The Irish Assassins: Conspiracy, Revenge and the Phoenix Park Murders That Stunned Victorian England
A brilliant work of historical true crime charting a pivotal event in the 19th century, the Phoenix Park murders in Dublin, that gripped the world and forever altered the course of Irish history, from renowned journalist, former New Yorker London editor, and Costa Biography Award finalist Julie Kavanagh.
Ireland, 1879-1882. After 700 years of British rule, the post-Famine generation of Irish tenant farmers began to push back against the reigning feudal system of landownership. The charismatic political leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, headed up the Land League, a revolutionary movement that promised to restore land and power to the people through a series of protests, strikes, and boycotts. After what became known as the Irish Land War had escalated into nationwide anarchy, Parnell and two associates were incarcerated without trial in Kilmainham Gaol. In April 1882, Parnell secretly forged the Kilmainham Treaty, a pact in which he pledged to work diplomatically with British Prime Minister William Gladstone for peace and the eventual independence of Ireland from England. It was a moment of real hope and a potential turning point in history, one that Gladstone himself described as "golden."Yet it would be shattered one sunlit evening, on May 6, 1882, as Gladstone's emissary, Lord Frederick Cavendish, who had arrived that day in Dublin, and Thomas Burke, the undersecretary for Ireland, were ambushed and stabbed to death while strolling through Phoenix Park in Dublin. The murders were funded by American supporters of Irish independence and carried out by the Invincibles, a militant faction of republicans armed with specially made surgeon's blades. The impact of the assassinations was so cataclysmic that it destroyed the peace pact, almost brought down the government, and set in motion repercussions that would last long into the twentieth century.
In a story that spans Donegal, Dublin, London, Paris, New York, Cannes, and Cape Town, Julie Kavanagh traces the crucial events that came before and after the murders. From Parnell's passionate affair with an Irish MP's wife, Katharine "Kitty" O'Shea, which eventually caused his downfall, to Queen Victoria's prurient obsession with the assassinations; from the investigation spearheaded by Superintendent John Mallon, the "Irish Sherlock Holmes," who tirelessly tracked down each member of the Invincibles, to the eventual betrayal and clandestine escape of leading Invincible James Carey and his murder on the high seas; The Irish Assassins brings us intimately into this fascinating story that shaped Irish politics and engulfed an empire. This is an unputdownable book from one of our most "compulsively readable" (Guardian) writers.
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Julie Kavanagh is the author of Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton; Nureyev: The Life, which was shortlisted for a Costa Book Award, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award, and was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize; and The Girl who Loved Camellias. Kavanagh has held positions as the London editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. She divides her time between London, North Wales, and Puglia.
Praise for The Irish Assassins:
"The tale of the Phoenix Park murders is not unfamiliar, but Kavanagh recounts it with a great sense of drama...Kavanagh's account reminds me of the very best of true crime, the sort that Dominick Dunne used to write for Vanity Fair. Like Dunne, Kavanagh never hurries; she takes the time to describe characters and places with exquisite detail. An engaging story is rendered beautiful because of the tiny ephemera that a less sensitive author might have carelessly discarded." --Times (UK)
"Journalist Kavanagh delivers a page-turning history of the murders of the chief secretary and the undersecretary for Ireland in May 1882...This entertaining and richly detailed chronicle offers fresh insights into a conflict whose repercussions are still felt today." --Publishers Weekly
"As true crime stories go, this one has it all: clandestine plotting, scandalous affairs, shadowy organizations, brutal murders, far-reaching political implications, and, for good measure, someone known as 'the Irish Sherlock Holmes.' . . . Kavanagh's gripping account of the murders is a stark reminder that history is a chaotic jumble of chance, circumstance, and opportunity, as much about what could have been as about what was." --Literary Hub
"In painstaking and sometimes-harrowing detail, journalist Kavanagh examines the fatal 1882 stabbings of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke. . . A cinematic, multilayered revenge tragedy centered on Ireland's fraught quest for independence." --Kirkus Reviews
"Enlightening, absorbing, and very exciting." --Lady Antonia Fraser
"Julie Kavanagh has taken a violent and sensational event, the assassination of two senior government official in Dublin in 1882, and placed it in a richly contextualized and many-layered historical setting. Using a wide range of sources and opening up new avenues of enquiry, she vividly demonstrates the convulsive reverberations of one violent act, tracing the shock-waves it sent into political salons at Westminster, cabins in County Donegal, court circles at Windsor, revolutionary cabals in Paris, the Irish leader Parnell's secret life in a London suburb, and the complex world of the transatlantic Irish diaspora. Consummately well-written and full of novel insights, this is the best kind of historical detective story." --R. F. Foster, Emeritus Professor of Irish History, University of Oxford
"In The Irish Assassins, Julie Kavanagh has brilliantly succeeded in making a complex sequence of events irresistibly accessible, providing an engrossing narrative that is violent, tragic, sometimes funny, extremely astute and remarkably well written." --Selina Hastings, author of Sybille Bedford: A Life
"This book is a fascinating, beautifully written account of an event whose consequences reverberate even today." --Tony Blair
"This is one of those rare books that is superbly written, tells me something I need to know, and which grips the imagination from first word to last. Julie Kavanagh has produced an engrossing account of revolutionary violence, political folly and human weakness. It is a powerful work." --Fergal Keane, BBC Ireland Correspondent
"In The Irish Assassins, Julie Kavanagh manages the extraordinary feat of guiding the reader through the complexities of Anglo-Irish politics while building the combined tension of an electric political thriller with a tragic love story. The people are real, the events still matter today and the impact is Shakespearean." --Ralph Fiennes
Praise for Julie Kavanagh:
"Ms. Kavanagh excels in describing the period." --Wall Street Journal, on The Girl Who Loved Camelias
"With her colorful new biography, The Girl Who Loved Camellias, Julie Kavanagh exposes the tawdry reality behind her heroine's legend. The author of an acclaimed life of Rudolf Nureyev, Kavanagh reveals that cold-eyed pragmatism, not saintly self-abnegation, formed the bedrock of Duplessis' character and career." --New York Times, on The Girl Who Loved Camelias
"In Nureyev: The Life, journalist and author Julie Kavanagh puts us in the midst of the people who surrounded Nureyev, supporting or battling him (or both) throughout his career... The book is dense with detail and character but haunted by a sense of loss." --Christian Science Monitor, on Nureyev
"Kavanagh gives us the fascinating details of the life of a modern-day genius in honest, thoroughly researched, achingly objective prose." --Denver Post, on Nureyev
"Julie Kavanagh's Nureyev: The Life offers a critically authoritative biography of the legendary dancer that should appeal to scholars and casual fans alike, combining exhaustive research with delightfully juicy, gossip-filled anecdotes to paint a remarkably full-blooded portrait...Nureyev is not propelled by exhaustive scholarship as much as terrific storytelling. Kavanagh seeds the book with vivid details." --Boston Globe, on Nureyev
"Julie Kavanagh, a British dance journalist who trained as a dancer and the author of Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton, has written a superbly researched biography of Nureyev." --New York Times, on Nureyev
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