parnell

PARNELL AND IRISH NATONALISM
The two-and-a-half years Joyce attended Clongowes happened to coincide with the climax of the Parnell affair, which seized the young boy's imagination. Charles Stewart Parnell, a Protestant landholder entered the British Parliament as an Irish representative in 1875. Along with the former "Fenian", or Irish revolutionary, Michael Davitt, he founded the predominantly Catholic Land League to redistribute farm land. Gradually he became head of a political group that included nationalists of all sorts from moderates to militant revolutionaries. By 1879 he had become leader of the Home Rule movement, which insisted that the Irish be allowed a measure of self-government. He managed to unite the Irish vote in the House of Commons, and by threatening various tactics of parliamentary obstruction, he was able to bargain for the Prime Minister Gladstone's support for Home Rule. His cause suffered a setback in 1882, when a radical group called the Invincibles assassinated two British officials in Phoenix Park, northwest of Dublin. Although Parnell publicly condemned the assassination, in 1887 the London Times ran a series of articles based on information supplied by a former nationalist named Piggott that accused Parnell of supporting the Invincibles. A trial showed the letters supposedly written by Parnell were forgeries, but the violent feelings of Parnell's conservative opposition were made clear. Then in 1890 Parnell was accused of adultery in a divorce suit brought by Captain O'Shea, a former member of the Home Rule party, against his wife Katharine.

The trial made headlines. Parnell's ten-year liaison with Mrs. O'Shea, to which the Captain had given tacit assent, was the stuff of scandal, and the intimate details that emerged were embarrassing for all concerned. For instance, Katharine and Parnell addressed one another as "King" and "Queen" in private. One of Parnell's code names in communicating with his lover, "Mr. Fox," became widely known, while Mrs. O'Shea was universally referred to as "Kitty," which was coincidentally a slang term for a prostitute. Parnell was a man of enormous pride and rather cold, aristocratic demeanor. He refused to defend against the charge and wished only to marry Mrs. O'Shea, who for ten years had remained legally married to her husband only in hopes of a legacy. Gladstone decided that his Liberal party in its fight for Home Rule could not afford to be associated with a man of questionable moral character, and the Irish party, at the urging of Davitt and Tim Healy, removed Parnell from leadership. Parnell refused to capitulate, and the party spilt; he was denounced by Catholic churchmen, whose leaders hoped to regain influence over the Nationalist movement. Among his attackers was Archbishop William Walsh, whom Simon Dedalus characterizes as "Billy the Lip."

As his power diminished, Parnell was accused of outrageous things, such as embezzling the Land League's "Paris funds" to subsidize his love life. Following his marriage to Kitty he continued to take his campaign to the people, in weakening health, and in 1891 died. As many as 150,000 people accompanied his sealed coffin to Glasnevin cemetery, led by the radical Fenians who had supported him at the end. In a revulsion of popular feeling, Parnell gained a kind of mythic status even among many of those who had attacked him, and as it became clear that Nationalism was in disarray he became the "dead king" who alone could have led Ireland to independence. Following his death the nine-year-old Joyce wrote a bitter broadside poem against Parnell's betrayers entitled "Et tu Healy," which John Joyce had printed. Joyce came to see Parnell as a martyr, betrayed by his own people, in the mold of earlier nationalist heroes who had led aborted insurrections, such as Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet. Like Joyce, Stephen Dedalus views himself as their potential successor, an Artist-Hero who may save his country not only from its enemies but from itself.