Charles Stewart Parnell
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Charles Stewart Parnell (27 June 1846 – 6 October 1891) was an Irish nationalist politician who served as Leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party from 1882 to 1891 and Leader of the Home Rule League from 1880 to 1882. He served as a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1875 to 1891. His party held the balance of power in the House of Commons during the Home Rule debates of 1885–1890.
Born into a powerful Anglo-Irish Protestant landowning family, he was a land reform agitator, founder in 1879 of the Irish National Land League. He became leader of the Home Rule League, operating independently of the Liberal Party, winning great influence by his balancing of constitutional, radical, and economic issues, and by his skillful use of parliamentary procedure. He was imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin, in 1882, but he was released when he renounced violent extra-Parliamentary action. The same year, he reformed the Home Rule League as the Irish Parliamentary Party, which he controlled minutely as Britain's first disciplined democratic party.
The hung parliament of 1885 saw him hold the balance of power between William Gladstone's Liberal Party and Lord Salisbury's Conservative Party. His power was one factor in Gladstone's adoption of Home Rule as the central tenet of the Liberal Party. His reputation peaked from 1889 to 1890, when letters published in The Times linking him to the Phoenix Park killings of 1882 were shown to have been forged by Richard Pigott. However, the Irish Parliamentary Party split in 1890 after the revelation of Parnell's long adulterous love affair, causing many British Liberals (many of them nonconformists) to refuse to work with him, and strong opposition from Catholic bishops. He headed a small minority faction until his death in 1891.
Parnell is celebrated as the best organiser of a political party up to that time, and one of the most formidable figures in parliamentary history. Many believe that Home Rule could have been achieved without bloodshed, if he had not been brought down by personal circumstances.
Family background and early life
Charles Stewart ParnellTemplate:Efn was born in Avondale House, County Wicklow. He was the third son and seventh child of John Henry Parnell (1811–1859), a wealthy Anglo-Irish Anglican landowner, and his American wife Delia Tudor Stewart (1816–1898) of Bordentown, New Jersey, daughter of the American naval hero, Admiral Charles Stewart (the stepson of one of George Washington's bodyguards). There were eleven children in all: five boys and six girls. Admiral Stewart's mother, Parnell's great-grandmother, belonged to the Tudor family, so Parnell had a distant relationship with the British Royal Family. John Henry Parnell himself was a cousin of one of Ireland's leading aristocrats, Viscount Powerscourt, and also the grandson of a Chancellor of the Exchequer in Grattan's Parliament, Sir John Parnell, who lost office in 1799, when he opposed the Act of Union.
