopted the cause of Irish nationalism, in extreme form, as her own. This group, which had organized demonstrations against the 1897 Jubilee celebrations and the visit of Queen Victoria in 1900, acted in limited co-operation with some Irish Party MPs against the Second Boer War. Willie Redmond was co-treasurer of the Transvaal Committee, set up to provide ambulance supplies for the Boers and John MacBride’s Irish brigade in South Africa, and had been in close contact with Gonne since they had met in Paris in 1898.34 In the first electoral challenge to constitutional nationalism since the 1870s, Griffith and Gonne had promoted, unsuccessfully, MacBride’s candidature in the South Mayo by-election of February 1900.35 Griffith, opposed to its attendance at Westminster, would mount a sustained assault on the party as a fountain-head of place-hunting and corruption. Constructing a myth of a quasi-separatist Parnell, he cast Redmond as undeserving of the Parnell legacy.36 His United Irishman had earlier greeted the Irish Party’s reunification with withering scorn:

The spectacle of… Mr John Redmond as the Independent and Sturdy Patriot provides sufficient merriment for all who take an interest in the fortunes of the Constitutionalists and are aware of the motives which have induced them to come together again after many years.37

Redmond’s 1895 Cambridge Union speech aroused a particular animosity in Griffith:

The Irish Parliamentary Party has given the seal of its approval to the policy of ‘Home Rule plus the Empire’ by electing Mr John Redmond as its chairman… his Imperialistic sentiment was strong enough to allow him to part company without a pang with the men who had fought beside him for five years under the delusion that he, too, was an Irish Nationalist….38

As for the exponents of violent nationalism, Redmond had little to fear from the marginal Irish Republican Brotherhood, or ‘Fenians’, at home, but their American counterpart, John Devoy’s Clan-na-Gael, was potentially a threat to the party’s support organization in the US. A warning came in early 1901 from John O’Callaghan, the Redmondite émigré journalist on the Boston Globe who would become the chief organizer of the UIL of America. The Clan, he wrote, were ‘as bitterly opposed as ever’ to the party’s reunification, were using the Cambridge Union speech against Redmond and alleged that he had personally promised the Queen an enthusiastic reception on her Irish visit. The only way to counteract Clan influence was to step up agitation: ‘things must be made hot in every sense of the word both in Ireland and in the House of Commons’. They needed:

… a good stand-up fight in the House of Commons… Let the young bloods assert themselves… before the session is a week old some of the party ought to be suspended; if you are inclined yourself so much the better… it will arouse the blood of our people here as nothing else can….

If he could have the entire party suspended again near the end of the session, hold the National Convention in Dublin and come over to the US at once, he would ‘sweep America from one end to the other, as Parnell did’. This would ‘make it impossible for anybody any longer to misrepresent or misunderstand what it is you stand for in Ireland’.39

Advice of a more sober kind came from Edward Blake, the sixty-eight-year-old MP for Longford South, former Canadian Liberal Government Minister, former anti-Parnellite and Dillon confidant, who had helped to bring about the reunion and was eager to move quickly to constructive work.40 Blake suggested how the parliamentary situation might be used to maximum Irish advantage. The new rules of debate made obstruction on the old Parnell lines impossible, but the Government’s difficulties in finding time for its ever-increasing volume of business could be exploited. What was needed was a system by which party members would insist on discussing every item of Government business, Imperial, British and Irish. Since speeches could not be long, they would need a considerable number of speakers; since they must be relevant, the speakers must have mastered their subjects; since arguments must not be tediously repeated, different speakers must take different lines.

The whole business, though in a sense guerrilla, must be conducted with some knowledge of the art of parliamentary warfare as now developed… Never too much on any question, but always something on every question, should be the aim.41

Acting on Blake’s advice, Redmond established eleven different committees covering the main issues of concern: land, Home Rule, local government, education, Anglo– Irish financial relations, British affairs and foreign affairs, involving as many members as possible. Party discipline was tightened: pairing was forbidden, and absences were to be notified to the whips.42

III

With progress on Home Rule blocked for the time being, the party’s 1901 parliamentary campaign began with amendments by Redmond and Dillon on the land question and the war respectively, presented in the debate on the Address. The UIL had resolved to reinvigorate the policy of land purchase and the creation of a peasant proprietary first adopted by the Land League under Parnell’s leadership twenty years earlier. As the latter had found, this was a policy more congenial to Conservative than to Liberal Governments. The first Tory legislation to facilitate land purchase was that of Lord Ashbourne in 1885. This was followed by less effective measures under Arthur Balfour in 1891 and his brother Gerald in 1896. As the historian Philip Bull has remarked, ‘the cumulative effects of purchase under these acts confirmed it as the way forward in the minds both of landlords and tenants’.43 Government and League were thus agreed on the objective; where they differed, crucially, was on the means to attain it. The Tories favoured the use of voluntary financial incentives, but had so far failed to create a sufficiently effective scheme to encourage the majority of landlords and tenants to bargain. The UIL campaigned for compulsory sale by landlords, and a parallel campaign among the Presbyterian tenants of Ulster raised the same demand.44

Redmond advanced the UIL policy as the Irish national demand when he presented his amendment to the Address on 21 February. He first criticized Gladstone’s great reforming Land Act of 1881, under which tenants could apply for judicial revision of rents every fifteen years, arguing that the dual-ownership system it set up should now be abolished.45 Downward rent revisions and associated legal expenses in the land courts would soon squeeze the majority of smaller landlords out of existence, while failing to protect tenants against the fall in agricultural prices. The fault in the Tory purchase acts, on the other hand, was that their operation was so slow – about 50,000 sales, less than one tenth of the total of farms, had been effected in fifteen years – that it would take another 150 years to settle the land question. The financial terms had been inadequate, but no voluntary system, he argued, could provide adequate incentives to both sides. The only solution was:

… a great, bold, and statesmanlike scheme… for the general compulsory sale of the land by the landlords to the tenants upon terms which will not only be just to the tenants, but which, so far as we are concerned, will be absolutely just to the Irish landlords.

Redmond, like Parnell before him, differed from almost all of his party colleagues in his vision of what lay beyond land purchase. While the abolition of landlordism meant for the majority, at least rhetorically, the disappearance of a hated British ‘garrison’, Parnell had hoped that a generous scheme of compensation would encourage landlords as individuals to take up leading roles in national life and even in the Home Rule movement. A united ‘patriotic union of classes’ under such a stabilizing influence would present an unanswerable case for self-government.46 Redmond had voiced similar sentiments as Parnellite leader; now, striking a note at variance with the ingrained anti-landlord sentiments of many of his party colleagues, he returned to his own conciliationist rhetoric of the 1890s:

We do not desire to exterminate any class of our countrymen, no matter what the history of their forefathers may have been… my own belief and hope [is] that, if a great scheme… is carried into effect, a very large proportion indeed of the Irish landlords who have been expropriated will be glad to retain their houses and homes and continue to live in the country and bear their share in promoting its prosperity in the future.47

He hailed the Ulster tenants’ campaign for compulsory purchase led by the Liberal Unionist MP, T.W. Russell, who had braved taunts from fellow unionists of ‘trafficking with traitors’ to second his amendment, as:

… that great movement which has sprung up in the province of Ulster, and which is led with such courage and ability by the honourable Member for South Tyrone… We present [our demand] to you here tonight with the authority of a united Ireland….48

Redmond’s presentation of his case was hailed on all sides as a tour de force, but the defeat of the land amendment was a foregone conclusion. There would be no legislation on the land issue in the 1901 session.49 However, a high level of participation by Irish Party members, who made eighty-four speeches in the first three weeks of the session, ensured that Irish affairs dominated debate on the other amendments also.50

By 1 March, The Times was complaining that ‘the multiplication of questions to Ministers which is part of the harassing tactics the Irish Nationalists have revived’ had become a great nuisance.51 The Tory Standard wrote at the Easter recess that the Irish Party had succeeded in seriously delaying work, and once or twice had brought it close to shipwreck.52 On 5 March, things were ‘made hot’ in the House in exactly the way O’Callaghan had suggested. The Government attempted, after only one night’s discussion, to close the debate on a key financial measure: the Vote on Supply. Some Irish Party MPs protested against this by refusing to take part in the division, and were named and suspended from the House. What followed recalled Redmond’s first day in Parliament in 1881: the suspended Members refused to leave the House, resisted the Sergeant-at-Arms and made it necessary to call in the police, while the Irish members sang ‘God Save Ireland’ amidst the uproar. Two nights later, Redmond, who had been absent during the disruption, denounced Conservative leader A.J. Balfour’s proposal to punish resistance to the Speaker’s directions with suspension for the rest of the session. His speech built to an impassioned calling into question of the very presence of the Irish representatives at Westminster under the Union:

I know a number of Members whose attendance in this House means for them practically ruin in their professions, and who come here simply from a sense of public duty, and who would not suffer in the slightest degree if you suspended them for the remainder of the session… the passing of every such rule as this… discloses to the world the fact that, with all your constitutional forms, you hold one portion of the so-called United Kingdom simply by brute force….53

Reaction in Ireland was enthusiastic, while the Irish Independent’s London correspondent wrote:

In the lobby last evening it was universally conceded that Mr Redmond’s speech in which he impugned the arbitrary action of Mr Balfour on Wednesday morning was one of the greatest oratorical triumphs witnessed in the House of Commons in recent years… even stereotyped Conservatives were forced to acknowledge that the speech was a marvellous display of eloquence and vigour.54

Balfour agreed that Redmond was perhaps the most gifted speaker in Parliament, though he lamented the ‘sad debasement of a noble gift of oratory’.55 In fact, his oratory in general balanced well-researched factual content and argument with a feature first noticed by the schoolmaster who had called him ‘the greatest actor that was ever seen at Clongowes’. A writer of ‘Parliamentary Portraits’ for the English Western Daily Mercury remarked on the theatricality of his parliamentary performances. Other Members, Sir William Harcourt excepted, were merely ‘speakers – debaters without style, appealing neither to the heart nor the passions, but addressing themselves to our material instincts’, while Redmond was:

… endowed with melodramatic powers of expression that exalt him above the greatest of our existing debaters… In his personal appearance Mr Redmond… walks with the measured stride of the well-graced actor… is senatorial in habit and carriage… Self-composed, and without heat of expression or hurry of movement, he now assists to preserve the illusion of greatness….56

Another English sketch-writer found in Redmond’s oratory:

… rarely an unnecessary phrase, and in this self-repression we see the real John Redmond – purposeful and strong… he has a superb gift of silence… Mr Redmond may appear pompous at times; he is always impressive….57

His transatlantic audience had been given the excitement they craved, and his cable of 15 March to the New York World drove home the point: they had shown that ‘a united, determined, active Irish Party, enabled to maintain constant attendance at Westminster, has the British Parliament at its mercy, the first and most important step towards compelling it to grant National self-government to Ireland.’58 The rising stock of the Irish Party contrasted with the poor standing of the British parties. Healy wrote to his father in February of his low opinion of both Government and Opposition: the first was merely ‘a Balfour–Chamberlain duet in debating power’, while the Liberal front bench, apart from Harcourt, was ‘not worth a curse’. The Irish had an abler team in proportion to their numbers than any of the others. Of Redmond, he wrote ‘the O’Brienites would not now tolerate an intrigue to unship Redmond, who will gradually consolidate his position’.59

With Liberals speaking in different voices on the South African war and other matters, the Irish Party was increasingly spoken of as the only real opposition in Parliament, its leader regarded by Ministers as the only person in the House with whom they could treat.60 By general consent, Redmond’s was the most important Opposition speech on the Budget; the following night he took the lead in opposing Balfour’s plan to take more days for Government business. In short, wrote the Independent enthusiastically, he had taken over the role of the recently elected Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman:

Looking back on the matter now… one can only wonder that there was ever any hesitation in a reunited party placing Mr Redmond at the helm… during the last couple of months he has manifested such industry, such unflagging attention to the onerous duties of his position, such dignity in demeanour, such eloquence in debate, and such political instinct, as would do credit to any leader of any political party, and which must have effect on an assembly like the House of Commons.61

The Manchester Guardian’s Irish correspondent wrote in May of the return of confidence and pride in the Irish representatives, while of Redmond’s leadership he wrote:

I hear from all sides of Mr Redmond’s tact and eloquence, as to which I had never had any misgiving; but I am agreeably surprised to hear of his strength and firmness as well – qualities which are essential in the success of his task.62

Redmond gave his own assessment to O’Callaghan in April. The UIL was now present in practically every county, even in places such as Wexford, which had previously been hostile, and ‘since Parliament opened, Mr Healy has carefully abstained from saying or doing anything of a hostile character’.63 Healy, on the other hand, was convinced that, behind the public appearances, the split lived on. One night during the following January in the Commons dining-room, he saw Dillon pass over a vacant seat at Redmond’s table. ‘He took a table by himself, where he was joined by T.P.’ According to Healy, Dillon ‘never made up the breach with Redmond’, but caucused continually with T.P. O’Connor, Irish Party MP for Liverpool, and:

… treated Redmond as a makeshift. So he was, no doubt, but this did not justify the constant projection of a rival to the Chair….64

Dillon would have pleaded his innocence of any such intentions. In the first of several tributes he would make at intervals right to the end of Redmond’s life, always careful to distinguish between a personal friendship he did not feel and the political partnership he valued, he thanked Redmond publicly at Coalisland in September for kind words he had spoken of his services to the party, and went on:

Whether he [Mr Dillon]liked his leader or not, he would feel it a sacred duty to be loyal to the leader in the face of the common enemy. Mr Redmond had made that duty a light and pleasant duty for those who served under him by his constant courtesy and by the determination which he had exhibited throughout the whole of the session to consult every member of the party and to allow every member of the party the full weight of his opinion… he had set an example to them of steady, persisting, untiring attention to duty….65

Healy expected O’Brien’s fanaticism to cause further dissension, which was likely to lead to O’Brien’s ultimate isolation within the party in the face of Redmond’s increasing strength. But O’Brien, worn out by his epic struggle against Healy and his tireless organizing work, could take no further part in political life after the first few weeks of the session. He would not return to the House until April 1902. He publicly offered to resign his seat, but Redmond would not hear of it, hoping solicitously that, ‘by keeping worry of all sorts at arms length’ he would soon be himself again.66 Nor was Redmond himself exempt from the strains of the work. He confided to O’Brien in May: ‘I intend at Whitsuntide to lie low for a week or ten days. Twelve hours a day here takes it out of me.’67

At the close of the session in August, by which time there had been further stormy scenes and the suspensions of Willie Redmond and Pat O’Brien from the House, the Liberal Morning Leader wrote:

This session has been a triumph for the Irish members, and they seem to like a fight to the finish, as last night’s debate goes to prove… More than once they have damaged [the Government] directly in a fair fight; oftener they have forced it into extravagances which were only confessions of its own weakness and irritation. The invasion of the House by the police, and the voting of Supply en bloc are the two crowning instances.68

The trustees of the parliamentary fund summed it all up in their address to the Irish people on 19 August: ‘Once more an Irish Party is respected and feared in the British Parliament.’69

IV

Success at home was one thing; in America quite another. The party’s parliamentary fund had turned in more than £8,000 by the end of the session, almost all of it raised in Ireland, a sum just sufficient to meet the needs of that year.70 Much of it was needed to pay allowances to members removed from their regular occupations by attendance at Westminster, or by extra-parliamentary League work, in an era before the payment of salaries to MPs. It was no surprise that Redmond received many applications – Healy claimed he was embarrassed by fifty-one at the start of that session – for subsidy. In September he told O’Brien: ‘All I want is to provide that the opening of the session shall not find the party penniless [Redmond’s emphasis]’.71 A visit to the US was the obvious way to tap new sources of funding, and Redmond felt sure that an autumn delegation that included himself and a prominent former anti-Parnellite, ideally Dillon, could raise up to £30,000, though it had to reckon with the influence of Clan-na-Gael:

As you well know, there is a great outside Irish public, and I am convinced we can appeal to them with success… They are only beginning to realize slowly in America that the reunion in Ireland is genuine, and I am convinced that our appearance together on American platforms would have an enormous effect in every part of the United States.72

It was soon clear that neither Dillon nor O’Brien, both pleading exhaustion, would be part of the delegation. Davitt, who would be in the US in early autumn on private business, promised to take part in the first meetings in New York, but decided to come home early.73 A disappointed Redmond told O’Brien of feeling ‘very sore about this… Of course it will be taken as a clear proof that “unity” is all humbug….’74

Lacking the big names that would advertise the reunion of constitutional nationalism, he had to settle for P.A. McHugh, the Leitrim MP and proprietor of the Sligo Champion, just out of prison having served a six-month sentence. Sailing with them on 24 October was Thomas O’Donnell, the young Irish-speaking MP for West Kerry.75 In a five-week tour of north-eastern US and Canadian cities, the delegates were received by the pro-Home Rule President Theodore Roosevelt and the Canadian Premier, met a group of Irish–American millionaires and addressed a conference of Irish societies in New York City. American supporters impressed on them the need for organization across the States. Redmond kept Dillon informed on the progress of the struggle against the Clan. In November, when they had already held ‘enormous meetings’, he reported that:

…the Clan are offering a most malicious opposition. In New York, Devoy and some others personally waited on our leading friends and threatened to break up our meetings. The success of the meetings and the enthusiasm must have opened their eyes.76

Late that month, exhaustion was setting in but the League could not be stopped:

The Clan is suffering heavily from its attacks on us… This cannot go on, and I have been approached within the last couple of days to know if I would meet Devoy and some others to discuss a possible arrangement. We are stronger in America than I had any idea of.77

On his return, Redmond could report the founding of an American UIL auxiliary organization. His hopes of funds at Land League levels were still high, but there were no precise figures.78 The ‘first fruits’ were announced on 20 January as $3,000 (£600), received from Irish New Yorkers. In the spring of 1902, Willie Redmond and Joe Devlin, the leading Belfast organizer of the League, were sent to the US to follow up the delegation’s work. Devlin returned at the end of June to announce that 200 branches of the League had been founded; however, although a ‘million-dollar fund’ had been started in Boston, they were able to send home only $5,000 (£1000).79 Redmond’s confident earlier estimates were a mirage. In the opinion of Irish police intelligence, the mission had been a failure, the footsteps of the delegates having been dogged by the Clan.80

V

With a post-Tory future in mind, Redmond was anxious to cultivate the natural allies of the Home Rule cause in the growing British labour movement.81 Before leaving for the US, his call for local Irish support for a Labour candidate against a Roseberyite (anti-Home Rule) Liberal in a Scottish by-election had used the language of socialism:

The ruling classes in England are as much the enemies of the masses of the English people as they are enemies of the masses of the Irish people, and we in the House of Commons have shaped our course during the past session so as to prove to the masses of the toiling workers of England that we are after all their best and truest friends….82

Quoting Lecky’s claim that ‘no great democratic reform for the benefit of the people of Great Britain was ever carried out exclusive of the vote by the Irish members’, he listed several measures – bills regulating the working hours of miners and factory workers and providing for sanitary and safety inspections – on which the Irish Party vote had been critical in winning majorities.83 Yet a different attitude was evident when Labour values clashed with the interests of Catholic religious orders on an Irish issue affecting perhaps the most defenceless workers of all. During the committee stage of a bill to amend the Factory Acts in July 1901, the Irish Party resisted an attempt to remove the exemption from inspection of Irish convent laundries – the ‘Magdalen’ laundries employing women socially disgraced by extramarital pregnancy – defending them as institutions ‘conducted in good faith for religious or charitable purposes’. Previous opposition from the Irish MPs had forced a Liberal Home Secretary to abandon an earlier attempt in 1895 to have these institutions inspected. Now the Irish members rejected a compromise proposal from the Home Secretary, and an amendment in Dillon’s name called for the continuation of the blanket exemption for convents, prisons, reformatories and industrial schools. Dillon threatened to block the entire bill if this were not accepted. By the time Willie Redmond stood up to propose Dillon’s amendment, Home Secretary Ritchie had already given way, despite strong protests from Liberal MPs, to save the bill from defeat. Willie stated their motives:

No scandal had occurred in these institutions in Ireland; no such scandals could occur… [the amendment] would have the effect of exempting those very limited number of Magdalen asylums, the conductors of which stated that… they could not continue to conduct them if they were thrown open to the ordinary inspection by the Government.84

One of those objecting most strongly to the exemption demand was the Scottish Liberal John Burns MP, one of the strongest advocates of the Home Rule cause and a future minister in the Liberal Government that would enact Home Rule. Although Redmond would have to take care not to alienate such supporters over such issues, six years later a Liberal Home Secretary, Herbert Gladstone, at his urging, would continue the exemption from the provisions of the Factory Act of ‘charitable, reformatory or religious institutions’.85

The party’s adherence to Catholic social values did not mean unquestioning obedience to the Church authorities on more purely political matters; indeed, during the following year, it ran into direct confrontation with them. The party had decided in secret on 7 October 1902, just before Redmond’s departure on a second visit to the US, to attend Westminster in strength at the opening of the autumn session to denounce coercion, then withdraw to Ireland to continue the struggle. Parliament reassembled on 16 October; eleven days later the party, led by O’Brien, made its protest and abandoned the House. It was thus absent from the debates on the later stages of the Tories’ Education Bill, which had already passed its Commons committee stage. That bill, which proposed to give public funding to Anglican and Catholic primary schools in England and Wales, was strongly supported by the hierarchies of those British churches and approved by the Irish Catholic bishops, though deeply unpopular with the members of the smaller Protestant sects – the Nonconformists – who objected to the forcing of Anglican religious teaching on their children where no alternative schools were available. On 6 October, the Irish bishops had privately endorsed a public appeal from Cardinal Vaughan to Redmond to continue his support for the bill in Parliament; an action prevented by the party decision to withdraw. Redmond, mandated to explain their reasons confidentially to the bishops, wrote to them that, while the party was ‘deeply sensible’ of the burdens on their Catholic countrymen in Britain, still heavier burdens were placed on the Catholics of Ireland by Government policies affecting ‘the very existence of our people in their own country’.86 It was an old discomfort for Irish Catholic nationalists to be caught between the demands of English Catholics, mostly Tory and anti-Home Rule, and those of Nonconformists opposed to rule by bishops of all hues but sympathetic to Home Rule.87

Redmond returned to London from New York on 9 November, almost two weeks after the party’s withdrawal to Ireland, to hear of attacks by Healyites and the Independent for its desertion of the bill, and calls for its immediate return to Westminster. Addressing a reception committee at Kingstown ten days later, he warned against a conspiracy by ‘certain men’ acting under the guise of safeguarding Catholic education in England, who had never shown their faces when the party had plodded through the lobby for weeks in support of the bill, but who now saw a chance ‘to come out of their lairs’ to attack the unity of the party. The party’s absence from Parliament could not now influence the bill’s enactment, since it had passed the Commons with huge majorities and was now in the Lords.88 Redmond’s speech stirred the Catholic bishops, silent until now, to open dissent and, on 25 November, the press carried a letter from Archbishop Walsh of Dublin calling the party’s abstention from the Education Bill debates wrong and its consequences bad. The Freeman, until then fully behind Redmond’s stance, began to wobble, writing of the ‘regrettable’ difference of opinion.89 O’Brien wrote, with characteristic overstatement, to Redmond:

His Grace’s performance is characteristic. Brayden’s [Freeman editor] feebleness is much worse. I daresay we will have a cannonade of similar clerical pronouncements with probably a few desertions by the weaker men… These men’s conduct at a moment like this in the fate of Ireland is one of the most horrible crimes in history….90

Redmond expected the storm to blow over, and cautioned O’Brien not to add fuel to the flames: ‘The party is quite sound. There are not three men who needed to be feared to turn tail tho’ no doubt many men here have got a fright.’ However, the row would give a ‘new lease’ to the increasingly Healyite Independent, and:

… we must now face a fresh campaign of abuse and blackguardism – and we cannot rely on the Freeman… I wish you had possession of the Independent. It is not safe for the movement to have to rely solely on the Freeman.91

Over the following days, the Freeman pressed for a change of stance, alleging that the bill was no longer safe without Irish votes, and publishing reports of opposition to the party’s policy at meetings of elected local bodies.92 On 29 November, having received an urgent telegram from a group of Donegal priests representing their bishop, Redmond immediately wired O’Brien that he feared ‘hostile action unless some nominal concession such as promising to return if Lords seriously injured bill’.93 The bishop in question was Patrick O’Donnell, Bishop of Raphoe, one of the leading intellects in the Catholic Hierarchy and a trustee of the party’s parliamentary fund. Such a powerful supporter could not be ignored. That day, Redmond publicly notified all party MPs that their action had been misunderstood by the bishops, ‘who, of course, on a question of this kind, have a special right to have their views listened to with the deepest respect’. In the autumn session, they would have swelled huge Government majorities needlessly; however, the bill might yet have been damaged, or improved, in the House of Lords, and ‘the presence of the Irish Members in the House of Commons, when the measure returns to that Assembly, may be of real importance’. Accordingly, ‘and in deference to the strong views expressed by the Irish Hierarchy’, he requested members to be ready to come to London if called on.94 Redmond confided to O’Brien his frustration at his inability to resist clerical power. Writing the letter was ‘a choice of evils’:

Any appearance of backing down must of course injure the prestige of the party – that I am quite conscious of. On the other hand, I am convinced Dr O’Donnell’s withdrawal would mean the immediate breakup of the movement here and abroad – the end of our Funds – and a split in the party at once. My letters and wires indicate all this…. P.S. I feel greatly disheartened. Our people are not able to stand up against the Church and the Church always, in every critical moment, has gone wrong. In ’52, in ’67, in Parnell’s crisis and now! – not to go further back.95

In mid-December, the contingency foreseen by Redmond materialized when the Commons considered a Lords amendment to put the cost of repairs to denominational schools on the rates, an improvement of particular benefit to the Irish Catholic schools in Britain that made it imperative for Redmond to issue a whip. Fifty-seven MPs rallied to Redmond’s call on 16 December, carrying the amendment by a majority of thirty-eight. The following day, they helped defeat, by a twenty-two-vote majority, a Nonconformist-backed attempt to weaken the rights of bishops in disputes over religious teaching.96 The Liberal Daily News, a long-time advocate of both secularism and Home Rule, lamented: ‘Mr Redmond’s tactics have answered magnificently as a demonstration of the power of organized Irish democracy… its crucial influence on our politics was never more powerfully illustrated’.97

Redmond’s deft handling ensured that the Education Bill episode was a threatened rather than an actual crisis for the party, yet its elements and actors foreshadowed the pattern of future crises: powerful former members now acting against it; two newspapers, one hostile, the other a sometimes unreliable ally and the interference of turbulent clerics appealing to the nationalist electorate over the heads of their elected representatives, seeking to bend the latter to their will.

VI

Parliamentary work was only one part of the party’s strategy to advance the land reform issue; the other was the promotion of vigorous agitation all over the country, which, Redmond stated in a letter to his MPs published in the press in late August 1901, was ‘a duty quite as important and imperative as attendance at Westminster’.98 Already by that date, with 100,000 members in 1,000 branches, the UIL had surpassed in size the Land League and National League.99 A programme of public League meetings was published, and Redmond led with a visit to O’Brien’s heartland of Westport on 1 September. The agitation, he said at Lismore in September, should be ‘of so strong, so intense, and so menacing a character that the landlords who are holding out against us and the Government will be forced… to come in and deal seriously with this matter… If you are in earnest, make this winter the last winter of Irish landlordism (cheers).’ However, any form of violence or outrage was ‘foreign to our programme and injurious to our cause’.100 In reality, ‘agitation’ skirted the borders of illegality with its boycotts and intimidation of people deemed obnoxious to the UIL – those who took evicted farms or grazing lands wanted for subdivision. Among those who showed greatest gusto was Willie, who gave his brother’s lofty words a populist gloss by calling for the boycotting of ‘enemies of the people’ to make the movement ‘a terror to England’. ‘We cannot fight in Ireland today as the Boers are fighting; I wish to God we could…’, he told a Clare meeting in January 1902.101

The League’s first Convention had been termed by Redmond ‘the Parliament of the people of Ireland’. Its developing agitation in late 1901 took on the character of what Bull has called an ‘alternative or de facto government’. League branches enforced its will at local level, using ‘League courts’ to give a semblance of legality to the intimidation of grazier farmers and land-grabbers.102 There had been calls from unionists throughout the year for the League to be proscribed, but the Chief Secretary had stalled.103 Only in January 1902, when four MPs were sentenced to prison terms under the Crimes Act on charges of incitement arising from their speeches, did Wyndham seem serious about trying to suppress the agitation. This occasioned protests by the party in Parliament, and on 28 February Dillon arraigned Wyndham and the Government in the House on its revival of coercion.104 April saw an escalation, with the proclamation by the Lord Lieutenant of nine counties and two cities as being in ‘a state of disturbance’, the abrogation of trial by jury in those counties and the revival of the ‘removable magistrates’ system, in abeyance since Plan of Campaign days.105

George Wyndham was thirty-eight in early 1902, a man of forceful personality and imagination possessed by a romantic sympathy for Ireland, partly derived from family connections with the 1798 rebel Lord Edward Fitzgerald, as well as confidence in his ambition to bring about what Andrew Gailey terms ‘the constructive rejuvenation of Irish society, and not simply the alleviation of certain social problems’.106 Though pressed by the Cabinet, his reluctance to take the coercion path stemmed from his conviction that it would threaten his plan to bring in a successful land bill, for which he would need Irish Party support.107 Redmond had told an Arklow meeting in May 1901 that he had given the Chief Secretary ‘tender treatment’ on his appointment, but that it was now ‘time to take off the gloves and fight him’. At a Limerick public meeting in July 1902, he called him, implausibly:

… one of the worst representatives of English rule who has come to Ireland within the last half-century… pretentious, incapable, supercilious… He is trying Coercion with us – let us try a little Coercion with him (cheers).108

Wyndham’s cousin Blunt was aware of the element of charade in Redmond’s rhetoric, and of what the two really thought of each other. In conversation with Blunt ‘about George’, Redmond confided in March 1902: ‘I am obliged to be fierce with him in public, but I know he is with us in his heart, and we all know it.’109 A month earlier, Blunt recorded:

Called on G. Wyndham and had a long talk with him about Ireland, which wholly occupies him. He is far more in sympathy with the Nationalists than with the Castle party… His own people, however, are constantly [urging] him to coerce, and he has been obliged to make a show of doing something in that way though most unwillingly… He was delighted when I repeated what Redmond said about him and that the Irish members still regarded him with a friendly eye….110

Wyndham, having fought for months against powerful opposition and severe financial constraints imposed by the Treasury, barely got a land bill through the Cabinet, and introduced it on 25 March 1902.111 It was soon evident that it was too limited in scope and offered too little inducement to the tenants to purchase. On 4 April in Cork, Redmond called it ‘a halting and insincere measure, which, if passed tomorrow, could not by any possibility go even an appreciable length in settling the Irish land question’; however, the Government had been ‘forced from their position of doing nothing’. Given the context of the heated atmosphere created by UIL agitation, a rent strike on the Roscommon de Freyne estate that left the League open to prosecution and monetary loss, Irish Party obstruction and pro-Boer utterances in the House and mounting unionist calls for full-blooded coercion, the bill stood little chance of a hearing in any case. Despite a feeble defence, Wyndham announced its effective withdrawal on 9 June.112

Coercion intensified in the early summer of 1902, with further arrests and sentencing of League workers and MPs, banning of meetings and reports of police brutality. By the end of the year, ten MPs, including Willie Redmond, had been imprisoned.113 The confrontational atmosphere spared any dilemmas regarding the party’s participation in the Coronation ceremonies for Edward VII. Its absence, Redmond said on 31 May, would ‘reveal to the world the canker which is eating at the very vitals of the Empire’.114 His announcement came just before the publication of the peace terms ending the South African War, which included the granting of Home Rule to the two Boer republics. Redmond rejoiced at the advent of peace, but remarked that only Ireland among pro-Boer nations had, by alienating British opinion, sacrificed her own interests to support them. In stating that her attitude had been motivated, not by race hatred against England, but by ‘high and noble motives’, he gave voice again to his long-held beliefs about the future of the Empire as a confederation of self-governing nations, into which Ireland, he hoped, would shortly follow the South African republics.115

The Government’s actions exposed confusion among senior party men regarding the limits to which League tactics could go while remaining within the law. With O’Brien back in action since April, the UIL National Directory on 27 June met and issued a ‘fighting policy’ manifesto that urged a strengthening of boycotting.116 The following weekend, Redmond accompanied O’Brien to Limerick to explain its meaning to the local League executive. His speech was long on militant rhetoric but short on instructions on how to proceed. It was left to O’Brien to spell out the details.117 However, apprehension soon grew among their colleagues, who since the spring had feared the suppression of the League. Dillon had already indicated to Redmond his disapproval of the issuing of documents giving detailed instructions, which he felt were ‘always of more value to the Government than to the movement’.118

In August, O’Connor wrote O’Brien from London: ‘You think Ireland is too quiet; we here have the impression that Ireland is utterly disturbed.’119 O’Brien sent the letter to Redmond, asking him whether he agreed that he had ‘gone too far’.120 Redmond replied from Aughavanagh that he quite agreed that the country ‘wanted rousing up’, but ‘where I differ from you is as to the means’. If the Limerick speech were repeated all over the country, and wholesale boycotting propounded as League policy, the consequence would be suppression and the imprisonment of the leaders, to be followed by ‘confusion, chaos and renewed apathy’.121 O’Brien protested at the contradiction between the expressed support of Redmond and Dillon for the manifesto and their objection to the only means of giving it genuine effect. Convinced that Redmond shared the views of Dillon, O’Connor and Blake, he declared himself willing to ‘keep in the background’ and leave the others free to develop the agitation as they saw fit.122

The wish of MPs to avoid imprisonment was not a matter of personal cowardice or fear of discomfort.123 Rather, these middle-aged men probably sensed themselves near the point reached by Parnell in October 1881 when he had told Healy ‘we have pushed this movement as far as it can constitutionally go’, and remembered the nightmare winter that had followed, when Parnell’s imprisonment left a leadership vacuum that allowed outrage and murder free rein over large parts of the countryside.124 Redmond was thus anxious to present the agitation in the most respectable light possible. At Cork on 18 July and Taghmon on 31 August, he dressed boycotting in the clothes of trades unionism. A ‘formidable and dangerous agitation’ meant applying ‘those legal rights and powers of combination and exclusive dealing which are freely exercised by Englishmen in all the great trades unions in Great Britain’ to ‘every unreasonable landlord, to every grazier, to every land-grabber in every parish….’125

Coercion reached its climax on 1 September when Dublin city and county, along with five other counties, were proclaimed. A well-attended protest meeting followed a few days later at the Mansion House addressed by Redmond, Dillon, the Lord Mayor and the four Dublin Nationalist MPs. Privately, Dillon was greatly relieved at the proclamation, which made it less likely that O’Brien would return to the offensive, ‘not the first time that the Government has extricated us from serious difficulties by timely action’.126

Just as coercion was forcing Redmond and his colleagues to rein in the land agitation, conciliation was suddenly in the air. Over the summer, letters from two landlords, Lindsay Talbot-Crosbie and Col. William Hutcheson Poë, had appeared in the press. Both advocated a conference between representatives of landlords and tenants to seek agreement on the land question. Both argued that land purchase could not advance until the Government provided sufficient finance to bridge the gap between the minimum acceptable to the landlord and the maximum affordable by the tenant.127 Two days after the proclamation of Dublin, a third letter was published, from a young Co. Galway landlord, Capt. John Shawe-Taylor, that went a step further. It suggested the names of eight men, four from the landlord side and four from that of the tenants: Redmond, O’Brien, T.C. Harrington and T.W. Russell, to act as representatives at a conference.128 Two days later, approval of the proposal came from Wyndham: ‘No Government can settle the Irish land question. It must be settled by the parties interested.’ The Government could only provide facilities and give effect to any settlement agreed by the parties.129

In O’Brien’s later assessment, this endorsement ‘lifted Capt. Shawe-Taylor’s proposal from the insignificance of an irresponsible newspaper squib to the proportions of a national event of the first magnitude’.130 Neither he nor Redmond, however, at first treated it seriously, Redmond writing to O’Brien: ‘Of course, Shawe-Taylor’s suggestion only made me laugh’, and telling a Waterford audience that the letter writers were ‘a few unrepresentative men’ and that the struggle must go on until the ‘commanders of the landlord army’, and not only its privates, were ready for peace.131 When Shawe-Taylor wrote to him directly on 15 September, however, his reply was open-minded:

I suppose, however, that I may take it for granted that it is a proposal for the abolition of dual ownership of land in Ireland. If this be so, I could not take the responsibility of refusing to confer upon this subject with genuine representatives of the landlords, but it would be absurd, as you must admit, for me to go into a Conference with men who had no authority to give effect to any conclusions arrived at. I fear at this stage I can give you no more definite reply.132

By this point, O’Brien was also willing to take part. Before sending his reply to Shawe-Taylor, Redmond asked O’Brien to show it to Dillon, ‘and if he approves, please post it for me’.133 It seems that Dillon did see the reply, and on 22 September the two men’s letters were published. The following day, two of Shawe-Taylor’s landlord nominees publicly rejected the proposal, and three weeks later the Landowners’ Convention voted in the same spirit by seventy-seven to fourteen.134 Undeterred, the Earl of Mayo and thirteen other landlords issued a circular, published in the press on 18 October, dissenting from the Convention decision and stating their intention to canvass the opinion of all landowners of more than 500 acres (4,000 of an estimated 13,000; smaller-estate owners were presumed to be predominantly in favour).135

As the Irish landlords deliberated, Redmond and Amy sailed for New York on 10 October, this time in the company of Dillon and Davitt, Mrs John Martin, the aged sister of John Mitchel, and young William, who celebrated his sixteenth birthday on the voyage.136 Devlin’s organizing work had laid the groundwork for the holding of the first UIL of America convention in Boston. Redmond’s oration to the Symphony Hall gathering on 20 October stirred the audience with the claim that the UIL was now the ruling power in Ireland; he called for generous subscriptions to match a fund of $500,000 being raised by the landlords to counter the League. Having fired up the crowd with talk of Ireland’s ‘grand old fighting race’ and its right to win freedom through armed insurrection, he brought them back to earth:

… if anybody tells me at this moment, and under the existing conditions in Ireland, that that is possible, I say he is either endeavouring to deceive people or he is ignorant of the facts.137

The delegates responded well to the sight of Redmond and Dillon together as visible evidence of the reunion, and the convention was judged to be a significant success, resulting in pledges of $100,000 (£20,000) in subscriptions to be paid within six months, the first £2,000 instalment of which arrived in Ireland in December.138

Leaving Dillon and Davitt in the US, Redmond arrived home to the news that the landlord poll had shown a two-to-one majority in favour of a conference.139 At Bermondsey, he addressed a London Irish audience on the changed political conditions in Ireland. ‘For the first time in their whole history, the great majority of Irish landlords are speaking words of sense and reason and conciliation….’140 In reality, the Shawe-Taylor initiative offered not only an escape for landlords from the spiral of mounting debt and diminishing control that Redmond had described in his Commons speech, but also rescue for Redmond and O’Brien from the crisis facing their agrarian campaign, as well as for Wyndham from the imminent collapse of his own plans for a transformation of the land system.141

By early December, another landlord poll had chosen four representatives: the Earl of Dunraven, owner of more than 16,000 acres in Munster, the Earl of Mayo, Col. Hutcheson Poë and Col. Nugent Everard. On 1 December, Redmond met Dunraven to draw up terms of reference for the conference. He was told that the Government meant ‘a big thing’ and that Wyndham was ‘breast high for a big deal’; Dunraven himself also had views ‘as to some kind of Home Rule afterwards’, as Redmond reported to O’Brien.142 The Government’s favourable attitude had been indicated by the appointment as Under-Secretary of Sir Antony MacDonnell, former Governor of Bengal, a Catholic Irishman, nationalist sympathizer and brother of the Irish Party MP for Queen’s County.143 The eight delegates now awaited only the Christmas recess to get down to business.

VII

In Ireland, the dance of repression and conciliation continued. Shortly after MacDonnell’s appointment, Willie Redmond was arrested at Kingstown on 4 November and given a six-month sentence in default of bail for incitement in Wexford. As the preparations for the Land Conference were made, the law took its course with the imprisonment of two other MPs and a newspaper editor.144

The four tenant representatives invited by Shawe-Taylor gathered with the four elected landlord delegates at the Mansion House on 20 December for the conference whose very coming together Redmond would soon describe as ‘the most remarkable event in the lifetime of any of us’.145 On O’Brien’s advice, Redmond proposed that the chair be taken by Lord Dunraven. The conference met over six days and issued its report on 4 January 1903. There was agreement on eighteen recommendations, eight of which O’Brien considered vital from the tenants’ point of view. There would be no compulsion, but a package of incentives to voluntary purchase based on the provision of state loans to the tenants. The guiding principles were that the price to be paid to landlords, when invested, should give them an income equivalent to that from their net second-term rents, that the repayment annuities payable by the tenants should be significantly lower than their second-term rents, and that the state should provide a bonus to make up the difference between the sums paid by the tenant and to the landlord. In addition, there should be special measures to restore the remaining evicted tenants, to provide land in the Western congested districts and to build houses for agricultural labourers.146

On 3 February, coercion was revoked for almost all of the country, and most of the imprisoned MPs were released. Local bodies reflected public opinion in praising the report. O’Brien advised an attitude of ‘cheerful expectancy… [but] armed expectancy’. Dillon, who had been sceptical of the conference idea in the autumn but had not opposed the party’s welcome for it, was still in the US when the Land Conference met. Taken ill at Chicago and forced to abandon the tour with Davitt and Blake, he returned home on 7 January in ill health and maintained a public silence on the report.147 It was Davitt who opened up a fierce attack on the Conference terms in a series of eight long letters to the Freeman beginning on 12 January. He had concluded from his own calculations and the statements of others that: ‘The cardinal fault of the report is that it gives altogether too high a price to the landlords, and thereby offers too little to the tenants to induce them to purchase.’ His chief claim was that the landlords were to be paid about thirty-three years’ purchase (the annual rent multiplied by the number of years), some twelve years’ purchase more than what he claimed was the market value of the land. They showed ‘a wolfish greed worthy of their record… of a grasping, sordid kind worthy of a Shylock….’148 Davitt was soon joined by Archbishop Walsh, fresh from his reprimand of the party a few months earlier, who launched an equally fierce series of broadsides on 12 February, writing of the tenants as having been ‘first blindfolded, and then misinformed by their self-constituted representatives as to the direction they were being marched in’; the seventeen or eighteen years’ purchase mentioned in the report as the price to be paid by the tenants he called a ‘ridiculous fable’.149

Apart from these two, the most trenchant critic was the Freeman itself, which had welcomed the conference but, from the day of the report’s issue, maintained an almost daily and increasingly overt editorial attack. O’Brien later wrote of his amazement on discovering that Thomas Sexton, the paper’s managing director, had written the critical leader on that first morning; in fact, he had taken personal charge of all editorials on the land issue from then onwards, and would use them to undermine both the report and the subsequent Land Act.150

Redmond responded with two speeches in Britain: one at Edinburgh on 17 January, in which he explained and defended the conference terms; the other at Lincoln’s Inn Fields two weeks later, in which he claimed that Irish opinion on the matter was ‘for all practical purposes a unit’ and that almost all the criticism was based on ‘an entire misrepresentation of [the report’s] terms and meaning’. Answering the archbishop, he said that no objections had been voiced in the party to any of the four names proposed as tenant representatives: ‘I say that Mr O’Brien, Mr Harrington and I went into that Conference as the authorized delegated representatives of the Irish Party….’151

Privately, he was not unduly perturbed by the criticisms, confiding to O’Brien on 14 January that Davitt’s first letter had not come as a surprise and would ‘do no harm’. However, he wondered nervously about Dillon’s views: ‘he hasn’t said a word to me about the conference’. He hoped there was ‘no danger of Dillon chiming in with Davitt’. The criticism was to be expected, but need not worry them ‘if we can keep the organization free from hostile declarations’. In a public letter to the Limerick county council chairman on 26 January, he called the thirty-three years’ purchase claim ‘an absurd mistake’.152 He might have been more concerned at Dillon’s possible attitude had he seen his handwritten comments on a copy of the December circular sent to MPs by Redmond asking their opinion of the four names originally suggested. Dillon’s note reads: ‘Copy of circular sent out by R – no copy ever reached me. JD 7 Feb. 1903… And the first I heard of this was R’s speech last Sunday [at Lincoln’s Inn Fields]… Note members are not asked whether or not they approve of meeting Dunraven and Co. at all.’153

On 11 February, after a week in which he made three journeys to Ireland and back, Redmond wrote that he did not think that Davitt could do any more harm: ‘If the Directory and the party speak out, the country will have made its opinion clear’.154 The two bodies did just that, giving the report resounding endorsements on 16 February in Dublin, although Dillon and Davitt were absent from both meetings. The following day, the party met at Westminster before the opening of Parliament and agreed almost unanimously that Redmond should move an amendment to the Address urging the Government to take action ‘by giving the fullest and most generous effect to the Land Conference Report’. The dissentient was Dillon, who wanted no reference made to the conference, effectively asking the party to reverse its endorsement. According to O’Brien’s record of the meeting, Redmond was roused into ‘prompt and dignified protest’, lamenting that Dillon had been in America when the Conference had met, as otherwise they would have insisted on his being a delegate.155 On 28 February, a party statement expressed concern at the effect in Britain of the newspaper controversy, and appealed to public men to abstain from further argument pending the introduction of the Land Bill. Dillon, still in ill health, had already told Redmond that he would leave soon for Egypt to recuperate and would not return before May.156

Wyndham introduced his great Land Bill on 25 March 1903. Taking its ambitious scope from the conference report, it went far beyond all previous land-purchase legislation. The tenants would repay the purchase money over 68.5 years at an interest rate of 3.25 per cent. To the purchase sum the state would add a 12 per cent bonus from a fund of £12 million, taken from Irish revenues, to be paid to the landlords as an inducement to sell. The Land Bill set upper and lower limits, called ‘zones’, on the reductions represented by the tenants’ annuities on their current rents. These reductions (40 per cent to 20 per cent in the case of first-term rents, 30 per cent to 10 per cent in the case of second-term rents) were related mathematically to the number of years’ purchase to be paid. When the calculations were done, it was seen that the prices implied were in the range of 18.5 to 24.5 years’ purchase for tenants on first-term rents (who comprised four-fifths of all tenants), and 21.5 to 27.5 years’ purchase for tenants on the lower second-term rents.

It was immediately obvious, however, that the Land Bill fell short of the conference report in several important respects. The average prices involved compared unfavourably with the seventeen or eighteen years’ purchase of first-term rents recommended by the Conference. The zonal system, introduced to speed up sales by removing the need for official inspection, interfered with free bargaining between landlord and tenant. The bonus fund of £12 million, the maximum that Wyndham could extract from the Treasury, was much less than the £20 million suggested in the Conference Report. The once-a-decade reductions in the annuity amounts advocated in the report – with a resultant lengthening of the repayment period – were not provided for. Finally, the clauses dealing with the congested districts, labourers’ housing and evicted tenants were vague and inadequate.

The Freeman immediately attacked the Land Bill as an attempt to inflate land prices; a shameless indulgence of landlords’ rapacity by their friends in the Government. Sexton deployed his renowned financial expertise to show that the comparatively low annuity payments were a smokescreen for a far longer repayment period than under the existing Land Acts.157 These points were unlikely to be of great concern to the farmers, who were attracted above all by the prospect of paying below their current rents, but they ran the risk of souring the political atmosphere. Redmond admitted to a Dublin UIL branch on 8 April that the bill was far from perfect, but reminded his hearers that ‘whatever its defects… [it] is the first bill ever proposed by an English Ministry which has for its avowed object to carry into effect the policy of Parnell and the Land League’.

The real question was: should it be given a fair trial, with efforts being made to improve it, or should it be rejected and a better bill sought, involving ‘further years of struggle and of suffering’? Since Wyndham’s only defence of the huge cost to British taxpayers would be the savings expected from social peace in Ireland, Redmond was concerned lest negative criticism damage the bill’s chances, and warned of the Chief Secretary’s weak position: ‘Criticism… must be that of a friend rather than of an implacable enemy’.158

A national convention was scheduled to consider the bill in Dublin on 16 April, and Redmond confided his worries to O’Brien. He had tried to probe Wyndham as to possible amendments, but found the Chief Secretary ‘in a very shaky condition’, saying that there was no hope of more money and that a demand for more would be ‘fatal’, but anxious and willing to meet them on other points. He wanted to know about ‘the pulse of the country’, fearing dissent both at the convention and surrounding the impending visit in July of the new King, Edward VII, which threatened to revive the previous year’s controversy over the Coronation and to create a dilemma for the party in the new atmosphere of conciliation:

I fear great trouble and great injury to the chances of any bill at all if we have rival motions by leading men debated at the Convention… I fear the effects of the King’s visit. We cannot afford to officially receive him, and refusals to adopt addresses etc. will do harm….159

At the Mansion House on the morning of the convention, Redmond watched Davitt take his seat ‘with a brow of thunder’, and told O’Brien: ‘I am afraid we are going to have a row.’160 In the event, the convention gave unanimous support to a series of resolutions drafted by O’Brien that accepted the broad principles of the bill while demanding ‘serious amendment in various points of vital importance’. Dillon’s absence from the Convention, and careful stage-management by O’Brien, combined to maintain unity, the only dissenting voice being Davitt’s. His amendment, which called for approval to be deferred until the bill could be brought back in amended form after its third reading, seemed at first likely to be carried, but was withdrawn after a plea by Redmond that it would be seen as a vote of censure on the party and its leaders.161

In the House, the second reading was carried on 8 May, following a four-day debate that included a much-acclaimed speech from Healy, who lauded the bill as ‘a great measure of peace’ that brought a new spirit into Anglo-Irish relations.162 Dillon’s speech, a balancing act that, his biographer wrote, ‘must rank among the great achievements of his career’, excoriated landlordism and the bill’s deficiencies, yet stated that it should be passed.163

The Land Bill’s progress was unscathed by a rumpus in mid-May at Dublin’s Rotunda, where Redmond inaugurated the Dublin collection for the parliamentary fund. Harrington, now in his third consecutive term as Lord Mayor of Dublin, was in the chair. His speech was interrupted by Maud Gonne (now Mrs John MacBride, fresh from her incarnation as a blood-sacrifice-demanding Ireland in the title role of Cathleen Ni Houlihan, the nationalist play written for her by W.B. Yeats), the Galway landowner, playwright and recent convert from unionism Edward Martyn and three others, who took seats on the platform. Gonne demanded to know whether Harrington would oppose a loyal address to the King. The indignant MP jumped to his feet, and a fierce verbal altercation ensued between him and Gonne, the meeting dissolving into shouting, cheers and hisses. Chairs were thrown at the stage and thrown back, fighting erupted among the audience, blood flowed and more than forty people were hospitalized. After some time, the disrupters were ousted and Redmond spoke, regretting the scenes and the injury done to the image of Ireland. A second group, who interrupted his speech on the party finances by singing ‘A Nation Once Again’, were quickly ejected. The disturbers, he told O’Brien later, received ‘an unmerciful drubbing’.164

The bill went into committee on 15 June, when the parliamentary battle to win the convention amendments began in earnest. Wyndham rejected Redmond’s motion to have the ‘minimum price’ (or maximum reduction in annuity) dropped; the Government’s majority was a mere forty-one. Support for Redmond came from all but three of the 103 Irish MPs, reflecting the agreement of Ulster unionist tenants with their nationalist counterparts. Dillon, returned from the Nile, wanted Redmond to move the adjournment of the debate to the following day. Redmond told him, in O’Brien’s recollection, that if he wanted to follow that course and lose the bill, he must do it on his own responsibility.165 Other amendments to ensure greater reductions for the purchasers were equally unsuccessful.166 As a crisis loomed, Redmond wrote on 17 June to Blunt, who acted as his intermediary with Wyndham, that amendment of the zones clause was ‘the least required to avert disaster’. ‘Obstinate insistence on the zone limits’ would lead to ‘angry debates’, he wrote; the opposition to the bill was ‘intense, and is rapidly growing uncontrollable’, and Wyndham would make a fatal mistake if he thought that Irish hostility to the clause was a game of bluff. A week later, compromise was reached with the help of Dunraven and his friends, with an amendment to allow tenants and landlords to make purchase agreements outside the zones under certain conditions.167

Government concessions followed on other points, although none increased the bonus or restored the decadal reductions. In July, in line with the national convention resolutions, Redmond put another set of amendments on the congested-districts issue. Here he sought compulsory powers for the Congested Districts Board, a shortening of the time it took to acquire land and the inclusion of county council chairmen in its membership. Most importantly of all, he demanded an end to ‘fraudulent tenures’ entered into by the Board with graziers for large tracts of land in areas of congested holdings. Wyndham had little to offer on these matters, and, on compulsion, was adamant that ‘to introduce compulsion now would throw the ball in the Lords into the hands of those who are not too friendly to the bill and myself’. On the question of allotments for labourers, he promised to bring in a separate bill the following year.168

The toll taken by these arduous negotiations is evident from Redmond’s letters to O’Brien. Writing in May after a long talk with Dillon, he was very sorry to say that the latter was ‘far from well’ and did not seem fit for the strain of the committee stage. As for himself:

I am thinking of going away somewhere on the Continent for ten days or a fortnight as I feel myself that I want a few days clear of politics and I cannot get that in Ireland or here.169

Taking time away from the House near the end of the committee stage, he spoke of his workload. He had come to Burnley in Lancashire to thank Irish nationalists there ‘in the midst of anxious and exhausting work in Parliament’, in which they had been working fourteen to fifteen hours a day on the bill, then afterwards on related private work. He was not minded to complain:

I have been 22 years in the English Parliament, and today, for the first time in my experience, that Parliament is engaged in the work of attempting to legislate for Ireland according to Irish ideas.170

The last phases of the bill’s passage were uneventful. It became law on 14 August, and was due to come into effect on 1 November.171 Wyndham’s Land Act marks the high point of the policy sometimes called ‘Killing Home Rule with Kindness’, begun by the Tories on their accession to power in 1895, which already included the great reform of Irish local government in 1898 and the setting up of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction the following year.

As the gruelling session closed, Redmond and O’Brien had reason to savour the success of their efforts. According to O’Brien’s wife Sophie, her husband was ‘well pleased to leave Redmond all the glory and éclat of the achievement’.172 Only the wildlife of south Wicklow, it seemed, had reason to fear the future. The Daily News commented:

After work play. Mr John Redmond left London last night for Aughavanagh, where the Irish leader’s shooting lodge is situated. Mr Redmond has ‘bagged’ in Parliament this year the biggest game that any Irish leader has brought down since the Union. But it should not be forgotten… that this year’s measure has passed the Commons with the full sympathy and support of the Liberal Party. From the Irish standpoint, Mr Redmond’s leadership during the session now drawing to a close has placed him in a position of political influence in Ireland which even the greatest of his predecessors hardly excelled… the Irish now see in Mr Redmond a leader who has welded the Irish Party into a highly effective force more really united and better disciplined than perhaps that party has at any time been.173

He was about to be reminded of just how tenuous that unity was, and how fragile a thing his political influence.

Notes and References

1W.S. Blunt, My Diaries (London, 1920), diary entry for 15 May 1901, p. 422.

2Private Redmond collection, Dr Mary Green.

3Redmond to O’Brien, 28 Aug. 1901, OBP Ms. 10,496 (5). Margaret Leamy remembered a visit to Aughavanagh that ‘was made happy and delightful by the never-failing thoughtfulness and sweet kindly feeling of our hostess Mrs John Redmond’. Margaret Leamy, Parnell’s Faithful Few (New York, 1936), p. 172.

4Newscuttings of visit of Irish envoys to UIL of America convention in Boston, 1908, RP Ms. 7443.

5F.J., 26 Oct. 1914.

6Pat O’Brien MP to Frank Sheehy-Skeffington, 4 May 1907, Sheehy-Skeffington Papers, Ms. 21,618; Denis Gwynn, The Life of John Redmond (London, 1932), pp. 25–7.

7Stephen Gwynn, John Redmond’s Last Years (London, 1919), passim.

8F.S.L. Lyons, John Dillon:a biography (London, 1968), p. 246.

9Katherine Tynan, Memories (London, 1924), pp. 62–3.

10Denis Gwynn, author of the first full-length biography of Redmond, told the Director of the National Library in 1952, twenty years after the publication of his biography, that he had taken away three of seven trunks of papers from Aughavanagh; he had not gone through the other four as they dealt with by-elections and UIL affairs. Of the three he took, he worked through them, selecting the important material for his book and returning the rest in two trunks to Captain Redmond (John’s son). ‘They have apparently disappeared,’ he noted. The single trunk kept by Gwynn contained the papers that now form the bulk of the more than 10,000 documents in the Redmond Mss. at the National Library of Ireland. Denis Gwynn to Edward McLysaght, 7 Oct. 1952, RP Ms. 15,280.

11D. Gwynn, Life, pp. 25–6.

12Ibid.; John J. Horgan, Review of Stephen Gwynn’s John Redmond’s Last Years in Studies, March 1920, pp. 139–141.

13Dillon wrote: ‘I need hardly say that I am extremely sorry to hear of the trouble you are involved in. It is a most melancholy and painful business….’ Dillon to Redmond, 12 Sep. 1902, RP Ms. 15, 182 (3).

14Redmond to O’Brien, 10 Nov. 1902, OBP Ms. 10,496 (6).

15Redmond to Amy Redmond, private Redmond collection, Dr Mary Green; Redmond to O’Brien, 26 Dec. 1902, OBP Ms. 10,496 (6).

16O’Mahony to Redmond, 15 Nov. 1902, RP Ms. 15,219 (3). O’Mahony (who in the meantime had moved to Sofia to set up an orphanage for Bulgarian victims of massacre) wrote in February 1904 hoping ‘that Willie progresses’. Three years later, O’Mahony was still offering to have the boy attended to at Grange Con. A party colleague, Edward Blake, wrote from Toronto to recommend ‘the Swedish treatment’, which he had heard was very efficacious in the case of the Duke of Hamilton, who had been having up to eight attacks a day and was rapidly sinking into paralysis. O’Mahony to Redmond, 22 Feb. 1904, RP Ms. 15,219 (3); Blake to Redmond, 6 Nov. 1902, RP Ms.15,170(2).

17Redmond to O’Brien, 14 Sep. 1903, OBP Ms. 10,496 (9).

18O’Mahony to Redmond, 20 Jul. 1907, RP Ms. 15,219 (3).

19The correspondence concerning the abandoned vocation of Louis G. Redmond-Howard is in the Redmond chronological papers for 1907, 1908 and 1909, RP Ms. 15,247 (6–9), 15,250 (1–2) and 15, 251 (1).

20R.F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London, 1993), p. 265.

21Lyons, Dillon, p. 206.

22Meleady, Redmond: the Parnellite, chapter 12.

23In late 1916, William Martin Murphy, the proprietor of the Irish Independent, a kinsman and sympa thizer with Healy, and by then a bitter political antagonist of Redmond, judged that ‘Redmond’s cardinal mistake as a Leader was made soon after his election, when he failed to assert himself. He had spent nearly a decade in the wilderness, with only a handful of followers, estranged from the bulk of the Party whom he was thenceforth to lead. He probably did not realize that they wanted a leader even more than he wanted a following. He did not know the strength of his position, with the result that he allowed himself to fall under the domination of others….’ W.M. Murphy to James O’Connor KC, 11 Dec. 1916, RP Ms. 15,209 (3).

24John J. Horgan, Review of Stephen Gwynn’s John Redmond’s Last Years in Studies, March 1920, pp. 139–141.

25Pat O’Brien MP to Frank Sheehy-Skeffington, 4 May 1907, Sheehy-Skeffington Papers, Ms. 21,618; D. Gwynn, Life, p. 27.

26Redmond to John O’Callaghan, 26 Apr. 1901, RP Ms. 15,213 (3).

27Stephen Gwynn, John Redmond’s Last Years (London, 1919), pp. 36–40. The journalist Francis Cruise O’Brien, a member of the Young Ireland Branch of the UIL, would write of Redmond in 1910: ‘There is nothing whatever of the crowd about Mr Redmond. He is always the aristocrat in politics, always essentially the gentleman… He has often listened to bitter attack, and he passed it by; he has endured unfair criticism, and heard undeserved sneers, and the blame of misunderstanding men, and he has borne all in silence. There is no childish petulancy about the man, no undignified hysteria, but a proud calm and a belief that in his own heart is his highest critic. He has the reserve… not merely of a proud, but also of a strong man…’ The Leader, 26 Feb. 1910.

28Joseph Devlin to Redmond, 20 May, Redmond to Devlin, 22 May 1905, RP Ms., 15,181 (1); Patrick Maume, The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Life 1891–1918 (Dublin, 1999), pp. 76–7. Maume’s book marshals a breathtaking array of sources to analyze the inner workings of the Irish Party/UIL machinery (and much else of Irish life).

29Padraig Yeates, Lockout: Dublin 1913 (Dublin, 2000), p. 45.

30Maume, Long Gestation, p. 77.

31F.S.L. Lyons, The Irish Parliamentary Party 1890–1910 (London, 1951), pp. 162–179.

32Of the new intake, only Joseph Devlin, first elected at thirty-one for Kilkenny North in 1902, who would later dominate nationalist politics in his native Belfast and nationalist Ulster generally, made it into the party’s inner circle; the others were Redmond (forty-four in 1901), Dillon (fifty in 1901) and T.P. O’Connor (fifty-two in 1901). Lyons, Parliamentary Party, pp. 158–161.

33Redmond to O’Callaghan, 26 Apr. 1901, RP Ms. 15,213 (3).

34Terence Denman, A lonely grave: the life and death of William Redmond (Dublin, 1995), p. 57; Richard P. Davis, Arthur Griffith and Non-Violent Sinn Féin (Dublin, 1974), p. 38.

35MacBride received 427 votes to 2,401 for John O’Donnell, the Irish Party candidate. Griffith’s paper United Irishman presented the by-election as ‘The Gold of the Jews against the Irish Brigade’ – a reference to William O’Brien’s wealthy Russian Jewish wife, Sophie Raffalovich – and enlarged on its anti-Semitic theme: ‘Just as the Gold of the Jews was lavished, and continues to be lavished, by the French Dreyfusites, in assailing the French Army, that constant terror of England, so even in the Irish West, the same foreign and filthy money is being lavished in assailing the Irish Transvaal Brigade.’ United Irishman, 24 Feb. 1900. For Griffith’s moderation of his anti-Semitism after 1910, and the more enduring bigotry of some of his contemporaries, see Manus O’Riordan, GAA Founder No Blooming Anti-Semite!, on the website An Fear Rua – the GAA Unplugged!, http://www.anfearrua.com/story.asp?id=2126 and http://www.anfearrua. com/story.asp?id=2127 , p. 17; Michael Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland: The Sinn Féin Party, 1916–1923 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 232–3; Maume, Long Gestation, pp. 34–5.

36Maume, Long Gestation, pp. 90–91, 108.

37United Irishman, 3 Feb. 1900.

38Ibid., 10 Feb. 1900. For the February 1895 Cambridge Union speech, which called complete separation of Ireland from England ‘undesirable and impossible’, and advanced the vision of a self-governing Ireland within an evolved Empire of devolved parliaments, see Meleady, Redmond, pp. 244–5.

39O’Callaghan to Redmond, 14 May 1900, 3 Jan, 8 Feb. 1901, RP Ms. 15,213 (1, 3). Redmond, in an effort to broaden his base of support in 1897, had cultivated close relations with Devoy, but these had ended when he embraced reunification with the anti-Parnellites, seen by Devoy as politically bankrupt. Meleady, Redmond, pp. 279–80, 315.

40Blake had been successively premier of Ontario (1871–2), Minister of Justice in the Liberal Canadian Government (1875–7) and leader of Canada’s Liberal Party (1880–7). He withdrew from Canadian politics in 1890 and moved to Ireland, where he served as an anti-Parnellite MP from 1892 and an MP in the reunited Irish Party (1900–07). For a summary of his career, see Ronan O’Brien, An Irishman’s Diary, The Irish Times, 13 Aug. 2007.

41‘Memorandum on Sessional Work’ from Blake to Redmond, 17 Dec. 1900, RP Ms. 15,170 (2).

42I.D.I., 19 Feb. 1901.

43Philip Bull, Land, Politics and Nationalism (Dublin, 1996), p. 109.

44Bull, Land, pp. 109–10.

45This was the origin of the ‘first-term’ and ‘second-term’ rents that would feature so prominently in the debates over the 1903 Land Purchase Act: ‘first-term’ were those revised (downward) in 1881, the latter those reduced further in 1896.

46Paul Bew, Enigma: a new life of Charles Stewart Parnell (Dublin, 2011), pp. 49–51.

47Hansard, 4th Series, 89, 711–728, 21 Feb. 1901.

48Ibid, 89, 728–746, 21 Feb. 1901. Russell had shocked Ulster’s landed establishment during the 1900 General Election campaign with a speech at Clogher that raised the cry for compulsory purchase; a demand soon echoed by other unionist candidates. Andrew Gailey, Ireland and the Death of Kindness: The experience of constructive unionism 1890–1905 (Cork, 1987), p.154.

49I.D.I., 21 May, 12 Jun. 1901.

50The figure was given by A.J. Balfour: Hansard 90, 866, 7 March 1901.

51Quoted in I.D.I., 2 Mar. 1901.

52Quoted in I.D.I., 2 Apr. 1901.

53Hansard, 90, 853–867, 7 Mar. 1901.

54I.D.I., 8 Mar. 1901.

55Manchester Guardian, 8 Mar. 1901.

56‘Parliamentary Portraits: Mr John Redmond MP’ by ‘an old Parliamentary hand’, Western Daily Mercury, 6 May 1901, in Newscuttings of 1901, RP Ms. 7429.

57Daily Mail, 2 Dec. 1905.

58I.D.I., 15 Mar. 1901.

59Healy, Letters and Leaders, I, p. 454.

60See Anon: ‘Character Sketch: Mr John Redmond. MP, Leader of the Irish Party’, Review of Reviews (Nov. 1901), pp. 476–82, in RP Ms. 7429.

61I.D.I., 22 Apr. 1901.

62Quoted in I.D.I., 10 May 1901.

63Redmond to O’Callaghan, 26 Apr. 1901, RP Ms. 15,213 (3).

64Healy, Letters and Leaders, I, p.456.

65I.D.I., 23 Sep. 1901.

66Ibid., 14 Mar. 1901; Redmond to O’Brien, 17 May 1901, OBP Ms. 10,496 (4).

67Redmond to O’Brien, 17 May 1901, OBP Ms. 10,496 (4).

68Quoted in I.D.I., 10 Aug. 1901.

69Ibid., 19 Aug. 1901.

70I.D.I., 19 Aug. 1901. This sum (which reached £10,576 by the end of 1901) was part of more than £30,000 contributed by Irish supporters since the June 1900 Convention, as Redmond told a Waterford meeting in late September 1901. The other elements were £10,000 for the 1900 election fund, £6,000 to cover the expenses of delegates to the two Conventions and over £5,000 paid directly to the UIL Directory in Dublin. Such a large total sum was, Redmond held, a sure sign of the restoration of faith in the party.

71Healy, Letters and Leaders, I, p. 454; Redmond to O’Brien, 10 Sep. 1901, OBP Ms. 10,496 (5).

72Redmond to Dillon, 19 Jun. 1901, RP Ms. 15,182 (3); J.F.X. O’Brien to W. O’Brien, 11 Jun. 1901, J.F.X. O’Brien Papers, Ms. 13,427.

73Redmond to O’Brien, 11 Jul., 10 Sep. 1901, OBP Ms. 10,496 (5).

74Redmond to O’Brien, 17 Oct. 1901, OBP Ms. 10,496 (5).

75McHugh had been imprisoned for contempt of court, having made allegations in his newspaper of jury-packing at the Connaught Assizes. O’Donnell had caused a minor sensation at the start of the 1901 session when he had attempted to address the House in Irish.

76Redmond to Dillon, 12 Nov. 1901, DP Ms. 6747/19.

77Redmond to Dillon, undated, posted 30 Nov. 1901, DP Ms. 6747/20. A week later, the Clan men had not come to see Redmond, although he was ‘getting messages of a conciliatory character all the time… I don’t think they can continue a policy of attack’. Redmond to Dillon, 6 Dec. 1901, DP Ms. 6747/21.

78I.D.I., 18, 19, 23, 27 Nov., 6 Dec. 1901.

79F.J., 30 Jun. 1902.

80NAI CBS 3/716, 27255A/S. A Dublin Castle intelligence officer, Major Gosselin, commented on the departure of Devlin and Willie Redmond for the US in January 1902: ‘We will have some tall talk when William commences’. NAI CBS 3/716, 26133/S.

81In the 1900 General Election, the Labour Representation Committee had sponsored fifteen candidates, two of whom had won seats: James Keir Hardie in Wales and Richard Bell in Derby. Hardie would become the first leader of the Labour Party after the 1906 General Election, in which it won twenty-nine seats.

82F.J., 24 Sep 1901. In the election, in north-east Lanarkshire, most Irish votes went to the Labour candidate, allowing the Tory candidate to defeat the Liberal Cecil Harmsworth by 904 votes, to the fury of the Liberals. Daily Chronicle, 27 Sep. 1901.

83Among Redmond’s papers is a large New Year greeting card dated 1 Jan 1902 from the United Textile Factory Workers’ Association, expressing hearty thanks for his help in securing the 12 o’clock stoppage time for the Saturday half-day. RP Ms. 7429.

84F.J., 23 Jul. 1901. Dillon’s amendment was carried by thirty votes to twenty-four. Willie Redmond said: ‘if this bill was wrecked it would be because certain members of the committee had a stronger desire to break into a few convents in Ireland than to pass a measure for the benefit of the working classes of the United Kingdom’. In fairness to the Irish members, Ritchie revealed that he had received objections on much the same grounds from ‘others not in Ireland, and not of the same religious faith’.

85Correspondence of Redmond with H.J. Gladstone, March–May 1907, RP Ms. 15,192 (1). An article published at the time by Redmond’s old Parnellite colleague, Edmund Leamy MP, dwelt unctuously on the unshakeable virtue of the religious managers of laundries. The relations of the nuns with the girls under their charge was ‘almost that of a mother and child’; their object was ‘in her own simple and beautiful language, to keep the poor strayed sheep who has been brought back to the fold from straying again… these pure, holy women who take their erring peccant sisters to their hearts, as if they had been given in charge to them by Christ Himself’. I.D.I., 22 Jul. 1901.There is no reason to believe that Redmond, his brother and many party MPs did not share such views.

86Secretaries of Standing Committee of the Irish Bishops to Redmond, 6 Oct.; Redmond to same, 7 Oct. 1902, in Newscuttings of 1902, RP Ms. 7431. These letters were published by the Freeman on 28 November.

87Davitt vigorously opposed the Cardinal’s appeal, publishing an indignant open letter to Redmond in the Freeman, asking ‘from whence is the authority derived to urge Catholics to decide upon the respective merits of Church of England Protestantism and Nonconformist Protestantism?’ The real purpose of the bill was ‘to extend the political influence of the Parson and the Squire, the chief props of Toryism, in England’, while ‘these English Catholic leaders are not our political friends, but the deadly and malignant enemies of our National movement’. F.J., 7 Oct. 1902.

88F.J., 20 Nov. 1902.

89Michael Cardinal Logue to Archbishop Walsh, 21 Nov., Bishop Sheehan to Archbishop Walsh, 21 Nov., Archbishop Walsh to Cardinal Logue, 24 Nov. 1902, WP Ms. 358/2; F.J., 25 Nov. 1902.

90O’Brien to Redmond, 25 Nov. 1902, OBP Ms. 10,496 (12).

91Redmond to O’Brien, 26 Nov. 1902, OBP Ms. 10,496 (6). The Irish Independent, originally a Parnellite paper, had been bought by the former anti-Parnellite and wealthy industrialist William Martin Murphy in 1900, and soon adopted a policy critical of the reunited party. See Meleady, Redmond, p. 330.

92F.J., 26, 27, 29 Nov. 1902.

93Telegram Redmond to O’Brien, 29 Nov. 1902, OBP Ms. 10,496 (11).

94F.J., 1 Dec. 1902.

95Redmond to O’Brien, 30 Nov. 1902, OBP Ms. 10,496 (6).

96F.J., 13, 17, 18 Dec. 1902. Redmond told O’Brien that he had hoped the Speaker would rule out the repairs amendment. Redmond to O’Brien, 12 Dec. 1902, OBP Ms. 10,496 (6).

97Quoted in F.J., 18 Dec. 1902.

98I.D.I., 31 Aug. 1901.

99Denman, A lonely grave, p. 60; speech of Redmond at Waterford, I.D.I., 23 Sep. 1901.

100I.D.I.,11, 2, 23 Sep. 1901.

101Denman, A lonely grave, p. 60.

102Bull, Land, pp. 129-133.

103Gailey, Ireland and the Death of Kindness, pp. 179–180. Senior Castle officials evinced a restrained approach throughout 1901 to police reports of seditious language used by Irish Party MPs, including Dillon, who said at Tralee on 20 October, at the news that a recruiting officer for the Irish Guards would arrive shortly: ‘I hope when he comes to Kerry you will hunt him out of the county’. In Dillon’s case, the official advised that his language constituted incitement, but the expediency of a prosecution was ‘more than doubtful’; regarding a speech by JP Farrell, MP for Longford North in September, the advice was that ‘prosecuting him for treasonable language would do more harm than good’. NAI CBS 3/716, 25565/S, 25333/S.

104I.D.I., 13 Dec. 1901; 11 Jan., 18, 19 Feb., 1Mar. 1902.

105F.J., 17 Apr. 1902. The power of the Lord Lieutenant to issue such a proclamation for part or all of a county or counties in the event of civil disorder was provided for under the Insurrection Act of 1822.

106For a full account of Wyndham’s extraordinary personality and political character, see Gailey, Ireland and the Death of Kindness, pp. 161–173. Wyndham had said that Douglas Hyde’s work A Literary History of Ireland ‘gives the truest and fullest instruction for the government of Ireland’. To a Dublin Castle official, he seemed ‘a tempestuous sort of genius… flashing about the Irish atmosphere like summer lightning, with inspirations and brilliant ideas about current problems which fairly took one’s breath away’. Quoted in Gailey, p. 173.

107Gailey, Ireland and the Death of Kindness, pp. 179–180.

108I.D.I., 6 May, 20 Oct. 1901; F.J., 7 Jul. 1902. Healy painted a vividly admiring pen-picture of the ‘child of genius’ Wyndham. ‘No soul more accordant with Ireland than Wyndham’s came out of England. On reaching Dublin his first visit was to the vaults of St Michan’s, where the body of his kinsman, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, lies… His sympathies with Ireland were intense. A Jacobite by tradition, a poet born, and with the blood of Lord Edward in his veins, his ambition was to make an international settlement between the island he administered and the island of his birth….’ Healy, Letters and Leaders, I, pp. 446–7. The Countess of Fingall was part of his social circle in Ireland: ‘He was in love with so many things: with his lovely wife… with Ireland and with England, with life itself. He came to Ireland full of enthusiasms, dreams and plans. He would settle the Irish Question first by settling the Land Question….’ Seventy Years Young: Memories of Elizabeth, Countess of Fingall (London, 1937), p. 270.

109Blunt, My Diaries, p. 434.

110Ibid., p. 430.

111Gailey, Ireland and the Death of Kindness, pp. 176–7, 181.

112I.D.I., 10 Jan. 1902; F.J., 26, 31 Mar., 5, 10 Apr., 10 Jun. 1902; Gailey, Ireland and the Death of Kindness, pp. 177–182.

113For their names, see Redmond’s speech at Liverpool, F.J., 16 Mar. 1903. According to O’Brien’s wife Sophie, Willie Redmond was allowed ‘every comfort’ in jail, including daily visits from his wife. Memoir by Mrs Sophie O’Brien (née Raffalovitch) of John and Willie Redmond, OBP Ms. 8507 (2).

114F.J., 2 Jun. 1902.

115Ibid., 2, 3 Jun. 1902.

116Ibid., 28 Jun. 1902; NAI CBS 3/716, 27225/S.

117F.J., 7 Jul. 1902.

118Dillon to Redmond, 8 Jun. 1902, RP Ms. 15,182 (3).

119Quoted in Bull, Land, p.161.

120O’Brien to Redmond, 20 Aug. 1902, OBP Ms. 10,496 (12).

121Redmond to O’Brien, [date unknown] Aug. 1902, OBP Ms. 10,496 (6).

122O’Brien to Redmond, 25 Aug. 1902, OBP Ms. 10,496 (12).

123P.A. McHugh had written to Redmond in 1901 from Kilmainham Jail that he could not be more comfortable: ‘Like Diogenes in his tent, I want for nothing… I am reading everything from the first appearance of man on this planet to the latest lecture on musical dentistry, and am so happy that I sometimes think myself selfish.’ McHugh to Redmond, 18 May 1901, RP Ms. 15,203 (6).

124See Meleady, Redmond, Chapter 3.

125F.J., 19 Jul., 1 Sep. 1902.

126Dillon to Redmond, 12 Sep. 1902, RP Ms. 15,182 (3).

127F.J., 14 Jun., 6 Aug. 1902.

128Ibid., 3 Sep. 1902. Harrington, MP for Dublin Harbour , in 1902 in his second term as Lord Mayor of Dublin, was the former Parnellite who had played a prominent role in ending the Parnell split.

129Ibid., 5 Sep. 1902.

130William O’Brien, An Olive Branch in Ireland (London, 1910), p. 141.

131O’Brien to Redmond, 3 Sep. 1902; Redmond to O’Brien, 6 Sep. 1902; both quoted in J.V. O’Brien, William O’Brien and the Course of Irish Politics 1881–1918 (1976), p. 141; RP, Newscuttings of 1902, RP Ms. 7431.

132Redmond to Shawe-Taylor, 19 Sep. 1902.

133Quoted in J.V. O’Brien, William O’Brien, p. 141.

134F.J., 23 Sep., 11 Oct. 1902. The two were Lord Barrymore and the Duke of Abercorn.

135Ibid., 19 Oct. 1902.

136All details of the visit are in Newscuttings of the 1902 American visit, RP Ms. 7432.

137Ibid. The event was remarkable for the rhetorical dissonance between the pacifist introductory address by the veteran slavery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (‘The descendants of the patriots of Lexington and Bunker Hill, like the people of Ireland, are learning that the sword brings neither true peace nor liberty….’) and Redmond’s playing to the Irish–American gallery after viewing a drill display given by the Massachusetts 9th Regiment: ‘You come of a grand old fighting race, one of the great fighting races of the world… if only on the old soil of Ireland we had the opportunity… of teaching our people the use of arms as you do here, we could very soon and very speedily settle the Irish question (tremendous cheering).’

138F.J., 13 Dec. 1902; Devlin to Redmond, 22 Dec. 1902, RP Ms. 15,181 (1).

139F.J., 29 Nov. 1902. The vote was 1,128 in favour to 578 against.

140F.J., 25 Nov. 1902.

141Bull, Land, pp. 144–5; Bull, ‘The significance of the nationalist response to the Irish land act of 1903’, I.H.S., xxviii, no. 111 (May 1993), pp. 286–7.

142Redmond to O’Brien, 1 Dec. 1902, OBP Ms. 10,496 (6).

143F.J., 29, 30 Oct. 1902.

144F.J., 5 Nov., 11, 20, 22 Dec. 1902. Willie had been summoned after the Taghmon meeting to appear in court in Dublin on 24 September. He had wired his brother to say that he would not appear, though Redmond did not ‘think that wise’. Redmond to O’Brien, 20 Sep. 1902, OBP Ms. 10,496 (6); Denman, A lonely grave, pp. 62–3.

145F.J., 19 Jan. 1903.

146Sally Warwick-Haller, William O’Brien and the Irish Land War (Dublin, 1990), pp. 226–9. The full terms of the Land Conference Report are given in O’Brien, Olive Branch, pp. 475–9.

147F.J., 7, 8, 15 Jan. 1903.

148F.J., 12, 24 Jan. 1903. At Newmarket-on-Fergus on 8 February, Davitt threatened that ‘the men who have smashed their system of felonious landlordism will hold their ground until its rotten carcass is fully and finally disposed of. What I, for one, want is victory, and not a mere promise of it….’ F.J., 9 Feb. 1903.

149Ibid., 12 Feb. 1903. The Archbishop’s interventions in nationalist politics were many, but, given his own interests in landed property, he might have been expected to be more circumspect on this occasion. He had been criticized in 1894 by the Parnellite MP Pat O’Brien for his ‘silent acquiescence’ in the mistreatment of Roscommon tenants by the Catholic landlord Lord de Freyne; O’Brien alleged that the Archbishop held a £40,000 mortgage on the estate. I.D.I., 14 Jul. 1894.

150O’Brien, Olive Branch, p. 185.

151F.J., 19 Jan., 2 Feb. 1903.

152Redmond to O’Brien, 14, 19, 22 Jan. 1903, OBP Ms. 10,496 (7); F.J., 26 Jan. 1903.

153Dillon’s copy of Redmond’s circular to the party, 2 Dec. 1902, DP Ms. 6747/31.

154Redmond to O’Brien, 11 Feb. 1903, OBP Ms. 10,496 (7).

155O’Brien, Olive Branch, p. 213.

156Dillon to Redmond, 27 Feb. 1903, RP Ms. 15,182 (4).

157F.J., 31 Mar., 11 Apr., 6 May 1903.

158Ibid., 9 Apr. 1903. Bull, Land, p. 152.

159Redmond to O’Brien, 1, 3 (twice) Apr. 1903, OBP Ms. 10,496 (8).

160O’Brien, Olive Branch, pp. 227.

161F.J., 17 Apr. 1903; Warwick-Haller, William O’Brien, p. 236.

162Frank Callanan, T.M. Healy (Cork, 1996), pp. 446–7.

163Privately, Dillon told Blunt that he was opposed to the bill on principle and would oppose it in committee and vote against its third reading were it not for his loyalty to the party and concern for its unity. Lyons, Dillon, p. 231–2.

164F.J., 19 May 1903; Redmond to O’Brien, 20 May 1903, OBP Ms. 10,496 (8). The chivalrous Redmond assured the audience: ‘The disturbance of this meeting might have been easily and summarily dealt with, were it not that it was led by a lady, against whom we could not put in force any of the rough and ready methods which in other circumstances would be used to other disturbers (applause).’

165O’Brien, Olive Branch, p. 237.

166F.J., 17, 18 Jun. 1903.

167Redmond to Blunt, 17, 19, 20 Jun. 1903, RP Ms. 15,171 (1); Wyndham to Redmond, 22, 23, 24 Jun. 1903, RP Ms. 15,233 (2). According to O’Brien, Wyndham later told Redmond of a nightmare he had had during the crisis, in which he had found himself creeping along a razor-sharp ledge of rock with abysses to right and left. O’Brien, Olive Branch, p. 242.

168Redmond to Wyndham, 2 Jul. 1903, RP Ms. 15,233 (2); Wyndham to Redmond, 5 Jul. 1903, Michael McDonagh Papers, NLI Ms. 11,447.

169Redmond to O’Brien, 20 May 1903, OBP Ms. 10,496 (8).

170F.J., 6 Jul. 1903.

171Ibid., 17 Aug. 1903.

172Memoir by Mrs Sophie O’Brien, OBP Ms. 8507 (2).

173Newscuttings of 1903, RP Ms. 7433.