Outline of Events

Ireland exerted a pronounced influence upon William Gladstone's political career. It had been one of his first priorities to uphold the status of the Church of England as the official Church of Ireland. Yet his commitment to Anglican exclusivity in Ireland collapsed in 1845 when confronted by Sir Robert Peel's proposal to enhance the state subsidy to the Catholic seminary at Maynooth. Gladstone allied himself with the Peelite project of pacifying Ireland through policies formulated independently (and often at odds with) the views of his party, and this, essentially, was the story of Gladstone's later engagement with Ireland – a story beginning in 1867, when Gladstone responded to Fenian terrorism in England by claiming that the time had come to remove Ireland's legitimate grievances with British rule. To this end he sought to end the status of the Church of England as the official Church of Ireland; amend landlord–tenant relations in Ireland through his 1870 Land Act; and tried (unsuccessfully) to make the Irish University system more accommodating of Catholics. With these measures Gladstone considered he had done enough to pacify Ireland. This was always wishful thinking, and the agricultural depression of the 1870s and 1880s intruded a new bitterness in landlord–tenant relations as farmers struggled to pay what they considered exorbitant rents. Thus, when becoming prime minister in 1880, Gladstone sought to neutralize the land issue by granting the tenants’ demands for the 3F's. It was hoped that by following up this initiative with local government reform, the stabilization of Ireland would be realized. But the devolution of powers to Ireland never came; instead, there were the Phoenix Park murders and a further wave of coercion. Thus by 1885 Gladstone was brought to recognize two facts: first, land reform had not pacified Ireland; second, Irish nationalism, far from being in retreat, had consolidated its grip upon Irish opinion. Gladstone's response was dramatic. Concluding that Ireland would only be a peaceful member of the Empire if it ran its own domestic affairs, he drew up the Irish Home Rule Bill of 1886. Unfortunately, Gladstone's conviction that the concession of a separate parliament for Ireland was a price worth paying for peace was not shared by large parts the Liberal party, let alone parliament or the nation.