On a wet June day in 1912, 13,000 Welshmen ‘of all ranks’1 assembled in Regent’s Park in London, marched down Regent’s Street and up Piccadilly to Hyde Park. The rain was so heavy by the time they reached their destination that the speeches were curtailed, but later in the day they repaired to the shelter of the Albert Hall, where the proceedings were chaired by the Archbishop of York, and speakers included the Duke of Devonshire and the Bishop of St Asaph. In spite of the ardour with which these speakers addressed an enthusiastic audience, we read that the general public remained ‘apathetic’2 to the subject which caused them so much concern, namely the possible disestablishment of the Welsh Church.
At this date, the bishops of the Welsh Church, in common with those of England, were appointed by the Crown – in effect by the prime minister in London. Eventually, after decades of debating the matter, Parliament would pass Welsh Disestablishment into law on 18 September 1914, by which time politicians in Britain and Europe had more pressing affairs on their minds. It was agreed that the operation of the Act would be suspended until after the war. It was only with the passage of the Welsh Church Temporalities Act, 1919, that the new ecclesiastical province was formed, with Bishop A. G. Edwards of St Asaph being formally invested as the first Archbishop of Wales on 1 June 1920.3
The issue is one of such esoteric obscurity that even today, many actual members of the Church in Wales, that is Anglicans, find it confusing. In the years before the Welsh Disestablishment Bill passed into law, however, feelings, or at any rate rhetoric, ran high. This was because like so many quarrels which seem obscure to outsiders, much more was at stake than the narrow issues in small print. It was a matter, in miniature, which reflected the great movements of events which would change the face of Europe, and which in other places would lead to violent conflict and Europe’s near self-destruction. It was, apart from other things, a class issue. The Church was perceived, with some justice, as being part of the old feudal order. The parson and the bishop were at one with the squire and the mine-owner. In many minds, the matters of Church and Education were intimately linked. Lloyd George had been (very well) educated at a church school in Llanystumdwy, but he had asserted his Baptist credentials by refusing to say the Creed when a boy there. ‘I hate a priest, Daniel, wherever I find him,’ he confided in a friend. He was not very conspicuous in his Christian observance, but his hammy attacks on attempts to force Church catechisms on Baptist, Methodist or Congregationalist Welsh children went down very well with his audiences in the valleys.
There was once a time when the people of this country had mastered the Bible, and at the same time there arose a monarch who taxed the people without their consent for purposes to which they objected. There also arose a State priesthood who wanted to exalt over all their extravagant pretensions. There was a famous Scripture reader with Welsh blood in his veins, of the name of Oliver Cromwell. He had mastered all the revolutionary and explosive texts in that Book, and the result was destructive to that State priesthood. The bench of bishops was blown up, the House of Lords disappeared, and the aristocracy of this land rocked as though an earthquake had shaken them.4
Even hammier, and even more memorable:*
Give the children the Bible if you want to teach them the Christian faith. Let it be expounded to them by its Founder. Stop this brawling of priests in and around the schools, so that the children may hear Him speak to them in His own words. I appeal to the House of Commons now, at the eleventh hour, to use its great influence and lift its commanding voice and say, ‘Pray, silence for the Master’.5
Those speeches refer not to disestablishment as such but to the influence of the Church in Welsh schools. They show, however, that, as in Ireland, the question of religion was deeply bound up with that of nationalism.
There were some 550,280 practising Nonconformists in Wales in 1906, against 193,081 communicants in the established Church.6 The case for disestablishment could be seen, then, not only as a class-based, but as a nationalist issue. With some one and a half million people living in Wales,7 the overwhelming majority were worshippers at some non-Anglican chapel. Gladstone, in 1891, speaking in favour of disestablishment, had declared in Parliament that ‘the nonconformists of Wales were the people of Wales’.8 The compulsory payment of ‘tithes’, that is a proportion (originally a tenth) of rent to the Church, was understandably resented by the Baptist smallholder, the Calvinistic Methodist shepherd or the Congregationalist coal miner. Here was a case not merely of one class exploiting another, but of Welsh national identity discovering and focusing itself in this comparatively esoteric question.
Dr John Clifford, a fiery bearded Baptist preacher, used the Welsh education bills and disestablishment bills to argue, not merely for a disestablished Bishop of Bangor, but for a different world, in which small nations and minorities within those nations had self-determination. On the other hand, the defenders of the status quo such as Lord Robert Cecil or the Duke of Devonshire knew that more was at stake than Welsh tithes. Lord Robert, ‘who believed Welsh Disestablishmentarianism was “individualism gone mad” or else … an unconscious conviction that religion is of no serious importance’,9 resigned from the government on principle when the Bill was passed. F. E. Smith, during the second reading of the Bill in the Commons, said it had ‘shocked the conscience of every Christian community in Europe’, prompting Chesterton’s ‘Antichrist, or the Reunion of Christendom, an Ode’:
Russian peasants round their pope
Huddled, Smith,
Hear about it all, I hope,
Don’t they, Smith?
In the mountain hamlets clothing
Peaks beyond Caucasian pales,
Where Establishment means nothing
And they never heard of Wales,
Do they read it all in Hansard
With a crib to read it with –
‘Welsh tithes: Dr Clifford Answered’
Really, Smith?
Chesterton’s reductio ad absurdum skewered F. E. Smith with brilliance, but, read nearly a century later, it reminds us that the various peoples and races evoked in the spoof – the Breton fishermen, the Turks – would all be encouraged by the dreams of nationalism and democracy. So would the Irish and the Serbs. The Jews, who had possessed no homeland since the Emperor Titus sacked Jerusalem in the year 70, would, such was the climate of the times, believe that the solution to their problems was the same as that for which many Irish and some Welsh, and most Balkan peoples, were yearning: Home Rule.
The Bible played a central role in the way that the Protestant peoples of northern Europe saw themselves. Just as Luther’s Bible, as well as being the translation of Hebrew and Greek texts, is also a work of German literature; just as the Geneva, and to a smaller degree the Authorized Version of the Bible shaped the political self-consciousness of Milton and Bunyan’s Englishmen; so the Bible in Welsh became something much more than a version of Near Eastern culture transposed into a Celtic tongue. It became a template by which the Welsh read their own story, a beleaguered, proud, small, pious people maintaining their identity against the threats of powerful neighbours. If the Welsh Bible was important at the time of the Reformation, it became even more so at the time of the Nonconformist conversion of Wales in the eighteenth century and during the various Nonconformist revivals of the nineteenth century. Tens of thousands of Welsh bibles were in circulation. One eyewitness in July 1810 described the arrival in a remote rural spot of a new printing of the New Testament, selling for one shilling each:
When the arrival of the cart was announced, which carried the first sacred load, the Welsh peasants went out in crowds to meet it; welcomed it as the Israelites did the ark of old; drew it into the town; and eagerly bore off every copy, as rapidly as they could be dispersed. The young people were to be seen consuming the whole night in reading it. Labourers carried it with them to the field, that they might enjoy it during the intervals of their labour, and lose no opportunities of becoming acquainted with its sacred truths.10
At the beginning of the twentieth century it was ‘quite a common thing to find in cottages three, four or more Bibles’.11 Welsh identification with the Jews became, on an analogical level, all but complete. Their chapels – Bethel, Bethesda, Ephraim, Ebenezer – took their names from the Bible, as did many of their villages. (My English father liked to post his Christmas cards in the Carmarthenshire village of Bethlehem.) After the English effectively obliterated the right of the Welsh to possess family names, many Welsh families took Jewish names such as Aaron or Samuel. (By paradox, many Jewish immigrants took Welsh names such as Lewis or Davis as rationalizations of Levi or David.) The identification of Protestant Bible-readers with the People of God in the Bible was not uniquely Welsh. ‘I think it is good to be brought up a Protestant’, wrote D. H. Lawrence:
and among Protestants, a Nonconformist, and among Nonconformists, a Congregationalist, which sounds pharisaic. But I should have missed bitterly a direct knowledge of the Bible, and a direct relation to Galilee and Canaan, Moab and Kedron, those places that never existed on earth … To me the word Galilee has a wonderful sound. The Lake of Galilee! I don’t want to know where it is. I never want to go to Palestine. Galilee is one of those lovely, glamorous worlds, not places, that exist in the golden haze of a child’s half-formed imagination.12
One of the most striking ways in which the British male of this date expressed a feeling of kinship with the Jews was in the popularity of circumcision. ‘It is a curious fact,’ wrote Ronald Hyam in his masterly Empire and Sexuality, ‘that outside the traditional circumcising communities [Jewish, Muslim, Melanesian, Amerindian and some African] the only Westerners to adopt it as a common practice were the English-speaking peoples.’13 The plot of George Eliot’s last great novel, Daniel Deronda, published in 1876, had hinged upon the discovery by the central character that he was Jewish, a fact unknown until his mature years. An American critic of our own day remarked that ‘Deronda had only to look’.14 But not, in 1876, if he had been of Jewish origin, but brought up from birth as if gentile.
In the later generation, there would have been much greater opportunity for confusion. Circumcision became popular among the medical profession in the 1890s. Some attribute this fact to the pioneering skills of a Jewish doctor named Remondino.15 Others think that circumcision became popular in army medical circles, especially in India. The periodical literature in the Edwardian period is extensive. For example, the British Medical Journal of 15 June 1907 contains a learned lecture on the subject by J. Bland Sutton, FRCS, who outlines the history of the custom among Jews, Muslims and the Masai and the Kavindondos of East Africa. Clearly, there were circumstances where British doctors had undertaken the operation for treatment of specific disorders. Dr Bland Sutton gives as an example: ‘The Museum of Charing Cross Hospital contains a prepuce removed from a man of 35 years of age, with an orifice so narrow that when the urine escaped from the urethra it ballooned the prepuce to the size of an orange, and it was then expelled by squeezing. Micturition required fifteen minutes.’16 But this was the consequence of congenital phimosis. The practice of circumcision upon males whose religion did not require it was, for Bland Sutton, a modern development. He notes that in 1906, 54 children were circumcised at his own London hospital, the Middlesex, while at the Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street in the same year a striking 874 patients were circumcised.
In our own day, once more, something like 1 per cent of the male population of Great Britain is circumcised, and this almost always for ritualistic reasons. In the period of the Empire’s heyday, however, especially among the professional and officer classes, the proportion was high. In the 1930s, a survey suggested that two-thirds of public schoolboys in Britain were circumcised. As the Empire declined, so did the circumcisions. In 1946, a survey of boys born on 4 March found that 38.8 per cent of the professional and salaried families had circumcised their sons, with 29.9 per cent of manual and unskilled workers.17 The separation of Cavaliers (uncircumcised) and Roundheads at private schools, from the Edwardian period to the early years of Elizabeth II, was something with which every privately educated British boy would have been jocularly familiar. Dr Remondino had believed that evolution would eventually lead to the disappearance of the prepuce altogether. Certainly, gentile doctors pointed to the much lower incidence among Jewish children of infant mortality, and there was a belief that circumcision was more hygienic. It is certainly remarkable that the British adoption of the habit coincided with the period, roughly from the 1890s to the 1950s, of the sand and heat of the Empire, though it is hard to see exactly why the popularity of this observance, hitherto in history of unambiguously religious significance, should be seen as ‘primarily an imperial phenomenon’.18 Lloyd George – presumably, born 1863, a Cavalier rather than a Roundhead – nevertheless identified as a Bible Welshman with the People of God in other respects.
Lloyd George himself said: ‘I was taught in school far more about the history of the Jews than about the history of my own land. I could tell you all the kings of Israel. But I doubt whether I could have named half a dozen of the Kings of England and no more of the Kings of Wales.’19 David Lloyd George, who, as prime minister, played a pivotal role in the promotion of Zionism, was actually employed as a solicitor for the Zionists between 1903 and 1905. He drew up the first documents submitted to the British government proposing a Jewish homeland, working on behalf of Theodor Herzl’s – founder of the Zionist movement – London representative, Leopold J. Greenberg, later editor of the Jewish Chronicle.20
Perhaps it was the very fact that some Protestants make the Bible their own story, that they see Moab and Kidron – as D. H. Lawrence did – as ‘those places that never existed on earth’, which makes the presence of actual Jews on occasion disturbing. The Jewish population of Wales was tiny, but it experienced in the summer of 1911 what the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, described as a ‘pogrom’.21
It had been a hard summer. A strike in the coal-mining industry, lasting from September 1910 to August 1911, had been broken by police and military violence. (Churchill sent the Metropolitan Police to patrol strike areas in Cardiff. Two rioters were shot dead in Liverpool in August 1911.) A railway strike had given the chance for local shopkeepers to raise prices, which in the heightened tension of the strike caused widespread anger and hardship. The Jews of South Wales were not miners. They tended to be small shopkeepers or landlords. Their numbers were tiny – less than 1 per cent – about 1,800 – of the population of Cardiff; in small Glamorgan towns or villages, negligible. Some 135 in Brynmawr, 150 in Tredegar. Yet in that summer of 1911 Churchill had to send the Worcester regiment to break up anti-Semitic disturbances. In Tredegar a band of ‘200 young fellows’ attacked Jewish shops while singing ‘several favourite Welsh hymn tunes’. These outrages were followed by attacks on Jewish shops in Ebbw Vale and Rhymney, in Cwm, Abertysswg and Brynmawr. Two Jewish shops in Senghennydd were torched at the end of the week. The total financial damage exceeded £16,000.
Haute Juiverie in London tried to dismiss the incident as no more than the fisticuffs of hooligans. Alfred de Rothschild, Sir Edward Sassoon and the Jewish World tried to pass it off as mere ‘lust of criminals: rioting would have taken place, Jews or no Jews’. Many of the Jews in South Wales had fled pogroms in Russia, and the prospect of the phenomenon extending even to remote valleys in Wales was no doubt intolerable. But the reports in The Times and the Welsh newspapers make it clear that the attacks were organized, that the rioters were not common criminals but ‘respectable people to all appearances’, ‘respectable working men’:22 precisely the socio-economic types who would rally to the fascist banners thirty years later.
Some 120,000 Jews lived in Britain in 1911, 23 the huge proportion recent immigrants from Russia and Poland.* The Russian pogroms of 1905–6, savage even by the standards of Eastern Europe, had produced fresh refugees. It was the virulence of Continental anti-Semitism which led, inexorably, to the hope first by a few, then by many, Jews that they might form a nation. The founding father and inspiration of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, believed that anti-Semitism was endemic in European society. ‘We are one people and subject to one fate.’ This was his view. The only solution was for them to find a place on Earth which was their own, though even that, given the fact that Jews were scattered across the face of a hostile Earth, must perforce be on sufferance. ‘Shall we choose Argentina or Palestine? We shall take what is given us.’24
Zionism as a plausible, viable idea came into being at the height of two mighty European political phenomena: British imperialism and small-nation nationalism. The British at various times supported the national aspirations of the Czechs, or the Serbs and the Greeks, since they wished to be independent of other imperialisms. The national aspirations of Indians, Irish or, later, Africans, who wanted to be rid of the British Empire, as opposed to the Austro-Hungarian or Ottoman or Russian empires, were a rather different story.
Theodor Herzl, born in Budapest, was in adult life resident in Vienna. He was a sophisticate, an internationalist who had been led to his idea of Der Judenstaat by the horrors of contemporary anti-Semitism, especially the Russian pogroms and the Dreyfus Affair in France. As well as approaching the British with the idea of a Jewish homeland in their colony of Uganda, Herzl had dealings with Kaiser Wilhelm II, with Pope Pius X, with the Tsar of Russia’s interior minister, and with the Ottoman Sultan in attempts to try out the possibility of establishing the homeland in Palestine. ‘The salvation of Israel will be achieved by prophets and not by diplomats,’ he had asserted.25
When Herzl died in 1904, Chaim Weizmann wrote to his fiancée that ‘Africa’ – the idea of a Jewish homeland in Uganda – ‘can now without doubt be regarded as finished …’26
Weizmann has been called an historic hero in a well-defined sense – ‘one who altered his people’s history in a way that would have been impossible but for his extraordinary gifts and achievements’.27 He was born in a ghetto, in poverty, in southern Russia in 1874 at a time when Zionism was little more than a dream, when spoken Hebrew was unknown outside rarefied rabbinic circles, and when Judaea was part of the Ottoman Empire, an underpopulated, picturesque but decayed region. When he died in 1952 in Rehovot, he was the president of the state of Israel. He had been the key figure in bringing that state into being.
He came to England from Russia – via Switzerland – becoming a demonstrator in chemistry at Victoria University, Manchester, in 1904. Winston Churchill, electioneering in Oldham, approached the Jewish leaders in Manchester, hoping for their support of the Liberal party. On the eve of the 1906 election, Weizmann met the Tory prime minister, Arthur Balfour, and they had the conversation which passed into legend.
Weizmann was concerned that many British assimilated Jews were extremely dubious about the Zionist idea.
I began to sweat blood to make my meaning clear through my English. At the very end I made an effort, I had an idea. I said ‘Mr Balfour, if you were offered Paris instead of London, would you take it?’ He looked surprised, ‘But London is our own!’ I said, ‘Jerusalem was our own when London was a marsh!’ He leaned back, continued to stare at me, and said two things which I remember vividly. The first was: ‘Are there many Jews who think like you?’ I answered, ‘I believe I speak the mind of millions of Jews whom you will never see and who cannot speak for themselves, but with whom I could pave the streets of the country I come from.’ To this he said, ‘If this is so, you will one day be a force.’ Shortly before I withdrew, Balfour said, ‘It is curious. The Jews I meet are quite different.’ I answered: ‘Mr Balfour, you meet the wrong kind of Jews.’28
It was Weizmann’s conviction that ‘England will understand the Zionists better than anyone else’.29 The models used by Weizmann, who was neither a prophet like Herzl, nor an historian, but a chemist, were, consciously or not, anachronistically contemporary. In seeking to ‘recreate’ the ancient homeland of the Jews, it was no accident that he found that England understood the idea ‘better than anyone else’. Although the Ugandan proposal was ditched, Weizmann went on thinking of the new country as a colony on the British model. Soon after Turkey entered the First World War, he wrote:
Don’t you think that the chance for the Jewish people is now within the limits of a discussion at least? … Should Palestine fall within the sphere of British influence and should Britain encourage a Jewish settlement there as a British dependency, we could have in 25–30 years about a million of Jews out there, perhaps more; they would develop the country, bring back civilization to it.30
In just the same way, Europeans appropriating African or Asian or South American territory considered themselves to be thereby bringing ‘civilization’. Though he was always careful in his public utterances to express his respect for the rights of the indigenous population of Palestine – ‘There is an Arab nation with a glorious past’ – he was candidly colonialist in his language. He spoke of the Jewish settlers as ‘colonialists’ following his first visit to Palestine in 1907,31 the Arabs were ‘primitive people’.32 The Jewish incomers would be ‘bearers of the torch and the preparers of civilization’.33 It is true that as his thinking developed Weizmann categorically stated and patently wished that ‘600,000 Arabs have just as much right to their life in Palestine as we have to our National Home.’34 It was an optimistic aspiration. Like the British in India, the Zionists of Weizmann’s generation could not entirely shake off the sense that when a European man set foot on non-European soil he did so as the superior of the native population. He came to conquer and to improve. In his more unguarded moments he suggested, in his thinking about the settlement of Palestine, that the fate of ‘several hundred thousand negroes’ was ‘a matter of no consequence’.35 Just as the British in South Africa could dehumanize the Indians by referring to them as coolies, so Weizmann could see the indigenous population of the Middle East as negroes.
The Liberals depended upon Irish support for their majority in the House of Commons at Westminster, so it was inevitable that they would try to appease the majority of Irish members who wanted Home Rule for Ireland. The passage of the Parliament Act* meant that opposition from the House of Lords could not impede the passage of the 1910 Home Rule Bill into law. But something much more damaging than a veto in the Lords stood in the way.
There were plenty of English Unionists dismayed by the notion of an independent, or quasi-independent, Ireland, but their fury was not to be compared with that of the Irish Unionists, above all those Protestants of the six counties of the North, Ulster. They chose as their leader and spokesman the solicitor general in the previous Conservative government, the lawyer who had prosecuted Oscar Wilde, Sir Edward Carson, member of Parliament for Dublin University. In January 1913 the Ulster Unionist Council raised the Ulster Volunteer Force: 100,000 men between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five. By summer, there was a march-past of 15,000 trained men at the Balmoral grounds near Belfast. F. E. Smith took the salute.36
These men were in the paradoxical position of preparing to take up arms against the British Crown, in protest against an Act passed in the British Parliament, in order to declare their loyalty to Britain. Asquith’s Liberal government dithered, as British politicians always dither when faced by Irish violence, and suggested the hopeless solution – namely that Home Rule would come into being, with Ulster possessing an ‘opt out’ for six years. ‘We do not want sentence of death with a stay of execution for six years’ was Carson’s contemptuous response. The Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, no Home Ruler he, denounced the Ulster Provisional Government as ‘a self-elected body, composed of persons who, to put it plainly, are engaged in a treasonable conspiracy’.37 There followed the so-called ‘Mutiny at the Curragh’ in which General Sir Hubert Gough, commander of the Cavalry Brigade at the Curragh, notified the commander in chief in Dublin, Sir Arthur Paget, that he and fifty-nine other officers would have no part in suppressing a Unionist revolt.
Ireland was on the edge of potential civil war, and the Westminster government could not now proceed without disaster. If they imposed Home Rule on the Protestants of the North, there would have almost certainly been the armed resistance threatened, with no opposition from the military. Equally, having passed the Home Rule Bill to the satisfaction of Irish members, Asquith’s government could not renege on the deal. To do so would be to invite the armed reaction of those Irish nationalists for whom Home Rule – that is, a measure of independence under overall British hegemony – was never going to be enough.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the impasse over Ireland was one of the factors which made Asquith and his Cabinet colleagues go to war with Germany, Austria and Turkey in 1914, rather than to seek a negotiated settlement or declare Britain to be neutral in the conflict. Of the awkward list of domestic problems which the Liberal government could not solve – Welsh disestablishment, female suffrage – Irish independence was much the most grave. Terrible as the prospect of a European war might prove, politicians think in short terms. The war could rally the dissident voices of the Welsh, the Women, the Irish, behind a common cause.
It certainly in the short term was an effective policy. Sir Edward Grey had no sooner told the House of Commons on 3 August 1914 of the government’s decision to go to war, than John Redmond, leader of the parliamentary Irish Nationalists, pledged his full support. British troops could be withdrawn from Ireland. Irish Nationalists would work hand in hand with the Ulster Volunteers in defending both Britain and Ireland. ‘And today I honestly believe that the democracy of Ireland will turn with the utmost anxiety and sympathy to this country in every trial and every danger that may overtake it.’38 It was in this atmosphere that the Irish Home Rule Act received the royal assent on 18 September 1914. (The entire Conservative opposition walked out of the House of Commons in protest.)
Enormous numbers of Irishmen volunteered to fight in the First World War. About 150,000 were in active service by April 1916 and over 200,000 had enlisted by the end.39 (There was never conscription in Ireland.) Hugely more Catholics than Protestants volunteered. No doubt patriotism played its part in Ireland, as everywhere else, in rallying men to the colours, but so did poverty. A government report estimated that of a Dublin population of 304,000, 63 per cent, some 194,000, were working-class. Living conditions were among the most squalid and deprived in the Empire. Thirty-seven per cent of Dubliners lived six to a room and 14 per cent of the houses were deemed ‘unfit for human habitation’. In such tenements, lavatories were unknown, and excreta lay scattered in corridors. ‘We cannot conceive,’ wrote the committee presenting this report, ‘how any self-respecting male or female could be expected to use the accommodation such as we have seen’.40
No doubt many of those who fought believed the wartime propaganda that Britain, and Ireland with it, was going to war to defend the rights of plucky little nations like themselves, Belgium or Serbia. Equally, there were very many Irish men and women who were not at this juncture politically or emotionally prepared for total independence. Many Irish people, until the London government played into the hands of Fenian out-and-out republicans, would have been content with devolved power to Dublin rather than full-blown independence.
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 than 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 the 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.