At the height of his career, the dashing Irish diplomat and humanitarian Roger Casement was a national hero in the United Kingdom, and knighted for his service to the realm by King George V. When he died in 1916, he was infamous as a traitor and a pervert: executed by hanging in Pentonville Prison before being buried in quicklime in an unmarked grave. Casement is the most uncomplicatedly good man that we are discussing in this book: someone motivated by a deep and profound compassion and solidarity with oppressed people who used his voice and his status to combat the violent colonization and subordination of Black and brown people in the Global South.
As we will see, this was all very well and good for the British state as long as it aligned with the national interest – as long as the barbaric practices he was describing could be safely ascribed to other, supposedly less-enlightened, Europeans. Once he began to materially assist people rebelling against British rule, however, he was blackmailed and defamed using his own diaries – his homosexuality, which was joyous and Whitmanesque if sometimes problematic in its elision of the power dynamics between Casement and his subaltern suitors, became a millstone hung around his neck.
Roger Casement was born in 1864 in Sandycove, a seaside suburb of Dublin with rocky beaches and clear blue water. Roger’s family was deeply embedded in the British colonial project. His grandfather Hugh ran a prosperous shipping business out of Belfast, and his father had been a captain in the Royal Dragoons in the 1842 Anglo-Afghan war. For the first two hundred years of British colonization on the Indian subcontinent, wars of conquest were fought not by the state alone but by the British East India Company, a joint-stock company with private armies and navies that cooperated with the state ones, when needed.1 In 1800, the British East India Company’s private army numbered 250,000 men – double the size of the British army.
If Casement’s father was by dint of colonial service and Protestant birth an exemplar of the British colonial state, his family, like many Anglo-Irish families, was often characterized by conflict around nationality and religion. His father insisted he was born in Ulster instead of Dublin; when Roger was four, his mother allegedly had Roger baptized into the Catholic faith while on holiday in Wales. Roger would come to believe that she had always been a Catholic, but a cousin claimed that his mother had converted, having ‘revolted from the coldness of the Protestant faith’.2
The young Roger, like many of the sensitive boys in this book, always preferred the company of his vivacious and warm mother to that of his disciplinarian father. But when Roger was only nine years old she died, sending his father into a deep depression. After some years of moving around – and a notable episode when Roger, aged eleven, appeared in court in London alongside his older brother for the crime of having stolen books from a newsstand – he, his brother, and their two siblings were sent to live with his father’s uncle and aunt in the family home of Magherintemple House, near Ballycastle, on the Northern Irish coastline. His father lived, grief-stricken by the loss of his wife, in a hotel forty miles away and, when Roger was twelve, died of tuberculosis.
The boy was then shipped off to the Diocesan School in Ballymena, studying classics and French. One of only six boarders at the school, he played cricket and began to love – and to write his own – poetry. Casement loved swimming in the nude on the rocky beaches near his school, seemingly as much for the opportunity to eye, and score with, local trade as for the exercise. The young Roger was torn between his family identity as an Anglo- Irish Protestant and a heartfelt association with and belief in Catholicism and Irish nationalism. As a teenager, he became interested in politics by following the career of Charles Stewart Parnell, an Irish nationalist and part of the Irish Parliamentary Party who sought to overthrow English landlords, support tenant farmers being starved off their land by genocidal British politics, and advocate for home rule. At the same time, his uncle Edward Bannister, a Liverpudlian who worked in shipping, regaled the young lad with stories about travel to South America and the Congo. And so at fifteen, when Roger finished his schooling, he took a job at the Elder Dempster company, a shipping line operating between Liverpool and the West Coast of Africa.
At this time, in 1881, the late Victorian imperialist world system was just kicking into its highest gear.3 The Seven Years’ War and American Revolution had drawn to a close the first wave of European colonization, while the Congress of Vienna after Napoleon’s defeat established a new European diplomatic order. The Industrial Revolution led to growth and urbanization in liberal Britain, which spent the nineteenth century consolidating colonial and naval power and building up industry and infrastructure.4 By the 1870s, other European countries, including Germany, which reunified under the Prussian Hohenzollern family that counted Frederick the Great among its number, had begun to challenge British hegemony and develop projects of heavy industry and colonization to match.
Africa had, before this time, only seen piecemeal colonization: while the transatlantic slave trade, pioneered by and then ineffectually condemned by the British, had devastating impacts on African lives and politics, very little of the continent was under direct European control. All of this changed over the next ten years, enabled by the second Industrial Revolution and key accompanying technologies such as railways, steamboats, the telegraph, and the medical discovery that quinine could treat malaria. Economic necessity – capitalism always needs new front lines of primitive accumulation – combined with race science and Christian missionary zeal in what became known as the ‘Scramble for Africa’.5
In 1876, at a conference ostensibly about humanitarian projects, King Leopold II of Belgium formed the ‘International Association for the Exploration and Civilization of Central Africa’, a front organization for violent colonization with members from many European nations. The fact that Central Africa was neither unexplored nor uncivilized – millions of people lived in the areas around the Congo river, and many kingdoms and states there had signed treaties with European nations – did not slow down these wild-eyed, genocidal ideo-logues one bit.
As different European powers began to colonize different parts of Africa and war seemed possible, in 1884, Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of Germany, organized the Berlin Conference, at which Africa was divided up between the various European powers with an active and racist disregard for the lives, desires, and humanity of the people who lived there. The conference was intended only to prevent conflict between Europeans and to ensure that each nation got supposedly ‘fair’ pieces of Africa, as though Africa were a cake to be distributed. The principle established in Berlin in 1884 was that of ‘effective occupation’: a given colonizer’s supposed ‘right’ to land depended on its ability to subjugate, control, and establish administration of the people who already lived there.6 Given control over a piece of land relatively contiguous to the borders of the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo, the ‘International Association …’ established the Congo Free State, which became King Leopold’s personal fiefdom.
The year of the Berlin Conference, Casement left his job as a ship’s purser and began to work for the International Association in the Congo. Why was King Leopold so intent on getting his hands on this piece of property? Industrial machinery in Europe required rubber, and the land in the Congo was perfect for the cultivation of rubber vines. All the humanitarian talk was cover for Leopold’s cold desire for personal enrichment, and conviction that Black people’s lives, freedom, and dignity mattered less than his personal fortune. Casement’s initial job was to help survey the land between the shoreline and two hundred miles up the Congo river; this waterway, not navigable because of waterfalls, stood between the site of potentially lucrative rubber plantations and the ships to take the crop to market in Europe.
While there, Casement met two men who would be very significant to his life. First, he met another young explorer named Herbert Ward, who became a fast and lifelong friend and praised Casement’s muscle and bone, sun-tanned face, and blue eyes. Casement was, in fact, an astonishingly beautiful man; however, it seems that he and Ward were never anything more than friends. Ward went on to become a sculptor in Paris, and died from injuries sustained assisting French soldiers at the front during the First World War.
Casement also met the British-Polish merchant marine named Joseph Conrad; like Roger, he had come to the Congo motivated by racist greed and the ideology of ‘civilizing’ the region through trade and forced religious conversions, and like Roger, he began to become horrified by the project of colonization upon seeing the ways in which the Congo Free State was administered.7 In 1899, Conrad published Heart of Darkness, a novel set against the background of the colonization of the Congo, which offers a penetrating critique of the colonial project and was itself critiqued by the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe for its repetition and re-instantiation of racist visions of Africans as ‘primitives’ and Africa as an ‘other’ onto which white Europe could project its racial and spiritual anxieties.8
Casement, too, would step away from the Congo Free State and instead sign up to work for the British Colonial Office. In 1895 he was made Her Majesty’s Consul in Maputo, in what is today Mozambique; and in 1901 he was transferred to the French Congo. Two years later, he was commissioned by the Balfour government in Britain to write a report about human rights in the Congo Free State. The British Empire was, at the time, invested in its self-image as more progressive and liberal than the monarchies of ‘old’ continental Europe; even in its colonization practices, it argued, it aimed to spread free trade and liberation.
These myths were lies then and they remain lies today: British colonization was a process in which a wealthy few were enriched through the shedding of unquantifiable volumes of blood. Anti-colonial resistance against the British was put down with harsh violence, and the British operated with near-total disregard for the lives, choices, autonomy, and self-determination of the peoples they conquered and governed. The fact of resistance, and of the importation of that resistance into progressive and liberationist political movements in the European metropolis (as scholars such as Leela Gandhi and Priyamvada Gopal have described), does not excuse or whitewash the actions of white European elites.9 Just as some British commentators today seek to excuse British actions then by comparing them to those of other colonizers – a fool’s game – the British state then aimed to do the same. This is how such a report was ever commissioned: the British wanted to establish themselves as comparatively good and moral colonizers in comparison with even worse others.
But none of this meant that what was going on in the Congo Free State – which Casement knew well, having worked there for years – was not an atrocity. Casement spent weeks travelling around the region interviewing workers and soldiers. As a private colony, Congo was governed by King Leopold’s personal decree. He had instituted a system of statute labour. The invention and patenting of the tire by John Dunlop in 1887 and Édouard Michelin in 1891 increased the demand for rubber for bicycle and, eventually, automobile tires. To meet this demand, by decree, the Congo Free State dictated that any land without a house or cultivated garden was the property of the state. Leopold then allocated the land, rich in natural resources and particularly rubber, to private companies as concessions.10 In this way the commons of the people of the Congo were stolen and converted into private European property.
On the plantations, law did not govern the treatment of labourers. The demand for labour was high, so the state demanded labour from Congolese people as a form of taxation, creating the ‘Red Rubber system’ – essentially a slave society, where people were forced to work. Local officials called capitas were recruited to organise the labour, but quotas for production were imposed from the central authority, with little consideration of the situation on the ground, meaning they were essentially unmeetable. The Free State also organised a military force to oversee production, called the ‘Force Publique’, in which the officers were white, while the soldiers were recruited from specific ethnic groups selected to inflame ethnic tensions. Overseers beat workers with hippopotamus-hidewhips.11
The Red Rubber system was one of extreme brutality, with mass rape among its methods. The white authorities began to worry that the ammunition supplied to Force Publique soldiers, imported at great expense, was being used for hunting. So they implemented a new system for ensuring labourers worked, and no ammunition was wasted; if the quota was not met, plantation managers were commanded to supply the severed hands of those punished for underproduction. The quota of severed hands became easier to meet than the quota of rubber. The mutilation or murder of workers, the seizure of land, and the forced labour meant families could not produce enough food to survive, and famine ensued. The white colonizers then kidnapped the orphaned children of their victims and forced them into child colonies, where they would be raised as more reserve labour.
Casement documented all these abuses, and worse. He made a very conservative estimate that 3 million people had died or been murdered under Leopold’s regime; Casement’s collaborator, the journalist E. D. Morel, claimed 20 million. The Congolese historian Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja describes these as ‘heinous crimes against humanity … Villages unwilling or unable to meet the assigned daily quotas of production were subject to rape, arson, bodily mutilation, and murder … It resulted in a death toll of holocaust proportions.’12 In 1880, between 20 and 30 million people lived in the Congo; by 1911, 8.5 million did. The survivors were, to quote Nzongola-Ntalaja, ‘enslaved subjects of a sovereign they never saw’.13 The profits flowed into magnificent construction projects in Belgium, both fitting out Leopold’s private residences and projects of public improvement. While many historians have shied away from the term ‘genocide’ because the overarching goal was profit rather than ethnic cleansing, this hardly reduces the ethical stain or the ongoing obligations for reparations.
The Casement report caused an outcry, although many business owners trading with the Free State refused to change their policies. Published in 1904, his was not the first such report – the Black American historian and journalist George Washington Williams first published a report describing Leopold’s regime as committing ‘crimes against humanity’ in 1890, while the Black American reverend William Henry Sheppard co-founded, with the Reverend Samuel Lapsley, the American Presbyterian Congo Mission in 1891.14 Reports from these men and Casement led to the creation of the Congo Reform Association, which succeeded in pressuring major powers to end Leopold’s one-man regime. Nzongola-Ntalaja points out that the CRA was still concerned with ‘reforming colonialism, not abolishing it … The Leopoldian system was [to be] replaced by a colonial regime that was just as oppressive, albeit in a less brutal manner.’15 The Belgian government took control of the Free State in 1908, but it was not until 1960 that the Congo achieved independence. Its first prime minister, the leftist nationalist and anti-colonial activist leader Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated by firing squad less than a year after a CIA-involved coup.
Casement was appointed in 1906 by the Foreign Office to a commission to investigate the Peruvian Amazon Company, a rubber extraction company that was registered in the UK with British shareholders and directors. Allegations had been made that, in its Peruvian plantations in Putumayo, workers were treated as virtual slaves; and some of those workers were Barbadians, who were British subjects, giving Casement the right to investigate. In letters and diaries, he resolved also to write about the ‘poor, docile forest tribes of Indians’ who according to rumours were being forced into slave labour.16
Casement interviewed workers and discovered a regime of brutality, casual murder, sexual abuse, and beatings. In interviews, white colonizers cheerfully admitted ‘owning’ Native labourers ‘with the willing support of the Lima government which regard any such “conquest” of a new tribe as a patriotic act’.17 Seizing Indians as slaves ‘for any so called public “need” ‘ was ‘done openly’.18 Casement found stocks in which workers were tortured by having their legs locked into cages too small to hold them; in a report about the use of pillories as punishment for workers, he wrote, ‘Men, women, and children were confined in them for days, weeks, and often months … Whole families … were imprisoned – fathers, mothers, and children, and many cases were reported of parents dying thus, either from starvation or from wounds caused by flogging, while their offspring were attached alongside of them to watch in misery themselves the dying agonies of their parents.’19
His final report, published in 1912, combined journalistic observation with interviews with victims – one of the first times that the voices of the victims of colonial violence had been presented in an official Western government report. Casement was praised at Westminster Abbey and in the London Times; a year later, he returned to check on promised improvements and found that there were none.
However, alongside the diaries in which he was compiling detailed notes on the atrocities he found in the Amazon, Casement kept a second set of diaries. Later, when they were discovered, these came to be known as the ‘Black’ Diaries (as opposed to the virtuous and journalistic ‘White’ Diaries); in them, Casement chronicled his sexual subjectivity, including sexual encounters with, and sexualized observations of, the people he was meeting on his travels. ‘Captain’s steward an Indian boy of 19, broad face, thin. Huge soft long one. Also Engineer’s steward, big too,’ went one characteristic entry, from 20 November 1910.20 Casement used the code ‘X’ to indicate sodomy; writing, on 13 January 1910: ‘Gabriel Ramos – X Deep to hilt … Gabriel querido waiting at Barca gate! Palpito. In very deep thrusts.’21 His meticulous notation would indicate both the size of the relevant cock – Casement was, it must be said, a size queen – as well as any money that changed hands during the encounter; it seems that in port cities, he was willing and able to pay for trade, although he appears to have had the same almost reverent attitude towards the men he was sleeping with whether he was paying them or not.
On 28 February 1910, in Rio de Janeiro, he wrote, ‘Deep screw and to hilt. X “poquino.” Mario in Rio 81/2+6’ 40$ … lovely, young 18 and glorious. Biggest since Lisbon July 1904 … Perfectly huge.’22 Three days later, having headed to São Paolo as part of his approach to the Peruvian Amazon, he wrote, ‘Antonio. 10$ Rua Dierita. Dark followed and hard … breathed and quick, enormous push. Loved mightily, to hilt deep X.’23 Ten days later, in Buenos Aires, Casement spent a ‘morning in Avenida de Mayo. Splendid erections. Ramon $7. 10” at least. X In.’24
These are complicated relations, both because of the racial hierarchies of the societies he was moving in, the wealth and power discrepancies, and the fact Casement usually paid for sex. Yet the accounts are marked by a tenderness and a refusal of many of the racial distinctions made at the time. But again, here there is an ability to choose, to cast certain bodies as desirable, as fetishized, that occurred within the framework of colonial and racial power. W. G. Sebald once wrote that ‘it was precisely Casement’s homosexuality that sensitized him to the continuing oppression, exploitation and destruction, across the borders of social class and race, of those who were furthest from the centres of power’.25 The historian Leela Gandhi describes this as a politics of friendship, in which homosexuality (alongside other forms of late nineteenth-century radicalism she describes) was understood as a ‘ground for … strange affinities with foreigners’, a ‘source of … ethical and political capacity’.26 Other such men included the utopian socialist and fellow handsome devil Edward Carpenter.
It is interesting here to think about homosexuality as a path towards anti-colonial alliance, and about the shared births of colonialism and homosexuality in the modern West. Many scholars of colonialism, including Silvia Federici, have established the mind-body binary as a central problem of colonial capitalist epistemology, in which bourgeois Protestant discourses of the mind-body binary led to two parallel phenomena: the colonization of the imagined ‘body’ by the imagined ‘mind,’ and the colonization of non- European peoples who were seen to be simply body. The obsession with hygiene and bodily regulation that accompanied the development of bourgeois hegemony in Europe reached its peak with investments in colonial hygiene and bodily regulation through forced conversions, cultural genocide, and public health programmes.27
These technologies of regulation were then imported back into the metropolis, where they were imposed on new urban proletarian populations seen as similar to the colonized in their resistance to both disciplined work and moral discipline. Casement was part of a group of gay men – not a group that understood itself necessarily as such, but a group we can definitely think of as relatively coherent in hindsight – who understood their homosexuality as part of a broader project of metropolitan anticolonial radicalism.
The literary scholar Javier Uriarte has argued persuasively that the twinned diaries – documenting Casement’s sexual interests and the atrocities of colonial domination – share key ways of looking. Uriarte defines this as ‘cruising’, a word queers use to describe both looking for casual sex and the particular attentiveness to detail combined with openness to possibility that characterizes a way of moving through the world.28 There is, queer scholars and activists have argued, a utopian and revolutionary possibility in this way of looking.29
Cruising’s codes are often quite strict even though they are learned socially; Uriarte writes that cruising, ‘looking and reading the body, the gaze, the gestures, and the movements of others … are precisely the activities that lay at the centre of Casement’s investigative travels’.30 The same attentive eye that documented the beaten and bruised bodies of labourers, or a torture device defying a colonial administrator’s testimony that no such thing existed, also documented the pleasures and connections available beneath the surface. Uriarte argues that it was both the tortured and pleasure-seeking bodies that led Casement to increasingly understand himself as a victim of British colonization and to radicalize his anti-colonial stance. In contrast to narratives of the Amazon as a woman to be deflowered, Casement’s Amazonian sex was connected to anti-imperialism.
Casement would eventually be granted a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George for his work in the Congo and, in 1911, a knighthood for his work in Peru. Why was Casement receiving these gongs from an imperialist power like Great Britain? Partly because his investigations were obviously aimed at Britain’s rivals, and because his work in Peru and the Amazon was seen to be in defence of British subjects – that is, their colonial subjects. But it’s also worth pointing out that within Britain at the time there was some form of popular moral and political opposition to colonialism, especially in the aftermath of the Boer War.
In 1902 the liberal economist J. A. Hobson had written his economic treatise Imperialism, which had positioned imperialism as a result of imbalances within capitalist society and not an offshoot of nationalist pride. Hobson also separated imperialism as a necessary corollary or development of capitalism, unlike, say, Lenin, who published his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1917, but both included a moral critique of the crimes of imperialism.31 Hobson was additionally anti- Semitic, especially in his explanation of the causes of war in South Africa.
This sentiment was echoed in socialist politicians of the time, including in the speeches of Keir Hardie, the founder of the Labour Party. That the critique of imperialism and colonialism at the time was a moral one should not obscure that it was often, if not usually, deeply paternalistic, if not racist. Much of the Christian moral critique revolved around a sort of racist idea of a duty of care to lesser races, a mirror of the White Man’s Burden that was a justification for colonialism in the first place. Critiques like Hobson’s, while opposing imperialism, still revolved around a social Darwinism, an advocacy of eugenics: in Hobson’s words, there were ‘important differences which should affect our conduct towards countries inhabited by what appear to be definitely low-typed unproductive races … and countries like China and India, where an old civilization of a high type … exists’.32
All this puts the lie to the idea that imperialist racism went unopposed in its day, a lie that serves to whitewash the reputation of racists like the politician and mining baron Cecil Rhodes.33
Even if there was a default racism cutting across society at the time, it was possible to take a stand against racism, imperialism and colonialism. While Cecil Rhodes was advocating white supremacism, Casement was writing in a letter home: ‘What has civilisation itself been to them? … A thing of horror – of smoking rifles and pillaged homes – of murdered fathers, violated mothers and enslaved children.’34 If Casement’s writings of the time are unusual in their foregrounding of Indigenous voices and disruption of the racist concept of the ‘civilizing mission’, some scholars have argued for a more complex understanding of the transactions at play in his depictions of and interactions with subaltern peoples.
Casement did not travel alone back to the United Kingdom – he brought with him two Indigenous young people from Putumayo, living examples of the violence and abuse described in his report. These men were featured in tours, photographed, and sat for portraits; this, argues the critic Leslie Wylie, placed Casement squarely within the long-standing metropolitan tradition of exhibiting picturesque ‘living curiosities and “native types” ‘ that postcolonial theory has long argued is part of the machinery of colonialism.35
In 1913, Casement retired from the British consular service and immediately threw himself into the Irish struggle for national liberation. He had been a member of the Irish nationalist party Sinn Féin since 1905. In November of 1913 he co-founded the nationalist militia the Irish Volunteers, and travelled to the United States on their behalf to build up support and make connections with exiled nationalists. As tensions in Europe began to rise in the run-up to the First World War, in July of 1914 Casement organised and helped fund the illegal importation of 1,500 rifles from Germany into Howth harbour, to arm the volunteers. Some of these guns were used in the Easter Rising of 1916.
In October of 1914, with Britain now at war with Germany, Casement disguised himself and travelled, via Norway, to Germany. He saw himself as an ambassador for a nascent independent Ireland. In Germany, Casement negotiated with the Germans and achieved an agreement in the scenario of a German invasion of Britain and Ireland, agreeing that Germany could land troops in Ireland ‘not as an army of invaders … but as the forces of a Government that is inspired by goodwill towards a country and people for whom Germany desires only national prosperity and national freedom’.36 Even if, as was likely, the Kaiserreich was less interested in Irish national freedom than sticking it to the British, this was still a major diplomatic achievement at a time when the defeat of Britain seemed possible in a way that would have enabled Irish freedom.
Casement then visited the German prisoner of war camps, where he tried to organise Irish POWs into an ‘Irish Brigade’. He did not get much luck: the threat of execution if Britain were to win the war was probably too strong, as well as the fact that many troops, having fought on the front line, maintained their loyalty to Britain. But he did manage to persuade the Germans to provide twenty thousand rifles and ten machine guns in addition to other forms of support.
Casement had learned of the upcoming Easter Rising and wanted to reach Ireland before it started in April 1916 so that he could delay it in advance of the arms shipment, which would enable a more decisive and effective attack. He had a German U-boat drop him in County Kerry but, upon landing, he suffered a relapse of the malaria he had picked up in the Congo. He retreated to a fort, too sick to travel. The Irish Volunteers refused to save him, worried about taking any action in advance of the Rising that might jeopardize their supplies or plans. Casement was charged with sabotage, espionage, and high treason; meanwhile, the arms shipment never arrived, having been intercepted by the Royal Navy. Casement was taken to London and held in Brixton Prison to await trial.
The trial was complicated; arcane legal arguments meant there was some confusion as to whether someone outside the country could commit treason. Argument revolved around whether an unpunctuated sentence in the original law implied that the crime had to be committed in the country, or whether it was enough for the crime to have impacts within the country. The decision went against Casement. Meanwhile the prosecution had uncovered more incriminating evidence – not of treachery, but of homosexuality. His ‘Black Diaries’ came to light, and were used as evidence of his general degeneracy in addition to treachery.
A government memorandum of the time read that ‘he has for years been addicted to the grossest sodomitical practices. Of late years he seems to have completed the full cycle of sexual degeneracy and from a pervert has become an invert – a woman or pathic who derives his satisfaction from attracting men and inducing them to use him.’37 The government leaked transcribed, typed copies of some of the most incriminating pages of the diaries. This hugely undermined Casement’s support, not just amongst British friends who might have been able to overlook some of his political activities, but amongst his allies in the Irish nationalist movement. His old friends, Joseph Conrad and Herbert Ward, disowned him. Casement’s reputation was besmirched for a generation, his role as a martyr destroyed before it could be built.
It would become almost an article of faith among some conservative Irish nationalists that the diaries had been forged. Some pointed to the large numbers of homosexuals involved in British intelligence during the First and Second World Wars; theories as to their supposed secret author include Sir Frank Ezra Adcock, who, before taking up a professorship in ancient history at Cambridge, had broken ciphers for the British military. Adcock was himself certainly gay, but there is no evidence that he or any other spooks faked four complete, day-to-day perfect diaries in Casement’s own handwriting.38
But for the new Irish state, dominated by the Roman Catholic Church, Casement’s case was a problematic one. A national hero killed by the British and therefore a martyr to the cause – but also a queer. The Irish nationalist William Maloney argued that the diaries had been faked to discredit Casement, arguing in a 1936 book that the diary was actually written by a man Casement was investigating. On the basis of this book, W. B. Yeats wrote an angry poem about Casement’s treatment, and in 1965 a book about Casement that included excerpts from the diaries and accepted them as fact was banned from being published by the Irish Censorship of Publications Board for obscenity. As recently as 2013, Angus Mitchell – who edited and helped publish the ‘White Diaries’ – published a book arguing that the Black Diaries were forged, and Irish media approvingly discussed the apparent forgeries.39 In his critical biography of Casement, which includes the texts of the Black Diaries in their entirety, the historian Jeffrey Dudgeon lays out a comprehensive provenance of the diaries, making it clear that Casement wrote them and that none of the supposed irregularities that congealed into conspiracy theories about their originality hold the slightest bit of water. The handwriting has been multiply analysed and proven to be authentic.40
During Casement’s trial, the prosecution actually offered a plea bargain, with the diaries used as evidence that Casement was guilty but insane, and he’d therefore avoid hanging. Casement refused the offer. Supporters, including Arthur Conan Doyle, Yeats, and George Bernard Shaw, made appeals for clemency, but to no avail. He lost his appeal, was stripped of his knighthood, and was sentenced to death. He was hanged by the British state in Pentonville Prison on 3 August 1916, at the age of fifty-one.
Father Carey, the Catholic priest who attended to Casement in his prison cell on the day of his execution, said Roger ‘marched to the scaffold with the dignity of a prince.’41 The executioner, Albert Ellis, later said: ‘He appeared to me the bravest man it fell to my unhappy lot to execute.’42 Found among the diaries was this poem by Casement, called ‘The Nameless One’:
I sought by love alone to go
Where God had writ an awful no.
Pride gave a guilty God to hell
I have no pride – by love I fell.43