now would throw the ball in the Lords into the hands of those who are not too friendly to the bill and myself’. On the question of allotments for labourers, he promised to bring in a separate bill the following year.168
The toll taken by these arduous negotiations is evident from Redmond’s letters to O’Brien. Writing in May after a long talk with Dillon, he was very sorry to say that the latter was ‘far from well’ and did not seem fit for the strain of the committee stage. As for himself:
I am thinking of going away somewhere on the Continent for ten days or a fortnight as I feel myself that I want a few days clear of politics and I cannot get that in Ireland or here.169
Taking time away from the House near the end of the committee stage, he spoke of his workload. He had come to Burnley in Lancashire to thank Irish nationalists there ‘in the midst of anxious and exhausting work in Parliament’, in which they had been working fourteen to fifteen hours a day on the bill, then afterwards on related private work. He was not minded to complain:
I have been 22 years in the English Parliament, and today, for the first time in my experience, that Parliament is engaged in the work of attempting to legislate for Ireland according to Irish ideas.170
The last phases of the bill’s passage were uneventful. It became law on 14 August, and was due to come into effect on 1 November.171 Wyndham’s Land Act marks the high point of the policy sometimes called ‘Killing Home Rule with Kindness’, begun by the Tories on their accession to power in 1895, which already included the great reform of Irish local government in 1898 and the setting up of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction the following year.
As the gruelling session closed, Redmond and O’Brien had reason to savour the success of their efforts. According to O’Brien’s wife Sophie, her husband was ‘well pleased to leave Redmond all the glory and éclat of the achievement’.172 Only the wildlife of south Wicklow, it seemed, had reason to fear the future. The Daily News commented:
After work play. Mr John Redmond left London last night for Aughavanagh, where the Irish leader’s shooting lodge is situated. Mr Redmond has ‘bagged’ in Parliament this year the biggest game that any Irish leader has brought down since the Union. But it should not be forgotten… that this year’s measure has passed the Commons with the full sympathy and support of the Liberal Party. From the Irish standpoint, Mr Redmond’s leadership during the session now drawing to a close has placed him in a position of political influence in Ireland which even the greatest of his predecessors hardly excelled… the Irish now see in Mr Redmond a leader who has welded the Irish Party into a highly effective force more really united and better disciplined than perhaps that party has at any time been.173
He was about to be reminded of just how tenuous that unity was, and how fragile a thing his political influence.
Notes and References
1W.S. Blunt, My Diaries (London, 1920), diary entry for 15 May 1901, p. 422.
2Private Redmond collection, Dr Mary Green.
3Redmond to O’Brien, 28 Aug. 1901, OBP Ms. 10,496 (5). Margaret Leamy remembered a visit to Aughavanagh that ‘was made happy and delightful by the never-failing thoughtfulness and sweet kindly feeling of our hostess Mrs John Redmond’. Margaret Leamy, Parnell’s Faithful Few (New York, 1936), p. 172.
4Newscuttings of visit of Irish envoys to UIL of America convention in Boston, 1908, RP Ms. 7443.
5F.J., 26 Oct. 1914.
6Pat O’Brien MP to Frank Sheehy-Skeffington, 4 May 1907, Sheehy-Skeffington Papers, Ms. 21,618; Denis Gwynn, The Life of John Redmond (London, 1932), pp. 25–7.
7Stephen Gwynn, John Redmond’s Last Years (London, 1919), passim.
8F.S.L. Lyons, John Dillon:a biography (London, 1968), p. 246.
9Katherine Tynan, Memories (London, 1924), pp. 62–3.
10Denis Gwynn, author of the first full-length biography of Redmond, told the Director of the National Library in 1952, twenty years after the publication of his biography, that he had taken away three of seven trunks of papers from Aughavanagh; he had not gone through the other four as they dealt with by-elections and UIL affairs. Of the three he took, he worked through them, selecting the important material for his book and returning the rest in two trunks to Captain Redmond (John’s son). ‘They have apparently disappeared,’ he noted. The single trunk kept by Gwynn contained the papers that now form the bulk of the more than 10,000 documents in the Redmond Mss. at the National Library of Ireland. Denis Gwynn to Edward McLysaght, 7 Oct. 1952, RP Ms. 15,280.
11D. Gwynn, Life, pp. 25–6.
12Ibid.; John J. Horgan, Review of Stephen Gwynn’s John Redmond’s Last Years in Studies, March 1920, pp. 139–141.
13Dillon wrote: ‘I need hardly say that I am extremely sorry to hear of the trouble you are involved in. It is a most melancholy and painful business….’ Dillon to Redmond, 12 Sep. 1902, RP Ms. 15, 182 (3).
14Redmond to O’Brien, 10 Nov. 1902, OBP Ms. 10,496 (6).
15Redmond to Amy Redmond, private Redmond collection, Dr Mary Green; Redmond to O’Brien, 26 Dec. 1902, OBP Ms. 10,496 (6).
16O’Mahony to Redmond, 15 Nov. 1902, RP Ms. 15,219 (3). O’Mahony (who in the meantime had moved to Sofia to set up an orphanage for Bulgarian victims of massacre) wrote in February 1904 hoping ‘that Willie progresses’. Three years later, O’Mahony was still offering to have the boy attended to at Grange Con. A party colleague, Edward Blake, wrote from Toronto to recommend ‘the Swedish treatment’, which he had heard was very efficacious in the case of the Duke of Hamilton, who had been having up to eight attacks a day and was rapidly sinking into paralysis. O’Mahony to Redmond, 22 Feb. 1904, RP Ms. 15,219 (3); Blake to Redmond, 6 Nov. 1902, RP Ms.15,170(2).
17Redmond to O’Brien, 14 Sep. 1903, OBP Ms. 10,496 (9).
18O’Mahony to Redmond, 20 Jul. 1907, RP Ms. 15,219 (3).