13 - Parnell and the Land League

Summary

Persona and Interpretations of Parnell

Who was he? Parnell was that most difficult of all types for a British politician to pin down – a member of the Irish-Protestant landed gentry with all the manners of a gentleman on the one hand, but possessing sympathies that were wider ranging than his own class and creed might conventionally dictate on the other. He had all the traditional traits of the Ascendancy: he hunted, played cricket, attended society balls at Dublin Castle and enjoyed horses. He was, in short, among the British elites, but not of them, a kind of enfant terrible. His contemporary Michael Davitt says of him that he was ‘an Englishman of the strongest type, moulded for an Irish purpose’; Bew that he was a conservative with a radical tinge. From a family established in the seventeenth century, he had an estate in Avondale, Co. Wicklow. His education in England had bestowed upon him an upper-class accent and a social circle which put him on an equal plane with those he interacted with in Parliament. But he had also developed a sort of interest in the plight of the Fenian martyrs, a luxurious eccentricity for an undergraduate at Cambridge in the late 1860s perhaps, but one with long-term political consequences. These paradoxes surrounding the persona of Parnell have often been remarked upon. Yet, according to Conor Cruise O'Brien, these very ambiguities gave him credibility both at Westminster and in Ireland.