Kilmainham – The Treaty that Never Was

Abstract

The letter dated 28 April 1882 which Parnell wrote in Kilmainham jail to Captain O'Shea has become indelibly known to history as the Kilmainham Treaty, with or without benefit of quotation marks or capital letters; and though probably few historians would today maintain that anything properly describable as a treaty was intended, let alone concluded, between Parnell and Gladstone, the influence of the name and myth persists. For example, the most recent and excellent biography of Parnell by Professor F. S. L. Lyons, while repudiating the existence of a bargain, nevertheless refers to ‘the Kilmainham settlement’ and even states that Parnell ‘negotiated the Kilmainham “treaty” that brought the ordeal [of the detainees] to an end’. A re-examination, however, of the original document, its textual content and its detailed circumstances casts a new and sinister light upon the letter, revealing Parnell as the victim of a series of malpractices by O'Shea, to which Joseph Chamberlain was at least partly privy.