to bring the War to an end received a curt reply. And there were the eighteen Catholic (and three Protestant) bishops who intervened in the closely fought Longford South by-election in April 1917 at the last moment (Archbishop Walsh, one of the signatories, also published a letter of his own) with an anti-partition manifesto that was probably decisive in swinging the vote against the Irish Party and to Sinn Féin.
Catholic clerics had long formed a significant part of the membership of the Land League and National League, and supplied many of its prominent personalities. But it had been understood since O’Connell’s time that, while Catholic nationalists would accept the guidance of Rome in spiritual matters, they would not allow it to dictate their politics. However, the boundaries between temporal and spiritual jurisdictions became embarrassingly blurred in the Parnell Split when two results in the 1892 general election were overturned on petition on the grounds of gross spiritual intimidation by the Bishop of Meath, Dr Nulty, giving much ammunition to Protestant opponents of Home Rule. The same question was raised again in 1911–12 when Pope Pius X issued his decree Quantavis Diligentia, claiming to exempt clerics from civil action in the courts, only a few years after the Ne Temere decree had laid down the obligation of the Catholic parent in a mixed marriage to ensure that the children were raised Catholic. Redmond knew the potential of these Papal rulings to fuel new arguments against Home Rule: writing to Dillon late in 1911, he calls the Quantavis affair ‘a horrible business’. Publicly, he could only respond that they were already in existence under British rule and would gain no added force under Home Rule, and that he personally would resist them to the death.
The modern tendency to see the Church’s role in the Home Rule movement solely through the prism of its intrusion in the secular sphere, turning Home Rule into Rome Rule, should be tempered by the realisation that the relationship was symbiotic. If the bishops expected the Party to agitate for educational and other policies of which they approved, the social discipline imposed by the Church kept the lid on the secret societies throughout most of the nineteenth century, creating an indispensable peaceful space in which constitutional politics could function.
Given his clear delineation of the boundary between secular and spiritual, and his marriage to a Protestant second wife, it is something of a shock to find his personal Catholicism infused with a positively Spartan sense of religious duty in his dealings with his nephew Louis Redmond-Howard, who had joined the Benedictines as a youth of 17 and, having taken final vows six years later, wished to renounce his vocation (Chapter 17). Redmond’s response as seen in these letters was much harsher than that of the lad’s religious superiors.
Redmond’s relations with Fenians in the 1890s, and his efforts on behalf of IRB members (though Invincibles were beyond the pale) serving long sentences for explosives offences (in particular John Daly and Thomas Clarke) supply an interesting background to his reactions to the rebellion of Easter 1916. It is arguable that it was his very closeness to the physical force partisans in the 90s – the ‘coexistence’ evident at the Independent office where Fred Allan managed newspaper and Fenian business simultaneously – that led him to underestimate the determination of Clarke and the other plotters to stage a violent rebellion. That, and a complacency about the power of democratic majorities to deter highly-motivated militant minorities from setting the agenda, may explain how, in spite of his statement to Stopford Green that the extremists deserved ‘no mercy’, he failed to act on the very credible warning of Bernard MacGillian a month before the rebellion.
One stereotype these letters will confound is that Redmond cared nothing for the Irish language or culture. His correspondence with Archbishop Walsh in 1901 on matters concerning the National Education Board, and his later correspondence with the Gaelic League founder, Douglas Hyde, should dispel that impression. The letters do not tell all. At the 1909 National Convention when the motion to make Gaelic a compulsory subject for matriculation to the newly founded National University was debated, it was Redmond, for better or worse, who was closer to the popular will in supporting it, and Dillon who had to endure catcalls for his opposition.
The correspondence of autumn 1903 with O’Brien and Dillon illustrates vividly the dilemma that confronted Redmond at that point: whether to continue with the policy of conference and conciliation – the doctrine being propounded with a convert’s zeal by O’Brien – that had broken the logjam of twenty years in winning effective land purchase legislation for tenant farmers, or to risk the nightmare of a new split by alienating Dillon and his supporters in the strong agrarian wing of the Party, which resented the financial incentives being paid to the landlords. In opting for Party unity over conferences with unionists, did he make the right choice? One thing is certain: those who say that the conference route would have averted the Home Rule crisis and, ultimately, partition, take insufficient account of the differences between southern and Ulster unionism, a distinction that Redmond himself grasped imperfectly as late as the debates at the Irish Convention.
One of the consequences of O’Brien’s break with Redmond emerges in the letters between Redmond and Dillon over the following four years: their differing approaches to bringing an end to the breach. The peculiar flavour of the two men’s correspondence noted by F.S.L. Lyons is at its most piquant here: Redmond refusing to believe the breach was permanent and remaining always open to possibilities of rapprochement; Dillon gloomily badgering him to give no quarter to O’Brien, fearing the harm he and Healy could jointly do to the movement. Cassandra in the legend was right, and Dillon in that role turned out to be right too, as Redmond finally realised in early 1909, after the brief one-year return of O’Brien and Healy to the Party, by which time the pair’s mutual gravitational pull had created a malign binary star that would pursue the Party to its doom.
The Redmond–Dillon correspondence becomes particularly intense in the prologue to the 1907 Irish Council Bill, the devolution measure promised by Liberal Prime Minister Campbell-Bannerman, which had the effect of a primed hand grenade rolled slowly into the Irish Party camp. Both men are aware from the beginning of its potential to damage the movement, yet seem mesmerised and unable to avert the danger by lowering the expectations of their followers.
The years of the Liberal ‘landslide’ government of 1906–9 were years of frustration and disappointment at the seeming postponement of Home Rule to a distant future, and the discontent festering in the Party and the country is documented in the letters of Chapter 7. But if these were doldrum years for Home Rule, they were also fertile ones for reforming legislation, especially 1908, with legislation passed for agricultural labourers, evicted tenants, town tenants and the working classes in towns, as well as the final resolution of the university question, as Redmond pointed out to Alderman O’Mara, the American John O’Callaghan and others.
With the final estrangement of O’Brien at the February 1909 ‘Baton’ Convention, followed by his foundation of the All for Ireland League, the Irish Independent, owned by William Martin Murphy, passed from the role of loyal opposition to that of destructive critic and even enemy, a role it would maintain for the rest of Redmond’s life (Chapter 12). The Party thereafter received much censure for its faults and little credit for its achievements. However, the withering attacks coming from the paper, augmented by those of Healy (theoretically still a Party member), could not prevent the veto crisis and Asquith’s declaration on Home Rule at the Albert Hall in late 1909 from elevating Redmond to a pivotal position in both British and Irish politics.
Redmond’s lobbying of Morley in advance of Asquith’s declaration, and the memorandum of his meeting with the Master of Elibank, show a new confidence and resolve. His reports to Dillon in early 1910 show a sure-footed exploitation of his leverage in the game of bluff he had to play with Lloyd George; the election had given the Irish Party the balance of power but both knew that Redmond could hardly use it against the Liberals without putting back the Home Rule cause for many years.
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Where in these letters does Redmond look weakest? Most obviously, it is in his forced acquiescence in the early Ulster exclusion proposals of the Liberal government in March 1914 (Chapter 10).