Hello, my name's David Rumsman and this is past, present, future, the History of Ideas podcast.

Today, in politics on trial, I'm talking about two trials, though they both concern one man,

the Irish politician Charles Stuart Parnel, the leading Irish politician of the late 19th

century.

Neither of these trials was a criminal trial.

One was an investigation into crime.

The other was a divorce case. In both of them, though not

literally, in fact, Parnell was in the dock. And in the end, between them, these two trials

changed the course of British and Irish history.

The two trials that I'm talking about today are very, very different kinds of occasions.

For a start, the investigation, what was known as the Parnell Commission that sat in 88 and 1889, lasted for more than a year. It ended up producing 35 volumes

of evidence. The court sat for six months, and it was illegal proceedings. There were witnesses,

there were lawyers, and a judgment was passed. The second trial, the divorce trial, lasted two days. It was widely reported

in the newspapers. Most people treated it almost as farce, certainly as melodrama, completely

different kind of legal proceedings. One instituted by the government, the other instituted by a

husband who accused Parel of adultery.

Such different occasions and yet the same man involved in both, the Parnel Commission,

investigated many things, but one of the questions it was asking is whether Parnel was

complicit in Irish Republican violence, whether he was connected to Irish

terrorism. The second was asking whether he was complicit, involved in the breakdown of a marriage,

whether he was an adulterer. And these two legal proceedings came to two diametrically opposed answers to these

questions. In the first case, was Parnell complicit in violence? The answer was no. In the second case,

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