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The two sons, Winston Churchill and Austen Chamberlain, both entered parliament with inherited Unionist views. However, changing political circumstances in Britain and Ireland led them to change their stance and adopt policies that would have been anathema to their fathers.
The Irish question was to dominate the early career of Joseph Chamberlain, and most of Lord Randolph Churchill’s political life. Yet, as Roland Quinault has noted, relatively little attention has been focused on this aspect of their careers. Of Chamberlain, he observes that ‘Ireland exercised a profound influence on Chamberlain’s career which has been rather neglected by those historians who have emphasised his radical or imperial credentials’.3 As for Churchill, he asserts that ‘Controversy has always surrounded the Irish policy of Lord Randolph Churchill’.4 This controversy resulted from the perceived inconsistency of his Irish policy, and the conflicting interpretations of this policy. Michael Bentley quaintly asserts that Churchill ‘had spent the period since December 1885 blinking orange and green like a traffic light’.5 A.B. Cooke and John Vincent argue that ‘in Irish terms Churchill was basically green not orange’; while his son, Winston, was adamant that Lord Randolph was always a total opponent of Home Rule.6 On the other hand, Wilfrid Blunt, a contemporary of Lord Randolph, insisted that the latter was a devout Home Ruler.7
Historians may have neglected the influence of Ireland on Chamberlain’s career but they have certainly not neglected Chamberlain. There are numerous single-edition biographies as well as the huge official biography in six volumes, started by J.L. Garvin and completed by Julian Amery.8 There is very little attempt in this book to critically analyse Chamberlain’s approach to Ireland and the account of his participation in the events of 1886 is ‘extremely misleading and unsatisfactory’.9 The latest biography is by Peter Marsh, who has spent a decade producing an extensively researched volume.10 However, all of these biographies, given the huge scope of Chamberlain’s career, devote very little attention to his involvement with Irish affairs. For example, in his book of 725 pages, Marsh