The English Catholics and Irish Nationalism 1865–1890: A Tragedy in Five Acts

Abstract

have recently contributed to this long overdue reappraisal. A fresh look has been taken at many aspects of his work, but so far his political role has not attracted much attention, and since Shane Leslie in 1921 and Denis Gwynn in 1951 last took an interest, the subject has been largely ignored. I wish here to reopen the subject and study the relation of English Catholics to Irish nationalism under his episcopacy. The Gladstone Diaries and correspondence, my own work on "H. E. Manning and the Social Question," and Professor Alphonse Chapeau's collection of the Manning Papers formerly housed in the library of the Université Catholique de l'Ouest in Angers, have helped me track the course of Manning's involvement with Ireland from 1865 to 1890, a twenty-five year period covering the growth of Fenianism, the Land War, and Parnell's rise and fall. The Irish question was no part of Manning's inheritance as Archbishop of Westminster. His predecessor, though himself an Irishman, had been wary of getting caught in this hornet's nest. A trueborn Englishman, Manning loved Catholic Ireland and managed to use his influence in high political circles for the sake of peace and justice in the "sister-island" until Britain, faced with a quasi-revolutionary situation in the 1880s, tried to use the authority of Rome to make the Irish Catholics more amenable to British rule and approached the Pope for the sake of quieting Ireland, forcing Manning to side with his Irish brethren when the English Catholics chose to stand by class and privilege. Delated by the Times as "the active promoter of separatist intrigues," dissuaded by the Archbishop of Dublin to publish his "Address to the Irish People" because he was viewed as the real author of the revolt of the Irish Party against Parnell, Cardinal Manning seems to have been yet another victim of the tragedy that wrecked the career of a brilliant politician and shattered the prospects of Ireland when Home Rule appeared so near at hand. Was Parnell's hubris responsible for the eventual catastrophe, was it the English Catholics' short sightedness, their archbishop's "extreme" and "mistaken" views or the Nonconformists' Puritanism, will be up to the reader to decide. But the rapprochement