by A. N. Wilson
This was not how it appeared to all Irishmen. Sir Roger Casement, in a letter of 17 January 1914 to the Freeman’s Journal, wrote: ‘As a matter of fact the people of Alsace-Lorraine today enjoy infinitely greater public liberties within the German Empire than we are ever likely to possess within the British Empire’, adding praise for ‘the extraordinary liberty German imperialism accords a lately conquered territory’.41 Casement entitled one of his denunciations of Britain, published in America in 1914, The Crime Against Europe. ‘Whereas the Triple Alliance’ – that is Germany, Hungary and Austria – ‘was formed thirty years ago, it has never declared war on anyone, while the Triple Entente’ – that is the alliance of Britain, France and Russia – ‘before it is eight years old has involved Europe, America, Africa, and Asia in a world conflict.’
Many ingenious psychological explanations have been sought for this Ulster Protestant’s virulent hatred of the English. At some point of such investigations allusion is usually made to his notorious diaries which reveal a refreshingly shame-free attitude to his promiscuous homosexual compulsions. Alas, the simplest explanation for why a man who spent his grown-up life in government service, culminating in a knighthood, should have come to his hostile, anti-British opinions was that they were based on actual first-hand observation.
To see photographs of Casement in his British consular uniform – cocked hat, white gloves, sword, gleaming brass buttons on his tunic – is to see a tormented character from one of Joseph Conrad’s novels. For looking out above the gold embroidery of the tunic collar is a man somehow at variance with the uniform. The bearded, half-humorous, quizzical face has looked into some morass: known, like Conrad’s Jim or Nostromo, the complicated emotion of being loyal to a principle while betraying a cause; perhaps even, like Marlowe recounting the terrible tale of ‘the heart of darkness’, seen into ‘the horror, the horror’. In 1904, Casement’s diaries record ‘a delightful day’ spent at Conrad’s house at Pent Farm, near Hythe,42 and the two men had followed some of the same paths, both in South America and in Africa – Conrad a Pole who had served as a merchant marine officer, Casement as a British diplomat, both strangers upon the Earth and looking at the imperialist phenomenon with sceptical eyes. In 1907 Casement explained to a friend:
I was on the high road to being a regular imperialist jingo – although at heart underneath all and unsuspected almost by myself I had remained an Irishman. Well the [Boer] war gave me qualms at the end – the concentration camps bigger ones and finally when up in those lonely Congo forests where I found Leopold, I found myself also, the incorrigible Irishman … I was looking at the tragedy with the eyes of another race.43
The extent of Belgian atrocities in the Congo was not exaggerated by Conrad in ‘Heart of Darkness’. Here was the horror, the horror indeed: Europeans behaving with unrestrained brutality towards the indigenous population. Africa cured Casement of any sense that imperialism was essentially, or even potentially, benign. The activities of the Ulster Unionists, his fellow Northern Irish Protestants, filled him with disgust on his return home. His stint of consular work in South America only confirmed his sense of alienation from the British Establishment of which he was a representative.
There is no doubt that Roger Casement was a traitor in the legal and technical sense of the term. While still serving in the British consulate, he enlisted in the Irish Volunteers, a quasi-military organization committed to securing ‘the rights and liberties common to all the people of Ireland without distinction of creed, class or politics’. They were preparing to fight the Ulster Unionists and if necessary the British troops. He went to America, which he increasingly detested, to raise money for guns. When the European war broke out, he wrote to his fellow-revolutionary John H. Horgan: ‘I feel for you my Catholic countrymen perhaps even more than you feel for yourselves – I feel for Ireland … – the shame and ignoring of our race – the white slave race of European peoples. But I don’t despair – because I believe … that the manhood of Ireland will outlast the British Empire.’ These fighting words turned out literally true.
‘My country can only gain from my treason’ was Casement’s view.44 Casement went to Germany, finally reaching Berlin, from America, on 31 October 1914, accompanied by the quasi-comic, slightly sleazy figure of Eivind Adler Christensen, a Norwegian sailor whom he appeared to have met casually in Times Square, New York. Casement’s surely hare-brained scheme was to secure the promise of 25,000 German troops, with 50,000 extra guns. He formed an Irish Brigade from those Irish soldiers taken prisoner in Germany and he optimistically calculated that the 150,000 Irishmen enlisted in the British army would fight for an Irish Free State.
The Germans were prepared to offer weapons, but not troops. Casement realized too late that he and his German friends were talking at cross-purposes – ‘Oh Ireland, Why did I ever trust in such a Govt [sic] as this – or think that such men would help thee! They have no sense of honour, chivalry, generosity … They are Cads … That is why they are hated by the world and why England will surely beat them.’45
Meanwhile, in Ireland, Casement’s friends in the Irish Republican Brotherhood – the IRB – sent a message via the German embassy at Berne that they had fixed the Rising for Easter Sunday 1916, and that the arms ship should reach Tralee Bay, with its German officers, not later than Easter Monday. Casement, Robert Monteith and another conspirator named Bailey arrived from a submarine in a rubber dinghy on Banna Strand, County Kerry, on Good Friday. In vain had Casement tried to make contact with the conspirators, and tried to dissuade them from continuing with a doomed enterprise. He was arrested, hiding in an ancient fort, with a ticket from Berlin to Wilhelmshaven in his pocket. A priest visited him in Tralee gaol – though he was not yet a fully fledged convert to the Catholic faith – and thus it was that Patrick Pearse, leader of the rebels, received the message on Holy Saturday: ‘Germany sending arms, but will not send men.’
British Naval Intelligence had broken the German diplomatic code as early as a year before. They knew of the planned Easter Rising. They knew of Casement’s homosexuality – a fact they would use against him in the later propaganda war. They knew of a possible invasion of Ireland. The Irish Chief Secretary, Augustine Birrell, took the view that the rebels were extremists, fanatics. The mainstream Irish Nationalist leadership – John Redmond, John Dillon, Joe Devlin – were against the Irish Volunteers; so were the tens of thousands of Irishmen who had enlisted in the British army to fight the Germans. If the rebellion could be contained as a nuisance and not elevated into a revolution, the moderates could hold the pass. Sadly, this sensible approach on the part of the British only lasted until the Easter Rising itself.
On Easter Monday 1916, Sir Matthew Nathan, under-secretary of state, was sitting in his office in Dublin Castle when a shot rang out beneath his window.
An Irish policeman had been shot dead by the Citizen Army. The Rising had begun. For the rest of the day, all over Dublin, the rebel forces shot their fellow Irishmen, often quite arbitrarily. The writer James Stephens saw them shoot a civilian trying to extricate his cart from a barricade which they had erected on St Stephen’s Green.46 The next day an army officer of the Royal Irish Rifles arrested three non-combatant journalists, Thomas Dickson, Patrick MacIntyre and Francis Sheehy Skeffington, a well-known pacifist, and had them shot by firing squad. Two days later, on Wednesday, British reinforcements arrived at Kingstown. The rebels, particularly those led by the half Spanish, half American Catholic enthusiast Eamon de Valera, kept up extremely effective sniper fire in central Dublin while the British guns bombarded rebel strongholds with heavy shells. The Post Office in O’Connell Street had been taken over by the rebels as their headquarters. It was emblazoned with the words IRISH REPUBLIC and flew the green flag for just a few days. By Thursday evening the flag had been scorched brown. By the following Monday, the GPO had been evacuated, 450 had been killed, 2,614 wounded, 116 soldiers and 16 policemen were dead.47
It was now rather harder tha
n a week earlier to contain the rebellion as a ‘nuisance’. Though the majority of Irish people still favoured a moderate political devolution, something had changed. Mythologizing the Easter Rising, W. B. Yeats could make of the men holed up in the GPO and subsequently shot by the English heroes of an Homeric status. He asked whether their sacrifice had been vain, given the fact that England was going to concede to Ireland a measure of self-government in any event.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart …
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.48
This was to be the story, not only of Ireland, but of almost every European country at some stage of the early twentieth century. Russia was on the verge of evolving into a prosperous liberal democracy; instead it had the bloodiest revolution and civil war. Weimar Germany, in spite of overpowering political and economic problems, could have struggled towards manageable consensual politics, as Britain did during its economic travails. It voted in National Socialism. The twentieth century looked to solve its problems by violent means. It distrusted consensus, it preferred mayhem.
The British troops had brought stability to Dublin, and in spite of their initial blunder in shooting three journalists, they had the overall support of Dubliners, especially of the working class. Above all they had it in their power to be magnanimous, since the heroic rebels had been utterly routed.
John Redmond, moderate Irish Nationalist leader, saw the Prime Minister, Asquith, as early as he could to explain the delicate balance of Irish feeling. On 3 May 1916, Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and Thomas Clarke were shot at dawn at Kilmainham gaol. Although they had been told they would be allowed a priest near them when they were shot, the soldiers in the event refused this. The next day four more executions – of Joseph Plunkett, Edward Daly, Michael O’Hanrahan and William Pearse – were carried out. The next day, John MacBride, briefly married to Maud Gonne in 1903, was shot. Asquith, with typical ambivalent weakness, told the War Office to ‘go slowly’ but did nothing personally to stop the shootings. The wounded James Connolly, taken on a stretcher from Dublin Castle to Kilmainham gaol, had to be propped in a chair to be shot. He held his head high. There were 3,000 arrests after the Rising, and although many were released almost at once, 1,867 were interred in criminal prisons in Ireland or Wales.
At the end of Easter week, the British ambassador in Washington had reported that Irish-American opinion was on the whole opposed to the rebels. Within three weeks all that had changed. A Home Ruler from Vermont wrote to Redmond: ‘The present wave of fury sweeping through Irish America originated with the executions and not with the rising.’ A similar reaction occurred in Ireland itself. British intransigence, and lack of willingness to take the broader view, paved the way for further bloodshed. Or so it was perceived. A Capuchin father in Dublin noticed his working-class flock became ‘extremely bitter’ after the executions, ‘even amongst those who had no sympathy whatever with the Sinn Feiners, or with the rising’.49
In fairness it has to be said that the government was in the middle of the bloodiest and most damaging European war in history. A full-scale Irish rebellion, even a civil war, would undoubtedly have weakened the British position, which had been the reason the Germans had supported the Easter Rising. Was Irish-American feeling truly so moderate until the first rebel was shot, or did the executions provide Irish-Americans with the excuse to do what they had done since the famines of the 1840s, hate the English? What government in time of war in 1916 would not have shot those who led an armed rebellion against it?
Yeats, in another poem of magnificent myth-making, ‘Sixteen Dead Men’, said:
O but we talked at large before
The sixteen men were shot …50
But there were only fifteen rebels executed after the Easter Rising. Eamon de Valera is often said to have been spared because of American intervention – he lived in America until he was two – but there is no evidence for this.51 It would seem as if this lucky, strange man owed his life to John Redmond, who intervened personally with Asquith. The sixteenth man of Yeats’s poem, not shot, but hanged, was Sir Roger Casement. He was held in Brixton Prison, then in the Tower of London in miserable conditions, weak, but able to charm his guards. He greatly feared, once it became clear that the British authorities had got hold of his diaries, that he would be put on trial for sexual offences rather than treason. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, petitioned to plead for clemency for Casement, was shown extracts of the diaries. ‘Huge’ – a favourite adjective in The Black Diary – sometimes refers to a club dinner but more often to the size of the male organs of strangers encountered in Hyde Park, or on his African and South American journeys. The notion that the diaries were a forgery, for long a theory entertained by Irish republican sympathizers, has been scotched forever by Jeffrey Dudgeon in his definitive edition of The Black Diaries, with a study of [Casement’s] background sexuality and Irish political life. Archbishop Davidson, having seen evidence of Casement’s hidden life, concluded: ‘it may be taken as further evidence of his having become mentally unhinged.’52
Casement died, like that other vilified Irish Protestant homosexual, Oscar Wilde, having been received into the Roman Catholic Church. The hangman, John Ellis, a hairdresser from Rochdale, accurately computed the necessary drop for a 6 ft 2 in, man weighing 12 stone – 168 pounds. ‘He is dead this Knight of the Flaming Heart, hanged by the neck with a rope manipulated by a Rochdale barber’ was the reflection of the one-time secretary to Sir Horace Plunkett, Maurice Joy, in The Irish Rebellion of 1916 and Its Martyrs. Accompanied by the RC padre, Casement was calm and said: ‘Lord Jesus, receive my soul’ before he died. (The hangman later committed suicide.)
In 1965, after secret negotiations between the Dublin government and the recently elected Labour government of Harold Wilson in London, it was agreed to disinter Casement’s body from Pentonville Prison. Black hair and an element of scalp were visible on a very white skull. The remains were placed in a lead-lined coffin. Casement’s dream of being buried at Murlongs Bay was firmly rejected by the Northern Ireland government, so the body was taken to Dublin. The staggering figure of 665,000 people, all but the same figure as the population of Dublin itself, trooped past to pay their respects during the five days when the body lay in state at Arbour Hill. Two nieces who had never known Casement, and who were now in their seventies, came from Australia for the State funeral. There was a day of national mourning as the gun carriage draped with the tricolour was borne from the procathedral to Glasnevin cemetery. Eamon de Valera, eighty-two and blind, spoke at the graveside – ‘I do not think it presumptuous on our part to believe that a man who was so unselfish, who worked so hard for the downtrodden and the oppressed and who died, that that man is in heaven.’53
Casement’s position at the end of his life, in spite of the fact that the German government was composed of ‘Cads’, was simple: ‘I am wholly pro-German always for the sake and cause of the German people. It is not my own honour at stake alone but the cause of Irish nationality in the extreme form I have stood for.’54
It is easy enough to see why Eamon de Valera revered Casement and believed him to be in heaven when he spoke in 1965. But there is another way of viewing, not merely the Irish Republican movements, but all small nationalisms that since the dissolutions of empires during the First World War have struggled to express their identity by violence. P. S. O’Hegarty (1879–1955), a member of th
e Supreme Council of the IRB and an historian of Sinn Fein, wrote towards the end of his life:
We adopted political assassination as a principle. We turned the whole thoughts and passions of a generation upon blood and revenge and death; we placed gunmen, mostly half-educated and totally inexperienced, as dictators with powers of life and death over large areas. We decided the moral law, and said there was no law but the law of force, and the moral law answered us. Every devilish thing we did against the British went full circle, and then boomeranged and smote us tenfold; and the cumulating effect of the whole of it was a general moral weakening and a general degradation, a general cynicism and disbelief in either virtue or decency, in goodness or uprightness or honesty.55
* Literally. As a boy in Wales in the 1960s I heard old men quote it with tears in their eyes.
* 106,082 Russians and Poles in England and Wales with others uncounted in Scotland.
* See next chapter.
8
Shipwreck
It is said that the following verses, circulated among friends, but inevitably ‘leaked’ to a wider audience, delayed their author’s knighthood ‘for twenty years’.1 Almost more fascinating, given the obvious truth of Max Beerbohm’s gentle satire, is the fact that he could temporarily suspend his sense of humour to the point of being prepared to accept a knighthood. His ‘Ballade Tragique in Double Refrain’ is set in ‘A room in Windsor Castle’ and is a dialogue between a Lady-in-Waiting and a Lord-in-Waiting.
SHE: Slow pass the hours, ah, passing slow;
My doom is worse than anything
Conceived by Edgar Allan Poe
The Queen is duller than the King.
HE: Lady, your mind is wandering,
You babble what you do not mean;
Remember to your heartening,
The King is duller than the Queen.
