Image:Charles Stewart Parnell - Brady-Handy.jpg

English: Charles Stewart Parnell was born in County Wicklow, of gentry stock. He was the third son and seventh child of John Henry Parnell, a wealthy Anglo-Irish landowner, and his American wife Delia Stewart, daughter of the American naval hero, Commodore Charles Stewart (the stepson of one of George Washington's bodyguards). Commodore Stewart's mother, Parnell's great-grandmother, belonged to the Tudor family and so could claim a distant relationship with the British Royal Family. John Henry Parnell himself was a cousin of one of Ireland's leading aristocrats, Lord Powerscourt, and also the grandson of a Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Irish House of Commons, Sir John Parnell. Thus, from birth, Charles Stewart Parnell possessed an extraordinary number of links to many elements of society; he belonged to the established Church of Ireland (most of whose members were unionists), he was connected with the aristocracy through the Powerscourts, he was linked to the old Irish Parliamentary tradition via his great-grandfather, to the American War of Independence via his grandfather, to the War of 1812 (where his grandfather had been awarded a gold medal by the United States Congress for gallantry), and distantly connected to the Royal Family. Yet it was as a leader of Irish nationalism that Parnell established his fame.