Parnell and the Registrar 1891: Parnell's last words on politics and personalities?
Shortly before his death in 1891, Charles Stewart Parnell had a wide-ranging conversation about British politics and Irish personalities with Edward Cripps, the Superintendent Registrar in the small Sussex town who had recently conducted his civil wedding to Katharine O'Shea. The Registrar's account of their talk, in a previously overlooked newspaper report, offers what may be the last opportunity to hear Parnell in private conversation on public issues.
Parnell marries in Sussex On Thursday 25 June 1891, Charles Stewart Parnell and Katharine O'Shea were married at Steyning in Sussex. Before the ceremony, Parnell had two interviews with the Superintendent Registrar, Edward Cripps, and he made at least one subsequent call, probably to collect documentation confirming the marriage. On one of these occasions, in August or September 1891, Ireland's uncrowned king was in a relaxed mood and made some revealing comments on the 'Split' that threatened his ascendancy in Irish politics.
Three-quarters of a century after the Parnell nuptials had given the place its brief moment of global fame, two architectural historians described Steyning as "half-way between a large village and a small town".[1] In 1891, the population of the five-square-mile parish was around seventeen hundred, which suggests that about a thousand people resided in the small urban core. By late-Victorian times, Steyning was overshadowed by the massive growth of the nearby seaside resorts of Brighton, Hove and Worthing. Nonetheless, historical primacy still counted: Hove, where Katharine O'Shea had rented a house, was in the registration district of Steyning and not the other way round.[2]
Viewed through the pages of Kelly's Directory for 1891, Steyning was an administrative small pond. Gilbert and Sullivan would have had no difficulty in identifying the local solicitor, Edward Cripps, senior, as the town's Lord High Everything Else. He was clerk to the Board of Guardians, who ran the district workhouse, secretary to the School Attendance Committee, which chased truants, and performed a similar function to an appeals committee that considered objections from ratepayers who thought their assessments were too high. Not surprisingly, in his fourth role as Superintendent Registrar, he felt the need of assistance by a deputy, Edward Cripps, junior, who was also a solicitor. In fact, Cripps senior died in March 1891 and his son duly moved up a notch.[3] Finding himself within a few months of achieving promotion charged with the organisation of a celebrity wedding, the younger Edward Cripps (and his wife, Hannah) would rise to the occasion.
Katharine O'Shea's divorce became final on 26 May: within a few days, there were rumours that the couple would marry in the first week of June.[4] Parnell seems to have returned to England at about that time after the latest bout of in-fighting in his homeland,[5] but it was not until Tuesday 23 June that he made the journey to Steyning to make the arrangements for their wedding.[6] The explanation for the delay which he gave in an interview with a news agency correspondent on his wedding day contains a startling piece of information that his biographers have generally overlooked: Parnell himself explained that the couple had wished to marry in an Anglican church but could not obtain a licence. Hence they had gone ahead instead with a civil wedding, while still hoping for a religious ceremony.[7] The implications of this remarkable statement are discussed in a separate Note in martinalia.[8]
Distrustful of the English in general (with the exception of his bride-to-be), Parnell probably expected to find Edward Cripps an unsympathetic bureaucrat. "When I first saw him he had an absolutely frozen manner[,] not cold only, but frozen," the Registrar would later tell the press.[9] However, it seems reasonable to infer, from their subsequent conversations, that Cripps was a Liberal in politics and let it be known that he was a supporter of Irish Home Rule.[10] It is also reasonable to assume that anybody who found the marriage of divorcees repugnant would not be working as a Superintendent Registrar. Although Parnell was initially "chilly … after the ice was broken he was quite joky". The two men had struck up a good relationship – but Parnell imposed considerable demands upon his new friend. He was anxious that the details, and especially the timing, of his wedding should be kept secret, although Cripps had to point out that all documentation issued by a Register Office was in the public domain, and could be inspected by any enquirer upon payment of a small fee. On 23 June, Parnell had taken out a licence permitting the couple to marry within three months. In fact, he wanted the ceremony to take place in less than forty-eight hours.[11]
Although Edward Cripps would later be known as the man who married Parnell, the nuptials seem to have been formally solemnised by a colleague, William Henry Spearing, the Registrar at Brighton. Spearing was senior to Cripps in the bureaucratic hierarchy, and it may be that he was qualified to conduct weddings while his associate in Steyning was merely empowered to record their details. No contemporary report explains how Spearing's participation was arranged in such a short time. Very little business was transacted by telephone in 1891, not least because operators could listen in to calls. The telegraph was also an insecure medium while, in any case, a telegram was too staccato a form of communication to explain such a sensitive assignment. Hence it is likely that Cripps made the eleven-mile journey to Brighton to explain the situation, and that Spearing – who no doubt had a schedule of his own – agreed to make the hush-hush early morning journey to Steyning at very short notice. The involvement of the official from Brighton also helped solve a practical problem associated with the civil ceremony. Its central feature was the signing of the marriage register by the happy couple. For the purpose of record, brides signed by their prior surname, spinsters by their maiden names, widows and divorcees by the surname of their former husband. Thus the future Mrs Charles Parnell would, for the last time, identify herself as Katharine O'Shea (although, in fact, she would revive the name to boost the sales of her 1914 autobiography). That page in the Steyning register would be worth a great deal as a media trophy and – since no convenient portable camera had yet been invented – there was a high risk that it might be stolen by some unscrupulous journalist. It was possible to imagine, for instance, a scenario where a newshound paid the required fee to examine the book, having arranged for an accomplice to stage some distraction – perhaps a cry of 'Help!' or 'Fire!' in the street outside – sufficiently alarming to summon Register Office staff and provide a fleeting moment for the detachment of the relevant page and the disappearance of the culprit. This nightmare was averted when Spearing, who was presumably unknown to the waiting pack, removed the register to Brighton. He was eventually tracked down by the press, but flatly refused to make the book available.
Weddings are public ceremonies, conducted with open doors, but Cripps and Spearing bent the rules for the celebrity couple. The bride and groom arrived in their horse-drawn phaeton and were admitted early to the Register Office, having taken elaborate precautions to outwit and elude lurking journalists.[12] There was a slight delay before the witnesses appeared,[13] during which Parnell, usually so careless about his clothes, checked his appearance in a mirror and adjusted his buttonhole. In high good humour, he blew kisses to his bride, "joyously" remarking: "It isn't every woman who makes so good a marriage as you are making, Queenie, is it? And to such a handsome fellow, too!" Katharine O'Shea particularly appreciated the effort that the Registrar and his wife had made to welcome them. "Mrs Cripps had very charmingly decorated the little room with flowers, so there was none of the dreariness usual with a registry marriage".[14] For Parnell, too, the long-awaited event was a predictably memorable occasion. As Cripps recalled, "he struck me as one of the happiest bridegrooms I had ever married". Other accounts described Parnell as a changed man in the final short months of his life, unexpectedly outgoing and gregarious.[15] It was in this euphoric spirit that he later talked, freely and informally, with his new acquaintance in Sussex.
Parnell talks politics in Sussex The newspaper report of their exchange of political gossip emphasised that "had Mr Parnell lived he (Mr Cripps) would not have permitted any part of their conversations to go forth to the public". However, the Irish leader's death freed him from the obligation to confidentiality, and it seems he felt that revealing Parnell's geniality and sharing his opinions would constitute an appropriate tribute to man he had come to like very much. While the newspaper report refers to "several" discussions between them on political matters, it seems that their longest conversation took place when Parnell called "just after" the Carlow by-election, which was held on 7 July. However, his reported references to the impending defection of the Freeman's Journal, threatened at the end of the month, point to a later date, while Parnell's confidence in his plans to establish a new Dublin daily newspaper suggest that the meeting took place in September, and possibly as late as the middle of the month, after his speech at Listowel on the thirteenth – in other words, very shortly before his death.[16] Cripps explained that Parnell had visited him to discuss "the arrangements necessary to be made to secure a second, or religious, marriage service in Steyning Parish Church" to supplement the Register Office ceremony of 25 June. The couple's intentions, which I discuss elsewhere on this website, are obscure, but it is likely that Parnell sought an attested copy of their marriage certificate.[17] Perhaps the two men chatted while a clerk made the necessary transcription in formal longhand. By this time, Parnell's fourth (or, maybe, fifth) visit to Cripps, an easy familiarity had developed between them. As could happen when the Irish leader was in a communicative mood, a good deal of ground was covered in what may have been a short conversation.
Edward Cripps was evidently sufficiently well-informed about Irish affairs to pose some pertinent questions, although his belief in the statesmanlike qualities of John Dillon struck his visitor as off-beam. However, his level of understanding probably reflected the degree of information to be expected from an intelligent newspaper reader: in 1890-1, the British press took an avid interest in Irish infighting. While historians will, I hope, welcome this fresh glimpse of Parnell's opinions during the Split, there may also be some suspicion about the lively detail of the reported speech. Although it is reasonable to assess the reliability of Edward Cripps as a witness, it should be remembered that he was a solicitor by profession. It is likely that he made memoranda following interviews with clients, noting key points that had been discussed. A chat with one of the most prominent figures in contemporary public life might well have been memorialised in the same way. For his part, Parnell seemed happy to engage in mild indiscretions, no doubt trusting to the professional reticence of a man he had come to like. There was no suggestion that he hoped to use Cripps as a channel of communication to any influential figure in British politics and, as the Registrar indicated, he only disclosed the Irish leader's comments as a form of personal tribute after Parnell's untimely death.
Despite their emerging cordiality, Cripps would probably have felt some reticence in taking the initiative to interrogate his distinguished caller. Rather it was Parnell who was "very desirous" of obtaining information about agricultural issues in Sussex. (Irish land legislation came under almost constant parliamentary discussion, and a detail regarding local custom or practice in rural England might make a useful debating point.) "The relations of landlord and tenant, the ways and means of obtaining reductions in rent, and questions of tenant-right and valuation, were points on which he sought information." As a small-town lawyer, Cripps would have been well-informed about the tricks and the small print of leases in the surrounding countryside, and he was able to supply "a deal of information" that put Parnell in his debt. Emboldened, he shifted the focus of the conversation, remarking: "You have been having rather a rough time lately." "If you stand up to fight," Parnell replied, "you must not object to a knock-down blow, but I'll keep on slogging." He then became remarkably frank about his defeat in the Carlow by-election. "It was the Priests who beat me. It has been my aim in Ireland to persuade the people to be a power outside the Priests, either with them or without them, but not through them. When I started the Land League[,] I started it without the Priests, and they never joined me until it was an absolute success. I have been trying to do without them. Now they can do without me[,] they have turned against me." This sweeping and revealing comment gives colour to the argument advanced by some historians that the decision by the Irish bishops in 1884 to treat the Home Rule party as the vehicle for their political aims was a significant, if usually ignored, landmark in Parnell's political career.[18] Although he acknowledged the alliance by offering tactical support to the Catholic Church on such questions as control of higher education, his comments to Cripps suggest that he resented the need to defer to spiritual tyranny.[19] "It seems to me that the political ecclesiastic is the mistake of history; he is always a partisan, and almost always a bigot. The Priests have even gone so far as to refuse the Sacrament to some of my supporters." In fact, Archbishop Croke specifically urged clergy "against any threat of deprivation of Sacraments, or any other spiritual advantage", because the gesture was counterproductive.[20] But Croke's disavowal of open intimidation rested upon a firm conviction of the underlying control of the priesthood over their flocks.[21] "You don't know how helpless an Irish peasant, poor fellow, is when he is against his Priest," Parnell told Cripps. The Registrar was struck by his "deep sympathy with the Irish peasant": "'Poor fellows, poor fellows" was his constant refrain. Historians may perhaps be more impressed by the explicit nature of Parnell's condemnation of priestly influence. Was he giving vent to his deepest feelings, or simply making a point that would be acceptable to a Protestant Englishman?[22]
Cripps pressed Parnell about his recent rejections at the polls. "I suppose the Carlow election has worried you, rather?" The Chief was dismissive of Carlow as an incidental setback, stressing rather that his main concern was to secure a voice in the national press: "it isn't the election that has worried me at all, but you have heard that our paper is going to 'rat'? It is, and I am starting another paper and you don't know the anxiety and trouble and amount of money required to start a daily paper. The money, I may say, we have got and we expect to get four-fifths of the Dublin advertisements, which will keep things going." The Freeman's Journal had initially supported Parnell when the Irish Party split in December 1890, but its status as the dominant (indeed, the only) Nationalist daily newspaper in Dublin had been challenged when T.M. Healy launched the rival anti-Parnellite National Press in March 1891. On 31 July, the Freeman's Journal had responded to a considerable fall in circulation by indicating its intention to change sides, blaming Parnell's marriage – rather than his earlier alleged adultery – for its change of front. However, a boardroom battle delayed its formal secession until 24 September. Meanwhile, Parnell issued a circular on 21 August calling for support to establish a third Nationalist newspaper. It was initially assumed that the formidable weekly United Ireland would be converted to a daily, but the project quickly attracted enough resources to take an entirely distinct form. Following his final public appearance at Creggs, he spent the last three days of September in Dublin supervising arrangements for the new voice of Parnellism, which appeared as the Irish Daily Independent early in December, two months after his death.[23] For historians, the most useful part of Parnell's comment to Cripps is his confidence in the project's ability to secure its finances by attracting advertisements, an element that scholarly accounts of the Split do not mention. However, in his 1928 autobiography, Healy published contemporary correspondence which indicated that the struggle for advertising revenue was crucial for the survival of his National Press, competition which compelled a loveless merger with the Freeman's Journal in 1892.[24]
Cripps then asked whether Parnell thought the Liberals would win the next election. "I think that before my unfortunate divorce case that was certain as far as you can foresee the future, and I don't see how it is different now," he replied. Parnell's description of the divorce case as "unfortunate" seems oddly understated. In conversation with A.J. Kettle at about the same time, he referred to it as "my misfortune", which may even imply that he saw himself as a victim.[25] He seemed to assume that the next election would bring about a change of government. "There seems a feeling of unrest abroad, which generally helps the Liberals." A little later in the conversation, Parnell returned to the point. "I certainly think the Conservatives have missed their chance; the counties going against them is the serious thing. They are playing with the labour movement and the eight hours' question, when the real master of the situation, the agricultural labourer, is at their very doors neglected. Some of these country squires with enormous acreage could have given every man – every head of a family in their district – half an acre and not missed it, and so made them Conservatives for life." Agricultural labourers had gained the vote through the 1884 Reform Act, and it had been their solid support for Gladstone and his party at the general election the following year that had shaken the traditional Conservative dominance of the shires. Three recent by-elections in English county seats had indicated a further move towards the Liberals: Parnell was perhaps misled by the headline results into exaggerating the trend away from the government.[26] His analysis helps to explain his interrogation of Cripps about the social condition of the Sussex countryside. Of course, it is unlikely that he wished to persuade the Unionist Tories to adopt his panacea.
Cripps then asked what would happen about Home Rule if the Liberals did form a ministry. "Well, I think there is a little want of prominence given to Home Rule with some politicians. Other things are put forward with it in the programme to a greater extent, but it is still the main question." Parnell here was certainly reading the trends of internal Liberal debate. In the week of his death, a rank-and-file conference in Newcastle-upon-Tyne would adopt – some might say, saddle the party with – a wide-ranging radical programme in which Ireland was not a prominent element. By now, the small-town Registrar was evidently feeling confident about plain-speaking to his famous visitor. Recent events, he suggested, had deprived Unionists of one of their stock arguments against Home Rule. "They have used you as Bogie-man to the electors. 'Home Rule means Parnell Rule, giving Ireland over to Parnell absolutely, and you know what he is!'" (Equally, and perhaps more damaging to the Irish cause among British voters, was the claim that the ousting of a Protestant leader by the Catholic hierarchy confirmed the deep fear that Home Rule would be Rome Rule.) Parnell was immune to the implied flattery of the proposition. "Argument you say; what has that to do with Home Rule, or right, or even justice? If it had[,] it would have been a thing of the past. Right, argument, or justice had nothing to do with the adoption of the Home Rule policy by the Liberals in 1886; it was the solid 85, nothing else." This was simply a reiteration of the position he had taken against Isaac Butt's cerebral moderation when he had first entered politics back in the eighteen-seventies.
The reporter from the Sussex Daily News wanted to know whether they had discussed personalities. Cripps replied that he had admitted that "an outsider like myself could not understand" how Parnell's colleagues had re-elected him as Chairman of the party in November 1890, and then turned against him so soon afterwards. The purpose of his remark was apparently to draw some comment about Justin McCarthy, but the Chief used it to comment on Gladstone's notorious ultimatum of 24 November 1890, in which he had threatened that Parnell's re-election as chairman of the Irish Party "would render my retention of the leadership of the Liberal party… almost a nullity".[27] Stripped of its overtones of Gladstonian obscurity, this was a blatant blackmail: if Parnell continued to lead the Irish, the Grand Old Man would have no option but to resign, at which point his likely successors in the Liberal leadership would abandon any commitment to Home Rule. Gladstone had issued his warning in a letter to his lieutenant John Morley, one of the few Liberal leaders who did take Home Rule seriously. Both Morley and Justin McCarthy were commissioned to convey Gladstone's opinion to Ireland's uncrowned king, but Parnell was effective at making himself conveniently invisible. McCarthy did encounter him as they headed for the crucial party meeting, but he failed either to broach the message or to persuade Parnell to listen to it. By the time Morley tracked him down, Parnell had secured his re-election, although his undisputed ascendancy would last for only a few days. Gladstone retaliated by authorising the immediate publication of his threat.[28]
Parnell made two comments to Cripps about Gladstone's intervention. The first was to treat it as a move on the political chessboard. "I don't blame the old man at all," he told Cripps. "He did what he thought best for his party, and was quite justified in doing it." This was precisely what he had said to Morley on being alerted to the immediate publication of the letter: "Mr Gladstone will be quite right to do that; it will put him straight with his party." "Parnell felt no resentment against Gladstone," his partner would recall.[29] As with his attitude to the divorce case as a 'misfortune', this apparently bloodless attitude downplayed the seriousness of the challenge to his political survival. Rather, he shifted ground to a second issue: "that letter came to me with the threat of publication and it was in print one hour after it was in my hands. Gladstone was not to blame for it, but it was a fact, and after the publication of the letter the thing was over, because it was dictation from the outside." Although this was ostensibly generous to the Liberal leader, it was also disingenuous. Gladstone had intended to convey his opinion to Parnell and to his Irish Party colleagues who were responsible for electing their leader. It was highly unlikely that his attitude would have remained a secret for long. Parnell effectively prevented this information from reaching his colleagues before the vote was taken, leaving Gladstone with little option but to authorise its release. However, in his explanation to Cripps, the beleaguered Chief did manage to summarise the key issue in the Split in three clear and effective sentences. "You see[,] I could never get my party to see the difference between an alliance and a fusion – alliance with either side, a fusion with neither. Alliance is strength, fusion is utter weakness. Dictation means fusion." A great deal of rhetoric and an even larger quantity of abuse erupted within the Home Rule movement during the fraught confrontations of 1890-1, which often obscured the key question that was defined by Parnell here: was the Party tied to its Liberal alliance or would it serve Ireland better by asserting its independence on a case-by-case basis?
"Don't you think Gladstone was egged on by others, Price Hughes and Stead?", Cripps asked. According to the press report, he added: "Do you include Mr Stead with the political ecclesiastics?" It is likely that the allusion to the journalist and editor W.T. Stead was a reporting error, and that Cripps had actually referred to Hugh Price Hughes, the Methodist minister whose denunciation of Parnell's adultery had given voice to the Victorian puritanism of the Free Churches. In calming his partner's anger, Parnell had excused Gladstone's intervention by telling her that "[h]e has the Nonconformist conscience to consider",[30] but to Cripps he was more circumspect, evading any discussion of Hughes and his pretensions to speak on behalf of British public morality – a further indication that the Registrar may have been a Wesleyan himself. "I don't know much about Mr Hughes," he replied, "but I never could understand Stead's enmity to me. I don't mean recently of course anyone can understand that; I mean years ago. He has always been my enemy. It was Stead who killed the Land Purchase Bill." The reference was to Gladstone's attempt in 1886 to couple devolution for Ireland with a major land purchase measure, which would have offered landlords the opportunity of escape from the rule of an Irish parliament. The proposal was withdrawn before the climax of the Home Rule debate, and historians have debated whether it was merely diversionary window-dressing.[31] In the event, the abandonment of the land purchase proposals, whether tactical or permanent, can be explained by more general criticisms of the process involved. As with all such land purchase schemes, tenants would switch from paying rent to paying annual sums to redeem a government-funded mortgage. Gladstone proposed to place the responsibility for collecting these repayments due to the British Treasury to the new Irish legislature, which would be elected by voters who, it might be reasonably assumed, had just signed up to purchase the land. It was certainly possible to wonder whether such an arrangement would work, and many did. Because the scheme did not come to fruition, it has received relatively little attention from historians, but it is safe to say that no scholarly account attributes any special role in its downfall to Stead. It is true that, in 1886, he was editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, "widely acknowledged as the most influential London political journal at this time"[32] and he was undoubtedly an unyielding critic of Gladstone's Irish policy. Perhaps historians should dig more deeply into the newspaper's files and scan the private correspondence of leading politicians to measure its influence on this particular question but, at the time of writing in 2025, there is nothing to bear out Parnell's allegation that W.T. Stead had killed land purchase in 1886. However, there is evidence that Parnell felt a particular antagonism towards him, and his comment to Cripps should perhaps be seen in this light.[33] Behind his urbane geniality, Parnell could be tenacious in his hatreds.
By 1891, Irish land bills were coming before the Westminster parliament with the regularity of shuttle buses. The Chief Secretary, Arthur Balfour, had just carried through the 1891 Land Act, which made available an extra £33 million in resources – although not in cash – to help tenants purchase their holdings. When its proposals had came before the House of Commons in 1890, Parnell supported Liberal criticisms of the details. However, a division on key feature of Balfour's land purchase bill on 27 November constituted the first example of the parliamentary consequences of the Split. Parnell led fifteen of his supporters into the government lobby, while most of his opponents abstained and some voted against. The issue between the two factions was now defined in its political implications: the anti-Parnellites were prepared to sacrifice the prospect of short-term gains in order to keep the Liberals tied to the larger aim of Home Rule, while Parnell was willing to deal with both or either of the Westminster party to secure incremental concessions. As he put it during the Carlow by-election, he was ready "to accept anything good that we can get from any English party, but at the same time not to surrender our independence to any English party".[34] Not surprisingly, he needed to emphasise the potential benefits of Balfour's legislation. When Cripps raised the subject with him, his response was brief but predictable. "I suppose you think Mr Balfour's Land Purchase would do good in Ireland?" "Yes, certainly, a great amount of good," came the reply. In the event, the 1891 Act had only a limited impact. Tenants found the application process complicated. Landlords were compensated in thirty-year government bonds, which guaranteed them a more assured income than rentals, but did not meet the needs of the more financially embarrassed among them for immediate cash. Some of these shortcomings bore out Parnell's initial criticisms.[35]
Although Parnell had been reluctant to comment when Cripps mentioned Justin McCarthy, he was quick to seize upon an oblique allusion to his principal tormentor, Tim Healy. In a probing comment on the continuing turbulence in Nationalist ranks, Cripps remarked that Jonah had been thrown overboard, "but that it did not seem that the sea had ceased from raging". The allusion was to an Old Testament episode in which sailors accused Jonah, who was their passenger, of being responsible for a storm that placed their lives at risk. Jonah sportingly agreed and recommended that they take appropriate action: "Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea; so shall the sea be calm unto you: for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you." The crew thought this was a good idea and acted accordingly: "So they took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea: and the sea ceased from her raging."[36] Although the story is now largely forgotten, its implications would have been readily identifiable in 1891: Parnell had been cast overboard in the hope of calming the agitated seascape of Irish nationalism. "Not with Healy's Neptune," he quipped in a sardonic mixed metaphor. It was his sole allusion to his most bitter foe.
Speaking, as he said, "as an outsider", Cripps suggested that the most likely alternative leaders to Parnell were John Dillon, and William O'Brien. "Two mad enthusiasts," was Parnell's reply. "O'Brien is an enthusiast with an immense amount of brains. I don't think the English people have ever realised the abilities of William O'Brien, a man of immense brain power."[37] Dillon, he bluntly dismissed as "an enthusiast without the brains". "Dillon's reputation for straightforwardness might help him in working with the English people," Cripps suggested. Parnell would have had good reason to doubt that assumption: on at least two occasions Dillon's fiery statements had forced him to engage in damage-limitation for fear of their impact upon British public opinion.[38] He responded scornfully. "Oh, it's that, is it! Perhaps that is the English reputation, but only reputation. An enthusiast is a man that can do an immense amount of mischief with the best intentions."
At this point, both men were thinking of the Plan of Campaign, a controversial project designed by Timothy Harrington but led, insofar as it was led, by Dillon. Individual landlords, especially those believed to be in financial difficulties, were targeted by rent strikes. Tenants were duly evicted, but with the assurance that they would receive financial support from a national movement backed by transatlantic fund-raising. The enemy would crumble, they would return to their farms in triumph and the structure of landlordism would be fatally undermined. Parnell was in poor health when his over-enthusiastic lieutenants embraced the strategy in 1887, and claimed that he only learned of it from newspaper reports of its launch. Although it scored a number of initial successes, over the next four years the Plan of Campaign became a disaster and – for some of its duped victims – a tragedy too. In a major and grandiose blunder, its leaders challenged a determined and wealthy Unionist landowner, Arthur Hugh Smith Barry. Part of Smith Barry's rental income came from properties in Tipperary town, much of it from shopkeepers. When they were evicted for non-payment, the Plan of Campaign constructed residential streets and a prototype shopping mall on a nearby site in an ambitious attempt to create a rival market centre. 'New Tipperary' was opened in April 1890, but the escalating costs of the scheme coincided with a collapse in fund-raising that followed the Split.[39] In a combative speech at Listowel on 13 September 1891, Parnell roundly denounced the "parcel of idiots" who had wasted precious funds on a hopelessly ambitious project.[40] Cripps, it seems, had read the report. "New Tipperary?", he enquired of Parnell's contemptuous dismissal of Dillon. "Rather," was Parnell's emphatic reply.[41] "An absolute failure. £20,000 wasted to take five from Smith-Barry." In fact, by mid-1891 New Tipperary had cost the Plan of Campaign the massive sum of £40,000, a figure that Parnell had angrily cited at Listowel.[42] Perhaps Parnell was separating the cost of construction from the burden of supporting the evicted tenants. However, a more likely explanation of the discrepancy would confirm the suggestion that Cripps had made a memorandum of the discussion, and had regrettably failed to decipher his own handwriting. If so, it was an alarming blunder by a solicitor. One interesting point about Parnell's comments on his two erstwhile colleagues is that he was much more severe on John Dillon than on William O'Brien, although O'Brien had been far more closely involved with the New Tipperary project. Parnell retained a lingering affection for O'Brien that he had never felt for Dillon.[43]
When Cripps asked: "How about Michael Davitt?", he touched upon another complex relationship. Outwardly, Parnell's feelings towards the Fenian ex-convict were characterised by friendly respect. "He had the warmest sympathies for a man who had suffered so much for Ireland." The journalist Edward Byrne "never heard Mr Parnell say any unkind word of Mr Davitt", for whose tough life he felt the "greatest sympathy".[44] True, he could treat Davitt's understandable obsessions light-heartedly. In 1882, Davitt veered off from the mainstream of the agrarian campaign to argue for the vision (Parnell called it the "will-o'-the-wisp") of land nationalisation. In public, Parnell brusquely treated this excursion as a temporary aberration. Privately, he relied upon any attempt by Davitt to explain his policy in detail as sufficient to demonstrate its impracticability: "The moment he becomes intelligible he is lost." [45] During the Home Rule crisis of 1886, Davitt insisted on pressing him to state his priorities if he became leader of an Irish administration. With the chances of achieving a Dublin parliament still in the balance, Parnell had no intention of discussing a policy agenda, even with a close ally, since any leakage of his intentions was more likely to lose votes than gain them. Innocent of such considerations, Davitt persisted in his interrogation, until Parnell roguishly cut him off. "The first thing I should do would be to lock you up."[46] No doubt it was a cruel allusion to Davitt's experience of penal servitude, but it did terminate the conversation and ensure that no echoes reached the press. Perhaps the incident should be regarded as banter between two men who understood and respected one another: in The Fall of Feudalism in 1904, Davitt offered an objective but predominantly positive view of Parnell's "power and directness". But Laurence Marley, the authority on Davitt, interprets the jest as evidence of "underlying tensions" between the two, and argues that Parnell's public dismissal of Davitt's land nationalisation scheme in 1884 caused long-term damage to their relations.[47] During the Split, especially during the by-election campaigns, they traded insults, with Parnell falling well below his usual standard of studied courtesy. He denounced "hysterical Davitt who never belongs to any one party for twenty-four hours together", mocking his tendency to gobble up new nostrums by terming him as "a jackdaw".[48] Yet, even in those angry days, Parnell still felt a thread of patronising affection. When Davitt proclaimed that the divorce scandal had set the cause of Home Rule back by twelve years, Parnell expressed ironic curiosity about the basis of the calculation: "it is not his habit to be accurate".[49] When Cripps mentioned Davitt, he responded in the same spirit of pitying indulgence. "Ah, there's another man with a great gift of going wrong, a good fellow, but wants somebody at his elbow always."
Parnell's dismissal of Michael Davitt prompted him into a general verdict on the shortcomings of his former associates. "These men can never see that they can get to the goal by walking, if they keep on walking and never turn back." As a fiery young political adventurer in the eighteen-seventies and early 'eighties, Charles Stewart Parnell had sometimes talked as if a determined rush might overwhelm the English barricades and bring about a new Ireland overnight. As he settled to middle-age (and marriage), he recognised that his role in politics would require a long-term struggle. But Parnell was in good spirits when he left the Registrar's office after their informal discussion. "He struck me as a genial and affable man," Cripps recalled, "and the last words he said to me were: 'I hope we shall soon meet again.'" Within a few weeks, he was dead.[50]
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 for his ever-helpful comments.
[1] I. Nairn and N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Sussex (Harmondsworth, 1965), 337. Steyning is pronounced to rhyme with 'penning', although I suspect that Parnell's Irish detractors preferred 'staining'.
[2] Local information is taken from Kelly's Directory for Sussex 1891, 2352-3.
[3] https://www.gravestonephotos.com/public/gravedetails.php?grave=554329. There seems to be no connection between the Cripps family, established in Steyning for several generations, and either Stafford Cripps, the Labour politician, or the philanthropist Edward Cripps.
[4] Much of this Note is based on reports from Welsh newspapers, via the National Library of Wales online newspaper archive. Except where specifically noted, these came from news agencies, and were common to the press in general, and hence may be widely traced. The very full report of the Parnells' wedding in The Times, 26 June 1891, is reproduced in https://steyningmuseum.org.uk/wp/steyning-museum/history-2/charles-stewart-parnell-katherine-oshea/.
[5] Parnell was reported to have taken the overnight boat from Dublin on Sunday 21 June, throwing reporters off the scent by boarding a Brighton train at Clapham Junction the following afternoon. On Wednesday 23 June he travelled to London, made an appearance in the House of Commons, and was seen in a jeweller's shop in Cheapside where he was thought to have purchased a wedding ring. London correspondent of Evening Express (Cardiff), 26 June 1891.
[6] Most accounts of the wedding follow K. O'Shea [Parnell], Charles Stewart Parnell … (2 vols, London, 1914), ii, 250-8, with additional detail in J. Jordan, Kitty O'Shea… (Stroud, 2005), 191-3. See the brief summaries in F.S. L. Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell (London, 1977), 590-1 and R. Kee, The Laurel and the Ivy … (London, 1993), 601. There is a longer account of the impact of the marriage in Ireland in F. Callanan, The Parnell Split, 1890-91 (Cork, 1992), 126-32.
[7] Jordan, Kitty O'Shea, 193 and Callanan, The Parnell Split, 1890-91, 137, briefly allude to the planned Anglican ceremony. Reports of the interview with the correspondent of the Central News Agency may be read in South Wales Daily News (via the National Library of Wales online archive) and Glasgow Herald (via Google News Archive), both 26 June 1891. The Central News Agency was a respectable source and the reports appear to be genuine: Parnell had probably made a pact with the journalists shadowing him, giving one full interview in exchange for a few hours of privacy. Nonetheless, an intrusive scribbler bribed the cook to gain admission to the house at Walsingham Terrace while the newly-weds were enjoying a wedding breakfast. Phyllis Bryceson, Katharine's faithful maid, asked: "Will Mrs O'Shea see him…", provoking a good-humoured roar from the bridegroom: "Who is Mrs O'Shea?" A female correspondent of an American newspaper gained access to Katharine's bedroom via a balcony: the resourceful Phyllis locked her in, and the intruder later telegraphed a fake interview to her employers.
[8] "The intention of Charles Stewart Parnell to marry Katharine O'Shea in an Anglican church": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/431-parnell-church-wedding, which also discusses the Hove-Steyning district.
[9] After Parnell's death on 6 October, Cripps gave an interview to a journalist from the Sussex Daily News. Its story was reproduced in the South Wales Daily News, 21 October 1891. The report is the principal source for this Note.
[10] At an early stage in the preparation of this Note, I came across a digitised record from the UK National Archives which indicated that Edward Cripps was a trustee of the Steyning Methodist church. Such are the vagaries of the Internet that I have not located it since. If the Cripps family were Nonconformists, they would probably also have been Liberals.
[11] In her 1914 blockbuster autobiography, Katharine Parnell stated that Parnell returned to Steyning on 24 June to check that arrangements were in place for the next day.
[12] As noted, the fullest (although not necessarily the most accurate) account of the Parnells' wedding day is in K. O'Shea [Parnell], Charles Stewart Parnell: his Love Story and Political Life (2 vols, London, 1914), ii, 250-6. There is some confusion about timing, but in a telegram to a friendly journalist that evening, Parnell stated that they had tied the knot at 9 o'clock in the morning. This seems to have been before the Register Office was open to the public: N. Kissane, Parnell: a Documentary History (Dublin, 1991), 98.
[13] The witnesses were two trusted servants (one of them Phyllis Bryceson) who were sent ahead by rail. It is likely that they had to change trains at Worthing, and there would have been a further ten- to fifteen-minute walk into Steyning from the railway station.
[14] O'Shea [Parnell], Charles Stewart Parnell: his Love Story and Political Life, ii, 252-3. 'Queenie' was Parnell's pet name for his partner. (J. Marlow, The Uncrowned Queen of Ireland… (London, 1975), 1: "nobody ever called her Kitty".)
[15] Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, 592-3; Callanan, The Parnell Split, 1890-91, 165. Visiting Steyning in 1937, W.B. Yeats was charmed to learn of an elderly gardener still working in the town who had seen the newly-married Parnells drive away from the Register Office after their wedding, 46 years earlier. R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: a Life, ii… (Oxford, 2003), 587.
[16] It is of interest that Cripps made no comment about Parnell's health. By the time he reached Dublin at the end of September, the Chief was clearly a sick man.
[17] Their options are reviewed in "The intention of Charles Stewart Parnell to marry Katharine O'Shea in an Anglican church, 1891": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/431-parnell-church-wedding.
[18] C.J. Woods, "Parnell and the Catholic Church", in D.G. Boyce and A. O'Day, eds, Parnell in Perspective (London, 1991), 9-37, esp. 21.
[19] C.J. Woods noted that Parnell criticised the government grant to the Queen's Colleges as early as 1883, in line with the hierarchy's disapproval of their secular ('godless') identity. He also reversed his earlier (1880) support for the admission to the House of Commons of the atheist Charles Bradlaugh. Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, 253.
[20] E. Larkin, The Roman Catholic Church and the Fall of Parnell 1888-1891 (Liverpool, 1979), 267 (letter to Laurence Gillooly, bishop of Elphin, 23 March 1891, during the North Sligo by-election).
[21] The poet Katharine Tynan recalled the pressure on female Parnellites like herself during the Split: "the women who were loyal to Mr Parnell were nearly all devout Catholics. It was not so very pleasant to be at daggers drawn with the priests, for us who were sincere and faithful Catholics. Indeed many of us suffered." K. Tynan, Twenty-Five Years… (London, 1913), 330. The women referred to by Tynan were probably mainly middle-class Dubliners. A woman from County Clare who attended the August 1891 Parnellite convention in Dublin (as an observer, since it was an all-male event) was "held to countenance 'Parnell and all his abominations'" and removed from office in a sodality by the parish priest: T.P. O'Connor, Memoirs of an Old Parliamentarian (2 vols, London, 1929), ii, 299.
[22] At some point in the eighteen-eighties, Parnell told F.H. O'Donnell that "I believe the [Catholic] Church to have been the constant enemy of human progress in every country and in every age". O'Donnell, who was both devout and inherently angry, replied in heated terms. F.H. O'Donnell, A History of the Irish Parliamentary Party (2 vols, 1910), ii, 324-5.
[23] Callanan, The Parnell Split, 1890-91, 110ff; R.B. O'Brien, The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell… (2 vols, London, 1891), ii, 350-1. Almost forty years later, T.P. O'Connor thought that Parnell encountered problems in securing financial backing for his newspaper, although he was hardly a neutral source and he admitted that his recollections were hazy. O'Connor, Memoirs of an Old Parliamentarian, ii, 313.
[24] T.M. Healy, Letters and Leaders of My Day (2 vols, London, 1928), ii, 358, 372-3; F. Larkin, "Parnell, Politics and the Press…", in P. Travers and D. McCartney, Parnell Reconsidered (Dublin, 2013), 76-91, esp. 78.
[25] A.J. Kettle (ed. L.J. Kettle), The Material for Victory… (Dublin, 1958), 97.
[26] In May 1891, the Unionists (Conservatives) defended three English county constituencies at by-elections. The Liberals gained Harborough in Leicestershire and Stowmarket in Suffolk, while reducing the Conservative majority in South Dorset from a comfortable 991 votes in 1886 to a mere 40. The arithmetical concept of 'swing' had not then been invented, and politicians tended to draw conclusions about political trends from the simple tally of by-election gains or losses. Luckily, there had been 'straight fights' (Conservative vs Liberal) in all three seats both in 1886 and 1891, making possible retrospective calculation of the swing. In South Dorset it was 4%, in Harborough 3.8% and in Stowmarket (where the Liberal candidate was Jewish and a wealthy outsider) 2.5%. These were not particularly large movements of opinion, especially when by-elections gave opportunity for the expression of the "feeling of unrest" to which Parnell referred. Early results in the 1892 general election indicated that there would be no Liberal landslide. The effect of this setback on the party leader is discussed in https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/388-midlothian-1892-gladstone-loses-his-temper.
[27] J. Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (3 vols, London, 1903), iii, 436-7, reprinted with slight corrections in H.C.G. Mathew, ed., The Gladstone Diaries…, xi (Oxford, 1994), 340-1.
[28] Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, 492-6; Callanan, The Parnell Split, 1890-91, 18-20.
[29] Callanan, The Parnell Split, 1890-91, 19; O'Shea [Parnell], Charles Stewart Parnell, ii, 164. It should be noted that Parnell used 'quite' in its strict meaning, 'absolutely' or 'totally'.
[30] O'Shea [Parnell], Charles Stewart Parnell, ii, 164.
[31] John Vincent dismissed Gladstone's land purchase bill as a "dummy" measure, arguing that it could not possibly have passed in the parliamentary time available and therefore was not seriously intended. J. Vincent, "Gladstone and Ireland" (the 1977 Raleigh Lecture), Proceedings of the British Academy 1978, 193-238, especially 232: https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/2237/63p193.pdf, and see A.B. Cooke and J. Vincent, The Governing Passion… (Brighton, 1974), 411. However, James Loughlin argued that, had Gladstone won the 1886 election, he would have reintroduced both bills in an autumn session. Subsequent Unionist policy suggests that they would have accepted a plan that would provide a lifeline for landlords. J. Loughlin, Gladstone, Home Rule and the Ulster Question... (Dublin, 1986), 80-94. A. O'Day, Parnell and the first Home Rule Episode, 1884-1887 (Dublin, 1986), 183-7 also regarded Gladstone's proposal as a serious and integral part of his Home Rule strategy.
[32] Loughlin, Gladstone, Home Rule and the Ulster Question, 168.
[33] Callanan's 'Postscript' in E. Byrne (ed. F. Callanan), Parnell: a Memoir (Dublin, 1991), 42. By 1890, Stead was running the highly successful Review of Reviews. In the immediate aftermath of the O'Shea divorce verdict, he wrote: "unless Mr. Parnell is effaced, and that speedily, the Home Rule cause becomes practically extinct" (December 1890, ii, 608). In September 1891, he dismissed the argument that Parnell had fallen victim to the tyranny of the Catholic bishops, and linked the O'Shea case to the scandalous Crawford divorce that had (temporarily) driven Dilke from public life in 1887: "So far from the discomfiture of Mr Parnell being a proof of sacerdotal despotism, his triumph would have been a demonstration that the elementary moral principles which Churches exist to teach had as little hold upon the Irish people as they have upon those supporters of Sir Charles Dilke, who admit that he is an adulterer and a perjured liar but who still maintain that he is a fit and proper person to make laws for a Christian land." Review of Reviews, iv, September 1891, 220. A quizzical analysis of Parnell had appeared in the periodical's second issue, i, February 1890, 100-7.
[34] Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, 436, 579; Callanan, The Parnell Split, 1890-91, 23.
[35] Textbook summaries of Irish land acts rarely mention the 1891 legislation. Applications to purchase land under its terms were set to close in February 1892. This timetable provided a cover for the settlement of the deadlocked dispute on the Ponsonby estates in east Cork, one of the greatest disasters of the Plan of Campaign, discussed below. Geary, The Plan of Campaign 1886-1891, 138-9.
[36] Jonah, 1: 11-12, 15.
[37] Parnell and William O'Brien enjoyed good personal relations, but Sally Warwick-Haller traced policy differences between them well before the Split. S. Warwick-Haller, "Parnell and William O'Brien…" in Boyce and O'Day, eds, Parnell in Perspective, 52-76.
[38] P. Bew, Ancestral Voices in Irish Politics… (Oxford, 2023), 89, 134-5. Frank Hugh O'Donnell's claim that Parnell complained: "John Dillon never opened his mouth but he put his foot in it" was admittedly hearsay. O'Donnell, A History of the Irish Parliamentary Party, i, 459.
[39] L. Geary, The Plan of Campaign 1886-1891 (Cork, 1986); I. d'Alton, "Barry, Arthur Hugh Smith", Dictionary of Irish Biography. 'Double-barrelled' surnames were beginning to be hyphenated: Smith Barry did not use a hyphen himself but his name was regularly so rendered. There is a photograph of the New Tipperary shopping mall on https://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000323849. It was closed in 1891 and demolished at night in April 1892.
[40] Callanan, The Parnell Split, 1890-91, 288-9.
[41] Although now outdated, "Rather!" was an exclamation indicating strong agreement.
[42] Geary, The Plan of Campaign 1886-1891, 129.
[43] F.S.L. Lyons, John Dillon: a Biography (London, 1968) contains much information on Dillon's attitude to Parnell, but very little in reverse.
[44] O'Brien, The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, i, 376; Byrne (ed. Callanan), Parnell: a Memoir, 21.
[45] Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, 233.
[46] O'Brien, The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, i, 158-9.
[47] M. Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism… (London, 1904), 104-15; L. Marley, Michael Davitt … (Dublin, 2010), 87, 74.
[48] Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, 583, 541.
[49] Byrne (ed. Callanan), Parnell: a Memoir, 21.
[50] The story may close with the two officials who conducted the ceremony at Steyning. On 7 October 1891, the day after Parnell's death, the Brighton Registrar, William Henry Spearing, called at Walsingham Terrace to take the particulars. This was a courtesy to the family of a distinguished figure, as deaths would normally be notified to him at the Register Office. Katharine Parnell was too distraught to see Spearing, and he made a second visit that evening to secure the necessary information. When Edward Cripps died in 1908, news agencies reported his passing under the headline, 'Married Mr Parnell'.