12(a)Redmond presents colours to Irish National Volunteers at Maryborough (Portlaoise), 16 August 1914. Courtesy National Library of Ireland.
12(b)British Army recruiting poster quoting Redmond speech 1915. Courtesy National Library of Ireland.
13‘The Golden Moment’: political cartoon (Punch, 24 May 1916). Reproduced with permission of Punch Limited, www.punch.co.uk
14(a)At Aughavanagh circa 1915 (from left): William Archer (‘Billie’) Redmond MP, unidentified woman, John and Amy Redmond, Pat O’Brien MP. Courtesy Redmond family private collection.
14(b)John Redmond: studio portrait 1918. Courtesy Redmond family private collection.
15(a)T.P. O’Connor MP. Courtesy National Library of Ireland.
15(b)Joe Devlin MP. Courtesy National Library of Ireland.
15(c)Winston Churchill MP. Courtesy National Library of Ireland.
15(d)David Lloyd George MP. Copyright National Portrait Gallery, London.
16(a)Andrew Bonar Law MP (left) and Sir Edward Carson MP. Courtesy National Library of Ireland.
16(b)Augustine Birrell MP. Copyright National Portrait Gallery, London.
16(c)Herbert Asquith MP. Copyright National Portrait Gallery, London.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank Dr Mary Green, London, great-granddaughter of John Redmond, for providing me with access to her private collection of Redmond family correspondence, photographs and newspaper cuttings, and for her kind permission to reproduce several of these photographs in this book. I am also grateful to her brother John Redmond Green for giving generously of his time in providing me with copies of photographs, letters and newspaper cartoons from the private family collection, as well as for making me aware of the account in Rudyard Kipling’s history of the Irish Guards of the action in which Redmond’s son, William Archer Redmond, won the Distinguished Service Order.
I am also indebted to Peter Leppard for drawing my attention to the Aughavanagh Visitors Book, in the possession of Dr Mary Green, and for his generosity in providing me with a copy of his transcription of the entries.
I am grateful to Charles Lysaght for drawing my attention to the speech of John Redmond at the Oxford Union on 6 June 1907 and to his own commemorative article ‘Our political debt to John Redmond is largely unpaid’ in The Irish Times of 1 September 2006, the 150th anniversary of Redmond’s birth.
It was a pleasure to meet Helen McIlwain of New York, the youngest child of Dr William T. Power, whose first wife was Esther Redmond, John Redmond’s eldest daughter. I thank her for giving me a full account of Redmond’s American descendants through Esther, and of the families and Irish antecedents of her own father and mother.
I wish to thank James and Sylvia O’Connor, of M.J. O’Connor Solicitors, formerly of George’s St., Wexford, for giving me access to the correspondence regarding the sale of the Redmond estate held in their office, and Tom Menton, formerly of O’Keeffe and Lynch, Solicitors (now O’Keeffe, Moore and Woodcock, Solicitors) for giving me access to his collection of Redmond’s correspondence relating to Freeman’s Journal affairs.
As with the preparation of the first volume of this biography, Redmond: the Parnellite (2008), I remain in debt to Mary and Jamie Ryan, Ballytrent House, Co. Wexford and to Jarlath Glynn, Wexford Library, for helping me to understand the Wexford roots of the Redmond family. My thanks are also due to the directors, librarians, keepers and staffs of the National Library of Ireland, the National Archives, the manuscript library of Trinity College Dublin, the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the Parliamentary Archives, Westminster, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and the Dublin Diocesan Archives for their patience and courtesy.
Dermot Meleady, August 2013
ABBREVIATIONS
RPJohn Redmond Papers, National Library of Ireland, Dublin
DPJohn Dillon Papers, Trinity College Library, Dublin
OBPWilliam O’Brien Papers, National Library of Ireland, Dublin
APHerbert Henry Asquith Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford
BLPAndrew Bonar Law Papers, Parliamentary Archives, Westminster
LGPDavid Lloyd George Papers, Parliamentary Archives, Westminster
WPArchbishop William Walsh Papers, Dublin Diocesan Archives
NAINational Archives of Ireland
CBSCrime Branch Special
I.D.I.Irish Daily Independent and Daily Nation until 31 Dec. 1904 (abbreviated in the text to ‘the Independent’)
I.I.Irish Independent from 2 Jan. 1905 (abbreviated in the text to ‘the Independent’)
F.J.Freeman’s Journal (abbreviated in the text to ‘the Freeman’)
I.T. The Irish Times
N.W. Northern Whig
B.N. Belfast Newsletter
INTRODUCTION
Redmond… possessed elements of statesmanship of a high order. The fact that he was given no chance to apply his qualities in the rebuilding of his native land is one of the myriad tragedies of Irish history.
– David Lloyd George, War Memoirs: Volume 1 (London, 1938), p.420.
In October 1908, the Irish Parliamentary Party held a banquet at the Gresham Hotel, Dublin for its leader John Redmond and three colleagues on their return from a mission to the United States. His deputy, John Dillon, paying tribute to Redmond, said that he had effected ‘one of the greatest works of conciliation ever wrought for Ireland… a task that, I must confess, many of us doubted whether it was within the power of mankind to achieve.’1 The reference was to one of Redmond’s foremost achievements since assuming the chairmanship in 1900: his binding up of the wounds of the party after the decade-long Parnell split and his refashioning of it as an effective political instrument for nationalist Irish purposes in the UK Parliament. The party’s reunification was a fragile affair: a fresh division had been patched up at the start of 1908, and would erupt again during the following year. Nevertheless, despite his having led the minority Parnellite faction for nine years after Parnell’s death, Redmond had been able to win the loyalty and affection of the former anti-Parnellite majority, chief among them Dillon. His success owed much to a rigorous application to work and to magnificently persuasive oratorical powers, but was due above all to what Dillon called ‘… the tact, the kindness,
