Welmer

While reading the series of emails between SC Governor Mark Sanford and Maria Belen Chapur, I began to feel a sense of tragedy, and came to feel a twinge of pity for the man, who has obviously struggled with his faith, torn between all he believes in and the Dark Lady of Buenos Aires. I also felt somewhat ashamed to behold the private failings of this public man — it is as though he and his lover have been stripped and exposed before a mocking nation comprised of a multitude of those who can barely conceal their own sins. It is truly hard to cast stones when one sees a couple of pitiable sinners revealed under the merciless sun of public scrutiny. However, tragedy and human failure on a grand scale is the stuff of legends, and in it there are lessons for all people, great or small that they may be.

So I introduce another man, an Irish hero from the 19th century known as Charles Parnell. Parnell was a young, charismatic politician and a good-looking, charming man. Son of a Protestant landowner of English ancestry and his American wife, he nevertheless took up the Irish Nationalist cause, forging an Irish bloc that dominated British Parliament and brought Home Rule for Ireland ever closer to reality.

Parnell was known not only for his ability to lead men, but the magnetic effect he had on women as well. Virginia Woolf, although only a girl when he died, eulogized him in her novel “The Years,” writing that his death was like “something fading in the sky.” Parnell’s commanding presence in parliament combined with his gentlemanly demeanor in public made him all but irresistible to women. However, despite his political acumen and will, he must have been something of a romantic. Indeed, an idealistic rather than practical character would have been required for someone of his background in those times to take up the Irish national cause. Perhaps this only added to his attraction.

Eventually, it was Parnell’s romantic nature that got the better of him when he met a woman named Katherine O’Shea, better known today as “Kitty O’Shea.” Kitty was an English woman married to Captain William O’Shea, a Catholic Nationalist from Galway. Having connections with the liberal political establishment in London, she began to act as an intermediary between Parnell and Prime Minister Gladstone in the early 1880s. In time, Parnell fell in love with Kitty, which led to a hidden life with her in a suburb of London where he fathered three children by her.

One might think that a man such as Charles Parnell would have had plenty of opportunities to find eligible single women, but he was beguiled by Mrs. O’Shea, and his romantic nature led him to continue with what, in Victorian Britain, he must have known would eventually be the ruin of his career. Yet he soldiered on, advancing the cause of Home Rule, which appeared for a time to be within reach… and then the scandal broke.

Kitty’s husband, after waiting for several years – allegedly to secure an inheritance – finally filed for divorce, naming Parnell as co-respondent. Following the divorce, Parnell acknowledged his paternity of the children and married Mrs. O’Shea. Although the affair had been common knowledge in political circles, the public had no idea, and at first was inclined to disbelief. Finally the truth became impossible to ignore, and his political opponents had a new weapon with which to attack him and his cause. As his charismatic presence was reduced to a running joke, unionists and radical Catholic nationalists alike took out their knives and went for blood. As the gravity of his folly became apparent to all, Parnell’s former lieutenants turned on him, as James Joyce wrote in “The Shade of Parnell”:

“In his final desperate appeal to his countrymen, he begged them not to throw him as a sop to the English wolves howling around them. It redounds to their honour that they did not fail this appeal. They did not throw him to the English wolves; they tore him to pieces themselves.”

He did not survive the scandal by more than a couple years, dying in the arms of his wife and former mistress of a heart attack in 1891. He was 45 years old.

The effects of Parnell’s fall from grace had a profound influence on subsequent British politics, and have reverberated through Irish society for over a century. No one can say for certain whether he could have achieved a unified Ireland, but the split of his Irish Party, largely a result of the Kitty O’Shea affair, greatly weakened any chance for such an outcome.

One might blame the failures of the Irish independence movement in the late 19th century on the poor judgment of a man who was willing to risk all for an adulterous woman, but perhaps a less passionate character never could have achieved what Parnell did in the first place. There are lessons in these stories, but given their endless repetition over the years from the beginnings of history, it would be a silly fantasy to think that we will ever see an end to grand failures born of human weakness; nor should we ever expect an end to the likes of Kitty O’Shea, who will, from time to time, be the ruin of men as long as we walk the earth.