Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  On the Tuesday morning, with Birrell still not in Dublin and Friend en route from Kingstown, Wimborne consulted Nathan, and sent a messenger to deliver by hand to the War Office in London a request for reinforcements. He reinforced himself, according to Cynthia Asquith, with draughts of brandy, which Lady Wimborne constantly refilled.41 He asked for a brigade, and for two more to be held in reserve. On this occasion, at least, Wimborne had some sense on his side: after the shooting of police officers on Monday the commissioner had withdrawn them, leaving law and order in disarray; though some plain-clothes officers were deployed in an intelligence operation. Cynthia Asquith, briefed by Lord Basil Blackwood, who had been at the Castle, noted Wimborne ‘was delighted to think he was at last really in the limelight and acquitting himself so well – flushed with importance and triumph.’42 However, Wimborne’s moment of fame would be brief. ‘Altogether,’ Lady Cynthia wrote, ‘he seems to have behaved like the Emperor of Asses.’ Certainly, Wimborne lacked both the literal and metaphorical authority to calm panic in others – such as the Dublin police – and to prevent the response to the actions of the rebels from getting out of hand. He had done nothing to cause the Rising, but the course he initiated in response to it would have grave consequences for the future relations of Britain and Ireland. On 28 April Wimborne sent Asquith his resignation. It was accepted, but not put into legal effect. Wimborne resigned not because he felt responsible – and indeed he was not – but because he wanted to give the government a clean slate from which to develop the future of Ireland.

  By nightfall on Easter Monday a large contingent of rebels had set up camp on St Stephen’s Green, notable among them Countess Markievicz, born Constance Gore-Booth in London forty-eight years earlier, the daughter of an Anglo-Irish baronet and landlord. While being drenched by rain during the night, the rebels failed to realise British troops had entered the Shelbourne Hotel, opposite, by the back door and set up a machine-gun post on the roof. At dawn on 25 April the British began to strafe the rebels, forcing them to flee to the College of Surgeons, where, predictably, they were besieged. An attempt by rebels from the Green to wreck nearby railway lines was aborted. Three volunteer battalions mobilised in the outer city, but again failed to secure strategic objectives, and soon went behind barricades to take a defensive rather than an offensive role in the campaign. Numbers remained considerably less than expected. From the moment the rebels went onto the defensive they were beaten; but because of a shortage of men (and women, for many were active in the fight) they had little choice but to retrench.

  By Monday evening British reinforcements and artillery started to arrive from the Curragh, Athlone and Belfast. Brigadier General William Lowe, a cavalryman from the Curragh, took over command early on Tuesday morning and made a plan to restore order. More than 2,500 cavalry and infantry were in Dublin by then; there would be 16,000 by the end of the week: the British had stopped taking chances. The soldiers quickly cleared St Stephen’s Green and City Hall. Lowe’s plan was to establish a line in the centre of Dublin, including the station, the Castle and Trinity College, that would split the rebel forces on either side of the Liffey. This he did. Once properly trained, organised and commanded men were in place, and someone in charge with a grasp of strategy, it was but a matter of time before the rebels were defeated. Later on Tuesday morning a destroyer bearing Friend arrived at Kingstown. He could not improve on Lowe’s plan, and left him in operational command.

  Early the next day, 26 April, reinforcements, composed mainly of Sherwood Foresters who had never seen combat, landed at Kingstown. A disproportionate number were eighteen-year-old boys too young to be sent to France. Others came south from Belfast. Lowe’s orders were to clear Dublin and its surroundings of rebels, with a machine gun at the head of each column of men; the column was not to advance beyond any building from which it had been fired upon, but to remove all resistance.

  Asquith was now becoming anxious. A few weeks later, Esher heard from a friend on the General Staff that the following exchange had taken place:

  Asquith: ‘This rising is terrible. What are we to do?’

  Robertson: ‘Send every available man to Ireland.’

  Asquith: ‘Yes, but we might be invaded!’

  Robertson: ‘Well, there are a million Germans in France, a ’undred thousand in England won’t make much difference.’43

  The soldiers were reminded that the rebels were but a small proportion of the population, and were asked not to damage private property unless absolutely necessary; there was some sense that it would be wise not to alienate the public. However, much-fired-upon soldiers sought to find rebels wherever they could; from Tuesday until Friday afternoon the street fighting, though localised, was ferocious, and leaked into the suburbs, causing extensive damage. Some Dubliners showed little consideration for property, as systematic looting broke out in the luxury shops of Grafton Street.

  On Wednesday the Crown forces brought four 18-pounder guns into central Dublin, and an armed yacht, HMS Helga, sailed up the Liffey. They launched a fusillade on Liberty Hall: its reduction to rubble made a symbolic point only as no rebels were inside. That morning Captain John Bowen-Colthurst, a Royal Irish Regiment regular officer, decided arbitrarily to shoot Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, a well-known Dublin writer, pacifist and school friend of James Joyce and Oliver St John Gogarty. Colthurst had arrested him the previous evening while Sheehy-Skeffington (who although imprisoned briefly in 1915 for making statements prejudicial to recruiting was a harmless crank who advocated Esperanto as the language of Ireland, feminism, vegetarianism and temperance as well as socialism) was touring Dublin trying to prevent looting.

  British troops arrested Sheehy-Skeffington on the evening of Tuesday 25 April when they stopped a disorderly crowd of which he was an innocent part. He was detained at Portobello Barracks from which, at eleven that night, Colthurst took him as hostage on a raid of a tobacconist shop wrongly thought to belong to a leading rebel. As they proceeded Colthurst stopped two young men returning from a religious meeting, on the grounds that they were breaking the curfew. He then shot one of the men, a nineteen-year-old mechanic. Colthurst continued with the raid, leaving Sheehy-Skeffington at a nearby guardhouse, whose soldiers he ordered to shoot him if snipers attacked the raiding party. Colthurst told his hostage to start saying his prayers in case he was shot. When Sheehy-Skeffington refused, Colthurst started to say them for him.

  He was not shot as a hostage, but taken back to Portobello Barracks. The next morning Colthurst announced to his junior officer that he intended to shoot Sheehy-Skeffington and two pro-British journalists who had been rounded up after curfew. The executions were carried out immediately by a firing squad. Colthurst’s conduct was abominable but he was not of sound mind. He had been invalided home from the Western Front with suspected shell shock, and had spent all the night before ordering the executions reading the Bible and praying. The death of Colthurst’s brother in action the previous year appeared to have unhinged him as much as religious mania. His comrades, not least Major Sir Francis Vane, his commanding officer, thought him mad. He admitted everything to Vane, who, unfortunately, was not in the barracks at the time. A fortnight later Colthurst said he had acted as he did because he believed (though on what basis it is impossible to know) that Sheehy-Skeffington and the two journalists were leaders of the Rising. He was court-martialled, found insane and sent to Broadmoor, an outcome that left the Nationalists outraged at what they considered a lenient sentence. The damage to Britain’s reputation in Ireland that Colthurst’s actions caused was unquantifiable.

  As they marched towards the Mount Street bridge in Northumberland Road the reinforcements were attacked by Volunteers from de Valera’s battalion, who fired from surrounding houses into their columns. They were held up for several hours until further reinforcements arrived, when the rebels were blown out with hand grenades. The Sherwood Foresters took 240 casualties. More soldiers arrived from Kingstown, and the cordon around central Dublin t
ightened.

  In Britain, only the barest details of the Rising were made public, much to the anger of the press. Goading the government, The Times made the point after several days of official silence that – as American newspapers were saying – ‘the silence of the authorities proves the revolt to be too serious for London to be frank.’44 The authorities by then believed the revolt under control: the censorship was the usual extreme caution tempered with inexperience and incompetence; information until the end of the Rising was limited to official communiqués with the minimum of detail fed to the press. Most newspapers circumvented this by finding accounts of varying degrees of reliability from eyewitnesses.

  On 27 April the Army Council appointed General Sir John ‘Conky’ Maxwell – the sobriquet referred to his considerable nose – as General Officer Commanding in Ireland, with immediate effect. The letter from the War Office to French, commander-in-chief Home Forces, announcing his appointment stated that:

  His Majesty’s Government desire that, in this capacity, Sir J Maxwell will take all such measures as may in his opinion be necessary for the prompt suppression of insurrection in Ireland, and be accorded a free hand in regard to the movement of all troops now in Ireland or which may be placed under his command hereafter and also in regard to such measure as may seem to him advisable under the Proclamation, dated 26th April, 1916, issued under the Defence of the Realm (Amendment) Act 1915. In regard to the question of administration, as also Military or Martial Law, Sir J Maxwell will correspond direct with the War Office, under the same system that obtains in peace time.45

  Maxwell’s main qualification was having no connection with Ireland; his other that he was available: which, given that Britain was in a life-or-death struggle, says something about his calibre. It was soon announced that he would be the military governor of Ireland, an appointment that suggested Asquith had decided to treat Ireland, effectively, as an enemy. If that was so, it created the idea of a British occupation among many Irish people to whom it had never previously occurred. It was something worse than alienation. By handing Ireland over to the Army to run, and to judge, Asquith began the process that would destroy the Irish Nationalism of Parnell and Redmond within two years, and deliver the country to Sinn Féin.

  Early on 28 April Maxwell arrived to find much of central Dublin on fire. His principal aim was to end the fighting, but with the unconditional surrender of the rebels. The Crown forces continued to use artillery and grenades. By Wednesday the GPO was cut off; and at the Mendicity Institution the 1st Battalion, out of food and ammunition, decided to surrender. As other garrisons were encircled and the fires came nearer, it became clear that there could be only one ending. Inside the GPO morale was maintained by an unsubstantiated belief that Volunteers from outside Dublin would relieve it. Even if a relief column was on its way – and it was not – the British machine guns and artillery would have slaughtered it before it came anywhere near the GPO. Outside, by Thursday night Sackville/O’Connell Street was burning almost from one end to the other. Connolly, fighting outside the building, was wounded in the leg by a ricochet and brought in during Thursday afternoon. Recognising the inevitable, Pearse ordered the women of Cumann na mBan out of the GPO on the Friday morning, much to their rage. Shells started to hit the building, and by the Friday afternoon it was burning. Late on the 28th Pearse led the evacuation of the GPO to a house nearby, at 16 Moore Street.

  There had been skirmishes in the country around Dublin, but rebels there, as elsewhere in Ireland, relied on orders from the centre, and after Tuesday the centre struggled to get orders to them. MacNeill’s countermand had in any case prevented a nationwide uprising. In some places Volunteers captured RIC officers and there was the odd shooting, but the country almost entirely failed to mobilise in support of Dublin. British troops dealt with substantial pockets of resistance near Galway, where British intelligence estimated there were 530 rebels, and at Enniscorthy in County Wexford, a small town where 600 Volunteers took control.

  On 29 April Pearse realised he and his comrades were cornered. They were exhausted, out of food and with no medical supplies. The final straw was the sight of civilians being killed in the crossfire as the Army sought to finish the rebels off. He sent Elizabeth O’Farrell, a nurse, out under a white flag to broker a truce; and during it Pearse met Maxwell to discuss a surrender that would cause the leaders to be tried but the rank and file released. Maxwell, a soldier and not a politician, saw no cause to give quarter, and insisted on unconditional surrender. Notes from the meeting show that Maxwell said the rebels should ‘throw themselves on our mercy’: he felt the government would not be hard on the rank and file, provided the surrender was swift.46 When the terms were put to the men in Moore Street some wanted to carry on fighting: but by the evening they all marched out to Sackville/O’Connell Street, under a white flag, and laid down their arms.

  Early on the Sunday morning, Nurse O’Farrell took Pearse’s written orders to the other battalions south of the Liffey. Eventually they surrendered; de Valera first demanded MacDonagh’s counter-signature as he did not know Miss O’Farrell, then announced that he surrendered only because he was obeying an order from a superior. Whatever humiliation the rebels felt, those who survived would treat what had happened as the beginning of the shift in Irish politics from using constitutional means to violent ones to secure their independence. Britain’s conduct during and after the Rising began the Irish Nationalist community’s abandonment of Redmond’s ideas of an accommodation with London in a Home Rule state, and the wholesale pursuit of a republic. However, as they were marched into captivity some rebels recorded the howls of execration from women outside Kilmainham Jail, the wives of soldiers who feared their separation allowances would be ended because of the rebellion and who wished to show their disapproval. As armed escorts marched them through the streets, before the execution of rebels turned public opinion, Dubliners howled abuse at them, and pelted some with rubbish. This reflected the fact that innocent people had been the largest group of casualties: the 256 civilians killed included 40 children, compared with 62 rebels, and of the 2,600 wounded most were civilians.47 Wreckage around the GPO was extensive, as in other areas of central Dublin. Around 200 buildings were seriously damaged. The Army, with little or no experience of urban warfare, lost 106 men (including 17 officers) and sustained 334 wounded.48

  A total of 3,430 men and 79 women thought to be part of the rebellion were arrested. Although an order was issued that a distinction be made between committed Nationalists, rank-and-file supporters of the Rising and ‘dangerous’ Sinn Féiners – that is, those either inciting violence or against whom there was evidence that could require a court martial – it was either not understood or was widely ignored. Prisoners were deported to English jails, often on cattle boats. By mid-May 1,600 were in England and Wales, held under DORA, on the dubious grounds that they were enemy aliens. Some were innocent of any involvement in the rebellion; this was usually realised within days, and 1,424 were freed without apology or compensation.

  On 1 May the London press carried its most extensive reports yet of the Easter Rising: The Times published a lengthy description of the fighting by the editor of the Irish Times, who said the ‘outbreak’ had ‘been directly induced by the criminal negligence and cowardice of the Irish Government.’49 Beatrice Webb, digesting the coverage, called the Rising ‘criminal lunacy … playing into the hands of the reactionaries.’50 Birrell – of whom a leading Nationalist landowner, Sir Horace Plunkett, said ‘more than any other living man he fomented this rebellion’ – resigned that day, and Nathan went shortly afterwards.51 Asquith, when Birrell visited him to resign, was so stricken at the loss of his friend that he ‘just stood at the window and wept.’52 Birrell, believing Home Rule was inevitable given that an Act was on the statute book, was a liberal who rejected the heavy hand; and he had also tried to avoid unnecessary provocation in the last phase of British rule, thinking the Irish would soon be masters in their country.
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br />   Herbert Samuel, as home secretary, went to Ireland to take over temporarily until a new administration could be installed. He found Dublin ‘a pitiful sight’, with so many buildings in ruins.53 Although the Rising had failed, the nature of the Irish question had changed. Used to having to deal with hard-line Unionists, the government now saw it would have to deal with hard-line republicans, their numbers swelling as aggressive actions by inexperienced and sometimes frightened boy soldiers continued to alienate normally pacific citizens. The reality would undermine the original perception that, so few were the rebels, the event could be taken as further proof of the loyalty felt to the Crown by the Irish.

  IV

  New measures were taken not so much to restore order as to emphasise who was in charge. On 2 May Maxwell told Kitchener he blamed the permissive regime in Dublin Castle for allowing the Rising, and said he trusted ‘politicians will not interfere until I report normal conditions prevail.’54 His way of achieving normality was to order house-to-house searches for rebels and illegal weapons, to arm the Dublin Metropolitan Police and to show ‘no pity’ to those who had been ‘playing at rebellion for months past.’ The country would be combed for Sinn Féiners who, if rebel sympathies could be proved, would be arrested whether they had taken part in the Rising or not. The intelligence services believed that had the Rising shown the slightest sign of succeeding a mass of people would have joined the rebels and sought to overthrow British rule. Within a couple of months 2,000 weapons were found, probably the tip of the iceberg: but the intrusion of troops into communities where there was little or no trouble bred anger and resentment, and continued despite loud warnings from John Dillon, Redmond’s most senior colleague, of its effects.55