, published in
Punch magazine, on 28 December 1867 This bombing enraged the British public, souring relations between Britain and Ireland and causing a panic over the Fenian threat. The radical,
Charles Bradlaugh, condemned the incident in his newspaper the
National Reformer as an act "calculated to destroy all sympathy, and to evoke the opposition of all classes". The bombing had a traumatic effect on British working-class opinion.
Karl Marx, then living in London, observed:The London masses, who have shown great sympathy towards Ireland, will be made wild and driven into the arms of a reactionary government. One cannot expect the London proletarians to allow themselves to be blown up in honour of Fenian emissaries. A cartoon by
John Tenniel published in
Punch magazine on 28 December 1867 shows the "Fenian Guy Fawkes" sitting on a barrel of gunpowder with a lighted match, surrounded by innocent women and children. The day before the explosion, the Prime Minister
Benjamin Disraeli, had banned all political demonstrations in London in an attempt to put a stop to the weekly meetings and marches that were being held in support of the Fenians, with a similar vice-regal declaration in Ireland. Disraeli had feared that the ban might be challenged, but the explosion had the effect of turning public opinion in his favour. After the explosion, he advocated the suspension of the
Habeas Corpus Act in Britain, as was already the case in Ireland, and wider security measures were introduced. Thousands of
special constables were enlisted to assist the police. The
Metropolitan Police formed a
Special Irish Branch at
Scotland Yard in March 1883, initially as a small section of the
Criminal Investigation Department, to monitor Fenian activity.
Queen Victoria, reportedly irritated that only one man was convicted for the bombing, wrote to Home Secretary
Gathorne Hardy observing that she was "beginning to wish" that perpetrators of such crimes "be
lynch-lawed on the spot". Liberal leader
William Ewart Gladstone, then in opposition, announced his concern about Irish grievances within days of the explosion, and said that it was the duty of the British people to remove them. This act powerfully influenced Gladstone in deciding that the
Anglican Church of Ireland should be
disestablished as a concession to Irish disaffection. Later, he said that it was the Fenian action at Clerkenwell that turned his mind towards Home Rule. When Gladstone discovered at
Hawarden later that year that Queen Victoria had invited him to form a government he famously stated, "my mission is to pacify Ireland". In April 1867, the supreme council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood condemned the Clerkenwell Outrage as a "dreadful and deplorable event", but the organisation returned to bombings in Britain in 1881 to 1885, with the
Fenian dynamite campaign. The impact of the event was referred to over 50 years later, when a review of
James Joyce's novel
Ulysses in the
Quarterly Review in October 1922 described the book as "an attempted Clerkenwell explosion in the well-guarded, well-built, classical prison of English literature". On 24 September 1877, MP
Charles Stewart Parnell opined to his constituents that "No amount of eloquence could achieve what the fear of an impending insurrection, what the Clerkenwell explosion and the shot in the police van [Manchester Martyrs incident] had achieved." Parnell also attributed the explosion and the Manchester Martyrs incident as leading to "some measure of protection being given to the Irish tenant" and the
Church of Ireland being "
disestablished and disendowed". ==References==