Charles Stewart Parnell(1846–1891)

Charles Stewart Parnell was born at Avondale, the family estate in the Vale of Avoca in County Wicklow, on the twenty-seventh of June 1846, fourth surviving child of John Henry Parnell, an Anglo-Irish Protestant landlord of the Wicklow gentry, and Delia Tudor Stewart, daughter of Commodore Charles Stewart of the United States Navy, the Old Ironsides captain of the War of 1812. The Parnell line had been in Ireland since the seventeenth century; the family was historically Whig in politics, and Charles's great-grandfather Sir John Parnell had been the last Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer before the Act of Union of 1800 and one of the small group of Irish parliamentarians who refused to accept it. He was schooled in England at Yeovil and at Magdalene College, Cambridge, which he left without a degree in 1869 on the death of his elder brother John and the inheritance of the Avondale estate.

He entered the House of Commons in April 1875 as Home Rule member for County Meath, taking the seat left vacant by the death of John Martin. He was twenty-eight years old and entirely unknown in Irish political life. Within two years he had taught the loose Irish Home Rule Confederation a new political technique: parliamentary obstruction, the disciplined use of every procedural device of the Commons to bring the business of the British government to a standstill until Irish demands were heard. Through 1877 he led the obstruction of the South Africa Bill in a forty-five-hour continuous Commons sitting, forcing the Speaker to introduce the closure procedure to the parliamentary rules. By 1880 he had become President of the Irish National Land League (founded in 1879 by Michael Davitt at Irishtown in Mayo) and on the seventeenth of May 1880 was elected by the Irish parliamentary members as Chairman of the Irish Parliamentary Party.

Between 1880 and 1885 he built the Irish Parliamentary Party into the most disciplined parliamentary bloc in the House of Commons. Every member signed a binding pledge to vote with the party whip; the central party fund (raised through the American Land League under John Devoy and Patrick Ford) paid each member a salary, the first paid parliamentary representation in British history; and the constituency machinery, organised through the parish branches of the National League, delivered effectively every Catholic Irish seat outside Ulster to the party in the general election of December 1885. The Irish bloc returned at that election was eighty-six members strong and held the exact balance of power between Gladstone's Liberals and Salisbury's Conservatives.

On the eighth of April 1886 Parnell forced Gladstone to introduce the Government of Ireland Bill, the first Home Rule Bill, which proposed a separate Irish parliament at Dublin with control of internal Irish affairs. The Bill was defeated on its second reading on the eighth of June 1886 by thirty votes after the secession of Joseph Chamberlain and ninety-three Liberal Unionists, and the issue split the Liberal Party for the next twenty years. Parnell drove forward despite the defeat: the Plan of Campaign of 1886, organised by his lieutenants William O'Brien and John Dillon, withheld rent from landlords across the most distressed estates of the south and west; the Special Commission of 1888 to 1889 cleared him of the Times newspaper's allegation that he had endorsed the 1882 Phoenix Park murders (the Times forgeries of Richard Pigott collapsed under cross-examination); and the second Home Rule Bill, prepared by Gladstone through 1892, was the direct continuation of Parnell's first Bill of 1886.

He held the leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party for eleven years and the chairmanship of the Land League and the National League across the most consequential decade of constitutional Irish nationalism. He delivered at Ennis on the nineteenth of September 1880 the speech that introduced the word boycott into the English language (urging the people of Mayo to treat the rent-extracting agent of Lord Erne, Captain Charles Boycott, with moral coventry, leave him severely alone, put him in a moral Coventry, isolate him from his kind as if he were the leper of old). He died at his house at Walsingham Terrace in Brighton on the sixth of October 1891 in his forty-sixth year and was buried at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, the funeral procession from Westland Row to the cemetery numbering some two hundred thousand people. The Parnell monument at the head of O'Connell Street in Dublin, designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and unveiled in 1911, bears the inscription from the Cork speech of 1885: 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. The Parnell name in modern Irish political history carries the weight of the Wicklow landlord who built the constitutional Irish demand into the disciplined parliamentary force that held the balance at Westminster.