5

To the Brink

On the way [to Carriganimma] my uncle asked me, ‘Do you expect to come back today?’

Patrick O’Sullivan, Easter Day 1916

In a sense, the rebellion was in train from the moment shortly after the outbreak of war when the IRB Supreme Council resolved to act before the war ended. When the Council met again in Clontarf Town Hall in mid-January 1916 to fix the date, its decision to fight ‘at the earliest possible moment’ was a formality. Later that month Connolly told Cathal O’Shannon ‘that a definite date had been fixed for the rebellion, and that MacNeill would not be in a position to interfere’. The message announcing that armed action would begin on Easter Sunday reached Devoy in New York ‘on or about February 5’, brought by an IRB courier. (Unhelpfully, ‘it was in a cipher that I did not know, and was neither dated nor signed’.)1 A second courier, Plunkett’s sister Philomena, arrived with a duplicate a week later. (She also brought a set of codewords, including ‘Fionn’ for a mishap, and ‘Aisling’ for the arrival of the requested German submarine in Dublin bay; this has been interpreted as evidence that the military committee were unaware that radio contact with the German ships would be impossible.)² Ostensibly, the decision to rise was driven by fear of British action to suppress the Volunteers, but there was no firm evidence that such action was imminent. If there had been, the choice of Easter Sunday would hardly have met the case. The real calculation was probably that the Easter 1915 precedent would make the mobilization look like a routine exercise. The three-month delay allowed plenty of time to make arrangements with the Germans, though as the committee was to demonstrate in April, it took a very optimistic view of the speed with which such arrangements could be made and altered. It also gave time for another trial mobilization, on St Patrick’s Day, which might well have provoked the government into repressive action. So indeed might the increasingly widespread discussion of the impending event, not only throughout Ireland but as far afield as Berlin and Rome.

In one of the more mysterious events of a confused period, Joseph Plunkett’s father, Count Plunkett, had an audience with the Pope in early April. He delivered a letter purporting to come from Eoin MacNeill, ‘President of the Supreme Council of the Irish Volunteers’, informing the Pope that ‘we have an effective force of 80,000 trained men, and the people, the Catholic nation, is with us’. The letter added that not only German assistance but also a big shipment of arms from America was promised. The war offered the chance ‘to obtain the freedom of rights and worship for our Catholic country’. The insurrection would begin ‘in the evening of next Easter Day’. The terminological confusion (mixing Volunteer and IRB titles), and the invocation of MacNeill (who later, plausibly, denied any involvement in this), suggest that this message was at least garbled, if not concocted by the eccentric papal count himself. Repeated references to religious identity, potentially very injudicious if they had become public, do not fit the Fenian pattern. The statement of available forces was frankly dishonest. While it is hard to believe that Plunkett would have deceived the Pope, it is also hard to believe that the letter was composed by either the IRB or the Volunteers. It has been suggested that the military committee was trying to ‘pre-empt the hierarchy’s condemnation’ of the rising.3 But it may also be that Plunkett (not for the first or last time) acted on his own initiative, or his son’s. (A few days before the rebellion, Joe Plunkett told Eoin MacNeill ‘he had received a message direct from Rome to the effect that the Pope had sent his blessing to the Irish Volunteers’, and to MacNeill in particular.)⁴ In any case, one statement in the letter was absolutely accurate: the date of the rebellion. The Pope knew more about what was going on than did Eoin MacNeill.

So, it is certain, did others. There is wide testimony that rank-and-file Volunteers felt that action was imminent. Frank Henderson recalled a series of lectures at which the Dublin Brigade officers ‘were gradually brought to the realisation that there would be a rising soon’. About three months before Easter, Thomas MacDonagh ‘told us definitely that there was going to be a rising’.5 Many others recalled a growing excitement, or ‘a tenseness which made us anticipate that we may be in a fight at short notice’.⁶ Some of this testimony should perhaps be discounted; it has been suggested that ‘plans to resist conscription were later attributed, as plans for a rising, to the men who actually brought one about’, and that ‘more substance than they deserve has been accorded to these vague and shifting schemes’.⁷ But the intensification of preparations was unmistakable. Large numbers were involved in manufacturing more or less primitive munitions in workshops all across the country. The dramatic St Patrick’s Day mobilization on 17 March, when some 1,400 Volunteers assembled in Dublin and 4,500 in the provinces, was a further clue. The centre of the capital was taken over in what could easily have been a dry run for a rising: ‘The Dublin Brigade, practically fully armed, uniformed and equipped held that portion of Dame Street from City Hall to the Bank of Ireland for over an hour, during which no traffic was allowed to break the ranks of the Volunteers, Citizen Army and Cumann na mBan.’⁸

For Todd Andrews, then a fifteen-year-old schoolboy and eager ‘camp follower of the Volunteers’, it was his ‘most thrilling experience’. Here, ‘with Eoin MacNeill, bearded, smartly uniformed and wise-looking at their head, was the reincarnation of the glamorous army of 1779’.⁹ We can only guess how many still thought that all this was a show – like Casement himself, whose reaction when the Germans belatedly gave Monteith training in the use of the explosives they were sending along with the old Russian rifles was one of denial. (As his biographer notes, he ‘hardly seems to have thought of the rifles as dealing death: they were symbolic or at worst defensive’. Explosives were less ambiguous, however; Casement thought that the Volunteers could ‘refuse’ them when they were unloaded.)¹⁰ But the men of Michael Brennan’s Meelick company in Clare could have harboured few illusions after their commander advised them that day ‘if an attempt is made to seize your arms, use them, and not the butt ends but the other ends of them and what is in them. Some of you may not like to commit murder, but it is not murder.’11

The sense of imminent action intensified during Holy Week. (Although, curiously, Plunkett’s other sister Geraldine had arranged her wedding for Easter Sunday; she thought that the rebellion would come in the first week of May because ‘Joe had learned from Bethmann Hollweg that a German offensive was planned for that time.’ She was ‘dumbfounded’ when her fiancé received his mobilization orders on Saturday.)¹² On 15 April, Pearse told a meeting of the Dublin Brigade council that nobody who was afraid of losing his job should come out on Easter Sunday.¹³ On Palm Sunday the Dublin Volunteers held route marches, and though ‘nobody said anything definite, we realised that something unusual was approaching. The excitement was intense.’¹⁴ Volunteer meetings were held every evening, and on Wednesday Thomas MacDonagh was reported by the police as ordering his battalion to bring three days’ rations that weekend. ‘We are not going out on Friday, but we are going out on Sunday. Boys, some of us may never come back.’ On Thursday MacDonagh, who usually gave his battalion ‘an encouraging little speech, a few compliments on our efficiency’ after a parade, addressed them at some length. He ‘reminded us we were standing on historic ground in Clontarf where Brian Boru had defeated the Danes in 1014. Easter was the time of the battle of Clontarf.’ More directly, MacDonagh warned them that ‘when big things happen like this, there is very often confusion of ideas; you may get an order over the weekend, and I want every man to obey it implicitly’.¹⁵

Despite these preparations, however, all the military committee’s planning came unstuck at the last minute. Secrecy had been seen by the IRB as vital to success, but it carried a price. In the week before Easter Sunday, three events – the end of Casement’s project, the so-called ‘Castle Document’, and MacNeill’s ‘countermanding order’, came together to derail and almost destroy the rising.

The IRB’s January message to Devoy contained a request for a ‘shipload of arms’ to be sent to Limerick quay between 20 and 23 April. This may possibly have been aimed at the Irish-Americans, but because, as Devoy recorded, all the Clan funds had been expended, he sent the message on to the Germans. ‘We have decided to begin action on Easter Saturday. Unless entirely new circumstances arise we must have your arms and munitions in Limerick between Good Friday and Easter Saturday. We expect German help immediately after beginning action. We might be compelled to begin earlier.’ On 10 February the German Embassy telegraphed this with the note that ‘the Confidential Agent will advise them if at all possible to wait, and will point out the difficulties in the way of our giving help’.16 In particular the Germans, then at the height of their submarine warfare campaign, were understandably resistant to the request that they send one of their hard-pressed U-boats to make an attack around the River Liffey. Their first proposal, as we have seen, was to send 20,000 rifles with 10 machine guns, ammunition and explosives in ‘two or three steam-trawlers’. Their 10 March telegram included the stern injunction that success in landing the arms ‘can only be assured by the most vigorous efforts’.

Shortly afterwards they decided to use a single 1,200-ton cargo ship, the former Wilson Line Castro (built in Hull in 1911), which had been seized in the Kiel Canal on the outbreak of war and recommissioned in the German navy as SMS Libau. They eventually gave way to Casement’s insistence that they provide a U-boat to take him back to Ireland – in direct contravention of Devoy’s unambiguous instruction that he stay in Germany. Under the command of a reserve lieutenant, Karl Spindler, the Libau sailed from Hamburg on 30 March through the Kiel Canal to Lübeck, where it was disguised as a similar-sized Norwegian steamer, the Aud. On 10 April Spindler set out through the Skagerrak on his perilous voyage. Without a radio, his orders were to arrive in Tralee Bay on the 20th, and rendezvous off Inishtooskert Island with the U-boat carrying Casement and Monteith. Remarkably enough, he arrived on time (at least, according to the colourful account he published after the war). To do this, he had to survive not only hurricane-force winds, but also the attentions of several British auxiliary cruisers. Since there is strong evidence that the Admiralty knew all about Spindler’s mission, it is an interesting question why the British allowed him to reach Tralee Bay. One investigator has proposed a Machiavellian motive: it would have been good propaganda to have had a comparatively insignificant cargo of second-rate arms landed by the Germans as proof of enemy involvement. This hazardous gamble would have been strange, though not inconceivable.17 Even more extravagant is the suggestion that the Admiralty intelligence chief, Captain Hall, was happy to see a rebellion take place, since it would trigger a full-blown repressive policy in Ireland.¹⁸ But it is curious that the Commander-in-Chief of Western Approaches, Admiral Bayly, based at Queenstown near Cork, claimed to have told the Irish Executive directly about the arms ship, and got no response. Oddest of all, perhaps, a careful survey of survivors in the 1960s showed that local people had seen no military or naval defensive preparations in the Fenit area.

Casement and Monteith, with a sergeant from the Irish Brigade, Julian Beverly – a particularly dubious ornament of a dubious outfit – sailed out of Wilhelmshaven on the U20 (the submarine that had sunk the Lusitania) on 12 April. After a day and a half it turned back with mechanical problems, and the three were transferred to U19 (commanded, by coincidence, by Captain Weisbach, who had been torpedo officer on the U20 when it sank the Lusitania). Monteith had used the day’s delay to try out the collapsible dinghy in which they were to land, spraining his right wrist in the process. On 15 April they set out again, to endure six days in the cramped and bilious conditions of a fighting submarine. Just why Casement was doing this has never been wholly clear. According to Monteith’s attractive memoir Casement’s Last Adventure (denounced, predictably enough, by one of their German comrades as ‘not just very inaccurate but more or less fiction’), Casement told him that it was his duty to stop the rising, since the Germans were not prepared to provide real military aid.¹⁹ Monteith, who seems not to have known of Devoy’s urgent wish to prevent Casement returning to Ireland, agreed with this. But one of Casement’s last letters shows him shifting his view dramatically: ‘the impending action in Ireland’, he wrote to Count Wedel on 2 April, ‘rests on very justifiable grounds’ (the government’s determination to smash the Volunteer movement and impose conscription). ‘I will very gladly go to Ireland with the arms and do all I can to sustain and support a movement of resistance based on these grounds.’²⁰ Captain Weisbach, who ‘developed a great admiration for Casement’ – still an imposing figure, even when seasick and shorn of his fine beard for the voyage – remembered his Irish passengers singing patriotic songs and breaking out a big flag (of Casement’s design). This was indeed a strange item to be carrying on such a mission, along with the Zeiss binoculars, flashlights, Mauser pistols and cyanide capsules with which the Germans had supplied them.

On the afternoon of Friday, 14 April, with the Libau/Aud hove to near the Arctic Circle because Spindler was slightly ahead of schedule, John Devoy was greatly surprised to see Philomena Plunkett walk into the Gaelic American office with a peremptory message from the military committee. ‘Arms must not be landed before midnight of Sunday, 23rd. This is vital. Smuggling impossible. Let us know if submarine will come to Dublin Bay.’ Devoy passed the message on, but seems not to have been told that there was no radio contact with Spindler. Nor does he seem to have wondered what was meant by the remark about ‘smuggling’. Is it possible, despite subsequent denials, that the military committee had really hoped until this point that the arms could be got ashore secretly?21 From this point, the IRB’s response to the German demand for ‘the most vigorous efforts’ is wrapped in obscurity.²²

Spindler, his nerves strained no doubt by the weather and his brushes with the Royal Navy, dropped anchor off Inishtooskert Island in Tralee Bay on the afternoon of Thursday 20 April. To his great disappointment, ‘no pilot boat came and there was no evidence on shore of any preparation to receive us’. Just after midnight, Captain Weisbach brought U19 to the rendezvous point a mile north-west of Inishtooskert. The Kriegsmarine had, it seemed, done its bit with distinction. But U19 searched for at least two hours without finding the Libau. Next day, Good Friday, was ‘a wonderful spring day’; yet neither boat, apparently, could see the other. According to Spindler’s account of his position, this was impossible. Weisbach, however, judged Spindler a bad navigator, and later analysis supports him. The Libau was probably at least seven miles from the rendezvous point. Even so, the passivity of the Volunteers ashore was weird. Spindler cruised around the bay (he claimed to have come within 600 yards of Fenit pier at one point), showing the pre-arranged signal, a green light, but nobody saw or answered it. The pilot saw a ship on the evening of the 20th and again the next morning, but did nothing.²³ Spindler’s account may be unreliable, but it surely remains true that ‘maritime minded people in Fenit might have been expected to become curious about a strange ship hanging around Tralee Bay’.24

On 17 April Austin Stack had presided as usual over the weekly meeting of the Tralee Battalion council. Unusually, according to his biographer, no minutes of this meeting survive. A week earlier he had announced that ‘he was arranging for the battalion to spend the Easter holidays in camp and hoped to have full details for the next meeting’. On the 12th, he sent his deputy commandant Paddy Cahill to Dublin to a meeting with Pearse ‘re arrangements’. Two weeks earlier, Cahill had gone to Dublin to receive from Seán MacDermott two signalling lamps to communicate with the arms ship. For reasons unknown, he failed to bring them back to Tralee. Still more puzzlingly, Stack never explained to him, or anyone else, the ‘detailed plan which he had’ – so his biographer thinks – ‘prepared for the landing of arms at Fenit and their distribution’.²⁵ Cahill, as a good IRB man, naturally did not ask about it. No copy of the plan survived. Stack took the trouble to go to Cahirciveen to brief one of his IRB men who worked at the Valentia telegraph station on how to send the news of the rising to America. But it did not occur to him to set a watch on the coast at the time originally arranged for the arms landing. The explanation offered by Florence O’Donoghue, who dismissed any suggestion ‘that a small party might have kept a lookout, disguised as fishermen or otherwise’ as ‘quite unrealistic’ because the RIC was too vigilant, does not seem entirely convincing.²⁶

Stack’s great test came early on Good Friday morning. He was having breakfast with Cornelius (Con) Collins, who had just come down from Dublin to take charge of the wireless arrangements, when he was told that two strangers had arrived at his father’s shop and wanted to see him urgently. They did not go there for an hour, but then Collins immediately recognized Monteith, and got the news that Casement had landed somewhere north of Fenit during the night. (Monteith and Bailey had walked from Banna Strand into Tralee, but did not know exactly where they had landed; Casement had collapsed on the beach after the dinghy had overturned in the surf.) Stack and Collins set off to find him, driving as far north as Ballyheigue and eventually running into a group of RIC searching the dunes at Banna Strand. Casement had already been arrested at ‘McKenna’s fort’; the police had no idea who he was, though the collapsible boat was clearly hard to explain. Stack and Collins headed off, followed by an RIC man on a bicycle, until they ran into another RIC patrol at Causeway, which arrested Collins and took him into the police station. In an almost farcical scene, Stack then pulled out his pistol and went into the barrack to rescue him. Inexplicably, not only was he not arrested – though he was of course very well known to the police – he succeeded in getting Collins out, with Collins’ gun obligingly returned into the bargain.27 (Together with the fact that the RIC County Inspector who interrogated Casement at Tralee asked him why on earth he had not shot the constable who arrested him, this may make us wonder how the force would have coped with any serious rebel activity.)

Later that day Stack convened a conference at the Rink in Tralee to brief the Volunteers on the Easter mobilization. During the meeting he received confirmation that Casement was being held in Ardfert RIC barrack (he was transferred to Tralee in the evening). His reaction was to break his silence and announce that the rising would begin on Sunday, but to argue, against those who wanted to go and rescue Casement, ‘that he had given a solemn injunction that no shot was to be fired’ before the rising. This was an odd argument from a man who had, only a few hours before, carried out an armed assault on a police station. As it turned out, this was to be Stack’s only armed action of the rebellion. He was finally arrested in the early evening when he again went – apparently at Collins’ request – to the police barrack where Collins was being held after being re-arrested. We do not know why Collins should have issued this highly irregular request, and Stack’s reasons for deciding, in effect, to give himself up, have never been explained.²⁸ Both ended up in the barrack at Tralee where Casement was being held overnight, before he was taken rapidly out of Ireland and rushed over to London. The failure to rescue Casement, and the suspicion that the police had been led to his hiding place on Banna Strand by local inhabitants, would haunt not only Stack himself but also the local community for generations.²⁹

A small but poignant disaster in Kerry later on Friday evening seems, in retrospect, to encapsulate the aura of doom hanging over the whole reception plan. Seán MacDermott and others had devised a plan to seize equipment from the wireless station at Cahirciveen and reassemble it in Tralee, ‘to establish communication with the arms ship and submarine from Germany’.30 Five men sent from Dublin, including a wireless specialist, Con Keating, were met by two cars in Killarney; two of them travelled in the first, and three in the following car. The second car took the wrong turning in Killorglin and plunged in the dark off Ballykissane pier into Castlemaine harbour. Although the driver survived, the three, Keating among them, were drowned. The leading car halted a few miles west of Killorglin, and when the following car’s lights failed to appear, the remaining group abandoned the mission and returned to Dublin.³¹

The maritime phase of the rebellion ended on 22 April. Spindler had spent the previous day drifting south-westwards past the Blasket Islands, shadowed by two British armed trawlers, and wondering if he should start commerce-raiding operations in the Atlantic. Towards 6 p.m. he was finally rounded up by two ‘Flower’ class sloops, which he identified, bizarrely, as cross-channel steamers. (It was an error that was of a piece with a string of mis-statements in his racy account, culminating in his encounter with a ‘whole swarm’ of British warships.) They escorted him towards Queenstown, where he scuttled his ship at 9.28 a.m. on the 22nd. As a final touch of vainglory, he claimed thereby to have blocked the entrance to Cork harbour.

The news of Casement’s arrest arrived in Dublin at a time when the military committee’s efforts to keep Eoin MacNeill from interfering with the mobilization were delicately poised between success and failure. The most remarkable of these efforts had been made on Wednesday that week, when, at a meeting of the Dublin Corporation, Alderman Tom Kelly rose to read out a document purporting to have been leaked from Dublin Castle. It listed ‘precautionary measures sanctioned by the Irish Office on the recommendation of the General Officer Commanding the Forces in Ireland’. All members of the Sinn Fein National Council, the Central Executive, General Council, and County Board of the Irish Sinn Fein Volunteers, Executive Committee of the National Volunteers, and Coisde Gnotha Committee of the Gaelic League, were to be arrested. The inhabitants of Dublin were to be confined to their houses ‘until such time as the Competent Military Authority may otherwise permit or direct’. Pickets were to be posted, and mounted patrols ‘continuously visit all points’ on the accompanying ‘Maps 3 and 4’. Finally, various premises were to be ‘occupied by adequate forces’ – Liberty Hall, 6 Harcourt Street (the Sinn Fein office), 2 Dawson Street (the Volunteer Headquarters), 25 and 41 Rutland Square (the Gaelic League and Irish National Foresters) – while others were to be ‘isolated’. These included the Archbishop’s House, Drumcondra; the Mansion House on Dawson Street; 40 Herbert Park (O’Rahilly’s house), Woodtown Park (MacNeill’s house) and ‘Larkfield’, Kimmage Road (Count Plunkett’s house); and St Enda’s College, Rathfarnham. This document, published next day in New Ireland, caused a sensation. The paper’s editor, P. J. Little, had received it from Rory O’Connor and passed it to Tom Kelly. The original was said to be in code, and to have been spirited out of Dublin Castle by a sympathizer. Little (who later became Minister for Posts and Telegraphs in the 1930s) believed then, and maintained for the rest of his life, that it was genuine.32 So, more importantly, though more briefly, did Eoin MacNeill, who exclaimed ‘the Lord has delivered them into our hands!’ This was exactly the kind of repression he had long expected, and believed would justify armed resistance by the Volunteers. He immediately issued a general order for all units to ‘be prepared with defensive measures’, with the object of preserving ‘the arms and organisation of the Irish Volunteers’. Local commanders were to ‘arrange that your men defend themselves and each other in small groups so placed that they may best be able to hold out’. MacNeill was careful to remind them that ‘Each group must be provided from the outset with sufficient supplies of food, or be certain of access to such supplies.’ (This might sound obvious, but as the eventual Easter mobilization would prove, was all too easily overlooked.) There can be no doubt that the Chief of Staff was in deadly earnest at this moment. He signed the order with yet another chivvying injunction – ‘This matter is urgent.’³³

But was it? Many people found the language and the policy of the ‘Castle document’ quite plausible (though the maps and annexes with their name lists never emerged). Others had doubts, however. Naturally the authorities brusquely denounced it. Even on the other side, a number of people wondered whether the government could envisage such a pointlessly provocative action as surrounding the house of the Archbishop of Dublin, a well-known opponent of republicanism, or arresting the leaders of the moribund Redmondite Volunteers. Insiders soon came to think that the document had been concocted by Joseph Plunkett. ‘Forgery is a strong word,’ as Desmond Ryan wrote, ‘but that in its final form the document was a forgery no doubt can exist whatever.’34 Plunkett, ‘on the basis of what he knew or could surmise of the precautionary measures drawn up by the military authorities’, had constructed ‘a ruse of war to create an atmosphere for the rising’. Its purpose was ‘to deceive Eoin MacNeill, the rank and file of the Volunteers, and the Irish people in general’. In particular the naming of the INV as a target was intended to bring the constitutional nationalists (of whom P. J. Little was one) into line.

Ryan was right to say that ‘in its final form’ the document was a forgery, a judgement echoed by academic historians as well, but it seems that the scepticism may have been overdone.³⁵ Little’s enduring belief in its genuineness had some basis. Seán MacDermott himself swore to it a few hours before his execution; telling the priest who spent the evening with him that ‘it was an absolutely genuine document’.³⁶ Grace Gifford, Plunkett’s fiancée, remembered sitting on his bed at Larkfield House writing it down as he deciphered it, using a code sheet that was later found in his field pocket book (picked up in Moore Street following the surrender, and now in the National Library). She was ‘quite certain’ that it had come out of the Castle, smuggled out in pieces by a sympathetic official, Eugene Smith. Smith’s own testimony (long delayed for fear of losing his pension) confirms this in essence: the document was ‘practically identical with that read out by Alderman Kelly, except that it did not state that the operations suggested were authorised by the Chief Secretary’. It was a despatch from General Friend to the Irish Office in London, detailing precautionary measures in the event of conscription being imposed. So this was not a plan for imminent action, but it was a real plan: Smith said that even the notorious reference to Ara Coeli, the archbishop’s house, which was taken by many as proof that the document was a forgery, was in the original.³⁷ Though Plunkett certainly ‘sexed up’ the document, he did not make it up; this was a real leak. As Grace Plunkett sagely reflected, ‘You cannot be too careful when the Civil Service is composed of Irish people.’³⁸

The common nationalist denunciation of the document must have gratified the military committee, but it was soon followed by a disastrous collapse of unanimity. MacNeill had been on his guard ever since the confrontations with Connolly and Pearse in January and February, though, as he later explained to Hobson, ‘I had great reluctance to show mistrust and preferred to rely on the assurance I had received.’ But in early April he once again became convinced that he was ‘not in the current of all that was going on’. He called a meeting of the Volunteer Staff at his house ‘to arrive at some definite understanding’. At this meeting, on 5 April, according to Hobson, ‘Pearse explicitly repudiated the suggestion that he or his friends contemplated insurrection or wanted to commit the Volunteers to any policy other than that to which they were publicly committed.’ He and the staff agreed to a written instruction that, apart from routine matters, no order would be issued without MacNeill’s counter-signature. Next day, MacNeill received a letter from a Chicago Irish-American, Bernard MacGillian (posted a month earlier but delayed by British military censors), warning him on the basis of ‘absolutely reliable information’ of a plot ‘to deluge Ireland in blood’. The plotters were aiming to discredit Redmond at any price, using the Volunteers as their tools. For the time being, MacNeill ignored this. The ‘intense tension’ of Holy Week persuaded him to issue his Wednesday general order warning of ‘a plan on the part of the government for the suppression and disarmament of the Irish Volunteers’, and instructing them to resist disarmament by force if necessary. On Thursday, Hobson and others took these orders out to provincial units.

About 10 p.m. that evening, however, Ginger O’Connell and Eimar O’Duffy told Hobson that companies in Dublin were receiving orders for the Sunday manoeuvres which could only mean that they were being used as a cover for insurrection. The three of them went to MacNeill’s home in Woodtown Park, got him out of bed, and went over to St Enda’s with him. The long-delayed confrontation between MacNeill and Pearse finally took place around midnight, when Pearse admitted for the first time that a rising was planned, and MacNeill said he would do everything in his power – short of informing the authorities – to prevent it. Pearse bluntly told him that the Volunteers had always really been under IRB control, and told Hobson that he was bound to accept the Supreme Council’s decision. Hobson rejected this, going back to his theory that a rising (at least one in circumstances Hobson disapproved) would contravene the IRB constitution. After this stand-off, the MacNeill group retired to Woodtown Park to draft three orders. The first directed that ‘all orders of a special character issued by Commandant Pearse with regard to military movements of a definite kind’ were ‘hereby recalled or cancelled’; all future special orders were to be issued by the Chief of Staff alone. The second empowered Hobson to issue orders in MacNeill’s name, and the third gave O’Connell overall authority over the Volunteers in Munster.39 The Munster officers were instructed to ‘report to Commandant O’Connell as required by him on the subject of any special orders which they had received and any arrangements to be made by them in consequence’.⁴⁰ O’Connell took the first available train to Cork, while Hobson set about circulating the orders (and copies of the ‘Castle Document’) across the country.

In the meantime, the military committee launched a damage-limitation exercise. MacNeill was roused from his bed again at 8 a.m. on Friday by the arrival of Seán MacDermott, with the news that ‘a ship of arms from Germany was expected at that very time’. MacNeill, suitably impressed, replied, ‘Very well – if that is the state of the case I’m with you.’⁴¹ He went downstairs to find that both Pearse and MacDonagh had also arrived. They all had breakfast together, but ‘there was not much said’, MacNeill recorded, because they were all ‘looking forward to an immediate rising in arms’. What did he mean by this rather surprising phrase? His biographer suggests that it can be explained by another order he wrote on the 21st: ‘Government action for the suppression of the Volunteers is now inevitable and may begin at any moment.’ Volunteers were to be on their guard, and to ignore the ‘worthless’ government statements denying the Castle Document. But his orders indicated that he was gearing up not for a ‘rising’ so much as for guerrilla resistance on the lines preferred by the ‘hedge-fighting’ group. MacNeill said that Joseph Plunkett called on him later to ask if he ‘was prepared to sign a proclamation’, but when MacNeill asked what its terms were, Plunkett ‘told me no more about it’.⁴² MacDonagh believed that MacNeill had ‘abdicated’ as Chief of Staff and transferred his authority to Pearse and MacDermott, while MacDermott claimed that MacNeill had endorsed orders recalling O’Connell and instructing local commanders to ‘proceed with the rising’.43 Like so many others, this order has disappeared, though the reply of Cork Volunteer commander Tomas MacCurtain was preserved: ‘Tell Seán we will blaze away as long as the stuff lasts.’⁴⁴

All these uncertain happenings provided the basis for the belief (fostered by Constance Markievicz among others) that MacNeill had agreed to a rising, and even signed the proclamation of the republic. It seems clear, though, that he was still being fed the minimum information calculated to keep him on side. At the same time, the terms MacNeill himself used for the kind of action he was expecting were ambiguous. He recorded that on Saturday the emergency seemed to recede, and he agreed with O’Rahilly and Seán Fitzgibbon ‘that the rising ought to be prevented’. By ‘rising’ he seems to have meant a purely defensive resistance, though it was an odd choice of word. When he read the news of the discovery of Casement’s collapsible boat on the Kerry coast he thought ‘that the situation was beyond remedy – though I was ready to take part in the rising I did not see the least prospect of success for it’. In the notes he made for his lawyer after his arrest in May 1916, he said he had seen MacDonagh and Plunkett in his house on Saturday morning and ‘dissuaded them. They were a bit shaken but not convinced. They undertook to consult their friends further (Pearse, Connolly, etc.)’ and arranged ‘to meet me again in Dublin at Rathgar’.

At last, on Saturday afternoon, the scales began to drop from MacNeill’s eyes. Yet another visitation, this time O’Rahilly bringing Seán Fitzgibbon and Colm O Lochlainn (who had met Fitzgibbon at Limerick on his way back from the disastrous Cahirciveen expedition), revealed that the arms ship was lost, the Castle Document a forgery and, finally, that Hobson had been placed under arrest. For the last time, MacNeill dashed with the others over to St Enda’s. Pearse was ‘in a very excited state’, according to O Lochlainn, and told him ‘We have used your name and influence for what they were worth, but we have done with you now. It is no use trying to stop us.’ When MacNeill said he would forbid the Sunday mobilization, Pearse retorted ‘Our men will not obey you.’ Even now, it took MacNeill some hours longer to come ‘to the conclusion that these persons intended to have their own way’. Only at midnight, after a final meeting with MacDonagh (his colleague at UCD), did MacNeill draft a curt order to all units: ‘Volunteers completely deceived. All orders for special action are hereby cancelled, and on no account will action be taken. Eoin MacNeill, Chief of Staff.’ A group of senior staff officers left to take the order out into the country – O’Rahilly, the only one who habitually drove his own car, extravagantly took a taxi to Cork and on through Kerry and Tipperary to Limerick. MacNeill went to the Irish Independent office to place a slightly modified version in the Sunday paper.

This was a disorienting torrent of events. Hobson’s arrest by his comrades of the IRB Leinster Executive, on the orders of MacDermott and the military committee, at the Volunteer Headquarters in Dawson Street on Good Friday afternoon was particularly remarkable.45 The conspirators seem to have believed that he was more likely than MacNeill to take effective action. He was certainly ‘the only one given this dubious honour’, as one historian has noted – a tribute to his continuing influence and knowledge. It was also a decisive moment in that longer process which has been called the ‘disappearance’ of Hobson, his elimination from the Irish nationalist story. By 1935, when MacNeill was asked which of the 1916 leaders had used ‘Bulmer Hobson’ as a pseudonym, ‘as far as the general public was concerned, he had disappeared as completely as if he had been executed with the rebel leaders’. More so, one might well say, since his reputation has never recovered. (In fact he was at some mortal risk from his captors, according to the Dublin IRB Centre in whose house he was held. They were apparently so ‘annoyed by being out of things’ once the rising began that ‘they were even suggesting he should be executed and dumped on the railway line at the back of my place’. Hobson, for his part, was, unsurprisingly, ‘inclined to be obstreperous, protesting against his arrest’.)⁴⁶ Hobson himself later claimed that ‘they were very nice to me’, and that his arrest was ‘almost a relief’ because matters were taken out of his hands.⁴⁷ He was liberated on Monday evening by Seán T. O’Kelly, but rehabilitation was a different matter. ‘Ireland could ill afford’, as has been said, ‘to lose the services of so capable and devoted a son’, but his freezing out was ‘a mystery, a whodunnit’, which could not be explained on policy disagreements alone.⁴⁸ There were personality clashes too, not least with MacDermott (‘deadly sly’); it is plain that Hobson was self-confident to the point of arrogance, and intolerant of dissent. But so was Griffith. Pride played a part, clearly. Though it is true that Hobson ‘did not retire voluntarily from national affairs’, he certainly preferred to avoid justifying his position to the survivors of the fighting. The air was never cleared. The IRB for its part seems to have considered putting Hobson on trial after the rebellion; but Michael Collins took avoiding action with the argument that this could only be done ‘by his peers’, who were all dead.49

Bulmer Hobson’s detention showed the lengths to which the conspirators would go – and were now forced to go – to neuter the ‘hedge-fighting’ group. They had risked a fateful conflict of authority, and on Easter Sunday morning their chickens came home to roost. When the ‘countermanding order’ appeared on the news-stands in the Sunday Independent, the military committee had already assembled at Liberty Hall. As the ‘Provisional Government’, the seven had now signed the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, which was being printed (with type obtained from an English master printer in Stafford Street) on the presses of the Workers’ Republic.⁵⁰ With typical reckless impetuosity Constance Markievicz grabbed one of the first copies off the press and rushed out to declaim it to the passers-by in Lower Abbey Street. In the same spirit she flourished her pistol when she heard of the countermanding order, and told Connolly ‘I’ll shoot Eoin MacNeill.’ Connolly and the Provisional Government reacted more thoughtfully. Tom Clarke urged that they go ahead that evening as planned. ‘If the rising was delayed until Monday, the men in most places would be demobilised and unable to do anything, as the British military would by then be on guard.’⁵¹ But Pearse, despite his bullish assertion to MacNeill that the Volunteers would not obey him, preferred to wait till next day. The others agreed. Even MacDermott, to Clarke’s distress, ‘voted against me’.⁵² And the impatient Connolly, whose own force was unaffected by the countermand, also accepted the delay. This may have been a serious error; the turnout on Sunday was much larger than the eventual muster for rebellion on Monday. Pearse’s earlier confidence was more justified than his last-minute caution.

MacNeill’s published order was unambiguous in intent, though it was gnomic about its reasons. ‘Owing to the very critical position’, all orders for Sunday were ‘hereby rescinded, and no parades, marches, or other movements of Irish Volunteers will take place’. In an effort to trump Pearse’s insubordination, MacNeill added almost pedantically, ‘Each individual Volunteer will obey this order strictly in every particular.’ The military committee, for its part, decided to issue two separate orders. The first confirmed the cancellation of the Sunday manoeuvres; the other ordered the start of operations at noon on Monday. The point of the first, according to Diarmuid Lynch, was ‘to obviate the possibility that units outside Dublin might start operations before the Dublin Battalions could occupy their allotted positions on Easter Monday’, and also – should the British ‘become aware’ of it – to allay their suspicions. Neither of these reasons seems very convincing, unless it was believed that the second order (sent out overnight) would be less likely to come to British attention. What is clear is that the two orders risked magnifying the confusion outside Dublin, and the evidence suggests that they did just that.

In most accounts of the rising, including those by participants such as Diarmuid Lynch and Desmond Ryan, Easter Sunday is written off as a day of rueful inaction. They give the impression that the countermand, duly confirmed by Pearse, was obeyed, and that no mobilization took place.53 This may have been true for the leaders, but was clearly not true for all their subordinates. In Dublin and across the country, many Volunteers headed off to the manoeuvres, cheerfully unaware of either MacNeill’s or Pearse’s order. James Crenigan, for instance, joined some 200 of the Fingal (5th) Battalion of the Dublin Brigade at Saucerstown. Harry Colley of F Company, 2nd Battalion – MacDonagh’s own unit – took his three rifles to Father Mathew Park, where he found ‘a number of the various companies of the 2nd Battalion assembled’. Seamus Daly outdid him, lugging no fewer than six rifles and four big parcels of revolvers on the tram to the park. (Some DMP men he passed on the way, evidently impressed by this arsenal, cheerily said ‘Well, James, you are going to have a great field day today.’)⁵⁴ The pavilion at the park had become a large arms depot. Colley’s First Lieutenant, Oscar Traynor (who, according to his commander, Frank Henderson, had come up with the bright idea of printing mobilization slips for the whole battalion), asked him how many rounds he had for his revolver. ‘He went to the pile of .32 ammunition and dipping his hands into it said “take that – you’ll want it. It will be all hand-to-hand fighting we’ll have at first.”’55 Colley was eventually ‘demobilised again by Captain Tom Weafer on information from Miss Ryan (MacNeill’s secretary) that only the ICA were out’. This left the 2nd battalion with the task of guarding the arms depot (which included ‘a good deal of 1st battalion and GHQ equipment’, plus explosive and electrical equipment, Frank Henderson recalled). Since the ‘police spies were very active that Sunday night while our men were on guard, there was a lot of noise with both sides tramping about, and I got very little sleep that night’.⁵⁶

Liam Tannam of E Company, 3rd Battalion, took a robust view of the countermand, telling some members of his company he met on the way to Mass not to obey any order that did not come directly from him. As a result, he assembled fifty-eight out of his sixty-three men in Oakley Road around 3 p.m. A quarter of an hour later, ‘a white-faced young fellow, sweating and panting’, pedalled up on a bike, with a letter from Eoin MacNeill addressed to Father McMahon of Rathmines, authenticating the countermand. Tannam sent him back with the message that he would only obey orders from his immediate superior (i.e. Eamon de Valera) and drew his men up with their flag (3ft by 2ft, ‘with a harp’) in front. Just then Captain Ffrench-Mullen, a 4th Battalion officer (whose sister, Madeleine, was a prominent Cumann na mBan activist), rode by in full uniform on his bike, and shouted ‘the whole thing is off’. ‘Not as far as I’m concerned’, Tannam robustly replied. Ffrench-Mullen said that Eamonn Ceannt had just demobilized the whole of his battalion, so he could take it as official. Tannam still refused, and only demobilized when his brother rode up with MacDonagh’s order, countersigned by de Valera, closely followed by MacDonagh himself and both Pearse brothers on their way home. He sent his men off around 3.45 p.m. with orders ‘to be ready for a sudden mobilisation’, and went home himself ‘bitterly disappointed, and thinking here is another case of conflicting orders’.⁵⁷

Outside Dublin, many Volunteers had still more strenuous, and much more anti-climactic experiences. Over 1,000 men of the Cork Brigade, for instance, assembled in various places across the county. Many, but not all, seem to have had instructions to meet at Beeing or Carriganimma.⁵⁸ It was while the Kilnamartyra Company was marching towards Carriganimma that Patrick O’Sullivan’s uncle posed the searching query, ‘Do you expect to come back today?’ Like many others, O’Sullivan had not thought about this, but was not entirely surprised.59 Twenty-nine of the Ballinhassig Company mobilized at Raheen Cross; some had been told that their aim ‘was to get arms that were to be landed’ but they ‘were not to tell anyone else in the Company of this. We were afraid that they would not turn out if they knew.’⁶⁰ Con Collins, of D Company of Cork City IV, paraded at the station with thirty-eight others to take the train to Crookstown, and marched from there to Macroom. There, Seán O’Sullivan ‘told us the exercises had been cancelled. He said it was the intention to go to Carriganimma, where other men were to meet us, but that owing to the downpour of rain no arrangement could be made for the men to camp out that night.’ It might endanger their health and make them unfit for ‘more important work later on’. All the Corkmen remembered the terrible weather of Easter Sunday. After a beautiful spring morning came ‘one of the wettest days we could remember’. When the assembly at Beeing was finally dismissed around 5 p.m. by MacCurtain and MacSwiney – ‘in uniform with high red boots’ – ‘everybody was thoroughly saturated … faces were coloured green where the dye from their hats had run onto them’.⁶¹ ‘Never such rain fell’, as Tim O’Riordan of Castlelack told Kathleen McDonnell.

The train brought us back to Crookstown. Every man had to buy his own ticket. We made a long stop at Crookstown, and another at Scariff. It was 4 o’clock or so by the time we got back to Castlelack. We brought with us an amount of rifle ammunition belonging to the Cork Volunteers. When the order came to disband, they were not prepared to return to Cork with it and it was to be cast away.⁶²

What was the impact of MacNeill’s ‘countermanding order’ on the rebellion? The traditional separatist verdict was unambiguous: it was disastrous. This view was established straight away in Liberty Hall, when Tom Clarke fulminated that MacNeill had ruined everything, and Markievicz brandished her pistol, swearing she would shoot him.⁶³ Pearse’s final communiqué, on the Friday of Easter week, spoke of the ‘fatal countermanding order’ which had prevented the original plans from being carried out. In time, and in the light of the rebellion’s impact, even hardline republicans came to take a slightly different view. Diarmuid Lynch proposed that the ‘untoward experiences’ of Holy Week had been ‘Providential in more than one respect’. Causing the Dublin rising to stand out in heroic isolation had been a blessing in disguise. Many recognized that one of the countermand’s inadvertent effects had been to confirm the authorities in their belief (stimulated by the capture of Casement) that the rising had been called off. But there was general agreement that the order’s effect had been significant.

By contrast, the first serious historical evaluation of its impact offered a rather different perspective. The traditional view was based on Tom Clarke’s anguished cry. ‘Our plans were so perfect, and now everything is spoiled.’ Only if the plans had indeed been perfect would the countermand have been disastrous. But a systematic examination of the situation in the provinces, by Maureen Wall, argued that the plans were so sketchy that the countermand could not have decisively affected their viability. The basic problem, on this view, was the secrecy of the military committee’s work, and the scrambling of the chain of command caused by the selective briefing of trusted officers. ‘Absolute secrecy maintained by a tiny group of men, who were relying on the unquestioning obedience of the members of a nationwide revolutionary organization, was bound to defeat their object of bringing about a revolution, except in Dublin where these men were, in fact, in a position to control events.’ It was ‘useless’ to put IRB men in key positions without letting them know of the existence of the military committee, or of the deep divisions in the higher leadership of the Volunteers.64

Can Wall’s stark verdict that ‘Eoin MacNeill’s countermand stopped no Volunteer, who was anxious for war, from participating in the Rising’ be sustained? Was laying the blame on him perhaps an example of the kind of search for scapegoats often found in ‘versions of Irish history’ which tried to simplify circumstances that were complicated or ‘too painful to contemplate objectively’?⁶⁵ The assertion that the military committee’s command structure was too fragile to bear the weight that Pearse placed on it is persuasive; and it is of course true that there was nothing to stop anyone coming ‘out’ in Easter week. (Some who had never even joined the Volunteers did so.) But, as often happens with such necessary correctives, ‘revisionist’ assessment may have swung too far in the opposite direction.66 Even with a shortage of service weapons, the numbers mobilized on Sunday were capable of mounting more extensive operations than would occur on Monday. In a sense – and as many critics later charged – the Sunday mobilizers had been brought out under false pretences; but that is not the same as saying they did not accept the idea of a rebellion. The evidence suggests that they did not feel duped by the mobilization plan. But while turning a field-day into a war was, as the planners had calculated, almost easy, turning out in the cold light of a weekday might be much more difficult. On Monday, only those who were indeed ‘anxious for war’ would turn out. It seems clear enough that the ‘countermand’ had dramatic effects.

Ironically, the military committee’s efforts to keep their plans secret may have deceived their own IV comrades more effectively than they did the ‘foreign enemy’. The British authorities were bombarded with warnings about the approaching rebellion. The last and most accurate came at the end of Holy Week from a police agent codenamed ‘Chalk’, who reported ‘Professor MacDonagh’s’ orders on Wednesday evening: ‘We are not going out on Friday but we are going out on Sunday.’⁶⁷ Crucially, however, they did not want to believe such warnings. When the rebellion broke out, they were taken completely by surprise. This was a classic instance of intelligence failure: caused not by a lack of information, but by the blinkered view of those whose job was to interpret it. We need to grasp the reasons for this, because without it the rebellion would, almost certainly, never have happened.

On 10 April 1916, just two weeks before Easter week, Major Price submitted a report (unavoidably delayed, ‘owing to pressure of work’) to his commander, Major-General Friend, on the state of the country. He outlined the main reasons for the faltering of military recruitment, including a generalized public dislike of military service, and the ‘lukewarm’ attitude of the clergy, as well as the ‘persistent and insistent’ Sinn Fein anti-recruiting campaign. Most of his report was taken up with his analysis of the ‘Sinn Fein Volunteers’, now totalling some 10,000 with 4,800 rifles, revolvers and shotguns.⁶⁸ Large caches of home-made bayonets and grenades had been recently found. The conclusions he drew were mixed. There was ‘undoubted proof that the Sinn Fein Irish Volunteers are working up for rebellion and revolution if ever they got a good opportunity’. At the same time, ‘the mass of the people are sound and loyal’, and there were encouraging signs that ‘popular feeling is turning against the Sinn Fein Party’. So how serious was the situation? Was immediate action required? Perhaps the key point in Price’s analysis was his assumption that ‘of course, these Sinn Feiners could never expect to face trained troops successfully’. This perfectly rational assumption left a German invasion, which could undoubtedly be ‘enormously assisted’ by the Volunteers, as the only significant military threat.69

If Price did not quite allow the government a way out, he diluted the urgency of his advice by its oblique phrasing – ‘It is a question of high policy whether the time is not ripe for the proclamation and disarmament of this hostile anti-British organisation before it is given an opportunity to do more serious injury.’ The ‘high policy’ people (who never saw this report, in fact) had of course repeatedly decided that the time was not ripe. Through the autumn and winter of 1915–16 Birrell and Nathan had endured a buffeting by the Unionist peer Lord Midleton, a big Cork landowner and former secretary of state for war, who persistently demanded decisive action. Birrell repeatedly argued that to attempt to suppress Sinn Féin ‘would probably result in shooting, and divide the country’ in the midst of war. ‘Strong measures when effective’, he lectured the exasperated Midleton, ‘are the best of all measures and the easiest, but if ineffective do no good but only harm.’⁷⁰ To put down the Volunteers would be ‘reckless and foolish’. The implicit pessimism of this analysis sat oddly with his bravado, as when he declared ‘I laugh at the whole thing.’ Midleton dissented: ‘I told him frankly that I thought he was pursuing a dangerous course.’

But Nathan loyally accepted his chief’s conviction that though Ireland was ‘in a rotten state’ and ‘ripe for a row’, it was without leadership; the only danger was of isolated terrorist attacks rather than a full-scale uprising. This was in spite of his own belief that the situation (in late November 1915) was ‘bad and fairly rapidly growing worse’. As a soldier himself, he was plainly unsettled by the increasingly grim view taken by the military authorities. Not long after his arrival in Ireland, he was treated to a heavyweight interview with Kitchener, who told him that Ireland was ‘in a state of festering rebellion’. By February 1916 the Irish commander-in-chief was calling for the suppression of the Volunteers, and the commander-in-chief of home forces, Lord French, pressed this course on Birrell, whose response was only to repeat his belief that public displays of troops marching about with bands would have ‘a good effect’. Nathan noted that ‘strong measures – or the appearance of them – are being put on the file for the time being, I am sure rightly’. That Nathan had some inkling of how mistaken Birrell’s optimism was can be seen from a revealing private reflection in March. ‘The press is always attributing base motives and sinister schemes to my country’, he wrote to a friend, ‘and the more truly Irish the newspaper the more violent its abuse of England.’ This was not surprising perhaps, but the syndrome went further. ‘The casual acquaintance does not hesitate to speak his mind, as he would say freely, on the subject of English wickedness, and I have dined as a guest with friends who have made this the main topic of conversation intended to entertain me.’71 Nathan clearly wanted to see this as merely an odd, if upsetting, quirk of the Irish character; but it was really a crucial political fact.

Though their confidence waxed and waned, Birrell and Nathan held on to the belief that the only likelihood of a rising would come from a premature attempt to suppress the Volunteers, and that even a consistent campaign against the subversive press might boomerang on the authorities. In response to a demand by the West Kerry MP for the suppression of the openly disloyal Kerryman, Nathan ‘pointed out that it would be difficult to justify the suppression of papers in the country if such as the Workers Republic published in Dublin were allowed to go on’. And suppressing them, he said, ‘would involve a whole sequence of events probably leading up to coercion’ – so ‘could not be contemplated except as part of a very big question’.⁷² Very big questions, naturally, were not in contemplation. When the Volunteers published a manifesto in the Dublin Evening Mail on 27 March, its editor, Henry Tivy (a Unionist of ‘fairly sound judgment though warped by strong political bias’, Nathan thought), protested, ‘Let me stake my reputation to you and General Friend that although there is a possibility of isolated outrages and even assassinations here and there, there is none whatever at present in any part of Ireland of what is called a general “rising”.’73 Ten days before the rebellion, Lord Midleton ‘took Mr Tivy’s view that the public should know all about the [subversive] movement, because that might lead to its suppression’. So Nathan once again patiently ‘explained the other aspect of the case’ – the danger of giving ‘currency to seditious talk and exaggerated boasts’ of the Volunteers by publication in the ‘better class of newspapers’.

The feasibility of rebellion was repeatedly weighed up, sometimes with ambiguous results. In mid-1915 the police had information ‘from two sources’ that ‘a large number’ of Volunteer leaders were anxious to start an insurrection. A motion proposing immediate insurrection had, they thought, been put to the Volunteer Executive by Bulmer Hobson, and only defeated by the casting vote of Professor MacNeill. Although the details of this were certainly garbled, the fact that there was talk of rebellion was plain. But, like Major Price, the police were looking for definite signs of German intervention, and could not find them. Like everyone else, the police gave out mixed messages: in September 1915, the Inspector-General opined that ‘the Sinn Fein leaders do not command either followers or equipment sufficient for insurrection’, but in December the RIC Special Branch sounded a more worrying note. The development of the Irish Volunteer movement was ‘now a matter deserving serious attention on account of its revolutionary character’; it was ‘thoroughly disloyal and hostile to the British government’, was ‘apparently now on the increase and might rapidly assume dimensions sufficient to cause anxiety to the military authorities’. Still, as late as 10 April 1916, Nathan told General Macready at the War Office that although the Volunteers had been ‘active of late, I do not believe that [their] leaders mean insurrection, or that the Volunteers have sufficient arms to make it formidable if the leaders do mean it’. In the early stages of the war, the danger of a German invasion was taken seriously enough for the Admiralty to send a group of naval officers disguised as American tourists on a yacht, the Sayonara, to cruise the west coast. (No other agencies were told of the undercover operation, and the yacht was arrested several times by naval patrols.) Coastal communities were placarded with warning notices telling the inhabitants to evacuate their homes in event of an invasion. But in January 1915 the yacht patrol was stood down, having found nothing; and – incredibly, perhaps – no further military steps were taken to prepare against any possible landings in the west.

The Irish government’s quietist consensus was increasingly disturbed by the Viceroy, Lord Wimborne, who saw his main task as to stimulate recruitment. He had taken personal charge of the new recruiting organization, the Department of Recruiting for Ireland, set up in October 1915 to replace the unsuccessful CCORI, and grew more and more worried by the spread of seditious propaganda. Arriving in April 1915, he was annoyed to find himself outside the loop of governmental decision-making, and battled for months to break out of the invisible barrier constructed around his office in the time of his predecessor, Lord Aberdeen, whom Birrell had held in contempt. In early March 1916 he finally persuaded Nathan to forward daily police reports to him (‘but not with a view to inviting my opinion’).74 He began to press for the tightening up of security measures. When he found, for instance, in March 1916 that deportation was again being discussed, he pointed out that it had been tried before without success, and demanded to ‘know what different methods of enforcement are contemplated to make the order effective’. He found the police reports defective, complaining ‘I can’t understand how the night manoeuvres in Dublin were omitted from the police report summary’, or ‘why it is that we are left to learn from the press this morning of the arms seizure in Cork. Surely we should have daily reports from the police of any Sinn Fein activities, and action of this kind should not be undertaken without the cognizance of the Executive?’⁷⁵

Wimborne was far from incompetent, but he was a political lightweight. A former Liberal MP (and cousin of Winston Churchill), he had been sent to the House of Lords in 1910 to bolster the Liberal minority. He came to the Lord Lieutenancy after a few months on the staff of the nascent 10th Division at the Curragh. His appointment did nothing to demonstrate that the British government was seriously engaging with the critical situation in Ireland. He continued to hold court in the traditional Viceregal manner. Lady Cynthia Asquith, then involved with Wimborne’s private secretary Lord Basil Blackwood, was a guest at the Viceregal Lodge in early 1916, and provided a brilliant vignette of ‘His Ex’ and ‘Queen Alice’, a couple who took themselves just a little too seriously. (Travelling at the end of January, Lady Cynthia echoed Birrell’s distaste for the Holyhead–Kingstown crossing: ‘most unpleasant – there wasn’t any sensational amount of motion but it must have been very well chosen, anyhow it carried its point … I got off feeling very green and plain.’) One of her main objects became to avoid an invitation to Wimborne’s private sitting room. ‘It is very oriental, the way he stalks out of the room followed by the woman, whom he returns at his leisure to the drawing room.’ He astonished her not just with his ‘terrible way of flapping his furry eyelids at one’, but also with his declaration that ‘he had read everything worth reading’. He ‘had the audacity to talk of his poverty’, while ‘“Queen” Alice was outraged the other day when someone estimated her annual dress expenditure at only £10,000.’ Yet this pompous would-be proconsul was the only member of the Irish executive with a positive agenda. Lady Cynthia wryly observed the gulf between him and the Chief Secretary, when Wimborne asked him to visit a shell factory. Birrell was puzzled – ‘Shells? Shells? What shells?’ He was thinking of the beach, not the war.76

Though the authorities might well have been alarmed by the big Volunteer parades on St Patrick’s Day, they preferred to focus on the fact that ‘only’ 1,817 of the 4,555 who turned out in the provinces were armed, less than half of these with rifles. (So the RIC estimated, though the DMP did not count the weapons of the 1,400 who mustered on College Green in Dublin). They drew comfort from the unenthusiastic attitude of the spectators. Again, on 30 March, when a big rally outside the Mansion House to protest against the deportation of Blythe and Mellows ‘was followed by disorderly conduct during which traffic was held up and two policemen were fired at’, they noted that while violent language was used, ‘the conduct of the persons attending was not disorderly’.⁷⁷ Crucially, perhaps, the well-informed source ‘Chalk’ reported on the 31st that the ‘Genreal [sic] Mobilization for next Sunday has been cancelled … as they appear to be afraid of being disarmed in a body’.⁷⁸

In late March, at a War Office meeting between Wimborne, Birrell and Kitchener to discuss recruiting, Wimborne raised the question of reinforcing the Irish garrison. Again, on the 23rd, senior Irish government officials conferred with Lord French at the Horse Guards to discuss the desirability of transferring one or more reserve infantry brigades from Britain to Ireland. French was happy with this in principle, but pointed out that it would delay training, might complicate draft-finding, and could entail other complications. The civil officials evidently did not press the point firmly enough to ensure that anything happened. Wimborne himself kept quiet about his real reasons for wanting the transfer – ‘that we had not enough troops in Ireland in case of internal trouble’ – because he thought it undesirable to say this ‘at the Conference, before the people who were there’.79 The leisurely pace of governmental preparation remained untroubled. No significant military reinforcements appear to have been sent; although on 6 April General Friend finally responded to Birrell’s hints about ‘some display of military force in the City’, saying he would see if he ‘could arrange for the Dublin Fusiliers, the RIC and some of the Cavalry to be more in evidence’.⁸⁰ The government also planned a bigger role for the part-time Volunteer Training Corps. On 22 April Nathan suggested to Colonel Edgeworth-Johnstone, the head of the DMP, that their uniform ‘has now been made sufficiently familiar to the public for men in it to be employed on quasi-military duty without exciting much comment’. As ever, the prime need was to avoid excitement.

As ever, too, Wimborne was the only senior official ready to risk provoking opposition. On that day, Easter Saturday, the government’s situation perfectly demonstrated its inner contradictions. The Chief Secretary was in London, where he had attended a Cabinet meeting and decided to stay for Easter. When the news of the sinking of the Libau/Aud arrived in Dublin, General Friend, amazingly, decided to follow his example. This left Nathan and Wimborne to interpret the mixed messages emerging from the multiplicity of meetings and journeys by ‘suspects’ across the country on that weekend of suppressed drama. They acted true to type. Both of them thought that Casement’s arrest and the loss of the German arms meant that the rebellion was off. (Nathan wrote to Birrell on Saturday, ‘the Irish Volunteers are to have a “mobilisation” and march tomorrow but I see no indications of a “rising”’.) But Wimborne seized on the opportunity these events provided to strike at Sinn Fein. Late on Saturday evening he urged immediate action. When Nathan came to see him at 10 a.m. next morning, however, it was only to propose a raid on Liberty Hall and ‘two other minor Sinn Fein arsenals’.

The pretext for this was that 250 lbs of gelignite stolen from Tullagh Quarry had been taken to Liberty Hall. Wimborne supported Nathan’s suggestion, writing to Birrell ‘Nathan proposes, and I agree, that Liberty Hall, together with two other Sinn Fein arsenals – Larkfield Kimmage and the one in Father Matthews [sic] Park, should be raided tonight.’ But he added that he had ‘strongly urged him at the same time to put his hand on the ringleaders’. The evidence was ‘now sufficient for any measure we think desirable’. Wimborne wanted ‘to implicate as many of the [sic] Sinn Fein as I can with the landing – invasion, in fact. It has changed everything’, and justified a major policy shift. Nathan, who plainly assumed that the Kerry events had provided a breathing space, insisted on waiting for Birrell’s reply. Nothing was done until 6 p.m. that evening, when Nathan returned to the Viceregal Lodge with the acting military commander, Colonel Cowan. They discussed the feasibility of raiding Liberty Hall, and Cowan stressed that it was by no means an easy operation; it would need ‘a gun’ (i.e. an artillery piece) which would have to be brought from Athlone. ‘Time was short for adequate preparations to ensure success.’81

Wimborne was by now seething with impatience. He cancelled a planned trip to Belfast, and convened another conference at 10 p.m. on Sunday evening, bringing Nathan and Cowan together with the DMP Commissioner and Major Price. There he argued that extensive preparations for a raid on Liberty Hall would be a waste of time; by the time they got in they would probably find an empty building. (It is hard not to suspect that this would have suited Nathan quite well.) What really mattered, Wimborne insisted, was to arrest the leaders: ‘60 to 100’ should be taken that very night. Edgeworth-Johnstone said that such a programme of arrests was feasible, but Nathan predictably objected that it would be illegal; arrests on the grounds of hostile association required approval by the Home Secretary. Wimborne argued that the prisoners could be remanded until this approval came through – he was quite prepared ‘to sign the warrants and take full responsibility for possible illegality’. Nathan still temporized, and the conference ended with a decision to abandon the Liberty Hall raid and wait for the DMP Commissioner to draw up a list of ‘prominent suspects’.

As Nathan was leaving the meeting, Wimborne, according to his own account, once again urged on him ‘in the strongest possible language the need for immediate and vigorous action, and again offered to take all responsibility’. Nathan’s reaction to this display of Viceregal uppishness can be well imagined. Nothing would happen until the next day; even the ‘minor arsenal’ at Fr Mathew Park was to be left alone, if not in peace. (Yet to raid that would surely not have required artillery.) And, ironically, Wimborne himself now backed away from his earlier determination to call for immediate reinforcements from the Curragh and Athlone, for fear that ‘any military activity would arouse the suspicion of the men we had in view and lead to their absconding’. On Easter Monday, instead of garrisoning the capital, the army would go off to the races.