Lionel Edward Gresley Carden

Sir Lionel Edward Gresley Carden (15 September 1851 – 16 October 1915) was a British diplomat. Early life Carden was born on 15 September 1851 in Brighton, Sussex the son of the Reverend Lionel Carden and Lucy Lawrence née Ottley. He was educated at Eton College. Diplomat In 1877 Carden was appointed the vice-consul in Havana and held a number of diplomatic posts around Central America. Lionel Carden played a central part in an extraordinary plot by Lord Salisbury, then prime minister, to foil Parnell's remarkably successful Home Rule campaign in the 1880s by attempting to prove Parnell's complicity in criminal activities. Salisbury sought to imply that Parnell encouraged the Phoenix Park murders in 1882, and that he was linked to the dynamite outrages in England which culminated in a bomb in the House of Commons in 1887, the year of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. These claims were ultimately disproved in a dramatic hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice in 1889. The principal organiser of the outrages was a certain General Millen who became chairman of the military arm of the American activists. What was kept secret was that in 1885 Lionel Carden, then acting chargé d'affaires at HM Legation in Mexico, interviewed General Millen and with government approval recruited him as a spy, and became his paymaster. Through intermediaries General Millen was directed by Lord Salisbury to ensure that the dynamite explosions continued, thereby creating public outrage against Irish nationalists and Parnell. General Millen met Lionel Carden again in 1888 with an offer, for a very large sum of money, to appear as a witness at the hearing mentioned above, which was about to take place.