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3

HOME RULE BY INSTALMENT

He hoped to be able to pass some serious measure which would be consistent with and would lead up to… the larger [Home Rule] measure.

– Memorandum by Redmond of interview with Campbell Bannerman,

14 Nov. 1905.

I have done my best… To this work I have given up every other consideration. I have thrown upon one side my profession… my worldly interest and the interests of my children, and I have devoted everything that I possessed in this world, all my time and my abilities, and… all my whole heart to advance this cause….

– Redmond at Liverpool, 3 Dec. 1907.

I

As transfers of power went in Britain in the twentieth century, that of late 1905 was a curiosity, with the formation of the new Government preceding rather than following the dissolution and General Election. In early November, the long-running dispute in the Cabinet between Balfour and Chamberlain on the free trade issue had become a crisis that threatened the imminent resignation of the Conservative Government. With the electoral tide running in favour of the Liberals, the question of the hour for Redmond was the likely attitude of a Liberal Government to the Home Rule issue. Statements in the previous month by Asquith, Morley and Lord Rosebery, Redmond’s bugbear of the 1890s, had left contradictory impressions. Asquith had declared that, while he had never gone back on the spirit or aims of Gladstone’s policy, there could be no Home Rule Bill in the next Parliament.1 Rosebery agreed with Asquith, but Morley on 20 October called for such a bill. An authoritative statement from the Liberal leader, Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman, was awaited with enormous interest. Communications between him and the Irish leadership required delicate handling. Dillon suggested that Redmond should try to meet him if possible before he spoke.2

Redmond had already gone north to deliver three key speeches – at Sunderland, Glasgow and Motherwell – addressed respectively to the Irish voters in Britain, the Liberal leadership and nationalists at home. To the first, his message was that, despite the awkward fact that the Liberals proposed to extend secular control of the school system in England and Wales while the Tories would defend denominational schools, they would find, by voting for pro-Home Rule candidates, that ‘the interests of their country and the real interests of their creed are identical’. Of the second, he asked how they would have the moral power to compel the Irish people to submit to a system of government they had solemnly condemned, given their party’s overwhelming support for his amendment to that year’s Address. Dunravenesque schemes of devolution could never settle the Irish question; Morley had stated the Irish demand correctly – ‘an Irish legislature with an executive responsible to it’.3 For the third, he reaffirmed his adherence to ‘the old policy of Parnell’:

Independence of all British parties, readiness to accept from any British party any concession which we think will shorten or smoothen the road to Home Rule… but no paltering under any circumstances with the one great principle underlying our whole movement….4

At Glasgow, while it was premature to give precise advice to the Irish electors in Britain, he set out guiding principles. Votes should not be given to Liberal candidates who had openly repudiated their pledges to Ireland; furthermore, they had a natural sympathy with Labour candidates, he said, repeating his trope that ‘the Irish Party in the House of Commons is itself a Labour party’.5

On 14 November, Redmond and O’Connor breakfasted with Campbell Bannerman. The Liberal leader told them that he was ‘stronger than ever’ for Home Rule, but it was a question of how far they could go in the next Parliament. He had no complaint to make of Redmond’s Glasgow speech, but thought it would not be possible to pass full Home Rule. However, ‘he hoped to be able to pass some serious measure which would be consistent with and would lead up to the other’.6 The promised public statement came when the Prime Minister-designate spoke at Stirling on 23 November. He wished to see ‘the effective management of Irish affairs in the hands of a representative Irish authority’. Moreover,

… if he were an Irish Nationalist he would take it in any way that he could get it. If an instalment of representative control were offered to Ireland… he would advise the Nationalists to thankfully accept it, provided it was consistent [with] and led up to their larger policy….7

Lord Rosebery responded to this speech by stating that, since the Home Rule flag had now been raised, he could not ‘serve under that banner’. Dillon worried that any reply from the Liberal leader would drive others in the same direction, but Campbell Bannerman held his peace. Within a week, Sir Edward Grey and Richard Haldane had rallied to their leader and Rosebery seemed isolated.8 There is no reason to doubt the judgment of Lyons that the readiness of Redmond and Dillon to accept, in principle, Campbell Bannerman’s interim proposal came both from their trust in him as a true Gladstonian Home Ruler and from their realistic assessment that they could not at that point demand more.9

Balfour’s resignation came on 4 December, and King Edward called on Campbell Bannerman to form a new Ministry. Asquith became Chancellor of the Exchequer; two other appointments of Irish relevance were James Bryce as Chief Secretary and Augustine Birrell as Education Secretary, while the popular Lord Aberdeen, who had been Lord Lieutenant briefly until Gladstone’s defeat in 1886, returned to that post.10 The National Convention met in Dublin on 6 December, and unanimously resolved that the Irish Party would not enter into alliance or give permanent support to any English party or Government that did not make the question of Irish self-government a cardinal point in its programme. The manifesto of the UIL of Great Britain on 1 January called on Irish voters there to support Labour candidates sound on Home Rule, except where doing so would damage the chances of a similarly sound Liberal against a Unionist.11

Voting took place over the two weeks following the dissolution on 8 January 1906. Balfour’s resistance to Chamberlain’s demand for full-blooded protection from the rising economic and military threat of Germany encapsulated the great issue of the General Election in Great Britain.12 Home Rule featured only in the negative sense that Unionists warned electors that a vote for the Liberals was inseparable from Home Rule, even as Liberals were enabled by their leader’s ‘instalment’ pledge to deny it at the hustings. The scale of the Liberal landslide was such that a Tory–Liberal Unionist majority of seventy-two seats was turned into a Liberal majority of 130 over all other parties (the Labour Party winning twenty-nine), and Balfour lost his Manchester seat.

In Ireland, the incipient split with O’Brien was papered over by an informal arrangement under which the sitting O’Brienite MPs – five in Cork City and county and one in South Mayo – were unopposed.13 The Irish Party was thus able to claim an unchanged strength of eighty-one seats after the election. Healy was another matter. Dillon wrote to Redmond after the Convention that it was vital to put him out, as he and O’Brien together would be ‘extremely formidable… our difficulties with the Liberals will I think be immeasurably increased if we are to have Healy and O’Brien on each flank.’14 An appeal from Cardinal Logue, however, persuaded Redmond not to contest the North Louth seat, and Healy was returned as an independent Nationalist. A particular cause for Irish Party celebration was Devlin’s recapture, by a majority of sixteen, of the West Belfast seat lost by Sexton in 1892. Unionists could celebrate their victory in South County Dublin, where the outgoing Chief Secretary, Walter Long, won the seat from the Nationalist with a crushing majority of 1,343 votes.15 Two independent Unionists who had expressed willingness to work with nationalists for reform, and whom O’Brien had in mind for his national conference, Sloan in South Belfast and T.W. Russell in South Tyrone, held their seats against orthodox Unionist opposition. Apart from the return of the O’Brienites, however, there was no electoral advance for conciliationism in the south. The following November, Captain Shawe-Taylor contested the Galway City seat as an Independent Nationalist (devolutionist), but was defeated by the Irish Party candidate, the Protestant journalist, Gaelic Leaguer and biographer of Redmond’s later years, Stephen Gwynn.16 In Belfast, foreshadowing the themes that would galvanize him in the following decade, Redmond, flanked by Devlin and O’Connor, had appeared at the Ulster Hall in December 1905 to declare that there were no safeguards of the religious liberty of Protestants that his party would not willingly give, even though they knew them to be unnecessary.17

II

At the opening of the 1906 Session, Redmond pitched his speech on the Address towards the new and massive Liberal rank-and-file. While a Parliament with a responsible executive was the only possible final settlement, the Government would ‘find the Nationalists reasonable and practical men – men who have spent twenty-five years of their lives in endeavouring to win this right for their country, men who do not want to die until they see some great advance made along the road.’18 At the Hotel Cecil St Patrick’s Day banquet, where he presided for the seventh year in succession, he would reach out again to this new majority:

… men who have… no selfish motives for the oppression of Ireland, but, on the contrary, are full of sympathy and goodwill for our country (applause), but who… cannot be expected to understand all the facts and circumstances of this Irish problem.19

Nationalists were not the only ones seeking the ear of the Liberal ranks. Ulster Unionist members supported Col. Saunderson’s amendment voicing the alarm of loyal subjects in Ireland at proposals to change the system of Irish government, and tried to induce Bryce to reveal details. Charles Craig, MP for Antrim South, alleged that the policy was one of stealth, the object being to hoodwink the electors.20

Bryce remained tight-lipped about the Government’s plans, although the hints he dropped – mention of the Irish Reform Association scheme, and even of Chamberlain’s 1885 Central Board scheme – pointed to devolution.21 It is likely that Redmond had already been given an outline of the new Government’s plans. He had met Sir Antony MacDonnell at the end of December, and warned him that the Irish Party could not accept a rehash of the Dunraven scheme.22 He recorded MacDonnell’s assurance that:

Bryce agreed to practically all points in my memo of 30 December. He [Sir Antony] was then engaged in making a first draft for a great scheme of reform of Irish Government which they hoped to introduce in the Session of 1907. His scheme would place every department of Irish Government and Finance under the control of an Irish Body in which the Elective Element would be supreme (probably three fourths). They proposed to consult us fully in drafting details and hoped to have it ready by next autumn.23

Consultation, or the lack of it, would be a major theme running through Redmond’s relationship with the sixty-eight-year-old Bryce.24 Although the latter had committed himself to the theory of ‘governing Ireland according to Irish ideas’, his practice fell short. Later that year, Redmond unburdened himself to W.T. Stead, editor of the Review of Reviews, on his dissatisfaction with Bryce:

… he is a splendid old fellow, but he is a pedant, and as pig-headed as he can be, and obstinate to the last degree… you will scarcely believe it, but he has never asked for my opinion since he has been in office… I haunt him, morning , noon, and night – which is the only way I can get anything done, and it takes two hours’ talk to make him see reason….25

For one thing, there was the Coercion Act, still on the Statute Book, though Lord Aberdeen had withdrawn all proclamations under the Act as ‘not now necessary’.26 Redmond applied pressure on Bryce throughout 1906 to have the twenty-four-year -old Act repealed, pressure that bore fruit only in December.27 Equally frustrating were the party’s attempts to make headway on the university issue. A royal commission had been appointed in 1901 to gather expert evidence on the higher education needs of Catholics, but Trinity College was excluded from its scope. The party moved that the revenues of Trinity College be so administered as to make them available ‘for the use of the general body of the nation’. In response, Bryce announced a new commission of inquiry into the College, to be chaired by Sir Edward Fry. Redmond sensed an excuse for further delay, but withdrew his objection on Bryce’s assurance of fast action by the commission.28 Wrangling continued for months, however, over the terms of reference and names of appointees, though Bryce accepted Redmond’s nomination of Douglas Hyde.29 It became evident that matters had not moved beyond the impasse reached with Wyndham two years previously. Bryce had promised Redmond privately to consult the Cabinet on the university question and ‘see how far it was possible to go’ to get agreement with the Irish Party and the Bishops.30 Now he pleaded the Government’s lack of time to make policy on such a difficult subject, and, echoing Wyndham, was against proposing any scheme until sure that it had some chance of being accepted and carried.31 On the issue of general educational reform, Bryce conveyed the impression of understanding what should be done but not knowing how to do it. On 22 March, responding to another Irish Party motion critical of all branches of education provision in Ireland, he surveyed the many defects of an ‘extremely difficult and complicated system’. He avowed his sympathy for the Gaelic revival, and hoped to meet the demand for its wider study in the schools. Yet all paths to reform seemed blocked.32

Redmond and Bryce also clashed in the House in April and May during a row over the latter’s reappointment of twenty-two Tory-appointed officers of the Land Commission whom Redmond accused of conspiring to raise the price of land. Urged by Dillon in Dublin that ‘the country requires a lead’, Redmond moved a critical amendment, only to see it defeated by the Liberal majority.33 On another land-connected matter, relations were just as bad. Despite Bryce’s appointment of six additional inspectors for the work of reinstatement of evicted tenants, data given by him to Redmond in October revealed that the process had not accelerated. In protest, Redmond moved the adjournment of the House on 29 October. The delay, he claimed, boiled down to one factor: the refusal of landlords to sell untenanted land on which either the evicted tenant or the ‘grabber’ of his farm could be resettled. The remedy was simple: ‘the Government must have resort to compulsion.’34 At year’s end, there were still no compulsory powers, but Bryce could report an improved rate of reinstatement, and was about to treble the number of staff, hoping to complete the investigation of all outstanding cases in six months.35

Two bright spots in Nationalist relations with Bryce were the Town Tenants Bill, piloted through the House by J.J. Clancy MP, which passed its Third Reading on 30 November, and the Labourers Bill. When the second was introduced on 28 May, Redmond noted the contrast with Wyndham’s withdrawn measure and acknowledged that the party’s three main demands had been met. The bill proposed to provide up to £4,250,000 in loans to local councils for the building of labourers’ cottages with plots of land. It was estimated that the provisions would allow upwards of 25,000 cottages to be built over five or six years. The bill was passed without division, and became law in August, with Nationalists and Ulster Unionists at one in congratulating the Chief Secretary.36

Of all the issues that occupied Redmond in the 1906 Session, none took up more parliamentary time, or required such sensitive handling, as the Liberals’ Education Bill for England and Wales. The bill originated in the public clamour for the reversal of the effects of the Tories’ 1902 Education Act, which provided for local authority funding for all elementary schools while allowing each religious denomination to manage its own schools and religious teaching. This had led to protests at the use of public money to support particular denominations – ‘putting Rome on the rates’, in one Nonconformist rendition. The Liberal landslide was a mandate to legislate for public control of publicly funded education and to abolish religious tests for teachers.

For most Irish nationalists, it was an issue on which religious beliefs came into potential conflict with the advancement of the Home Rule cause. The backdrop to the controversy was the radical action taken against Catholic interests in France under the anticlerical Governments of the Third Republic, amounting to ‘persecution’ of the Church in the eyes of the nationalist press in Ireland. The bill was likely to have profound effects on the Catholic elementary schools of Britain. With nine-tenths of Catholics there of recent Irish origin, the Irish Party’s dilemma was to represent their educational demands at the risk of antagonizing the Nonconformist and Radical elements who were among the staunchest British supporters of Home Rule. Fortunately, the head of the Catholic Church in England, Francis Bourne, Archbishop of Westminster, with whom Redmond was in constant contact on the matter, took from the outset a pragmatic and conciliatory approach to the legislation. When Redmond and Dillon met him in February, Bourne told them that he considered popular control of schools to be irresistible, and therefore did not favour a ‘frontal attack’ on the bill; rather, his hope was that ‘by finesse’ some advantages might be obtained for Catholics. Where the majority of the parents of children in a school belonged to a particular religion, for example, the local authority might be willing to agree that the teachers should be of the same faith. The Government would allow local authorities to concede that demand, but would it compel them to do so?37 From O’Connor came similar advice:

We shall have to consent to full popular control. I have always regarded that as inevitable and have told the priests so. But I believe that if we assent to that, we may get excellent terms on other points. As you know, there is no real hostility to our schools; it is the ascendancy of the Anglicans that is assailed; and we have no interest in defending that….38

Introduced by Birrell on 9 April and described by the Freeman as ‘epoch-making, if not crisis-making’, the bill proposed an exemption, crucial for Catholics, which allowed a school in an urban district or borough to remain denominational, subject to local authority permission, if four-fifths of the parents demanded it. Having been told by individual Nonconformists of their willingness to see this provision made compulsory on the local authorities rather than have an open breach with the Irish Party, Redmond had reason at first to hope for a compromise that would allow him to support the bill.39 In the Second Reading debate in May, Wyndham announced the Tories’ uncompromising opposition to the bill as a violation of religious equality.40 Redmond and Dillon were keen to distance themselves as far as possible, in tone and content, from Wyndham’s attack. However, when Bryce proposed the Bible reading programme known as the ‘Cowper–Temple’ scheme as the religious education curriculum, their opposition was trenchant. Dillon warned that ‘to us it is hostile… the simple Bible teaching in the schools is to us Catholics worse than no religion’; for Redmond it was ‘abhorrent to our religious convictions’.41 Redmond sought to present the issue as the protection of minority rights rather than an attempt to dictate to the English Protestant majority. Catholics could accept secular control of the teaching of secular subjects, but, regarding religious teaching, must not be forced to violate their consciences. To enable him to support the bill, the Government must make the four-fifths exemption compulsory on local authorities. He appealed to ‘the great Liberal Nonconformist majority’ to remember its glorious history of struggle for civil and religious liberty, to view the Catholic objections in that light and to remember that Catholic Irishmen had trusted them at the election and had helped to deliver their great majority.42

The Second Reading passed by a majority of 206 on 10 May with seventy-five of the Irish Party opposing and the Ulster Unionists abstaining.43 In the six-week battle that followed in Committee, all of Redmond’s and Dillon’s resources were called upon as they fought for the desired changes while simultaneously seeking to appease the Liberal rank-and-file.44 That appeasement was needed was evident from the flood of angry mail Redmond received as soon as the decision to oppose the Second Reading was announced. One anonymous postcard carried the message: ‘Parnell the Protestant, not a tool of the Priests, would not have killed Home Rule by alienating the Protestant majority of the English nation….’45 In response, Redmond expressed the hope:

… that they might be found able…to join with the great body of Nonconformists in passing a measure which, while safeguarding the real interests and religious rights of the minority they represented, would at the same time remove the injustices which had been inflicted upon Nonconformists.46

Writing in June to Devlin, then touring Australia, he was optimistic: ‘The political situation is on the whole satisfactory… I think we will be able to extract ourselves from the difficulties of our position.’47 The Committee debates, however, did not produce the amendments required by the Nationalists, and sixty Irish Party members were present to vote against the Third Reading on 30 July, leaving it with a majority of 192. The party would now have to look to the House of Lords for amendments that would make the bill tolerable to Catholics.48 In December, the Lords’ amendments were considered by a hostile Commons majority. As discussions on a compromise proposal proceeded, Redmond was anxious again to dissociate himself from the Tory–Anglican and English Catholic opposition. Stressing his reluctance to vote against the Third Reading, he held out for his own amendments and professed himself ‘most anxious’ to do all in his power to prevent the loss of the bill.49

Redmond’s eagerness to come back to the Government camp if only he were given the required concessions had its reward, but too late. Birrell announced his acceptance of the concessions, which, Redmond admitted, would cover practically all the Catholic schools.50 On 4 December, Bourne told Redmond confidentially that the bishops had resolved that they too could then withdraw their opposition to the bill.51 On 12 December, following a guarantee from Birrell that the concessions would be part of any compromise, the Irish Party changed sides and voted with the Government to send back en bloc the Lords’ destructive amendments.52 The larger compromise was not, though, to materialize. A week later, the House of Lords refused to accept the Government’s response to its amendments, and the bill was pronounced dead.53 Archbishop Bourne publicly thanked the Irish Party for its rescue of the Catholic schools from jeopardy.54 Redmond told his constituents soon afterwards that the Irish Party had won an admission that the Catholic schools were distinct and exceptional and should retain their Catholic atmosphere and teaching. ‘The concession must and will remain,’ he said. ‘It is, in my judgment, a charter of the Catholic schools of England.’55 There the issue would rest until the Government made a fresh attempt to legislate in 1908.

III

In 1902, Redmond had mocked the declared hope of Lord Rosebery to become Prime Minister by a majority that would be independent of the Irish vote, saying that he would ‘never live to see that day’.56 Rosebery was not Prime Minister, but such a majority had now materialized, and the relatively powerless position of the Irish Party together with the lack of a Home Rule commitment by the new Government were bound to buttress the arguments of those who preached the futility of parliamentarianism. Although the three organizations gathered under the Sinn Féin banner were too paralysed by dissension to take advantage of the situation, and no Sinn Féin candidates were put up in the election, Griffith and others accused the Irish Party of subservience to the Liberals. If the party’s claims of being able to deploy the Irish vote in Britain as it pleased were true, they said, it should have thrown it to the Tories in order to win the balance of power.57

The party also attracted criticism for the consequences of one important Liberal policy. If ‘governing Ireland according to Irish ideas’ meant anything, it was opening positions in the administration and governance of the country to nationalists in preparation for the anticipated day of self-government. Redmond’s complaints regarding Bryce’s Tory reappointments to the Land Commission, for example, could be allayed only by appointing nationalists. Yet this laid the party open to the perennial charge laid against constitutionalist politicians: that of ‘place-hunting’. The Sinn Féin critique echoed similar charges made by Redmondites against anti-Parnellites in the 1890s, when O’Brien had defended the ‘Morley magistrates’ (Catholics appointed by the then Liberal Chief Secretary) as necessary to correct the Tory preponderance in the judiciary. Redmond set the official attitude in refusing all requests to use his influence to win state jobs for nationalists.58 In 1912, he told Harold Spender in an English newspaper: ‘Never in my life have I asked a single Government for a single office for my friends, though I have made many enemies by my refusals.’59 Yet there were indirect ways of achieving the same result. In the ’90s, Redmond had occasionally told Morley that, while he could not name Parnellites for appointments, if candidates’ names were mentioned he could comment on their suitability. Refusing a request in 1906 for help with a reappointment to a legal post, he added that he would regret if a change were made as the work had been most efficiently done, and that he was sure that this fact would be considered. The following day, he received heartfelt thanks from the supplicant.60 For Griffith, the Local Government Board was ‘the fountainhead of corruption’. Its unionist president, Sir Henry Robinson, claimed that many of the newer MPs wrote to him in such terms as ‘If my pledge did not forbid it, I would be happy to recommend X’, but Redmond, Dillon and others ‘never approached him in this way’. Maume concludes that Redmond ‘found equivocation stressful and probably rarely intervened’.61 In 1907, Griffith published lists of party supporters, journalists and lawyers close to the Freeman who had received Government jobs. D.P. Moran disagreed about the impropriety of it all. At a time when the upper echelons of the civil service were disproportionately Protestant and unionist, he called it ‘a very green and foolish rule’ to refuse to canvass for nationalist candidates; the impression of the Party as a patronage machine arose from the fact that the rule deterred committed nationalists from applying while lukewarm nationalists and place-hunters got the best jobs.62

Although Redmond has been criticized for failing to groom youthful talent for leadership, his speech at the December 1904 launch of the Young Ireland Branch of the UIL (soon to be known as the ‘YIBs’) suggests that his intentions, at least, were otherwise. Most of the members were students or recent graduates of Dublin’s Royal University. Redmond admitted that the party had suffered in recent years from ‘an absence of young men in our ranks’, due partly to the Parnell split and partly to the springing up of ‘more attractive’ movements, such as the Gaelic League. Although the League was doing ‘a noble, and what I would say almost, a holy work in Ireland’, the two movements were complementary, and his only regret was that those who had joined the language movement had not at the same time gone into the political movement. He hoped that the new branch would revive the spirit of:

… the remarkable episode of the coming together in Parnell’s time in ’80 and ’81 and the years that followed of such a galaxy of young and brilliant Irishmen willing to devote themselves and sacrifice their interests in the political movement.63

The YIBs took seriously Redmond’s advice to become a forum for ‘free discussion on political issues’, and the branch soon became a loyal opposition within the movement, its members taking a spirited part in the many controversies of the coming years. Among its notable members were the journalists Francis Skeffington and Francis Cruise O’Brien, and the poet and academic Thomas Kettle, all three of whom would marry daughters of David Sheehy MP, and Richard Hazleton, who had already distinguished himself in his campaigning in South Dublin. When seat vacancies arose in 1906, Hazleton was returned unopposed for North Galway in March and Kettle by a narrow margin for East Tyrone in July.64 In October, the Freeman boasted of the party’s ‘two latest and brilliant recruits’, and Redmond, at a banquet before their departure on an American mission for the UIL, declared it many years since two young men had entered the party who gave such hope and promise of great careers.65 Given that his only previous youthful recruit with leadership potential was Devlin, his satisfaction was understandable. Kettle, along with the middle-aged Gwynn, would give the party intellectual weight and able defence of its policies in the coming years.66 Kettle, who edited his own weekly paper, The Nationist, had already heavily criticized Griffith’s ‘Hungarian’ policy – a factor that may have caused the Sinn Féin groups to omit mention of Hungary from their policy statements at the end of 1905 – and argued against economic separatism and the ‘little-Irelandism’ of many Gaelic revivalists, and for an Irish nationalism enriched by the European heritage.67 When Davitt fell ill and died in late May 1906 (his funeral in Mayo was attended by Redmond, Dillon and many others of the Irish Party), Kettle, in dealing with land issues, would try to fill his shoes. ‘In these days of conciliation, I am still an impenitent follower of Michael Davitt,’ he said at the February 1909 National Convention.68

It remains a fact, however, that little new blood was brought into the senior levels of the party, and that Kettle and Hazleton were the only two YIBs to become MPs under Redmond’s leadership. The difficulty lay not so much in a desire on his part to keep power in senior hands as in his powerlessness to control local UIL organizations. He received applications from at least three other YIB members to stand for the party. One applicant was the able W.G. Fallon, who won the party’s nomination for the mid-Cork seat in January 1910, only to be defeated by the O’Brienite candidate. In the December election of the same year, Redmond failed to secure the mid-Tyrone nomination for Fallon, finding it impossible to put forward his name after a local dispute.69 In late 1909, Frederick W. Ryan and Frank MacDermot wrote seeking nominations, but no vacancies were available. Ryan stood, and lost, as an independent Nationalist candidate for the King’s County (Birr) seat in December 1910. MacDermot, a twenty-two-year -old Oxford graduate and son of Redmond’s late legal colleague The MacDermot KC, then reading for the English Bar, wrote that he would appreciate an interview even if there were ‘only a slight chance’ of finding a suitable seat. Redmond passed the letter to his private secretary, T.J. Hanna, with a note to say: ‘The writer is a very clever and good fellow [Redmond’s emphasis].’ MacDermot became instead another backroom intellectual, writing memoranda for the party on the fiscal aspects of Home Rule.70 It was all a far cry from May 1890 and Parnell’s parachuting of the twenty-two-year -old Henry Harrison straight from Oxford, unopposed, into the vacant seat of mid-Tipperary.

Other YIBs were too far from the party’s conservative Catholic mainstream to be acceptable as candidates; Redmond’s dislike of those he saw as faddists and cranks was triggered by the pacifist vegetarian feminist Sheehy-Skeffington. The loss to the party was not limited to young men. As Senia Pašeta points out, the exclusion of women from participation in the party, and even effectively from the YIB, and the party’s failure to support female suffrage drove politicized women into the Gaelic League or Sinn Féin.71 Moreover, the early promise of even the two new recruits was not fulfilled. The American tour of Kettle and Hazleton was a failure, bedevilled by personality clashes between the two envoys and the local UIL leadership. O’Callaghan sent Redmond a stream of letters about the arrogance and uncommunicativeness of the Irishmen, who, for their part, alleged that the east-coast-based officers had left them to fend for themselves in the midwest and further west.72

IV

Following Redmond’s meeting with Sir Antony MacDonnell early in 1906, the latter sent Bryce a first draft of a scheme for Irish government reform in February, and the Government’s deliberations went ahead in great secrecy.73 By midsummer, the Irish leaders were still in the dark as to exactly what was entailed in Campbell Bannerman’s ‘instalment of representative control’.74 Redmond and Dillon used their autumn speeches in Ireland to voice their expectations. At Grange, Co. Limerick, on 23 September, Redmond warned that he would take no responsibility for any such ‘makeshift’ as a measure of mere administrative Home Rule. However, any scheme proposed would be carefully examined and submitted to a representative national convention. This was too negative for the Liberal press, and a fortnight later at Athlone he declared himself ‘sincerely anxious’ to be able to support the Government’s scheme. He warned nonetheless that a ‘bold and statesmanlike’ scheme would be easier to pass than ‘something cramped and crooked and not practical’. The proposal would be judged solely by the criterion of the advancement of the Home Rule cause, and if it proved to be an ‘abortion’ would be repudiated by the party and people.75 Dillon was more upbeat, telling a Leitrim audience that he had every reason to believe that the Government was about to grant ‘complete control of the administration of their country through directly elected representatives of the Irish people’; the scheme would be ‘at least as good as the measure they have given to the Boers’.76 Whatever his grounds for such optimism, it was short-lived. In late September, he told Redmond that, from hints dropped by a contact, he expected the scheme to be ‘very unsatisfactory’.77

Redmond met Bryce in Dublin on 8 October, the day after the Athlone speech, to be shown the latest draft of the scheme.78 An administrative council of fifty-five members, two-thirds of it elected from the county councils, one-third nominated by the Lord Lieutenant who would preside, would co-ordinate some Irish boards and departments and their expenditure.79 Redmond forwarded the draft to Dillon with the comment:

I said practically nothing to Bryce except that at first sight it seemed beneath contempt, as it is. He seemed greatly alarmed and said nothing was settled...80

At a further meeting, with Sir Antony present, Redmond and Dillon proposed to Bryce that the Irish MPs should sit as the Irish council. Bryce objected that this would make the council too large to be effective, but conceded the principle of direct election by the parliamentary electorate.81 Soon afterwards, Campbell Bannerman asked the rising Liberal star David Lloyd George to meet Redmond to suggest a postponement of the legislation for a year. Lloyd George’s quid pro quo was an early dissolution if the House of Lords rejected the Government’s planned English bills, followed by an election to seek a mandate to curtail the power of the Lords. Redmond ‘expressed no opinion’. Subsequent history might have been very different had this scenario been played out: the Lords’ veto might have been removed in 1908 or 1909 and a Home Rule Bill become law in 1911 or 1912, well before the onset of the Great War.82

In December, the Chief Secretaryship changed hands. Bryce, whom Lloyd George had told Redmond was ‘in despair’ over the council scheme, had seen a way out of his Irish woes in taking up the British ambassadorship in Washington. His replacement was Birrell, Redmond’s second preference for the job, whom, despite the Education Bill controversies, he found genial and open to persuasion, and who was far less likely than Bryce to allow himself to be overborne by MacDonnell.83 ‘Birrell is a strong man and will keep Antony MacD in order’ was the observation of Campbell Bannerman reported by O’Connor to Redmond.84 Birrell arrived in Dublin on 28 January 1907, by which time Redmond and Dillon had rejected further talk of postponement of the scheme.85

Birrell was determined to try again, and in the Cabinet committee dealing with the scheme, he had a strong ally in Morley. The committee met on 22 February, and radically revised the scheme in the face of protests from Sir Antony. Birrell reported to Redmond that the meeting had produced, he thought, ‘satisfactory results’.86 Sir Antony, however, threatening resignation, sent a counter-proposal to the Cabinet, which met on 9 March to decide between the two opposing memoranda. MacDonnell thought that his ‘weak’ scheme would pass the House of Lords, but Birrell was certain that no scheme, however moderate, had any chance of doing so in the present Parliament. Since any scheme would be rejected, it was better to keep the confidence of Nationalists with a full-blooded one.87 However, more conservative ministers were persuaded to favour a restricted scheme. The outcome was a shift away from the committee’s proposal.88 MacDonnell was sufficiently satisfied not to resign, though Redmond told Dillon that, from a long talk with Birrell, he ‘gathered things are going fairly well’.89 After another wrangle over the constituencies to elect council members, the Cabinet on 1 and 3 May made final decisions on the scheme.90

Redmond’s public references to the impending legislation from the start of 1907 maintained the tone of anxious expectancy of his autumn speeches. Yet, in failing to spell out the fact that no legislative powers were about to be granted, he laid a trap for himself.91 He might have presented the scheme as similar to Chamberlain’s ‘central board’ scheme of 1885, which Parnell had welcomed on its merits, or as an attempt to build on the local government legislation of 1898 that would not abate in the slightest the demand for Home Rule; he might have described it in the terms used by Campbell Bannerman at Manchester as a ‘little, modest, shy, humble effort to give administrative powers to the Irish people’.92 Instead, an uncharacteristic ambiguity did little to educate public opinion. At the Hotel Cecil banquet on 18 March, having paid tribute to the memory of the deceased veteran Fenian John O’Leary, he equivocated:

… but while that hope [of full Home Rule] is not likely to be realized, at least we can confidently say that a great proposal in the direction of Home Rule will immediately be made. Let me say for myself I have no belief in half-way houses (cheers)….93

It was small wonder that, at the London UIL reception held to welcome back Devlin from his year-long fund-raising mission in Australia and the U.S., he should confess to an anxiety ‘so deep and intense that I am almost afraid to express myself as sanguine….’94 Birrell too was full of foreboding as he prepared the Prime Minister for the possible scenarios on the bill’s introduction: ‘My own opinion is that if we introduce the bill as drawn, R. and D. will on Tuesday week express an adverse opinion to it, but… will keep it sufficiently alive to force us to run the odious risk in Ireland of dropping it ourselves or the risk of seeing it altered against our will… It makes a grave situation.’95 Just after the 3 May Cabinet meeting, Dillon wrote to his wife:

Redmond and I have just come down from our interview with B. We have won three-fourths of our battle… The bill as it now stands is so much improved that it bears no resemblance to the original scheme. Nonetheless, it will not be easy for us to decide our attitude towards it.96

The long-awaited bill, introduced on 7 May 1907, proposed a Council of 107 members, including eighty-two to be elected directly by the people, twenty-four nominated members and the under-secretary. This would be given administrative control of eight of the forty-five existing Government departments, including Education, Agriculture and Local Government. The Council would operate through committees deciding by resolution, subject to the veto of the Lord Lieutenant, who would also have discretion to initiate executive action. Control of the police and other important departments was reserved to Dublin Castle.

V

The day before the bill’s introduction, Redmond and the Irish Party entertained the colonial premiers, then visiting Britain, at a banquet at the House of Commons. The occasion was informal, and the great tenor John McCormack evoked ‘extraordinary enthusiasm’ with his singing of ‘The Irish Emigrant’ and ‘My Snowy-Breasted Pearl’. Redmond made a short speech conveying gratitude for the unchanging sympathy of the colonies with the Irish cause.97 Joining the premiers of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Newfoundland was, for the first time, General Louis Botha, the leader of the Transvaal, the newest autonomous state of the Empire, recently granted home rule within five years of the end of a bitterly fought war. Botha had observed, in his first speech as premier, that ‘the people of Great Britain have trusted the people of the Transvaal in a way which is not equalled in history’.98 The theme of trust in the Irish people would feature heavily in the controversies about to begin on the Council Bill. Redmond’s reception of the measure in the House – critical but not dismissive – played for time, and the party voted for the First Reading. Framing his comments as a series of questions, he promised to give a considered judgment at the National Convention to be held shortly in Dublin. Chief among his concerns were the undemocratic nominated element in the Council (a safeguard for the Protestant minority), the practicability of the committee system, the bill’s financial aspects and the powers of veto and initiative of the Lord Lieutenant.99 Above all, would the scheme, if put into effect, hinder or help the ultimate winning of full Home Rule? ‘On the answer to that question our support of this bill must depend.’ They were determined that the Home Rule remedy would be applied:

… but in the meantime we should shrink from the responsibility of rejecting anything which, after that full consideration which the bill will receive, seems to our deliberate judgment calculated to relieve the sufferings of Ireland and hasten the day of her national convalescence.100

Redmond’s circumspection, however, could not prevent a rush to judgment by others. It was reported that the bill was the subject of ‘practically universal criticism’ in the Westminster lobbies. Liberals were criticizing its timidity, while Unionists were as hostile as if the Act of Union had been repealed.101 Following the publication of the text at the weekend, nationalist Ireland began to respond. The North Dublin Executive of the UIL prefigured the language of many branches in denouncing it as a ‘wretched, miserable measure… insultingly hostile to the National aspirations of the Irish race’. The bishops of Limerick and Kildare were among the first to attack, Bishop O’Dwyer seeing its provisions for lay control of the new education department as ‘grotesque’.102 Hostile comment poured in from League and AOH branches and from local bodies all over the country, while most provincial papers echoed the two Dublin nationalist dailies in heavily criticizing it. Everywhere, the term most in use to describe it was ‘insult’.103

As the Convention approached, Redmond and Dillon were in daily contact, but brought few other party members into their confidence. As with the public, so with the party: they had done little to prepare it for a sober assessment of the scheme. Those MPs who voiced their views to the newspapers were mostly opposed; they outnumbered by about two-to-one those who echoed Redmond’s Commons approach or favoured amending the bill.104 Although a party meeting was due before the Convention, Dillon advised against it. On one thing he was clear on 9 May: it would never do to submit any resolution approving of the bill. ‘The Convention will have to be handled very carefully,’ he added.105 Redmond’s intensive parliamentary labours of 1906 had left him somewhat out of touch with Irish opinion; he had spoken only seven times in Ireland in 1906, and only once so far in 1907. Between 1901 and 1905, by comparison, his yearly platform appearances had averaged between eleven and fifteen. The handling of the Convention was uppermost in his mind when he asked Dillon, better attuned to grass-roots sentiment, for news of opinion in Dublin:

It will be very difficult, until I hear more from Ireland, to say what the best course will be at the Convention. I am quite clear, however, that if the Convention decides that we ought not to support the Second Reading, the bill will not be proceeded with at all….106

There had been ‘very little opportunity’ for Dillon, so far, to gauge feeling. In an uncharacteristic bout of wishful thinking, he fancied:

… there is a tendency to [a] reaction in favour of giving the bill fair consideration. The explosion of disappointment and anger in the country will have some very wholesome results… I think, if we make full use of it… we may be able to secure some necessary amendments.107

Equally uncharacteristically, Redmond was tending to pessimism. The same day he sent Dillon draft resolutions for the Convention that assailed the bill as containing ‘no provisions calculated to promote a settlement of the Irish question’, and as ‘marred by an absence of trust in the people’, as well as by unjust and unworkable provisions:

The more I think it over the more I lean towards the view that to carry a motion in any sense accepting the bill would, tho’ possible, only be possible by really driving the Convention and that most serious consequences might follow in the Party and out of it….108

Yet Dillon still held out for the possibility of swinging the Convention. Redmond’s draft would undoubtedly be carried by a sweeping majority, but would cause the bill’s abandonment. Instead, he would try his hand at a milder version that might avert such a ‘tactical misfortune’.109 The following day, Dillon sent word that his wife Elizabeth had been taken seriously ill at their Dublin home; he had been up nearly all night. Later that day, however, he sent his own draft resolution, ‘much more moderate than yours’, advocating that the party abstain on, rather than oppose, the Second Reading if the bill’s many defects were not addressed. Recommending that Redmond show both drafts to Blake, O’Connor and Devlin, he sent his own not as an alternative, but simply as ‘my view of the best tactics, if the Convention were bidable [sic]’. Even if not, they should be willing to risk ‘some unpopularity’ to put ‘the commonsense policy’ before the Convention.110

As a source of information about Irish opinion, Dillon was now useless to Redmond. However, the latter had gleaned enough from the newspaper cuttings sent him by Dillon and from other sources to let him know the trend of events. ‘As far as I am able to gather,’ he wrote to Dillon on 13 May, ‘the feeling against Birrell’s bill is growing rather than diminishing.’111 Worse yet, any prospect of swinging the Convention was about to become even less feasible. Even as Redmond wired his hope for Elizabeth’s recovery, she had already passed away.112 Her death would remove the stricken Dillon from active politics for many months, along with any possibility that the majority of the party and League could be induced to accept an unpopular course. When the party convened in Dublin on 15 May to express sympathy with Dillon, several MPs threatened trouble if the bill were not denounced.113 Three days later, Redmond wrote to Blake that he and Devlin had spoken at length with Dillon, and that they ‘practically came to the conclusion that the best thing for the party and the movement is to reject the bill’.114 Meanwhile, the Daily Mail was already claiming that the bill was ‘practically dead’.115

On the morning of Tuesday 21 May, the doors of Dublin’s Mansion House were besieged by around 3,000 delegates, including many from Australia and the U.S., a throng far greater than could be accommodated in the Round Room. Denis Gwynn’s account describes the electric atmosphere and Redmond’s ‘commanding presence, his magnificent voice, and his natural, impressive gestures [that] made him incomparable as the chairman of public assemblies’, as he moved that the bill be rejected as utterly inadequate in scope and unsatisfactory in details.116 A great ‘roar of approval’ greeted his motion. Speaker after speaker followed in the same vein, and the motion was passed overwhelmingly. Redmond, however, had begun defensively, answering critics of his vote for the First Reading who alleged that he and his colleagues had all along been committed to the bill. He justified it on technical grounds as necessary to ensure that the bill could be printed and placed before the Convention in fulfilment of the pledge made at Grange the previous year. If he had prevented the introduction of the bill, he could well imagine the critics saying that he ‘had stood between Ireland and some great unknown boon’.117 Healy had justified his own First Reading vote on exactly the same grounds, but there was substance in his charge of a failure of leadership, as he told the Irish Independent:

To have allowed it to be brought in was a disaster… to summon a Convention to deal with this wretched business is an abdication by those claiming to be National leaders of the exercise of ordinary judgment and foresight, and an attempt to throw responsibility on others less acquainted with the play of political forces in England and its Parliament.118

Redmond’s action held the party together, and secured the withdrawal of the bill on 3 June. The unionist press hailed the latter. The Liberal press and politicians were critical of the Irish leadership’s failure to educate its public on a measure of administrative reform, or felt it had been ‘got at’ by the priests, while more radical Liberals blamed the debacle on the overcautious safeguards for the minority built into the bill at the behest of the Liberal Imperialists in Cabinet.119 Redmond told Dillon of his sense that neither Birrell nor Campbell Bannerman had had any belief in the bill:

… and I think what has happened will strengthen their hands in the Cabinet against the Roseberyites… I am urging the Government very strongly to go on at once with their other Irish legislation.120

The damage to Redmond’s position lay in the impression – fostered by both unionist and nationalist critics – that he had secretly favoured the bill but had been forced by an angry public to do a last-minute about-turn. At the very least, the disparity between his initial non-committal reception of it and his unequivocal stance at the Convention left him looking indecisive.121 (An anecdote in Margaret Leamy’s memoirs raises an intriguing possibility regarding his private attitude. Staying with the Redmonds at Leeson Park at that time, she heard him say ‘My idea is, take it – at least it gives us a bill with a united Ireland’; after the Mansion House meeting he came home ‘crestfallen and disheartened at the opportunity they had within their grasp and were throwing away’).122

The harm done might have been reduced had the party’s MPs, at least, been taken into the leadership’s confidence as to what the bill was and was not. The episode showed up the drawbacks of the party’s consultative mechanisms, with all major decisions increasingly taken by the quadrumvirate of Redmond, Dillon, O’Connor and Devlin. Moreover, while Dillon’s instinct was to be less critical of Liberal than of Tory legislation, popular expectations were always higher with the Liberals in power. Paradoxically, a more modest Tory measure similar to Bryce’s early drafts might have been easier to ‘sell’ on its merits as a measure of local government reform. As it was, a council with more members than the entire Irish representation at Westminster, sitting merely to oversee administration and lacking legislative powers, was bound to focus attention on what was withheld rather than on what was granted.

Was Redmond’s conduct of the affair between 7 and 21 May the ‘astute handling of a very difficult situation’ of Denis Gwynn’s description, or the ‘maladroit handling… underlining his shortcomings as leader’ of A.C. Hepburn’s account? The second judgment must be taken as closer to the truth, with the proviso that this particular die had been cast long before 7 May. The crisis had its source at the breakfast with Campbell Bannerman eighteen months earlier, and the acceptance by Redmond and Dillon of the ‘instalment’ concept. For many nationalists, Home Rule itself represented a compromise; to have it thus further diluted was too much to accept. Redmond failed to register the new spirit of scepticism, induced by the cultural nationalist movement and the wide circulation of Griffith’s book, which greeted any concession from any British Government. His temperamental reluctance, mentioned by both Gwynns, to discuss political matters outside of formal settings – a trait that would now be described as a failure to ‘network’ – and that strange indifference to his own reputation that would surface again at later times of crisis, were at least partly to blame.123

The YIBs resolved that henceforth the party should refuse to consider any proposal short of Home Rule. For more radical nationalists, the debacle was confirmation of the bankruptcy of Irish Party attendance at Westminster. Griffith’s Sinn Féin (the successor to United Irishman) pilloried Redmond as having lost all authority, and drew an ideological conclusion:

We were convinced the Devolution bill would be worthless… For the last intelligent man who lingered in the hope of achievement for Ireland through Parliamentarianism, Mr Birrell has rung down the curtain.124

Popular disappointment was reflected in the party’s Irish fund-raising. Contributions to the parliamentary and national fund for the year would total a mere £7,000, only half the out-turn of £14,000 for 1906 and the lowest figure since Redmond’s election as leader.125

For Sir Antony MacDonnell, the episode marked the end, for the time being, of his influence in Irish affairs. Even after his demotion by Walter Long to the status of a normal under-secretary, he had continued to act as though a Cabinet minister in his own right. The party had come to see in him as great a threat as the Ulster Unionists had seen him to be with regard to the Union in 1904. As the only one of the protagonists who believed in the intrinsic merits of the Council Bill, he now tendered his resignation to Birrell, but withdrew it when he heard that the Irish Party was about to start a campaign against him in the House. Birrell remained ‘quite determined’ to get rid of him:

He [Birrell] is extremely bitter against him and attributes the failure of the bill entirely to him and Bryce. He does not seem at all bitter about our action…I am satisfied Sir A will speedily disappear. B said he had ‘more than enough of MacDonnellism and would not swallow any more’.126

VI

The May events had wider repercussions in the party, in Parliament and in Ireland. Moving quickly to re-establish his authority, Redmond convened a party meeting at Westminster on 11 June and issued a statement that called the Convention decision ‘an event of the first magnitude’ that showed that the people would reject any measure calculated to undermine the National movement, and criticized the Government for refusing to be guided by the Irish representatives. For British friends of Irish liberty, the lesson was ‘the folly of the policy of minimizing measures’. For nationalists, the decision was ‘a fresh and vigorous call to arms… with the object of forcing the Irish question to the forefront of the politics of the hour’.127 An opportunity to underline the party’s independence presented itself in the Jarrow by-election in July, when Irish voters were urged to vote for the independent Home Rule candidate, Alderman O’Hanlon, rather than for the Liberal or the Labour candidate. Speaking to an audience of working men in this most Irish of British constituencies, Redmond reminded them of his party’s record, which entitled him to ask for their confidence.128 The ‘dramatic and sensational effect upon the cause of Home Rule’ he hoped for did not materialize, the Labour candidate being victorious and O’Hanlon coming last.129

Such rallying calls and flourishes of independence did not still the rumbles of revolt in the party. At the Directory meeting on 20 June, the Gaelic-speaking MP for Kerry West, Thomas O’Donnell, indicating the penetration of Sinn Féin ideas into the party, moved that after the ‘betrayal of Irish hopes’ the party should ‘withdraw from an assembly which neither legally nor morally has a right to make laws for Ireland’, and should initiate at home a campaign of ‘constructive work, combined with open and defiant hostility to all English interference in our internal affairs’. Four MPs supported him, one of them the member for North Leitrim, C.J. Dolan. Another amendment from O’Donnell, to have O’Brien, Healy and their followers invited into the party, received support from eight of those present, including two other MPs.130 Two days later, Dolan announced his resignation from the party while stating that he would retain his seat. James O’Mara, MP for South Kilkenny, then resigned his membership and his seat, complaining that the Irish vote had been given to the Liberals in 1906 without a definite bargain.

On 20 July, Sir Thomas Grattan Esmonde, MP for North Wexford, resigned as Chief Whip of the party, later announcing that he would join the Sinn Féin group without giving up his seat.131 Called upon to resign in fulfilment of his pledge, he announced in mid-August his intention to stay in the party, on the condition that O’Brien and Healy were invited to rejoin.132 Responding on 14 August to an invitation from Wexford Corporation to be conferred with the Freedom of the Borough, Redmond referred to the ‘strange and perplexing situation’ in north Wexford. The only thing that was clear was that Esmonde was determined not to submit his ideas to the people of Wexford, who were unanimously opposed to them, just as Dolan had ‘run away from the poll’.133 He told an Esmonde constituent that the situation seemed ‘absolutely intolerable… no one wants to put any indignity on Sir Thomas Esmonde at all, but it is quite impossible for us to recognize a “conditional” member of the party….’134

In the midst of these defections, Redmond came under fire from his former ally, now advocate of the Sinn Féin abstention policy, John Sweetman, who republished his letter of 1894 to Justin McCarthy indicating his dissatisfaction with the anti-Parnellite Liberal alliance of that time. Sweetman unfairly advanced egotistical motives for Redmond’s clinging to a bankrupt policy:

The applause which his elocutionary powers receive in that House is the very breath of his life. To take John Redmond from the House of Commons would be as cruel as to take a great actor from the stage….135

To counter further Sinn Féin advances in Dublin, Redmond asked Harrington in August to organize a public meeting at the Mansion House to revive party support there. He suggested that, following the National League precedent, a UIL central branch should be formed in Dublin with fortnightly meetings: ‘I am convinced that a reaction is setting in in Dublin against these Sinn Féin people and that a reorganization of the National forces is possible.’136 Harrington assured him hopefully that ‘Dublin is really as sound as ever’. Sinn Féin, he claimed, were composed of people who had always been hostile, but were no more influential than they had ever been; it was only that ‘owing to mistakes on our own part they have been allowed to become a little more prominent’.137 In September, Harrington reported that the spirit had been much improved by the Mansion House meeting.138 The new central branch was inaugurated on 23 October as a forum for the discussion of current political topics.

The May debacle also galvanized Birrell into action to assuage nationalist feelings. By the end of June he was ready with an Evicted Tenants Bill that embodied the compulsion principle for the first time. The Freeman reckoned that it had kept faith with the tenants, and would finally settle the problem if allowed to do so by the Lords.139 Its passage through Committee was made tortuous, however, by intensive debating of hostile Unionist amendments. The sharpest controversy turned on the issue of the power to dispossess ‘planters’ – the new tenants who had long ago taken evicted farms – in order to restore the evicted, the limits on the numbers to be restored and the amount of land to be acquired for the purpose. Urged on by Redmond, the Government on 22 July applied the closure to the debate, causing uproar in the House.140 Passing the Commons by 228 votes to 49 on 2 August, the bill went to the Lords, who proceeded to undo much of Birrell’s work. Birrell’s willingness to compromise led to agreement by the end of August on compensation and other safeguards for planters, and a limit of 2,000 on the number of evicted tenants to be restored.141 The Evicted Tenants (Ireland) Bill received the royal assent on 28 August, fulfilling the promise made by the Tories in 1903 to bring closure to this chapter of the land war saga. As we shall see, however, land agitation would continue. The June statements of Redmond and the Directory had unanimously called upon UIL members to devote themselves to ‘a really vigorous and sustained agitation’ throughout Ireland during the coming autumn and winter.

Parliamentary activity aside, Redmond’s chief response to the debacle was to launch himself into a nationwide speaking tour. This was preceded by a speech at the Oxford Union on 6 June at the invitation of the president-elect William C. Gladstone, grandson of the great statesman, to debate the motion that: ‘In the opinion of the House, Ireland should have the right to manage her own affairs’ (see page 2). The occasion was a triumph for Redmond, whose oration reached back to medieval times for the origins of the Irish parliament. Pitching his argument towards his young Tory audience, he contrasted the Council Bill, which had ‘distrust of the people’ written all over it, with the Tories’ Local Government Act of 1898, which showed that ‘they trusted the people as fully as they did here in England….’142

At New Ross on 23 June, he returned to the scene of his first election to Parliament to unveil the 1798 monument, remembering ‘the day when I came here a young boy with fear and trembling to ask this great honour from the people’. Admitting that he had made many mistakes, he professed himself to be ‘full of fight’. The arguments of those who imagined that the policies of the last twenty-five years must be abandoned were ‘the words and reasons of political children’.143 At the Battersea UIL branch on 7 July, he rounded on ‘all the cranks, all the soreheads, all the political outcasts [who] have been much in evidence for the last few weeks…There is not one of them who has ever given inside or outside the House of Commons one useful day’s work for Ireland (cheers)….’144

When Parliament rose in late August, his tour became a gruelling itinerary that, in just over three months, would take him to twenty centres, fourteen of them in Ireland.145 With almost penitential rigour, he applied himself to the task of reconnecting himself with nationalist audiences after two years’ intensive focus on parliamentary work. There was little relaxation at Aughavanagh that autumn; not until just before Christmas would he manage one uninterrupted week there.146 The bereaved Dillon could offer only encouragement:

You will have a tough fight both with Sinn Féin and O’Brien and Co. But the country is overwhelmingly with you and the Party, and all that is necessary is to rouse up the people as you are doing and put a fighting policy before them which they can understand….147

With the twofold aim of rescuing the constitutional movement from danger and, as he explained at Drumkeeran in October, addressing ‘the great public outside through the newspapers in Ireland, and especially in England, in putting the cause of Ireland plainly before the world’, he expounded his party’s policies on all the issues disquieting nationalists, devoting each speech to a different theme.148 At Ballybofey on 29 August, he dealt with the party’s relationship with the Government, emphasizing that there could be no alliance with the Liberals except on the condition that they committed themselves, not only to bringing a Home Rule Bill into Parliament, but to making it the first item in their programme.149 The visit to Donegal provided an opportunity to visit the grave of Isaac Butt at Stranorlar: the latter’s fate must have been called to mind by recent events.150 At the Mansion House a week later, he called the Council Bill debacle a blessing in disguise, having shown the Government the impossibility of satisfying Ireland with anything less than real Home Rule.151

Elsewhere, his subject was the position of the Protestant minority in nationalist Ireland. Redmond denied that they were, or would be, persecuted by the Catholic majority, and regretted the ‘infinite mischief’ such stories did.152 At Portumna in October, he tried to outflank the local Sinn Féin organization by identifying the party with the agrarian agitation still simmering in East Galway, in part the result of the slow reinstatement of evicted tenants on the local Clanricarde estate.153 At Wexford on 21 October, at the ceremony to confer him with the Freedom of the Borough, he had news of imminent reinstatement for the evicted tenants of the nearby Coolroe estate. When he referred to some of the more personalized criticism to which he had been subjected that year, he let slip his customary mask of sanguine impassivity:

… a man who occupies the position which, all too unworthily, I fill (No, no) is open to many attacks, and from many quarters – the open attacks of open enemies. For my part I have never shrunk from such attacks, or complained of them… [but] the half-veiled sneer of false friends [is] harder to bear, the cowardly malice of the repeater of false and lying gossip, and the cynical imputer of base, unworthy motives. No one is too cynical or too mean, apparently, to level attacks on a man who has on his shoulders the weight of responsibility which has been placed on me. 154

At other venues, his themes ranged from financial relations and the cost of government to the university question and his concerns regarding industrial stagnation and the town slums problem. The marathon campaign ended with a whirlwind tour of Welsh, Scottish and English centres, where he noted among other things the rising tension between the Liberal Commons majority and the House of Lords. At Liverpool, his final venue, he concluded:

I have done my best. No man can do more. I have honestly striven all my life to forward the cause of Ireland. I commenced this work very young… From that day to this I have certainly not spared myself. I have devoted every thought and every word and action of my life to forward this cause. If I have not achieved more, it is because of my limitations of opportunity, of intellect, of power, but my whole heart has been in this work (hear, hear)….155

VII

The party’s and Directory’s June calls for renewed land agitation, echoed by Redmond in his speaking tour, were a response to the agrarian unrest that had resumed in certain parts of Ireland since the passing of the Wyndham Act, often assuming new forms as a consequence of it. An increase in average land prices of at least 26 per cent between 1903 and 1909 made it difficult for poorer farmers to purchase. While Ulster and Leinster together accounted for 60 per cent of land sales since the Act, 22 per cent of sales had taken place in Munster, and only 18 per cent in Connacht.156 Not long after the Act was passed, UIL branches in parts of the west and south adopted the tactic of ‘rent combinations’ to force down the price of land. Farmers wishing to purchase were encouraged to withhold part or all of their rent in order to pressurize the landlords to sell at lower prices. Rent combinations operated in fifteen counties (six in Munster, six in Connacht and three in Leinster) between January 1907 and June 1908; there were at least sixty-three such combinations in ten counties in January 1908.157 It seems that they stimulated the progress of purchase: 36 per cent of all the purchase deals reached between 1903 and 1908 were signed in 1908, the peak year for the agitation.158

A second arm of the agitation, the so-called ‘Ranch War’, was directed at the other long-standing UIL objective: land redistribution in the congested areas. The chief obstacle to this was the grazing system, under which landlords let untenanted lands for grazing on eleven-month leases, at rents that, reflecting market demand, were higher than those set by the land courts. These lands provided certain landlords with an increasing proportion of their income, giving them little incentive to sell. The failure to compel them to do so was one of the defects in the 1903 Act complained of by Redmond as well as the anti-conciliationists. Tenants in the affected areas wishing to purchase these lands took matters into their own hands by intimidating graziers into giving up their leases, the aim being to force a sale to the Estates Commissioners, who would then divide the land. In 1905 and 1906, the anti-grazier campaign was almost wholly confined to County Galway.159 The often illegal methods used in these forms of agitation did not have the approval of the UIL leadership, still less that of the Irish Party leadership. However, in October 1906, two MPs, Laurence Ginnell of North Westmeath and David Sheehy of South Meath, inaugurated the new tactic of ‘cattle-driving’ – the driving of cattle off the grazing farms. Action on this line soon followed in neighbouring counties. Within six months, cattle-driving had spread to parts of Connacht and to midland counties not previously disturbed. Cattle-drives numbered 390 during 1907, and rose to 681 the following year. They seemed to achieve their object: an unprecedented 174 grazing farms remained unlet in 1907.160

The political dimension of the campaign was soon on display. Unionists who expressed concern about lawlessness and disparaged the Government for inactivity were labelled ‘carrion crows’ by Birrell in April 1907 (indicating, as the Freeman put it, their ‘insatiable appetite for the unsavoury’). The phrase was taken up with enthusiasm by the nationalist press.161 Birrell’s claim that the country had not been more peaceful in 600 years seemed a complacent echo of nationalist propaganda, and would look hollow in the light of data he later gave for Irish agrarian crime in 1907: ninety-eight outrages with firearms (up from twenty-two in 1906), 276 cases of malicious injury to persons, animals and property and 270 people needing police protection.162 In August, six counties were proclaimed as seriously disorderly and 400 extra police drafted in at the request of the RIC Inspector General; the following June, a further two counties and 350 police were added.163 The Times called for the revival of the 1887 Coercion Act.164 Birrell warned that cattle-driving could only tie the Chief Secretary’s hands on reform. T.M. Kettle challenged such warnings as ‘reactionary’ utterances similar to those of ‘Buckshot’ Forster (Birrell’s Liberal predecessor in 1881), and sought to justify cattle-driving: ‘All the economics, all the public spirit, all the common sense was on the side of the cattle-drivers and against the Castle drivellers.’165

Before the Council Bill fiasco, Ginnell had complained to Redmond at his refusal to convene a party meeting to plan for the campaign: ‘Neither League nor party having decided to suspend agitation, I have no authority to suspend it. Your decision threw me back upon my own duty to keep the people up to the fighting line.’166 With the bill dead, it was time for the shift in attitude implied by Kettle’s words. Devlin, having conferred with Redmond, wrote to Dillon in June 1907 that the situation demanded that ‘prompt steps should be taken to give the country a lead’.167 He advised Redmond that the representative of each district where cattle-driving was carried on ‘should be sent into these places to associate himself with the people’. Listing the counties where the grazing agitation was most acute, he referred to Ginnell: ‘There is no row at present in Westmeath, but Ginnell has written me to say that he is coming over in order to create one, and I have given him every encouragement.’168 All this was reflected in the unwonted militancy of the June Party Statement and of Redmond’s call at Battersea for agitation for the compulsory purchase of the grazing tracts, repeated in east Galway, the heart of the disturbed area where Sinn Féin organizers were already active. A sizeable number of party MPs took their cue from Redmond and advocated boycotting and intimidation.169 Prosecutions for cattle-driving multiplied throughout 1907 and 1908. In late August 1907, six counties were proclaimed, and J.P. Farrell, MP for North Longford, who had called for the fight to be extended to every ranch, was arrested along with seventeen others. Ginnell was prosecuted and given a six-month sentence for contempt of court when he failed to attend in December.170 Farrell was jailed for six months the following December, and served three months.171

Paul Bew has described the novel aspect of the anti-grazier agitation that distinguished it from earlier phases of the land war. As Ginnell’s January 1907 letter to Redmond testifies, graziers were often well-to-do Catholics and nationalists, some even members of the League. The potential for double standards and hypocrisy, and conflicts within the League between nationalists divided by the land issue, was obvious.172 Ginnell complained of being attacked and thwarted at every turn by the ‘wealthy Westmeath grazing interest’ and its chief organ, the Westmeath Examiner, whose editor was J.P. Hayden, MP for South Roscommon and a personal friend and confidant of Redmond from Parnellite days. Hayden had made ‘incursions’ into his constituency, said Ginnell, who asked Redmond to ‘take serious notice’ of Hayden’s opposition to UIL policy and to prevent his making the League an organization for the defence of ranchers.173

IX

Everywhere Redmond went in autumn 1907, he was made aware of the strong grass- roots mood in favour of having O’Brien and Healy – the mortal enemies of 1900, whose relationship had slowly transmuted itself into an alliance cemented by a certain agreement on agrarian policy, a shared hatred of Dillon and a shared contempt for Redmond – and the former’s acolytes readmitted to the party.174 In early October, O’Brien publicly suggested a friendly conference with Redmond, who replied favourably to the idea at subsequent meetings that month. Efforts were made behind the scenes in November by Captain Donelan and George Crosbie to arrange such a conference.175 The moves revived all of Dillon’s old unease, especially when O’Brien insisted on Healy’s readmission, as well as on a convention to be held in advance to ratify the terms of agreement in both of their cases. Redmond’s suggestion that Healy’s case be deferred for a year until things settled down was refused outright by O’Brien, who wrote to Healy that: ‘He [Redmond] undoubtedly pines for an agreement, but shudders at the danger of offending Dillon and the Freeman.’ Healy found Redmond’s suggestion ‘not unnatural’, and was willing to allow O’Brien to re-enter without him, so strongly did he believe in his power to ‘stop the rot’ in the party.176 Meanwhile, Redmond battled against Dillon’s negativity:

I feel very strongly that if Crosbie’s letter were published tomorrow alongside of an absolute refusal by us, the effect would be extremely bad and many of our best friends would think us in the wrong.177

Despite Redmond’s refusal of a convention, and O’Brien’s adamance on the admission of Healy, initial impressions were nonetheless positive when the informal conference went ahead on 13 December, with Bishop O’Donnell joining O’Brien, Healy and Redmond.178 However, wrangling continued over the precise meaning of the party pledge. Redmond received a barrage of advice from Dillon, who had no doubt that ‘much mischief’ had been done and that O’Brien had gained much ground.179 Despite Redmond’s assurance on 19 December that no concessions had been made on vital matters, Dillon was unpersuaded, and blamed him for O’Brien’s revival:

… a very serious situation has now arisen. O’Brien with great astuteness has… outmanoeuvred the Party, and he is now appearing before the country as the champion of unity – always a popular cry… Before your speeches at Drumkeeran and Limerick… O’Brien and his followers were absolutely unable to get a meeting in Mayo or indeed in any part of Connaught. But now the idea has gone abroad that you are more or less in sympathy with this agitation… if this is allowed to continue, I fear the effect on the position of the Party will be disastrous….180

Redmond refusing further meetings with O’Brien, the standoff continued into the new year.181 O’Brien and Healy responded positively, however, when the principles agreed before Christmas were published and endorsed by the Directory as the basis on which the dissidents might return to membership of a pledge-bound party. In turn, the party approved this declaration, Dillon proposing the readmission of all MPs who accepted the principles and signed the party pledge. On 18 January 1908, the Freeman announced ‘The Triumph of Unity’ and published friendly correspondence between O’Brien and Redmond.182 Privately, Redmond wrote to O’Brien: ‘I sincerely trust that we are now at the end of our quarrels which have been a great source of unhappiness to me all through.’183

The agreement covered the O’Brienite MPs Augustine Roche, D.D. Sheehan and John O’Donnell. Esmonde announced a week later that he would rejoin the party in deference to the wishes of his friends, but had ‘no great hopes’ in the efficacy of parliamentary action.184 Dolan was a different matter. On 30 January, he finally declared his resignation and his intention to stand for Sinn Féin. The by-election was fixed for 21 February. The campaign, in reality an eight-month affair, lived up to the best traditions of violent Irish elections.185 Dolan’s support lay among the members of the North Leitrim UIL Executive who had opposed the Council Bill and had mandated him in June to go to the National Directory to call for the party’s withdrawal from Westminster. At Redmond’s October meeting at Drumkeeran in the constituency, Dolan had tried to speak, but was met with cries of ‘Clear out’ and ‘Traitor’, followed by the throwing of mud and stones.186

The party took seriously the electoral challenge from Sinn Féin, and threw its resources into the Leitrim campaign under the direction of McHugh. Griffith, Hobson and other prominent Sinn Féiners campaigned for Dolan, who was supported by a local newspaper and eleven Sinn Féin clubs. The campaign revealed Devlin in the role of the party’s ‘enforcer’. AOH members imported by him from Ulster – termed by one historian the Home Rule movement’s ‘Belfast stormtroopers’ – were used to disrupt Dolan’s meetings and assault his supporters. The Freeman reported ‘lively scenes’ at a meeting at Kiltyclogher when a Sinn Féin band drowned out the supporters of the party candidate, F.E. Meehan. ‘Stormy scenes’ were reported from other towns. At Drumkeeran, Dolan was accompanied by Anna Parnell and George Gavan Duffy, who were pelted with eggs and mud by party supporters. Parnell had a pail of water thrown over her. In the election, Meehan polled 3,103 votes to Dolan’s 1,157 in an electorate of 6,324.187 From an anti-parliamentarian point of view, this was considerably better, at 27 per cent of the poll, than the six to one defeat suffered in their previous challenge to the party in February 1900. Griffith hailed the result as a moral victory, depicting it in Sinn Féin as a declaration of Irish independence and comparable with Daniel O’Connell’s historic 1828 victory that had paved the way for Catholic Emancipation. However, it remained true, as Jackson points out, that an outgoing MP had been unable to mount a serious defence of his seat.188

Sinn Féin continued for a time to profit from the Irish Party’s weaknesses. The number of its branches, having risen from twenty-one in 1906 to fifty-seven the following year, rose again to 115 in 1908. In the January 1908 municipal elections, it won three of the nine seats it contested in Dublin Corporation.189 The year 1909 would see its fortunes decline as those of the Irish Party rose again: by August of that year there were only 581 paid-up members in the entire country, 211 of them in Dublin.190

Another development of 1907 would have been noticed by few except for the police at Dublin Castle. Hobson, McCullough and others of the young men who had reluctantly accepted Griffith’s dominance of Sinn Féin had also become members of the supreme council of the IRB, edging out the old guard. There, joined by Thomas Clarke, the ex-Portland prisoner for whose release Redmond had campaigned throughout the 1890s, just returned from the US to open a tobacconist shop in Dublin, they awaited the downturn in British fortunes that might enable them to strike.191

Notes and References

1F.J., 12 Oct. 1905.

2Ibid., 21, 26 Oct. 1905; Dillon to Redmond, 26 Oct., 2 Nov. 1905, NLI Ms. 15,182 (8). Dillon wondered if there was a safe way to communicate with Campbell Bannerman: ‘If he were to make a really bad speech, the situation would become very bad indeed.’

3F.J., 9, 11 Nov. 1905.

4F.J., 13 Nov. 1905.

5Ibid., 11 Nov. 1905. ‘I am proud… that no victory in the House of Commons for the last five years … has been obtained by the Labour Party that was not obtained through the help and instrumentality of our votes (cheers),’ he added. The Labour Party leader, Keir Hardie, sent a telegram of congratulations on this ‘epoch making’ speech. Keir Hardie to Redmond, 11 Nov. 1905, RP Ms. 15,193 (7). Redmond would repeat this theme several times, as at Sunderland in March 1909, where he stood on a Labour platform for the first time. F.J., 16 Mar. 1909.

6Memorandum of Redmond interview with CampbellBannerman, 14 Nov. 1905, RP Ms. 15,171 (2).