The sole piece of ‘straight’ narrative, that is, of incident following closely upon incident, which Patrick has left us is the account of his experiences on the way home from Ireland (chapters 18-23 of the Confession). Briefly, on making land he and the ship’s crew pushed inland through a barren and apparently uninhabited region, where they came near to starvation. Such was their plight that the captain called on Patrick to justify his claim that the Christian god was all-powerful, for it was doubtful, he said, whether they should ever see another human face. Just then, however, they came upon a herd of pigs, on which they regaled themselves. Up to the fourteenth day thereafter food was available to them in abundance, including a find of tree honey, and, in implicit contrast to their previous situation, they had also fire and siccitas, that is, dry weather (or perhaps shelter).

It is intended to examine in this article an instance of Gladstone’s ‘sophistry’ employed in defence of Parnell himself; the review which Gladstone wrote of T. Wemyss Reid’s biography of W. E. Forster, and which appeared in the Nineteenth Century for September 1888, under the title ‘Mr Forster and Ireland’. Considered as sophistry, it is, indeed, a virtuoso performance; some of the documents material to the case are ignored, others are misconstrued, others yet are quoted so selectively as to disguise the fact that, in reality, they contradict the argument they were adduced to prove, and the whole thesis depends upon a play upon meanings which trembles upon the brink of transparency. Merely to expose Gladstone, however, in a practice of which his enemies have so often accused him, and which, in any case, is not uncommon in politics, would be to indulge illfeeling without benefiting scholarship. The review deserves wider attention in that it is also a unique interpretation of the ‘Kilmainham treaty’. Other accounts, in all their diversity, have tended to agree that the episode was in some sense a political transaction.

Gladstonian apologists have effectively distorted the intentions of the conservative government during the period 1885-7 in which Holmes was a member of it. Carnarvon’s unofficial meeting with Parnell, and Conservative ambiguity over the need for a new crimes act, provided two easy handles for criticism which could be used without any knowledge of the inner workings of the ministry of 1885-6. Holmes’s memoir is therefore of value in showing that there was a distinctly conservative policy on Ireland, a policy which in intention if not in performance stands up well to examination in conservative (or liberal) terms. It is certainly made clear that conservative policy, where liberal, did not reflect only the stereotyped opportunism of habitual weakness: and that, in cases where a reactionary policy prevailed, this cannot be taken as evidence of an ultimately reactionary disposition towards Ireland within the cabinet. Further, the very obvious hesitancy and equivocation of the cabinet on Irish matters turns out to hinge on opposition of personalities who were in underlying agreement, rather than on differences of principle or on any real attempt or desire to manoeuvre astutely.