BIO: Charles Stewart PARNELL, the greatest champion of Irish Home Rule, like a character in a Greek drama, had a tragic flaw, per an article in a copy of "British Heritage" magazine. He kept the issue in the public eye but failed to achieve his primary goals as a Member of Parliament. To the Victorian world, Parnell's death at 45 from rheumatic fever was a perfect example of divine retribution; punishment for his decade-long adulterous affair with Katharine O'SHEA. Yet when the mists of emotional condemnation had lifted, allowing history to judge him with a more objective eye, the controversial statesman emerged as the unsurpassed champion of Ireland's fierce longing for Home Rule. A handsome Protestant Anglo-Irish aristocrat from County Wicklow, Parnell masked his genuine sympathy for the Irish with an arrogant demeanour and glacial personality - the polar opposite of that of his followers. But from the time he first felt political stirrings, the Protestant-born Parne! ll possessed a conviction that as the majority, Catholics were Ireland's legitimate policy makers and deserved freedom from English oppression. With a few years of his election to Parliament in 1875 he had charted his course. He would unit all Irish Members of Parliament who supported a legislative body in Dublin into an Irish Nationalist Party with him at its helm. And he would join with ex-Fenians to form an Irish National Land League to protect the rights of tenant farmers and encourage peasant land purchase. In 1879, when he became president of the Land League, its activities were limited to organizing popular resistance to eviction - action that often resulted in property destruction, bloodshed, and even loss of life. Parnell and the Land Leaguers first coined the term "boycott" when they orchestrated a widespread refusal to work for or trade with one of the evictors, an exploitive landlord named Captain Charles BOYCOTT. But sporadic acts of local agitation had achieved little, and Parnell knew the Irish could not hold onto their land with pikes and buckshot. He decided that Ireland's most direct path to land reform and independence lay through Westminster. Accordingly, during the 1880s he forged an alliance between his Nationalist Party and Prime Minister GLADSTONE's Liberal Party, a partnership that suited Gladstone equally well because having the Irish Home Rulers in his camp bolstered his power to keep Conservative opposition at bay. For the first time in history, the! British took the Irish MPs seriously. The alliance, however, did not guarantee Gladstone's beneficence. In response to Land League-initiated violence in County Mayo, his Liberals attempted to pass the Coercion Act, legislation that mandated government by force in Ireland. It called for the suspension of habeas corpus and the right to jail Land League members without benefit of trial. To fight passage of the incendiary act, Parnell led his Home Rule MPs in obstructionist tactics. If Parnell did not actually invent the filibuster, he was one of the first lawmakers to use the technique with skill; one Land League speech lasted some 40 hours.. While in the throes of such parliamentary intricacies, the 34-year-old Parnell met an attractive Englishwoman named Katharine O'SHEA whose repeated dinner invitations he had been declining for months. Katharine brazenly accosted the Irish leader in a street outside the House of Commons, addressing him from her carriage. The woman's thick auburn hair, flawless complexion and alert blue eyes, combined with her confident manner of speaking, aroused feelings in him. An English clergyman's daughter, Katharine was the youngest of eight children. Her rich Aunt Ben had always doted on her, allowing her to live in style at Wonersh Lodge, an estate near Eltham a few miles from London. As a young woman she had been swept off her feet by an Irishman, Captain Willie O'SHEA with his good looks, glib tongue, and the gold braid of his Hussars uniform. At the time of her first meeting with Parnell, Katharine and Willie, an MP from County Clare, already had three young children. Belyin! g her upbringing and the Victorian times, Katharine was an unconventional woman who insisted that her husband live in London, visiting her and the children at Wonersh Lodge on the weekends for the sake of appearances. She apparently no longer loved him, and his presence in her life was an annoyance. Despite their separate living arrangements, Katharine remained ambitious for her husband. It was imperative for her that Willie's political career succeed, unlike his army career, which had fizzled, and his investment in a Spanish sulphur mine, which had been lost. When she met Parnell, he was an emotionally vulnerable man. Growing up as one of 11 children of an Anglo-Irish father and American mother, he had received little individual attention. His father died when Parnell was 13, and it was said that his mother lacked maternal warmth. While Parnell could clear the hurdles of public speaking with ease, he had never learned to confide in anyone. He needed a confidant as m! uch as a lover. By October Parnell and Katharine were deeply in love. When Parnell and his colleagues were in Paris for a meeting, Timothy HEALY, his devoted private secretary, discovered the affair when he opened a letter addressed to his boss; both astonished and devastated, Healy nevertheless suppressed the incriminating correspondence for years out of loyalty to the Irish cause. Meanwhile, Parnell's own political fortunes took a dramatic and unfavourable turn. In 1881 Gladstone succeeded in passing his Irish Land Act. Parnell countered with an inflammatory speech delivered in County Wexford. "The Irishman," he pronounced, "who thinks he can throw away his arms will find to his sorrow that he has placed himself in the power of the cruel and perfidious English enemy." Only hours after his speech, Gladstone issued a warrant for the Nationalist leader's arrest. British police caught up with Parnell in Dublin and transported him to Kilmainham Goal where he was confined for "fomenting armed rebellion in Ireland. " During his 7-month incarceration Parnell drafted a manifesto urging Irish tenants to fight the Coercion act by nonpayment of rent. To his amazement they ignored his instruction, heeding instead their priest's warning that withholding rent was sinful. This failure on the part of tenants to go along with Parnell spelled doom for the Land League. Soon after his release from Kilmainham, a new British Secretary for Ireland, Lord Frederick CAVENDISH, and his undersecretary were stabbed to death in Dublin's Phoenix Park by members of the Invincibles, an extremist Fenian group. Outraged by the butchery, Parnell issued a statement deploring the murders. But a few months later letters (which proved to be fake, the work of Richard PIGOTT, a down-and-out Dublin journalist who had been bribed by an organization dedicated to blocking the Irish Nationalist Movement) surfaced implicating Parnell in the crime. British agents kept Parnell under surveillance in the hopes of linking him t! o the Phoenix Park murders, but they eventually filed a report confirming his innocence. However, the report did disclose the scandalous report that Captain O'SHEAs wife was PARNELL's mistress. Willie O'SHEA brought suit for divorce, naming PARNELL as co-respondent, and GLADSTONE demanded Parnell's resignation. Catholic Ireland and Victorian England alike were appalled at Parnell's behavior. Ireland's rejection of its once-exalted leader was almost universal. Yet a few remained loyal. Expressing admiration for Parnell, William Butler YEATS referred to "that lonely and haughty person cast out by the people at the behest of their priests." Parnell stated that, The dishonour and discredit are not on my side." He tried desperately to regain power, transversing Ireland making appearances on behalf of Nationalist MP candidates. The effort took a toll on his already delicate state of health, and by the time he and Katharine married he was fatally ill. He died in England with Katharine at his side three short months after their wedding. In the end, the stench of divorce court forced a postponement of Irish Home Rule, the cause so immeasurably advanced by Charles Stewart PARNELL. Funerals have always been Ireland's forte, and on 10th of October, 1891, Dublin gave its disgraced hero a majestic one. Cynics remarked that it was because he had the good breeding to die.

As a follow up to Jean Rice's excellent article about Charles Stewart Parnell. - There is an excellent book written about Charles Stewart Parnell and Katherine O'Shea - Never Call It Loving by Dorothy Eden. Also saw an wonderful movie about Charles Stewart Parnell starring Clark Gable, think it was made in the late 1930s. The movie begins with the very sad scene of a family being evicted from their home and it being destroyed and Charles Stewart Parnell was present as President of the Land League. The movie chronicles Parnell's struggle with his party and the forgery that falsely implicated him in the Phoenix Park murders. Slan go foill, Margaret (Mairead)