Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd

Gladstone and Ireland by John VincentReview by: F. S. L. LyonsIrish Historical Studies, Vol. 22, No. 84 (Sep., 1979), pp. 498-500Published by: Irish Historical Studies Publications LtdStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30005681 .

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498 REVIE'IWS ANI) SHORT N()'ICES

whether bfor taking a short cut via the references to an original source, for the preparation of teaching material or for writing an undergraduate essay.

This is the second ancillary publication ofthe New History ofIreland, and its first venture into historical statistics. More volumesare planned, and it isto bIe hoped that they will appear in the not too distant future.

J. M. GoDIISTRO)

GI,\wro)INE AND) IRELAND.I By John Vincent. The proceedings of the British

Acadenv, London lxiii (1977), 193-238. Oxford University Press. 1978.

£1.00.

TO be asked to give the Raleigh Lecture on History is a feather in any historian's cap and Professor Vincent has risen to the occasion in no uncertain fashion. His theme, Gladstone and Ireland, is closely related to the one he explored with A. B. Cooke in The governing passion, which they published in 1974. The chief difference is that whereas in that long book the authors were exploring the specific crisis of home rule in 1885-86 - and not just the Liberal contribution to that crisis - here Professor Vincent is casting a comprehensive, if necessarily brief, glance at the whole of Gladstone's affaire with Ireland.

His conclusions, as well as his technique, are what one might expect from his earlier work. Professor Vincent is the thinking man's iconoclast and he goes about the destruction of historical myths with the same passionless efficiency as the demolition expert brings to the felling of an obsolete factory chimney. Except that there is no deafening noise, for Professor Vincent moves with such quiet precision that the great Victorian monument has collapsed upon itself before we are even aware that it has begun to crumble.

I must own, unlike some other historians, to have been converted and strongly influenced by The governing passion and I have readily succumbed - or almost succumbed - a second time to the felicities of Professor Vincent's style and the acuteness of his insights. His method is one ofclassical simplicity and it nearly always works. What he does is to ignore the accretions of legend and go back to the sources - the public or private comments of Gladstone himself and his contemporaries - to show that the truth about the G.O.M.'s Irish policy is neither so apparent nor so inspiring as, for example, the lateJ. L. Hammond was accustomed to portray it. The only danger of such a proceeding is that Gladstone used so many words to express so many different meanings that to select only those which point in a particular direction is to incur the risk of distortion by omission. And one has to admit that Professor Vincent's selection of Gladstone's obiter dicta has sometimes the air of an anthologie 4 clef

One says that Professor Vincent is concerned with Gladstone's Irish policy, but the whole thrust of this lecture is that Gladstone had no policy, rather a bundle of prejudices which had to be hurriedly adjusted to political realities by a series of improvisations that were sometimes brilliant and sometimes dismal. Professor Vincent has not much difficulty in demonstrating, for example, that 'for a large part of his middle life' Gladstone did not consider that Ireland was a 'problem', believing that if there were some economic and social stresses these would be best resolved by

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REV\IEWS AND SHORT NO'TICES 499 inducing Irish landlords to behave more like English landlords and become sensible and solid pillars of the community.

It is true, of course, that about the middle 1860s this rather nonchalant approach gave place to a desire to tinker, but even that desire, Professor Vincent argues plausibly, though it produced Irish church disestablishment and the land act of 1870, was less a policy than a reaction to the state of British politics - it was partly a means of retaining, or strengthening, his hold on his own party and partly a means ofdishing Disraeli. The only point in this part of his analysis with which I would not wholly concur is when Professor Vincent dissociates Gladstone's burgeoning interest in Ireland from the state of the country at the time of the Fenian rising. Professor Vincent says that to suggest that Gladstone took up the question in response to serious unrest does not fit chronologically, meaning by this that he took it up early in 1867 because Lord John Russell was taking it up and not as a reaction to agitation. Yet, while it is true, as Professor Vincent points out, that many of the things which Gladstone said in his famous Southport speech of December 1867, just after the Clerkenwell explosion, he had anticipated earlier in the year, this concentration upon the British events of 1867 obscures the fact that in Ireland itself 1865 was probably a much more critical year, and it remains at least possible that Gladstone had noted and been inwardly influenced by that fact.

As for the 1870s, Professor Vincent is on stronger ground when he maintains that Gladstone 'resumed interest in Ireland to re-establish himself as a Liberal leader'. He is also quite right when he demonstrates the naive optimism with which Gladstone confronted the Irish question even after the land war had broken out. Certainly, there seems then to have been no trace of a mission to pacify Ireland, or indeed to do much else other than to develop a mild interest in the devolution of some form of local government provided that the opprobrious label, home rule, was studiously avoided. Even by November 1880, when the land war was in full career, Gladstone, says Professor Vincent, 'went on denying that there was an Irish question until well beyond the last moment'. But, as he also truly says, when the prime minister did wake up to the fact that there was a war on, his reaction was characteristically vehement, so that he became actually more ardent for coercion than was his chief secretary, the luckless W. E. Forster. As for the famous land act of 1881, it was, Professor Vincent demonstrates, more conservatively drafted than has usually been allowed.'It was the land courts, not Gladstone, who made the 1881 act what in the event it was, an act for the general reduction of rents.'

When Professor Vincent moves on to the home rule crisis he is revisiting territory already covered in The governing passion. His fundamental point is that the embracing of home rule by Gladstone was a response to the prevailing British political situation. Indeed, Professor Vincent roundly says: 'The fears that moved Gladstone towards home rule were all anti-Irish in tone and mostly wrong.' But there is, as he admits, a qualification to be made here. That Gladstone did engender a mystique about home rule there is too much contemporary evidence to be ignored, but the fact remains that the personal sources for this great emotional outpouring are likely to remain hidden until the relevant volumes of Gladstone's diaries are made-available to historians. In the meantime it would be rash to base any final judgment on

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500 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

what Gladstone said to other people, still more on what they said about him. That conceded, it is clear that the particularities of party warfare in 1885-86 evoked from Gladstone a series of reactions which suggest that it was indeed the saving of the Liberal party, and of his own position within the party, rather than Irish exigencies that made him go the way he did. Nor was the way that he went intended to open the floodgates of reform. And we may leave the last word with Professor Vincent, whose final paragraph, with its characteristic panache, is certain to stimulate argument and controversy, as no doubt will nearly every page of this distinguished lecture:

It is only if one puts oneself in the shoes of Parnell (or still more of Dillon) that a pattern of achievement can Ibe seen: the suppression of radicalism and the peasant movement by the twin acts of 1881, the imposition of responsibility Iby the Kilmainham treaty of 1882, the clerical reconstruction of Irish electoral politics by the seats act of 1885, the demolition ofthe Tory-Irish alliance and thus olf Parnell's independent parliamentary power, the absorption of the home

nllers into Liberalism by the events of 1886 - this, seen as a pattern, shows Gladstone as the most masterly upholder o'f Unionism since Pitt, one who with a minimum ofl'realconcession put the United Kingdom on a satisfactory working hasis which could, so far as Ireland went, have lasted well beyond 1922.

F. S. L. L')NS

A DICTIONARY OF IRISH BIOGRAPHY. By Henry Boylan. Pp xi, 385. Dublin Gill & Macmillan. 1978. £11.00.

PUBLISHED just a century after Alfred Webb's A compendium of Irish biography (1878) and half a century after J. S. Crone's Concise dictionary ofIrish biography (1928), Henry Boylan's .4 dictionary o qf Irish biography compares favourably with both as a convenient work of reference. The new work contains about 1,000 entries (compared to 1,500 in Webb and 2,800 in Crone), of varying lengths but averaging about 220 words (the same as in Webb but longer than in Crone). There are no references to sources, though there is at the end of the book what is described asa 'select bibliography'. No living person is featured, but a great merit is the large number of mid twentieth-century lives not easily found elsewhere.

Any critique of a compilation of such wide scope as this must be prefaced by a recognition that it is exceedingly difficult for a single author to achieve excellence or even consistency. That A dictionary of Irish biography, taken as a whole, is instructive, reliable and balanced is a vindication of its author's industry and tenacity.

While Mr Boylan displays, in his treatment and in his bibliography, a very wide knowledge of the literature relating to Ireland, he reveals that he has not always discovered and examined all the main sources for the lives he features. T. G. McAllister's study of Terence Bellew McManus would have indicated to him that the Young Irelander was born not in 1823 but, very probably, in 1811; and Rupert Coughlan's study of James Napper Tandy that the United Irishman was born not in 1740 but about 1737. A greater degree of accuracy, precisionand usefulness could have been attained had the compiler identified the main sources for each life, examined them carefully, and listed them for the reader's benefit at the foot of each entry.

The one serious criticism that must be made is ofMr Boylan's definition of Irishness as a criterion for selection. He states, somewhat ambiguously: 'Birth in Ireland has been taken as the prime requirement, but this is modified to admit those who, though born abroad, had an Irish parent, or

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