Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  Recruitment meetings proliferated in early April, prompting Dublin Castle to consider, late in the day, whether it should try to disarm the Volunteers, for all their threats to kill anyone who tried. On 12 April Birrell minuted that the suggestion ‘requires careful consideration’. Wimborne thought it ‘a difficult point’, wondering how the policy could be successfully carried out.28 The RIC, which had asked the question, received no reply by Easter, though on 13 April two republicans were imprisoned for three months for illegally transporting guns and ammunition within the Dublin police district.

  II

  Casement had stayed, somewhat unhappily, in Germany, and was therefore no part of the planning of the Easter Rising. A fellow Irishman in Berlin, who was in contact with Dublin, informed him of the plan early in March. Although Casement had not been consulted, he realised this was his opportunity to take part in the creation of the Irish republic for which he longed. The British authorities, ironically, had more knowledge of rebel activity than he did. From the outbreak of war to Easter 1916 the Admiralty intercepted thirty-two cables between the German embassy in Washington and Berlin about assisting Irish rebels.29 Casement was told a U-boat would take him to Ireland’s west coast for a rendezvous with rebels and with another – disguised – German ship carrying arms, and he departed on 12 April. His U-boat broke down, delaying his journey while he transferred to another.

  Some of the intercepted cables revealed that a cargo ship, captured at Kiel when war broke out and recommissioned into the German navy, would bring in some arms; it was disguised as a Norwegian steamer, the Aud. In March the Germans had offered to land 20,000 rifles and ten machine guns in Tralee Bay via two or three fishing trawlers in the days immediately before an uprising. In the end, just this one boat was sent. It left Lübeck on 9 April and reached Tralee Bay on the 20th. The rebels had no radio contact with the ship, so could not tell it not to arrive before midnight on Easter Sunday, the 23rd: the rebels would not be ready to receive the shipment until then. Therefore Karl Spindler, the Aud’s captain, was surprised when dropping anchor on the 20th that no pilot boat met him. Nor was there Casement’s U-boat: Spindler was poor at navigation and was 7 miles from the agreed rendezvous. On Good Friday, 21 April, the Aud conspicuously sailed up and down Tralee Bay looking for a U-boat, or for some Volunteers to unload its cargo.

  That morning the RIC arrested Casement on the Kerry coast after he landed from the U-boat. He was taken to Tralee. The police did not know who he was, but the collapsible boat in which he had landed suggested espionage. Once his identity was established he was taken to London; on 15 May he was charged with treason under a statute of 1351. Armed trawlers escorted Spindler, who never met his submarine, to Queenstown, where he scuttled his ship and its cargo on 22 April.

  There were tensions within the republican leadership. Pearse was committed to an uprising; but MacNeill had always doubted the rationale behind it and considered the argument for it to have been based on wishful thinking about the relative strengths and abilities of the opposing forces. MacNeill conceded that defensive manoeuvres might be necessary when he learned of a pamphlet, allegedly from Dublin Castle but forged by other republicans, detailing ‘plans’ for a system of repression to forestall a rising. (It was based on genuine plans for dealing with civil disobedience after the introduction of conscription, should that ever happen: there was no plan to implement it in April 1916.) However, when at midnight on 20 April Pearse told MacNeill that the Rising was happening the next day, and that the Volunteers were under IRB control, MacNeill and a small group loyal to him immediately sent an order to Volunteer branches across Ireland that ‘orders of a special character issued by Commandant Pearse’ were cancelled with immediate effect.30 Branches were told to do nothing except on the order of the chief of staff – MacNeill – himself, with lieutenants sent from Dublin to spread the word; though the IRB kidnapped one, Bulmer Hobson, to prevent him fulfilling his mission.

  The next morning MacNeill temporarily changed his mind again when Mac Diarmada, Pearse and MacDonagh visited him and announced that the German arms shipment had arrived. However, when he read of Casement’s arrest he decided, again, that the action had to be cancelled. He then heard the arms had been scuttled, and that the Dublin Castle document was a forgery, and instructed Pearse to stop; but Pearse refused and said: ‘it is no use trying to stop us.’31 When MacNeill said he would send an order countermanding the mobilisation, Pearse told him it would not be obeyed. Nonetheless, MacNeill, at midnight on 22 April, sent an order cancelling the Rising. Driving through the night, his senior staff officers took the new order to branches outside Dublin, and MacNeill took a press notice – a modified and nuanced version of what was in the leaflets distributed to activists – to the Sunday Independent.

  On the morning of Easter Sunday, 23 April, it was learned that 250 pounds of gelignite had been stolen from a quarry near Dublin. Alerted by the press notice, rather than by the theft of the explosives, officials met in the Castle. Birrell was spending Easter in London, reading an improving book on the Chevalier de Boufflers, an eighteenth-century French man of letters and colonial governor. Before his departure he had fretted with Nathan for days, as intelligence came in detailing the threat of a rising, about whether taking action would make matters worse. Wimborne and Nathan, holding the fort in Birrell’s absence, decided Casement’s arrest and the sinking of the Aud meant there would be no rising. Yet Wimborne, whom his friend Lady Cynthia Asquith – daughter-in-law of the prime minister – had recently described as ‘a figure of fun, but rather a pathetic one’, was less sure than Nathan that all would be calm, and wanted to show a firm hand. He demanded Birrell be asked for permission to order the arrest of the leaders of the potential rebellion.32 On Easter Monday morning, 24 April, Birrell finally agreed to have the men arrested, and to their being deported to England.

  During Easter Sunday, copies of a proclamation of the republic were printed on the presses of a left-wing newspaper. To wrong-foot the authorities the Rising was postponed until noon on Easter Monday. The IRB’s seven-man provisional government cancelled MacNeill’s order to demobilise. This action was straightforward in Dublin, where communications were swift and much could be done by word of mouth; in the provinces it was complicated, and even in Dublin there was some confusion. Orders were being issued, countermanded and counter-countermanded; the command structure of the IRB was amateurish, and groups went without orders for hours on end, making both advances and coordination with other units nearly impossible. When the Rising eventually failed, MacNeill and his countermanding order were obvious targets of blame. In fact, as MacNeill knew, the plans for the Rising were entirely inadequate, and merely allowed the British Army to corner and kill men. However, many more rebels were alerted to come out and fight on Easter Day than appeared on the Monday, so MacNeill’s final countermand had some effect, and almost certainly saved lives.

  Pearse’s Volunteers, and Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army, supported by 200 women of Cumann na mBan, occupied strategic locations in Dublin on the morning of Easter Monday. These included the 4th Battalion of the Dublin Brigade, under Ceannt, taking the South Dublin Union – an enormous workhouse – and the 2nd Battalion, under MacDonagh, the Jacob’s biscuit factory. A few were in the Citizen Army’s green uniform, but most made do with what military-style clothing they could find – bandoliers, puttees and jodhpurs – and armed themselves with whatever came to hand, from rifles to pickaxes. With confusion rife, an estimated 700 people began the uprising, and it is thought their numbers rose to 1,500 in Dublin.33 A so-called ‘headquarters group’ of around 150 marched from Liberty Hall in Beresford Place, long the meeting place of anti-British agitators, to Sackville Street – as O’Connell Street was still officially, but not colloquially, known – outside the General Post Office, a monumental Greek revival granite building of a century earlier, between 11.50 a.m. and noon. Connolly, who supposedly said, as he started: ‘we are going out to be slaughtered’, led the g
roup.34 It says much for the Castle’s attitude that the police ignored the march as just another exercise. The column, on Connolly’s order, did a left wheel and entered the GPO. Staff and customers were ordered out, though accounts suggest it took time for them to register that the rebels meant business. For the next four days not only would the GPO be the headquarters of the so-called provisional government, it would also be a point of refuge for disconnected rebels fleeing from the British Army, inadvertently concentrating them in a position where their eventual defeat became inevitable.

  A Sinn Féin tricolour was hoisted on the GPO flagpole; and shortly after noon Pearse went into Sackville/O’Connell Street and read the proclamation of the republic (for whose drafting he was mainly responsible) to a bemused group of passers-by; although a contemporary account from a reporter on the Saturday Post says a man resembling Clarke’s description proclaimed the republic from Nelson’s Pillar at 1.30 p.m. Both events may have happened.35 The proclamation drew heavily on Irish cultural roots, beginning with the summons: ‘IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.’36

  Having proclaimed, too, that an army, supported by Americans and from Europe, was ready to seize the moment and reveal itself, it continued:

  We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people and government has not extinguished the right, nor can it ever be extinguished except by the destruction of the Irish people. In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty; six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms. Standing on that fundamental right and again asserting it in arms in the face of the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State, and we pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades in arms to the cause of its freedom, of its welfare, and of its exaltation among the nations.

  The proclamation claimed ‘the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman’, in return for guaranteeing ‘religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities’ and resolving ‘to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation’ while being ‘oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government’. The IRB military council signed it: Clarke, Mac Diarmada, Pearse, Connolly, MacDonagh, Ceannt and Plunkett, all of whom placed their republic under the protection of ‘the Most High God.’ Many Dubliners, and Irish people in general, were unimpressed by what they deemed an extremist political act. The hint of German support contained in the proclamation’s reference to Europe was distasteful even to many who were not Unionists. Those Dubliners not in Sackville Street or, later in the afternoon, around St Stephen’s Green were slow to grasp that a rebellion was in progress: but by Tuesday morning, when the serious fighting started, central Dublin was effectively sealed off from the world.

  Military strategists believe the reason the Rising began to falter so soon was the rebels’ decision, having proclaimed the republic, not swiftly to occupy Dublin Castle and the fortress-like space of Trinity College. This may have been a calculated risk. They seemed to rule out particularly Protestant targets, such as Trinity, in case of appearing to embrace the sectarianism the proclamation had promised to avoid. A desire to preserve Dublin’s heritage was later cited as a reason why the Bank of Ireland was not occupied; the last Irish parliament had met in the bank building. But some decisions about how to fight were simply incomprehensible, such as why the rebels chose to expose themselves to attack by gathering on St Stephen’s Green rather than in one of the great buildings surrounding it. Their lack of numbers fatally undermined them and they had insufficient men adequately to garrison against a counter-attack the buildings they occupied. It was noted that a high proportion of those taking up defensive positions were barely more than schoolboys.

  Lives were lost almost immediately. James O’Brien, an officer of the Dublin Metropolitan Police on guard at the Castle, was shot at around noon. A British sniper killed his murderer, Seán Connolly, a captain in the Citizens’ Army and an Abbey Theatre actor, an hour later. Each was the first on either side to die. Soon afterwards rebels took the Castle’s guardroom: but retreated, not knowing there were only another twenty-five soldiers there. One of the first Irish civilians killed was F. W. Browning, a Dublin barrister who was also Ireland’s most renowned cricketer: he had captained the Gentlemen of Ireland against Australia, and as an assiduous recruiter raised a footballers’ company for the 6th Royal Dublin Fusiliers. He was on his way to report for duty and was targeted because he was wearing a khaki brassard bearing the royal cipher.

  Significant failures of intelligence handicapped the rebels, as did absurd optimism. There is evidence that some leaders never stopped believing the Germans, like the 7th Cavalry, would appear: after he had surrendered, Mac Diarmada was heard to say: ‘we were sure they would turn up.’37 Nor did they receive support from their fellow Dubliners, few of whom then shared the revolutionary ethos of the provisional government. When they commandeered vehicles and carts for barricades they simply caused annoyance. The core problem with the plan was that there was no plan B. Asquith, facing an important debate in Parliament the following morning about the conscription crisis, heard the news late on 24 April, when he arrived at Downing Street from the Wharf. According to Hankey he observed: ‘well, that’s something’, and went to bed.38

  III

  It is hardly surprising Asquith was untroubled. Apart from having bigger fish to fry, he had had no indication anything was amiss in Ireland. In the weeks before the Rising, Birrell had suggested to military commanders in Dublin that the Army should merely be seen going about its lawful business. For the next two or three days the story was of attempts by rebel battalions and smaller groupings in outer Dublin to secure positions too big or too vulnerable to hold, and to await the inevitable. The 3rd Battalion – which unlike other groupings refused to allow women to fight in it – made its headquarters in a bakery by the Grand Canal Street bridge around half an hour after the republic was proclaimed. De Valera, its commander, was a half-Spanish, half-Irish maths teacher of American birth who had risen through the ranks of the Volunteers. He had hoped to send his men out to occupy the port at Kingstown and stop British arms and reinforcements coming in by sea; but he lacked the men. The 2nd Battalion holed itself up in the Jacob’s factory, waiting to be attacked: but they were not. The absence of a coherent plan, as MacNeill had warned, was palpable.

  The General Officer Commanding in Ireland, Major General Lovick Friend – in his youth an occasional first-class cricketer of some distinction – had, despite warnings of a possible insurrection, like Birrell chosen to visit London for Easter. He returned the moment he heard of the Rising. On Easter Monday there was racing at Fairyhouse, and much of the officer class was there. There were very few soldiers left in the capital, something an intelligence operation superior to the rebels’ would have discerned and exploited; when Pearse and his followers occupied the GPO only around 400 soldiers of the King were in Dublin, based in four separate barracks around the city.39 The first instinct of their commanders was to secure the Castle.

  Wimborne, as Lord Lieutenant, now became the focus of executive action faute de mieux. His position was mainly ceremonial; but he enjoyed the pomp and circumstance, and his wife was known as ‘Queen Alice’. A former soldier, he had begun the war on the GOC’s staff at the Curragh, and was now director of recruiting for the Army in Ireland. Still in his early forties, he was an aristocratic party hack, and a philanderer so celebrated that women were advised to avoid being alone with him. He landed the job not least because he was recommended to Asquith by Churchill, his cousin: hearing in November 1914 that the post would soon be filled, Churchill wrote to the prime minister ‘to ask most earnestly
that Ivor may not be overlooked … I am sure that the choice would be a right one.’40

  Insofar as Wimborne was required to have a depth he was soon out of it. He was too lightweight, and lacked the political nous, to handle the situation sensitively. His main misjudgement was to act as though the entire population of Dublin had risen against the government, rather than just a loose band of rebels and fanatics who, but for the over-reaction that he initiated, would have attracted only the disdain of most of the population. He decided at once to declare martial law, on his own recognisance. Birrell, steeped in Liberal doctrine, was appalled at Wimborne’s action, and urged Asquith not to extend martial law outside central Dublin. However, once the chief secretary was on the boat to Dublin, his credibility in tatters because of his complacency over the preceding months and years, the cabinet (despite some dissent from Lloyd George) put the whole country under martial law, which the King confirmed at a Privy Council on 26 April. This compounded an over-reaction that had not finished yet. Given that much of Ireland had come to deplore the rebel action, this was pitiful public relations.