Charles Stewart Parnell

Charles Stewart Parnell has proved a compelling figure in his own time and to ours. A Protestant landlord who possessed few of the gifts that inspire mass adoration, he was the unlikely object of popular veneration. His long liaison with a married woman, Katharine O’Shea, exposed him to the fury of the Catholic Church. Other Protestants secured niches in the pantheon of national heroes but nearly all earned their places as victims of British rule; Parnell’s destruction came at Irish hands. Since initial publication in 1998, new evidence and fresh interpretations allow for a fuller and yet more complex portrait for this revised account of Parnell’s life. This revision considers Parnell’s career within the context of his times, Anglo-Irish affairs, and theoretical perspectives. It makes extensive use of Parnell’s public and parliamentary speeches, arguing that he was an exemplar of new forms of political communication and expressed a coherent ideology rooted in the liberal radicalism of the age. In the end he was a victim of his own successes and of a virulent nationalism that squeezed out the immediate possibility of an inclusive nation.Parnell’s vision, though, was never wholly submerged and would reappear in the more cosmopolitan atmosphere of contemporary Ireland.