Charles Stewart Parnell (27 June 1846–6 October 1891) was the Leader of the Home Rule League from 16 April 1880 to 11 May 1882 (succeeding William Shaw) and Leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party from 11 May 1882 to 26 November 1891 (preceding John Redmond). Parnell, who served as MP for Meath from 1875 to 1880 and for Cork City from 1880 to 1891, was the leader of the Irish nationalist Home Rule movement for much of the late 19th century, although a sex scandal publicized by his British rivals ruined his reputation.
Biography[]
Charles Stewart Parnell was born in Avondale, County Wicklow, Ireland to a wealthy Anglo-Irish Protestant landowner and his American wife. Parnell became involved with the Home Rule movement while serving as High Sheriff of Wicklow during the mid-1870s, and he was elected to Parliament in 1875 as the Home Rule League MP for Meath. Parnell was affiliated with the radical and middle-class wing of the Irish Nationalist Party, founding the Land League in 1879 and distancing the Irish Nationalists from their former Liberal Party allies. He was briefly imprisoned at Kilmainhal Gaol in Dublin in 1882, but he was released after renouncing physical force Irish republicanism. That same year, he founded the Irish Parliamentary Party, and his party's success at the 1885 general election forced the Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone to support Home Rule in exchange for the support of the IPP. His British rivals forged letters which purportedly showed Parnell expressing sympathy with the murderers of the 1882 Phoenix Park murders, but, revelations of his long-lasting love affair with a married woman in 1890 destroyed his career. He faced strong opposition from nonconformist Protestant Liberals and from Catholic bishops, and he died in 1891 at the age of 45.