Charles Stewart Parnell (27 June 1846 – 6 October 1891) was an Irish landowner, nationalist political leader, land reform agitator, and the founder and leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party. He was one of the most important figures in 19th century Ireland and Great Britain and described by Prime Minister William Gladstone as the most remarkable person he had ever met.
Parnell led the Irish Parliamentary Party as Member of Parliament (MP) through the period of Parliamentary nationalism in Ireland between 1875 and his death in 1891. Future Liberal Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, described him as one of the three or four greatest men of the 19th century, while Lord Haldane described him as the strongest man the British House of Commons had seen in 150 years. The Irish Parliamentary Party split during 1890, following revelations of Parnell's private life intruding on his political career. He is nevertheless revered by subsequent Irish parliamentary nationalists.
Charles Stewart Parnell was born in County Wicklow, of Protestant gentry stock. He was the third son and seventh child of John Henry Parnell (1811–1859), wealthy Anglo-Irish landowner, and his American wife Delia Tudor Stewart (1816–1898) of Bordentown, New Jersey, daughter of the American naval hero, Admiral Charles Stewart (1778-1869) (the stepson of one of George Washington's bodyguards). There were eleven children in all: five boys and six girls. Admiral Stewart's mother, Parnell's great-grandmother, belonged to the Tudor family so had a distant relationship with the British Royal Family. John Henry Parnell himself was a cousin of one of Ireland's leading aristocrats, Viscount Powerscourt, and also the grandson of a Chancellor of the Exchequer in Grattan’s Parliament, Sir John Parnell, who lost office in 1799 when he opposed the Act of Union.