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History > Great Britain, 1815–1914 > Late Victorian Britain > The political situation > The Irish question

The Irish question loomed ominously as soon as Parliament assembled in 1880, for there was now an Irish nationalist group of more than 60 members led by Charles Stewart Parnell, most of them committed to Irish Home Rule; in Ireland itself, the Land League, founded in 1879, was struggling to destroy the power of the landlord. Parnell embarked on a program of agrarian agitation in 1881, at the same time that his followers at Westminster were engaged in various kinds of parliamentary obstructionism. Gladstone's response was the Irish Land Act, based on guaranteeing “three fs”—fair rents, fixity of tenure, and free sale—and a tightening up of the rules of closure in parliamentary debate. The Land Act did not go far enough to satisfy Parnell, who continued to make speeches couched in violent language, and, after a coercion act was passed by Parliament in the face of Irish obstructionism, he was arrested. Parnell was released in April 1882, however, after an understanding had been reached that he would abandon the land war and the government would abandon coercion. Lord Frederick Charles Cavendish, a close friend of Gladstone and the brother of the Whig leader, Lord Spencer Hartington, was sent to Dublin as chief secretary on a mission of peace, but the whole policy was undermined when Cavendish, along with the permanent undersecretary, was murdered in Phoenix Park, Dublin, within a few hours of landing in Ireland.

Between 1881 and 1885 Gladstone coupled a somewhat stiffer policy in Ireland with minor measures of reform, but in 1885, when the Conservatives returned to power under Robert Arthur Salisbury, the Irish question forced itself to the forefront again. Henry Herbert, earl of Carnarvon, the new lord lieutenant of Ireland, was a convert to Home Rule and followed a more liberal policy than his predecessor. In the subsequent general election of November 1885, Parnell secured every Irish seat but one outside Ulster and urged Irish voters in British constituencies—a large group mostly concentrated in a limited number of places such as Lancashire and Clydeside—to vote Conservative. The result of the election was a Liberal majority of 86 over the Conservatives, which was almost exactly equivalent to the number of seats held by the Irish group, who thus controlled the balance of power in Parliament. The Conservatives stayed in office, but when in December 1885 the newspapers reported a confidential interview with Gladstone's son, in which he had stated (rightly) that his father had been converted to Home Rule, Salisbury made it clear that he himself was not a convert, and Carnarvon resigned. All Conservative contacts with Parnell ceased, and a few weeks later, in January 1886, after the Conservatives had been defeated in Parliament on a radical amendment for agrarian reform, Salisbury, lacking continued Irish support, resigned and Gladstone returned to power.

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