When Gladstone became Prime Minister in 1868 he had famously declared: ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland’, though he had already acknowledged to John Bright that this might ‘lead the Liberal party to martyrdom’. This mission was to rend and distort British politics for the next thirty years and his failure to carry it out was a disaster.
It would be hard to imagine any people for whom the English had less sympathy than the Irish: they were poor, married too young, priest-ridden, lived on potatoes. They crowded into the largest British cities bringing with them their lax and alien habits and their false religion, and undercutting wages.
Ireland was also associated with terrorism. In 1865-7 the Fenians caused death and disturbances in Chester, Manchester, and Clerkenwell. It was Fenian violence which triggered off Gladstone’s decision to begin his mission forthwith.
The problems fell into three categories:
1. Religion: The established position of the Church of Ireland was hard to defend in a country with a large Roman Catholic majority and a significant Presbyterian minority.
2. Politics: A substantial number of Irish people wanted ‘Home Rule’ - a return to the Dublin parliament which had been abolished in 1800.
3. Land: The Famine left a bitter political as well as economic legacy.
(a) The endless sub-division of peasant holdings left the tenants in a precarious position.
(b) The situation was exacerbated because ‘the owners were Protestants while the tenants were Catholics’.
The First Gladstone Administration, 1868-1874
Gladstone’s aim in his first administration was to make the Irish choose between constitutionalism and Fenianism. Accordingly in 1869 he dealt in part with the religious grievance when he disestablished the Church of Ireland and confiscated its endowments worth about £16m. It is difficult to conceive now how controversial this move was at the time and how much it was resented by Anglicans under both sides of the Irish Sea. The Lords only gave way and passed the bill as a result of energetic efforts by the Queen to avert a constitutional clash. Gladstone’s own reputation suffered because up till this point he had passionately opposed disestablishment, and now he seemed to be yielding to terrorism.
Gladstone’s next move to was to pilot through the Irish Land Act of 1870. It gave legal sanction to the so-called ‘Ulster custom’ by which departing tenants in good standing received generous ‘compensation’ from incoming tenants. But it did not exclude eviction for non-payment of rent and thus gave no protection against rack-renting or against the inability of tenants to pay their rents. Gladstone had trouble getting the bill accepted by cabinet colleagues such as Robert Lowe and the duke of Argyll (who saw it as an attack on landlordism in general), but it passed fairly easily through the Lords and Commons because it was realized that it would make very little difference in practice.
Gladstone’s hope that the Land Act would pacify the Irish countryside proved false. Acts of 1870 and 1871 virtually suspended Habeas Corpus in Ireland.
The Beginnings of ‘Home Rule’
The 1874 election returned 58 Irish MPs, under the leadership of the Protestant barrister Isaac Butt, elected to support ‘Home Rule’. Butt had invented the phrase and the movement was launched under his inspiration at a Dublin meeting in 1870. During Disraeli’s premiership Butt annually introduced a Home Rule Bill but it was invariably tossed aside with never more than a handful of English MPs giving it their vote.
In 1878 Butt resigned the leadership of the Home Rulers under pressure from those who felt that the constitutional path was leading nowhere. He was replaced by the Member for Meath, the maverick Protestant landlord, Charles Stewart Parnell, who already by 1877 had begun to show his skill at disciplining the Irish groups into the concerted tactic of deliberately obstructing the whole business of the Commons. This was a new tactic and caused a sensation at the time when there was no mechanism for dealing with obstruction. The obstructionism is one of the reasons for the lack of legislation at the end of the Disraeli government.When Parnell declared that he did not believe ‘that any murder was committed at Manchester’ (where a policeman had been killed by Fenians), he became the most hated man in the Commons, though a hero to the Fenians.
The Land League
It is surprising that Gladstone did not anticipate the effect in Ireland of the agricultural crisis - especially as his own rents at Hawarden fell by 15% in 1879. During the late 1870s and throughout the 1880s harvests were bad and prices falling. The countryside was in crisis, with misery and starvation unprecedented since the Famine. The number of families evicted rose from 463 in 1877 to 2,100 in 1880 and 5,201 in 1882. The explosion of anti landlord feeling began among the smallholders on the west coast in Co. Mayo and gradually spread among tenant farmers throughout the whole country. Mass meetings were held, tenants refused to pay their rents and landlords and their agents were subjected to assaults and intimidation.
In the autumn of 1879 the Irish Land League was founded by the Fenian, Michael Davitt, who had been released from a 12 year sentence penal servitude for treason-felony at the end of 1877. Its President was Parnell when told ‘It will take an earthquake to settle the land question’ replied
Then we must have an earthquake.Campaign money poured into the League from the USA and Australia.
Parnell was careful not to advocate violence but he advised the members of the League to pay no rent at all if landlords refused to accept what their tenants regarded as a fair rent. The resulting Land War lasted for three years. It was a revolutionary and frightening campaign, even though its objects were essentially conservative (protection of tenants’ rights) and it had little support among landless labourers. Assaults by night on landlords’ cattle, ricks, and homes, became commonplace, all of them, it was alleged, the work of ‘Captain Moonlight’. Individuals woke to find graves dug before their doors. The wider aim of the Land Leaguers was to strengthen their position by winning from the landlords the ‘three Fs’.
The Second Gladstone Administration, 1880-1885
When he became Prime Minister in April 1880 Gladstone inherited the problem of rural violence, symbolized by the murder of Lord Mountmorres in Co. Galway. In September the Land League introduced a new tactic when Parnell urged that anyone taking a farm from which a tenant had been evicted should be
isolated from his kind as if he were a leper of old.The first person to be so treated was Captain Boycott, the agent of a large landowner in Co. Mayo. An expedition to relieve him organized from Ulster only served to advertise the success of the method which soon became a universal weapon.
At the end of 1880 Parnell and thirteen others were prosecuted for conspiracy, but the trial ended in January 1881 when the jury failed to agree.
Coercion: The new Chief Secretary for Ireland was W. E. Forster. With the support of the viceroy, Lord Cowper, he insisted on introducing a new Coercion Bill (the Protection of Person and Property Bill) for Ireland against the wishes of the Prime Minister. Parnell replied with a renewed campaign of parliamentary obstruction so effective that the bill was delayed for a month. When it became law in March 1881 it gave the authorities in Ireland complete powers of arbitrary arrest, all rights of habeas corpus being suspended. The debate on the bill lasted for 41 hours and was only ended on the Speaker’s initiative when the ‘guillotine’ was introduced for the first time.
The Second Land Act: Gladstone only accepted coercion because he was working on a new land act, which he introduced without consultation with Parnell in April 1881 - it became law in August. This provided tenants with the ‘3 Fs’: fair rents, fixity of tenure, and ‘free sale’ (of their holdings). These were drastic incursions into the rights of landlords, and constituted ‘a very severe interference in the principle of freedom of contract’; the duke of Argyll resigned in protest from the cabinet in May. His defection underlined the growing uneasiness of the ‘Whigs’ in the Gladstone government. The objections to the bill were two-fold: (a) it was confiscatory (b) it was a concession to violence.
The arrest of Parnell: The bill put Parnell in a dilemma as he feared it would take the steam out of Home Rule. He persuaded most of his followers to abstain from supporting the bill on the second reading. Two days after it passed the Commons he deliberately provoked a scene and got himself expelled, and he went on to deter tenants from dropping their agitation on the grounds that the Act did nothing for the 100,000 Irish tenants, who, since they were heavily in arrears with their rent, were still liable for eviction. He delivered speeches of a more and more extreme kind in order to show the incorruptibility of his principles, and Land League violence continued. On 7 October Gladstone deliberately provoked Parnell by telling a large public meeting in Leeds that ‘the resources of civilization’ were by no means exhausted should it
appear that there is still to be fought a final conflict in Ireland between law on the one side and sheer lawlessness on the other.Parnell in turn denounced the Prime Minister at a meeting in Wexford as
this masquerading knight-errant, this pretending champion of the rights of every other nation except those of the Irish nation.On 13 October he was arrested (along with many others) under the Coercion Act and
imprisoned in Kilmainham Jail. ‘The arrest ... of the leader of a parliamentary group of more than forty members ... who was rapidly becoming ... one of the half-dozen dominating House of Commons personalities of the century was a strenuous step for any government to take, particularly as it was based on little more than the hope that it might reduce agrarian crime.’Relations between the Irish Nationalists and the Liberals had sharply deteriorated. Chamberlain, once a sympathiser, now began to talk about
war to the knife between a despotism created to re-establish constitutional law, and a despotism not less completely elaborated to subvert law and produce anarchy as a precedent to revolutionary change.Parnell was in custody for six months until April 1882 under the fairly lax conditions
appropriate to an uncharged and unconvicted prisoner. He had a sitting room with two good armchairs and a fire. But he felt his imprisonment keenly because of his passion for Mrs O’Shea.In December 1881 the Land League was proscribed. Its members were arrested or fled abroad.
The Kilmainham Treaty: With the breaking of the League Gladstone was able to devote more attention to the remaining grievances of the Irish tenants. On 10 April 1882 Parnell was permitted leave from prison on compassionate grounds. While he was released he made contact with Captain O’Shea through whom he communicated with Chamberlain (President of the Board of Trade) and Herbert Gladstone, the Prime Minister's son. Both sides wanted a settlement. A secret, informal bargain was struck: the government should bring in a bill to cancel the debts of tenants who owed large arrears; Parnell should use his influence to end crime and disorder.
When Parnell was released, Cowper and Forster resigned and their places were taken by two Whigs: Lord Spencer (5th earl) and Lord Frederick Cavendish, younger brother of Lord Hartington, who had married a niece of Mrs Gladstone.
The Phoenix Park Murders: On Saturday 6 May Spencer arrived in Dublin. After the pageant of his entry, Cavendish was walking in Phoenix Park with T. H. Burke, the under-secretary, when a band of men, part of a club called ‘The Invincibles’ surprised the pair and hacked them to death with surgical knives.
Parnell was horrified and probably in fear of his own life. A fortnight after the murders there began a long series of letters between Gladstone and Mrs O’Shea, who became a secret go-between. Gladstone sent a new Secretary, G. O. Trevelyan, but also passed a newer and stiffer Crimes Bill. In the Commons, the Tories, led by Arthur Balfour, strenuously argued against the virtual alliance between the Liberals and Home Rulers created by the Kilmainham Treaty. This ensured the stormiest possible passage for the Arrears Act. On 17 August an entire household - parents, three sons and a daughter- were stabbed and battered to death at Maamtrasna. The alleged murderers were executed at the end of the year.
1882 had seen violence at a new high: 26 murders, 58 attempted murders. But just before the year closed the new Coercion Act bore fruit in the arrest of the Invincibles. Two of them turned Queen’s evidence. In April 1883 they were tried; five were hanged and three sent to penal servitude for life. For all its horror, the Phoenix Park massacres did not change the political situation.
The fall of the government: By 1885 Gladstone’s government was battered. It was torn by internal tensions between Joseph Chamberlain who resented the inattention to social reform and by the Whigs who detested the Irish policy. The Gordon affair administered the coup de grace.
In the spring of 1885 the Cabinet began to quarrel once more over whether or not to renew the Coercion Act of 1882. Chamberlain and his fellow radical Sir Charles Dilke wanted coercion dropped and a system of elected county councils in Ireland. Almost all the Whigs in the cabinet opposed the plan. In May Chamberlain and Dilke resigned.
In June the government was defeated by 12 votes over the budget - largely as a result of heavy Liberal abstentions. The new electoral registers were not yet ready, so there could be no general election for months to come. Gladstone resigned and Lord Salisbury became Prime Minister for the first time, at the head of a minority Conservative administration.
