"Rome Rule"
The Irish Home Rule League was confronted with a tremendous crisis. The leader of the Home Rule Party, Isaac Butt, was a moderate who advocated for cooperation with the Liberal government under William Gladstone, which had just won re-election in 1875. However, in Christmas of 1877, the declaration of the Union of Rome outraged many supporters of the Irish Home Rule League, chief among them the Catholic Church in Ireland, which overwhelmingly denounced the Union of Rome, as did Catholic churches in most of the world outside of Manitoba, England, and Germany. Unfortunately for Butt, he also happened to a member of the Church of Ireland, making him a Protestant. This sparked a back-bench revolt against Butt, led by the obstructionist Joseph Biggar, who had ferociously opposed Butt. The most notorious figure who had turned against Butt was Charles Stewart Parnell, despite the fact that Parnell was also a Protestant. This change was heavily led by members of the Irish National Catholic League, which was quickly founded by Archbishop Thomas Croke to protest Gladstone's recognition of the Union of Rome - although they gained most of their support from farmers after they included provisions discouraging (mostly Protestant) landlordism and supporting the distribution of land to (mostly Catholic) tenant farmers. The result of this leadership challenge was however not to actually replace Butt, but rather to split the Home Rule League, which was never a fully organized political party, but rather something closer to a caucus. The smaller Butt faction and the larger Biggar faction simply sat apart from each other, often lobbing insults at each other.
The British parliament between 1874-1880 eventually became known as the Zombie Parliament, named after the walking dead corpses of Caribbean mythology (the name was coined by Randolph Churchill, a fierce opponent of Gladstone). Opponents of Gladstone derisively referred to his earlier proposals of Irish "Home Rule" as "Rome Rule" but with the creation of the Union of Rome, Gladstone openly celebrated his Home Rule proposal as Rome Rule. When he brought up the Government of Ireland Bill of 1878, the Irish MPs split (Butt for, Biggar against), as the Conservatives voted lock-step against. Most worryingly for Gladstone, several liberals, such as the newly elected Joseph Chamberlain, voted against the bill, but most were such new MPs, they brought few other MPs with them. Ultimately, the bill passed by 18 votes. A furious effort was made to stop the bill in the House of Lords, which was inclined to veto the bill and did so. However, the House of Lords backed down in the new 1879 Act, after Gladstone agreed to allow the 28 representative peers of Ireland to continue voting in the House of Lords - and then exclude all 101 Irish MPs to sit instead in the Irish "Second Order" (the original plan was to exclude only 80). The Irish First Order was also reformed, in order to gain the support of the Irish Representative Peers in the House of Lords, to remove any elected members. Originally, it had all 28 representative peers and 75 representatives elected by a restricted franchise, but the new First Order would simply be a body of all the Irish peers. This was accepted by the House of Lords, because the First Order would thus be almost entirely Protestant.
Amusingly, as a result of the bill, the next Parliament was to only elect 551 members, horn of the 101 Irish MPs. Amusingly, if you excluded the roughly 60 Irish MPs that belonged to the Liberal Party, Gladstone's Liberals by that itself would lose its majority in Parliament. This outraged the Conservatives, who mocked the "Zombie Parliament", and who mobilized in rage over British defeat in the Zulu War, Russian triumph in the Great Eastern War, and against Irish Home Rule. The results for the Liberal Party was an annihilation in the heartland of Britain. A crushing defeat saw the Conservatives triumph with 360 seats over 191 for the Liberals, putting Disraeli back in charge.
In contrast, Irish Home Rule wasn't even that popular in Ireland itself, as Irish radicals raged against the un-elected Protestant Peers of the Irish First Order. In the 1880 elections, the "National Parliamentary Party", led by Joseph Biggar and his proteges, Charles Stewart Parnell and John Dillon, won in a landslide on a platform of ending landlordism, crushing the Conservatives everywhere outside of Ulster. The disorganized remnants of the Liberals and Butt's moderates also flailed, crashing into a distant third and fourth. The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland basically occupied a similar role as the Governor-General of places like Canada, but there was no office of the Prime Minister (as the Irish Order was explicitly not an Irish Parliament). The leader of the largest party, the NPP, however, declared himself a de facto Prime Minister, passing ambitious bills to limit land taxes for tenant farmers and rents, while denying official recognition of any properties of the Union of Rome.
Ironically, Irish Home Rule thus actually weakened Irish representation in politics. The Irish Order was more or less irrelevant because the First Order vetoed almost every reform passed by the Second Order. The Conservative government notably declined to actually reverse the Irish Home Rule bill as it had originally promised, because it actually liked what it saw from Irish politics. Protestant landlords were more or less totally safe and without Irish representation in Westminster, Gladstone's proposals to reform tenant farmers by lowering rents and allowing them to purchase the land they farmed on fell on flat ears. There was actually no reason anymore that British politics had to heed Irish concerns. In response, seeing the failure of Irish Home Rule, a national tenant strike was called by the Irish National Parliamentary Party, which quickly caught fire. Angry that the government refused to even consider modest land reforms, both the First Order government in Dublin and the Conservative government in London, many tenants immediately began refusing to pay rent to their landlords, which the Tories saw as an affront to the rule of law and thus "progress."
At this time, the French Emperor, Napoleon IV was actually pursuing his own reforms in France to ensure more egalitarian distribution of land for small farmers, who largely became smallholding farmers who strongly supported the French monarchy. A grinding agricultural recession smashed into France in the 1880's, including the introduction of the mushroom phylloxera, which destroyed almost French vines. In response, Napoleon IV called for widespread agrarian reform, which would finance tenant farmers to purchase their own lands, which was cheap due to the agricultural depression. Then in order to restore agriculture, the French government hiked grain and corn tariffs, angering both the Americans and British. The North Germans complained, but this was seen as hypocritical, as the French had only increased tariffs to directly match North German tariffs (which had been demanded by landowning Prussian junkers). Anglo-French business-people lambasted the scheme as "Catholic socialism" - an insult that Napoleon IV openly embraced. Napoleon IV's land reforms often became the model for Irish tenant farmer activists, which further caused the British commercial elite to staunchly oppose land reform as a Catholic and Socialist scheme. Although the Papacy in Avignon was set to condemn anti-rent boycotts as contrary to the rule of law and sanctity of contract, modern archives reveal that Imperial French pressure nixed that proposed Papal encyclical.[1]
The 1885 election was narrowly won by the Conservatives and only after they had allowed the young Randolph Churchill to run a campaign based on expanding the franchise. However, by 1887, the country was soon in recession due to the negative economic impacts of the Spanish-Confederate War sparking a recession in the United States. Eventually, the 1890 elections would be seen as a "war election." Irish tenants, either unwilling or unable to pay rents, finally joined the tenant strike in mass. By 1888, the vast majority of tenants in Ireland weren't paying rents, with open fighting and murder on both sides as local officials tried to enforce rents. As the Irish National Party had adopted more or less a position of denying funding to the Irish Home Rule Government (and by extension, the Irish police), the British Army was the only force that could enforce rents, which Prime Minister Churchill chose to do. Britain itself rallied behind Churchill, re-electing the Conservatives in 1890 despite the recession. However, sentiment in Ireland overwhelmingly rejected the intervention of the British Army. Open violence erupted, as the Irish Republican Brotherhood began training tenant farmers to sabotage and resist the British Army. In addition, anger at the First Order bubbled, as Irish aristocrats and landlords had to constantly dodge assassination by Irish radicals. For all intents and purposes, Ireland was now under martial law. Outraging Ireland further, Charles Stewart Parnell, one of the more moderate Irish nationalists now in charge, was arrested by British forces on adultery charges and died in prison in 1891 from kidney disease, which was immediately blamed on British soldiers. Although he had been suffering from kidney disease for years, it was alleged that the British soldiers denied him medical care, causing his death. [2] This put the much more radical Dillon in charge.
Although Prime Minister Churchill seemed to be the "Lord of Electioneering" for his ability of winning two stunning victories at the age of 36 and 41, he appeared to be slowing down for some unclear reason. As the economy recovered, Churchill appeared to be romping towards another victory in 1895. Sick and horrified by the violence, Churchill's Conservatives sought to implement their own land reforms in hopes of mollifying Irish tenant farmers. The Irish situation had developed far worse than they had hoped and although firmly believing that the rule of law had to be preserved, now believed that changing the law was the only way to stop the violence. However, by then, liberal leader Joseph Chamberlain (his political star rose after the failure of Irish Home Rule, which he had opposed) openly opposed those land reform proposals, and sided with several "Ultra-Tories" to stymie them. The two parties had ironically switched positions on land reform, though it was all positioning anyways, as Westminster didn't even have the power to implement land reform in Ireland due to home rule. In addition, besides personal health issues, the United Kingdom, while fighting the Irish Land Wars, would be romping not towards one, but two cataclysmic wars.
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[1] The OTL encylical "
Saepe Nos" in 1888
[2] More or less his OTL death - the ITL British didn't kill him, but that's not what people believe.