Charles Stuart Parnell was leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, which held the balance of power in the British Parliament in 1885. Three years earlier he was in jail for supporting Irish tenants who opposed paying rent to English landlords. On 12 April 1887, the day that Parliament debated an act proposing tougher action against the tenants, Parnell was accused of supporting the murder of a British politician.

In 1882 the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Lord Cavendish, and Ireland’s most senior civil servant, Thomas Burke, were stabbed to death in a Dublin Park. A letter supposedly from Parnell saying that Burke got his just deserts was published in the Times as part of a series of articles connecting Parnell and his followers to crime. Parnell complained that the letter was forged. A special Parliamentary committee investigated this and other allegations between September 1888 and November 1889. One of the witnesses, Richard Piggott, confessed to forging letters and then committed suicide. This cleared Parnell of the most serious charge.

Whilst the committee sat Jack the Ripper was active in the East End of London. The man charged by the Home Secretary to catch the killer was Robert Anderson, Assistant Commissioner (Crime) at New Scotland Yard. An Irish barrister Anderson had spent much of his career fighting Irish terrorists. In his memoirs, published in 1910, he revealed that he had written some of the articles on Parnellism and Crime.