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Lord Randolph Churchill and Home Rule*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2016

R. E. Quinault
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Extract

‘If we wish to maintain the Act of Union we must abide by the conditions of the Act of Union.’

Lord Randolph Churchill 1883

‘It is rather in these old speeches that we find instruction than in anything said at the present day.’

Lord Randolph Churchill 1883

Controversy has always surrounded the Irish policy of Lord Randolph Churchill. In particular, he played an important part in opposing Gladstone’s home rule bill of 1886, when he ‘played the Orange card’. But despite this episode there has been much varied speculation about his real attitude towards home rule. Was he a sincere and consistent opponent of home rule, as his son and his friend, Rosebery, claimed, or was he, as Wilfred Blunt alleged, a secret sympathiser with home rule? Alternatively, did Churchill merely adopt an opportunist attitude towards home rule as Robert Rhodes James has implied? In their recent book, entitled The Governing Passion, A. B. Cooke and J. R. Vincent have produced a new and idiosyncratic interpretation of Churchill’s involvement with Ireland and home rule in the period 1885-6. The purpose of this enquiry is to re-examine these interpretations, especially Cooke and Vincent’s.

Type
Research Article
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 21 , Issue 84 , September 1979 , pp. 377 - 403
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 1979

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank A. D. Macintyre, of Magdalen College, Oxford, for His comments on an earlier draft of this article and for stimulating my interest in Irish history.

References

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147 Ibid., 2 April 1883.

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183 Lack of space has prevented attention being paid to all aspects of Churchill’s policy. I hope to rectify this in a subsequent study.

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185 Ibid., p. 166.

186 Ibid., p. 161.

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188 Ibid., p. xiii.

189 Ibid., p. 438

190 Ibid., p. 431. The Times, 3 June 1886.

191 The Times, 4 June 1885.

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