“Ireland had ‘the Man’ who could bring round ‘the Hour’. Parnell felt the hideous irony of fate which destroyed the first in the name of the second” (Callanan, 1992, p. 9). Charles Stuart Parnell was the greatest Irish nationalist leader of the late nineteenth century. He transformed the Irish question of freedom into the pivotal issue of British politics, bringing Ireland the closest it had ever been towards Home Rule. What happened in the seventeen and a half years of his political life determined much of the way Irish nationalism was to go in the twentieth century. Parnell is remembered as a fighter for Irish freedom, and more odiously, as a victim of the British Government, the Catholic Church, and even his own people and party. His meteoritic rise to political power cannot compare, however, to his epic and wretched downfall. He was a politician who (unlike most) did not betray his people, on the contrary, his people betrayed him. The simple act of falling in love with the “wrong” woman cost Parnell everything he accomplished in his political career. British Prime Minister Gladstone summed up best the essence of Parnell, after his untimely death: “I cannot tell you how much I think about him, and what an interest I take in everything concerning him. A marvelous man, a terrible fall” (Kee, 1993, p. 1).
Parnell was born June 27th, 1846 in the prosperous county Wicklow on his family’s estate at Avondale. He was the seventh child of an American mother and a well-to-do Protestant Irish landlord. Though Ireland was in the midst of one of the worst famines the world had ever seen, “Wicklow was less affected by the Famine than most other counties: it had a much smaller percentage of its population on outdoor relief” (p. 16). In 1853, at the age of six, Parnell was sent away to boarding school in England. When Parnell’s father suddenly died in 1859; Parnell, not his older brother, inherited the family estate which was very unusual and controversial. Parnell attended...