wish of MPs to avoid imprisonment was not a matter of personal cowardice or fear of discomfort.123 Rather, these middle-aged men probably sensed themselves near the point reached by Parnell in October 1881 when he had told Healy ‘we have pushed this movement as far as it can constitutionally go’, and remembered the nightmare winter that had followed, when Parnell’s imprisonment left a leadership vacuum that allowed outrage and murder free rein over large parts of the countryside.124 Redmond was thus anxious to present the agitation in the most respectable light possible. At Cork on 18 July and Taghmon on 31 August, he dressed boycotting in the clothes of trades unionism. A ‘formidable and dangerous agitation’ meant applying ‘those legal rights and powers of combination and exclusive dealing which are freely exercised by Englishmen in all the great trades unions in Great Britain’ to ‘every unreasonable landlord, to every grazier, to every land-grabber in every parish….’125
Coercion reached its climax on 1 September when Dublin city and county, along with five other counties, were proclaimed. A well-attended protest meeting followed a few days later at the Mansion House addressed by Redmond, Dillon, the Lord Mayor and the four Dublin Nationalist MPs. Privately, Dillon was greatly relieved at the proclamation, which made it less likely that O’Brien would return to the offensive, ‘not the first time that the Government has extricated us from serious difficulties by timely action’.126
Just as coercion was forcing Redmond and his colleagues to rein in the land agitation, conciliation was suddenly in the air. Over the summer, letters from two landlords, Lindsay Talbot-Crosbie and Col. William Hutcheson Poë, had appeared in the press. Both advocated a conference between representatives of landlords and tenants to seek agreement on the land question. Both argued that land purchase could not advance until the Government provided sufficient finance to bridge the gap between the minimum acceptable to the landlord and the maximum affordable by the tenant.127 Two days after the proclamation of Dublin, a third letter was published, from a young Co. Galway landlord, Capt. John Shawe-Taylor, that went a step further. It suggested the names of eight men, four from the landlord side and four from that of the tenants: Redmond, O’Brien, T.C. Harrington and T.W. Russell, to act as representatives at a conference.128 Two days later, approval of the proposal came from Wyndham: ‘No Government can settle the Irish land question. It must be settled by the parties interested.’ The Government could only provide facilities and give effect to any settlement agreed by the parties.129
In O’Brien’s later assessment, this endorsement ‘lifted Capt. Shawe-Taylor’s proposal from the insignificance of an irresponsible newspaper squib to the proportions of a national event of the first magnitude’.130 Neither he nor Redmond, however, at first treated it seriously, Redmond writing to O’Brien: ‘Of course, Shawe-Taylor’s suggestion only made me laugh’, and telling a Waterford audience that the letter writers were ‘a few unrepresentative men’ and that the struggle must go on until the ‘commanders of the landlord army’, and not only its privates, were ready for peace.131 When Shawe-Taylor wrote to him directly on 15 September, however, his reply was open-minded:
I suppose, however, that I may take it for granted that it is a proposal for the abolition of dual ownership of land in Ireland. If this be so, I could not take the responsibility of refusing to confer upon this subject with genuine representatives of the landlords, but it would be absurd, as you must admit, for me to go into a Conference with men who had no authority to give effect to any conclusions arrived at. I fear at this stage I can give you no more definite reply.132
By this point, O’Brien was also willing to take part. Before sending his reply to Shawe-Taylor, Redmond asked O’Brien to show it to Dillon, ‘and if he approves, please post it for me’.133 It seems that Dillon did see the reply, and on 22 September the two men’s letters were published. The following day, two of Shawe-Taylor’s landlord nominees publicly rejected the proposal, and three weeks later the Landowners’ Convention voted in the same spirit by seventy-seven to fourteen.134 Undeterred, the Earl of Mayo and thirteen other landlords issued a circular, published in the press on 18 October, dissenting from the Convention decision and stating their intention to canvass the opinion of all landowners of more than 500 acres (4,000 of an estimated 13,000; smaller-estate owners were presumed to be predominantly in favour).135
As the Irish landlords deliberated, Redmond and Amy sailed for New York on 10 October, this time in the company of Dillon and Davitt, Mrs John Martin, the aged sister of John Mitchel, and young William, who celebrated his sixteenth birthday on the voyage.136 Devlin’s organizing work had laid the groundwork for the holding of the first UIL of America convention in Boston. Redmond’s oration to the Symphony Hall gathering on 20 October stirred the audience with the claim that the UIL was now the ruling power in Ireland; he called for generous subscriptions to match a fund of $500,000 being raised by the landlords to counter the League. Having fired up the crowd with talk of Ireland’s ‘grand old fighting race’ and its right to win freedom through armed insurrection, he brought them back to earth:
… if anybody tells me at this moment, and under the existing conditions in Ireland, that that is possible, I say he is either endeavouring to deceive people or he is ignorant of the facts.137
The delegates responded well to the sight of Redmond and Dillon together as visible evidence of the reunion, and the convention was judged to be a significant success, resulting in pledges of $100,000 (£20,000) in subscriptions to be paid within six months, the first £2,000 instalment of which arrived in Ireland in December.138
Leaving Dillon and Davitt in the US, Redmond arrived home to the news that the landlord poll had shown a two-to-one majority in favour of a conference.139 At Bermondsey, he addressed a London Irish audience on the changed political conditions in Ireland. ‘For the first time in their whole history, the great majority of Irish landlords are speaking words of sense and reason and conciliation….’140 In reality, the Shawe-Taylor initiative offered not only an escape for landlords from the spiral of mounting debt and diminishing control that Redmond had described in his Commons speech, but also rescue for Redmond and O’Brien from the crisis facing their agrarian campaign, as well as for Wyndham from the imminent collapse of his own plans for a transformation of the land system.141
By early December, another landlord poll had chosen four representatives: the Earl of Dunraven, owner of more than 16,000 acres in Munster, the Earl of Mayo, Col. Hutcheson Poë and Col. Nugent Everard. On 1 December, Redmond met Dunraven to draw up terms of reference for the conference. He was told that the Government meant ‘a big thing’ and that Wyndham was ‘breast high for a big deal’; Dunraven himself also had views ‘as to some kind of Home Rule afterwards’, as Redmond reported to O’Brien.142 The Government’s favourable attitude had been indicated by the appointment as Under-Secretary