Kitty O'Shea and the Parnell divorce

A movement is rarely undone by the men who oppose it from across the floor. More often it is undone in a private room, by a letter signed years before, kept in a drawer, and produced on a morning when the weather in London is unremarkable and the legal calendar has at last caught up with a marriage that ought never to have been one.

THE WOMAN IN THE GALLERY

Katharine Wood was born at Bradfield Rectory in Essex on the thirtieth of January 1846, daughter to Sir John Page Wood, Anglican rector and baronet, and niece to William Page Wood, Lord Hatherley, Lord Chancellor in Gladstone's first ministry. She married Captain William O'Shea in London on the twenty-fourth of January 1867, when she was twenty. By the summer of 1880 the marriage was a courtesy. By the autumn of that year, the man who had taken her hand at a House of Commons dinner, Charles Stewart Parnell, member for Cork City and chief of the Irish Parliamentary Party, had begun a correspondence she would later describe, in her own book, as the first letter in which he had let himself go a little. Three children followed. Claude Sophie, born in February 1882, lived a few weeks. Clare came in 1883, Frances Katharine in 1884. Captain O'Shea, by then member for Galway through Parnell's intervention, kept his counsel and his options. He kept, also, a separation deed and a sheaf of letters.

THE STRAND, NOVEMBER

The Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division of the High Court sits in the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand in a long room of grey stone and high windows. On the morning of Saturday the fifteenth of November 1890 the November light is thin and the gas is lit early. The case is listed as O'Shea v. O'Shea and Parnell. The petitioner is on the bench at the front-left, in his captain's stiffness; the respondent has filed no answer; the co-respondent has filed no answer. There is, therefore, no contest, only a recitation. Mr Justice Sir Charles Butt presides without ornament. Counsel for the petitioner reads from affidavits: dates of hotel stays at Eltham and at Brighton, the fire-escape at Medina Terrace, the assumed names. Reporters from every London daily fill the press benches and three from Dublin sit behind them with notebooks open on their knees. Katharine sits in the public gallery in a black silk gown and a black bonnet. She has been advised, by her uncle's chambers, to attend in person and to say nothing.

A SECOND OF TIME IN THE BACK ROOM

The hinge has already been turned, weeks before, in a back room in Brighton. It turned the night Charles took the affidavits in his hand and read them through and laid them down and said, in the flat tone she knew meant the matter was closed, that they would not contest. He had calculated, as he calculated everything, in seats and divisions. To contest meant cross-examination, meant her in the witness box, meant the children named one by one. Not to contest meant the press would have the affidavits unanswered and the Catholic bishops would have the affidavits unanswered and Mr Gladstone, at Hawarden, would have the affidavits unanswered. He weighed them as a man weighs lead. The Liberal alliance, which had carried the first Home Rule Bill to its defeat in 1886 and which by every count of the Commons would carry the second when Gladstone returned to power, depended on his person being usable. I should have one quality at least, he had said to her once, walking on the shingle, the quality of going on. He chose the marriage and let the leadership take what blow it would take. It was the choice of a man who had decided, somewhere inside himself, that the public life was already shorter than the private one. She, in the gallery now, watching the back of his counsel's wig, understands this and does not flinch.

THE DECREE

On the seventeenth of November Mr Justice Butt finds the petition proved on the unopposed evidence and pronounces a decree nisi, with custody of the two surviving children to the petitioner. The whole hearing has taken parts of two days. Outside on the Strand the newsboys are already calling it. By the evening editions the affidavits are in every club in London and every presbytery in Ireland. The Times prints the fire-escape. The Freeman's Journal in Dublin prints the dates. Cardinal Manning writes from Archbishop's House to the Irish hierarchy. Mr Gladstone writes from Hawarden to John Morley a letter that will be carried to Justin McCarthy and read aloud, the letter saying that Parnell's continuance at the head of the Irish Party would be productive of consequences disastrous in the highest degree to the cause of Ireland.

COMMITTEE ROOM FIFTEEN

The Irish Parliamentary Party meets in Committee Room Fifteen of the House of Commons from the first of December to the sixth. The room is narrow, the windows give onto the river, the gaslight in early afternoon turns the panelled walls a bituminous brown. Parnell takes the chair as sessional chairman and refuses to vacate it. Tim Healy speaks the sentence the room will be remembered for, the sentence about the mistress of the party, and Parnell goes white and does not answer. The argument runs four days. On the sixth, forty-five members withdraw and twenty-six remain. Justin McCarthy leads the seceders out into the corridor. The door closes. The party that had held the balance between Liberals and Conservatives since 1885, that had made and unmade ministries, that had carried a Home Rule Bill within thirty votes of passage, is two parties now, and neither of them is a government in waiting. In Ireland the Catholic Hierarchy declares him morally unfit. Three by-elections, Kilkenny in December, North Sligo in April, Carlow in July, return anti-Parnellites by margins that grow.

BRIGHTON

On the twenty-fifth of June 1891 Charles Stewart Parnell and Katharine O'Shea are married at the Steyning Registry Office in West Sussex by civil ceremony. The Catholic Church of Ireland refuses to recognise the marriage. He is forty-five and grey at the temples; she is forty-five and tired. They take rooms at 10 Walsingham Terrace, Brighton, with the sea in the window. Through the summer he travels by night train to constituency meetings in the rain, returns hoarse, sleeps badly, travels again. By September the rheumatism in his arm has spread. On the sixth of October 1891, in their bedroom at Walsingham Terrace, with her hand in his, he dies of pneumonia. He is forty-five years old. The funeral procession in Dublin on the eleventh draws a crowd estimated at two hundred thousand, the largest in the city's nineteenth century. He is buried at Glasnevin under a plain Wicklow granite boulder, uncarved.

THE LONG AFTERMATH

Katharine outlives him by thirty years. The will leaves her almost nothing, the law of the day allowing his sisters to contest. She moves through reduced lodgings, Hove, Worthing, Littlehampton. In 1914 she publishes, with her son Gerald's help, Charles Stewart Parnell: His Love Story and Political Life, the book in which she prints his letters in full and from which every Parnell biographer since has worked. She dies at Littlehampton on the fifth of February 1921, seventy-five years old, four months after the Government of Ireland Act has carved partition into statute and three months before the Anglo-Irish Treaty. She is buried in Littlehampton Cemetery, the headstone giving her name as Katharine Parnell.

A movement is rarely undone by the men who oppose it from across the floor. It is undone in a private room, by a letter signed years before, and the consequences run a quarter-century afterwards down corridors no one in that first room can see. The Irish Parliamentary Party that fractured in Committee Room Fifteen never produced another leader of his stature. The Home Rule Bill of 1893 passed the Commons and died in the Lords; the Bill of 1912 was suspended for a war; the years between were filled, at last, by other men with other methods. At Glasnevin the granite boulder still stands without a date, the single word PARNELL cut into its face, and beside it the small wreath of bog-oak leaves the Wicklow committee renews each October.