Those Wild Wyndhams by Claudia Renton

Author:Claudia Renton [Claudia Renton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-12-17T11:00:00+00:00

‘They don’t call it Home Rule, but the path is the same’: Gladstone’s ghost looks on approvingly as George Wyndham examines MacDonnell’s Devolution Scheme.

There are two letters from MacDonnell that suggest that George had been told of the scheme, even if he had not listened – one found in a box of letters after his resignation, the other, trapped between the pages of a Congested Districts Report that George had taken with him to the Continent. The latter made specific reference to the manifesto, in which manifesto MacDonnell hoped George ‘recognized the trace of conversations we have had’.39 This incriminating letter suggests that, contrary to his claims in The Times, George knew and possibly even approved of the scheme. Seeking to explain it away, Guy Wyndham could only proffer the weak explanation that his brother had not read beyond the first few sentences.40

George’s true position is more difficult to tell. A decade later, Mary commented to Wilfrid Blunt that ‘It is curious how each person wants to prove George to be the thing they love themselves or to twist him into their narrow horizon if they like pink! They say he is pink that he was a nationalist, that he was an R.C. this that & the other …’41 In 1911, George would inveigh against constitutional reform of the House of Lords and the removal of its absolute veto, claiming inter alia that it would pave the way for Home Rule. Yet this lay in his more extremist future. What brought him down when Parliament reconvened in February 1905, and an amendment to the King’s Address was moved concerning his own conduct, was that he could not be pinned down at all on what he had meant, what he had known, what he supported and what he believed.

Five years before, George had made his name in response to an amendment to the monarch’s Address on opening Parliament. Now, he ‘had to fight with his back to the wall under a hail of furious charges and envenomed insinuations, knowing that even on the benches alongside of him and behind him there was an atmosphere of sullen suspicion’.42 He was accused of concealing ‘ugly facts’, of using MacDonnell as a scapegoat or a Trojan horse. ‘Cannot the right hon. Gentleman give a plain answer to a plain question?’ he was asked. George’s family did not pretend that his conduct during those weeks in the Commons when he was under attack was anything other than a shambles. They had simply to wait for the horror to end. At the end of January, a leader in The Times declared that ‘the Chief Secretary, owing it is understood to enfeebled health, has seen little or nothing of the country for the administration of which he remains responsible’.43 Of all the attacks, this, for the ‘Patriot’ George, was one of the most bitter blows.

On 20 February 1905 he made his final speech as Irish Secretary in the Commons. He was shambolic, rambling and confused. On 6

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