ABSTRACT
As Timothy Healy explained it, his epithet ‘uncrowned king’ to describe Charles Stewart Parnell was simply a spontaneous product of the excitement generated during a fund-raising tour of North America in 1880. 1 This explanation, however, rather underplays its significance. In fact it reflected, and was one of the more attention-getting aspects of, a sustained campaign both to enhance Parnell's leadership of Irish nationalism and to shape the nature of Irish national identity itself in one of the most formative periods of modern Irish history. As the pre-eminent symbol of Britishness the monarchy was one of the most important institutions against which an independent Irish national identity could be defined. Accordingly, it is not surprising that the creation of a ‘royal’ persona for Parnell — with its cluster of associations evoking authority, deference and allegiance — was identified as a significant element of the process of de-legitimising the authority of the British state in Ireland at the same time as it advanced the interests of the Nationalist movement. The significance of monarchy to the politics of identity was accepted, in its own way, no less by the viceregal system in Ireland than it was by the Parnellite leadership. In this period, repeated attempts would be made to engineer closer personal contact between royal personages and the Irish masses in the belief that the royal presence had the ability, in the right political circumstances, to trigger the ‘natural’ loyalty of the people.
