The Government won the vote, but with the support of only six Irish Unionists.82 For the Nationalists, the opportunity to inflict further damage on the Government was irresistible. The principal issue had now become the terms of MacDonnell’s appointment. During the debate, Dillon and Campbell Bannerman demanded the release of all the correspondence related to this. On 22 February, Redmond moved a motion for adjournment in which he exploited the contradictions in the statements of the Government spokesmen. When the correspondence was read, it confirmed Lansdowne’s revelation. He had written to Wyndham that he was ‘an Irishman, a Roman Catholic, and a Liberal in politics’ with ‘strong Irish sympathies’. Apart from control of law and order, land and university reform and the co-ordination of boards, he had made it a condition of his appointment that, subject to Wyndham’s control, he should have ‘freedom of action in executive matters’. Asked by Redmond why, if the two men had agreed on these terms, he had called Sir Antony’s conduct ‘indefensible’, Wyndham replied that the words ‘co-ordination of boards’ had never suggested to him either an elective financial council or a board with legislative powers. As to why he had not acted a month earlier to correct MacDonnell’s honest mistake, he answered that the first document, the manifesto of 31 August, had made no impression on his mind. To explain that, he could only come back to the missing letter.83
The Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, endorsed Wyndham’s interpretation of the terms and justified the censure passed on MacDonnell.84 The damage done to the Government, however, made the hapless Wyndham’s position untenable. Dillon counselled Redmond to ‘sit tight’ and leave all the fighting to the ‘Orangemen’: the more they embarrassed the Government, the better.85 On 6 March 1905, Balfour announced the Chief Secretary’s resignation. In his statement of explanation, delayed for two months because of ill-health, Wyndham admitted that it was inevitable that the misunderstanding should give rise to misconceptions about his aims, ending his power to do useful work in Ireland.86
Redmond propagated the nationalist view of Wyndham as a closet devolutionist brought down by die-hard Ascendancy reactionaries and Orangemen, the real governors of Ireland. While personally sorry for Wyndham’s fate, he viewed the real offence, for which he had properly had to resign, as his failure of nerve in capitulating to ‘that little, intolerant faction of anti-Irishmen’ and joining unworthily in the censure of Sir Antony for pursuing a line of policy of which he fundamentally approved.87 This betrayal of the Under-Secretary, together with the broken promises on the university question and the Labourers Bill, and the issuing of the secret regulations on the operation of the Land Act, were more than adequate reasons for the party’s present policy of driving the Government from office, he told a banquet in his honour in Dublin later that year.88 As for the devolution advocates, he told a Liverpool audience:
… the chief fault I have with Lord Dunraven as a tactician is that from his point of view he tried to go a trifle too fast; but there is no cause for disappointment to us in all that has happened. On the contrary, [it] is, to my mind, an enormous gain and advantage for the cause (hear, hear)… those [Devolution] proposals mean a frank and public confession of the absolute breakdown of Castle government in Ireland (applause)….89
Irish Unionists, on the other hand, were incensed by MacDonnell’s continued presence at Dublin Castle. The new Chief Secretary, Walter Long, was surprised at the bitterness of feeling he encountered among Dublin loyalists. A Dublin Orangemen’s meeting in May, called to demand MacDonnell’s dismissal, ejected Capt. Shawe-Taylor amid ‘stormy scenes’. Meanwhile, the Ulster Unionist MPs withheld support from the Government as long as MacDonnell continued in office, reducing its already fragile majorities. Long, however, defused their anger on 6 April 1905 when he announced that MacDonnell now held his office in the same way as other heads of departments.90
Already weakened by these developments, the Government suffered its worst defeat yet at the polls in April, when the Liberals overturned a huge Tory majority at Brighton.91 In late June, Balfour’s introduction of a drastic ‘redistribution’ motion, to reduce the Irish representation at Westminster (by a quarter) for the first time since the Act of Union, caused Redmond to put the Irish Party on guard. His mastery of the rules of procedure won him a ruling from the Speaker that forced Balfour to abandon his motion.92 Similarly, sustained alertness to possibilities of defeating the Government bore fruit on 20 July in a vote on the Land Act. Balfour went to the King, but told him that ministers still had sufficient ‘dignity’ to carry on the Government. It was not yet the end of the ten-year Tory–Liberal Unionist coalition, but the Freeman’s London correspondent wrote of the ‘tremendous triumph’ for the Nationalists:
To have destroyed the Redistribution proposals and defeated the Government in the same week is a record of which Mr Redmond and the party have the best reason to be proud.93
Hard work and parliamentary sureness of touch had rescued Redmond’s leadership from the damage of late 1903. Secure in the unloving embrace of the Dillonite majority, he received the Freeman’s seal of approval when, on medical advice, he took advantage of the Easter recess to spend almost a month in Italy with Amy.
Mr Redmond affords a high example… by the assiduity and devotion with which he attends to his parliamentary and general public duties. While the House of Commons is sitting, he is never absent an hour from its precincts, and no one in the whole assembly has a more perfect command of the entire run of its business.94
V
In July 1904, O’Brien had returned to public life with a series of five long letters to the Freeman assailing the anti-conciliationist ‘cabal’ under the heading ‘The Land Conference and its Critics’, which, together with the paper’s replies, stretched over a month.95 He had followed this with a drive to recover his former Cork seat, bringing renewed anxiety to the Irish Party. Dillon, home from Sicily, badgered Redmond during July about O’Brien’s intentions, mirroring the urgency of the latter’s missives of the previous year. ‘A fierce controversy is unavoidable unless you intervene’, he wrote on 7 July. He was sure that O’Brien’s attack on the party’s conduct was ‘a very wicked and dangerous cry… when raised by a man of O’Brien’s literary power and great political record, it is bound to do great mischief’.96 In response, Redmond had a resolution passed unanimously by the party on 4 August appealing to the Cork UIL for unity. Before sailing for the US, he expressed his hope for the re-election of O’Brien, who was duly returned unopposed on 19 August.97 On his return in mid-October, he ‘heartily rejoiced’ at the outcome, but hoped that O’Brien would:
… recognize the great and vital issues at stake and the disasters of disunion, and will accede