84F.J., 23 Jul. 1901. Dillon’s amendment was carried by thirty votes to twenty-four. Willie Redmond said: ‘if this bill was wrecked it would be because certain members of the committee had a stronger desire to break into a few convents in Ireland than to pass a measure for the benefit of the working classes of the United Kingdom’. In fairness to the Irish members, Ritchie revealed that he had received objections on much the same grounds from ‘others not in Ireland, and not of the same religious faith’.
85Correspondence of Redmond with H.J. Gladstone, March–May 1907, RP Ms. 15,192 (1). An article published at the time by Redmond’s old Parnellite colleague, Edmund Leamy MP, dwelt unctuously on the unshakeable virtue of the religious managers of laundries. The relations of the nuns with the girls under their charge was ‘almost that of a mother and child’; their object was ‘in her own simple and beautiful language, to keep the poor strayed sheep who has been brought back to the fold from straying again… these pure, holy women who take their erring peccant sisters to their hearts, as if they had been given in charge to them by Christ Himself’. I.D.I., 22 Jul. 1901.There is no reason to believe that Redmond, his brother and many party MPs did not share such views.
86Secretaries of Standing Committee of the Irish Bishops to Redmond, 6 Oct.; Redmond to same, 7 Oct. 1902, in Newscuttings of 1902, RP Ms. 7431. These letters were published by the Freeman on 28 November.
87Davitt vigorously opposed the Cardinal’s appeal, publishing an indignant open letter to Redmond in the Freeman, asking ‘from whence is the authority derived to urge Catholics to decide upon the respective merits of Church of England Protestantism and Nonconformist Protestantism?’ The real purpose of the bill was ‘to extend the political influence of the Parson and the Squire, the chief props of Toryism, in England’, while ‘these English Catholic leaders are not our political friends, but the deadly and malignant enemies of our National movement’. F.J., 7 Oct. 1902.
88F.J., 20 Nov. 1902.
89Michael Cardinal Logue to Archbishop Walsh, 21 Nov., Bishop Sheehan to Archbishop Walsh, 21 Nov., Archbishop Walsh to Cardinal Logue, 24 Nov. 1902, WP Ms. 358/2; F.J., 25 Nov. 1902.
90O’Brien to Redmond, 25 Nov. 1902, OBP Ms. 10,496 (12).
91Redmond to O’Brien, 26 Nov. 1902, OBP Ms. 10,496 (6). The Irish Independent, originally a Parnellite paper, had been bought by the former anti-Parnellite and wealthy industrialist William Martin Murphy in 1900, and soon adopted a policy critical of the reunited party. See Meleady, Redmond, p. 330.
92F.J., 26, 27, 29 Nov. 1902.
93Telegram Redmond to O’Brien, 29 Nov. 1902, OBP Ms. 10,496 (11).
94F.J., 1 Dec. 1902.
95Redmond to O’Brien, 30 Nov. 1902, OBP Ms. 10,496 (6).
96F.J., 13, 17, 18 Dec. 1902. Redmond told O’Brien that he had hoped the Speaker would rule out the repairs amendment. Redmond to O’Brien, 12 Dec. 1902, OBP Ms. 10,496 (6).
97Quoted in F.J., 18 Dec. 1902.
98I.D.I., 31 Aug. 1901.
99Denman, A lonely grave, p. 60; speech of Redmond at Waterford, I.D.I., 23 Sep. 1901.
100I.D.I.,11, 2, 23 Sep. 1901.
101Denman, A lonely grave, p. 60.
102Bull, Land, pp. 129-133.
103Gailey, Ireland and the Death of Kindness, pp. 179–180. Senior Castle officials evinced a restrained approach throughout 1901 to police reports of seditious language used by Irish Party MPs, including Dillon, who said at Tralee on 20 October, at the news that a recruiting officer for the Irish Guards would arrive shortly: ‘I hope when he comes to Kerry you will hunt him out of the county’. In Dillon’s case, the official advised that his language constituted incitement, but the expediency of a prosecution was ‘more than doubtful’; regarding a speech by JP Farrell, MP for Longford North in September, the advice was that ‘prosecuting him for treasonable language would do more harm than good’. NAI CBS 3/716, 25565/S, 25333/S.
104I.D.I., 13 Dec. 1901; 11 Jan., 18, 19 Feb., 1Mar. 1902.
105F.J., 17 Apr. 1902. The power of the Lord Lieutenant to issue such a proclamation for part or all of a county or counties in the event of civil disorder was provided for under the Insurrection Act of 1822.
106For a full account of Wyndham’s extraordinary personality and political character, see Gailey, Ireland and the Death of Kindness, pp. 161–173. Wyndham had said that Douglas Hyde’s work A Literary History of Ireland ‘gives the truest and fullest instruction for the government of Ireland’. To a Dublin Castle official, he seemed ‘a tempestuous sort of genius… flashing about the Irish atmosphere like summer lightning, with inspirations and brilliant ideas about current problems which fairly took one’s breath away’. Quoted in Gailey, p. 173.
107Gailey, Ireland and the Death of Kindness, pp. 179–180.
108I.D.I., 6 May, 20 Oct. 1901; F.J., 7 Jul. 1902. Healy painted a vividly admiring pen-picture of the ‘child of genius’ Wyndham. ‘No soul more accordant with Ireland than Wyndham’s came out of England. On reaching Dublin his first visit was to the vaults of St Michan’s, where the body of his kinsman, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, lies… His sympathies with Ireland were intense. A Jacobite by tradition, a poet born, and with the blood of Lord Edward in his veins, his ambition was to make an international settlement between the island he administered and the island of his birth….’ Healy, Letters and Leaders, I, pp. 446–7. The Countess of Fingall was part of his social circle in Ireland: ‘He was in love with so many things: with his lovely wife… with Ireland and with England, with