John Redmond

The National Leader

Dermot Meleady

• Publisher: Merrion Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781908928405
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia irlandesa

Dermot Meleady's authoritative second part of his full-length biography of John Redmond, the first to be published in 80 years, begins in 1901 shortly after his election as chairman of the Irish Parliamentary Party in the Westminster Parliament, and ends with his death in 1918.

The book details Redmond's reconstruction of the Party following its reunification after the destructive decade-long Parnell split, and his refashioning of it as a political weapon for winning Irish Home Rule.

It follows his role in successfully passing the Conservatives 1903 Land Purchase Act which greatly accelerated the transfer of land ownership from Irish landlords to Irish farmers. His successes and failures in the years of the 1906 10 Liberal Government are also fully documented, but when the Liberals move in 1911 to remove the House of Lords veto, the stage is set for the passage of the third Home Rule Bill, the paramount goal of Redmond s endeavours. The events of the following turbulent five years the increasingly militant resistance of Ulster Unionism to Home Rule, the outbreak of the Great War and the unforeseen Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 as much a blow against Home Rule as against British rule cast him down from triumphant prime-minister-in waiting to the status of Ireland s lost leader.

Through exhaustive research in Redmond's personal papers, Dermot Meleady has produced the definitive story of one of the most tragic figures in twentieth-century Irish political history.

1

RECONSTRUCTION

As long as you deprive Ireland of the substance of constitutional government and preserve the empty form by bringing us here to this Parliament… you will have in your midst… a body of men who are with you, but not of you… a body of men who regard this House and this Parliament simply as instruments for the oppression of their country….

– Redmond in the House of Commons, 7 March 1901.

Mr Redmond’s election renders it impossible for Irishmen who believe in the re-establishment of their country as an independent nation to give support of any kind, in the future, to the party of which he is now the leader….

– Arthur Griffith in United Irishman, 10 Feb. 1900.

I

Early one May morning in 1901, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was walking in Rotten Row, near Hyde Park in London, when he was confronted by a rider bearing, he thought, the face and figure of a Roman emperor, seated on a huge dray-horse. The English Catholic diarist, veteran supporter of the Irish Home Rule and land struggles and cousin of the recently appointed Tory Chief Secretary for Ireland, George Wyndham, recognized John Redmond, MP for Waterford City, elected the previous year as chairman of the reunited Irish Parliamentary Party. The two had last met in 1888, when both had served prison sentences arising from the Irish land agitation known as the Plan of Campaign. Redmond was cordial in his greeting, and Blunt, aware of his new eminence at Westminster, was able ‘most truthfully to congratulate him on the position of Irish affairs, which have never been so hopeful since Parnell died….’1

Redmond, now in his forty-fifth year, was taking exercise before travelling the short distance to the House of Commons, having left the small apartment he shared with his wife Ada – known within the Redmond family as ‘Amy’, as he was known as ‘Jack’ – at Wynnstay Gardens, off Kensington High Street, which became his permanent home in London during parliamentary sessions. They had married in December 1899, exactly ten years after the death of Johanna, Redmond’s first wife and the mother of his three children, and less than two months before his election to the leadership that sealed the reunification of the party, which had been divided for the nine years following the fall of Parnell. Differences in age – she thirteen years younger than he– and in religion – she from a Protestant Leamington Spa family, he a devout Irish Catholic, albeit with a capacity, as Parnellite leader in the fraught years of the split, to resist clerical interference in politics – did not prevent the marriage being a happy one.

Away from Parliament, Amy was his constant companion, travelling with him to political campaign meetings everywhere in the two islands. Letters between them are consequently scarce: two from him, from Donegal in 1903 and from France in 1915, address her as ‘sweetheart’.2 At Aughavanagh, the former barracks in the Wicklow Mountains that Redmond first leased from the Parnell family as a shooting lodge and later converted into his permanent Irish residence, she immersed herself in her husband’s leisure pursuits, even catering for guests in his absence. A note from Redmond to William O’Brien in August 1901 conveys his regret that she could not accept his invitation to accompany Redmond to Westport: ‘She is doing the housekeeping here for a party of shooters and cannot stir’.3 Amy gave a singular insight into her philosophy of marriage when interviewed by a New York newspaper in 1908 on one of Redmond’s US visits. The writer noted that ‘She follows his work to its very core, thinks as he does about it, but declares herself to be “… not a worker, you know, merely a silent sympathizer… I don’t believe I have a fad in the world, except to make my husband comfortable”’.4 In 1914, when a group of Belfast nationalist women made her a presentation during a wartime recruiting visit, Redmond took a rare chance to pay public tribute to her, speaking touchingly of the fourteen years during which she had given him ‘peace, happiness and love’.5

A close friend and political associate described Redmond as an enthusiastic huntsman, ‘a good shot’ and ‘a capital fencer’ since youth, who had also played cricket and still attended big matches whenever possible. Regarded as one of the best-dressed men in the House of Commons, and fond of wearing a violet in his lapel, he was a charming conversationalist on a great variety of subjects who ‘… smokes, plays billiards and rides – all three well’. Fond of the theatre, he attended as many first nights as possible and, remembering his own acting days at Clongowes, was especially attracted to amateur productions of Shakespeare.6 That was the public side. Another colleague who became a friend rounded out this picture by describing his reserve, his modesty and his love of seclusion and privacy.7 Prolific in letter-writing and speech-making, Redmond yet seemed unconcerned for his own reputation. He was the only one of the protagonists of the turbulent nationalist politics of the 1890s who left no memoir of the period. Neither did he leave any record of his interior or emotional life. Whether Redmond, during his youthful travels in Australasia and America, underwent anything like the experience of John Dillon, who recorded in his diary the effect of the sight of naked Maori girls diving for coins, we will never know.8 We know almost nothing of his relations with women during his decade of widowerhood. There is only the hint in the poet Katherine Tynan’s recollection that ‘he had always been something of “a dog with the girls”… in a perfectly innocent flitting from flower to flower way… and while the girls had some delicious pangs, I don’t know that there was much serious harm done’.9 Similarly, we have no clue as to why no offspring issued from the second marriage. It is possible that some of the missing information was among the large quantity of Redmond’s papers that disappeared from Aughavanagh sometime after the unexpected death of his son in 1932.10 It is more likely, however, that his need for self-expression was satisfied in the meticulous composition of his wide-ranging speeches. With political associates, his letter-writing was concise and formal rather than expansive; even to close confidants, he invariably signed off with ‘Yours very truly’.11

At the Kensington flat, Redmond and his wife lived quietly, following the nationalist practice established by Parnell of avoiding the social round of the London political elite, refusing private hospitality from Tory opponents and Liberal allies alike. It was likewise in Dublin, where, until they made Aughavanagh their permanent Irish home in 1908, they lived at the house of Redmond’s brother William Hoey Kearney (‘Willie’) Redmond, MP for East Clare, at 8 Leeson Park. This austere social code reflected the ethos of the pledge-bound Irish Party: the safeguarding of its political independence ruled out personal intimacy with British politicians and its attendant opportunities for personal advancement. His position as nationalist leader already entailed the sacrifice of his potential for high office as a gifted parliamentarian, not to mention the success he could easily have attained in his profession of barrister. To this was added the sacrifice of the natural taste for hospitality that underlay his reserve. His real social life was confined to a few trusted friends in the Irish Party. Even there, as he told his supporter John J. Horgan, ‘I am a crank on the question of staying with friends. I always stay at an hotel’.12 Only at Aughavanagh, among family and his small band of intimates, could he slip the public restraints and liberate his true self.

At the time of his second marriage, Redmond’s two daughters, Esther (‘Essie’), aged fifteen, and Johanna (‘Joey’), aged twelve, were boarders at Mount Anville, the south Dublin secondary school for middle-class girls run by nuns of the Sacred Heart order. His son, William Archer (‘Billie’), aged thirteen, following the male family tradition, was boarded at Clongowes. William’s health was a source of concern that, by the autumn of 1902, left Redmond deeply worried.13 The malady is left unnamed in his correspondence, but can be deduced to have been epilepsy. Redmond took the boy with him to the October 1902 Boston UIL Convention and wrote to O’Brien on his return that he was ‘in great trouble about my boy’, and afraid that he would have to ‘send him away for a year or two to the West of America or Australia….’ A specialist in New York had recommended the ‘ranch’ as treatment.14 William was hospitalized in London, and discharged just after Christmas, when Redmond took a day between meetings of the Land Conference to convey him to Portsalon, Co. Donegal, where he left him with the family of Col. Barton, a local landlord and hotelier, for a month.15 He received advice and offers of help from several sources. His old colleague from Parnellite days, Pierce Mahony (now O’Mahony), offered a rest cure for William at his own estate at Grange Con in west Wicklow.16 It seems likely that William was sent to the US. The following September, his father wrote to O’Brien from Aughavanagh to turn down an urgent request to meet in Dublin because ‘My boy is coming up here for a few days and as I have not had him with me for nearly a year I want to stay’.17 William’s disorder seems to have resolved itself gradually, as Redmond left him at Aughavanagh in the summer of 1907, after which he began law studies.18 Three years later, William was called to the Irish Bar and was ready to start his own political career.

Redmond’s personal ethos of fidelity to political and religious duty showed its less attractive side in his harsh response to the failed religious vocation of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Reconstruction
• 2. The Limits of Conciliation
• 3. Home Rule by Instalment
• 4. ‘You Take Too Gloomy a View’
• 5. ‘I Stand Where Parnell Stood’
• 6. At the Harbour’s Mouth
• 7. The Hateful Expedient
• 8. ‘And God Save England Too!’
• 9. The Politics of Hope
• 10. ‘Detestation and Horror’
• 11. Humiliation and Loss
• 12. A Last Chance
• 13. Epilogue
• Appendix: Re-imagining 1914
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plates