Parnell

Parnell began as a woman's given name. It comes from the Old French Pernelle, the mediaeval short form of the Latin Petronilla, the female form of Peter and the name of an obscure Roman martyr. Pernelle was popular for English girls in the Middle Ages, and when the genitive s attached to it the result was a surname taken from a mother rather than a father: a matronymic, one of the oldest kinds of family name in Britain and Ireland, the route that also produced Madison from Maud.

The timing fits English practice. Surnames are documented among the barons of England in the eleventh century, spreading down from the nobility, and by 1400 most English families, and those of Lowland Scotland, carried a hereditary one. Parnell is one of them, native to these islands, and it still travels alongside the spelling Parnall.

Parnell reached Ireland as an English name, arriving after the old order there had been taken apart. English common law was introduced across the island in the sixteenth century, and the county and the sheriff replaced the country and the clan chief. The Flight of the Earls in 1607 took the senior Gaelic chiefs of Ulster out of the country and left Dublin in real control of the whole island for the first time.

Into that landscape came Thomas Parnell, a Cheshire officer of Cromwell's army, granted the Avondale estate at Rathdrum in County Wicklow in the 1660s. Through the eighteenth century the Parnells rose into the Anglo-Irish Protestant gentry, with a seat in the Vale of Avoca and a place in the political life of Dublin. The surname stayed rare in Ireland, and it is overwhelmingly associated with the single family that carried it into Irish history.

Sir John Parnell, 2nd Baronet (1744–1801), was Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer, the last man to hold that office before the Act of Union of 1800 dissolved the parliament he sat in, and one of the small group of Irish parliamentarians who refused to accept the Union. The family's politics were Whig, and this is their first entry in the national story: a man of the Protestant governing class who would not vote his own parliament out of existence.

Other Parnells made their names in letters and in the peerage: Thomas Parnell (1679–1718), Anglo-Irish poet and clergyman, and Henry Parnell, 1st Baron Congleton (1776–1842), Irish writer and politician, whose title reached its fifth holder in Henry Parnell, 5th Baron Congleton (1890–1914), an Anglo-Irish soldier.

Charles Stewart Parnell was born at Avondale, 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 of Delia Tudor Stewart, daughter of Commodore Charles Stewart of the United States Navy, the Old Ironsides captain of the War of 1812. He was schooled at Yeovil and at Magdalene College, Cambridge, leaving without a degree in 1869 on the death of his elder brother John and his inheritance of Avondale.

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 and entirely unknown in Irish political life. Within two years he had taught the loose Irish Home Rule Confederation obstruction: the disciplined use of every procedural device the Commons allowed to bring British government business to a standstill until Irish demands were heard. Through 1877 he obstructed the South Africa Bill in a forty-five-hour continuous sitting, and forced the Speaker to introduce the closure procedure into the rules of parliament.

Michael Davitt founded the Irish National Land League at Irishtown in Mayo in 1879 to fight the landlord system on the ground it was worked on. By 1880 Parnell was its President, and on the seventeenth of May 1880 the Irish members at Westminster elected him Chairman of the Irish Parliamentary Party. A landlord by birth, he led the Irish Catholic tenant movement against the class he came from, tying the agitation in the fields to the argument in the Commons.

At Ennis on the nineteenth of September 1880 he told the people of Mayo how to deal with Captain Charles Boycott, the rent-extracting agent of Lord Erne. Not violence: leave him severely alone, put him in a moral Coventry, treat him as if he were the leper of old. The speech put a new word into the English language, which has kept it ever since.

Between 1880 and 1885 Parnell built the Irish Parliamentary Party into the most disciplined bloc in the Commons. Every member signed a binding pledge to vote with the party whip. A central 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 parish branches of the National League ran the constituencies.

At the general election of December 1885 that machinery delivered effectively every Catholic Irish seat outside Ulster. The Irish bloc returned was eighty-six members strong and held the exact balance of power between Gladstone's Liberals and Salisbury's Conservatives. The Irish demand could no longer be talked past, and it had to be dealt with through him.

On the eighth of April 1886 Parnell forced Gladstone to introduce the Government of Ireland Bill, the first Home Rule Bill, proposing a separate Irish parliament at Dublin with control of internal Irish affairs. It was defeated on second reading on the eighth of June 1886 by thirty votes, after the secession of Joseph Chamberlain and ninety-three Liberal Unionists, and the question split the Liberal Party for twenty years.

He drove forward regardless. 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 allegation, printed by the Times, that he had endorsed the Phoenix Park murders of 1882, the forgeries of Richard Pigott collapsing under cross-examination. Gladstone's second Home Rule Bill, prepared through 1892, continued directly from Parnell's first.

Anna Parnell (1852–1911), his sister, carried the cause on her own account: she founded the Ladies' Land League and stands in the record as an Irish nationalist in her own right.

Parnell held the leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party for eleven years, and the chairmanship of the Land League and then the National League across the most consequential decade of constitutional Irish nationalism. He died at Walsingham Terrace in Brighton on the sixth of October 1891 and was buried at Glasnevin in Dublin, the funeral procession from Westland Row 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, carries the line from his 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 name carried others. Fanny Parnell (1848–1882) was an Irish poet and nationalist. Samuel Duncan Parnell (1810–1890), a settler in New Zealand, is often credited with establishing the eight-hour working day there. Edward Parnell (1859–1922) became Mayor of Winnipeg, Harvey Parnell (1880–1936) governor of Arkansas, and Thomas Parnell (1881–1948) an English-Australian physicist.

Closer to home the name runs through science, sport and the stage: Richard Parnell (1810–1882), British physician and naturalist; Clare Parnell (born 1970), British astrophysicist; Hester Parnall (1868–1939), English brewer and businesswoman, under that spelling; Reg Parnell (1911–1964), English racing driver and team manager; and Val Parnell (1892–1972), British television managing director and theatrical impresario.