Of all the names associated with revolutionary Ireland, that of the ‘beautiful wild creature’, Maud Gonne, is one of the best-known. However, her links with the country she loved were tenuous, for her family, though of Irish descent on her father’s side, was wholly English on her mother’s, and she was born in Aldershot, Surrey, England.
Maud’s mother, Edith Cook, died of tuberculosis when Maud was four years old, and subsequently she and her younger sister, Kathleen, were reared by governesses in Kildare and France. When
Maud was sixteen, her father, Tommy Gonne, an army colonel, moved to the Curragh, Kildare, taking his daughters with him. Maud loved her carefree life with the Dublin Castle set – the horse-riding, the parties, her personal popularity – but her adored father died of typhoid at just fifty-one years of age and her life was changed forever. His dying wish (according to Maud) was that he could have done more to redress some of the injustices he could see all around him. Twenty-year-old Maud, devastated by her loss, vowed to take his place, and so began her lifelong love affair with Irish revolutionary politics.
The well-known, rather square-jawed photographs of Maud Gonne do not do her justice. Contemporary accounts never fail to mention that, standing nearly 6ft tall (1.8m) with masses of auburn hair and fiery golden eyes, she was majestically beautiful. WB Yeats, who fell deeply in love with her at first sight in 1889, wrote of a ‘beauty like a tightened bow, a kind / that is not natural in an age like this’. People literally used to stop and stare at her in the street so much did she seem, said he, ‘of a divine race’. Maud was well aware of this: ‘I do not say that the crowds are in love with me,’ she said, only half in jest, when rejecting the advances of the lovesick poet, ‘but they would hate anyone who was!’
In 1902 Maud was to give an unforgettable performance as the personification of Ireland in Yeats’ ‘Cathleen ni Houlihan’, and inspired by her, Yeats was to write some of the greatest poetry in the English language. In addition to her fantastic looks, Maud Gonne also exuded charisma from every pore. She had an abundance of what we would today call ‘star quality’, and she traded on this to help her in her life’s work: to free Ireland from English rule.
Maud’s passion for Ireland was always at least partly informed by her hatred of England. After her father’s death she lived in London with an uncle, and she disliked both the country and her guardian in equal measure. Liberation came in the form of a kind aunt who took her and Kathleen back to France, where Maud immediately succumbed to the charms of a most unsuitable lover – Lucien Millevoye, a handsome but married French patriot and journalist. It was through Millevoye that Maud first became active in revolutionary politics. Indeed, her first revolutionary act was for France, not Ireland, when she played a minor role in her lover’s ongoing plans to regain the territory of Alsace-Lorraine from Germany.
After her French adventures, Maud was back in Ireland by 1889, determined to throw herself into the Irish nationalist movement. But she was blocked by members of the old guard, such as Michael Davitt, founder of the Land League, who simply did not trust women in politics. Eventually, she managed to win the respect of the former Young Irelander and Fenian, John O’Leary, and also the future leader of Sinn Féin, Arthur Griffith, who vouched for her, thus giving her the entrée she needed. In less than a year she was living in rooms on the corner of Nassau Street, central Dublin, and presiding over a group of young nationalists. She was on the road to revolution.
Maud was brave, generous with her time and money, passionate and very sincere, but she had her limitations. She was melodramatic, narrow-minded and had a very unpleasant tendency towards anti-Semitism. She herself admitted she was not ‘intellectual’, but she would go to almost any lengths to achieve her ideals. ‘More and more I realised,’ she wrote, ‘that Ireland could rely only on force, in some form or another, to free herself.’ Her view of independence was over-simplistic: she wanted a reinstatement of the traditional values of an ancient Irish world, before urbanisation, before industrialisation, before, in short, British rule.
There was a niche for Maud in the nationalist movement. As well as her freakish good looks and mesmeric stage presence, she also had a thrilling voice, and she turned out to be a natural at public speaking. Thus her gift to the nationalist cause was to inspire others. The Princess Diana of her day, Maud became what Micheál mac Liammóir called ‘the nation’s last great romantic heroine’.
The 1890s were a particularly turbulent time for Maud, both politically and personally. She travelled around Donegal helping to mount resistance against the shameful evictions of 1889 and 1890, in some cases actually physically rebuilding the burnt-out houses of evictees. This made her very popular with the country poor, who named the fantastical presence in their midst the ‘Woman in Green’ or the ‘Woman of the Sídhe’ (fairies). Maud also conducted lecture tours in Europe and the USA. Her message was always the same: England has no right to Ireland and must be banished, with force if necessary. She also had a lifelong interest in penitentiary reform, and campaigned vigorously for the release of the Irish ‘TreasonFelony’ prisoners in Portland Jail, who were kept in conditions so inhumane – for example, solitary confinement in the dark – that some of them lost their minds.
In 1890 Yeats made a proposal of marriage, the first of many over the next twenty-five years. Maud turned him down – they were a perfect spiritual match, but she needed to be free. Unknown to Yeats, one of the things she needed to be free for was her continuing illicit relationship with Millevoye. Maud’s affair with Millevoye produced two illegitimate children: a boy, Georges, in 1890, and a girl, Iseult, in 1895. Tragically, Georges died of meningitis when he was only eighteen months old.
Even though Maud hadn’t been there for much of his babyhood, the loss of her son devastated her; she carried Georges’ little bootees with her for the rest of her life. But at a time when single motherhood would have made her a total social outcast, Maud was never able to publicly mourn her dead son or to acknowledge her living daughter; she always referred to Georges as her ‘adopted’ child and to Iseult as her niece or ‘kinswoman’. Nonetheless rumours, both true and untrue, flew around Maud and what she got up to when she was not in Ireland, and she lived the rest of her life under a moral questionmark. Her relationship with Millevoye ended shortly after Iseult’s birth.
In 1897 the British Empire celebrated the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria, or the ‘Famine Queen’ as Maud dubbed her. In Dublin, amid the ostentatious feasting and partying in the streets, Maud marked the occasion by draping a coffin with a black cloth and parading it through the city.
Meanwhile, far beyond the Pale, in Mayo, the potato crop had failed again and there was yet another famine threatening. As soon as she got word of this, Maud headed west. Once in Mayo she travelled around, whipping up support among local people and the clergy. She called a public meeting in Belmullet and personally addressed a crowd of 10,000, demanding food and money from the local Board of Governors on their behalf. Once she had the crowd on her side, she intimidated the local authorities into giving the people what she had promised. After this the legendary status of the Woman of the Sídhe increased still further.
In 1900 Maud founded Ireland’s first women’s nationalist organisation, Inghínidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland), and she met her future husband, Major John MacBride. John was a famous soldier and revolutionary hero just returned from South Africa, where his Irish Brigade had been fighting the British in the Boer War. He was good-looking, gallant, charming and had an obvious passion for Irish independence. Perhaps it was these qualities that attracted her to him, or perhaps his soldierly bearing reminded Maud of her father, or maybe Maud just felt that two icons belonged together for Ireland’s sake, in any event, against all advice, Maud married John in 1903. The marriage, which produced a son, Seán, in 1904, was unhappy right from the start, and within two years Maud had obtained a civil dissolution.
Her women’s organisation fared better than her marriage. Maud herself was never a woman’s woman, but she was frustrated by the way that women’s abilities were ignored or subsumed into the men-only business of politics. Like the Gaelic League, Inghínidhe na hÉireann ran Irish classes, promoted Irish goods and so on, but, unlike the League, it was also unashamedly political. For example, its stated aim was the re-establishment of Irish independence, and it was vehemently pro-suffrage and anti-conscription. One of its first actions was ‘the Patriotic Treat’. This was a huge children’s party, planned to coincide with Queen Victoria’s visit to Ireland in the spring of 1900, which successfully upstaged the government-sponsored festivities.
In 1910 Inghínidhe na hÉireann battled malnutrition among Dublin’s poorest children by setting up a School Dinner Committee, comprising their own members and members of IWFL. Due to high levels of unemployment, working-class mothers often acted as a family’s sole breadwinner on a wage of just a few shillings a week and children’s diets were pathetically inadequate as a result. For a nominal fee (or for free if necessary), the Committee organised a system whereby poor children got a plate of hot stew every day. This action finally led to a change in legislation in 1914, when the Provision of Meals Act was extended to include Ireland.
Another of the organisation’s contributions to the nationalist movement was its journal, Bean na hÉireann (Woman of Ireland), the first ever women’s paper to be produced in Ireland, which ran from 1908 to 1911. Bean na hÉireann focussed on feminist and nationalist issues, and published articles by Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, James Connolly, Constance Markievicz, Mary MacSwiney and Arthur Griffith.
In 1914, Inghínidhe na hÉireann merged into the newly formed Cumann na mBan – the female wing of the militaristic Irish Volunteers. Meanwhile, now living in France, Maud devoted herself to ambulance work in that war-torn country. Ever since leaving John MacBride, she had lived mainly in France because she was afraid of losing custody of Seán; early twentieth-century family law courts often awarded custody of children to the father. For Maud this situation was resolved by fate when, in May 1916, Major John MacBride was one of fifteen men executed by the British Army in reprisals after the Easter Rising.
The following year Maud returned to live in Dublin. However, she was now less popular than before. It may have been felt that she basked a little too much in the reflected glory of her exhusband’s martyrdom: certainly she only started to use his name after his death and she insisted on wearing black for many years, although she claimed this gesture was for Ireland rather than for MacBride. She was also unconventional in conventional times, and her ‘grand romantic dottiness’, as Micheál mac Liammóir called it, was a quality much less forgivable in an ageing divorcée with a murky sexual past than in a young, pure and beautiful symbol of Ireland.
In 1918 some seventy nationalists, including Maud, were arrested by the authorities on the spurious excuse that they were in league with Germany against Britain. Maud was interned for six months in Holloway Women’s Prison, north London, where she shared her imprisonment with Kathleen Clarke and Constance Markievicz. Conditions were comparatively good, but Mrs Clarke later said that Maud was like a ‘caged wild animal…like a tigress prowling endlessly up and down.’ Not surprisingly, the woman whose horror of prisons had led her to campaign for prisoners’ rights for more than twenty years found her own incarceration absolutely unbearable. She was the first of the three to be released, on the grounds of ill-health.
During the War of Independence, Maud worked for the White Cross, which supplied financial relief to the families of victims of violence. In 1921 she was anti-Treaty, but as a long-time loyal supporter of Arthur Griffith, who supported the Treaty, she was uncharacteristically quiet on the matter. However, her position hardened after Griffith’s death in August 1922, fuelled by the fact that she hated WT Cosgrave’s Free State government. She became disillusioned with her great admirer,WB Yeats, due to his decision to serve in the Irish Free State Senate in 1922, and he in his turn wrote regret-filled poetry about how she had wasted her beauty and passion, most famously in his 1916 poem ‘No Second Troy’.
Also in 1922, along with Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and Charlotte Despard, Maud founded the Women’s Prisoners’ Defence League (WPDL) for the ‘help, comfort and release of’ republican prisoners. A serious thorn in the side of the Free State government, the organisation of ‘Mothers’, as Maud called them, was banned in early 1923. Tall and gaunt in her everlasting widow’s weeds as she continued to lead placard marches around the city, Maud’s appearance was now so eccentric that Dublin wits took to calling her ‘Gone Mad’, while they referred to the hyperactive Charlotte Despard as ‘Mrs Desperate’.
In 1923 the Free State government arrested Maud again for her activities with the banned WPDL. Her crime was to parade peacefully down a street carrying anti-Free State placards. Inside the dreaded Kilmainham Jail, she immediately joined a hunger strike with ninety-one other inmates. Meanwhile her close friend, the seventy-nine-year-old Charlotte Despard, was staging a solitary protest against her illegal imprisonment: she waited on a chair at the prison gates, day and night, for twenty days until Maud was stretchered out, suffering from malnutrition but still defiant.
Maud continued to lecture and tour for the still-banned WPDL throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. She did not stop agitating until 1932, when Eamon de Valera released the prisoners on his accession to power. To Maud’s disgust, however, de Valera began his own campaign of jailing republicans. In protest she started a news-sheet and fired off many an angry letter to the press, but as a political force she was spent. Instead she watched as her son, Seán MacBride, took an active role in republican politics. He became the IRA’s chief-of staff in 1936, founded a new political party, Clann na Poblachta, in 1946 and served as minister for External Affairs from 1948 to 1951.
Maud Gonne lived to be a legend in her own lifetime. One of the first modern female nationalists, she had the sad experience of outliving all her old friends and comrades:WBYeats, Arthur Griffith, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and Countess Markievicz. The free spirit who could not bear to be caged became, as she put it, ‘a prisoner of old age, waiting for release.’ Her release finally came in April 1953, at the age of eighty-seven. She was buried, holding her dead baby’s bootees, in Dublin’s Glasnevin cemetery. Her grave is in the ‘republican plot’, near the graves of Countess Constance Markievicz, Cathal Brugha and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa.