INTRODUCTION

Abstract

It has been observed that generations of historians ‘have been chained to the task of explaining why Gladstone chose in 1885 to champion Irish claims’. Chief amongst these claims was that for national self-determination, an issue that was to determine the course of Anglo-Irish relations for the next forty years. It was, as one contemporary politician observed, ‘the pivot on which the political future turned’. This volume re-examines why, late in 1885, the leader of the Liberal Party embraced the idea of Irish home rule without securing the support of his party for this radical departure. In his recent biography of Gladstone, Richard Shannon admits that his subject's conviction that Irish home rule had become a matter of absolute urgency by mid-December 1885 ‘has always been something of a puzzle’, and he claims that ‘there is nothing in the records’ to indicate that Irish nationalism then threatened any ‘critical degree of violent action’ against the British government of Ireland. This book therefore examines the advice and information that Gladstone received about Ireland at this critical time. It casts light on communications and transactions that are only partly known in order to provide a fuller chronology of the first home rule episode, and so to help solve this puzzle.