O'Shea · 1890
Kitty O'Shea and the Parnell divorce
On the fifteenth and seventeenth of November 1890, in the Probate Divorce and Admiralty Division of the High Court of Justice at the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand in central London, the divorce petition of Captain William O'Shea (Irish Parliamentary Party MP for Galway 1880–86) against his wife Katharine *Kitty* O'Shea (1846–1921, born Katharine Wood, daughter of an English-Sussex baronet) was heard before Mr Justice Sir Charles Butt. The co-respondent named in the petition was Charles Stewart Parnell, then forty-four years old, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster, the effective political-architect of the Irish-Home-Rule programme and (since the 1885 election) the political-balance-of-power figure in the House of Commons between Liberals and Conservatives. The divorce-case revealed publicly the eleven-year relationship between Parnell and Kitty O'Shea, three children born to the couple, and the tacit acceptance by Captain O'Shea of the relationship in exchange for political favours from Parnell. The political-consequence of the public disclosure was, by every careful judgment of the Home-Rule historians (F. S. L. Lyons, R. F. Foster, Roy Jenkins), the political destruction of Parnell within seven weeks. The Irish Parliamentary Party split between the Parnellite minority and the anti-Parnellite majority at the Committee Room Fifteen meeting of the sixth of December 1890. Parnell married Kitty O'Shea at Steyning Registry Office on the twenty-fifth of June 1891 and died of pneumonia at their Brighton home on the sixth of October 1891, forty-five years old. The Irish Home Rule political-movement was, on the Parnell collapse, leaderless for the next twenty years.
It is twenty past ten on the morning of Saturday the fifteenth of November 1890, in the Probate Divorce and Admiralty Division courtroom of the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand in central London, in the pale November light through the Strand-side windows. She is forty-four years old. She is Katharine Kitty O'Shea, born Katharine Wood at Bradfield Rectory in Essex on the thirtieth of January 1846, daughter of the Anglican clergyman-and-baronet Sir John Page Wood and Emma Caroline Wood, the niece of Lord Hatherley (William Page Wood), the Lord Chancellor of Gladstone's first ministry. She is in the Probate-Court public gallery, in a black silk gown and a black bonnet.
She has not entered the court as a defendant. The petition has named her as the respondent and Parnell as the co-respondent; her legal representation, by the instructions of her uncle Lord Hatherley, has not contested the petition. Captain William O'Shea, her husband since 1867 (married in London the twenty-fourth of January 1867 when she was twenty), is on the petitioner's bench at the front-left.
She thinks: Willie has been waiting eight years to file the petition. Willie has been holding the petition over us since 1882 as a political-leverage tool with Charles for the Galway-seat patronage and the political-favours.
She thinks: the petition is uncontested because we have, by Charles's political-judgement of last August, decided that the public-disclosure is the only path to a clean divorce-and-marriage. The Irish-Catholic political-electorate will, on the public-disclosure, turn on Charles. Charles, on his personal political-judgement of last August, has decided to accept that.
She thinks: the British-Liberal Party under Gladstone will, on the public-disclosure, withdraw the Home-Rule support from the Parnell-led Irish Parliamentary Party. Gladstone has, in the Hartington letter of last September, indicated he cannot continue the Liberal-Irish-Parliamentary Alliance on Parnell's public-political position post-divorce.
She thinks: Charles is forty-four. I am forty-four. We have three children together (Claude Sophie, born 1882, died as an infant in November 1882; Clare, born 1883; and Frances Katharine, born 1884). We have been together since the summer of 1880, eleven years. We are about to be married in the late spring of 1891 after the decree absolute. We will have three or four years of public married life before the Irish political destruction Charles is about to suffer takes its physical toll on his health.
Mr Justice Butt heard the uncontested petition in two days (the fifteenth and the seventeenth of November 1890), found the petition proved on the evidence of Captain O'Shea's affidavits, and granted the decree nisi on the seventeenth of November. The decree absolute followed on the fifteenth of May 1891.
The political consequence ran through the three weeks following the decree nisi. The Catholic Hierarchy of Ireland, on the Cardinal Manning intervention with the Irish-Catholic Bishops' Conference of the third of December, declared Parnell morally unfit for the Irish-Parliamentary-Party leadership. The Liberal Party under Gladstone, on the Hartington-and-Morley advice of the twenty-fifth of November, withdrew the Liberal-Home-Rule alliance from the Parnell-led party. The Irish Parliamentary Party held the leadership crisis-meeting in Committee Room Fifteen of the House of Commons on the first to the sixth of December 1890. The party split forty-five to twenty-six against Parnell on the sixth of December.
Charles Stewart Parnell married Katharine O'Shea at the Steyning Registry Office in West Sussex on the twenty-fifth of June 1891. The Catholic-Church-of-Ireland refused to recognise the civil marriage. The Irish Parliamentary Party rejected him in three by-elections (Kilkenny December 1890, North Sligo April 1891, Carlow July 1891). He died of pneumonia at their Brighton home, 10 Walsingham Terrace, on the sixth of October 1891, forty-five years old. He is buried at Glasnevin Cemetery, the funeral procession of about two hundred thousand on the Dublin streets being the largest funeral procession in Irish nineteenth-century history.
Kitty O'Shea outlived Parnell by thirty years. She wrote the 1914 autobiography Charles Stewart Parnell: His Love Story and Political Life, the foundational personal-source for the Parnell biographies. She died in genteel poverty at Littlehampton in Sussex on the fifth of February 1921, seventy-five years old. The Irish Home Rule political-movement, having been broken on the Parnell-O'Shea divorce of 1890, did not produce another political-leader of Parnell's calibre. The political-vacuum of the Irish-Parliamentary-Party 1890–1916 was filled by the Easter Rising. By the careful judgment of every Home-Rule historian since Lyons (1968), the events of 1916 and 1921 stand on the political-collapse of December 1890.