Home Rule

Another installment in my series
CHURCHILL’S WORLD
Stories of the world during the time Winston Churchill lived in it: 1873 to 1965

Previously

The first colony in the British Empire was Ireland. It had never fit into the Empire or into the Kingdom. The English were Protestant; the Irish were Catholic. The English were masters; the Irish were servants. The English owned the land in Ireland; the Irish rented it and worked it.

Emigration became the dominant feature of Irish society. The Potato Famine of the 1840’s made Irish emigration not only desirable but a matter of survival. By 1870 there were more Irish in America and overseas than in Ireland. During Winston’s youth, the population in Ireland declined steadily amid the poverty. The annual Christmas gift from the family overseas became a basic necessity of the Irish economy.

What to do about Ireland? Disraeli expressed the Conservatives’ perplexity:
“I want to see a public man come forward and say what the Irish question is. One says it is a physical question; another, it is a spiritual. Now it is the absence of aristocracy, then the absence of railroads. It is the Pope one day, potatoes the next.”

In the Nineteenth Century the Irish had produced a number of talented champions of their cause: Grattan, O’Connell, and Butt. Each of these moved closer towards a truly Irish Party in the country and in Parliament.

Charles Stewart Parnell took over the leadership of the Irish Party just in time for the 1880 elections. His predecessors had formed a Party. He knew how to use it.

His overall plan was to bring coordinated pressure upon Britain from all quarters for Home Rule for Ireland. His secondary objective was to contain the terrorism that the militants were providing.

Winston Churchill in “My Early Life” gives this story:
…from this house there came a man called Mr. Burke. He gave me a drum. I cannot remember what he looked like, but I remember the drum. Two years afterwards when we were back in England, they told me he had been murdered by the Fenians in this same Phoenix Park we used to walk every day.

He was eight.

Murders and violence had begun while Marlborough was governor and continued through the time of Gladstone’s Liberals. Parnell denounced the murders.
…no act has ever been perpetrated in our country, during the exciting struggle for social and political rights of the past fifty years, that has so stained the name of hospitable Ireland as this cowardly and unprovoked assassination of a friendly stranger.

Parnell tried to use civil disobedience while controlling violence. In his hands it was a weapon that hurt his own cause as well as the one he opposed. The world would have to wait until the next century for Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King to show it how to use civil disobedience as an effective weapon. He failed to appreciate the importance of enforcing non-violence.

His other tools were far more effective. In Parliament, his party could tip the scales against one party or another. Irish had emigrated to Britain itself in large numbers and could vote in its elections. This meant that Parnell could not only influence most of the Irish borough’s voters but large numbers of voters in Britain, too. Irish in America and elsewhere could not contribute votes to Parnell’s organizations, but they could contribute money.

The most important part of Parnell’s campaign was the moral part. The essence of British imperialism (and of Europe’s) was that its empire was a benevolent force for progress and good in the world. To Parnell, it was not. Supporting Parnell meant rejecting the heart of Britain’s accomplishments over centuries, in fact, since Columbus’ time. By 1885 he had made the issue of Irish Home Rule the dominant issue in British Politics.

By-elections during these years drained away Liberal MP’s. By the early 1885 vote of censure for the Gordon catastrophe at Khartoum, the Liberals survived by just fourteen votes. Then Parnell decided to throw his 37 votes to Churchill. They pulled the plug on Gladstone in June.

Lord Salisbury became Prime Minister. He invited Lord Randolf into the cabinet to head the India Office. Once in, he annexed Burma.

With Parliament and the country so bitterly divided, there had to be an election. Parnell instructed the Irish in Britain to vote Conservative. Gladstone and the Liberals fought back and won.

In this election the Irish vote in Ireland swung decisively away from the Liberal candidates and towards Parnell. He even won a borough in Protestant Ulster. This presented a permanent shift in voting habits on the Irish Island.

The election deepened the deep fissures in British society. In Britain, Parnell’s support turned out to be the kiss of death. In Parliament it had become indispensable. The issue was tearing at the country and especially at the Liberal Party. This was Gladstone’s dilemma.

By January 1886 Gladstone decided to tackle it once and for all. He concluded more reforms would not be enough. The size of the vote as well as the history of Britain’s relations with the Irish demonstrated that. He decided to go all the way with Parnell on Home Rule for Ireland.

Liberal opinion was badly split. Joseph Chamberlain and other powerful Liberal leaders saw Home Rule as the beginning of the end of the British Empire.

The Grand Old Man moved the first reading of the Home Rule Bill on April 8, 1886. He was 77 years old. His speech lasted for 2 ½ hours. In both terms of quality and content it was one the great performances of history.

Lord Randolf practically declared civil war. “Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right!” he said.

The debate was the high point of the Europe’s Imperial Age. To Gladstone it was about human rights. To his opponents it was about the basic goodness of the British Empire. Chamberlain and the other Liberal leaders as well as the Liberal rank and file deserted in droves.

In the final vote, Gladstone lost 311 to 341. Of his 311 votes, 84 came from Parnell’s Irish. Gladstone had got the Irish Party but his own party had broken in two. Could the Conservatives do any better?