page_title: Michael Davitt
section_title: Final years and death
hierarchical_section_title: Michael Davitt / Final years and death
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Fenian rebel turned peaceful Irish nationalist Michael Davitt (1846–1906)
context_page_description: Michael Davitt was an Irish republican activist for a variety of causes, especially Home Rule and land reform. Following an eviction when he was four years old, Davitt's family emigrated to England. He began his career as an organiser of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which resisted British rule in Ireland with violence. Convicted of treason felony for arms trafficking in 1870, he served seven years in prison. Upon his release, Davitt pioneered the New Departure strategy of cooperation between the physical-force and constitutional wings of Irish nationalism on the issue of land reform. With Charles Stewart Parnell, he co-founded the Irish National Land League in 1879, in which capacity he enjoyed the peak of his influence before being jailed again in 1881.
  Davitt travelled widely, giving lectures around the world, supported himself through journalism, and served as Member of Parliament for the Irish Parliamentary Party during the 1890s. When the party split over Parnell's divorce, Davitt joined the anti-Parnellite Irish National Federation.
context_section_description: Following a speech in which he denounced the Second Boer War and the fact Ireland had to pay £10 million to the war effort despite opposing it, Davitt left the Commons for good on 26 October 1899 in protest of "the greatest infamy of the nineteenth century". Obtaining commissions from William Randolph Hearst's New York American and the Irish paper Freeman's Journal, he travelled to South Africa to report on the war and lend support to the Boer cause. On 26 March 1900, he arrived in Pretoria and spent the next three months touring and visiting Irish units in the Boer army. Following the last session of the Volksraad, Davitt left the country as Lord Roberts' army advanced. The fact that the Boers were a small nation of courageous fighters facing off against the British Empire impressed Davitt. Nevertheless, of all his writings, The Boer Fight for Freedom (1902) has aged the least well: despite Davitt's concern for other indigenous peoples, he accepted the Boer narrative that Black Africans were "savages".
  The pro- and anti-Parnellite factions finally reconciled in 1900, but despite its explosive growth—the police estimated 989 branches and 100,000 members in August 1901—the United Irish League did not gain hegemony over the Irish nationalist movement. To combat the UIL, the British government introduced a new round of coercion and by September 1902 forty UIL leaders were jailed. Davitt and John Dillon were touring the United States to raise funds when the 1902 Land Conference was held, and by their return the Wyndham Land (Purchase) Act 1903, masterminded by O'Brien, was a fait accompli. Davitt criticised what he saw as the overly generous provisions for landlords to sell their estates to the tenants, the Irish Land Commission mediating to then collect land annuities instead of rents, on the grounds that the land rightfully belonged to the people. Later in 1906, after the Liberal Party came to power, his open support for their policy of state control of schooling, rather than denominational education, merged into a conflict between Davitt and the Catholic Church. This would be the last controversy that Davitt was involved in.
  Davitt died in Elpis Hospital, Dublin on 30 May 1906, aged 60, of septicaemia arising from complications in a tooth extraction. As he requested, his funeral took place without any public notice and he was buried in Straide. Nevertheless, The New York Times reported that Dublin businesses shuttered in respect while several MPs and "enormous crowds" attended the procession when his body was removed for transport. Additional mourners accompanied the train and a procession of almost one mile (two kilometres) followed the coffin from the station in Foxford, Mayo to Straide. Davitt's estate was valued at £151; in his will, he wrote "To all my friends I leave kind thoughts, to my enemies the fullest possible forgiveness and to Ireland the undying prayer for absolute freedom and independence, which it was my life’s ambition to try and obtain for her."
caption: Portrait of Davitt by William Orpen, c. 1906
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