The intention of Charles Stewart Parnell to marry Katharine O'Shea in an Anglican church, 1891

The expressed wish of Charles Stewart Parnell to marry Katharine O'Shea in an Anglican church ceremony has been generally ignored by his biographers. Given the opposition of the Church of England to the remarriage of divorcees throughout the twentieth century, his intention – presumably shared by his bride – merits investigation.

I: Parnell's plan to marry Katharine O'Shea in an Anglican church On Thursday 25 June 1891, Charles Stewart Parnell and Katharine O'Shea were married at the Register Office in the small Sussex town of Steyning. Immediately after the ceremony, Parnell twice stated that the couple had planned a Church of England wedding, and that they continued to hope that they might repeat their vows in an Anglican church. Parnell's principal biographers did not refer to this episode.^[1] Given that the bride's first marriage, to Captain William Henry O'Shea, had recently been dissolved and taking account of the fact that the Church of England refused to marry divorcees throughout the twentieth century, the report may seem surprising. Were they serious in seeking to exchange vows at the altar, or was the claim merely a cynical political gesture, designed to throw an unattainable cloak of legitimacy over a union that was angrily condemned both by Irish Catholics and English Nonconformists? If the Parnells were indeed sincere in hoping to marry in an Anglican church, were they naïve or arrogant? If the declaration of intent was merely a public relations device, was it likely to have any impact?

Did Parnell plan to marry in an Anglican church? A few hours after his wedding to the former Mrs O'Shea, Parnell gave a widely syndicated interview to a correspondent of the Central News Agency, in which he revealed that the couple had resorted to a civil ceremony after failing to arrange a Church wedding. "[T]he explanation of his marriage at Steyning was a very simple one. He found it impossible to procure a licence for a wedding at any church in the country, and in order to prevent delay in the marriage it was considered best to have the ceremony performed at a registry office, and that course was followed. The service in a church would take place in London as soon as he was able to put in a fortnight's residence in the metropolis." This explained one mystery in the timing of the wedding. The decree in the O'Shea divorce had become absolute on 26 May but, although his desire to marry his partner had been central to Parnell's tactics throughout the scandal, it was not until 23 June that he had approached the Superintendent Registrar at Steyning to secure a licence. Although he had been in Ireland for part of that time, it was puzzling that almost four weeks should have passed before he set the formal preparations in motion. The delay adds to the plausibility of the church wedding story. There was, too, one other element in the situation that was almost certainly too personal for Parnell to discuss in public. On 27 June, two days after the Register Office ceremony, he turned forty-five. It is likely that he saw this as a landmark date by which he was determined to have made Katharine O'Shea his wife. This benign form of midlife crisis imposed its own timetable, carrying an imperative that outweighed any considerations regarding Irish politics.

Parnell added that it was unlikely that the wedding would take place until after the Carlow by-election, where voters would go to the polls on 7 July. He expected that the church service would happen "within a month" but, as he archly informed the reporter, "he would endeavour to let no one know exactly when and where it would take place".^[2] At one level, his estimate of the timing was a statement of the obvious, if only because the couple (or one of them) would have to establish residence in the parish where they hoped to be married. Obviously his next two weeks would be devoted to the hotly contested struggle in Carlow, where the result would be crucial to his prospects of emerging from the looming general election with any substantial parliamentary following.  Unfortunately, the pledge to make Katharine his wife with benefit of clergy – but not quite yet – could also be interpreted as a ploy intended to neutralise criticism of his private life in what was shaping up to become a dirty campaign.

Did the reporter provide a genuine picture of Parnell's views? By the eighteen-nineties, it was not unknown for unscrupulous scribblers to invent interviews with distinguished but unapproachable personalities.^[3] However, the Central News Agency was unlikely to jeopardise its standing in the press world by engaging in fake news, although it did have some reputation for sensational stories. In any case, Parnell himself quickly provided confirmation. Having spoken to the representative of a London wire service, he appreciated that it would not be a good idea to overlook the Freeman's Journal, Dublin's influential Nationalist newspaper. (The Freeman's Journal had supported him through the early months of the Split, but would use the excuse of his scandalous marriage to change sides: Parnell was almost certainly aware of the need to protect his flank.^[4]) At 7.25 in the evening a message was handed in at the telegraph office in Hove for despatch to J.M. Tuohy, the paper's London correspondent, announcing that his wedding to "Mrs O'Shea" had taken place that morning. The telegram added: "Marriage will shortly be solemnized in a London church there having been delay in obtaining licence for this." (A possible reason for the reported delay is discussed at the close of this Note.) Regarding this as a portentous announcement, Tuohy kept the telegram which was eventually deposited in the National Library of Ireland.^[5]

Was an Anglican wedding possible? An answer to this question requires a brief excursion into the history of divorce in Britain.  It is often reproachfully alleged that, for all its emphasis upon the sanctity of marriage, the Church of England owes its independence from Rome to Henry VIII's determination to divorce Catherine of Aragon. In fact, the king sought an annulment, an ecclesiastical decree that the couple were never validly married in the first place. The concept of legislative divorce was established in 1667 by the case of Lord Roos, whose wife had become pregnant by a lover and taunted him with the prediction that the boy would inherit his peerage. Roos secured an act of parliament declaring all her children to be illegitimate, followed three years later by a further enactment that permitted him to remarry. Roos later became the first Duke of Rutland, underlining the point that the private act of parliament route was only available to the upper classes. Nonetheless, the procedure became a well-trodden path for the wealthy, especially rich men, who wished to escape from the bonds of a failed marriage, with 314 acts being passed between 1700 and 1857.^[6] This was a considerable waste of time for a legislature that was notoriously inefficient even in the discharge of its primary duties. The process was also massively expensive, leading to censorious comparisons with the fate of poor people who risked prosecution for bigamy should they remarry years after the collapse of a relationship. (The creation of a Divorce Court in 1857 did little to remedy this class injustice, since the legal process was still expensive.)

While involvement in other people's marriage problems hardly enhanced a political career, early Victorian public figures managed to survive involvement in divorce proceedings. In 1828, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Lord Melbourne, was sued by an aristocratic clergyman for 'criminal conversation', the seduction of his wife – the usual preliminary to an application for a private act of parliament to terminate the marriage. The case farcically collapsed, with the non-appearance of witnesses, giving rise to a well-founded suspicion that "the noble and reverend cuckold" had been bought off. Six years later, Melbourne became Prime Minister. During his term of office, he survived a second such case, continued to appoint bishops and acted as mentor to the young Queen Victoria until he lost an election and was ousted by the House of Commons in 1841.^[7]  A notable mid-nineteenth century case was the divorce of the prominent Peelite politician, Lord Lincoln, in 1849-50. His estranged wife had eloped to the continent, pursued by Lincoln's friend Gladstone, who tracked her down in Italy and discovered that the fugitive had become pregnant. Gladstone gave evidence to the parliamentary committee that considered Lord Lincoln's application to cut her loose, a gesture that was cited against him when he opposed the creation of an independent divorce court seven years later.^[8] A key point here is that the political career of the wronged husband did not suffer, although he did not seek to remarry and apparently formed no new relationship. Succeeding his father as Duke of Newcastle in 1851, he served as a senior cabinet minister from 1852 until 1855 and again from 1859 until his health gave way in 1864.

By the eighteen-fifties, on average, four private divorce bills were passing through Westminster every year. (Almost all of them instituted by aristocratic husbands who sought to dump erring wives, a notable example of a dual standard.) Even many of the bishops recognised that this ritual was an indefensible anomaly, the more so as it usually involved the moribund ecclesiastical courts in sordid parallel procedures.  It made sense to establish a divorce court empowered to authorise dissolution of failed marriages within defined but circumscribed conditions.^[9] Hence the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 encountered little opposition in the House of Lords but, in the Commons, it was angrily resisted by Gladstone, the voice of High Church insistence upon the indissolubility of marriage.^[10] The clergy – represented by the episcopal bench in the upper House – had a more specific aim, the concession of their right to refuse to marry any petitioner involved in a divorce case. They secured the exemption but, in the opinion of Archibald Campbell Tait, the Bishop of London, "certain strong language used by the friends of the clergy … created an impression in the minds of the laity that the clergy wanted to domineer over them". Hence the conscience clause was accompanied by a novel provision, compelling any incumbent who declined to preside at the wedding of a divorced parishioner to make his church available to "another clergyman who did not disapprove" of such remarriage, thereby asserting the principle that "parish churches belonged to the laity as well as to the clergy". Since London Society was likely to generate some element of immorality, Tait was anxious to secure a compromise that would protect the sensitivities of his clergy. "To allow a clergyman to go into another man's parish and to celebrate marriage, was, undoubtedly, something new; but so was the exemption, for the clergy had hitherto been obliged to remarry divorced persons." Indeed, he clung to the hope that it would be unlikely that "parties would be so glad to make a parade of their sin as to go to their clergyman and request to be married in his parish church, and it was extremely unlikely that, in the event of his refusing to officiate himself they would seek to bring in another to officiate for him". Henry Phillpotts, the caustic and domineering Bishop of Exeter, dismissed the provision, predicting that the youngest curate in his diocese would not live long enough to the intrusion of an itinerant divorce-endorser.^[11]

Indeed, the legislation, probably unwittingly, contained a potential episcopal veto on such an event: the temporary celebrant had to be "entitled to officiate within the Diocese in which such Church or Chapel is situate". Bishops could certainly discourage their clergy from giving the seal of approval to sinful unions. They might also inhibit a priest ordained elsewhere from acting within their jurisdiction. In addition, divorcees needed to find a way around a bureaucratic hurdle. The usual prelude to a wedding in an Anglican church was the reading of the banns, an announcement on three Sundays preceding the ceremony of the couple's intention to marry. This public procedure would obviously shatter Parnell's concern for secrecy. The alternative was the securing of a special licence, which was issued on behalf of the bishop by his chief administrator, the chancellor of the diocese. In 1894, a report commissioned by the Convocation of the Province of York found that six dioceses refused to issue special licences to any divorcee, fifteen countenanced the remarriage of 'innocent parties' while twelve had no rule against granting special licences to any divorcee. However, by the time the report was updated the following year, eleven dioceses were refusing to accept applications from divorcees, while the number following an unrestricted policy had halved to six.^[12] Clearly, by the middle of the eighteen-nineties, there was a trend towards the use of administrative procedure to block the remarriage of divorcees in church, which makes it difficult to be certain how individual dioceses had handled such matters at the time when Parnell sought a church wedding. In 1894, Chichester was part of the total prohibitionist category, but I do not know whether this was a long-standing policy or a stance adopted in response to the publicity surrounding the projected Parnell-O'Shea nuptials. At the other end of the spectrum, the diocese of London stood firm for the open granting of special licences to all qualified applicants regardless of their previous matrimonial history, its chancellor insisting that the terms of his appointment gave him no alternative.^[13] While the issue of divorce was beginning to stir at the time of the O'Shea divorce, the remarriage provisions of the Matrimonial Causes Act remained in force. Hence, in 1891, Parnell was indeed entitled to expect that he might marry Katharine in an Anglican ceremony.^[14] As a skilled parliamentary legislator, he would have had no difficulty in consulting the Statute Book, and the subject would probably have been informally discussed during the O'Shea divorce case with Katharine's solicitor, Sir George Lewis, and her barrister, Sir Frank Lockwood – two of the ablest lawyers in Britain.

Equally, it was true that concern about the increasing number of divorces was encouraging opposition to remarriage in church. Three hundred marriages were dissolved in 1875, but the figure passed four hundred in 1890 and was heading for five hundred by 1897. While some sections of the social elite came to regard the process as part of their natural entitlement, wider public opinion became increasingly censorious towards those who were dragged into the divorce court, even though their peccadillos equally attracted much salacious interest. The Prince of Wales was hissed in public after he was compelled to give evidence in one such case, even though – in this case – he was simply a fringe member of a disreputable pack.^[15] Sir Charles Dilke in 1885-7 became the first prominent politician whose career was halted when he was cited as co-respondent.^[16] In a rare gesture of dissent from his hero, Gladstone's biographer, John Morley, insisted that no statistical significance should be attached to the raw figures, which simply reflected the growth of overall population. Nonetheless, there was concern in the High Church wing of the Anglican Church that the termination of inconvenient partnerships was coming to be regarded as a routine matter in some sections of fashionable Society, and bishops came under pressure to define the Anglican position on remarriage. The Lambeth Conference of 1888 had declared that "the Christian Church cannot recognise divorce in any other than the excepted case, or give any sanction to the marriage of any person who has been divorced contrary to this law, during the life of the other party…. under no circumstances ought the guilty party, in the case of a divorce for fornication or adultery, to be regarded, during the lifetime of the innocent party, as a fit recipient of the blessing of the Church on marriage."^[17] Convened every ten years, the Lambeth Conference was an impressive international gathering of bishops from the Anglican Communion and the Episcopal Churches of Scotland and the United States. Yet if it was worldwide in its participation, it was certainly not global in its authority. The Church of England might frown on divorce and deplore remarriage, but it was still bound by the intrusion provision of the Matrimonial Causes Act throughout England and Wales.^[18] In 1895, the Reverend J.W. Ayre, vicar of a Mayfair parish, consulted the Bishop of London about the controversial Brinckman wedding, which is discussed below. Frederick Temple replied that he would refuse to conduct such a ceremony himself, but that Ayre had no alternative to make his church available to any cleric who took a more flexible attitude.^[19]

Journalists do not seem to have questioned the feasibility of a Church wedding for the Parnells.^[20] However, one referred to the likelihood "that some of the parish clergymen of Brighton would have refused to marry divorced people. Brighton is a very High Churchy place, and even the Low Churchmen are high in their notions."^[21] No doubt, given Brighton's hedonistic status as Britain's leading holiday resort, local clerics were indeed anxious that it should not also gain a reputation as the country's Sin City. However, there may have been a specific issue about marrying in Brighton that was private to the couple themselves. In one of the curious coincidences that so often surface in the Parnell saga, Katharine had pledged her vows to Willie O'Shea in the town twenty-four years earlier. Her wealthy brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Barrett-Lennard, owned a holiday home in Brighton, and this had provided her with a residence qualification that entitled the couple to marry in the town's historic parish church, St Nicholas of Myra.^[22] It may be that Parnell and Katharine sought not simply to terminate her first marriage but to exorcise the O'Shea relationship altogether by tying their own knot in the place where she had first been led to the altar. Perhaps, on the other hand, the associations were too raw.^[23] Overall, the risk of attempting a gesture that local clerical opinion would have found provocative ruled out a ceremony in the Brighton area.

In any case, for the purposes of matrimonial law, the couple did not live in Brighton. As Kelly's Directory for 1891 duly chronicled, Katharine was resident in the parish of Aldrington, a rural district that was beginning to be engulfed by the bricks and mortar of Hove. Here we encounter a curious echo of Parnell's earlier life. Aldrington was a small parish, with an area of about a square mile, and for a long time it had been curiously devoid of inhabitants.

Indeed, the 1851 census had reported a population of one.^[24] In 1750, the advowson (the right to appoint the rector) had been bequeathed to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where Parnell had intermittently studied between 1865 and 1869.^[25] Since the spiritual needs of the parishioners were hardly overwhelming, the church had fallen down some centuries earlier and the tithe rent amounted to less than £300 a year – hardly a cherry on the clerical career cake – Magdalene used the patronage to reward long-serving Fellows, who were of course absentees. During Parnell's undergraduate days, Aldrington was held by the Reverend Edward Warter, who lived in Shropshire where he enjoyed fox-hunting. However, in 1875 Magdalene sold the advowson to the Reverend Henry Manning Ingram, a Cambridge graduate who was the son of a (presumably wealthy) surgeon from Steyning. On Warter's death three years later, Ingram appointed himself rector of Aldrington, and spent £2,000 on building a new parish church on the site of its ruined predecessor. At the same time, the parish was "laid out for building purposes", and it is possible that God and Mammon were advancing in financial partnership. Development was slow: when Katharine rented her house in Walsingham Terrace in 1887, it was the most westerly outpost of the Brighton-Hove urban sprawl, with a view across cornfields. On the afternoon of the Register Office ceremony, the newlyweds strolled along the coast and visited a brickworks (Parnell found it hard to be a romantic), a sign that rural Aldrington was on the point of disappearing.^[26]

Given their sentimental attachment to the small parish where they happened to reside, it would not have been surprising if the couple had opted to marry in Ingram's Victorian church, importing an intruder if the rector himself objected to their morality. Unfortunately, Aldrington hardly met Parnell's insistence upon secrecy. Arrangements for an early morning wedding would almost certainly have leaked out locally, either through Church officials or from the servants at Walsingham Terrace. Nor was it likely that the incumbent would have agreed to conduct the service. Ingram had been second master (i.e. deputy head) at Westminster, a major public school, where unswerving orthodoxy would have been part of the job description. He had publicly protested in 1875 when J.W. Colenso, the heretical Bishop of Natal, was invited to preach in the Abbey.^[27] If his Church renewal project in Aldrington was indeed connected with property development, he would not have regarded the former Mrs O'Shea as a business asset. The law would have compelled him to make his church available, but it did not require him to remain silent about any such intrusion.

Parnell's determination to outwit inquisitive journalists leaves historians reliant upon unsubstantiated news items: even the one definite statement, that the couple planned to marry in London, could have been intended to mislead. Obviously, too, his death on 6 October 1891, after barely three months of marriage, makes it impossible to know whether the intention to seek a Church service had been abandoned or merely deferred. Certainly, the vicious tone of the Carlow by-election may have pointed to delay. "Kitty" was abused as a "debased and shameless woman" (and worse), while the civil wedding in the Steyning Register Office was denounced as a "Pagan ceremony".^[28] Any notion that this hostility would be dispelled by resort to an Anglican service was quickly dispelled. Abbreviated agency reports tended to emphasise the implied element of a trade-off, one for instance announcing that "a second religious ceremony will take place in London immediately so as to satisfy Catholics". "Some people have queer notions as to pleasing Catholics", commented a Church publication in New Zealand.  "Any such ceremony … would only offend Catholics as a mockery of religion."^[29] Such comments do not prove that the couple's intention to marry in church was a cynical political gesture, but their intensity may help to explain why it seemed prudent to postpone the ceremony.^[30] Moreover, in a somewhat unscrupulous appeal to ecumenical sentiment, Archbishop Walsh pointed out early in August that the Anglican Church shared the Catholic position that marriage with a divorcee was invalid.^[31] Even more pressing was the worsening crisis in Parnell's political career, which forced him to spend more time in Ireland and consequently undermined his ability to make plans, and secure the necessary residence qualification for a second wedding.

Thus it is possible that the plan for an Anglican ceremony was simply deferred. Parliament took long holidays in late Victorian times, but a new session – which did not begin until February 1892 – would allow the couple to move to London. Parnell had long lived a mysterious existence in the capital, successfully masking his whereabouts. No doubt such skills could be harnessed to establish anonymous residence somewhere in the metropolis, to be followed by quiet nuptials presided over by some complaisant nomad in holy orders.^[32] Even in the theocratic dream world of the Irish hierarchy, it might be difficult to maintain the corrosive anathema of moral outrage against the Parnells indefinitely, as would in fact be demonstrated by the embarrassment caused by Healy's atrocious description of the grieving widow as "a proved British prostitute" in November 1891. At a political level, a deferred second ceremony somewhere in London might still draw a line under the affair comfortably in advance of the general election which took place in July.

Yet there may have been an alternative possibility, a clandestine wedding in the parish church at Steyning, the small town where the Parnells had tied the knot at the Register Office. The story broke in a 'background' feature on their life together which appeared just two days after the news of death.^[33] It contained supporting information, some of it plausible, some of it puzzling, and both the detail and the speed of publication suggest that a journalist had received an advance tip-off but had been keeping it quiet while waiting for the larger scoop of the clandestine wedding. It was claimed that "overtures" had been made to the vicar of Steyning, the Reverend Arthur Pridgeon, who had consulted the Bishop of Chichester on the matter. The "overtures" may have been initiated by Edward Cripps, the Superintendent Registrar at Steyning, who had struck up a friendly relationship with the bridegroom who had so unexpectedly turned up in his office. One obvious impediment to a marriage in the parish church was that neither Parnell nor Katharine were residents of the town. But Cripps, a solicitor, could easily have arranged a short-term rental to provide the qualification, and done so without publicity. Another problem about the report is that, by 1894, Chichester was one of the dioceses that banned the issue of special licences to all divorcees. At the age of 88, and two decades into his episcopate, Bishop Richard Durnford was hardly likely to be a radical. His biographer quoted at some length notes made by Durnford on attitudes expressed to divorce by the views of the Fathers of the early Church. Unfortunately, the document was given without any indication of the date or context in which it was compiled, but there is some reason to think that it represented research relating to the challenge raised by Parnell.^[34] If Durnford did reach for his theological tomes to help him offer guidance, the delay proved highly inconvenient – although maybe not to the bishop. By the time the bishop got around to replying to Pridgeon, Parnell had resorted to the Register Office, and Durnford ruled: "By the civil law, he is married, and therefore re-marriage is impossible". It was a viciously ingenious form of Catch 22: because Katharine could not marry in an Anglican church, the couple had resorted to a civil wedding, but because they were now legally married, they could not renew their vows at the altar. One possible interpretation of the report, which would fit the chronology, might be that the plan was to use the marriage service of the Prayer Book simply as a form of blessing, which would circumvent the legal requirement of a licence. If so, Bishop Durnford was not minded to call down the goodwill of Heaven upon Parnell and his paramour.

Arthur Pridgeon was a graduate of the University of Durham, a small Northern institution that had produced a steady stream of Anglican clergy since its foundation in 1832.^[35] This placed him outside the predominantly Oxford and Cambridge ecclesiastical networks of power and patronage, and made him particularly susceptible to episcopal direction.^[36] Nonetheless, he bowed to the law or, as the slightly muddled feature put it, he "expressed his willingness to comply with the Act of Parliament respecting the loan of the church for such a purpose, the only condition attached being that Mr and Mrs Parnell should find a clergyman".

At this point, the report became opaque. Parnell, it seemed, did not plan to take up Pridgeon's offer. Rather, arrangements had been made with the Reverend John Penfold, of St. James's Church, Marylebone, "to perform the ceremony, and but for the absence of the Bishop of London from England this would have taken place. They were awaiting the return of his lordship in order to obtain the necessary licence". Bishops tended to indulge in lengthy autumn vacations (Frederick Temple was fond of Wales) and his holiday arrangements might well have interfered with Parnell's plans. However, given that the chancellor of the diocese of London, the legalistic Dr Tristram, refused to recognise any episcopal role in the granting of special licences, Parnell may have been using the reference to Bishop Temple's absence as a smokescreen of disinformation to mask his intentions. But the focus upon the Reverend John Penfold is less persuasive. Twenty-seven years of age, he had been ordained three years earlier and was serving as a mere curate at St James's, Marylebone, where he hardly had the authority to organise a controversial wedding. Perhaps it should be noted that there were two Penfold households listed as Steyning residents in the 1891 edition of Kelly's Directory. The young clergyman had no recorded connection with the town but maybe he was a cousin and drawn into the network probably activated by Edward Cripps. There seems to have been no evidence that he sought to controvert the report, but if he was indeed prepared to conduct a renewal of the Parnell nuptials, John Penfold was taking a considerable career risk.^[37] The obituary report perhaps confused (or was deliberately misled) in believing that young Penfold had volunteered to conduct a ceremony in London. This would suggest that Steyning was the planned venue all the time.  In an interview with a Sussex newspaper after Parnell's death, Cripps stated that the Irish leader had called on him, apparently more than once, in connection with "the arrangements necessary to be made to secure a second, or religious, marriage service in Steyning Parish Church". Presumably Parnell sought attested copies of his civil certificate as part of the documentation required to apply for an ecclesiastical special licence.^[38] Although he was the oldest prelate in the Anglican Church, Bishop Durnford retained his energy and his enthusiasm for travel, and enjoyed a lengthy continental tour every autumn: he would die in Switzerland four years later, one month before his ninety-third birthday. It may have been his absence from his diocese, and not that of Temple from London, that slowed the process.

Given the clandestine planning and the inconclusive outcome, that seems to be as far as the story of the Parnells' plan to marry in an Anglican church can be taken.  It may be concluded with reasonable certainty that Parnell and his partner did hope to seal their union in the Protestant communion into which they had both been born. As Parnell himself was reported to have stated, the four-week delay after Katharine's divorce became absolute could be explained by his unsuccessful attempts to arrange a church wedding. The timing of the Register Office ceremony at Steyning on 25 June was almost certainly dictated by Parnell's determination to be married before his forty-fifth birthday. The further interview or interviews described by Edward Cripps took place after the Carlow by-election, on 7 July, and the defection of the Freeman's Journal, a slow-motion about-face that became public knowledge around the end of that month.  Parnell, then, was still making plans that summer for a religious ceremony, presumably at some point in the autumn. In fact, the fight to save his political career took him repeatedly to Ireland throughout August and September. Early in October, he died.

But if Parnell and Katharine were genuine in their desire to exchange their vows at the altar, were they purely romantic in their motives? Given reliable evidence, historians can usually offer plausible assessments of practical intentions, but they are not well equipped to measure sincerity. We can, however, dismiss the allegation made at the time that the couple cynically aimed to deflect anger at their "Pagan" wedding by covering their union in a veneer of ecclesiastical respectability. It is true that Parnell was hardly steeped in religiosity, but he would have been well aware of the rigidity of Roman Catholic teaching on matters relating to sex and marriage. It is certainly likely that the depth of the venom against 'Kitty' that erupted during the Carlow by-election affected the timing of their planned second wedding, which would have seemed particularly provocative at such a time, but that does not prove that their intention had been a mere political ploy.

There is one further shred of evidence, of negative witness, that requires comment. In her 1914 autobiography, Katharine said nothing about the couple's intention to marry in church. Her memoir was a puzzling palimpsest of embarrassing revelations coupled with startling omissions: for instance, she somehow failed to mention that Parnell was the father of two of her daughters.^[39] It is at least possible that she passed over her husband's attempts to arrange an Anglican ceremony because she did not wish to give colour to the detractors who had cast doubt on the validity of their secular union. It was, too, the case that so much happened in the short life of Charles Stewart Parnell that there was no space for events that were projected but did not come about. Parnell's biographers have faced the same challenge of selection, and hence they have also excised any consideration of his matrimonial projects in those final months of his life. Yet those plans for a church wedding do constitute a small endnote to the story of his life.

II: How the Church of England fought back against remarriage in church Viewed through the hindsight of the twenty-first century, it may still appear strange that Parnell should have hoped to marry his divorced partner in an Anglican church. It seems equally surprising that journalists could have reported the news item, in one case acknowledging that he would encounter obstacles, but generally with the assumption that such a ceremony would indeed take place. The timing of the campaign to roll back the remarriage-in-church loophole in the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act which erupted in 1895 may be explained by the convergence of several developments in their usual causal combination of some long-term and others immediate. The basic context was the rising annual number of divorces, which would reach five hundred in 1897, allowing one prominent Anglo-Catholic to assert that "experience had conclusively shown that facilities for divorce, far from diminishing the number of unhappy marriages, had largely increased them".^[40] More broadly, the Church of England found itself increasingly compelled to comment upon the social implications of moral issues, which meant that it could not simply shelter behind obligations imposed upon it by Parliament. In large measure, this was a by-product of the success of the Salvation Army, a freelance Protestant movement that attracted a working-class following throughout the eighteen-eighties. Anglicans were forced to reach out and create rival organisations, which brought clergy into a new form of institutional contact with the concerns of the poor. One of the most successful initiatives was the Mothers' Union, which mushroomed from its beginnings in 1885-7 to become a movement organised at national level from 1893, by which time there were 60,000 members. The Mothers' Union took off because it provided a support network for women who felt isolated as they struggled to rear their children, and it quickly adopted political positions on issues that threatened the integrity of family life, such as alcohol and prostitution. In reality, its members were hardly threatened by the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 (although the organisation demanded its repeal), since the cost of divorce court proceedings effectively limited legal dissolution of marriage to the prosperous middle-class and the debauched aristocracy. Nonetheless, working women knew all too well that the desertion of a husband risked plunging their families from poverty to penury. Hence the Mothers' Union took a strong line on the sanctity of marriage, a message to which the bishops needed to make some response.^[41] But perhaps the most important powerful element of all behind the 1895 agitation was the increasing strength of the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England, for whom remarriage in church represented an issue that enabled them to storm both the moral and political high ground of late-Victorian values.

The Anglo-Catholic or High Church tendency within Anglicanism is usually associated with ritualism, but this confuses a symptom, albeit increasingly a key identifier, with a more fundamental driving force. For Anglo-Catholics, the crucial questions for the Church lay in defining the nature and interpretation of authority.^[42] For three centuries following the Reformation, Anglicans accepted, if with some degree of intellectual lethargy, the foundational fact that their liturgy, beliefs and practices were all dictated by the secular agency of Parliament. However, parliamentary supremacy could be recognised because the legislature was fundamentally Protestant and at least notionally Anglican. All this changed in the five years before John Keble preached a landmark sermon at Oxford warning of the dangers ahead. In 1828, Nonconformists had been formally admitted to Westminster, in itself a symbolic act, since they had long been permitted to sit as MPs by enabling legislation. More seismic was Catholic Emancipation in 1829, which opened the doors of the Commons to Irish Romanists and of the Lords to the aristocratic heirs to English recusant families. True, Catholic parliamentarians were required a swear that they would not interfere with Anglican supremacy, but this gesture hardly calmed Protestant fears that Popish promises were subject to priestly prohibitions. Then, in 1832, the Reform Act remodelled the representation and extended the franchise, giving voice to those who wished to strip the Church of its wealth. The minority episcopal Church in Ireland was an early target, and Oxford, which was both clerical and plutocratic, felt moved to challenge the authority of transient legislators.

Essentially, the disparate adherents of what was initially termed the Oxford Movement turned to the Early Church, to the doctrinal writings of the Fathers: as Keble put it, "blessed saints delivered these truths which were easily accessible to all".^[43] Unfortunately, the accumulated wisdom of Christendom did not always point in the same direction, which pointed to the need for a super-authority that could umpire the disagreements. There was, too, the embarrassment that many of England's European neighbours interpreted the traditions of the Church in a markedly different spirit. In the dozen years before the passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act, the High Church tendency was weakened by the secession of adherents who turned to the inscrutable and immutable authority of the Pope: Newman, Manning and Henry Wilberforce were the most high-profile converts but, in 1857, Anglo-Catholicism was widely suspect as an internally disruptive half-way house to Rome. Hence, in Tait's judgement, the House of Commons reacted to the pretensions advanced by Gladstone and his allies by asserting that even adulterers possessed rights as Anglican parishioners.

The more headstrong Anglo-Catholic clergy had no difficulty in locating the source of spiritual authority in themselves, always of course with the modest explanation that they had simply been chosen to act as loudspeakers for the voice of God. It was these men who discovered that the collective Church that transcended space and time used ritual to dignify and to mystify its worship. In this second wave of the now-broadening Oxford Movement, the term 'High Church' evolved from a political connotation, an attitude to relations between Church and State (the order of presentation was revealing) into a liturgical label referring to ceremonial practices that aroused the hostility of doctrinaire Protestants. By the time Disraeli formed his second ministry in 1874, there was considerable popular indignation against vestments, incense and the intoning of services. The response was the Public Worship Regulation Act, which aimed to apply a firm hand and eradicate pantomime Popery for ever.  Clergy who defied the rulings of the Church courts could be imprisoned for contempt, a sentence that was open-ended since offenders could only secure release by purging their contempt with an apology and a promise to mend their ways. Anyone could launch a prosecution, provided they secured the permission of the bishop in whose diocese the objectionable practices were taking place. The Public Worship Regulation Act rebounded disastrously, with five well-publicised Anglo-Catholic clerics refusing to bow the knee (to Parliament, at least) and opting to accept imprisonment as the price for their defiance. One of them, Sidney Faithhorn Green, was so determined to embrace the crown of martyrdom that he repudiated every compromise formula offered by his increasingly embarrassed bishop, and remained behind bars for eighteen months. The upshot was that the bishops went into fearful reverse, and quickly determined to veto every threatened prosecution. Thus a piece of legislation intended to eradicate ritualism actually became the charter and guarantee that allowed such practices to flourish liturgically. Thus emboldened, the Anglo-Catholics began to flex their muscles in ecclesiastical politics.^[44] The English Church Union, the High Church party within the Anglican Communion, became more confident in its demands. For instance, in 1888, it lectured the bishops assembling for the Lambeth Conference, insisting (among a list of subjects for episcopal attention) that they take note of "the increasing corruption of morals which is being caused by the fact of the Divorce Court professing to separate those whom God has made one" and "to the scandal occasioned by the conduct of those priests who venture to pronounce the Blessing of the Church upon unions not allowed by God and the law of the Church".^[45] As we have seen, the worldwide gathering responded accordingly.

Anglo-Catholic practices spread, permeating other tendencies within the Church. Clerical dress, including the 'dog-collar', originally an Oxford Movement borrowing from Rome, became increasingly standard garb. In 1850, the 'eastward position', in which the celebrant turned his back on the congregation during the Eucharist, was enough to trigger anti-Popery riots. Fifty years later, it was in use in 85 percent of Anglican churches in England and Wales. In 1888, candles were placed on the altar in thirty percent of churches. Two years later, in the landmark Lincoln Judgment, the Archbishop of Canterbury, E.W. Benson, pronounced that candles could only be employed for illumination, and not much of it. Yet by 1901, 55 percent of churches were lighting candles to add to the atmosphere of devotion. While only a small number of churches went the full Monteverdi and used incense in their services, by the early twentieth century vestments were worn in around one quarter of Anglican churches.^[46] When the energetic Randall Davidson became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1903, he announced that the ritualists had pushed their luck too far, and that he would take "[s]tern and drastic action" to bring them to heel. As part of the disciplinary campaign, discussions began to close the loopholes in the Prayer Book 1662 that had been prised open by the fiendish ingenuity of High Church extremists. Yet by the time the revised liturgy came before Parliament, two decades later in 1927, it contained so many concessions to Anglo-Catholic practices that it was thrown out by an angrily Protestant (if not entirely Anglican) House of Commons.^[47]

Thus, by the middle of the eighteen-nineties, the heirs to the Oxford Movement knew that their excesses were untouchable and, no longer on the defensive, they felt confident in moving forward to a new phase, in which the formerly persecuted would start to enforce their beliefs on the Church at large. Remarriage of divorcees in church provided them with an ideal issue on which to launch their counter-attack. The octogenarian Bishop Durnford had formed his theology before the Anglo-Catholic revival had begun, but, when he needed to clarify his thoughts on the subject of divorce, he turned to the writings of the early Church. For Anglo-Catholics, here was a simple clash of authority: the Fathers had taught that divorcees could not marry again, but a secularised Parliament had humiliated the Anglican Church by compelling clergy to acquiesce in the blessing of adulterers. By the middle of the Naughty Nineties, only a spark was needed to ignite the flames.

Enter Father Black The issue erupted in April 1895 at the marriage of Theodore Brinckman, an Army officer and heir to a baronetcy, whose bride, Miss Linton, was the stepdaughter of an earl.^[48] The ceremony was conducted at St Mark's, North Audley Street, by Dr Ker Gray, minister of the nearby St George's, Albemarle Street, a proprietary chapel (i.e. a piece of private property, not a parish church). Gray, a distant connection of the Scottish Dukes of Roxburghe, felt called to serve the nobility and gentry, in 1901 instituting a special service of Evensong to which worshippers were invited to attend in evening dress. It is conventional, almost to the point of cliché, to describe events in London's West End as 'fashionable', but there can be no hesitation in applying the adjective to the Brinckman nuptials. The wedding was certainly no hole-in-the-corner affair, and the large congregation was packed with titled guests. There was, however, one potential complication: the bridegroom had recently been divorced, although – as his apologists insisted – "under circumstances reflecting no discredit upon himself". Nonetheless, his decision to seek a church wedding with Miss Linton had triggered a legal case (Ex Parte Brinckman), which had confirmed that the chancellor of the diocese of London had no power to refuse a licence for his remarriage.^[49]

For William Black, a High Church clergyman – he called himself Father Black – the excuse was not good enough. Soon after his ordination in 1868, he had joined the Cowley Fathers, an Anglican order founded on monastic principles. They had sent him to serve at their mission in Bombay (Mumbai) for a decade before returning to England around 1889. In 1892, he had become curate at St Saviour's, Pimlico, one of the Highest of High Churches, and a target for militant Protestant hostility. (Unfortunately, his location during the O'Shea divorce case and its aftermath in 1890-1 has not been traced, although – as discussed later – it may be of interest.) He was an interesting personality, more Friar Tuck than Savanarola, an amateur artist and a keen student of Norwegian poetry, an enthusiasm that he had acquired while holidaying in Scandinavia.  He had made several attempts to block the remarriage of divorcees in church, by appealing either to the Bishop of London or to the incumbent whose building was to be used. Since his initiatives were unsuccessful, he decided to resort to direct action and launch a protest during the Brinckman nuptials. "Evidently opposition had been anticipated, for, while a strong force of police had been stationed outside the church, a similar precaution had been adopted inside, several constables being placed in the galleries." Weddings are public events, conducted with open doors. In the Anglican ceremony, there is a crucial moment where the celebrant, having identified the bridal couple, declares: "if any man can shew any just cause, why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak, or else hereafter for ever hold his peace".^[50] At this point, Father Black, who had stationed himself in a gallery close to the chancel, rose and objected that Brinckman had a "canonical wife living" and that his remarriage was a violation of Church law. He was interrupted by Gray, who curtly stated that he had a warrant from the Bishop of London and refused to hear the protest. Black continued to read his statement in a loud voice, and was hissed by the congregation, most of whom evidently did not share his interpretation of the sanctity of wedlock. He then left the church, accompanied, curiously enough, by a High Church layman, the young Duke of Newcastle, the grandson of the couple who had been divorced by one of the last private acts of parliament. In expectation of a row, a crowd had gathered outside the church, one of whose members angrily denounced Black as a "scoundrel", with a supporting adjective that unfortunately the press declined to report.

Twenty-first century Britain has become sadly resigned to the arrogance of fanatics who measure the assertion of their rectitude by the disruption that they inflict on others. By contrast, such forms of intrusive protest were uncommon in Victorian times, even though Father Black could point out that the Book of Common Prayer invited precisely the kind of objection that he had attempted to express. Would the annual meeting of the English Church Union, due a few days later, repudiate his violation of good taste? In fact, the ECU President, Viscount Halifax, not only boldly defended Black's action but openly threatened secession if the Anglican Church failed to confront the remarriage issue. Halifax was England's leading lay Anglo-Catholic figure: indeed, many would have regarded him as more Catholic than Anglo, especially since his unauthorised mission to the Pope the previous year to explore the possibility of reunion with Rome. His warning that High Church clergy "rather would they lose their endowments than agree to a system which was in direct defiance to the Word of God" was no doubt intended to conjure memories of the Disruption that had split the Church of Scotland half a century earlier, which had been triggered by a similar issue.^[51]

The brazen nature of the Brinckman nuptials seemed to highlight a vacuum of moral leadership in the Anglican Church. Addressing the upper house of the Convocation of the Province of Canterbury, Bishop Temple "spoke strongly in condemnation of what had taken place, and deplored the law which allowed the marriage of a guilty person to take place in church, even when he had shown no sign of repentance". The bishops agreed "to take such steps as the members of this House may be able to prevent the recurrence of the scandal". This was a weak response that left them open to an embarrassing initiative by Halifax.^[52] On 28 May 1895, he introduced a bill into the House of Lords to repeal Section 58 of the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. He explained that his object was simply "to release the clergy and their parishioners from one particular obligation imposed by the Act in regard to persons who have been divorced for adultery, which they felt to be an outrage to their conscience; to relieve the whole Church of England from an occasion of great scandal". It was unacceptable that someone "whose violation of the Seventh Commandment alone made another marriage possible" could "pick up any stray clergyman who was willing to undertake the office" and "intrude the stranger, against the will of the incumbent and against the will of the parishioners, into the church for the purpose of giving God's blessing to a marriage which was certainly not entitled to it. In no other case was any clergyman allowed, against the will of the incumbent, to intrude into his parish or minister in his church." The 1857 Act had safeguarded the rights of the individual divorcee, but had overridden the feelings of other worshippers. "Look at the case of a devout congregation attached to the church. The members of it had been doing their best to lead Christian lives, and to encourage in all around them virtue and morality." Yet if two of their neighbours committed adultery, "they were forced to see the guilty perpetrators of the scandal treated just in the same way as the guiltless, and married with all the paraphernalia and with the same prayers and the same blessings as the most innocent and virtuous."^[53]

A proposal introduced without government backing so close to the end of the parliamentary session had little chance of reaching the Statute Book. Although Halifax threatened dark but unspecified consequences if his bill failed to pass, he quietly withdrew it from consideration a month later. His aim was to force the bishops to take action, and to take action under pressure from his own party within the Church. In a low blow, he quoted from a letter of support that he had received from the Reverend Hugh Price Hughes, the outspoken Methodist minister who had mobilised the Nonconformist Conscience against Parnell in 1890 – who, under other circumstances, would have been invited to mind his own business.  Lord Grimthorpe, an ecclesiastical lawyer and curmudgeonly opponent of ritualism, denounced the proposed measure as a power grab, "a Clergy Supremacy Bill … a Bill to allow the clergy of the Church of England to determine whether a guilty divorcee ought to be married or not". "I never saw spite so open in the House before," Archbishop Benson wrote in his diary of Grimthorpe's diatribe.^[54]

As Archbishop of Canterbury, Benson's aim was to limit divisions among Anglican factions, even if this meant that some poisoned chalices had to be kicked down the road. But even more important was the need to ensure that the episcopate did not lose control to the laity over the policies and practices of the Church, and least of all to an enthusiast whose leadership tendencies pointed Romewards. Thus he faced an awkward choice: voting for the bill would risk handing the initiative to the English Church Union, voting against would endorse a scandalous anomaly. He solved his problem by cloaking concession in hyperbolic rhetoric of outrage at the existing situation: "under the law as it stands, a man, bearing the stigma of a Court of Justice, is entitled to claim the use of the Church for that very ceremony which he has outraged. From the court to the church; driven out of one place as a disgraced adulterer, he enters the other as a bridegroom, amid the sound of bells and with everything the church can do to celebrate his marriage as a holy rite, and it may be with his paramour, and it may be on a sacred day like Easter morning." This was putting the case in lurid terms, and might have led some to wonder why he had been Primate for twelve years without confronting the issue.^[55] Privately, he urged Halifax to confine himself to aiming for the repeal of the controversial Section 58 of the Matrimonial Causes Act, while allowing the Lord Chancellor, Lord Herschell to introduce "a more drastic measure in favour of the Church".  It is impossible to know what strategy the Archbishop planned to deflect the High Church campaign. Within weeks, the collapse of Lord Rosebery's Liberal government removed Herschell from office, while Benson himself unexpectedly died the following year. Section 58 of the 1857 Act remained in force until A.P. Herbert's Matrimonial Causes Act of 1937, which extended the conscience clause to empower clergy to refuse the use of their churches for the remarriage of divorcees.^[56]

However, the failure to secure legislative change represented only a minor defeat for the High Church campaign against remarriage in church, since the apparent setback enabled the Anglo-Catholics to maintain the initiative in their campaign to undermine the bishops. Father Black continued to harass those who sought spiritual endorsement for sinful unions. Sometimes he varied his technique: for instance he would act as a decoy, taking a prominent position close to the altar, easily identifiable in his long black robe, but when the celebrant reached the 'just cause or impediment' clause, an anonymous confederate would rise somewhere in the body of the church and deliver the protest while he remained silent. At St Clement Danes in 1899, where the intending female participant was a divorcee, he realised that perhaps reducing a bride to tears at the altar would have been bad publicity, while unfavourable comparison would have been made with the fate of the woman taken in adultery in the New Testament. Instead, he chose to make his protest on a preceding Sunday, challenging her description as a "single woman" when the banns were read. His interventions may not have been effective but they certainly made an impact. When Waldorf Astor married the divorced Mrs Shaw in 1906 – she became the celebrated Nancy Astor – his millionaire father gave him Cliveden as a wedding present, but fear that Black would interpose led the couple to marry in virtual secrecy, and most of their friends only learned of the event through the press. (Black was annoyed at being outwitted, and uncharitably wondered whether her American divorce had really taken effect.) But the real target remained not the sinful couples who remarried at the altar but the spineless bishops who were ineffective in stopping the practice.

Frederick Temple, who had succeeded Benson as Primate, repudiated the High Church view that divorce was always wrong.^[57] Although personally respected, Temple, now in his late seventies, was notorious for letting matters slide. Under pressure at the meeting of Convocation in 1898, the bishops issued an anodyne reminder that "the Christian ideal is that of indissoluble marriage, and that the most dutiful and loyal course, even in the case of the innocent party, is to put aside the thought of re-marriage after divorce". This helpless pronouncement coincided with two more Society weddings of divorcees at London churches, one of them the ultra-fashionable St James's, Piccadilly. Father Black was quick to provide a quotable comment for the press: "the fault lies with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is too lax on this point.... Dr Temple and the bishops are afraid of disestablishment and the consequent loss of their social position if they opposed public opinion, which, of course, is in favour of such marriages."^[58] Yet the tide began to turn. In 1902, the recently installed Bishop of London, Arthur Winnington-Ingram, preached a sermon described as "a declaration of war against the re-marriage of divorced persons". In emotive language, he declared it "a profanation and prostitution of our beautiful Marriage Service for it to be used over those who have been divorced. The law allows re-marriage, but the law compels no clergyman to perform that marriage". He added, with dramatic deliberation, "the law compels no bishop to visit the church in which the clergyman performs such a marriage. There are many things which the law cannot touch upon which the moral conscience of the Church can speak."

The impact of Winnington-Ingram's fulminations did not always equal the fire of their expression. He foreshadowed a direction of travel in Anglican practice, but not yet a point of arrival. The clergy of his own diocese were ambivalent in handling the issue. When a wealthy divorced banker sought to marry a second time at All Souls', Langham Place in 1906, the bishop himself warned local clergy against taking part in the ceremony, but refrained from issuing a general prohibition, which would have looked too much like a medieval interdict. Furthermore, in a gesture that suggests Winnington-Ingram's right hand was not working in sequence with his left, the diocesan chancellery had adopted its own procedure to discourage demonstrations of the Father Black variety by refusing to publish special licences for the remarriage of divorcees. In any case, the bishop's disapproval did not deter the Rector, the Reverend Francis Scott Webster, who went ahead with the wedding. A member of the Evangelical wing of the Church of England who promoted open-air services, Webster was presumably unmoved by the threat that his diocesan would boycott him.^[59]

In any case, there were hundreds of churches in London and, for many, episcopal visitations were a rarity. Furthermore, thanks to a historical fluke, they were not all under Winnington-Ingram's jurisdiction. Located just off the Strand, the Savoy Chapel could hardly be more central, but its status as a Royal Peculiar placed it beyond diocesan control:  the Bishop of London could only visit if invited. The Reverend Hugh Boswell Chapman, chaplain from 1909, was an engaging bachelor cleric who believed he had a special mission to the outcasts of society, which extended to the outcasts of Society. He remarried divorcees and also provided blessings for their civil weddings: Consuelo Vanderbilt, the ex-Duchess of Marlborough, was a high profile client in 1921. However, on Chapman's death in 1933, the Savoy Chapel fell into line with the now-prevailing Anglican ban on such unions.^[60] Gradually, the Church had hardened its opposition to the remarriage of 'guilty parties', and tended to discourage even the innocent from seeking a religious service. In 1912, the Letters Patent appointing the chancellor of the diocese of London had been revised, eliminating a perceived commitment to the unrestricted issue of licences to divorcees. That year, Archbishop Davidson made clear his firm opposition to the remarriage of adulterers in church, and he came close to securing a ban on the practice in a divorce law reform bill in 1920, although the measure failed to pass. His position was endorsed by the Lambeth Conference in 1930. By 1952, there were over forty thousand marriages in England and Wales involving people who had been divorced. Just fifty-eight took place in Anglican churches. The door forced open in 1857 had been closed almost entirely.^[61]

The uncrowned king and the vicar on skates  The exorcism of remarriage in church may be illustrated by the fate of the next uncrowned king who sought to legitimise his union with a divorced partner at the altar. In December 1936, Edward VIII gave up his throne, was demoted to Duke of Windsor and retreated to exile on the continent. There he sought to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson in an Anglican ceremony.^[62] Not surprisingly, the couple encountered difficulty in finding a clergyman who would oblige, and there was some uncertainty about the status of any such ceremony on French soil, where marriage was a purely civil institution. There were in fact two sketchy networks of ordained Episcopal personnel in France, one under the supervision of the Suffragan Bishop of Fulham, the other maintained by the sister church in the United States: both cohorts were forbidden to act. Given the intensity of episcopal disapproval, only a bold cleric would volunteer to travel from England to perform the nuptials, and the Duke might well have queried the motives of anyone who came forward. In the event, an offer to perform the service was received from the Reverend Robert Anderson Jardine, vicar of Darlington in County Durham. It was accepted, partly for want of any alternative but mainly because the fallen monarch lacked the resources to maintain a secretariat capable of checking Jardine's standing in the Church. Jardine was in fact on poor terms with his diocesan, the formidable Hensley Henson, and his subsequent eccentric career compounded the general sense of shoddy discredit that hovered over the Windsors.^[63]

Given that he had been Supreme Governor of the Church of England just six months earlier, it was bizarre that the Duke of Windsor's Anglican marriage ceremony should have been such an empty pastiche. "Mr. Jardine has no authority whatever to officiate in any other diocese than Durham, unless he has the sanction of the proper ecclesiastical authorities," thundered Bishop Henson. The Reverend F.A. Cardew, the principal Anglican cleric in France, announced that he took no cognisance of the proceedings because they were entirely unauthorised and "scarcely … within the sanction of the Church".^[64] Under ecclesiastical law, marriages were only valid if conducted in a church or chapel. In no sense could the music room of a French chateau be regarded as consecrated space. An oak chest covered with an embroidered tablecloth was manoeuvred into place to impersonate an altar. At Jardine's insistence, a cross was located (it was borrowed from a remarkably trusting nearby Protestant church), after the offer of a Catholic crucifix had been rejected with horror. He read the service with dignity – that, after all, was his job – but the words had no more meaning than if they had been recited by performers in a stage play. The Windsors were man and wife (or duke and duchess) because, shortly before the religious parody, the mayor of the local commune had united them in wedlock under the Code Napoleon. The Bishop of Fulham announced that no disciplinary measures would be taken against Jardine, the insulting implication being that nothing had actually happened.

The sequel would quickly highlight the vacuous nature of the episode. The "gallant little fellow" in whom the ousted monarch had placed his trust seems to have been in the grip of a clerical midlife crisis that would quickly make him an embarrassment. On his return to Darlington he found his church packed with sightseers, but his congregation turned against him and he was forced to resign his living. He moved to the United States in an unsuccessful attempt to launch a new career as a lecturer and celebrity preacher. In 1939, he agreed to officiate at the Hollywood wedding of a young couple who had literally bumped into one another at a skating rink. In honour of their fortuitous first meeting, the bride and groom intended to wear roller skates at the altar, and Jardine agreed to do so too. Somewhat belatedly he withdrew after learning that the couple would skate up the aisle to the Wedding March and that the service – as might have been expected – was to be filmed.^[65]  His well-publicised naivety in falling for a publicity stunt did nothing to enhance the dignity of the Windsor wedding two years earlier.^[66]

III: Back to Parnell Had they been able to arrange a church wedding, Parnell and Katharine O'Shea would no doubt have been more careful in their choice of a celebrant than the naïve Duke of Windsor – although their range of choice would have been limited – but the personal and spiritual reinforcement that they would have hoped to secure from a religious ceremony might well have been accompanied by some negative aftermath. However, the basic point about this excursion into the hardening of Anglican attitudes to the remarriage of divorcees in church is that it underlines that, in 1891, the Parnells were entitled by law to access to a church wedding, provided they could find a clergyman willing to conduct the service in a parish where they (or one of them) had established legal residence. The campaign against Section 58 of the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act gathered strength – or, at least, found an assertive voice – from 1895, four years after the completion of the O'Shea divorce allowed the lovers to make their partnership official.  The Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England demanded that the episcopate take a firm line in discouraging such marriages, and the bishops not only responded, unwillingly at first, but seem to have quickly discovered that they rather enjoyed wielding authority over the private lives of erring laity. The repeal of Section 58 was agreed in principle in the unsuccessful divorce law package of 1920, and was eventually quietly removed in 1937. Posterity may tend to view Parnell's hopes to marry Katharine O'Shea at the altar with the scepticism engendered by our hindsight knowledge of the Church of England's refusal in more recent times to countenance the marriage of divorcees, a position from which it has conducted a long and awkward retreat. The Anglican Communion had certainly proclaimed that position at the Lambeth Conference of 1888 but, in its homeland, the Anglican Church continued to accept the burden placed upon it by Parliament. Thus, for Parnell and Katharine O'Shea, a church wedding was legally possible in 1891, although it would have been arranged in a potentially hostile climate of opinion.

Parnell's announced intention to seek a religious ceremony had done nothing to dampen censure in Ireland, but did it have any impact in England? In reporting his plans, journalists seemed to take the matter for granted as meriting no special comment, beyond the suggestion that he would not find the clergy of Brighton responsive.^[67] The campaign against remarriage in church that erupted four years later can hardly be seen as a delayed reaction. Parnell was not referred to the two debates initiated by Viscount Halifax in 1895-6, but by the middle 'nineties, he was hardly mentioned on either side of the Irish Sea. (When Yeats referred to Parnell in a debate on divorce in the Senate of the Irish Free State, its President, the Protestant Lord Glenavy, ordered him to "leave the dead alone".) Yet, as so often in the Parnell saga, there were some strange coincidences that may throw light on the road that led to the Steyning Register Office.

It will be recalled that Katharine O'Shea's divorce had become absolute on 26 May but that Parnell did not seek a licence for a civil marriage until 23 June. He accounted for the delay by explaining that he had "found it impossible to procure a licence for a wedding at any church in the country". On 9 June, midway through that four-week period, the English Church Union held its annual meeting. Internal disagreements made it a contentious gathering, which was adjourned into an evening session.^[68] Here two further motions were moved, one condemning what W.S. Gilbert called "that annual blister", the attempts to legalise marriage with deceased wife's sister. The other called upon the ECU to "promote action for the repeal of the law which professes to compel the clergy to allow the use of their Churches for the marriage, and in some cases to solemnize the marriage, of a divorced person (whose husband or wife is still living), in defiance of the Church's teaching".^[69] The timing of the proposal, at the very end of a long day, suggests that it represented what in a modern political organisation would be called an emergency resolution. The ECU had made clear its opposition to the remarriage of divorcees in church back in 1888, but the issue did not seem to be a front-line concern around the turn of the decade. It is possible to suspect that High Church activists had heard of Parnell's attempts to arrange a clandestine religious service, and realised that such a provocative gesture by so controversial a politician would give them an ideal focus around which to organise the campaign of petitions to parliament against the practice that the resolution called for. The ECU initiative could certainly have deterred more flexible clergy from co-operating with Parnell's plans in the two weeks following the annual meeting.

Of course, the timing of the ECU discussion may have been merely fortuitous and unlucky. But there is a further coincidence that, at the very least, represents a curious overlap in backgrounds. The motion was proposed by the Reverend Richard Macgregor Grier, whose outline biography was characteristic of many late-Victorian clergymen in its apparent essential Englishness. Grier was an Oxford graduate, vicar of the Staffordshire town of Rugeley and also a prebendary of Lichfield cathedral, preferment which made him a member of the chapter and gave him a house in the close. However, Foster's Alumni Oxonienses adds a fascinating detail: on his admission to Pembroke College in 1853, he was recorded as the son of John William Grier, a clergyman of Wicklow, Ireland – the county that is indelibly associated with Charles Stewart Parnell. It might be stretching matters to label the younger Grier as a Wicklow man, since his father evidently moved the family to England around 1835, the probable year of Prebendary Grier's birth.^[70] By the time the younger Grier enrolled at Oxford, his father was the perpetual curate of a small industrial parish near Stourbridge. The fact that he was described as coming from Wicklow suggests that the family identified with Ireland, a reminder of the considerable, largely invisible but probably influential Protestant Irish element in middle-class English society. Perhaps we should not make too much of this: after all, everybody has to be born somewhere, and the Duke of Wellington pithily dismissed the assumption that an Irish birthplace dictated Irish nationality. Nonetheless, it is intriguing that a clergyman born in Wicklow should have used a meeting in London to attack the remarriage of divorcees in church at precisely the moment when the Garden County's most prominent politician was attempting to organise just such a ceremony somewhere in the capital.^[71]

The long arm of coincidence has one further contribution to make to this story. As noted above, there is a gap in the curriculum vitae of Father William Black between 1889, when he left India, and 1892, when he became curate at St Saviour's, Pimlico. Perhaps he lived at the Cowley community in Oxford, which a Clerical Directory for 1893 gives as his address, or it may be that he was engaged in unassigned parish work. Wherever he may have been located, we can only guess at his reaction to Parnell's announced intention to seek a church wedding. However, his decision to disrupt the Brinckman nuptials in 1895 was not the first expression of his opposition to the remarriage of divorcees in church. As he explained at the time, he had received no response to his previous protests to the Bishop of London and pleas to the clergy involved, and had determined that he could no longer hold his peace. Is it possible, then, that he would have staged some demonstration had he discovered Parnell's plans for a secretive ceremony somewhere in London? Intriguingly, their paths may have crossed a quarter of a century earlier, for Black had been a student at Cambridge from 1864 to 1868, overlapping with Parnell, who was an undergraduate for five terms in 1865-7.^[72] In itself, this proved nothing: there were around two thousand junior members in residence in the mid-eighteen-sixties, and the two young men were in different colleges, Black at Christ's and Parnell at Magdalene.^[73] Apart from the Union (which Parnell never joined) and various sports clubs, there were virtually no university-wide societies in the eighteen-sixties, and hence no Hibernian social organisation.^[74] Nonetheless, it is possible that they encountered one another. Black had been at school at Rossall, one of the new second-rank public schools of the Victorian era, in this case established to provide cut-price boarding-school education for the sons of clergy. One of his contemporaries enrolled at Magdalene in 1864, and there were no fewer than three more among Parnell's October 1865 cohort of twenty freshmen. Furthermore, there was an additional and important reason why Parnell's fellow students from Rossall might have wished to introduce him to their friend from Christ's. William Black had been born in Dublin, the son of the Reverend William Faussett Black, who was himself a Sligo man. As with the Grier family, Black's father eventually accepted a living in England, but the family were at Raheny in Dublin, where Black senior was rector, from 1858 to 1864, at a time when the teenage Parnell was also living at various addresses in and near the city.^[75] Of course, none of this proves that they met, or were even aware of one another in their student days, and any encounter might well have been chilly, for Parnell felt little enthusiasm for trainee clergymen.^[76] However, it is likely that Father Black subsequently became aware that Parnell had been his contemporary at Cambridge, since the Irish leader's time at university (although not his undignified departure) was occasionally referred to in background articles as he rose to notoriety. Had Parnell's plans to marry at a London church gone ahead and had Father Black learned of them, perhaps, just perhaps, he would have been goaded into disrupting the ceremony both in the name of religion and for the honour of Ireland. Of course, this can only be a speculation, but we may certainly conclude that Parnell was right to make his plans in secret.

For a list of material relating to Charles Stewart Parnell on this website: https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/382-charles-stewart-parnell-on-www-gedmartin-net.

ENDNOTES My thanks to Andrew Jones and Everett Messamore for help in the preparation of this essay.

^[1] It is not mentioned in either F.S.L. Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell (London, 1977), or R. Kee, The Laurel and the Ivy … (London, 1993). F. Callanan, The Parnell Split, 1890-91 (Cork, 1992), 137 and J. Jordan, Kitty O'Shea… (Stroud, 2005), 193 briefly allude to the planned Anglican ceremony. Major biographies by R. Barry O'Brien (1898) and Paul Bew (1980 / 2011) concentrated on his political career: O'Brien was a Victorian who found it hard to discuss the Parnell-O'Shea relationship at all.

^[2] Reports of the interview with the correspondent of the Central News Agency may be read in the South Wales Daily News (via the National Library of Wales online newspaper archive) and the Glasgow Herald (via Google News Archive), both 26 June 1891. A note here on terminology: a Register Office was a public bureau for recording births and deaths, and solemnising civil marriages. A registry office was a private employment agency, usually finding work for domestic servants. The two were (and are) often confused.

^[3] For an example, K. O'Shea [Parnell], Charles Stewart Parnell… (2 vols, London, 1914), ii, 254-5, an act of revenge by a female journalist, apparently from the United States, after being evicted from the Parnells' home in Hove.

^[4] The change of front by the Freeman's Journal was sharply denounced by St John Ervine, one of Parnell's most unsympathetic biographers. "It seemed that that journal was prepared to support him after he was found guilty of adultery, but was not prepared to support him when he married the woman with whom the adultery had been committed!" Parnell (London, 1925), 310-11.

^[5] For a facsimile reproduction, see N. Kissane, Parnell: a Documentary History (Dublin, 1991), 98. The telegram asked Tuohy to circulate the news to news agencies, and it was duly syndicated by the Press Association. F.M. Larkin, "Tuohy, James Mark", Dictionary of Irish Biography.

^[6] https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/private-lives/relationships/overview/divorce/. The procedure was streamlined in 1798. B.S. Bennett, "The Church of England and the Law of Divorce since 1857….", Journal of Ecclesiastical History, xlv (1994), 625-6.

^[7] P. Ziegler, Melbourne (London, 1976), 100-10, 226-38.

^[8] F.D. Munsell, The Unfortunate Duke… (Columbia, Mo, 1985), 108-19; R. Shannon, Gladstone, i: 1809-1865 (London, 1982), 222, 343-4.

^[9] The legislation did not apply in Ireland, and Irish divorces continued to be secured by private act of parliament, of which 39 were passed between 1857 and 1910. Petitioners had to secure a separation order from the Irish courts before approaching Westminster. By 1910, the average cost of the procedure, if undefended, was about £500, although male petitioners (who dominated) might recoup some of their expenses by suing a wife's seducer for 'criminal conversation'. It is believed that only Protestants took advantage of the process.  D. Fitzpatrick, "Divorce and Separation in Modern Irish History", Past & Present, cxiv (1987), 173-4. In 1896 Parliament passed (without debate) three such bills to dissolve the marriages of Richard Hollingsworth Griffin and Annie Beatrice Griffin and of George Vance Scovell and Vivienne Scovell, both couples from Dublin, and of Robert Archer Ross Todd, a solicitor from Ballyshannon, County Donegal and his wife Sarah Gertrude Todd. In all three cases, the husband was permitted to marry again, the status of the wife being apparently undefined. The surnames indicate, as we should expect, that all three couples were Protestants. At the founding of the Free State, the Attorney-General, the constitutional lawyer Hugh Kennedy, suggested that "we should make provision for divorce bills for those who approve of that sort of thing". However, the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Edward Byrne, did not approve of that sort of thing, and asserted that any Christian who had been baptised, in whatever sect, had become a member of the Church and hence subject to its jurisdiction, an ingenious telescoping of two different meanings of the term 'Church'. (Byrne's views were reported to the President of the Executive Council, W.T. Cosgrave, by his colleague E.T. Duggan, but there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of his summary. Cosgrave himself admitted to another bishop that he had not known that "His Holiness [i.e. the Pope] had jurisdiction over all baptised persons".) Byrne further argued that it did not matter whether the dissident spouses were Christians at all, since dissolution of marriage was contrary to Natural Law, which was defined by the Catholic Church. Cosgrave carried legislation to ban divorce, a prohibition that de Valera wrote into the 1937 Constitution. The 1925 episode provoked a monumental protest from W.B. Yeats on behalf of the Protestant minority ("the people of Parnell"). His defiance was not welcomed by his co-religionists, and the minority Protestant churches seem to have been notably silent on the matter, so much so that it was argued that they supported the outright ban. 1925 marked the hierarchy's posthumous exorcism of Charles Stewart Parnell and Katharine O'Shea; the Yeatsian outburst was more requiem than anthem. In 1920s Ireland, remarriage after divorce was referred to by the coded term "Mormonism". J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912-1985… (Cambridge, 1989), 157-8; M. Laffan, Judging W.T. Cosgrave… (Dublin, 2014), 186-7; R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: a Life, ii… (Oxford, 2003), 293-8; Fitzpatrick, "Divorce and Separation in Modern Irish History", 187-95.

^[10] J. Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (3 vols, 1903), i, 569-72. 1854 bill.

^[11] O. Chadwick, The Victorian Church: Part I (3^rd ed., London, 1971), 481-4; R.T. Davidson, Life of Archibald Campbell Tait… (2 vols, London, 1891), i, 213; Hansard, 24 August 1857, 2060-1. Section lvii of the  Matrimonial Causes Act, 1857, c. lxxxv, provided that " it shall be lawful for the respective Parties thereto to marry again, as if the  prior Marriage had been dissolved by Death: Provided always, that no Clergyman in Holy Orders of the United Church of England and Ireland shall be compelled to solemnize the Marriage of any Person whose former Marriage may have been dissolved on the Ground of his or her Adultery, or shall be liable to any Suit, Penalty, or Censure for solemnizing or refusing to solemnize the Marriage of any such Person." Section lviii carried the rider that "when any Minister of any Church or Chapel of the United Church of England and Ireland shall refuse to perform such Marriage Service between any Persons who but for such Refusal would be entitled to have the same Service performed in such Church or Chapel, such Minister shall permit any other Minister in Holy Orders of the said United Church, entitled to officiate within the Diocese in which such Church or Chapel is situate, to perform such Marriage Service in such Church or Chapel." (italics added) It will be noted that the clergy conscience clause only applied to a refusal to marry the 'guilty party'.

^[12] A.W. Winnett, Divorce and Remarriage in Anglicanism (London, 1958), 189-90.

^[13] The chancellor of the diocese of London, Thomas Hutchinson Tristram, insisted that the Letters Patent of his appointment required him "to grant marriage licences and all other canonical dispensations whatsoever for the Bishop and his successors which have been used and accustomed to be done by the laws, customs, canons and statutes of this Kingdom of Great Britain". Since the remarriage of divorcees had been customarily accepted before 1857, he claimed that no bishop could inhibit him from his duty to issue special licences on an unrestricted basis. The Letters Patent of his successor were amended after his death in 1912. Winnett, Divorce and Remarriage in Anglicanism, 190-1.

^[14] A note on my use of Parnell (surname) and Katharine (forename) to identify the couple. The bridegroom is, of course, generally referred to by his surname, and it would seem cloyingly inappropriate to call him 'Charles'. To call the bride 'O'Shea' would risk confusion with her ex-husband, and would fasten upon her a surname that she was anxious to shed. In any case, the couple continued to hope for an Anglican ceremony after the civil wedding at Steyning, which made her Katharine Parnell. Parnell's partner was a formidable personality, and her identification here as 'Katharine' most certainly does not imply any gendered inferiority.

^[15] In 1870, the future Edward VII was called as a witness in a divorce case. Although not cited as co-respondent (two members of his raffish circle were the named offenders) he found it prudent to deny on oath that he had committed adultery with the erring wife. P. Magnus, King Edward the Seventh (London, 1964), 107-9.

^[16] Dilke was accused of seducing Virginia Crawford, the 18-year-old bride of a Scottish lawyer, a charge that he denied. Dilke's biographers have minutely dissected the case. It is very likely that he was the victim of a false accusation, initially advanced by Mrs Crawford to shield her real seducer, but his barrister incautiously suggested that there were 'indiscretions' in his past life and he was manoeuvred into admitting that he had been her mother's lover. A cabinet colleague initially encouraged him with the prediction that the case would be "a nine-day wonder to be forgotten" ("After all you are not the Archbishop of Canterbury"), but the revelations forced Dilke to withdraw from public life for five years. He was re-elected to the House of Commons in 1892 but never regained ministerial office. The Crawford divorce formed a murky prelude to the O'Shea case in 1890. R. Jenkins, Sir Charles Dilke … (London, 1958), 215-370, esp. 222; D. Nicholls, Sir Charles Dilke… (London, 1995), 177-212.

^[17] https://www.anglicancommunion.org/media/127722/1888.pdf

^[18] Temple had made his position clear in response to (undated) questions from a troubled clergyman who refused to remarry a woman who was the 'innocent party' in a divorce. "Question: Knowing the law (viz. that I can refuse to marry her, but that I cannot refuse the use of the church if she can find a priest willing to marry her), am I justified in dissuading her from seeking to be married in church, recommending a civil marriage in preference? Answer: No. Question: She particularly wishes to have 'the Church's blessing' on her re-marriage, which according to the Church's doctrine ought not to be? Answer: The Church always strongly dissuaded the innocent party from re-marrying, but never forbad it." E.G. Sandford, Memoirs of Archbishop Temple (2 vols, London, 1906), ii, 112. This may be the Ayre episode referred to in the next endnote.

^[19] John Watson Ayre, a product of Peterhouse, Cambridge, had been vicar of St Mark's, North Audley Street, since 1851. News items from this period are taken from https://newspapers.library.wales/, a user-friendly site which is easily searchable by keywords and date. Most reports in the Welsh newspapers came from press agencies and hence do not necessarily represent any explicit editorial opinion associated with individual publications.

^[20] The London correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald (1 August 1891), who was not sympathetic to Parnell, reported that "there is to be a religious marriage in London". As indicated in its title, W.T. Stead's Review of Reviews offered an overview of periodical literature, combined with a monthly digest of news and comment written by its editor. In July 1891, it described the impact of Parnell's marriage to Katharine O'Shea. "Until he married, many of his followers refused to believe that there was any truth in Mr O'Shea's evidence; now they reluctantly admit that they have been mistaken. The news of the wedding in the registrar's office at Steyning on June 25th fell like a thunderclap on his agents who were fighting his battle at Carlow; and the Irish hierarchy regard the battle as practically over; nor do they think that the 'religious ceremony' which is promised at an early date will do anything to rehabilitate Mr Parnell in the eyes of his followers." Review of Reviews, iv, July 1891, 9. The son of a Nonconformist minister, Stead held what may now seem narrow views about issues related to sex. He had denounced Sir Charles Dilke when he was successfully cited in a divorce case in 1885-7, but he deserves to be remembered for his sensational campaign against child prostitution. The July 1891 report shows that Stead disapproved of the Parnell-O'Shea marriage and evidently endorsed the belief of the Catholic hierarchy that its confirmation in a religious ceremony (note the disapproving inverted commas) would rescue Parnell's reputation, but it is also important to note that he did not doubt that a church service was possible. 

^[21] The comment came from the London correspondent of the Cardiff Evening Express, 26 June 1891. It probably appeared in other newspapers too.

^[22] Jordan, Kitty O'Shea, 9. In her 1914 autobiography, Katharine simply said that "we were married very quietly at Brighton on January 25, 1867". Although Captain O'Shea was hardly a credit to the Church of Rome, there can be no doubt about his allegiance to the faith he was born in. It is intriguing that she did not mention that their wedding was an Anglican ceremony. O'Shea [Parnell], Charles Stewart Parnell, i, 52.

^[23] In a further odd coincidence, Parnell himself apparently believed that he had been born in Brighton. Although there is some slight support for this notion from the six-week interval between his birth and his recorded baptism at Rathdrum, historians have generally (and, indeed, understandably) accepted his mother's statement that he was born at Avondale. However, it is possible that the family had spent an extended period at Brighton sometime during Parnell's childhood. T.P. O'Connor, Life of Charles Stewart Parnell (London, 1891), 11; Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, 627; J.McL. Côté, Fanny and Anna Parnell… (Basingstoke, 1991), 38.

^[24] The sole inhabitant was the gatekeeper of a tollbar. In the following decade, he married and triggered a minor population explosion, to 7.

^[25] The 1750 bequest had been made by a former member of the College with the worthy name of John Citizen.

^[26] O'Shea [Parnell], Charles Stewart Parnell, ii, 147, 255-6. Parnell, who was always fascinated by construction work, tried his hand at moulding two bricks. Ingram's Aldrington project can be traced through the University of Leicester's Historical Directories Collection: https://le.ac.uk/library/special-collections/explore/historical-directories.

^[27] Information on clergy from Cambridge University comes from https://venn.lib.cam.ac.uk/cgi-bin/search-2018.

^[28] Callanan, The Parnell Split, 1890-91, 126-32 summarises the hostile reaction in Ireland. T.M. Healy later recalled: "Parnell had now 'married' Mrs. O’Shea in a registry office in London [sic], though her husband was alive. This had no validity in Catholic eyes. Religion and not 'law' is decisive for us as to the bond between woman and man." A week after the civil ceremony, the Catholic hierarchy formally condemned Parnell's leadership, but this seems to have been mainly a question of timing (the bishops held their first meeting for almost a year on the day of the Steyning ceremony). T.M. Healy, Letters and Leaders of My Day (2 vols, London, 1928), ii, 361; F.S.L. Lyons, The Fall of Parnell 1890-91 (London, 1960), 278-9; E. Larkin, The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland and the Fall of Parnell 1888-1891 (Liverpool, 1979), 279-84.  Their resolution referred to "new and convincing proof that he [Parnell] is wholly unworthy of the confidence of catholics".

^[29] New Zealand Tablet, 24 July 1891, via PapersPast, the National Library of New Zealand's online newspaper archive. "For Catholics Mr Parnell is not and cannot be married to this lady… [who] remains the wife of Captain O'Shea. Legalised concubinage, adulterous in its nature, is all we recognise in the matter. How could religion, in any shape, sanctify that?" On 27 August 1891 it added: "If Parnell were guilty in debauching his friend's wife, he is now a hundredfold more guilty in Catholic eyes in contracting a sinful marriage which the heads of our Church teach us is no marriage. It is the crowning proof of his infamy." These statements reflect the view of the hierarchy in Ireland.

^[30] Parnell's sister Emily Dickinson was a notoriously unreliable source, but it may be noteworthy that she believed that the wave of revulsion against him after the divorce case had been receding, but was revived by the marriage: "the avalanche of spiteful maledictions and vile expressions which, having nearly worn itself out, was partially subsiding, was renewed with redoubled vigour and energy". E.M. Dickinson, A Patriot's Mistake…   (Dublin, 1905), 179-80.

^[31] Lyons, The Fall of Parnell 1890-91, 294n. Despite Walsh's clever appeal to Anglican thinking, there is much in the verdict of Conor Cruise O'Brien that Irish reactions to the Parnell-O'Shea affair marked the point when the secular nationalism of the 1798 tradition was replaced by a "fiery, scurrilous, ruthless, populistic Catholic-nationalism" in which Protestants would find only a token place. C.C. O'Brien, Ancestral Voices… (Dublin, 1994), 29-30.

^[32] Although leafy seaside Sussex was comparatively oversupplied with clergy, the total strength of the diocese of Chichester was around 500, one-third of the clerical workforce in the diocese of London. Two-thirds of the Chichester clergy were beneficed (i.e. in secure jobs), but two-thirds of the Londoners were curates or otherwise unattached.

^[33] The article appeared in South Wales Daily News, 9 October 1891. It was probably syndicated.

^[34] W.R.W. Stephens, A Memoir of Richard Durnford ... (London, 1899), 330-2. To the question: "how far the blessing of the Church can be given to a second marriage of the guilty party[?]", he noted that "in the case of a second marriage contracted contrary to Christ's commandment, let it be understood by the manner in which she blesses such a marriage, that she cannot acknowledge it as purely Christian, therefore cannot give it her full blessing". This reflects tacit recognition of the provision of the legal right of erring parishioners to override the veto of their local cleric. Durnford had taken part in the drafting of the encyclical letter issued after the 1888 Lambeth Conference, and his research into divorce may date from that time.

^[35] The University of Durham was founded by Bishop Van Mildert as a device to channel some of the bishopric's indecently large endowments away from the attentions of the reformed Parliament. Throughout the 19^th century, the Dean and Chapter constituted the Governing Body.

^[36] Pridgeon had, however, been appointed to Steyning (in 1882) by his father-in-law, who owned the advowson.

^[37] John Brookes Vernon Penfold had been born in Gloucestershire c. 1864. He had entered Jesus College Cambridge in 1884 but does not seem to have formally graduated. He was chaplain at King William's College, Isle of Man from 1888 to 1890 when he moved to the Marylebone curacy. There is some mystery about his ordination, Venn's Alumni Cantabrigienses records that he was ordained deacon in the diocese of Sodor and Man and priest in the diocese of London in 1892. However, a brief note on him in Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Penfold_(priest)) quotes a Liverpool newspaper from July 1888 reporting his ordination. Penfold could hardly have worked as a curate, especially in a central London church, without being in full orders, and he certainly could not have conducted an Anglican wedding had he only been a deacon. In 2002, in response to the Anglican recruitment crisis, the two archbishops authorised deacons to conduct weddings in special circumstances, but added that "a deacon should rarely, if ever, solemnize a marriage and should only do so for exceptional reasons". Possibly there was some perceived irregularity in Penfold's Manx ordination that required a second ordination in 1892. His career was not harmed by his reported association with Parnell's marriage plans: he was appointed to a church in Guernsey in 1892. In later life, he was a prominent Freemason. Parnell does not seem to have had any contact with the Masonic Order, and Irish Catholics would not have welcomed any such connection.        

^[38] The interview with the Sussex Daily News was extensively reported in South Wales Daily News, 21 October 1891. Parnell's comments will be discussed in a Note on Martinalia.

^[39] Katharine Parnell's 1914 autobiography was superbly analysed by Roy Foster in Paddy and Mr Punch … (London, 1993), 123-38.

^[40] Viscount Halifax, see below.

^[41] O. Chadwick, The Victorian Church: Part II (2^d ed., London, 1971), 192-3.

^[42] Here I follow D. Newsome, The Parting of Friends… (London, 1966), also published in Cambridge, Mass. as The Wilberforces and Henry Manning... Looking back half a century in 1932, the outspoken Dean Inge recalled that the original generation of followers of Pusey "called themselves High Churchmen" and were "entirely indifferent to ritual". Fifty Years: Memories and Contrasts … (London, 1932), 115-16. The collection of essays had appeared in The Times, which reprinted them in book form.

^[43] Newsome, The Wilberforces and Henry Manning, 75. A century later, Inge explained the Anglo-Catholic problem of identifying authority. "The problem for this party has always been how to define its position as an autonomous branch of the Catholic Church, while resisting the claims and the attractions of Rome. Institutionalism has a logic of its own, and leans heavily on the prestige of ecclesiastical tradition. If the seat of authority is neither (as our Articles plainly teach) the Holy Scriptures nor the inner light, the testimonium Spiritus Sancti, it must be the Church, and the question arises, which Church? The Church of England speaks with an uncertain voice, being in fact the Church of the English nation and containing as many varieties of religious belief as the nation which it represents." Fifty Years: Memories and Contrasts, 116.

^[44] Chadwick, The Victorian Church: Part II, 348-50. Green was imprisoned between March 1881 and November 1882. It was eventually determined that he had vacated his living by wilfully absenting himself. At that point, his contempt of court ceased to count, and he was released. The evangelical Church Association, which had launched the prosecution, managed to bankrupt him in the process. It was not an episode that any sensible prelate wished to repeat.

^[45] https://anglicanhistory.org/england/ecu/roberts/1887.html.

^[46] Chadwick, The Victorian Church: Part II, 318-22.

^[47] https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/421-archbishop-davidson-the-general-strike-and-the-revised-prayer-book-1926-1928.

^[48] As with other contemporary episodes reviewed here, the Brinckman wedding was widely reported in the press. The Cardiff Evening Express, 29 April 1895, carried a very full account.

^[49] The second Brinckman marriage ended in divorce in 1912.

^[50] This is the version in the 1662 Prayer Book.

^[51] The Kirk had split in 1843 over the issue of the intrusion of appointed ministers, chosen by patrons, in the face of the determination of congregations to elect their own pastors. The attribution of motive to Lord Halifax here rests upon the assumption that specifically Scottish issues were more widely known in the late-Victorian Westminster world than may be the case today. Not only were Scots (e.g. Balfour, Campbell-Bannerman, Rosebery and – arguably – Gladstone) prominent cabinet members, but English politicians often sat for Scottish constituencies. In addition, the English aristocracy had close links of property and intermarriage with their counterparts north of the Border. By comparison, in the early twenty-first century, devolution has tended to sideline Scottish issues from the UK agenda. Hence a signal that Halifax seems to have flashed may now be missed.

^[52] Winnett, Divorce and Remarriage in Anglicanism, 181.

^[53] Hansard, 28 May 1895, 431-48. For the withdrawal bill on the grounds that it was too controversial to be considered at such a late stage of the session, Hansard, 24 June, 1895, 1743.

^[54] A.C. Benson, The Life of Edward White Benson…  (2 vols, London, 1899), ii, 641. Grimthorpe's normal tone of angry sarcasm rose to white heat as he denounced the argument that "the objection against the guilty divorcee could be maintained and ought to be maintained, while the offence was fresh and while he had given no sign of repentance. But to whom was the guilty divorcee to give the sign of repentance? To the clergyman asked to marry him, he presumed. Then the clergyman was to take upon himself to say and certify to the parishioners and the public when a guilty divorcee had sufficiently repented to be allowed to be married in church. Did their Lordships not see that that made the clergy masters of the position as regards the administration of the rites of the church? And why after that particular sin more than any other?"

^[55] The same objection was thrown at Halifax himself, the Lord Chancellor (Herschell) commenting: "If there had been this terrible grievance and scandal, the noble Viscount might have called the attention of the House to it some time before this during the last 30 years." This was hardly fair: Halifax had succeeded to his title in 1885, just ten years earlier.

^[56] "No clergyman of the Church of England or of the Church in Wales shall be compelled to solemnize the marriage of any person whose former marriage has been dissolved on any ground and whose former husband or wife is still living or to permit the marriage of any such person to be solemnized in the Church or Chapel of which he is the minister." Matrimonial Causes Act 1937 c. 57, Section 12. The Anglican Church in Wales had been disestablished in 1920. A.P. Herbert's reform was generally, and rightly, seen as a liberalisation of divorce. This was presumably a concession to the clergy. Lloyd George's Lord Chancellor, Buckmaster, had been prepared to make the same concession in his divorce law amendment bill in 1920, but it failed to pass. Bennett, "The Church of England and the Law of Divorce since 1857", 631n.

^[57] In a reply to "the Rev. W. Black" in February 1899, Temple wrote: "The Book of Common Prayer does not pronounce marriage indissoluble. It declares that whom God hath joined together no man may put asunder. Our Lord's exception in the case of adultery shows that a divorce in such a case is not man's doing but the Lord's." Sandford, Memoirs of Archbishop Temple, ii, 293-4.

^[58] By "public opinion", Black presumably meant "upper-class opinion".

^[59] An Oxford graduate, Francis Scott Webster had been one of the founders of the Church Army, an Anglican alternative to General Booth's Salvation Army. An Evangelical, he took a prominent part in the funeral in 1902 of John Kensit, who was the Protestant counterpart of Father Black in his attempts to disrupt ritualist services. In 1903, Webster invented an ingenious partial temperance pledge, aimed at social drinking, which required a promise "never to take intoxicating drinks except at the midday and evening meals". He took leave of absence from All Souls' in 1907 to visit missionaries in China. His decision to conduct the marriage of a divorcee in 1906 did not call down divine wrath, but he was killed by a car when crossing Marylebone Road in 1920.

^[60] Oddly enough, Chapman had been one of the first students at Keble College Oxford, the memorial to the founder of the High Church movement, an institution steeped in an Anglo-Catholic atmosphere.

^[61] Winnett, Divorce and Remarriage in Anglicanism, 190-1; Bennett, "The Church of England and the Law of Divorce since 1857", 628, 633.

^[62] F. Donaldson, Edward VIII (London, 1976 ed., cf. 1^st ed. 1974), 319-26.

^[63] Jardine was reported to be a graduate of Liverpool University, a former Baptist minister and a "ranter". He was said to have made money by publishing articles describing his role in the Windsor's marriage, although a lecture tour of the United States immediately after his excursion to France was a failure. My source, the Sydney Truth, 1 August 1937, was almost certainly a widely disseminated agency report, consulted via the National Library of Australia's online newspaper archive, Trove. He published his account of the Windsor wedding in pulp-fiction style: R.A. Jardine, At Long Last (Hollywood, Calif., 1943). In his defence, he was said to have been an excellent plumber.

^[64] Jardine, At Long Last, 163, 101. Frederic Anstruther Cardew held the splendidly titled office of Rural Dean of France. In 1916, he had established a Theatre Girls' Hostel in Paris.

^[65] The story can be pieced together through reports on Trove.

^[66] The erosion of the Anglican ban on the remarriage of divorcees may be traced through more recent royal weddings. In 1992, Princess Anne circumvented episcopal disapproval by marrying in the Church of Scotland. In 2005, the future King Charles III married his long-term partner, whose first husband was still very much alive (and who, like Captain O'Shea, had been raised as a Roman Catholic), in a Register Office ceremony at the Windsor Guildhall. This was followed by a service of blessing conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who described the compromise as "consistent with Church of England guidelines concerning remarriage". During the service, the couple recited a strongly worded act of penitence ("We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness"). They were not required to specify details, and the entire congregation was invited to join in. No service of blessing was available to the Parnells in 1891. By 2018, Anglican attitudes had changed, and Prince Harry was permitted a full Church wedding to a divorcee.

^[67] It is possible that there was hostile comment in Church publications, but these lie beyond the scope of this enquiry.

^[68] The ECU was divided over Lux Mundi, a collection of essays published two years earlier that sought to accommodate Anglo-Catholic theology with contemporary liberal trends. There was also some resistance to the proposal of Lord Salisbury's government to abolish fees for elementary schooling. A motion regretting "the adoption of Free Education as calculated to weaken still further the sacred tie between parent and child" was blocked by a large majority.

^[69] https://anglicanhistory.org/england/ecu/roberts/1890.html.

^[70] According to the 1860 edition of Crockford's Clerical Directory, John William Grier had traded his Trinity Dublin BA for an Oxford degree in 1835. Foster gives the date as 1853, a possible confusion with R.M. Grier's matriculation that year. A Staffordshire directory for 1851 shows that he held the poorly paid living of Amblecote by that time. J.W. Grier died in 1866.

^[71] R.M. Grier was a temperance advocate. In an 1883 public lecture in Rugeley, he dissected the claim advanced by the Licensed Victuallers' National Defence League that the closure of Dublin public houses on Sundays had encouraged the formation of the Invincibles, a terrorist gang responsible for the Phoenix Park murders the previous year. Grier had no difficulty in demolishing this "pure and simple fiction", but his discussion showed an awareness of Irish affairs. R.M. Grier, The 'Truth' about Sunday Closing and Local Option... (Rugeley, 1883), 6.

^[72] I have written extensively on Parnell's time at university, e.g. "Charles Stewart Parnell at Cambridge: New Evidence (1992)" (https://www.gedmartin.net/published-work-mainmenu-11/265-charles-stewart-parnell-at-cambridge-new-evidence-1992) and a more recent summary 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).

^[73] The Cambridge Chronicle, 17 November 1866, reported 2,039 undergraduates in residence. Numbers would have fallen during the academic year, partly through drop-outs but also because around 200 fourth-year Honours students took their final examinations and graduated in the Lent Term. William Black seems to have taken a Pass degree in 1867, and gone on to a Third in Theology the following year.

^[74] Parnell certainly could not have afforded (and would probably not have been welcome at) such select clubs as the Athenaeum in Trinity Street or the Pitt Club in Jesus Lane, nor would he have had much interest in the Amateur Dramatic Club, established in 1855.

^[75] The Parnell family mansion, Avondale, was let after the death of his father in 1859. In 1865, when he entered Magdalene, Parnell's address was in Upper Temple Street.

^[76] When a Church of Ireland cleric attempted to admonish him for his relationship with Katharine O'Shea, he frostily replied: "When I was at college I had opportunities of seeing men of your Church and of your cloth, preparing for their profession, and I must say they were no better than they should be, morally or otherwise." T.M. Kettle, (L.J. Kettle, ed.), The Material for Victory … (Dublin, 1958), 96.