Henry Harrison on Charles Stewart Parnell, 1951
In a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1951, Henry Harrison recalled his memories of Charles Stewart Parnell.
Henry Harrison was an Irish Nationalist member of the Westminster parliament who acted as unofficial secretary and general helper to Charles Stewart Parnell at the time of the breaking of the Home Rule movement during the 1890-1 Split. Born into a prosperous Ulster Protestant family in 1867, he was a collateral descendant of Henry Joy McCracken, hanged for his part in the 1798 rebellions. Despite spending part of his childhood in London, and a successful record at an English public school, it was Harrison's Irish identity that shaped him, perhaps filtered romantically through the idealistic tradition of 1798. In 1887, he entered Balliol College, Oxford, then regarded as the intellectual centre of the University, where he read Classics. Although he had pleasant memories of Balliol, he does not seem to have been obsessed by his studies, instead devoting his energies to sport and to the student Home Rule Club, of which he was elected secretary.[1]
In April 1889, Harrison was arrested at Gweedore in Donegal, where evicted tenants had repossessed their cabins. In his defence, he pleaded – or, rather, proclaimed – that he had simply been distributing food to hungry people, but it was alleged that his act of throwing a bag of bread through a hole in the roof of an occupied tenement constituted complicity in resistance to eviction. The authorities used the remand process as punishment, aided by Harrison's own refusal to agree to terms of bail. The case against him was eventually dismissed, but the "generous-hearted young Englishman" who had been handcuffed for committing an act of humanity was now a hero.[2] Although one early report of the episode had elevated him to "Professor Harrison", his connection with Oxford was becoming tenuous.[3] Certainly, a spring evening in 1890 found him in the lobby of the House of Commons, eagerly reporting his experiences to MPs. Parnell and his then-ally, William O'Brien, were discussing the forthcoming by-election in Mid-Tipperary, and puzzling over the problem that no suitable local candidate could be found. O'Brien happened to catch sight of the "University stripling who had just been bearing a gallant part in the eviction struggles in Donegal", and asked: "Why not that fine young fellow, if no local man was offering?" "Would you mind introducing me?", was Parnell's response. In mid-May, Harrison was returned unopposed, as member for Mid-Tipperary, a constituency with which he had no personal connection whatever.[4] "Mr Harrison is the nominee of Mr Parnell," the news agencies baldly reported.[5] It was almost the last occasion on which the Chief could parachute a candidate into an Irish constituency.[6]
Although he was unusually young to be an MP, Henry Harrison threw himself into parliamentary life, delivering a combative maiden speech early in July in which he denounced every aspect of the Irish administration.[7] Replying, the Unionist Chief Secretary for Ireland, Arthur Balfour, had some difficulty in conforming to the House of Commons courtesy that required a polite allusion to a novice orator, waspishly referring to Harrison's espousal of Irish Nationalism as "a cause of which he has shown himself eminently qualified to become an ornament, and to which he is so recent a convert", while regretting that he "spoke with some of the intemperance of youth".[8] Harrison's claim that the police in his constituency were not only brutal but frequently drunk probably did not endear him to the Royal Irish Constabulary, one of whom coshed him during a confrontation in Tipperary town that autumn. In addition to bonding with his voters, the young MP pressed for an investigation of the sanitary conditions in Derry Gaol, an establishment whose accommodation he had experienced after his arrest in Donegal. There was every reason to expect that the political career of Henry Harrison would make notable and dramatic contributions to the Irish cause.
Unfortunately, he would become one of the casualties of the Split, and never sat in parliament again after his defeat by Anti-Parnellites in the general election of 1892. Immediately after his arrival at Westminster, Harrison had attached himself to the party leader and remained doggedly faithful throughout the Split.[9] There was some force in his argument, during the fraught caucus debate in Committee Room Fifteen in early December 1890, that Parnell was the only possible leader who could extort a satisfactory Home Rule bill from Gladstone.[10] However, his unshakeable insistence that the imposition of Captain O'Shea upon Galway City in 1886 was in no way connected with his hero's private life suggests an element of idealistic gullibility.[11] Parnell seems to have felt some responsibility to mentor the "stripling" whose academic career he had brought to an abrupt close. In education and social background, the young MP was almost certainly a more congenial companion than most of the Home Rule party's middle-class Catholic lieutenants. Harrison recalled that the party leader talked to him like "an elder brother", but it may be worth noting that his own father had died when he was he was a small boy, and there was perhaps an element in their working relationship of the younger man seeking a substitute parent. Nonetheless, it would be misleading to exaggerate the degree of closeness between them. Harrison described himself as "a sort of A.D.C. [aide-de-camp] and bodyguard", neither role suggesting any access to inner-circle policy-making. Nor were the two constantly together. Harrison was absent in the United States during the spring of 1891, taking part in an unsuccessful Parnellite fund-raising mission. Their paths similarly diverged in the early autumn, and Harrison "had no notion that he was ill". Like most of his contemporaries, he was shocked by the news of Parnell's death, which he learned about from placards advertising the evening newspapers on the streets of London. He mourned "the man simple and kindly, and yet with a royal graciousness of manner … intensely manly and intensely human who yet seemed to shine with an inner light". More practically, he thought of Parnell's widow, "supported by no friends or relations of his or her own … if I wished to do what most would please my dead Chief … I must do all that in me lay to lighten her burden at the moment, and to help to place her affairs upon a safe and durable basis". Without waiting for a response to his telegram of condolence and offer of assistance, he travelled to Hove, booked into a convenient hotel, presented himself at Walsingham Terrace, where Parnell's body rested, "and asked what I could do to help". Katharine Parnell was prostrated with grief and it would be some weeks before he actually met her, but he accompanied Parnell's coffin to Glasnevin as her unofficial representative and, on 31 October, issued an authoritative statement to The Times announcing the widow's intention to commission a biography that would defend her husband's career and reputation.[12] It would be the non-fulfilment of this promise that he regarded as placing upon him a subsequent obligation to defend Parnell's memory.
Harrison learned more about Charles Stewart Parnell in the year after his hero's death than had been revealed to him during the short period of their association. His first surprise was to discover that the two youngest girls in the Walsingham Terrace household, eight-year-old Clare and six-year-old Katie, were recognised as Parnell's daughters, even though they bore O'Shea's surname. This information had been kept secret, partly no doubt to protect the children's privacy, but also to avoid any obstacle to the completion of their mother's divorce. As the law stood in 1891, a divorce was initially granted through a decree nisi, the Latin word meaning 'unless'. If any suspicion arose surrounding the evidence given in the original case or if new circumstances emerged during a six-month period after the court hearing, an official called the Queen's Proctor possessed the right of intervention which might lead to the retraction of the decree. Had it been established that the two girls were recognised as Parnell's daughters, the obvious deduction would have been that O'Shea had known of his wife's relationship (as, of course, he did), which would have made him complicit in her adulterous deception. Such an outcome would have discredited the gallant Captain, no doubt a pleasant outcome, but it would also have destroyed the divorce, thereby leaving the woman whom Parnell desperately wished to make his wife still shackled to her legal husband. Unfortunately, although nobody disputed that Parnell was the biological father of Clare and Katie, O'Shea was their legal parent – and the divorce settlement had awarded him custody of children under the age of sixteen. For some months, Parnell's daughters were carefully guarded whenever they left the house to take a walk, escorted by Harrison himself, who ostentatiously carried a shillelagh, accompanied by the late Chief's ferocious Irish terrier. These precautions deterred O'Shea from carrying out his threats to abduct Sophie and Katie, but Harrison was less successful in frustrating his attempts to use the custody issue to extort money from his ex-wife's dwindling fortune.[13] Fortunately, for historians at least, one positive gain resulted from Harrison's disinterested tenacity: as she took the first steps towards coming to terms with the devastating blow of her bereavement, his widow told him something of the story of her relationship with Parnell, and of O'Shea's mercenary connivance in the new path that her life took after they became lovers in 1880.[14]
Towards the end of 1892, Harrison withdrew from Katharine Parnell's life, believing, as he later explained, that her financial affairs had been set on a firm footing.[15] His failure to win a seat at the general election earlier that year would prove to be the end of his parliamentary hopes.[16] He made a career in banking, enlisted in the British Army in 1915 (at the age of 47) and twice won the Military Cross. In 1920, he supported Sir Horace Plunkett in arguing for Dominion Home Rule, and made the natural transition to active endorsement of the Free State. Now known as Captain Harrison, he worked in military intelligence during the Civil War: he would later claim that he had orders to arrest the fugitive Eamon de Valera, along with an assurance that he should not worry if his quarry could not be captured alive.[17] By the mid-nineteen-twenties he was one of the last Parnellites on the fringes of Irish public life, a close ally of another survivor of Irish Party days, Captain William Redmond. As a Northerner who criticised Ulster separatism, he later proved a useful contributor to the Fianna Fáil anti-Partition campaign of the nineteen-forties.
It is possible that Harrison's belief in a united Ireland within the British Commonwealth might eventually have led to a breach with Parnell, had his idol lived to march the nation in a different direction.[18] But he remained faithful to his leader's glorious memory: "I knew him and appraised him as a demi-god," he proudly told W.B. Yeats in 1936.[19] By his sixties, Harrison constituted himself the guardian of the Chief's historical reputation. In 1931, he published Parnell Vindicated: the Lifting of the Veil, ostensibly to challenge the frivolously venomous denigration of Parnell by St John Ervine that had appeared six years earlier – appropriately enough in a series called 'Curiosities in Politics'. He also dissected the 1914 blockbuster, Charles Stewart Parnell: his Love Story and Political Life, which had been published under the alleged authorship of Parnell's widow, calling herself – for marketing purposes – Katharine O'Shea. While accepting that some of the letters disclosed in the book were genuine, Harrison firmly argued – at some risk of retaliation, whether legal or physical – that much of the text had been fabricated by her son, Gerard O'Shea, whom Harrison had first encountered doing his father's dirty work at Walsingham Terrace.[20] Although Parnell Vindicated is now largely forgotten, its role in the evolution of a more nuanced assessment of the Chief should not be underestimated. His assault on the contested 1914 autobiography would later form a starting point for Roy Foster's magisterial dissection of its complex layers.[21] His single-word summary of his admired mentor in a chapter heading, "Enigma", would resurface as the title of Paul Bew's 2011 biography. Harrison excused the forty-year interval between Parnell's death and his attempt at a comprehensive defence by stating that "much now rests on reasoned conviction that in the old days owed its origin to intuitive faith".[22]
Harrison continued to fly the Parnellite flag. In 1938, he attacked J.L. Garvin, the biographer of Joseph Chamberlain, accusing him of wilfully ignoring evidence that the Birmingham statesman was well aware of Captain O'Shea's connivance in his wife's relationship with Parnell.[23] Harrison used this book to move from defence to counter-attack. One of the many mysteries of the O'Shea divorce case is that the petition to dissolve the marriage was brought by a man who professed himself to be a Catholic, even if he was not a very good one. How did it come about that a member of a Church so totally opposed to divorce could violate one of its key commandments?[24] Harrison was in no doubt that Chamberlain, and Chamberlain's cash, explained the decision to publicise the scandal in a ruthless attempt to destroy the Irish leader's political and by so doing shatter the movement that he had created. In Harrison's seventies, the ardent hero-worship of the Oxford undergraduate still shone through the forensic analysis of biographical data.
At the age of eighty, he took on, and demolished, a new target. In a slow-motion exercise in institutional smugness, The Times published historical tomes extolling its own omniscience. Unfortunately, there had been one embarrassing blemish, its insistence for two years from 1887 that the ostensibly constitutionalist Charles Stewart Parnell had secretly encouraged terrorist outrages. The revelation that the letters upon which it based its allegations were forgeries, and clumsy ones at that, did great damage to the newspaper's integrity and authority, which an official history would have done well openly to confront. Instead, its third volume, published in 1947, managed to imply that its charges against Parnell had in fact been true, and that the editorial staff of The Times had simply been unlucky in trusting a couple of fake documents. If the authors had gambled on there being nobody still around who was capable of contesting its attempted self-exculpation, they soon discovered that they were mistaken. Harrison provided a bleak memorandum of correction, which the newspaper thought prudent to print as an appendix to the next instalment of its self-glorification.[25] In his last years, he encouraged two Trinity College postgraduate students who were setting the foundations for modern scholarly appraisal of the Home Rule party and its magnetic leader. Conor Cruise O'Brien was not totally persuaded by Parnell Vindicated, which he felt overstated the case for the defence, but he held its author in justifiable esteem. "To have talked with so intelligent and charming and cheerfully partisan a survivor as was Henry Harrison, is upsetting to the impartiality, but also to the ignorance; one tended to become involved, but one got to know more." Although O'Brien processed these reminiscences through a filter of "fascinated scepticism", when he published Parnell and his Party, 1880-1890 in 1957, three years after Harrison's death, he dedicated the book to the memory of his genial informant.[26] In his study of the Split, published in 1960, F.S.L. Lyons placed more reliance upon Parnell Vindicated, although he too indicated reservations about the vigorous account of the injury received by Parnell during the 1890 North Kilkenny by-election that Harrison shared with him six decades later.[27] Harrison's veteran memories were handled with appropriate historical detachment, but there can be no doubt that he constituted the human hyphen that linked the life of Charles Stewart Parnell with modern-day academic attempts to comprehend the man and his achievement.
Henry Harrison made one further contribution to the memorialisation of Ireland's lost leader. Early in 1951, he delivered a twenty-minute radio talk about his hero. This was broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation on its Third Programme, and the text was subsequently published in the BBC's weekly magazine, The Listener.[28] (One wonders whether Radio Éireann would have welcomed the topic in those narrow and gloomy times.) The BBC had launched the Third Programme in 1946 as a cultural and intellectual service avowedly aimed at a minority audience. Three years later, the average listenership on a winter evening was estimated at around 90,000.[29] Harrison's talk was apparently broadcast in an early-evening slot devoted to subjects as varied as modern theology and low-temperature physics, a format that made some demands upon its audience. The constraints of a short presentation inevitably meant that the text embedded personal testimony amongst a matrix of second-hand generalisations, with some statements derived not from personal experience but from biographies, particularly the 1898 landmark study, The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell 1846-1891 by R. Barry O'Brien. Obviously, Harrison is at his most valuable in his description of the Parnell whom he accompanied on political expeditions and through his memories of events that he actually witnessed. Since it was impossible for speakers to provide a great deal of contextual detail in the time available, I have added some explanatory endnotes to Harrison's text. I have also attempted to identify some of his borrowings and to unravel his occasionally approximate quotations.
It is now time to invite readers to travel back three-quarters of the century, to a winter evening in the grim world of post-war Austerity Britain. Tune in to the BBC's Daventry transmitter and listen to Henry Harrison's admiring evocation of a lost Irish leader.
Henry Harrison's BBC talk on Charles Stewart Parnell
I knew Parnell for less than two years – the two years of triumph followed by tragedy that ended his short life at the age of forty five. I came to him as an undergraduate straight from the Balliol of Benjamin Jowett and Nettleship and Strachan Davidson, and the impression that he made on my mind has remained fresh and indelible.[30] The years that have passed since then – sixty–one years – and reflection and study have only served to justify and confirm that impression. My picture of Parnell is of a man cast in a heroic mould, of passionate personal force held under easy control and finding its natural expression in swift and decisive action, of an intellect resting on quite exceptional powers of perceptive insight and balanced judgment, of a man of courage and pride with no slightest trace of self-consciousness or thought of self-interest and of a man self-dedicated to Ireland's cause. And when he died it was to me as the death of Ajax defying the lightning.[31]
For a physical portrait I may quote John Morley as saying that he resembled one of George Meredith's heroes in his masculine good looks.[32] But I, myself, at the age of twenty-two regarded him with the athlete's rather than the artist's eye. He was tall – about six foot in height – finely proportioned and of lithe strength. He stood well over his ground, as they say of a racehorse, with a natural balanced poise. His brow was the brow of a creative thinker indicating perceptive genius rather than mere calculating power. Beneath it were remarkable reddish-brown eyes, with the irises slightly convex, in a setting of delicately drawn lines. The straight nose became slightly aquiline when he smiled. His hair and beard were brown – the under-beard a vigorous thrusting growth of a darker chestnut hue. His face in repose had the grave serenity of a mind at peace with itself. His deportment had the graciousness and the simplicity of true good manners. Over all was the dignity that was born of self-respect and self-discipline and of a character in perfect balance of mind and body. Much of his physique and of his temperament, I think, was derived from his mother, whom I also knew.[33] She was the daughter of the American Admiral Stewart, a famous character whose father emigrated from Ulster with his Connaught-born wife, named Sarah Ford, in the latter part of the eighteenth century.
The stories of Parnell's self-possession, glacial calm, frozen hauteur and austere manner and the like are easily explained. As a young man he had the usual social instincts. We know of his attending dances at Dublin Castle and at the British Embassy in Paris, of his shooting parties and cricket matches, of his pleasure in arranging little dinner parties for special friends, of his easy manner in social intercourse in mixed company.[34] I garnered many such stories from older, non-political contemporaries who had known him socially. And the main truth of all this is clearly set out in the writings of Justin McCarthy and William O'Brien.[35] The parliamentary artist and reporter, H. W. Lucy, who wrote under the pen-name of 'Toby MP' tells of Parnell's earlier days in Parliament, of his waving his arms and shouting in a high voice.[36] Parnell soon learned his lesson. His parliamentary battles for Ireland against English prejudice earned him much hostile clamour in the House and hostility and personal insult in the Lobbies and outside generally. And when to the odium incurred by his successful parliamentary tactics were added the inflammation and the hatreds caused by the agrarian warfare and bloodshed in Ireland he had need to fall back on his pride and his courage. He remade the surface of his manner so that nothing could shake his calm imperturbability – no sting could gall him, no compliments would melt him. And this complete self-mastery led directly to his mastery over others. He said later: "I hate to be hated."[37] And so he remained aloof. Aloofness inevitably led to loneliness. Loneliness led to his romance. His romance led to tragedy and death. But, even so, he had done his work. He killed Irish landlordism, and his cure by land purchase ultimately prevailed. And he lit the fire in which Dublin Castle and all its evil works were eventually consumed.
Soon after I joined Parnell, in May 1890, I was brought into close contact with him. I acted as a sort of A.D.C. and bodyguard in strenuous times. And this gave me opportunities for many personal talks in the course of railway journeys and long country drives. He was kindly and frank. His attitude was that of an elder brother talking to his younger brother, or of the captain of the side encouraging a new cap. He was detached and objective without self-assertiveness or desire to impose a view, and with gentle courtesy and unfailing lucidity. I was struck by the resemblance of his methods of exposition to those of the Balliol dons I had recently left – the simplified statement of the governing principle and the orderly analysis of facts, arguments and hypotheses that formed the structure of the problem under discussion. I have many memories of a man who impressed me as no other man has ever done. He won my enduring loyalty and affection.
No man has ever been lied about as Parnell has been lied about. Even his death brought no surcease in the campaign of wanton defamation. Too many who had betrayed continued to attempt to justify their betrayal. Too many who had feared him or were jealous of him lived on to wreak their spite when he was gone. And there were too many of the lower sort of scribblers in Fleet Street who habitually spiced their random paragraphs and even more ambitious prose with vile falsehoods. Parnell died on October 6, 1891, and his funeral in Dublin on the following Sunday was the occasion of a vast manifestation of public grief beyond all imagination. Yet for years stories were circulated that he was not dead, that he was in hiding, that an ex-colleague had seen him in Germany some months after his death: it was even rumoured in 1900 that he was fighting for the Boers and was none other than the famous guerrilla fighter de Wet.[38] All these rumours or stories were grotesquely false. There was no mystery about his death.
Another absurd misrepresentation is the oft-repeated nonsense that Parnell was so phenomenally ignorant that he barely knew even the name of Shakespeare. Whether he had read a great deal or not I do not know, but he assuredly had some familiarity with the Greek classics, and he had spent four years at Cambridge.[39] There is a passage in Hansard of 1877 that records his saying of a Mr Waddy that he (Parnell) had come to know him as a Hecuba in his lamentations about the past and as a Cassandra in his gloomy anticipations of the future.[40] I personally heard him in Committee Room Fifteen quote the lines which in those days at Ieast had not become hackneyed: "To thine own self be true, And it shall follow as the night the day Thou canst not then be false to any man".[41] If there be any who still doubt Parnell's intellectual equipment, let them read the full official record of his evidence in chief and in cross–examination before the Special Commission in 1889 when his whole political life was vivisected and laid bare for hostile examination.
Other fantastic misrepresentations have denied Parnell's greatness as a political leader and have attributed the success of Irish parliamentarianism in the eighteen-eighties to the brilliant abilities of certain of his more active lieutenants. None of us thought anything of the sort at the time.[42] The plain fact remains for history to see that when Parnell went[,] the success of his party soon went too – the Irish Question ceased to dominate British politics and the younger generation of Irishmen, having read the signs and portents, swept away Irish parliamentarianism for ever in 1918– 21.
The outstanding achievement of Parnell's career was his control of the agrarian revolutionary forces generated by the crop failures in 1878 and 1879 and of the ex-Fenians who still dreamed of armed revolt. He would, I think, himself have preferred military action, but his studies of American campaigns convinced him that it was hopelessly impracticable.[43] The essence of his pact with the militant elements was disclosed in his speeches of 1879 and 1880. He did not believe it was possible indefinitely to maintain an independent Irish Party at Westminster, in face of the sapping and undermining by social and political influences to which it would be exposed. What he proposed was a political campaign, on constitutional lines, of a character as he described it, "short, sharp and decisive like a bayonet charge", to win Home Rule – and if this failed, he said, he would return to the young men of Ireland and take counsel with them as to what further and other steps should be substituted.[44] It was in this view that he maintained semi-friendly relations with the Liberals and Radicals in the mid-eighties for he feared that in the franchise and redistribution laws then under discussion the representation of Ireland, as fixed by the Act of Union, might be cut down. Again, it was in this view that he gave the Irish vote in Britain to the Tories, lest the Liberals might return with so large a majority as to dominate all other elements in the House. Indeed, Joseph Chamberlain had already threatened him with a dictated Irish policy far short of Home Rule and Gladstone himself had appealed to the British public for an overall majority.[45]
Parnell was sure in his estimate of the interplay of the major factors in British politics. And later on he remained quite undismayed by the defeat that befell him after 'the Split' caused by the divorce proceedings. I remember his saying to me during the Carlow election, within four months of his death, that he was certain of the ultimate result. In a public speech he announced that he and his followers, though temporarily in a minority, would form "rallying squares" on which the majority could fall back when their inevitable disappointment by the Liberals would defeat them.[46] The possibility of his death had not occurred to him – nor to anybody else.
Apart from his genius, Parnell's two most marked characteristics were pride and pity. It was his pride that made him insist that once Mrs O'Shea's name had been linked publicly with his own there must be a divorce so that he could make her his legal wife. It was his pride – pride for his country – that made him refuse to resign his Irish leadership at the call of the English Liberals. It was his pride that sustained him in his silent and disdainful endurance of the foul abuse that was heaped on him. It was his pity for the sufferings of the Irish people that drove him into public life. He shed tears whilst Sir Charles Russell was telling the Special Commission of the pitiful horrors of an eviction campaign. More than once he has dispatched me to interfere with a man beating a horse or to protect a vociferous opponent on the roadside from some of our more ardent supporters. His sense of pity explains the sympathetic thoughtfulness which he showed for the lady he loved as the following episode illustrates. I was with him at Castlecomer when a hostile mob pelted us with bags of lime. He was struck in the eyes. When we got out of the village I watched Dr Hackett of Kilkenny roll back the eyelid on a pencil and try to remove the lime which had set on its inner surface – in vain. The socket and eye were greatly inflamed and swollen. Parnell took it all in stoic silence, though obviously in great pain, all through our drive back to Kilkenny. The newspapers told the story and the Anti-Parnellites straightway denied it. Some even of their leaders wrote a joint letter to a London paper pledging their word that nothing but flour was thrown. The explanation illustrates my point. No sooner did Parnell reach his hotel than he sent a telegram to Mrs. O'Shea in Brighton to bid her disregard all press stories of an injury to his eyes and that he had not been hurt. The text of this telegram, by a Post Office indiscretion, reached the Anti-Parnellite leaders who based their denials on it. I did not learn of this until long afterwards. But at the time I had no doubt. I had got some of the white powder in my mouth, and it is not hard to distinguish between the taste of flour and the taste of lime.[47]
When the Divorce Court verdict was pronounced I had no hesitation. I trusted Parnell as man of honour, and it was clear that we had not been told the whole story in the undefended hearing. His private life was his private life. He had taken another man's wife, but I refused to believe that he had deceived the husband or had violated the honourable laws of hospitality. He was a great man – our Ireland's great man – and he was indispensable to the welfare of Ireland. But I was glad when he said in Committee Room Fifteen that the whole story was not yet told and "I would rather appear to be dishonourable than be dishonourable". That was for me full reassurance, and I have proved it all since.[48]
I will add one reminiscence. A month or so later I was sitting beside Mr R. B. Haldane QC, on a bench in the House of Commons. He said, "Of course, I am a Liberal and I go with my Party, but if I had been in your position I should have voted as you did. Mr Parnell is a great man. I regard him as the strongest man who has been in the House of Commons for a hundred and fifty years." And Lord Haldane, as he afterwards became, did not talk lightly.[49]
This portrait of Henry Harrison, from the National Gallery of Ireland, is by his sister, Sarah Cecilia Harrison, who died in 1941. The symbolism of placing him in front of a picture of Classical ruins perhaps suggests that he was a survivor from a lost world. It is reproduced here under the terms of a Creative Commons licence, with thanks to the National Gallery of Ireland.
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 I am grateful to Deirdre Larkin who brought this radio talk to my attention, and to Dr Andrew Jones for comments on the draft text.
[1] Harrison had been a Scholar at Westminster School. He had initially planned to enter the British diplomatic service. O. McGee, "Harrison, Henry", Dictionary of Irish Biography: https://www.dib.ie/index.php/biography/harrison-henry-a3824.
[2] The description (which Harrison might not have accepted) comes from the New Zealand Tablet, 5 July 1889, and was almost certainly taken from an Irish newspaper.
[3] In defence of Harrison's studious intentions, it should be said that he was in Donegal as part of a 'reading party', a civilised academic tradition that enabled undergraduates to combine a holiday with intensive study.
[4] W. O'Brien, The Parnell of Real Life (London, 1926), 66. In long-range recollections, details often vary. In 1931, Harrison recalled that he "did not make Parnell's acquaintance until the day on which the Irish Parliamentary Party unanimously re-elected him to the chair after the divorce court had pronounced" (25 November 1890). Given that he had taken his seat in June, he presumably meant that this was their first extended conversation. H. Harrison, Parnell Vindicated… (London, 1931), 88.
[5] Even so, as Harrison recalled in 1943, Parnell insisted that he was to be "no charge upon party funds". Harrison evidently had a private income and did not need the unofficial salary that the Irish Party paid its MPs. C.C. O'Brien, Parnell and his Party 1880-90 (Oxford, 1957), 139n. R. Barry O'Brien signalled that Parnell remained unimpressed with his recruit even after he was elected. In an undated interview during the Split, Parnell pointed out a young (but unnamed) MP who had been recommended to him (by 'C', possibly W.J. Corbet): "'He is a Protestant, he is a landlord, he is an Oxford man, and he is a good speaker. He would be useful in the English constituencies.' ... I dare say he makes pretty speeches, and I suppose he thinks himself a great Irish representative." R.B. O'Brien, The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, 1846-1891 (2 vols, London, 1898), ii, 333. O'Brien perhaps included this snippet as a warning shot, to deter Harrison from criticising his biographical credentials. When the book was announced, the London correspondent of the Western Mail (13 October 1898) reported: "Surprise is expressed that Mr Barry O'Brien should be the author of the Parnell biography, seeing that the notes for this work were originally entrusted to Mr H. Harrison, the young Englishman who was one of Mr Parnell's most stalwart Parliamentary supporters."
[6] Two further by-elections followed shortly after Mid-Tipperary, both constituencies in Donegal.
[7] Hansard, 8 July 1890, 1175-81.
[8] Hansard, 8 July 1890, 1182.
[9] The two major studies of the Split are F.S.L. Lyons, The Fall of Parnell 1890-91 (London, 1960) and F. Callanan, The Parnell Split, 1890-91 (Cork, 1992). Neither regarded Harrison as a major participant.
[10] O'Brien, Parnell and his Party 1880-90, 325.
[11] Harrison, Parnell Vindicated, 362-6. Harrison marshalled evidence to prove that Parnell imposed O'Shea upon Galway to use him as a channel of communication to Joseph Chamberlain. The argument has some plausibility, but the fervour with which Harrison advanced it forty years later is revealing.
[12] Harrison, Parnell Vindicated, 92-3. Katharine O'Shea had fallen out with her siblings over her aunt's estate, which was the subject of legal action. Of her three children by O'Shea, only nineteen-year-old Norah stood by her mother, and acted as intermediary for Harrison.
[13] Harrison, Parnell Vindicated, 102-17. One Tuesday, Katharine Parnell received a letter from O'Shea assuring her that, in view of "the reasonable attitude" taken by her counsel to a court action regarding the division of her marriage settlement "on Wednesday", she was "worrying herself unnecessarily about Clare and Katie…. I do not intend to take them away from you". The letter was post-dated to the Thursday of that week. The letter implied that Katharine had surrendered to his claims of her own free will, and that, in appreciation, O'Shea had agreed not to seize the children. In fact, it was a threat, which Harrison countered by annotating the document with an attested time of delivery. But he could not prevent Katharine Parnell from agreeing to her ex-husband's terms.
[14] Harrison, Parnell Vindicated, 118-29, 167-80. "Did Captain O'Shea know? Of course he knew. …There was no bargain; there were no discussions; people do not talk of such things. But he knew, and he actually encouraged me in it at times."
[15] Harrison, Parnell Vindicated, 211-14. The parting seems to have been amicable, although Katharine Parnell could be arbitrary and mercurial in her behaviour. Harrison gradually lost touch with the household, but received a friendly letter from Norah O'Shea in 1921 informing him of her mother's decline.
[16] Harrison was defeated again in 1895.
[17] J.M. Regan, The Irish Counter-Revolution 1921-1936… (Dublin, 1999), 113.
[18] However, this is not the view of Parnell's likely trajectory taken in Patrick Maume's ingenious essay, "A Counterfactual Chief? If Parnell had lived till 1918" in P. Bew, Enigma… (Dublin, 1911), 205-15, which qualified a similarly devolutionist speculation by Daniel Mulhall in History Ireland, July/ August 2010.
[19] F.S.L. Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell (London, 1978 ed., cf. 1st ed. 1977), 608. Harrison argued that Parnell's political work and his love story "are yet to be formulated in the light of the amended record, where the Muses of Poetry and History hold their courts". This appeal seems to have prompted Yeats to write the ballad "Come gather round me, Parnellites". For all his florid language, Harrison identified the enduring central challenge in Parnell biography, how to interweave his personality and private life with his public career. Yeats offered a bald summary: "He fought the might of England / And saved the Irish poor, / Whatever good a farmer's got / He brought it all to pass; / And here's another reason, / That Parnell loved a lass."
[20] Harrison, Parnell Vindicated, 421-42 (Ervine), 218-38 (O'Shea [Parnell]). The 1914 book he condemned as "a forgery no less evil in its falsity" the letters crafted by Richard Pigott to dupe The Times in 1887 (discussed below).
[21] R.F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch… (London, 1993), 123-38.
[22] Parnell Vindicated, 92.
[23] H. Harrison, Parnell, Joseph Chamberlain and Mr Garvin (London, 1938).
[24] O'Shea attempted to defend his decision to seek a divorce to Cardinal Manning, who did not wish to become involved and suggested an application to Rome for an annulment. 332-3. M. Dungan, The Captain and the King… (Dublin, 2008), 332-3.
[25] The History of The Times… 1884-1912 (London, 1947), 43-89. (The case cost The Times £200,000. "A considerable, if temporary, loss of prestige must also be admitted"). Harrison's memorandum is at The History of The Times… 1921-1948, ii, (London, 1952), 1145-8. Buried at the end of a lengthy volume, the correction was hardly prominent, but it was admitted that "the paper's association with Captain O'Shea proved by Captain Harrison is not creditable" and that all hints that Parnell was really guilty were formally disavowed. Harrison had published a longer version of his rebuttal as Parnell, Joseph Chamberlain and ’The Times’: a documentary record (Belfast, 1953), I am grateful to Dr Andrew Jones for pointing this out to me.
[26] O'Brien, Parnell and his Party 1880-90, vii-viii; C.C. O'Brien, Memoir… (Dublin, 1992), 122.
[27] Lyons, The Fall of Parnell 1890-91, 167-8. Parnell suffered an eye injury when he was pelted by a hostile crowd during the December 1890 North Kilkenny by-election. Harrison "emphatically" told Lyons that the attackers had used quicklime, not flour as his detractors claimed. The episode formed part of his radio talk.
[28] Harrison's talk was published The Listener, 22 March 1951, 455-6 under the title "Memories of an Irish Hero. Henry Harrison on Charles Stewart Parnell".
[29] H. Carpenter, The Envy of the World ... (London, 1967), 109. The impact of television in the nineteen-fifties drove the audience below 50,000, but this erosion had probably not taken effect by March 1951. The Third Programme was criticised as elitist and, in 1957, its output was reduced to provide air time for the new Network Three, which offered a broader range of programmes. (Its coverage of specialist hobbies gave it the nickname of the Fretwork Network.) Both were replaced in 1967 by the music station Radio Three. Perhaps the Third Programme's enduring memorial is that it commissioned the radio play Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas.
[30] Under Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol 1870-1893, the college became Oxford's intellectual pacemaker. Harrison recalled that Jowett was "immensely kind to me always" (Parnell Vindicated, 88). The philosopher R.L. Nettleship and the classicist James Strachan-Davidson were notable Balliol dons. Harrison introduced their names here to prepare for his later description of Parnell's donnish manner.
[31] In Classical mythology, during a storm at sea Ajax the Lesser defied the gods by insisting that he would survive their disapproval. This offended the relevant deity, Poseidon, who drowned him. The parallel with Parnell in 1890-1 probably seemed more obvious to an educated audience in 1951 than it does now.
[32] I am unable to identify the allusion to Morley. In his Recollections (2 vols, London, 1917), Morley offered a subtle if puzzled character sketch of Parnell (i, 236-49) but with only a brief physical description: "as fine and pleasing a carriage as any man in the House of Commons – free, erect, lithe, and with every mark of unaffected dignity". This was written after an interview in the tense atmosphere of November 1890: Morley had found Parnell "more than usually cordial and gracious" (i, 251). Morley was an admirer of the poet and novelist George Meredith. On one occasion, he persuaded Meredith to attend a banquet where Parnell was a principal speaker: Meredith was "immensely struck by Parnell's style" [of oratory] (i, 241). Possibly this was the allusion that Harrison had in mind. Using a theoretical matrix derived from Cultural Studies, Joseph Valente discussed "The Manliness of Parnell" in Eire-Ireland, xli (2006), 64-121. It is a theme that is not far below the surface of Harrison's hero-worship.
[33] A slight simplification, dictated by the constraints of a short talk and not intended to mislead. Harrison had met her "on two or three occasions in the early 'nineties". Parnell Vindicated, 50.
[34] The allusion to attendance at dances at the British Embassy probably came from John Howard Parnell's attempt to cash in on his brother's notoriety in Charles Stewart Parnell: a Memoir (London, 1914), "Charley often got invitations from Paris to balls at the British Embassy, and thought nothing of making a flying trip to France to attend one; in fact, I do not think he ever missed one." (62-3) There is a highly coloured tale of an amorous cricket match at Avondale in E.M. Dickinson, A Patriot's Mistake … (Dublin, 1905), 65-78. "She might well have styled it with not less accuracy 'A Patriot's Sister's Mistake'," was the waspish comment of the Irish Times review, 4 December 1905. Both books were probably ghost-written on the basis of scraps of recollections from their purported authors.
[35] Harrison was on firmer ground in reporting that Parnell had been a much more relaxed and informal figure before his close engagement in political conflict. This was certainly brought out by Justin McCarthy's Reminiscences (2 vols, London, 1899), ii, 89-116 and amply supplemented by William O'Brien's The Parnell of Real Life (London, 1926), the works referred to here.
[36] H.W. Lucy, A Diary of Two Parliaments (London, 1885), passim, e.g. 225: "Parnell was up, pale with passion…. with hands clenched, teeth set, and face lividly pale, hissing out rebuke for an imaginary misdemeanour" (1 May 1877).
[37] "'The truth is,' he said to me [McCarthy] more than once, 'I am nervous about being disliked; I hate to be hated.'" Reminiscences, ii, 103-4.
[38] The stories that Parnell had not died are discussed by J. McConnel, "'One morning you would open the paper … and read, Return of Parnell': rumours, legends and conspiracy narratives about Charles Stewart Parnell’s staged death", Historical Research, xcviii (2025), 86-104. The most plausible example was John Dillon's shock at walking past a man whom he recognised as Parnell outside a performance of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung in Munich in 1894. This was almost certainly Henry Parnell, who closely resembled his dead brother and lived in obscurity on the continent. McConnel challenges the assumption that these stories are evidence of peasant millenarianism. He sees them rather as a form of political resistance among working-class Dubliners, an extreme expression of their distrust in the political system. (Text available on https://academic.oup.com/histres/article/98/279/86/7738267)
[39] This was not strictly correct: Parnell spent five terms at Cambridge between 1865 and 1867, when he came of age and was thrown into managing the affairs of the Avondale estate. He returned briefly in 1869. Elsewhere in this website, I have written extensively about Parnell's time at Cambridge, e.g. "The Cambridge Academic Record of Charles Stewart Parnell" (https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/262-the-cambridge-academic-record-of-charles-stewart-parnell) and "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).
[40] Samuel Waddy was a lawyer who liked the sound of his own voice. On 14 June 1877, "baring his small and fussy soul", he denounced the notion of a distinction between 'political prisoners' and common criminals. Hecuba was a female figure in Classical mythology who had suffered a sad life; Cassandra was notorious for gloomy predictions of the future. Although these symbols are largely forgotten today, Parnell's sarcasm was hackneyed at the time, and revealed no deep Classical education. Lucy, A Diary of Two Parliaments, 262; Hansard, 14 June 1877, 1799. Harrison might also have appealed to Parnell's use of a Latin phrase, ne plus ultra ('no further beyond') in his March of a Nation speech in 1885. This was delivered to an all-ticket audience in Cork, a predominantly middle-class and professional gathering who might have been expected to understand the phrase. But he had also used it in an open-air address in Mayo in 1877. Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, 69.
[41] The quotation comes from Hamlet, and is spoken by Polonius in Act One, Scene 3. As Harrison remarks, it became overused. The irony of its popularity may be that Shakespeare probably used the sentiment as one of a number of platitudes designed to label Polonius as a self-important bore.
[42] Harrison was alluding here to the claims by Tim Healy (although he did not deign to use the name) that Parnell was a mere cipher, "a good figurehead", manipulated by a clique of activists, notably including Healy himself. Parnell's inaccessibility throughout the last five years of his life gave some colour to this myth. F. Callanan, T.M. Healy (Cork, 1996), 268-9.
[43] It is highly unlikely that Parnell would have told an ardent and combative young man that he had a secret preference for violent revolution. Harrison followed here the argument advanced by R. Barry O'Brien in his 1898 biography, e.g. (of 1880): "If he could he would have preferred to settle the Anglo-Irish question by open warfare. That was not possible." O'Brien, The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, 1846-1891, i, 200.
[44] It seems that Harrison here conflated two of Parnell's most striking statements. In 1877, he boldly told the House of Commons that obstruction should be used "like the action of the bayonet – short, sharp, and decisive". At Limerick in 1880, he warned – a recurrent theme – that an Irish Party at Westminster would inevitably be demoralised and disrupted by insidious English influences. It was necessary to maintain unity "while we are making a short, sharp, and I trust decisive struggle for the restoration of our legislative independence". O'Brien, The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, 1846-1891, i, 108, 255.
[45] This passage referred to the 1885 general election.
[46] "If they should happen to be beaten at the next general election, they would form a solid rallying square with the 1,500 good men who voted for Ireland's nationhood in the County Carlow, of the 2,500 heroes who voted for the same cause in North Sligo, and of the 1,400 voters in North Kilkenny, who stood by the flag of Irish independence". J. Wyse-Power (compiler), Words of the Dead Chief... (Dublin, 1892), 157. The speech was made after the result of the Carlow by-election. Parnell's 1891 determination to fight a long battle contrasted with his rapid assault strategy of 1880. The quotation also appeared in O'Brien, The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, 1846-1891, ii, 331.
[47] One suspects that wireless sets across Britain shook as Harrison delivered this passage. Lyons recalled Harrison insisting to him "in the most vivid terms" that Parnell had been injured by quicklime, not flour. Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, 542. The Illustrated London News published a picture of Parnell delivering a passionate stump speech with his damaged eye elaborately and dramatically bandaged: N. Kissane, Parnell: a Documentary History (Dublin, 1991), 95.
[48] Harrison was present when Parnell made this statement. Harrison, Parnell, Joseph Chamberlain and Mr Garvin, 217. He inscribed the sentence on the title page of Parnell Vindicated.
[49] As Secretary of State for War 1905-12, the Liberal politician Richard Burdon Haldane carried Army reforms that ensured the rapid mobilisation of the British Army in 1914. He was Lord Chancellor in Asquith's ministry from 1912 to 1915, and again in the first Labour government in 1924. His reputation as a philosopher added to his formidable aura as an intellectual Edinburgh Scot, although his enthusiasm for German culture made him unpopular in the First World War. In quoting the opinion of Haldane, Harrison was appealing to a heavyweight. Haldane himself recalled in 1929 that Parnell was "as extraordinarily gifted as he was eccentric. He was no orator, and yet he was one of the most effective speakers in Parliament I have ever heard." Richard Burdon Haldane: An Autobiography (London, 1929), 82. If Haldane's reference to 150 years was not simply hyperbole, it would suggest that he was thinking of Sir Robert Walpole, although these two giants were not easily compared.