he chosen to publish his memoirs, he might have been expected to leave us an account of his relationship with Redmond – of the strengths and stresses inherent in their joint stewardship of the Party as well as of their earlier mutual hostility during the Parnell Split.
As it was, the only sympathetic memoir came from Stephen Gwynn, the Party’s MP for Galway City and one of its few members who had taken an active part in the wartime recruiting campaign with an enthusiasm approaching that of Redmond himself, enlisting, aged 51, in the 16th (Irish) Division and serving as a captain in a Connaught Rangers battalion on the Western Front. In John Redmond’s Last Years, Gwynn produced an elegiac account of his leader during the Home Rule crisis, the rebellion and its aftermath. However, Gwynn had not known Redmond in the years of the Split or the earlier period of his leadership. And, in describing Redmond’s sojourns at Aughavanagh, he may have overstated its seclusion as a place of retreat and recreation while underplaying its significance as a place of work also, a place where he kept up with his voluminous correspondence just as diligently as in London and where he received many visitors.
The memoirs came instead – and they were certainly prolific – from William O’Brien and Timothy Michael Healy. Both were former colleagues of Redmond who had parted company with him in the Split, then become embroiled in a bitter feud of their own that lasted over a decade before finally reconciling sufficiently to dog the steps of the Party leadership, united by a common hatred of Dillon and a common contempt for Redmond. Both men’s trajectories ended in an abandonment of constitutional nationalism and an embrace of Sinn Féin.
O’Brien produced three sets of memoirs, published in 1905, 1910 and 1920, each offering a different perspective on his changing relationship with Redmond. Healy produced, in 1928, as he was about to retire after six years as Governor General of the Irish Free State, a two-volume set of extracts from his own correspondence with commentary justifying his own actions and judging his contemporaries over four decades.
Much of the caricature of Redmond that has come down to us from the Sinn Féin-permeated political culture that later wrote him out of history – out of touch with the Irish people and Irish culture, too much time spent in London, too trusting of British politicians, his tendency to ‘compliance’ where Parnell had embodied ‘defiance’ – had originated in the writings of O’Brien and Healy.
However, although Redmond left no published testament, he did leave a body of finely crafted speeches and, being a prolific letter-writer who answered almost all his correspondents within a day or two, a vast correspondence amassed over four decades. Fortunately, the bulk of the latter is available to us in the collections held at the National Library of Ireland and Trinity College Dublin. The aim of this edited selection of extracts from that correspondence, apart from bringing to life many of the episodes of the vibrant political life of a period which Irish people were long assured by the educational curriculum was politically barren, is to give Redmond his own voice, to allow him to speak directly to us over a century, and, in doing so, to correct some of the elements of that caricature.
Any fair-minded reading of these letters cannot fail to register the toughness displayed in Redmond’s exchanges with British politicians. Whether he is lobbying Asquith for a satisfactory Home Rule declaration in late 1909, setting forth his ‘No Veto, No Budget’ ultimatum to the Government in 1910, warning it against partition proposals in 1913, urging his proposals for wartime Irish recruiting on the Prime Minister and Lord Kitchener or importuning Lloyd George to act to save the Irish Convention, there is throughout a gravity, a frankness, an urgency of tone and a persistence, sometimes to the point of tedious repetition, that are very far from the distorted image of the biddable lackey.
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The letters in general are courteously businesslike in style and content, conveying, in their neatness of handwriting and conciseness of style (a sharp contrast to the letter-writing style of Dillon), a strong impression of self-discipline. Little emotion is revealed. His commonest expression of feeling is ‘unease’ or ‘anxiety’, but stronger sentiments break through at moments of historic import or crisis. His letter to the American supporter John O’Callaghan in April 1901 conveys a real pride in what he has achieved in binding the wounds of the Split. There is nervous anticipation in his letter to William O’Brien of 20 January 1903, as the two men wait for the Land Bill which Chief Secretary George Wyndham had promised to base on the report of the Land Conference in which they had participated, with the aim of carrying out land purchase on ‘a much larger scale than ever before attempted’. A few years later, with the Liberals in power and the Home Rule ship still becalmed, he tries to assuage Alderman O’Mara’s impatience (‘You take too gloomy a view’) and to focus his attention on the Party’s programme of legislative reform. Excitement flashes through his cable to T.P. O’Connor in November 1909, telling of the imminent clash between the Houses of Parliament over the Lords’ veto and its implications for Ireland. There is a manifesto-like confidence in his public message to John Muldoon in July 1911: ‘I fear no rock ahead.’ For a defence of his actions in August–September 1914 at the outbreak of the Great War, it would be hard to equal his spirited communication to T.B. Fitzpatrick in Boston that recounts the ‘considerations of honour’ which had motivated him. A sense of vindication informs his letter to Alice Stopford Green following the split in the Volunteers in October 1914, as he asserts that the dissidents must be fought ‘vigorously and remorselessly’. A year later, after months of being flayed by the Irish Independent, which used the space created by the suspension of the Home Rule Act to discredit the Act and portray him and Dillon as weak leaders who have surrendered the Party’s independence, the tone has become rueful. He tells his old friend Fr Patrick Kavanagh ‘I have acquired a very thick skin. Otherwise I would be dead long ago.’
As might be expected in correspondence extending over such a long period, the letters cover a vast range of subjects and personalities. Those from his first decade breathe the excitement of the new MP for New Ross, pitched headlong into the white heat of Parliamentary battle in 1881 at a climactic moment in the Land League struggle, when uproar followed the arrest of Michael Davitt, and Redmond found himself taking his seat, making his first utterance and being ejected from the House, all within 24 hours. His relish for the fight with ‘Buckshot’ Forster over the coercion Bill is balanced by a surprisingly clear-eyed perception of Parnell and a mature assessment of Gladstone’s Land Bill and the Irish Party’s tactics in regard to it. In May 1886, there is his anxiety over the imminent fate of the first Home Rule Bill, instantly dismissed with the thought that, anyway, ‘success in the near future is assured’.
The letters from the Parnell Split show another side: an anguished but far from fanatical supporter of the Chief whose main concern is to create the possibility for him to retire with dignity, with adequate recognition for his great contribution in advancing the nationalist cause. As for his helping to keep the Split alive after the leader’s death, something often held against him in the 1890s, we are given clues to his motives in his indignation at having his attempts to secure Parnell’s voluntary retirement misrepresented by O’Brien as ‘betraying Parnell’.
Redmond’s correspondence of 1892 with the Liberal MP William Mather reveals him as having already thought deeply about the subtleties of the future constitutional relationship between Ireland and Great Britain under Home Rule. The following year, as the second Home Rule Bill was progressing through the Commons, this concern had expanded to the financial sphere. In letters written to Chief Secretary John Morley, we find him rejecting as ‘unjust and humiliating in the last degree’ the fiscal provision to deprive the Irish Parliament, not merely of the imposition of all taxes, but even of their collection, a measure that would cause him and his followers to vote against the Bill. This was not simply a pose adopted to please the Fenian rump who had attached themselves to Parnell and were now counted among his own following. There is a consistency of tone between this criticism and his representations to Asquith in 1912 over the proposal in Committee of the third Home Rule Bill to deprive the Irish Parliament of control of the Post Office as a concession to unionism. Although he was never dogmatic, as others were, on the question of fiscal autonomy, there
