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The immediate political background was the conflict between the Liberal government and the House of Lords over the 1909 “People’s Budget”. When the Lords rejected the budget, a general election followed in January 1910. The result left Liberals and Conservatives closely balanced in the House of Commons. Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party, committed to constitutional Home Rule within the United Kingdom, possessed the votes needed by H. H. Asquith’s Liberal ministry.
Lord Rosebery’s Liberal administration fell in June 1895, having already shown little capacity to revive the cause of Irish self-government after the defeat of the second Home Rule bill in the House of Lords in 1893. A Conservative and Liberal Unionist ministry replaced it. On 4 July Gerald Balfour, younger brother of the former chief secretary Arthur Balfour, became chief secretary for Ireland. His appointment mattered because he entered office at a time when agrarian agitation was quieter than in the Land War years, but the underlying land question remained unsettled, nationalist MPs were divided, and Home Rule had plainly receded from Westminster’s immediate agenda.
The split had formally occurred in December 1890, when the majority of Irish MPs left Parnell and followed Justin McCarthy. In 1891 that majority acquired a more durable organisational form in the Irish National Federation. It retained the parliamentary language of Home Rule but rejected Parnell’s leadership as an impediment to restoring the Liberal alliance on which a second Home Rule bill seemed to depend. Parnell’s adherents, led in parliament by John Redmond and others, insisted that Ireland must not allow an English Liberal leader to decide who could lead an Irish party. The disagreement was therefore not merely personal, although personal morality was continually invoked; it concerned political independence, electoral calculation and the terms on which Irish self-government might be pursued.
