Other letters equally incriminating were published.  Parnell denied the authorship, his denial was not accepted; fierce controversy ended in the establishment of one of the strangest Commissions of Enquiry ever set up—­a semi-judicial tribunal of judges.  Its proceedings created the acutest public interest, drawn out over long months, up to the day when Sir Charles Russell had before him in the witness-box the original vendor of the letters—­one Pigott.  Pigott’s collapse, confession of forgery, flight and suicide, followed with appalling swiftness:  and the result was to generate through England a very strong sympathy for the man against whom, and against whose followers, such desperate calumnies had been uttered and exploited.  Parnell’s prestige was no longer confined to his own countrymen:  and the sense of all Home Rulers was that they fought a winning battle, under two allied leaders of extraordinary personal gifts.

Then, as soon as it was clear that the attack of the Pigott letters had recoiled on those who launched it, came the indication of a fresh menace.  Proceedings for divorce were taken with Parnell as the co-respondent:  the case was undefended.  Mr. Gladstone and probably most Englishmen expected that Parnell would retire, at all events temporarily, from public life, as, in Lord Morley’s words, “any English politician of his rank” would have been obliged to do.  Parnell refused to retire; and Gladstone made it publicly known that if Parnell continued to lead the Irish party, his own leadership of the Liberal party, “based, as it had been, mainly on the prosecution of the Irish cause,” would be rendered “almost a nullity.”  The choice—­for it was a choice—­was left to the Irish.  To retain Parnell as leader in Gladstone’s judgment made Gladstone’s task impossible, and therefore indicated Gladstone’s withdrawal from public life.  To part with Parnell meant parting with the ablest leader that Nationalist Ireland had ever found.

A more heartrending alternative has never been imposed on any body of politicians, and John Redmond, unlike his younger brother, was not of those to whom decision came by an instinctive act of allegiance.  His nature forced him to see both sides, but when he decided it was with his whole nature.  The issue was debated by the Irish party in Committee Room 15 of the House of Commons, with the Press in attendance.  In this encounter Redmond for the first time stepped to the front.  He had hitherto been outside the first flight of Irish parliamentarians.  Now, he was the first to state the case for maintaining Parnell’s leadership, and throughout the discussions he led on that side.  When Parnell’s death came a few months after the “split” declared itself, there was no hesitation as to which of the Parnellites should assume the leadership of their party.  Redmond resigned his seat in North Wexford and contested Cork city, where Parnell had long been member.  He was badly beaten, and for some three