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Launching the Counterattack: Part II of The Roman Catholic Hierarchy and the Destruction of Parnellism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Extract
PARNELL was a rare political genius. The quality of that genius was never more clearly revealed than in those exciting days after he had been deposed as leader of the Irish Party on December 6, 1890, in the House of Commons by the majority of his colleagues. Three days later he returned to Ireland to appeal their decision to the Irish people. Within two weeks he had secured to himself all the effective levers of political power in the country, and his bewildered opponents found themselves without funds, newspapers, or Party organization. He then coolly, from a position of maximum strength, opened negotiations for a surrender he never intended to honor. His strategy was simply to give the various factions among his opponents enough time to fall to quarreling among themselves, and his tactic during the negotiations was to drive wedges at every opportunity. The success of his plan depended on the inability of his opponents to sink their differences. Given the ambitions, needs and temperaments of his opponents, this wager on factionalism must have hardly seemed like a risk at all. In the last analysis, however, Parnell did not have much choice. Since the combination against him was bigger and stronger than he was, if he could not persuade them to turn on each other, he must in the end be overwhelmed.
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- Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1966
References
1 Sexton of Gillooly, March 13, 1891, Gillooly Papers. Courtesy of the Bishop of Elphin.
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4 MacEvilly to Gillooly, March 14, 1891, ibid.
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10 Sligo Electoral List, ibid. The breakdown of voters is on the basis of parishes.
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73 Davitt to Walsh, December 8, 1891, Walsh Papers. How reluctant Davitt's consent was is indicated by his comments to Archbishop Walsh only a few days before he consented to stand. “I have been urged by the Federation to stand for Waterford but I have given an emphatic refusal. The fight of the past year has broken down my health and left me, financially, all but ruined. It is in these circumstances I am asked to take a step which would be calculated to send me either to Glasnevin or the poor house before another Christmas comes round.”
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* Research for this article was made possible by grants-in-aid from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the Social Science Research Council, and the Old Dominion Fund of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.