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many people in Ireland inevitably realised the possibilities of constitutional action to achieve their aims. Successive Reform Acts and the changing electoral fortunes of Britain’s two major parties increased the ability of nationalist leaders to exploit their position in the British parliament. By the 1870s, nationalist Ireland was beginning to evolve a united and disciplined parliamentary party which was determined to wrest some form of independence from the British parliament at Westminster. This aim was not finally achieved until 1922, and until then Irish affairs often dominated, and on many occasions, obstructed its work.
In December 1885, Prime Minister William Gladstone suggested that the spirit in which the Irish question should be approached was
Absolute renunciation of prejudices, calm and searching reflection, abhorrence of all passion and exaggeration, a fair, not illiberal, estimate of humanity: these are among the indispensable conditions of progress in such a case. To which I will add for the moment great reserve.1
If these precepts had been adhered to, the history of the British parliament’s relationship with Ireland could have been entirely different. Instead, Ireland was used as the arena for party political disputes and by various politicians to further their ambitions. As a result, the ‘Irish question’ was ‘everywhere, varying as the atmosphere varies, yet ever present’.2
This book will throw new light on the momentous events of those years by studying the actions and motives of two British political leaders and their sons who had a major role in the Irish question throughout an over forty year period. The Conservative, Lord Randolph Churchill, and the Liberal, Joseph Chamberlain, were prominent in Irish affairs from the mid-1870s, and although on opposite sides of the House, they united in 1886 and again in 1893 to defeat the first and second Home Rule Bills. Ostensibly dissimilar in background, politics, and temperament, yet in the end their common desire was to prevent many in Ireland gaining their greatest wish—an Irish parliament in Dublin.