Queen Of The Land League

Anna Parnell

o mark International Women’s Day, local historian Rosemary Raughter explores the remarkable story of Avondale’s Anna Parnell (1852-1911)…

Born in 1852 at Avondale, Co Wicklow, Anna Parnell was one of eleven children of landowner John Henry Parnell and his American wife, Delia.

Her father died when she was just seven, leaving considerable debts, and the family had to leave Avondale, living in a series of homes in Dublin and later for a time in Paris. Like most well-born girls of the time, Anna and her sisters were educated at home by governesses and were able to read widely and developed an early interest in Irish politics. While her sister Fanny had literary ambitions, publishing poems in praise of nationalist heroes, Anna was a talented artist, and as a young woman studied art in Dublin and London.

In 1875, Anna’s elder brother, Charles Stewart Parnell, was elected to Parliament at Westminster, where he soon achieved a prominent position in the movement seeking Home Rule for Ireland. Anna, by now living in London, attended the House of Commons regularly, reporting on debates from the ‘ladies’ cage’ to which female visitors were then confined. When agricultural depression and widespread hardship in Ireland in the late 1870s resulted in the agrarian disturbances known as the Land War, she supported the Land League, founded and headed by her brother, and travelled to America where she and Fanny raised thousands of dollars to finance its campaign.

Back in Ireland, the Land League leadership approached Anna to propose the establishment of a women’s organization, the Ladies’ Land League, which would assist the men and carry forward the work should Parnell and his colleagues be imprisoned. The LLL sprang into action, processing applications for relief, distributing funds, travelling around the country and speaking on platforms, attending and reporting on evictions, and supplying practical assistance to those made homeless. Membership grew rapidly – by the end of the year there would be over 400 LLL branches in Ireland, and members included a number of young women who would later be active in nationalist and feminist agitation.

With the arrest of C S Parnell and his colleagues in autumn 1881, violence intensified in the countryside, hugely increasing the problems facing the Ladies. Meanwhile, the LLL faced condemnation not only from its opponents in government, the Church and the press, but from the Land League leadership itself, which regarded it as extravagant and unduly radical in its approach. In April 1882, C S Parnell was released, paving the way for an agreement to end the campaign of resistance.

The Land League immediately sought to exert control over the LLL, which angrily resisted direction and within a short time found itself with no option but to disband. At the same time relations between Anna and her brother broke down, leading to an estrangement which lasted until his death ten years later.

Disillusioned, exhausted, and grief-stricken at Fanny’s recent death, Anna retreated to England, where she lived in obscurity, sometimes under an assumed name, for much of the rest of her life. However, she did return to Ireland occasionally and continued to interest herself in Irish politics, forging links with some of the new generation of nationalist activists.

Eventually, angered by misapprehensions about the LLL’s part in the Land War, she set out to write her own account of the campaign, in which she damned the Land League’s policy of ‘rent at the point of the bayonet’ as ‘not consistent with sanity’, and condemned the male leadership’s determination to keep the Ladies ‘at the grindstone’ while maintaining control over them. At the same time she looked to the future, hoping that ‘the noble example’ set by the Ladies ‘to all the women of Ireland’ would eventually be recognized. However, her work failed to find a publisher, and the manuscript was subsequently assumed to have been lost.

In 1910, Anna moved to Ilfracombe, a small seaside resort in Devon. She accidentally drowned while swimming in September 1911, and was buried in Holy Trinity churchyard, Ilfracombe a few days later. Only seven people attended the funeral of Catherine Maria Anna Mercer Parnell, and over subsequent decades her name and achievements largely disappeared from view.

However, the publication in 1986 of her rediscovered manuscript, Tale Of A Great Sham, brought about a much-overdue reassessment of her role and that of the Ladies in the Land War of the 1880s, raising awareness of this early example of women’s ability to organize for a political cause and of the obstacles facing women in Irish nationalist politics.

You can explore more local history through the eyes – and extensive research – of Rosemary Raughter here. Sources for above here.