ABSTRACT
In the autumn of 1885, Lord Richard Grosvenor was occupied in two transactions, the combination of which must make a strange impression on anybody who has followed the events of the time. He was corresponding with Mrs. O’Shea, partly about Parnell’s plans, partly about finding a seat for O’Shea. He was corresponding with a gentleman of the name of Richard Pigott who had asked him to find money for the publication of a pamphlet called Parnellism unmasked. The extraordinary events that followed from the meeting of Houston, then a young man in the twenties, with this veteran sponger and blackmailer, are well known to all who remember the excitements of the Parnell Commission. Parnell declared in the House that the letter was a “villainous and barefaced forgery,” but the Times refused to withdraw. Most Unionists, thinking that the Times had, and Parnell had not, a character to lose, believed that Parnell was lying.
