CHAS. STEWART PARNELL

Taranaki Daily News, 10 July 1929, Page 15

CHAS. STEWART PARNELL

"A MAN OF MYSTERY” .FOUGHT AGAINST HOWLING MOB STRANGE SECRETS OF HIS LIFE. It is doubtful if in modern times there has existed such a man of incalculable mystery as Charles Stewart Parnell. Cold, secretive to the point of mania, unemotional almost to the point of cruelty, lie fought the last five years of his life against the howling mob of those who had once been his friends in his efforts to protect from insults another man’s wife with whom he was in love. And although he has been dead almost forty yeans, there are still people in Ireland who believe that he is alive; and although the political cause for which he fought so desperately, and which killed him in the end, is nowadays only a matter of dust-and-llansard, he still continues to be the hero—and the villian—of innumerable biographies. Even that violent Ulsterman of genius, Mr. St. John Ervine, bis best biographer, had to confess that he began to write his book with a feeling of prejudice against Parnell, but "ended it with a feeling of deep affection for him.” Parnell is the gigantic figure who looms over the Rt. Hon. T. P. O’Connor’s “Memoirs of an Old Parliamentarian,” which one might describe as the last Testament of the old Irish Parliamentary Party. Mr. O'Connor has many amusing and exciting stories to tell of life at Westminster in the ’seventies, the ’eighties, and the ’ninties,. which even now make interesting reading, but it is with the enigmatic figure of Charles Stewart Parnell that he seems to be primarily concerned. It is a tragic story, devastatingly tragic at times, and vividly told. DEVOID OF LITERARY TASTE. It will surprise a good many modern English readers to learn that Parnell was a man almost completely devoid of literary taste. “He did not,” writes Mr. O’Connor, “get any of his inspiration from reading. 1 doubt if Parnell to the very end of his days could give you anything like a correct account of any epoch of Irish history.” Again he tells us: —

"Parnell had, in no cense of the word, any literary taste; there are not half a dozen records of visits to a theatre; the only quotation from Irish poetry he is ever recorded as making were the wellknown lines: “First flower of the earth, first gem of the sea” —and my recollection is that he quoted even those wrong, substituting ‘jewel’ for ‘gem’ and ‘ocean’ for ‘sea.’ ”

He was, too, “the most slatternly of men,” and “it used to be said that when he was called from his belated and feverish attempts to prepare a speech in the library of the House of Commons, he lost all his papers in the short distance between the library and his place in the House.” Curiously secretive to the point of childishness, he suffered from strange superstitions. Ho had a “hatred and a terror of the colour green” and the number thirteen. So great was his fear of thirteen that once when Mr. Maurice Healy brought him a draft of the Land Reform Bill, which contained thirteen clauses, he ordered the draftsman either “to reduce the number of clauses to twelve or increase them to fourteen”! Even more eccentric was his absolute indifference to money”:— “lie was not an extravagant man; on the contrary, he was wha't the Irish call a ‘rather near’ man; but he was slatternly, never answered letters, took no notice of bills, and ran up accounts unconsciously and for years at a time. He used to take many of his meals at a hotel at Wicklow', quite close to his ancestral home; I believe none of his lunches was paid for during a period of nearly a quarter of a century, and when he died one of the claims on his estate were the unpaid bills of his hotel.” It is a curious fact, too, that when he went to consult Sir Henry Thompson, the great medical specialist, he always went under an assumed name, though his identity was palpable to everyone!

A TRAGIC LOVE AFFAIR. It is, of course, in the extraordinary love affair of Parnell and Mrs. O’Shea—a love ali'air which, unhappily, caused Parnell’s downfall and split the Irish party in two —that most modern readers will bo interested, Mrs. O’Shea, a woman of considerable beauty—she died in 1921—it will be remembered, was the wife of Captain O’Shea, an Irishman with political ambitions. Before her marriage to O’Shea she was Kato Wood, daughter of a baronet, niece of Lord Hatherley, a famous Lord Chancellor, and sister of Sir Evelyn Wood the soldier. When she met Parnell, whom she was anxious to have grace her dinner-parties, she had already fallen out of love with her husband, but they do not seem at that time to have contemplated divorce. She, too, was reckless with money and had a mania for taking new houses, “She took up all kinds of leases of houses,” writes Mr. O'Connor of her in her later days, “and every change of abode involved the removal of her largo household—her daughters, her horses, her dogs and her furniture.”

Parnell conducted his courtship in such secrecy that until O'Shea, like a bolt from the blue, launched his proceedings for divorce, none of his followers had the slightest inkling that affairs were moving towards tragedy. Mrs. O'Shea would come to watch Parnell from the Ladies’ Gallery at the House of Commons, and “sometimes, when he wanted to see her before she went home, he would make a signal with his handkerchief, indicating that she was to meet him at Charing Cross.”

“Sometimes they would meet at Brighton. Ou one occasion he got into the train at Clapham Junction. She did not at first recognise him, for he had cut off his beard with his pocket scissors in the train, and had a white muffler around his throat and on the lower part of hie face. Ho carried his disguises to farcical limits. Katharine Tynan tells us of having seen him, muffled* and furtive, like a man with a dreadful secret in his soul, shambling along the London streets.” “THE MISTRESS OF THE PARTY.”

Tho divorce proceedings, of course, rent the Irish party in two. There were angry scenes in which foul language was bandied, in which Mr. ‘Tim’ 5 Healy cried out in exasperation, "Who is to be mistress of the party?” “At that terrible interjection passion froze. Parnell rose, with that blazing light in his eyes, and members thought he would strike Mr. Hcaly.yMr. Sexton yy’wiljsie of. : • ■■ A..., jJUD bodzhlV

felt the gravity of the remark so much that he confessed he hoped that Parnell would do so. Mr. Arthur O’Connor said: ‘I appeal to my friend the chairman.’ ‘Better appeal to your own friends,” said Parnell; ‘better appeal to that cowardly little scoundrel there, that in an assembly of Irishmen dares to insult a woman.’ ”

It was during Parnell’s imprisonment that Mrs. O’Shea bore a daughter to Parnell—a child of sorrow that was to live only a few weeks: — “‘I made an alter of flowers in the drawing-room,’ says Mrs. O’Shea, ‘as the child was much too ill to be taken to church, and there the priest came and baptised Sophie Claude — Sophie after Parnell’s sister and Claude after Lord Truro, an old friend of mine.’ ” “A few days after the death of the baby, Mrs. O’Shea got the welcome news that Parnell might come to her fo. a fewhours and, perhaps, see the child alive. Parnell had obtained a parole of a week from Kilmainham Gaol to attend the funeral of his nephew in Paris. ‘ln the April morning,’ she says ‘when the air was fragrant with the sweet freshness of the spring flowers, and the very breath of life was in the wind, Parnell came to me and I put his dying child in his arms.’” But the child did not die for some days: “This infatuated lover, this equally infatuated woman, with the child lying dead by her side as Parnell took his way back to his prison in Dublin, with the jealous and vigilant husband in another •room of the house, to avoid —it is hard to imagine a more tragic scene. THE SECRET MARRIAGE.

' Three months before his death, Parnell was secretly married to Mrs. O’Shea by the Registrar at Steyning. Mr. O’Connor describes the story of their love-affair as “an idyll.” “Every passage of it, every letter in it,” he says, “is a picture of an association that had in it all the elements that go to make a great, true love-story.” As Parnell himself said to his wife one evening after their marriage, “the storms and thunderings will never hurt us now, Queenie, my Wife, for there is nothing in the wide world that can be greater than our love; there -is nothing in all the world but you and I.” But Parnell, unhappily, had calculated wrongly, for in Ireland “the marriage had an opposite reaction to that which Parnell had hoped.” The clergy were roused to anger by what they looked upon as a “blatant flaunting of his sin.” “From that hour,” says Mr. O’Connor, “he was politically doomed.” In another three months this strange lover of 45 had met his death, by strain and over work, by the worry caused by the famous forged letters which appeared in The Times. No longer was “Queenie” to receive his “good night” telegrams, which he sent to her every evening he was away from her; no longer receive those passionate expostulations, his letters. But in the background, writes Mr. O'Connor, there was even deeper tragedy.Talking to the late John Dillon, a fewdays before his death, Mr. O'Connor was assured that in those last . tragically happy days of marriage “Parnell’s inheritance of insanity had at last fallen upon him, and that Parnell must bo regarded as having been more or less insane during the last months of his life.”