between meetings of the Land Conference to convey him to Portsalon, Co. Donegal, where he left him with the family of Col. Barton, a local landlord and hotelier, for a month.15 He received advice and offers of help from several sources. His old colleague from Parnellite days, Pierce Mahony (now O’Mahony), offered a rest cure for William at his own estate at Grange Con in west Wicklow.16 It seems likely that William was sent to the US. The following September, his father wrote to O’Brien from Aughavanagh to turn down an urgent request to meet in Dublin because ‘My boy is coming up here for a few days and as I have not had him with me for nearly a year I want to stay’.17 William’s disorder seems to have resolved itself gradually, as Redmond left him at Aughavanagh in the summer of 1907, after which he began law studies.18 Three years later, William was called to the Irish Bar and was ready to start his own political career.
Redmond’s personal ethos of fidelity to political and religious duty showed its less attractive side in his harsh response to the failed religious vocation of his nephew Louis Redmond-Howard, the orphaned son of his sister Dorothea. Louis’ father had died when he was one year old, his mother when he was fourteen, and he had joined the Benedictine monastery at Great Malvern, Worcestershire, at the age of seventeen. In the summer of 1907, then aged twenty-three and having just taken final vows, Louis wrote to Redmond that he realized that he had made a great mistake, had undergone a severe mental crisis and was applying to Rome to be released from his vows. His hope to explain matters in person was rebuffed by Redmond, whose response was far less sympathetic than that of the lad’s religious superiors, who approved his petition for a dispensation. Refusing to believe that Louis had not understood the irrevocability of the vows he had taken, Redmond wrote that his behaviour had been ‘deceitful, ungrateful to the Order which has done so much for him and therefore disgraceful’. He would not intervene when Louis wished to reclaim the small property inheritance from his mother that he had allowed to pass to his sister Dora (now Dame Therese, a Benedictine nun at Ypres) who had donated it to the order. By March 1908, Louis had received his dispensation from Rome and wished to begin law studies in London immediately. In urgent need of money, he indirectly approached Redmond about the possibility of his purchasing his inheritance. Redmond was unrelenting, refusing all appeals for an allowance for Louis or the purchase of his property. As far as he and his family were concerned, Louis would have to ‘face the world alone’.19
II
Redmond’s election as leader of the Irish Party – ‘that curious blend of Trollopian fixers, political journalists, respectable ex-Fenians and closet imperialists’20 – was a chance affair, a planetary conjunction of individuals whose diverse trajectories brought them to his support at the right moment. As John Dillon’s biographer, the late F.S.L. Lyons, pointed out, all knew that it was not a genuine union of hearts.21 The first year of reunion had been overshadowed by the persistence of conflict, not between former Parnellites and anti-Parnellites, but between three of the leading former anti-Parnellites. William O’Brien, the former anti-Parnellite MP for Cork City, had founded the United Irish League in 1898 with the dual purpose of reviving land reform agitation and ending the split. With the second goal achieved, O’Brien campaigned to have the UIL become the controlling force in the reunited party. This struggle won him the support of Dillon, the deputy leader and MP for East Mayo, but pitted both against Tim Healy, MP for North Louth. The latter saw in UIL dominance a vehicle for O’Brien’s vanity and dictatorial tendencies, while O’Brien portrayed Healy as the perpetuator of the factionalism that had plagued the 1890s. Redmond, concerned above all as new leader to prevent a new division, proved to be too weak politically to repress the conflict, which ended in what Redmond called ‘making peace with a hatchet’: the expulsion of Healy at the December 1900 UIL convention.22
O’Brien’s metaphor for Healy’s presence in the party as a ‘poisoned bullet’ proved apposite. The removal of Healy at last allowed the healing process begun a year earlier to take effect. The sudden end of bitter, personal in-fighting liberated the energies of the party and allowed it to function with a coherence of purpose and an efficiency that had not been seen since pre-split days. Redmond’s adroit handling of the December convention had averted another bifurcation. Opposed to Healy’s exclusion, yet aware of how marginal his position had become, he was determined to put the interests of the reunited party above all other considerations. In navigating a safe course through the clashes of giant egos, he was always vulnerable to the charge, from one side, of failing to ‘stand up to’ the other. Just as O’Brien in a later crisis would damn him with faint praise for his ‘accommodating opinions’, Healy would complain in his memoirs that Redmond had ‘feebly opposed’ his expulsion.23
The key to Redmond’s ability to heal the wounds of the Parnell split, and, ultimately, to his longevity as party leader, lies in the combination of his personal characteristics with his particular political strengths and weaknesses. Of the prominent men who might have become leader in 1900, and given that Dillon had already given up the leadership of the anti-Parnellites, it is inconceivable that O’Brien, with his bursts of manic energy punctuated by long periods of exhaustion, or Healy, with his acid tongue and inability to work with colleagues, could have healed the divisions in the party at that time. Redmond’s ‘accommodating opinions’ and evenness of temper, on the other hand, allowed him to work with people to whom he had been opposed for a decade. His personal reserve superficially resembled that of Parnell, but he lacked what Horgan called ‘that daemonic spirit which frightens as well as inspires and which made Parnell a great leader of men’.24 Instead, he was noted for kindliness, courtesy and tact, as well as a fine sense of humour. There were none of the mystifying disappearances that had characterized Parnell in his later years. His scrupulous attention to work and punctilious attendance at Parliament – described as ‘almost mechanically systematic and punctual’ – soon won all-round admiration, all the more for the obvious self-discipline involved, since some old friends remembered him as ‘rather fond of his ease’.25 The results were soon obvious, as he told an American correspondent in April 1901:
There is not a trace, as far as I can observe, of bitterness or ill-feeling arising out of the old Parnellite and anti-Parnellite split. Nothing could be better, or, indeed, more generous than the manner in which I have been treated by the entire party… this includes every man in the party, from Mr Dillon downwards.26
Redmond’s qualifications for leadership were considered to be his judgment, his superb oratorical powers and his unrivalled grasp of parliamentary procedure, traits that would continue to win him general acceptance as the best advocate of the Home Rule cause at Westminster. They helped to overcome the distrust felt by many former opponents, especially those close to Dillon, who saw him as unsound on the agrarian issue. However, his inclusive, Parnellite rhetoric, sailing above the ethnic demagoguery of some colleagues, left Irish audiences with feelings of admiration rather than visceral fire. The lack of a fanatical personal following in turn dealt him one of his failings as leader: an underestimation of his powers and a failure to assert his own political ideas that would undermine him at crucial moments in later years.27
In reality, Redmond’s powers as leader were greatly circumscribed in comparison with those of Parnell. Under the UIL principles imposed on the party by O’Brien, control of candidate selection had moved from the leader and party caucuses to the League’s constituency organization. This shifted