William Henry O’Shea and Katharine O’Shea

William Henry O’Shea and Katharine O’Shea (respectively, born 1840, Dublin, Ire.—died April 22, 1905, Brighton, Sussex, Eng.; born Jan. 30, 1846, Cressing, Essex, Eng.—died Feb. 5, 1921, Littlehampton, Sussex) were husband and wife from 1867 to 1890. Their relationship with the Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell led to a divorce scandal that terminated Parnell’s career and divided Irish nationalist opinion.

William Henry O’Shea was the only son of a Roman Catholic solicitor in Dublin. Educated at Oscott and at Trinity College, Dublin, he became a cornet of the 18th Hussars in 1858 and was retired as captain in 1862. In 1867 he married Katharine, sixth daughter of the Rev. Sir John Page Wood of Rivenhall Place, Essex. The O’Sheas had one son, Gerard, and two daughters. It is not clear when O’Shea became aware of the existence of intimate relations between his wife and Parnell, though he and his wife are said to have ceased marital relations several years before 1880, when she and Parnell became acquainted. From 1881 Mrs. O’Shea and Parnell lived together at Eltham, near London. Neither she nor her husband, who did not object to this arrangement, contemplated divorce during the lifetime of her aunt, Mrs. Benjamin Wood, on whom the O’Sheas were financially dependent.

In the meantime, O’Shea was elected to the British House of Commons in 1880 as a Home Rule member from County Clare, Ire., and in that same year he supported Parnell’s successful campaign for leadership of the Irish Nationalist Party (Irish Parliamentary Party). Although he helped obtain Parnell’s release from prison for having attacked the Irish Land Act of 1881, Parnell came to mistrust him. In 1885 O’Shea claimed to have negotiated an agreement between Parnell and Joseph Chamberlain, at that time president of the Board of Trade, for a local government plan in substitution for Home Rule. In 1886 Parnell and Chamberlain arranged O’Shea’s election to Parliament from Galway as a Home Ruler, but O’Shea (as Chamberlain evidently expected) thereupon refused to support a Home Rule Bill sponsored by the prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone. Throughout that decade, Mrs. O’Shea was the intermediary for correspondence between Parnell and Gladstone on the Irish problem.

Mrs. Wood, who died in 1889, left her considerable property to her niece, Mrs. O’Shea, but other relatives contested the will. When O’Shea saw that he could not share in the estate and had no further reason for preserving the appearance of marriage, he filed a petition for divorce on Dec. 24, 1889, charging adultery and naming Parnell as corespondent. No defense was offered, and the divorce was granted on Nov. 17, 1890. Parnell was blackguarded by English Nonconformists and by the Irish Catholic hierarchy and lost his political leadership. He married Mrs. O’Shea in June 1891, four months before his death.