Background

To appreciate the context of the Liberal push for home rule in the longer his­tory of Anglo-Irish relations in the nineteenth century, it is helpful to think of three waves of the so-called �Irish question’: the Great Famine of 1845 and the British response led by Lord Russell’s Whigs in the late 1840s, Fenian violence of the late 1860s and Gladstone’s subsequent adoption of the Irish cause in his first premiership, and finally the economic and agricultural turmoil in Ireland in the late 1870s and Gladstone’s further Irish reforms in the early 1880s.

1.1 The Great Famine and Russell’s Premiership

At the time of the push for home rule in the 1880s Ireland had been under the unified parliament with Great Britain since the Act of Union in 1800, in which it was represented by 100 MPs, 28 lords temporal, and 4 lords spiritual. Organised Irish opposition to this arrangement began with Daniel O’Connell’s National Repeal Association in 1841. O’Connell had successfully pressed for Roman Cath­olic emancipation in the 1820s but remained unsatisfied by Westminster’s han­dling of Irish affairs. His movement foundered when a series of mass meetings led to his arrest for seditious conspiracy in 1844, after which the Young Ireland group briefly took up the mantle of the independence movement until a failed revolt precipitated their downfall in 1848.^{[1175] [1176] [1177] Meanwhile, the great potato famine had begun to plague Ireland in 1845, leading to mass starvation and migration. Ostensibly seeking to lower food prices in Ireland, while seizing the opportu­nity to push his free trade policy, Sir Robert Peel famously repealed the Corn Laws in 1846, promptly securing him a vote of no confidence and replacement by a Whig government under Lord John Russell. Peel’s market liberalisation bringing scant improvement in Ireland, Russell created a public works pro­gram, which he tasked Charles Trevelyan to administer alongside the direct re­lief program.11 Trevelyan, a strong believer in laissez-faire, limited the perfor­mance of these programs, complementing his trust in market forces with strong anti-Irish sentiment, seeing the famine as �the judgment of God’ sent �to teach the Irish a lesson’?2 Upwards of one million Irish died from starvation or disease during Russell’s six-year premiership, and another million were forced to emi­grate.}

1.2 Gladstone’s First Premiership

After Russell’s premiership ended in 1852, Irish issues receded from the politi­cal foreground where they remained until Gladstone’s first campaign as Liberal Party leader in the 1868 election. Gladstone won the election over Disraeli on a platform focused on Ireland. Speaking in Southport in December 1867 he announced his support for disestablishment of the Church of Ireland and made �justice for Ireland' his mantra in 1867 Southport speech.^{[1178] [1179] [1180] Just days be­fore this speech, Fenian operatives had bombed London's Clerkenwell Prison in an effort to free arms supplier Richard Burke, killing twelve and injuring scores more. The Clerkenwell bombing was only the latest and worst in a re­cent spree of Fenian disruptions, including the abduction of two prisoners in Manchester in 1867 and three attempted raids on British forts in Canada in 1866. Gladstone thus risked appearing soft by adopting a platform of Irish re­form, but the gamble paid off. Once in government, Gladstone won passage of bills disestablishing the Church of Ireland (1869) and reforming land law (1870), which involved establishing a money-loan program for tenants wishing to buy their holdings.}

1.3 The Land War and Gladstone’s Second Premiership

After Gladstone lost the 1874 election, Disraeli held the premiership until 1880, during which time he maintained a largely inactive posture towards Ireland. This was more out of a sense that any Irish policy would be more contentious than no Irish policy than it was a result of quietness in Ireland itself. Indeed, Disraeli's premiership coincided with economic depression and agricultural violence that threw the Irish question once again onto centre stage. Thanks to the worldwide boom in railway transportation, foreign imports increased dra­matically in the 70s, particularly wheat from American farms and refrigerated meat from Argentina and Australia.

By 1879, therefore, things had clearly come to a head. Irish nationalist lead­ers capitalised on the discontent in October by forming the Irish National Land League to advocate for the �Three Fs’ of land reform: fixity of tenure, free sale, and fair rents. Irish MP Charles Stewart Parnell served as its first president. Although himself a landowning Anglican from an old Ascendancy family, Par­nell had been among the most radical members of the Home Rule League since shortly after its founding by Irish MP Isaac Butt in 1873. Amiable and re­strained (and an Anglican landowner like Parnell), Butt had played by the rules and hoped home rule would come through the normal channels of parliamen­tary politics. Hence it was a felicitous coincidence that the fateful year 1879 also saw Butt’s death and eventual replacement as leader of the Home Rule League by Parnell in 1880 after a brief period of leadership by the similarly conciliatory William Shaw. In contrast with Butt, Parnell’s more aggressive leadership relied heavily upon obstructionist parliamentary tactics like the filibuster.^{[1181] [1182]}

Parnell’s vigorous obstructionism could draw only so much attention to the Irish question without a fundamental change to the representative structure of Westminster: until Irish MPs were so numerous as to command the balance of power between Liberals and Tories, obstructionism was all they had.

With Irish problems temporarily abated, Gladstone turned his attention to one of his chief ambitions for his second and quite possibly final premiership: suffrage reform.

By the time of the 1885 election Gladstone had already resigned as Prime Minister over foreign policy blunders - including the brutal death of General Charles Gordon in Sudan, which drew Gladstone (unintentionally) public re­buke from the Queen - and Lord Salisbury had piloted a minority Tory govern­ment for five months. When the results were announced in mid-December it was Liberals 50%, Tories 43% and Irish 7%.^{[1185] [1186] Parnell finally had real leverage. During the ensuing months of coalition negotiations the question was who would win the Irish members, Liberals or Tories, and how? Initially Gladstone seemed to favour a Tory-led coalition in favour of home rule, on grounds that, Tories being in government, this would keep the Irish question above party politics.21 He indicated as much in a letter to Arthur Balfour, Tory minister and Salisbury’s nephew. However, almost concurrently with his letter to Balfour, Gladstone’s son and accomplice, Herbert, leaked notice of his father’s conver­sion to home rule in what appears to have been a rogue operation later dubbed the �Hawarden Kite’. Although Gladstone’s complicity in the leak is questiona­ble, it had the dubious virtue of being completely accurate and thus set in mo­tion the inevitable realignment that resulted in a Gladstone home rule govern­ment and eventually alienated the many unionist Liberals, both Whig (like Lord Hartington) and Radical (like Joseph Chamberlain) from their party. But in February of 1886 their allegiance was at least notionally still up for grabs. Hence began the ideological campaign for Irish home rule.}

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