page_title: Charles Stewart Parnell
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Charles Stewart Parnell / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Memorial to Charles Stewart Parnell on the north end of O'Connell Street in Dublin sculpted by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. From 1885 Reads: To Charles Stewart Parnell "No man has a right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation. No man has a right to say to his country thus far shalt thou go and no further. We have never attempted to fix the ne plus ultra to the progress of Ireland's nationhood and we never shall."
context_page_description: Charles Stewart Parnell was an Irish nationalist politician who served as Leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party from 1882 to 1891 and Leader of the Home Rule League from 1880 to 1882. He served as a member of parliament from 1875 to 1891. His party held the balance of power in the House of Commons during the Home Rule debates of 1885–1890.
  Born into a powerful Anglo-Irish Protestant landowning family, he was a land reform agitator, founder in 1879 of the Irish National Land League. He became leader of the Home Rule League, operating independently of the Liberal Party, winning great influence by his balancing of constitutional, radical, and economic issues, and by his skilful use of parliamentary procedure. He was imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin, in 1882, but he was released when he renounced violent extra-Parliamentary action. The same year, he reformed the Home Rule League as the Irish Parliamentary Party, which he controlled minutely as Britain's first disciplined democratic party.
  The hung parliament of 1885 saw him hold the balance of power between William Gladstone's Liberal Party and Lord Salisbury's Conservative Party.
context_section_description: Charles Stewart Parnell possessed the remarkable attribute of charisma, was an enigmatic personality and politically gifted, and is regarded as one of the most extraordinary figures in Irish and British politics. He played a part in the process that undermined his own Anglo-Irish caste; within two decades absentee landlords were almost unknown in Ireland. He created single-handedly in the Irish Party Britain's first modern, disciplined, political-party machine. He held all the reins of Irish nationalism and also harnessed Irish-America to finance the cause. He played an important role in the rise and fall of British governments in the mid-1880s and in Gladstone's conversion to Irish Home Rule.
  Over a century after his death he is still surrounded by public interest. His death, and the divorce upheaval which preceded it, gave him a public appeal and interest that other contemporaries, such as Timothy Healy or John Dillon, could not match. His leading biographer, F. S. L. Lyons, says historians emphasise numerous major achievements: 
  Above all there is the emphasis on constitutional action, as historians point to the Land Act of 1881; the creation of the powerful third force in Parliament using a highly disciplined party that he controlled; the inclusion of Ireland in the Reform Act of 1884, while preventing any reduction in the number of Irish seats; the powerful role of the Irish National League and organising locally, especially County conventions that taught peasants about democratic self-government; forcing Home Rule to be a central issue in British politics; and persuading the great majority of the Liberal party to adopt his cause. Lyons agrees that these were remarkable achievements, but emphasises that Parnell did not accomplish them alone, but only in close coordination with men such as Gladstone and Davitt.
  Gladstone described him: "Parnell was the most remarkable man I ever met. I do not say the ablest man; I say the most remarkable and the most interesting. He was an intellectual phenomenon." Liberal leader H. H. Asquith called him one of the three or four greatest men of the 19th century, while Lord Haldane described him as the strongest man the House of Commons had seen in 150 years. Historian A. J. P. Taylor says, "More than any other man he gave Ireland the sense of being an independent nation."
  Lyons points up the dark side as well. The decade-long liaison with Mrs. O'Shea was a disaster waiting to happen, and Parnell had made no preparations for it. He waited so long because of money – there was an expectation that Mrs. O'Shea would receive a large inheritance from her elderly aunt who might have changed her will if she had known about the affair. In the aftermath of the divorce he fought violently to retain control in a hopeless cause.  Thereby he ruined his health and wrecked his movement; it never fully recovered. The bottom line for Lyons, however, is positive: 
  He gave his people back their self respect.  He did this ... by rallying an inert and submissive peasantry to believe that by organized and disciplined protest they could win a better life for themselves and their children. He did it further, and still more strikingly, by demonstrating ... that even a small Irish party could disrupt the business of the greatest legislature in the world and, by a combination of skill and tenacity, could deal on equal terms with – eventually, hold the balance between – the two major English parties.
  — Lyons 1973, p. 616
caption: Memorial at the junction of O'Connell Street and Parnell Street, Dublin
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