| Chapter 1: | Two Tory Radicals: Lord Randolph Churchill, Joseph Chamberlain and the Evolution of their Views on the Irish Question to 1880 |
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the Union between Britain and Ireland, having resisted the disestablishment of the church in Ireland in 1868 because he thought it would endanger the Union. In 1880, true to his principles, he refused to dine with the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Edmund Dwyer Gray, because the latter had had the audacity to attend a Home Rule meeting. Benjamin Disraeli, then Prime Minister, was a friend of Churchill’s grandmother and a frequent guest at Blenheim. In 1880 he wrote a famous letter to the Duke of Marlborough, which appeared in The Times, 9 March 1880, drawing attention to the ‘pestilential’ nature of Home rule. He was later to become a role model for the young Churchill.
The greatest influence on Churchill’s earliest views of Ireland and the Irish was his mother, Frances, who had strong convictions on politics and religion. Fanny, as the Duchess of Marlborough was known, was a formidable woman. Lady Randolph once noted that ‘At the rustle of her silk dress the household trembled’.4 The Duchess had inherited her Unionist views from her father and ‘passed on her family’s unionist sentiments to her two sons, Blandford and Randolph’.5 According to Churchill she hated ‘Romish practices like poison’.6 One of Churchill’s early biographers has written that it was from her he gained ‘the rudiments of his practical instruction in at least the politics of Ireland’.7 These were the formative influences on Churchill’s views of Ireland and the Irish, and there is no doubt that he was strongly influenced by them. In a speech in Belfast on 22 February, 1886, he proudly stated that ‘I like greatly to remember that I can number among my ancestors the great minister Castlereagh, who founded the Union between Great Britain and Ireland’.8
Chamberlain’s Background
Joseph Chamberlain, in contrast, was born on 8 July 1836 in a modest home in Camberwell, London. His father, a strong Unitarian, came from a long line of Cordwainers, and his mother was the daughter of a cheesemonger.9 His son Austen, many years later, said that it was from his mother that Chamberlain ‘derived his wit, social gifts and love of the beautiful’.10 Chamberlain was not highly educated; he left school at sixteen to work in his father’s business.11 However, he was