5

‘A deplorable narrative’:
Gladstone, R. Barry O’Brien
and the ‘historical argument’ for
Home Rule, 1880–90
Ian Sheehy

Writing to the Unionist academic A. V. Dicey in November 1886,

Gladstone, in an oft-quoted letter, revealed how he felt the time had
arrived for promulgating what he called the ‘historical argument’ for
Home Rule: ‘Now we must go forward with it, we cannot afford to dis-
pense with any of our resources.’ As these comments suggest, the Liberals,
having suffered a resounding defeat at the 1886 election, were apparently
not in a position to be selective. All the potential weapons in the Home
Rule armoury had to be employed if they were to launch a recovery, and
these included ‘history’, even if Gladstone was conscious of the risks such
an approach involved in the sense of stirring old animosities and of the
fact he was still getting to grips with the subject (he was ‘far from having
mastered it’, he told Dicey). Accordingly, the Liberal leader had ‘touched’
only briefly on the topic during the House of Commons debates on Home
Rule, though, in the combative atmosphere of the subsequent election
campaign, he had advanced the historical case in more strident, detailed
terms.1 Nevertheless, these remained rather limited opening salvos given
the vastness of the subject, and, as a result, the full historical argument
had yet to be unfolded. ‘The people do not know the case’, Gladstone had
admitted to James Bryce, the Liberal MP and writer, shortly after the elec-
tion. This was a problem that, together with Bryce and other Home Rule
intellectuals, the Liberal chief sought to rectify with his usual energy and
determination over the next six years, conducting what Richard Shannon
has described as the ‘most sublime example in constitutional democracy
of a history lesson applied to politics’.2

110

D. G. Boyce et al. (eds.), Gladstone and Ireland

© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2010
 Gladstone and R. Barry O’Brien 111

In adopting this approach Gladstone was taking a well-trodden path,

as the employment of history for political purposes was a long-estab-
lished practice in Irish nationalism, at both the popular and elite lev-
els, although it was one which, ironically, his Irish ally at that time,
Charles Stewart Parnell, did not really share.3 But what shape did the
Gladstonian Irish history lesson take? Inevitably, there were a number
of different strands. At first, his main concern was to highlight what he
considered the past wrongs suffered by Ireland at the hands of England,
incorporating this theme into many of his 1886 election speeches.
Wide-ranging material for such a view was hardly lacking in national-
ist historiography at that time, but Gladstone was content to focus on
the more recent examples of English turpitude. In particular he drew
attention to how the Union was carried in 1800, the infamy of which
was without historical parallel in his opinion because of the manifest
‘fraud, bribery and intimidation’ which had secured its passage. In the
House of Commons he confined himself to a brief aside regarding the
‘dreadful story of the Union’, but, as indicated above, on the campaign
platform he gave full vent to his convictions, averring at Liverpool on
28 June that there ‘was no blacker or fouler transaction in the history of
man than the making of the Union’.4 Moreover, according to Gladstone,
English misdeeds had not ended there, for, under the Union, Ireland
had not been dealt with in either a just or an effective manner, a fact
he also impressed upon his audience at Liverpool and elsewhere. This
approach entailed the re-evaluation of earlier Irish nationalist politi-
cians, most notably Daniel O’Connell, who, having been opposed by
the youthful Gladstone, was now lauded in an article of 1888 for his
attempt to restore the ‘public life of his country’.5
By delineating this shameful historical story, Gladstone hoped people
would see the rationale behind Home Rule, namely that Ireland had
legitimate claims against England and that the latter should make rep-
aration for the past. Instead of being an ‘unnatural’ tampering with the
constitution, Home Rule would become an act of wisdom and justice.
As H. C. G. Matthew has written, the Home Rule policy was in part a
‘recognition of an historical and therefore an empirically demonstrable
grievance’ rather than an ‘abstract argument about a perfectible consti-
tution’. Furthermore, England would also gain from such an attempt to
right the wrongs of the past because of the restorative effect it would
have on the country’s international reputation, for, in Gladstone’s
view, the mistreatment of Ireland was the one black mark on an other-
wise noble national history (he spoke of ‘deep stains that ... deface and
deform the character of an illustrious nation’). Thus, both countries