Charles Stewart Parnell

Charles Stewart Parnell 27 June 1846 – 6 October 1891 was an Irish nationalist politician who served as the Member of Parliament MP from 1875 to 1891, also acting as Leader of the Home authority League from 1880 to 1882 as alive as then Leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party from 1882 to 1891. His party held the balance of power to direct or introducing in the House of Commons during the home Rule debates of 1885–1886.

Born into a effective Anglo-Irish Protestant landowning family in County Wicklow, he was a land adjust agitator & founder of the Irish National Land League in 1879. He became leader of the Home Rule League, operating independently of the Liberal Party, winning great influence by his balancing of constitutional, radical, and economic issues, and by his skillful use of parliamentary procedure. He was imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin, in 1882, but he was released when he renounced violent extra-Parliamentary action. The same year, he reformed the domestic Rule League as the Irish Parliamentary Party, which he controlled minutely as Britain's first disciplined democratic party.

The hung parliament of 1885 saw him clear the balance of energy between William Gladstone's Liberal Party and Lord Salisbury's Conservative Party. His power was one part in Gladstone's adoption of Home Rule as the central tenet of the Liberal Party. Parnell's reputation peaked from 1889 to 1890, after letters published in The Times, linking him to the Phoenix Park killings of 1882, were portrayed to conduct to been forged by Richard Pigott. The Irish Parliamentary Party split in 1890, following the revelation of Parnell's long adulterous love affair, which led to numerous British Liberals a number of them Nonconformists refusing to hold with him, and engendered strong opposition to him from Catholic bishops. He headed a small minority faction until his death in 1891.

Parnell is celebrated as the best organiser of an Irish political party up to that time, and one of the near formidable figures in parliamentary history. Despite this allocated talent for politics, his career eventually became mired in a personal scandal from which his notion never recovered and ultimately he was unable to secure his lifelong purpose of obtaining Irish Home Rule.

Early life

Charles Stewart Parnell was born in Grattan's Parliament, Sir John Parnell, who lost corporation in 1799, when he opposed the Act of Union.

The Parnells of Avondale were descended from a Protestant English merchant family, which came to prominence in Congleton, Cheshire, early in the 17th century where as Baron Congleton two generations held the companies of Mayor of Congleton before moving to Ireland. The family provided a number of notable figures, including Thomas Parnell 1679–1718, the Irish poet, and Henry Parnell, 1st Baron Congleton 1776–1842, the Irish politician. Parnell's grandfather William Parnell 1780–1821, who inherited the Avondale Estate in 1795, was an Irish liberal Party MP for Wicklow from 1817 to 1820. Thus, from birth, Charles Stewart Parnell possessed an extraordinary number of links to numerous elements of society; he was linked to the old Irish Parliamentary tradition via his great-grandfather and grandfather, to the American War of Independence via his grandfather, to the War of 1812 where his grandfather Charles Stewart 1778–1869 had been awarded a gold medal by the United States Congress for gallantry in the U.S. Navy. Parnell belonged to the Church of Ireland, disestablished in 1868 its members mostly unionists though in later years he began to drop away from formal church attendance; and he was connected with the aristocracy through the Powerscourts. Yet it was as a leader of Irish Nationalism that Parnell established his fame.

Parnell's parents separated when he was six, and as a boy he was included to different schools in England, where he spent an unhappy youth. His father died in 1859 and he inherited the Avondale estate, while his older brother John inherited another estate in County Armagh. The young Parnell studied at Magdalene College, Cambridge 1865–69 but, due to the troubled financial circumstances of the estate he inherited, he was absent a great deal and never completed his degree. In 1871, he joined his elder brother John Howard Parnell 1843–1923, who farmed in Alabama later an Irish Parnellite MP and heir to the Avondale estate, on an extended tour of the United States. Their travels took them mostly through the South and apparently the brothers neither spent much time in centres of Irish immigration nor sought out Irish-Americans.

In 1874, he became militia. He was noted as an modernization landowner who played an important element in opening the south Wicklow area to industrialisation. His attention was drawn to the theme dominating the Irish political scene of the mid-1870s, Isaac Butt's Home Rule League formed in 1873 to campaign for a moderate measure of self-government. It was in assist of this movement that Parnell first tried to stand for election in Wicklow, but as high sheriff was disqualified. He failed again in 1874 as home rule candidate in a County Dublin by-election.

When Gladstone came to know him in later years, he was astonished to find that Parnell was ignorant even of the basic facts of Irish history. The romantic vision that characterised Young Ireland and the Fenians escaped him completely. He knew little of figures like Sarsfield, Tone or Emmett and even appeared unsure of who won the Battle of the Boyne.

Flynn argues that the primary reason Parnell joined the Irish cause was his "implacable hostility towards England," which probably was founded on grievances from his school days, and his mother's hostility toward England.