Parnell, Charles Stewart

Irish Parliamentary Party leader Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–1891) was born on 27 June 1846 at his family's estate at Avondale, Co. Wicklow. Parnell went to school in England and attended Cambridge University but did not graduate. He was elected Home Rule MP for Meath in 1875 and made a name for himself by obstructing the business of Parliament. After Isaac Butt's death in 1879, Parnell became the de facto leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), but he came to lead the wider nationalist movement only when agricultural depression revived the land question in the late 1870s. When Michael Davitt organized the Irish Land League in 1879, Parnell, himself a Protestant landowner, realized the league's political potential and became its president. Widespread agrarian violence characterized the ensuing Land War of 1879 to 1881, and Ireland seemed on the verge of revolution. Capitalizing on British fears, Parnell wrested the Land Act of 1881 from the British government. This legislation finally granted Irish tenants the "three Fs"—fair rent, fixity of tenure, and free sale.

Fearing continued agrarian instability, in 1882 Parnell shifted his focus to winning Home Rule in the British Parliament. Parnell gave the IPP a national organization by creating the Irish National League and established greater discipline and loyalty to himself within the IPP. These steps paid off when the IPP won a record eighty-six seats in the 1885 election. This electoral mandate gave Parnell the leverage necessary to convince the British Liberal Party to support Home Rule. Although the 1886 Home Rule bill failed to pass, Parnell had placed Irish self-government on the Liberal agenda.

Parnell rapidly fell from the heights that he had reached in 1886. The new Conservative government's fierce opposition to Home Rule left Parnell with less political flexibility. Parnell also faced a public outcry in 1887 when The Times incorrectly linked him to the infamous Phoenix Park murders. But it was Parnell's personal life that ultimately ended his career. In December 1890 British Liberals and Irish Catholics turned on Parnell after news surfaced of his long-standing love affair with Katharine O'Shea, the wife of a Home Rule MP. Most members of the IPP repudiated Parnell's leadership, and although he fought to maintain his position, his political career was over. Physically exhausted, Parnell died on 6 October 1891. Parnell was an exceptional figure: a Protestant landlord who advocated land reform for Irish Catholic tenants and a distant and rather difficult man who during the 1880s was the charismatic uncrowned king of Ireland.

Parnell, Charles Stewart

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