Revolutionary Imperialist: William Smith O'Brien, BO]1803-1864 by Richard Davis Lilliput 392pp, £17.95
This is the definitive biography of William Smith O'Brien, in spite of its title. O'Brien was a "Queen, Lords and Commons" nationalist in the tradition of Grattan and O'Connell, who also believed an Irish parliament could help Britain by restraining her aggression. He became a reluctant rebel leader during the year of revolutions, 1848.
He began his political career as Conservative MP for Ennis in 1828. From the age of 17, however, this Protestant aristocrat of ancient Irish lineage wished "to serve and do good to my country". On joining O'Connell's Repeal Association in 1843, O'Brien was denounced by his evangelical mother - the dowager Lady Charlotte - on whom he depended financially.
As the Famine crisis worsened, he obstructed the business of parliament to demand food for the starving Irish. The government's hard-hearted response completed his alienation from Westminster, and identification with the Young Ireland group.
Like Wolfe Tone, O'Brien dreamed of establishing colonies and wrote a journal for his wife in exile (which Richard Davis has already published). Unlike most nationalists, he saw assisted emigration as a means of providing a better life for the poor. While high-minded and brave, he lacked Tone's charisma and determination and never became a separatist.
To describe O'Brien as a "revolutionary imperialist" is, however, misleading. In a seminal essay, to which Professor Davis does not refer, T.W. Moody summed up the Young Irelanders as modern Commonwealth men. In the interests of unity and harmony, they were prepared to accept the British monarch as head of an independent Irish state.
O'Brien supported rebellion only as a last resort. He hoped a show of force could achieve self-government without bloodshed. But the circumstances of Famine-ravaged Ireland were entirely different from 1782. The parallels which the Young Irelanders drew with the Continent in 1848 were equally unrealistic. Professor Davis contends that O'Brien never wanted the leadership but was manoeuvred into it by Gavan Duffy and others. He admitted later that their attempted rising was a "fatal miscalculation".
After this inept but significant protest, O'Brien was among those captured and charged with high treason. The crafty Viceroy, Lord Clarendon, thought O'Brien should not be hanged but "this ought not to be said until after he is found guilty". Accordingly, his death sentence was commuted to transportation. As Davis remarks, "he became an exiled martyr doomed, like Ulysses, to wander the globe".
In 1854 the Foreign Secretary recommended conditional pardon for the transported Young Ireland and Chartist prisoners. On May 9th, 1856, they were granted full pardons to celebrate the end of the Crimean war.
Reflecting disillusionment after his return from Van Diemen's Land, O'Brien said if the Irish people wished to live under the British imperial parliament he would reluctantly accept their decision. Shortly afterwards he asserted that Ireland must not identify with the British Empire. He believed Irish self-government did not necessitate the disruption of the empire.
Although opposed to Fenianism, O'Brien inadvertently provided a stimulus to the movement during a 7,000-mile tour of the United States in 1859, when he was treated as the elder statesman of Irish nationalism. (The spitting on American trains, a corollary of tobacco chewing, nauseated the fastidious O'Brien.) On the outbreak of the Civil War, he supported the American Union but - consistently humane - thought it was not worth so much bloodshed to preserve. He estimated that 200,000 Irishmen fell in "this horrible warfare".
A biographer's greatest challenge is to get the balance right between the inner and public person. This detailed biography does not always succeed. For instance, we are told that O'Brien became "a proud father" on the birth of his wife Lucy's first child; his reaction to fathering a son, and possibly a daughter, to a mistress in England is not recorded. (His family paid off the woman.)
Nonetheless, Richard Davis, who has already written with distinction about Young Ireland and Arthur Griffith, does justice to O'Brien's complex political philosophy and rounded identity. In the tradition of Thomas Davis, he believed passionately in education. His breadth of reading and linguistic skills were awesome. Fluent in English and French, he understood Irish, Latin, Greek, ancient and modern, Italian, German and Spanish. His erudition reminds one of another eminent Victorian, Gladstone.
Brendan O Cathaoir's Famine Diary will be published shortly