Tales From the Tower of London

by Donnelly, Mark P.

  With the cache of arms and ammunition stowed aboard the German ship Aud (which had been disguised as a Dutch trawler) Roger Casement climbed into a U-boat and headed for Ireland for the first time since before the war broke out. On Good Friday, 21 April 1916, the German submarine surfaced off the coast of County Kerry. Casement, who had shaved off his beard so he would not be recognised, was provided with an inflatable rubber raft and began paddling towards the shore as the submarine disappeared beneath the waves of the Irish Sea.

  When he landed at Banna Strand, Casement walked through the driving rain towards an ancient, abandoned fortress where he took shelter to wait for the Aud. Six hours later a local policeman found him there, exhausted and soaking wet. When he asked what the bedraggled man was doing, a rather disoriented Casement muttered that he was an author out exploring the countryside. Considering the weather, the story seemed a little strange. When the policeman asked for identification, Casement fumbled through his pockets, accidentally allowing a soggy German train ticket to fall to the ground. His suspicions now on high alert, the officer made a quick search of Casement’s suitcase where he found a cargo manifest from the Aud revealing details of twenty thousand rifles and ammunition. Roger Casement was arrested on suspicion of spying and taken to nearby Ardfert barracks for questioning by the military.

  Even as the hapless Casement was being taken to Ardfert, the Royal Navy intercepted the Aud. The information provided by Christensen and intercepted German transmissions had conveniently provided the exact time and place of its arrival. Rather than have his cargo of contraband confiscated by the British, the captain scuttled his ship, sending the rifles and all hopes for Irish independence to the bottom of the Irish Sea.

  During his interrogation at Ardfert, Casement asked to see a priest. Had his captors known that Casement was a Protestant, it might have seemed strange, but in predominantly Catholic Ireland it seemed a perfectly normal request. When Father Francis Ryan arrived, Casement told him who he was and explained the urgency of getting word to the Irish National Volunteers and Sinn Fein that there would be no aid from the Germans. The rebellion must be called off. Whatever his politics might have been, Father Ryan was dedicated to saving lives and agreed to deliver the message.

  Beyond his brief meeting with Ryan, Casement seemed completely willing to cooperate with the authorities. He duly answered all their questions, saying, ‘I am not endeavouring to shield myself at all. I face all the con-sequences. All I ask you is to believe I have done nothing dishonourable . . . I have done nothing treacherous to my country. . . .’ It seemed a very odd statement for a man carrying German armament manifests, but it certainly convinced the authorities that their prisoner was a traitor. The next day Sir Roger Casement was escorted to London under heavy guard, arriving at Euston station on Easter Sunday morning. From the station he was whisked to Scotland Yard and more questioning by Basil Thompson, head of CID, and Captain Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall, chief of Naval Intelligence.

  As in his previous round of questioning, Casement was more than happy to cooperate so long as his testimony did not implicate anyone other than himself. Yes, he had attempted to obtain arms from Germany; yes, they were intended to aid in an Irish rebellion and yes, he knew that it was a treasonable offence. But, he insisted, he had not been disloyal to Great Britain, insisting that ‘loyalty is a sentiment, not a law’. Obviously, it was a sentiment he did not share. According to Thompson, Casement’s answers were ‘very vivacious and at times histrionic in manner’. After hours of questioning, Sir Roger was moved from Scotland Yard to the Tower of London where several German spies were already being held. After long years of non-political use, the Tower had been brought back into service during the early years of the war, mostly for its psychological effects both in reassuring citizens that captured spies were being securely detained and for the effect the Tower’s reputation would have on would-be spies.

  While Casement was being grilled in London, Ireland was descending into chaos. Even before the rising began its leaders had fallen out among themselves. Because there had been word that Casement’s plan to smuggle arms had failed, some wanted to call the whole thing off, others wanted a postponement to verify where Casement, and Germany, stood, and still others wanted to proceed as planned. In all the confusion, the number of men who actually took part in the Easter morning rising plummeted from the hoped-for five thousand to just over a thousand. This small band of rebels stormed through the streets of Dublin, rushing past startled knots of people on their way to Easter morning church services. By the time the rebels smashed their way into the General Post Office, the law courts and a few other public buildings to declare a free Irish Republic, the crowds had turned from wondering confusion to outright hostility. Most of them simply shook their heads in derision but a few openly faced the rebels down, jeering at them. It was hardly the reception they had hoped for.

  The following day, Monday 24 April, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland placed the entire country under martial law. Since there was no way of knowing how many rebels there actually were, and whether they would be receiving support from a German invasion force, the Irish police were told to expect significant back-up from the military.

  Under less harrowing conditions than the middle of the First World War, the British might have reacted differently to the crisis. As it was, Whitehall was in no mood to chance either a German invasion or a civil war in Ireland. Rather than simply protect public and private property and wait for the revolutionaries to exhaust themselves, the full force of Great Britain’s military might was brought to bear. Five thousand battle-ready troops, along with armoured cars, machine guns and field artillery descended on Dublin to contain the situation. To ‘soften up’ rebel positions before the troops arrived, the Royal Navy’s Hielga steamed up the River Liffey and began shelling all known rebel locations. In a week of absolute anarchy, more than two hundred civilians and one hundred and thirty British soldiers and Irish police were killed.

  News of both Casement’s arrest and the Dublin uprising hit England’s newspapers on Monday morning, Casement receiving almost as many column inches as the uprising itself. Not since the Scottish uprising under Bonnie Prince Charlie 170 years earlier had there been such an internal threat to Great Britain. And at the centre of it all was Sir Roger Casement, one of the most honoured British civil servants of the age. The crown and government felt completely betrayed. Home Office legal adviser Sir Ernly Blackwell said, ‘It is difficult . . . to imagine a worse case of High Treason than Casement’s. It is aggravated, rather than mitigated, by his previous career in the public service.’ In the six days before it collapsed, the Irish rebellion transformed Roger Casement from a revered public figure into the most vilified man in Britain.

  On 29 April the Dublin rebels surrendered to the military. Of the hundreds that were arrested, fifteen were tried by court martial and sentenced to death. The vast majority of Irishmen and women wholeheartedly supported the verdict.

  Following his move from Scotland Yard to the Tower of London, Roger Casement was held incommunicado for more than two weeks. Even the soldiers who guarded him were ordered not to speak to him. Had it not been for one Welsh guardsman who whispered the news of the uprising and its calamitous results, Casement might never have known the outcome of his hurried plea to Father Ryan. Depressed and discouraged, Casement twice tried to kill himself; once by swallowing a bent nail he had pulled out of the wall of his cell and once by swallowing a tiny flask of curare that he probably kept hidden in his clothes. Now under a constant suicide watch, Casement was forced to have two guards inside his cell at all times, as well as a third stationed outside his door. The single bulb in his cell burned twenty-four hours a day. In this paranoiac atmosphere, and unable to sleep with guards watching him, Casement’s mental condition deteriorated rapidly.

  By the time his case came to court a few weeks later, the preponderance of evidence, not least of which was Casement’s own confessions, offered little doubt as to what
the outcome would be. Somehow, the seriousness of his situation either never dawned on Casement, or his deteriorating condition simply blocked out reality. Day after day, as he stood in the dock, Casement seemed completely unmoved by the proceedings and the mounting pile of evidence being presented against him.

  As the trial proceeded, a routine police investigation of his Ebury Street flat in London turned up new, and completely unexpected, revelations about Sir Roger. A series of small journals, dubbed by metropolitan police ‘the Black Diaries’ were ostensibly accounts of his time in the Congo in 1903, and in Peru in 1910–11. On closer examination, they revealed a secret life of almost constant, casual sexual encounters with young men, most of them black and nearly all of them for money. In a separate account ledger were records of how much he had paid each of the young men for their services. Shocked and disgusted, the police passed the diaries over to the prosecution team headed by King’s Counsel F.E. Smith.

  Knowing that regardless of how shocking the diaries were they had no bearing on the charge of treason, in what seemed a gesture of good will Smith passed the diaries on to Casement’s defence counsel. To barrister Alexander Sullivan, Smith suggested that while they had no direct bearing on the case, the diaries might convince the three-judge panel hearing the case to accept a plea of insanity. It would be an unspeakable humiliation for Casement, but it was probably the only way to save his life.

  When Sullivan confronted his client with the diaries, he was completely taken aback with Casement’s reaction. According to Sullivan, ‘He instructed me to explain to the jury that the filthy and disreputable practices and the rhapsodic glorification of them were inseparable from the true genius; moreover, I was to cite a list of all truly great men to prove it.’ Sullivan pondered long and hard as to what to do about the diaries and his client’s inexplicable behaviour. If he failed to make them public, his client was doomed, if he offered them in evidence, it would certainly rob Casement of the public sympathy that would be necessary to obtain an appeal. In the end, Sullivan decided the Black Diaries would do his case more harm than good and they were quietly laid aside.

  After closing arguments by both sides, Casement was brought back into court to hear the verdict. As he took his place in the dock, he looked around, smiled at the audience and waved at distraught friends in the public gallery. Even when the judges announced the verdict of guilty and placed the traditional black caps over their wigs for the pronouncement of the death sentence, Casement seemed not to understand the significance of what was happening. In fact, he seemed amused at the sight of the three bewigged judges wearing little black cloth caps on their heads. The day after the trial closed, Sir Roger Casement was formally stripped of his knighthood, the first such disgrace in nearly three centuries.

  While no one could argue that the trial had been anything but fair, and the loss of his knighthood was certainly no more than Casement deserved, the sentence of death seemed somehow too severe for a man who had dedicated two decades of his life to humanitarian causes. The matter began gnawing away at the conscience of the international community. From both sides of the Atlantic appeals began pouring into British government offices pleading for the life of Roger Casement. The Archbishop of Canterbury met the Lord Chancellor and the Home Secretary in the hope of having the death sentence commuted. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle insisted that Casement’s mental and physical health had obviously been broken by his years in the tropics and that he was not responsible for his actions. Colonel T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) described Casement as ‘a broken archangel’ and begged the government to take pity on him. In the United States, letters and petitions flooded the British Embassy in Washington. The American Negro Fellowship League asked for clemency on the grounds of ‘the revelations he made while the British Consul in Africa, touching [on] the treatment of natives in the Congo. . . . Because of this great service to humanity . . . we feel impelled to beg for mercy on his behalf.’

  But it was Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw who most concisely stated the real danger in the situation when he wrote to the Manchester Guardian on 22 July. Shaw accepted the validity of the verdict, saying, ‘There need be no hesitation to carry out the sentence if it should appear, on reflection, a sensible one,’ and agreed ‘that Casement’s treatment should not be exceptional’. But he also insisted that if Casement were executed, the reaction in Ireland would effectively hand Ireland over to Sinn Fein and the revolutionaries, saying, ‘In Ireland he will be regarded as a national hero if he is executed, and quite possibly a spy if he is not.’ It was a double-edged danger of which the government was fully aware. Worse still, Whitehall feared that an American backlash of pro-Casement sentiment might slow any possible US entry into the war – a risk that Great Britain could no longer afford to run.

  On 15 July 1916, Home Office legal adviser Sir Ernly Blackwell proposed a solution. In a memorandum, he wrote, ‘Public sentiment must not be allowed to influence the execution of the law and nothing is to be gained by reprieving [Casement] on one ground and pretending to have done so on another. So far as I can judge it, it would be far wiser from every point of view to allow the law to take its course. In closing, he added that although the Black Diaries were irrelevant to Casement’s trail they might be an effective tool to stop the public outcry against his execution and prevent a traitor from being transformed into a martyr. The government agreed. To release Casement to appease his supporters would make a mockery of justice but to execute him could well transmute him into a martyr for Irish independence. The best option would be to use the diaries to discredit him and then let the law take its course.

  There was little doubt that the Black Diaries’ revelations about Casement’s private life would destroy his reputation. If his sexuality were not enough, his predilection for young, hired, black men and his statements alluding to his preference for the submissive role in sex would lead almost everyone to believe that he was at best unhinged, or at worst a sinner beyond redemption. Casement had, in Blackwell’s words, ‘completed the full cycle of sexual degeneracy’.

  To facilitate the plan, selected extracts of the diaries were typed up and circulated privately to various influential parties most concerned with the case. The prime minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the American ambassador and even the head of the outlawed Irish National Volunteers were all given copies. Walter Page, the US ambassador, had been warned that the diary extracts were ‘of an unspeakable filthy character’, and when he finished reading them he wrote to President Woodrow Wilson insisting that ‘if all the facts about Casement ever become public, it will be well that our Government had nothing to do with him or his case, even indirectly!’

  When John Harris, head of the Anti-Slavery Society, who had known and admired Casement for his work, was shown the diary extracts he nearly fainted. Although the information in the diaries was circulated privately, it was far too scandalous to be allowed to reach the press. Still, they could not simply be kept in the dark as to why Casement’s support was disappearing like dust in a high wind. If they were not told something, they would start snooping around on their own and the results could be disastrous for the Foreign Office’s reputation. Fortunately, when apprised of the situation, the press agreed. The editor of the Times simply said that releasing the information would be ‘irrelevant [to the case], improper and un-English’. The pro-Irish New York Times agreed; a 24 May editorial stated that while Casement might, or might not, be a traitor, he was certainly a man with ‘a screw loose’.

  Blissfully unaware that everyone, particularly his staunchly conservative Irish Catholic comrades were deserting him like rats from a sinking ship, as late as 14 June Roger Casement stated in a letter, ‘The British Government dare not hang me (they don’t want to either – as individuals, I think). They simply dare not. . . . They know quite well what the world would say.’ He was right. The government knew exactly what the scandalised world was going to say. It would say nothing.

  Following his conviction Roger Caseme
nt was transferred from the Tower to London’s Pentonville prison to await execution. During his incarceration there he requested the prison chaplain, Father Carey, to arrange his acceptance into the Catholic Church. The archbishop agreed to the request, but stated that Casement would have to confess his regret ‘for any scandal he might have caused by his acts, public or private’. Shocked and distressed, Casement wrote to his cousin, ‘They are trying to make me betray my soul.’ Whether he, or the archbishop, was referring to his treasonable acts against Great Britain, or his private life, remains open to question. In either case, Casement refused. It was only when Father Carey discovered that Casement’s parents had baptised him both in his mother’s Catholic religion, as well as in his father’s Protestant faith, that the conversion was allowed without Casement’s confession.

  On 3 August 1916 the disgraced Roger Casement, last of the plotters in the disastrous Easter Sunday Rising, was led to the scaffold at Pentonville. To the end, Casement denied the right of an English court to condemn an Irishman. In a speech from the scaffold he stated that, ‘Since in the acts which have led to this trial it was the people of Ireland I sought to serve – and them alone – I leave my judgement and my sentence in their hands.’ It was almost the same ploy Mary Queen of Scots had used three centuries earlier when she insisted no English court had jurisdiction over a foreign monarch. It had not worked for Mary then, and it did not work for Casement now.

  Accompanying him to the scaffold was Father Carey. Deeply impressed with the way Casement conducted himself in his last minutes, Carey later wrote, ‘He feared not death . . . he marched to the scaffold with the dignity of a prince.’ The hangman, Mr Ellis, had a similar reaction, saying, ‘Mr Casement was the bravest man it [ever] fell my unhappy lot to execute’.