Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 43.djvu/347

 Despite his activity in Ireland, Parnell did not neglect opportunities of obtaining a hearing from his countrymen in England, where there prevailed in many quarters a feeling that his past services were being unfairly underrated, and that he had been betrayed by his own friends. The Irish National League at Limehouse, on 13 May, treated his endeavours to explain his policy with decided hostility. On 17 June, however, he laid a full statement of his case before a public meeting at Bermondsey; he stoutly advocated the independence of the Irish party, and praised the Land Bill of the tory government, which the liberals had opposed. On 18 July he spoke at Newcastle on the details of home rule, and said that he was convinced that of the liberal party not one in three believed in the cause.

Parnell throughout this period was residing at Brighton, and the long and fatiguing journeys which he was repeatedly making between that place and Ireland, combined with the mental anxieties attending the struggle, soon shattered his broken health. He often expressed to his friends his unshaken confidence in his ultimate triumph, and hardly seemed to recognise the strength of the obstacles in his path. On 27 Sept. at Creggs, co. Galway, he spoke in public for the last time. He was suffering acutely from rheumatism, but he hurried back to his house, 9 Walsingham Terrace, Brighton, and there he died of inflammation of the lungs on 6 Oct. His last words are said to have been, ‘Let my love be conveyed to my colleagues and to the Irish people.’ He was buried in Glasnevin cemetery, Dublin, on 11 Oct., amid every sign of public sorrow. Two hundred thousand persons attended the ceremony.

The division in the ranks of the Irish party continued after Parnell's death. Mr. John Redmond, M.P. for Waterford, was elected leader of the Parnellite section; but, although his supporters fought hard in Parnell's name at the general election of 1892, only nine Parnellites (out of a total of eighty-one nationalists) were returned to parliament. Mr. Gladstone and the liberals secured, with their Irish allies, a majority of forty in the House of Commons, and a Home Rule Bill, on lines for which Parnell was largely responsible, passed its third reading by a majority of 34 on 1 Sept. 1893. But the House of Lords rejected it a week later (41 for and 419 against). In face of the apathy on the question, which had been growing in Great Britain since Parnell's overthrow and the consequent dissensions in Ireland, the liberal government deemed it prudent to practically acquiesce for the present in the decision of the House of Lords, and the active agitation for home rule came for the time to a close in both England and Ireland.

Parnell will always hold a conspicuous place in Irish and in English history. By his personal efforts he dragged the question of Ireland's legislative independence from the field of academic discussion into that of practical politics. When he entered public life, home rule for Ireland was viewed by English politicians as a wild and impracticable dream. Within eleven years Parnell had coerced a majority of one of the two great English political parties into treating the scheme's adoption by parliament as an urgent necessity.

At heart he was a rebel. Could he have settled the Irish question by equipping an army of forty thousand men, he would have done it. His speech at Cork in 1885, when he declined to recognise any limits to Ireland's claim to ‘nationhood,’ indicated the goal of his ambition. But he combined with his revolutionary sympathies the astuteness of a practical statesman. With the weapons at his command he foresaw that home rule was attainable, and that an Irish republic was not. When his strategy had wrested from the liberal party assent to home rule, he was led by expediency to strictly adapt his conduct so as to secure that concession. Although he determined to make the best of Mr. Gladstone's measure, he believed that Ireland might at a later period, under another leader, enjoy something beyond it. His hatred of England sprang from his hatred of the English domination of Ireland, but he hoped for a friendly alliance with her after she should surrender the cause of quarrel. He recognised Ireland's commercial dependence on England, and perceived that Ireland's commercial interests recommended peace.

In his endeavours to extort home rule from England he was not scrupulous as to the means employed. He appealed for aid to every class of Irishmen, and retained the support of the revolutionary party by a tacit acquiescence in their methods of work. But he was careful to restrict his responsible control to the action of the constitutional wing of the army of Irish nationalists. Wholly impervious to criticism, he had a passion and a rare capacity for leadership, together with unbounded courage and splendid self-confidence. In manner reserved and distant, he cherished many aristocratic sentiments, and the aspirations of democracy drew from him no genuine response. Nevertheless he exerted a mysterious power of fascination over all who sympathised with his views. His speeches, though always incisive and earnest in tone, were rarely eloquent or even