Charles Stewart Parnell, Cambridge University and the fable of Daisy
In 1905, Charles Stewart Parnell's sister claimed that he had been expelled from Cambridge University for seducing a local girl and driving her to suicide. Although the story was nonsense, it lingered throughout the twentieth century.
A Patriot's Mistake, published in 1905, purported to be the reminiscences of Parnell's sister Emily, who had married the ne'er-do-well Arthur Dickinson.[1] This publication claimed that Parnell had been expelled from the University of Cambridge at the age of nineteen after driving a local girl to suicide. Mrs Dickinson's plea that she had revealed the story "reluctantly, and under great pressure"[2] tends to confirm the suspicion that her book was in fact the work of some sensationalist ghost writer out to help her profit from the notoriety surrounding Parnell's memory. The tragic tale of "Daisy", his alleged victim's name, may be dismissed as utterly fantastic, although it is possible that it was concocted from some disparate and faintly remembered events from forty years earlier. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this brazen imposition upon public credulity was the fact that, just seven years previously, R. Barry O'Brien had published an authoritative account of Parnell's departure from Cambridge, supplied by Magdalene College where he had been an undergraduate. This conclusively established that Parnell had been 'rusticated' (briefly sent down, a form of sin-binning) after becoming involved in a street fight and losing a court case for assault.[3] It spoke volumes for Emily Dickinson's loose grasp of the concept of chronology that, when challenged to explain the conflict of evidence, she insisted that her brother had been rusticated from his college several years after he had been expelled from the University.
A Patriot's Sister's Mistake It can hardly be said that A Patriot's Mistake made much impact when it was published in December 1905.[4] A bleakly contemptuous notice in the Irish Times, a Unionist newspaper with no interest in defending Parnell's memory, suggested that it might have been better titled A Patriot's Sister's Mistake. The reviewer complained that there was "not very much in it about Charles Stewart Parnell", and singled out for specific condemnation "a story of Parnell's Cambridge days which it would have been better to leave in oblivion".[5]
The saga of the downfall of the hapless Daisy is spread over several pages of cloying prose, much of which benefits from omission. I confine myself to extracts, regrettably extended, from Emily Dickinson's tissue of twaddle, sufficient to convey the flavour and reveal the purpose of the tale:
During his sojourn at the University a very unhappy event occurred, which we would willingly cover with the large cloak of charity, and ignore but for the baneful influence it had on his after life, and for the explanation it affords of the counter-stroke which Fate struck him in his later years. So true is the scriptural mandate which says, "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap". ... His Cambridge days were boyishly happy .... A year of this Cambridge life of mingled work and play went by, Charles trying to fit himself for the public life which was, even then, his greatest ambition, while enjoying to the full the college friendships, debating clubs, and wine parties, which serve to brighten the grey existence of an undergraduate. It was then, when he had reached his nineteenth year, that the first tragedy of his life came, a tragedy in which, alas! another suffered, though released by the hand of death from sharing the lifelong remorse which was his heritage.
Charles was one of the most enthusiastic oarsmen on the river, spending nearly all his spare time in flannels.... [While boating downstream, he spotted a pretty girl] not more than sixteen, of remarkable loveliness, engaged, basket in hand, in picking fruit. ... Daisy was as innocent as the large-eyed flowers from which she took her name, wholly unconscious of her charms and therefore more charming. ... Her knowledge of the world was very small. Living in a secluded district with few neighbours, love in connection with herself had hardly yet entered her head; and she had no mother.... [Parnell] therefore magnanimously resolved to give Daisy a good deal of his improving society, and help to advance her education.... [T]he acquaintance ripened into a deep and trusting affection on the girl's part, and an equally strong, though less pure and unselfish passion on the boy's part. He knew it was impossible to marry Daisy, lovely and innocent though she was, as he was under age and a ward of Chancery. [Cloying descriptions of their courtship are omitted, but things went wrong between them.] [T]heir paradise was spoiled by an impulse of young passion, and, as is usually the case, the ebb-tide, on one side at least, set in from that hour. A coldness and estrangement gradually grew between them, and an increasing wretchedness on the girl's part, who was sensitive and inexperienced....
One morning, on coming along the river bank, near the place where Daisy and he had first met, he caught the sound of many frightened voices. On turning a bend in the path he suddenly came upon a group which haunted him for years after. A small crowd of villagers was gathered round a figure that had just been dragged from the river, now swollen with heavy rain. A woman held the head that was covered with dank masses of golden hair, and the slender, dripping form was that of a young girl. Pushing aside the crowd with a gasp of horror, Charles recognised the body of his little wife, as he had called Daisy. She was quite dead, and, as one of the bystanders said, must have been in the water for many hours....
Charles went back to college, though he never afterwards knew how he got there. An inquest was held, at which he was present as a witness. While shielding the girl's name from slander, he admitted having a great admiration and friendship for her, and the shock which her death gave him.... She was buried in the village churchyard with her namesake flowers growing round her, and for Charles a lifelong punishment began.
Various versions of his acquaintance with the dead girl had come to the knowledge of the heads of his college, and Charles's name was formally removed from the books of his university. Cambridge was now hateful to him, and he thought this punishment a very light one compared with the torturing remorse which was to haunt him the greater part of, if not all, his life. His family were unaware of the exact nature of the blow that was crushing him. Long after his first frenzied grief had given place to the saddened calm which marked all his after life, he reaped the consequences of his youthful folly and selfishness, and was the frequent victim of violent nervous attacks. In these would appear before him, in the dead of the night, standing at the foot of his bed, the dripping white-clad form, with locks like a cataract of golden rain, which he had seen that morning on the river bank.[6]
It is worth repeating that this nonsense appeared seven years after R. Barry O'Brien's biography had established that Parnell was briefly exiled from his college shortly before this twenty-third birthday, not expelled from the University when he was nineteen. Where supporting detail was thrown in to give colour to the narrative, it can generally be shown to be clichéd and unfounded. Parnell refused to join the Magdalene Boat Club and was never a member of the Cambridge Union, which throws some doubt on the aquatic and debating activities attributed to him. Although he was almost certainly more politically aware in his student days than lazy legend has allowed,[7] there is no evidence that he saw Cambridge as part of a preparation for a career in politics. Some fabrications are clumsy in their falsehood. "Charles went back to college, though he never afterwards knew how he got there" certainly conveys a vivid cameo of a young man gripped by panic and remorse. The problem is that Parnell never spoke of the episode – not surprisingly, since it never happened – and Emily expected her readers to believe that she "discovered with a flash of insight the whole cause of his altered and careworn looks" after he had shared a bedroom with her husband, Arthur Dickinson, who had been forced to hold him during a particularly violent nightmare.[8]
Years later, Parnell's secretary and dogged defender, Henry Harrison, organised a search of the local coroner's records, which revealed that "there was no girl called Daisy drowned whilst Parnell was at Cambridge, nor any girl called Daisy the subject of any inquest whilst Parnell was at Cambridge". In itself, this might not be conclusive, for Daisy might have been a pet name: if all we knew about Katharine O'Shea was a rumour that Parnell had a relationship with a woman in Eltham called "Queenie", then census records would hardly throw useful light on the mystery. But Harrison went further: there was no inquest on any drowned female for eleven months before Parnell's departure from Cambridge. Hence there was "no atom of truth in any of the statements susceptible of verification that are contained in the story…. It is seldom that positive disproof can be carried to such a point of completeness."[9]
However, there was one suicide during Parnell's Cambridge years that might have lodged in his memory, but it happened not downriver towards the Fens but at Grantchester, where the Cam was, in Rupert Brooke's phrase, a "yet unacademic stream". In the early hours of 29 December 1866, fire destroyed a public house and spread to a nearby row of cottages, reducing 25 villagers to destitution. Twenty-year old servant girl Annie Smith had fallen asleep while "repairing her stays" and knocked over a candle. Having been threatened with transportation to Australia if she ever caused a fire, she threw herself in the river and drowned. Annie Smith had perished deep in the midwinter vacation, and no undergraduate gave evidence at her inquest. Medical evidence dismissed the possibility of pregnancy, which goes some way towards ruling out any premarital relationship.[10] Parnell returned late to Cambridge for the Lent Term of 1867, on 12 February, but impecunious students like himself often took their afternoon exercise on the "Grantchester Grind", where the scene of the fire would still have been evident, and local people were no doubt willing to talk about the tragedy.[11] It is well attested that Parnell suffered from nightmares, like the one witnessed by Arthur Dickinson, probably the result of the childhood trauma of being abandoned by his mother: Katharine O'Shea similarly had to hold him firmly in her arms during his nocturnal terrors. Annie Smith's death may well have made its way into one of them and perhaps Parnell did once wake Arthur Dickinson by shouting in his sleep that there was a drowned girl at the foot of the bed. But the stuff of nightmares can hardly be regarded as historical evidence.[12]
The Daisy Hopkins case, 1891-2 As it happens, there was a real-life Daisy who made something of an impact upon the University of Cambridge in the late-nineteenth century. Although she was neither innocent nor drowned, Daisy Hopkins may have lodged in Emily Dickinson's memory, providing a convenient and easily recollected name for Parnell's imaginary sex victim.[13] Traditionally, the University possessed the right to exercise extensive police powers over the local inhabitants. In particular, the Proctors could arrest any young woman found in the company of an undergraduate in circumstances that suggested – to the enforcers – the possibility of an amorous (and presumably commercial) encounter. These legal privileges were resented by townspeople, and their opposition came to a head with the arrest of a seventeen-year old whose family had recently moved to Cambridge from Ely, although whether she had ever been engaged in picking apples while wearing a pretty dress is not recorded.[14] The fact that Daisy Hopkins was "suspected of evil" – known to the police, we should say – might be regarded as a matter of opinion. More persuasive was the rumoured decision of her undergraduate companion to flee the country, an extreme response that might reasonably be interpreted as a confession of guilt.[15] Her appearance in the Vice-Chancellors' court, "fashionably attired in a navy-blue costume, trimmed with gold edging, and a fawn coloured felt hat", suggested that the wages of sin supported a comfortable lifestyle. However, Daisy Hopkins protested that the Proctors' bulldogs (constables) had swooped upon her when she was on her way home from Newnham village, where she had visited her "young man", having been stopped by a disoriented passer-by who asked her for directions to Tennis Court Road. Ignoring her pleas of ill health (she had a sore throat) and her solicitor's request for an adjournment to locate a character witness who was in Holy Orders, the Vice-Chancellor sentenced Daisy Hopkins to fourteen days' detention in the Spinning House, the University's Dickensian prison for fallen women. There followed a terrible scene in which she became hysterical and had to be dragged from the courtroom.[16]
The University had scored a massive own goal. In the weeks that followed, the local press published a collage of condemnatory comments from across the country, among them "academical tyranny", "atrocious scandal", disgrace to civilization". Organisations as varied as the Salvation Army and the Personal Rights Association, a pioneer civil liberties group, rallied to support the incarcerated victim. More immediate and devastating was the lethal move from her solicitor, who headed for the Court of Queen's Bench to invoke habeas corpus. Daisy Hopkins had been convicted of "walking with a member of the University in a public street of the Town of Cambridge", the usual formula for such prosecutions. It was a simple matter to establish that there was no such offence in English law, and the prisoner had to be released. A mighty seat of abstruse learning had been made to look very silly. The fun continued for several months, as the Daisy Hopkins camp primed her to take legal action seeking damages for unlawful imprisonment.[17] This failed, but waves of local anger and national ridicule effectively signalled the end of the University's special jurisdiction.
While there is no specific evidence that the Parnell clan followed the Cambridge farrago, chronology alone would suggest that it made some impact. It was easy to attribute the death of their famous – or notorious – brother in October 1891 to his persecution by a large section of English opinion in the grip of a hypocritical and miserably selective outburst of sexual morality. The Daisy Hopkins affair ran from early December 1891 through to March of the following year, and was widely reported in Ireland as well in Britain.[18] The ramifications of legislation to curb the University's jurisdiction continued into 1894.[19] It is likely that the surviving Parnells would have drawn grim pleasure from seeing an elite institution rendering itself absurd in the persecution of a harmless young woman.
Understanding Emily However, it is only fair to concede that there is one piece of potential evidence that might give some slight trace of plausibility to Emily's sensational story. Parnell spent the first two terms of the 1865-6 academic year at Magdalene, but he did not return for the third. Was it possible that he had become embroiled in some unsuitable and untimely romance, that reports reached the ears of his uncle, Sir Ralph Howard (whom Emily later cited as her source) and that Parnell had been sent to cool his ardour in the glens of Wicklow instead of spending the Easter Term in Cambridge?[20] It seems unlikely. The near-contemporary case of Richard Greenhalgh, a Magdalene undergraduate apprehended "at the backs of the Colleges, walking & talking with a Servant Girl" in 1867, confirms that such a connection would have been the subject of formal disciplinary action. It was hardly likely that a student, however moonstruck, would have been despatched for a whole term without the sanction of a College Meeting.[21] A quarter of a century later, as the Daisy Hopkins case demonstrated, donnish values remained unchanged.
Parnell's absence from Cambridge during the summer of 1866 may be more prosaically explained by the problem that he had simply run out of money: his Easter Term account for 1866 shows that his Lent Term bill remained unpaid.[22] As a ward of the Court of Chancery, thanks to the death of his father, his expenditure was tightly controlled, making it virtually impossible for him to borrow additional funds. Further evidence of just how tight was the external control over his budget comes from 1867. His College bill for the Lent Term was £50, 17 shillings and fourpence: he carried forward into the Easter Term arrears of 17 shillings and fourpence. It is likey that the account had been handled by a Chancery clerk who was authorised to disburse There is further evidence of his tight budget from 1867. His College bill for the Lent Term was £50, 17 shillings and fourpence. He carried forward into the Easter Term arrears of 17 shillings and fourpence. The account was perhaps sent to a Chancery clerk who was only authorised to disburse £50. Not only had Magdalene turned out to be very expensive but Parnell also had to cope with the unexpected disappearance of the income that had no doubt been earmarked for his university experience. Avondale, the family home, had been let to Thomas Edwards, a contractor who used the mansion as a headquarters while constructing the railway from Dublin to Wexford. By 1865, the Wicklow section was complete. That year, Edwards, a widower, got married again, and perhaps his new wife wished for a home of her own. An attempt was made in September 1865 to find a new tenant, but it seems that nobody wanted to take on an estate that would revert to its heir two years later, when Charles Stewart Parnell would come of age. At just the moment when he was planning to spend several hundred pounds a year studying for a Cambridge degree, Parnell had to adjust to the removal of what must have been a similar sum from his income. [23]
Forty years later, Emily Dickinson, whose memoirs suggest that she never understood money, perhaps retained some memory of her brother unexpectedly failing to return to Cambridge after the Easter vacation. Her mind was like flypaper. The name Daisy was one of the scraps that adhered. Perhaps, too, Parnell had talked about the tragic drowning of a young woman at Grantchester: fire was an ever-present danger in the Victorian world and he might well have been moved by the disaster to check on safety precautions at Avondale, a mansion that operated with very few indoor servants, and hence imposed a greater degree of responsibility upon family members . Perhaps her brother did form some emotional attachment to a girl at about this time: it is hardly unusual for a teenage boy to fall in love, while the intensity of his subsequent relationship with Katharine O'Shea demonstrates that Parnell's lonely childhood left him starved of affection.[24] His brother John mentioned Parnell's fascination with a "bright, pretty girl" when they were pupils of the Reverend Alexander Whishaw at Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire. Parnell was about sixteen at the time, and John claimed that his studies were "considerably interrupted" by the romance, the kind of emotional crisis that might well have aroused concern among adult relatives.[25] Forty years later, these various stories merged in Emily's imagination (or were embellished by an unscrupulous editor) to create an Ophelia-like tragedy that purported to explain the termination of Parnell's university career.[26]
Daisy refuted but tenacious In his 1925 biography of Parnell, St John Ervine admitted that Emily Dickinson was an unreliable source, but he could not resist using the story of Daisy and her watery demise, pleading that "there were several of her relatives and also Mr Barry O'Brien alive to deny her story when it was published, if it were untrue".[27] Presumably he was unaware of the doubts expressed by another biographer and the denunciation orchestrated by Parnell's family. The publication of A Patriot's Mistake had made little impact, and there was no reason why R. Barry O'Brien, a respected author, should have given it publicity. However, the story both attracted and repelled another chronicler of Parnell's career, T.P. O'Connor. "Tay-Pay" was both a Nationalist politician and an astonishingly prolific middlebrow journalist, who produced his own weekly newspaper, which had a literary focus.[28] Narrating the tale of Daisy gave him the opportunity to fill a column with extended quotation, while heavily hinting that the source was not to be trusted. In February 1906, he commented that the "startling" episode "is told in such melodramatic fashion – and is in some respects so much in contradiction with well-known facts, that it is somewhat hard to know whether it is quite authentic or whether it is not a vague recollection of some half-understood statement worked by a woman's vivid imagination into melodrama.... There is no suggestion that Parnell himself ever told the story, and Mrs Dickinson's husband is not a very safe authority. It is certain that Parnell was not rusticated from Cambridge, as Mrs Dickinson seems to imagine, because of some rumours about such a story: the cause of his rustication was a very innocent and boyish street encounter, the details of which have often been published."[29] This was about as close as it was possible to come to saying that the tale was untrue without incurring an action for defamation. Nonetheless, T.P.'s Weekly had given Daisy more exposure than she had achieved through Emily's largely-ignored book.
It may have been the publicity that T.P. O'Connor had given to Daisy that resolved Parnell's surviving siblings to seek an authoritative statement from Magdalene College dismissing the alleged episode.[30] It was Henry Tudor Parnell, who acted on their behalf, since he was a Cambridge graduate and might reasonably expect the courtesy of reply from the Master of Magdalene. As Foster commented, Henry was "a shadowy figure", the youngest of the three brothers who had survived to adult life and the only one who was able to live off his inheritance. He took no part in public life but was believed to be a Conservative in politics. He kept a low profile, travelling a great deal, possibly to avoid association with his notorious brother, whom he closely resembled.[31] Although Henry took care to distance himself from Parnell's politics, he was outraged by his sister's decision to publish "the worst story I have ever heard about our dead brother …. that our brother was expelled from Cambridge, in consequence of the suicide of a girl whom he had seduced". On 22 February 1906, three weeks after T.P. O'Connor's article had appeared, he wrote to Stuart Donaldson, the Master of Magdalene, to ask whether the College records show "any truth in this incredible story, as other relatives besides myself, consider that, if it is not true, it ought to be contradicted at once".
Donaldson, who had only been associated with Magdalene for two years, turned to the two longest-serving Fellows. Alfred Newton, the Professor of Zoology, disliked Parnell's politics but was adamant (he was usually adamant) that "there was nothing against his character" when he fell foul of College discipline in 1869. "I was then in residence, and can positively declare that no story or report to his discredit, such as is alleged, ever reached my ears; while had there been such a rumour I must have heard of it." A.G. Peskett had come to Magdalene as an undergraduate in 1870, the year after Parnell's rustication, and been elected to a Fellowship in 1875. He too had "never heard of any such scandal…. I am convinced that there is no foundation for it whatever". Peskett had the distinction of being the first Fellow of Magdalene to marry after the abolition of celibacy in 1882, but he would have been living in College during the years in which Parnell rose to notoriety, and it is likely that he heard about him as an undergraduate from College servants. "I always understood that Mr Parnell's conduct at this college was perfectly correct, except for this assault, committed under some real or imagined provocation". Donaldson himself copied the extract from the Order Book regarding Parnell's rustication, helpfully explaining that "gross misconduct" that brought about his condemnation "appears to be the technical term in such cases, and does not at all imply such a serious cause as is alleged by your sister in her book".[32] However harsh the Fellows of Magdalene may have been in 1869 (and they could hardly have ignored so blatant a case of assault), their successors certainly rallied to the defence of Parnell's honour in 1906. Henry Parnell sent the correspondence to the Daily News, and it was copied by newspapers as far away as New Zealand.[33] Unluckily, as so often, a wave of press reporting proved ephemeral, and the Magdalene rebuttal did not come to light again until 1974.[34]
Of course, the Daisy fable was not concocted to throw light either upon Parnell's exit from Cambridge or upon his entrance into adulthood, but to provide deep background for the melodrama that engulfed him in the last year of his life. It was an artistic device to complete the topping and tailing of a life that was rotten with sexual indulgence. Parnell paid for driving an innocent girl to suicide – presumably she was pregnant although this is never explicitly stated – by his entanglement with a designing woman. He was punished for both episodes by the humiliating public destruction of his political career. Hence the pious and pompous allusion to sowing and reaping, and the bizarre assertion that the Daisy episode had to be unmasked "for the explanation it affords of the counter-stroke which Fate struck him in his later years". The problem with the sensational legends that have gathered around Parnell – sad to say, this one is not unique – is that they constitute a detritus that clogs the biographical record and may prove hard to eradicate. Hence St John Ervine specifically accepted the well-established fact that Parnell had been rusticated after being successfully sued for assault, but found the tale of Daisy too tempting to be abandoned. The combination required some authorial convolutions. He agreed that Emily Dickinson's book was ill-written, incoherent and frequently inaccurate, but "[n]evertheless, she is, I think, to be trusted in this matter", before proceeding to regale his readers with three pages of Parnell's heartless love-making. Where evidence was lacking, Ervine supplied its absence with an appeal to myth. Irish landlords, he explained, were notorious for exercising droit de seigneur over the daughters of their tenants. Parnell probably believed that "a gentleman is entitled to take his pleasure among the women of the lower class".[35] As if this were not monstrous distortion enough, he threw in his clinching argument: "The tone of Magdalene at that time probably encouraged him to hold this belief."[36]
Henry Harrison's refutation of the story in 1931, noted above, ought to have killed it altogether. Nonetheless, Daisy lingered. Writing for the popular market in 1936, Joan Haslip agreed that A Patriot's Mistake was a "very inaccurate biography" and that there was "absolutely no foundation" to Emily's story of his expulsion from Cambridge. Even so, Haslip elaborated her brief account of Parnell at Cambridge by stating that "he found it easier to get on with women of a lower class, and there were tea-shop girls and daughters of local farmers with whom he had passing affairs which he invested with a certain romantic quality".[37] Thus Daisy was dismissed as non-existent but instantly reincarnated as a regiment of easily available sweethearts. As late as 1966, Jules Abel half-dismissed Daisy before wistfully adding that "the story cannot be rejected out of hand". It was probably no coincidence that his book was called The Parnell Tragedy. A decade later, F.S.L Lyons finally dismissed Daisy as "one of his sister Emily's more bizarre fabrications".[38]
Daisy and the tunnel of love It is difficult to improve upon the verdict of Shane Leslie that Emily Dickinson's account of her brother's Cambridge days was "[i]nsanely scandalous". Henry Harrison was equally scathing, describing Emily Dickinson as having "no training or practice in responsible statement" who saw her authorial task as one of "embalming in print the tales oft-told that have grown, as such tales will, out of all knowledge in the telling".[39] Nonetheless, the historian has a duty to seek some explanation of the motives and sources behind this strange fabrication. We may start by noting that, in the eighteen-sixties, it was Emily who brought upon herself a cloud of moralistic disapproval. She had formed an attachment to a Wicklow neighbour, a young Army officer called Arthur Dickinson, whom her relatives did not regard as a suitable husband. On one occasion, the pair arranged an ill-judged tryst in a London square, opposite Sir Ralph Howard's town house, where she was staying at the time. Lady Howard caught them in the act of kissing, and it may be suspected that her denunciation of Emily's morals, as reported in A Patriot's Mistake, owed something to the acidity of Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest.[40] The couple married in 1864, but Dickinson quickly turned out to be as unreliable as his detractors had predicted. He seems to have made no attempt to establish a matrimonial home, and they quartered themselves upon Avondale, where Emily was well-placed to pick up family gossip. She certainly had a great deal of impecunious leisure in which to repent her wild youth and, although Parnell settled a small income upon her, she may well have taken pleasure in fostering a legend that he, too, was less than perfect. In their various ways, Parnell's siblings had all suffered collateral damage from the controversial career of their famous brother. Emily Dickinson's autobiography artlessly demonstrated that she was the architect of most of her own misfortunes but, at some level of her consciousness, perhaps she felt that, fourteen years after his death, Charles Stewart Parnell could suffer no further harm from the conflation of disparate and barely remembered episodes into a sensational denigration of his memory. "No one would dream of imputing bad faith to Mrs Dickinson," wrote another literary journalist, Robertson Nicoll, "but it is much to be hoped that her memory has occasionally played her false."[41]
When challenged by Henry Parnell in 1906, she stood by her story, although it may well have been embellished in the process of editing. The shreds that drifted down the decades to be woven into the Daisy fable may be summarised. Parnell did not return to Cambridge for what should have been his third term in the summer of 1866. There is no suggestion in family memoirs that he was ill, and the most likely explanation for his absence is that he had run through the tight budget imposed upon by the Court of Chancery. It was not usual in gentry circles for daughters to be briefed about family finances, and Emily – who was by then married – was hardly likely to be an exception. Perhaps, some time in his teens, Parnell had indeed become infatuated with a girl of his own age but maybe not of his social class: his brother John claimed that such an episode happened when they were pupils at Chipping Norton, and that his studies had suffered for a time. In later years, Emily might have elided his temporary absence from university with his earlier and equally temporarily broken heart. It is unlikely that their uncle Sir Ralph Howard, whom she claimed as her source, had much to do with the matter. He had declined to act as legal guardian to the Parnell children, and the understanding by which John would become his heir, thereby passing Avondale to Charles, had been concluded well before their father's death in 1859. Possibly Parnell had dramatised the horror story of Annie Smith's suicide in order to impress upon his wayward sister the need for fire safety, chilling her with the accounts he had heard of the girl's body being dragged on to the Grantchester footpath, dank and dripping, from the swollen midwinter waters of the Cam. Add an ounce of sisterly malice and throw in the name of a young woman persecuted by the University authorities at around the time of Parnell's death, and the various episodes merge into a single tissue of nonsense. T.P. O'Connor's hint, quoted above, that the Daisy story was the product of "a vague recollection of some half-understood statement worked by a woman's vivid imagination into melodrama" indicates that its accuracy was doubted at the time.
Modern-day Parnell historiography is content to leave Daisy resting in an unnamed country churchyard, perhaps indeed with her namesake flowers blooming over her grave. There is no evidence that she, or any other young woman, played any serious part in the emotional life of Charles Stewart Parnell while he was at Cambridge. He was not expelled from the University at the age of nineteen for driving a girl to kill herself. Rather he opted not to return when briefly exiled for punching a passer-by a month before his twenty-third birthday. It may even be doubted whether the Daisy fable was ever intended to throw light on Parnell's student days. Rather, it was designed to function as a neat counterbalance to the drama of the O'Shea divorce that closed his troubled career. On the verge of adult life, he had seduced a young girl and drove her to a watery death. In his final years, he was dragged down in to a pit of adultery and punished for his sins.
"All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure". The career of Charles Stewart Parnell provides a variation upon Enoch Powell's dictum.[42] In the circumstances of 1891, it was certainly a failure, although Parnell had achieved much and – at 45 – might well have recovered to fresh triumphs. His career was cut off at no happy juncture; rather it was overwhelmed by the disastrous collision between his private life and his public role. There is an undefined overlap between the literary form of political biography, which concentrates upon policies, parliaments and campaigns, and the biographies of politicians, which seek to place their activities in the context of family, class and locality. In the case of Parnell, biographers surely incurred a responsibility to attempt some integration of his public and private worlds. Yet R. Barry O'Brien, in 1898, flatly refused to tackle the challenge. "I do not think that it is any part of my duty as Parnell’s biographer to enter into the details of his liaison with Mrs. O’Shea. I have only to deal with the subject as it affects his public career, and when I have stated that he lived maritally with Mrs. O’Shea I feel that I have done all that may reasonably be expected of me. I am not going to excuse Parnell, neither shall I sit in judgment on him. He sinned, and he paid the penalty of his sin. For ten years this unfortunate liaison hung like a millstone round his neck, and dragged him in the end to the grave. There it lies buried. I shall not root it up."[43] O'Brien's voluble protests were a little too strident. Victorian propriety no doubt pointed to the drawing of a veil over the Parnell-O'Shea relationship, but a more important imperative pointing to discreet silence was the fact that Captain Willie O'Shea was still alive, and more than ever on the look-out for money-making schemes. Any attempt to evaluate the ménage at Eltham would inevitably have cast doubt upon the veracity of the unchallenged evidence he had given in the divorce case in 1890, almost certainly leading to an action for defamation. The gallant Captain might not have fared well in a second round of court proceedings, but O'Brien was wise to duck the possibility of conflict.[44] Remarkably, there would be no new scholarly Life of the Irish leader for almost eighty years. Nonetheless, in two decades after the publication of Barry O'Brien's biography, the Parnell market would be served by three kith-and-tell memoirs which, in the easier atmosphere of Edwardian days, revealed more about the women in his life. In 1905, Emily Dickinson paraded Daisy, his widow Katharine took the lid off her relationship in 1914, while John in 1916 added Miss Wood, the American beauty whom Parnell pursued in the early eighteen-seventies from Rome to Rhode Island. Since Katharine's maiden name was Woods, another artistic linkage was possible to weave an alleged continuity in Parnell's turbulent love life. From John also came the tale of teenage infatuation with a girl at Chipping Norton, while in 1928 Tim Healy's autobiography incidentally added "Lizzie from Blankshire", the Manchester barmaid who was said to have been the mother of Parnell's child in the late 'seventies.[45]
It was doubly unfortunate that Daisy should have been revealed first, and also to have come earliest in the saga of Parnell's alleged sexual adventures. The cumulative result of these salacious revelations was that Parnell's life came to be depicted as running through two parallel tunnels, the one public, the other private, which only came together, and with disastrous consequences, in the divorce crisis of 1890-1. Gradually, as more archival evidence from the political world came to light, it became clear that Parnell's relationship with Katharine O'Shea had crossed over into the public domain at several points, notably in the negotiations for his release from Kilmainham in 1882, and the attempt to find a constituency for her estranged husband in 1885-6.[46] By the time Robert Kee made his heroic attempt to straddle both tunnels in 1993, so much was known about the political Parnell that it tended to swamp the well-veiled story of his personal life. Hence it is still not emphasised in Parnell biography that September 1880, the month when he "effectively ceased to act as a restraining force on the land agitation", also marked the beginning of his affair with Katharine O'Shea.[47] In the autumn of 1880, Parnell smashed through the barriers both of conventional morality and of normal political activity, and the likely interaction between those spheres of personal and public life has yet to be fully explored. Emily Dickinson's claim that Parnell called Daisy "his little wife" may have been the lucky hit of a fertile imagination, for it was not until 1914 that Katharine revealed that she was being addressed as "Wifie" by the end of 1880.[48] Daisy may have been eliminated from a distorted Parnell story, but biographers have not yet integrated her real-life successor into a fully illuminating account of this complex political giant.
ENDNOTES For further discussions of the career of Parnell, see "Charles Stewart Parnell on www.gedmartin.net":
https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/382-charles-stewart-parnell-on-www-gedmartin-net. For a full list of material relating to the history of Magdalene College on martinalia, see https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/372-magdalene-history-on-ged-martin-s-website.
[1] E.M. Dickinson, A Patriot's Mistake: being Personal Recollections of the Parnell Family. By a Daughter of the House (London, 1905). Except in the possession of a vivid imagination, Emily Monroe [Parnell] Dickinson shared few qualities with the American poet Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (1830-86).
[2] Cambridge Independent Press, 16 March 1906, quoting Emily Dickinson's letter to Daily News, undated.
[3] R. Barry O'Brien, The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell (2 vols, London, 1898), i, 40-1. The episode is discussed in "The departure of Charles Stewart Parnell from Cambridge, 1869": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/380-the-departure-of-charles-stewart-parnell-from-cambridge-1869.
[4] Publication unluckily coincided with the resignation of Arthur Balfour's Unionist ministry.
[5] Irish Times, 4 December, 1905. It may be noted that the Irish Times review did not allege that the Daisy story was untrue, but merely complained that it should not have been published. The amended title, A Patriot's Sister's Mistake, was quoted approvingly by Roscommon Herald, 16 December 1905. Another reviewer was Robertson Nicoll, of the Bookman, who concluded: "On the whole, it appears to be a book that would have been better left unwritten. It is of no value as a guide to Parnell's political career." Article republished in Marlborough Express (New Zealand), 1 February 1906.
[6] Dickinson, A Patriot's Mistake, 49-57.
[7] When asked at the Special Commission in 1869 if he recalled the Fenian rising of 1867, he replied: "Yes; I recollect that of 1865 and subsequent years. I was at Cambridge then. I watched the course of that rising with some interest and attention." Special Commission Report, 30 April 1889, 695. Parnell's tactics in 1885, based on the hope that the Conservatives would take up Home Rule, thereby neutralising the House of Lords, makes sense on the assumption that he had also closely followed the passage of the Second Reform Act in 1866-67, a crisis that mostly spanned his second year at Cambridge.
[8] Dickinson, A Patriot's Mistake, 58-9.
[9] H. Harrison, Parnell Vindicated ... (London, 1931), 432.
[10] Cambridge Chronicle, 5 January 1867; R. Kee, The Laurel and the Ivy ... (London, 1993), 40. The pub, the Rose and Crown, was rebuilt in Cambridgeshire's dull yellow brick, and became the Rupert Brooke restaurant in 2014. It is highly unlikely that Annie Smith would have been convicted of any crime, and she would not have been transported, since women were not sent to Western Australia, the only colony still accepting convicts.
[11] Parnell's return to Cambridge on 12 February 1867 was noted in Magdalene College Archives, B/239. My own search for press reports of contemporary drownings found three other local cases, none of them likely to have suggested Daisy. In January 1866, the body of an "old maiden lady" called Sarah Ann Haynes was found in a ditch on Midsummer Common. She had earlier been seen on King's Parade in a distressed condition, believing that she was about to be arrested for the murder of her father. A Trinity undergraduate was drowned at Grantchester the following month: "the river was high and the stream strong". On Good Friday 1867, a youth was drowned at Fen Ditton. Cambridge Chronicle, 20 January; 24 February 1866; 27 April 1867.
[12] Parnell's nightmares were described by his wife Katharine (then Mrs O'Shea) in very similar terms. He frequently struggled with imaginary assailants while seeming to be awake. "When the attacks came on I went into his room and held him until he became fully conscious, for I feared that he would hurt himself. ... He was terribly worried about these nightmares, but I assured him that it was only indigestion in a peculiar form." K. O'Shea [Parnell], Charles Stewart Parnell: his Love Story and Political Life (2 vols, London, 1914), ii, 43.
[13] Similarly, Tim Healy called Parnell's partner "Kitty" because it was a familiar nickname for prostitutes.
[14] The family lived in Gold Street, parallel to Burleigh Street and off East Road, which disappeared in the 1980s redevelopment. Information from the 1891 census reveals that her 64-year-old father was a shepherd, who had perhaps moved into the town because he could no longer work in the fields. Daisy Hopkins had been born in Ely, but the family had lived at Landbeach, a village 3 miles north of Cambridge, during the 1880s: https://capturingcambridge.org/petersfield/the-kite/gold-street/. In later court proceedings, Daisy Hopkins gave her occupation as a milliner.
[15] This may have been an exaggeration. He was Charles Russell of Jesus, a married mature student in his mid-30s who had returned from India, where he had been superintendent of forestry in Mysore. He certainly decamped from the University, but may not have gone far, since he was called to the Bar in April 1893. He was no relation of the more famous Charles Russell who had defended Parnell before the Special Commission. In 1900, he published Bullet and Shot in Indian Forest, Plain and Hill: with Hints to Beginners in Indian Shooting. It was dedicated to "his unselfish and devoted wife who, regardless of her own preferences, has shared her husband's exile, ever loyally supporting him and cheerfully bearing discomforts and inconveniences for his sake." A guilty conscience may be suspected.
[16] D.A. Winstanley, Later Victorian Cambridge (Cambridge, 1947), 114-24, supplemented by Cambridge Independent Press, 4 December 1891 and passim. There were full, and generally disapproving, accounts in newspapers across Britain and Ireland. A good example is Birmingham Daily Post, 5 December 1891, and there is a useful selection on https://capturingcambridge.org/petersfield/the-kite/gold-street/. As ever, a Cambridge saga is a honeycomb of irony. The Vice-Chancellor, John Peile of Christ's, was a (rare) supporter of higher education for women: a Newnham hall is named after him.
[17] Daisy Hopkins complained that she had been made to wear prison dress and scrub floors during her 10 days of detention. Her claim against the Proctor responsible for her arrest for £1,000 in damages was widely seen as excessive.
[18] The Belfast Newsletter (12 December) described Daisy Hopkins as "more sinned against than sinning". The London correspondent of the Freeman's Journal (14 December 1891) related the tale of a Proctor who attempted to arrest a young woman walking through Cambridge in the company of an undergraduate. She was his sister, and the student had responded to the insult by knocking the Proctor down. This was probably a legend, but it was a dangerous one for the University.
[19] Under the revised legislation, the Proctors retained the right to arrest suspected prostitutes, but their cases came before the Town magistrates. Attempts were made in both Houses of Parliament to remove the University's power of arrest altogether, to avoid the danger of the accidental incrimination of "young women studying at Girton and Newnham". The Spinning House (at 42 St Andrew's Street) was demolished in 1901, and replaced by a Jacobean-style police station. In 2023, that building had become a boutique hotel. Winstanley, Later Victorian Cambridge, 138-43; https://capturingcambridge.org/centre/st-andrews-street/42-st-andrews-street-police-station-spinning-house. A cell door from the Spinning House was preserved in the Cambridge Museum.
[20] Challenged by Henry Parnell to reveal the source of the Daisy story, Emily Dickinson cited their uncle, Sir Ralph Howard, "who was so annoyed, that he left my brother no legacy in his will". In fact, it had been agreed at least a decade earlier that Parnell's elder brother, John, would be Sir Ralph Howard's heir, which is why Avondale was left to Charles. Magdalene College Archives, E/A/2/4, H.T. Parnell to S.A. Donaldson, 27 February 1906; J.H. Parnell, Charles Stewart Parnell: a Memoir (London, 1916), 114-15. Sir Ralph Howard was a convenient witness for Emily to cite, since he had died in 1873. He had refused to become Parnell's legal guardian. Emily's muddled defence was dissected and dismissed by Roy Foster in his Charles Stewart Parnell: the Man and His Family (Hassocks, Sussex, 1976), 124-5.
[21] The Greenhalgh case is discussed in "The departure of Charles Stewart Parnell from Cambridge, 1869": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/380-the-departure-of-charles-stewart-parnell-from-cambridge-1869.
[22] Magdalene College Archives, B/153.
[23] In his first term, Michaelmas 1865, Parnell had spent £154, 12 shillings – roughly 50 percent more than most other freshmen. He paid £52 to redecorate his rooms and reupholster furniture, and £17 to a tailor, both unusually large sums. There is further evidence of his tight budget from 1867. His College bill for the Lent Term was £50, 17 shillings and fourpence. He carried forward into the Easter Term arrears of 17 shillings and fourpence. The account was perhaps sent to a Chancery clerk who was only authorised to disburse £50. Parnell's finances in 1865-6 are analysed in "Charles Stewart Parnell: Economics and Politics of a Building Trade Entrepreneur": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/263-charles-stewart-parnell-economics-and-politics-of-a-building-trade-entrepreneur.
[24] Roy Foster was certainly correct when he wrote that Parnell's "strange personal life make sense, when he is seen as an abandoned child, emotionally immature and repressed, who became late in life utterly dependent upon the mother-figure of Katharine O'Shea". It is curious that this obvious insight should have remained unstated for a century after his death. It was presumably obscured by the twin traditions that saw Parnell either as a great romantic lover (in 1937, Hollywood cast Clark Gable to play the role) or as a ruthless home-wrecker. R.F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch ... (London, 1995 ed., cf. 1st ed. 1993), 48. One might express a mild reservation about "late in life": Parnell was 34 when the relationship began, perhaps a little early for a midlife crisis.
[25] John Howard Parnell's account tended to play down the point that Parnell was a young teenager at Chipping Norton: the brothers were there when Whishaw's wife died in December 1862 (The Times, 5 December 1862). Although John stated that Charles was "only sixteen", and the memoirs of the Earl of Meath, who was also at Wishaw's, suggest that Parnell was also there the previous year. Published in 1916, John Howard Parnell's girlfriend story may have been included to supply the by-now compulsory love interest. J.H. Parnell, Charles Stewart Parnell: a Memoir, 49-51; Earl of Meath, Memories of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1923), ch. 2.
[26] F.S.L. Lyons noted the bizarre parallel with the death of Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet: Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell (London, 1978 ed.,, cf. 1st ed. 1977), 33.
[27] Ervine, Parnell, 70.
[28] O. McGee, "O'Connor, Thomas Power", Dictionary of Irish Biography. O'Connor's short biography of 1891, Charles Stewart Parnell: a Memory, drew upon his previous writings, but was produced at high speed to appear immediately after Parnell's funeral. He was MP for Galway 1880-5, but switched to represent a Liverpool constituency, the only Home Rule seat in England, which he held until his death in 1929. Parnell used his vacating of Galway to provide a seat for Captain O'Shea, with disastrous consequences.
[29] I doubt the statement that the true story of Parnell's rustication had "often been published". A Note on the various legends surrounding his departure from Cambridge will shortly be added to martinalia. T.P.'s Weekly, 2 February 1906, 129-30, also quoted in Westmeath Independent, 17 February 1906. I am grateful to Stuart Goss for his help in tracing this source. T.P. O'Connor repeated his guarded criticism of Emily Dickinson's "strange book" in Memoirs of an Old Parliamentarian (2 vols, London, 1929), ii, 232.
[30] Four Parnell siblings were alive in 1906: John Howard was a forlorn Parnellite symbol; Anna had broken with her brother when he suppressed the Ladies' Land League; Theodosia had married a British naval officer with aristocratic connections and adopted a low profile; Henry Tudor was a conventional Conservative.
[31] Foster, Charles Stewart Parnell: the Man and His Family, 222-4. He made a rare public appearance as a mourner at his brother's funeral, where Katharine Tynan was struck by the "striking resemblance" to the deceased. It was probably Henry whom John Dillon is said to have encountered on a street in Munich sometime after Parnell's death, an experience which apparently unnerved him so completely that he never spoke about it. "Suddenly he heard Parnell's voice" and saw him among a group speaking English, "with that shabby and neglected air he wore in later life." Dillon "had no doubt of his identity" and even "caught the unmistakable stench which his immediate acquaintances swore hung about him in those years". (The Chief, who was a chain-smoker, appears to have neglected personal hygiene towards the end of his life.) A record of the incident was said to have been discovered by James Dillon in his father's papers after his death. John Dillon visited the spa at Marienbad (now Mariánské Lázně, Czechia) in 1894, and may have passed through Munich then. John Howard Parnell wrote that Henry "went through Cambridge, but was too nervous to pass his examination for a degree". This can hardly be correct: Henry was admitted to Trinity, the only college to impose an entrance examination, and the Venn ACAD Cambridge Alumni Database records that he graduated in 1873. It is possible that John Howard Parnell referred to a decision not to read for Honours. K. Tynan, Twenty-Five Years: Reminiscences (London, 1913), 349; F. O'Connor, Leinster, Munster and Connaght (London, n.d.), 71-2; F.S.L. Lyons, John Dillon: a Biography (London, 1968), 164; J.H. Parnell, Charles Stewart Parnell: a Memoir, 11.
[32] The correspondence with Magdalene was published in Daily News, 5 March 1906, and widely copied in the press. The original letters are held in Magdalene College Archives, E/A/2/4. Henry Parnell wrote, from Switzerland, to the Master, S.A. Donaldson, on 22 and 27 February; Donaldson replied on 25 February, enclosing reports from A.G. Peskett, 24 February and Professor Alfred Newton, 25 February 1906.
[33] E.g. New Zealand Herald (Auckland), 21 April; (Dunedin) Evening Star, 23 June 1906.
[34] "Parnell at Cambridge: the Education of an Irish Nationalist", Irish Historical Studies, xix (1974), 77-8.
[35] It was precisely to counter such suspicions that, during the 1875 Dublin by-election, Parnell secured the support of Fr Galvin, parish priest of Rathdrum, who denied that "the slightest taint of impropriety" attached to the young squire of Avondale, or to any members of his family. Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, 45. Fr Galvin signed off in oddly proprietorial terms: "Such is the conviction of his parish priest, who ought to know him well." Parnell, of course, was a Protestant. Another priest, Canon Edward D'Alton, gave credence to the alleged link between Daisy and Katharine in a popular history of Ireland: "unfortunately for himself and for Ireland – he had other overmastering passions than ambition and pride. His own sister records that, while a young man at Cambridge, he was responsible for the ruin of a trusting girl who lived with her father on the banks of the Cam." E.A. D'Alton, History of Ireland from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (3 vols, London, 1910), iii, 369.
[36] St John Ervine, Parnell (Boston, 1925), 69-72. Ervine's specific evidence for narrating the Daisy story was an assurance from John Howard Parnell's widow that the story was true. But John had made no mention of Daisy in his own memoir and, by implication, was presumably one of the family members who supported Henry Parnell's quest for a rebuttal of A Patriot's Mistake. Ervine sought to cover his tracks with the College he so casually traduced by appealing to another popular myth: "Mr A. C. Benson’s refining influence had not yet been exercised to make Magdalene seemly, and it was then essentially a sporting and somewhat rowdy college." However his continuation tells more about the vividness of Ervine's imagination than it does about mid-Victorian Magdalene. "Most of the men hunted. The authorities were astounded when a Magdalene man took a degree, and it is probable that among themselves the men considered such an act as slightly disgraceful. Parnell did not increase the reputation of his college for scholarship." I have challenged such legends in "Magdalene College Cambridge in Mid-Victorian Times": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/233-magdalene-college-cambridge-in-mid-victorian-times.
[37] J. Haslip, Parnell: a Biography (London, 1936), 21. Joan Haslip's biography has not retained a place in Parnell historiography, perhaps because she "deliberately avoided footnotes" (v). Nonetheless, it was a notable achievement for an author who was only 24 – and her third book.
[38] J. Abel, The Parnell Tragedy (London, 1966), 22; Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, 32-3. Robert Kee's 1993 discussion is mentioned above.
[39] S. Leslie, Studies in Sublime Failure (London, 1932), 63; Harrison, Parnell Vindicated, 31.
[40] Dickinson, A Patriot's Mistake, 26-31. To Emily's explanation that "we are engaged, though nobody knows it," Lady Howard was said to have replied: "The fact of your having formed an engagement without the knowledge of your family only makes your behaviour worse. Besides, being engaged is no excuse for allowing a man to kiss you".
[41] Marlborough Express (New Zealand), 1 February 1906, probably reprinted from the Bookman.
[42] E. Powell, Joseph Chamberlain (London, 1977), 151.
[43] R.B. O'Brien, The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, ii, 163-4. The term 'liaison' was still regarded as French, and therefore alien, suspect and hence requiring italicisation.
[44] In 1898, O'Shea was trying to raise capital for the unlikely project of a railway in South Africa. M. Dungan, The Captain and the King ... (Dublin, 2009), 368-9.
[45] J.H. Parnell, Charles Stewart Parnell: a Memoir, 74-82 for Miss Wood; T.M Healy, Letters and Leaders of My Day (2 vols, London, 1928), ii, 93, 110. Lizzie has proved only slightly more durable than Daisy: Lyons was doubtful (Charles Stewart Parnell, 149-50); Kee (The Laurel and the Ivy, 339) filtered her out altogether. A search has been made in the 1881 census in the Holloway area, where Healy believed Lizzie to be living at that time, in the hope of finding a child surnamed Parnell living with a single mother, but without result. I am grateful for Gail Wood for her help in this.
[46] J.L. Hammond's Gladstone and the Irish Nation (1938) confirmed Katharine O'Shea's intermediary role. F.S.L. Lyons demonstrated the interweaving of the personal and political, e.g. at the 1886 Galway by-election, in his The Fall of Parnell... (London, 1960), 35-71.
[47] At Ennis on 19 September 1880, Parnell endorsed boycotting as a weapon to deter "grabbers" from taking the farms of evicted tenants, ostensibly the tactics of non-violence but obviously dangerous in the tinderbox of rural Ireland. If the letters that Katharine Parnell published in 1914 were genuine – and there is no reason to doubt them – then we may conclude that during his visit to Ireland, they were exchanging missives as early as 9 September written in terms that suggest two people who had either embarked upon a sexual relationship or who recognised that they were on the verge of a cataclysmic affair. Indeed, three days after the Ennis speech, Parnell found their separation unbearable and launched himself into a thirty-hour round trip to London in the frustrated hope of securing a few minutes in Katharine's company. Joyce Marlow thought they became lovers early in October, but Parnell had earlier taken rooms at the Cannon Street Hotel, even though he had lodgings in Bloomsbury. P. Bew, C.S. Parnell (Dublin, 1980), 44; K. O'Shea [Parnell], Charles Stewart Parnell: his Love Story and Political Life, i, 141-6,152-4; J, Marlow, The Uncrowned Queen of Ireland ... (London, 1975), 65. In 1860, passengers departing by steamer from Kingstown (Dublin) at 7.30 p.m. could catch the 2 a.m. departure from Holyhead, which reached Euston at 11.00, a 15 and a half hour journey: https://creweheritagesupporters.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/London-and-North-Western-Timetables-1860.pdf.
[48] Katharine was "My dearest Wife" by 28 December 1880, "My dearest Wifie" by 3 January 1881. A facsimile letter of 15 December 1881 confirms "Dearest Wifie". K. O'Shea [Parnell], Charles Stewart Parnell: his Love Story and Political Life, i, 169-70, facing 226.