DAVE MANSE,LL the bill in June 1886 there was another general election which returned the conservative party to office with a large majority (added to by the defection to it of the right-wing Liberals, and the Chamberlainites who were now calling themselves LiberalUnionists - in time this coalition, which was united by the conviction that the integrity of the United Kingdom had to be preserved, came to call itself the Unionist Party). Although the Home Rule issue had now been shelved because of the results of parliamentary votes and elections, the prospects for the Nationalists under Parnell did not seem too bad. Parnell cultivated the Liberal connection and made sure that the British « progressive » party, and particularly Gladstone, remained committed to Home Rule and to its link with the Irish parliamentary party. Meanwhile, due to bad harvests and low prices land agitation directed against evicting landlords was building up again in the poorer districts, and leading members of the National League had formulated a new Plan of Campaign ( though it was not publicly approved by Parnell) to channel the strength of the fresh agitation in their direction. Suddenly, however, events started going badly wrong for the Nationalists: the Pope was persuaded to denounce the Plan of Campaign, and two weeks later Parnell did the same so as to preserve his constitutionalist respectablity. But then a scandal broke in which Parnell was implicated in an adulterous relationship with the wife of one of his political colleagues. At first both his party and the Roman Catholic hierarchy were willing to overlook the scandal so long as Parnell remained the driving force of Nationalism, but then the NonConformist wing of the English Liberal party threatened to withdraw its support from Gladstone if he did not withdraw his from the <{ adulterous » Parnell. Gladstone complied and the Roman Catholic hierarchy dropped Parnell like a hot brick. Parnell, who was more enamoured of his own power than of anything else, fought like a titan to retain his leadership of the party but the only results of his efforts were the splitting of the party into warring factions, his own resignation and his early death. In fact the new land war had been a failure for reasons I will go into the second part of this article, and by the time Gladstone was re-elected in 1892, again dependent on the support of the Irish parliamentary party, the only reason that the Nationalist party had enough parliamentary seats to oblige Gladstone to attempt once again unsuccessfully to introduce 92
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