10

Punishment

You are letting loose a river of blood … It is the first rebellion that ever took place in Ireland where you had the majority on your side. It is the fruit of our life work … and now you are washing out our whole life work in a sea of blood.

John Dillon, House of Commons, 11 May 1916

In purely military terms, the rebellion was suppressed with some efficiency. Perhaps it was true that, to the mind of Stephens’s Dubliners, survival for more than a day was a rebel triumph. But in the circumstances, hamstrung in the preceding months by political caution, and wrongfooted by the tangled events of Holy Week, the army’s performance was not unimpressive. The forces immediately available, which only barely outnumbered the rebels, were pushed instantly to key points, and within twenty-four hours it could already be said that the military challenge had been neutralized. Within forty-eight hours the rebellion was consigned to an increasingly hopeless ‘last stand’. It should be remembered that the British army – in common with practically every army in the world – had no experience of urban warfare. The battle of Dublin was an extremely rare military phenomenon; as one observer noted, ‘for a parallel to this form of fighting in a big city, one has to go back to the days of the French Revolution, or the Commune in Paris’.1 A British officer who later wrote on the rebellion judged that ‘to be in some parts of Dublin then was in many ways a worse experience than being in France or Flanders’.² Despite the difference of scale, it posed the same kinds of military problems as Stalingrad – or Fallujah, where the ‘insurgents’ were similar in number to the Dublin rebels (though the citizens had largely escaped before the assault began).3 There can be little doubt that the rebels could, if they had not concentrated their forces as they did, have created an extremely difficult military situation.⁴

General Maxwell’s allegation that the rebels ‘mixed with peaceful citizens’ in order to ambush the troops may have been misleading, but his assertion that ‘I cannot imagine a more difficult situation than that in which the troops were placed’ was fair enough.⁵ His biographer amplified this point:

In fighting of this sort the soldier sacrifices much of what discipline and training have taught him, manoeuvre is a dead letter, and, man for man, the civilian with a rifle to his shoulder and a wall or barricade in front of him is fully, if foully, a match for the professional soldier.⁶

The minor military disaster at Northumberland Road and Mount Street Bridge, though it stemmed in part from some of the deep-set military weaknesses that were to be displayed on an epic scale two months later at the Somme, also reflected the lack of an urban warfare doctrine. It caused a disproportionate share of the week’s military casualties. Overall, however, these were perhaps surprisingly small: 106 killed – 17 of them officers – and 334 wounded.⁷ (Crown fatalities were thus about twice those of the rebels, broadly in line with Clausewitz’s hypothesis.) In the same week, at Hulluch on the Western Front, the 16th Division had lost 570 dead and over 1,400 wounded.⁸

But, of course, in a civil conflict of this kind, ‘purely military’ terms are irrelevant, if not actually misleading. As soon as the limits of the rebel threat had become clear, the methods used to suppress the rebellion became a political as much as a military issue. The fear of German invasion would naturally persist, and as French wrote to Maxwell on 29 April, ‘that is what we must be prepared for’; but he prefaced this by saying ‘I do not think there is much chance (now) of a German landing on the West Coast.’ That much had been clear by the 26th, indeed. If the government was going to exert some political control over the process of suppression, this was the moment to begin. But instead, the Cabinet reconfirmed Wimborne’s proclamation of martial law and extended it across the whole country, most of which had remained entirely peaceful – a proceeding without any authority in common law.9 The politicians were not entirely oblivious to potential problems. On Thursday Birrell sent an urgent warning against this extension, and on Friday morning the Cabinet spent some time thinking about it.¹⁰ Asquith apparently remarked that ‘there was no danger in the situation’ by then. Lloyd George, who cannot have forgotten the bruising tussles over the use of martial law in South Africa, warned the Cabinet that ‘the whole of Ireland might be set ablaze’ by the ‘unconsidered actions of some subordinate officer’. But Sir Nevil Macready, the Adjutant General, who was called over from the War Office to advise, suggested that ‘it was better to risk overstepping authority than to delay action’. To limit the risk, all the Cabinet heavyweights – Bonar Law, Balfour and Curzon – weighed in to help draft an instruction advising Maxwell to tell his officers that the powers exercised under the proclamation of martial law ‘are not to be put in force except after reference to yourself, unless urgent local circumstances necessitate immediate action, and that otherwise the ordinary machinery of the laws will continue to operate’.¹¹ But this was really only a rephrasing, rather than a restriction, of the standard doctrine of martial law (and, as Bonar Law pointed out, did not really meet Birrell’s objection).

We have already seen the ferocity of the language used in military orders issued before Maxwell’s arrival. He certainly did nothing to temper this; his boast to French on the 30th that ‘any holding out tomorrow in Dublin will be blown off the face of the earth’ was almost a caricature of gung-ho military machismo. There was a wide sense during Easter week that an alien kind of militarism was in the ascendant. Many Dublin citizens, even those most hostile to the rebellion, found the army’s style alarming: ‘this is true Germanism’, thought one indignant loyalist who was aggressively ordered away from his front window by a soldier brandishing a ‘heavy revolver’.¹² The Cabinet’s reaffirmation of martial law contributed powerfully to this. In practical terms, as Maxwell was soon to discover, it had little meaning; but together with the formal appointment of Maxwell as ‘Military Governor’ it sent (as it was meant to) a resonant signal. Ireland was under military rule. Asquith himself was reported to be content for the army to get on with its task. French assured Maxwell on 1 May that the Prime Minister was ‘very pleased with it all’.

What ‘it all’ amounted to at this point was the fulfilment of Asquith’s public assertion that the government’s ‘paramount duty’ was ‘to stamp out rebellion with all possible vigour and promptitude’. On 30 April, Maxwell and Lowe laid out a plan for the final mopping-up of rebel forces in Dublin, based on ‘expanding the existing cordon so as to comprise a wider field’. They set up two area commands, under Colonel Maconchy north of the river and Colonel Portal south of it, with four sub-areas. Each of these consisted of a brigade of infantry, two field guns, and two armoured cars. ‘The general idea’ was for each sub-area commander ‘to gradually overcome the rebels in his area by “feeling his way” and by ascertaining through every possible means the location of rebel strongholds’. They were also to distribute the C.-in-C.’s proclamations, and ‘carry out rigoursly [sic] the punishments provided therein’. A mobile column held in reserve at the Castle would be available ‘should it be necessary to instigate any encircling movements within sub areas’.13 Sporadic resistance did in fact continue in Dublin for several days after Pearse’s surrender, particularly in the Ringsend area, so these operational arrangements were not excessive.

Maxwell’s next moves, however, would be less politically palatable. On 2 May he sent Kitchener a despatch which made clear that he blamed political weakness for the outbreak of the rebellion, and hoped that ‘politicians will not interfere until I report normal conditions prevail’. Though he had ‘said the rebellion is crushed, I have not said more than that, and there is still work to be done’.¹⁴ He was ‘disarming all districts that have broken out in actual rebellion – house to house search’, and he intended to arm the DMP with the captured weapons. (‘Had they been armed’, he said, ‘I don’t think the Dublin rebellion would have broken out.’) Of the rebels, he concluded that ‘at the last moment the bulk of the rank and file were jockeyed by the leaders into active rebellion. But they have all been playing at rebellion for months past and therefore deserve no pity.’¹⁵ A few days later he reiterated to the Chief of the General Staff that ‘although this rebellion is crushed, it is folly to suppose that all danger is over’. He added an interesting interpretation: ‘it is in the Irish character to loudly proclaim loyalty, and such protestations are pouring in, but this in my opinion is a reason we should be all the more watchful’. It would ‘never do to be caught on the hop again’.16 Others were even more suspicious than Maxwell. One of MI5’s ‘private correspondents’ who had been stranded at Malahide during the rebellion reported that ‘the bulk of the people were merely waiting for the slightest sign of success to join the rebellion’, and MI5’s director suggested that ‘if the truth were known this feeling is very general and it is very hard to draw the line where Sinn Feiners and Redmondites part’.¹⁷ All these were danger signals that might have caused some worry to the government, had it known of them.

On 3 May, the garrison commander at Queenstown was informed that ‘now that the rebellion in DUBLIN and elsewhere has been crushed the GOC-in-C intends to arrest all dangerous Sinn Feiners’. This category was to include ‘those who have taken an active part in the movement although not in the present rebellion’.¹⁸ To do this, the country was divided into three areas, the north (Ulster and County Louth), the country ‘south of a line running 5 miles north of the railway Ennis–Limerick–Clonmel and a straight line from there to Arklow’, and ‘the remainder of Ireland’. In the southern area, placed under the Queenstown commander, ‘small columns consisting of Infantry and Mounted Troops should be sent to various Centres and gradually the whole district worked through’, in co-operation with the police. In the central area, more substantial mobile columns were set up at Longford, Athlone, Kilkenny and Castlebar. Each of these consisted of two companies of infantry, a squadron of cavalry, and an eighteen-pounder gun; an armoured car (‘useful to round up outlying bands if any such exist’, Maxwell thought) was added to each on 5 May.¹⁹ Lowe was instructed that ‘great care should be taken to collect as much evidence as possible with regard to the part each arrested Sinn Feiner has taken in the rising’, and told that ‘any Sinn Feiner who actually resists arrest may be dealt with on the spot by Court Martial’.²⁰

Maxwell told a number of people that ‘after he had finished with Dublin, he would deal with the country’; but even though this policy had been adumbrated by General Friend as early as the second day of the rebellion, its exact point was never entirely clear. It was intended in part, as the accompaniment of heavy artillery indicated, as a show of force designed to encourage loyal subjects and overawe disaffected nationalists. The standard cordon-and-search technique used (‘a sudden encircling of disloyal areas by the cavalry, while the infantry systematically drives the enclosed area section by section’) was thought successful in this. Lowe later reported that the appearance of troops in areas where they had ‘not been seen for some time past and in some cases never’, had had an ‘excellent moral effect’.21 (Birrell, it will be recalled, had repeatedly asked for ostentatious displays of military force before the rebellion, and been repeatedly fobbed off.) In terms of concrete results, however, such as disarmament, the columns were less productive. Maxwell told Kitchener that ‘all arms will have to come in before I can rest assured that there is no chance of another outbreak’. But although a fair number of arms were captured (just over 2,000 rifles by early July), he had to recognize that the quantities left in nationalist hands were ‘impossible to estimate’.²² (The local commander in Limerick, for instance, noted that in one village only a couple out of over twenty guns had been handed in: ‘they are known to be there but their owners have concealed them’.)²³ He contented himself with arguing that ‘the number of rifles in the hands of Sinn Feiners and Nationalists known to the police seems small, and even if doubled is negligible from a military point of view’.²⁴ Full disarmament could only be achieved by house-to-house searches, which seem to have been ruled out on the quasi-political grounds that, as Lowe warned, they would ‘exasperate the populace’.

If the number of guns collected was inadequate, the number of ‘Sinn Feiners’ arrested – 3,430 men and 79 women – was much more impressive. Unfortunately, this haul was to generate more problems than seem to have been anticipated. Although the original military instructions had stressed that ‘great care should be taken that men who are merely strong Nationalists should not be confused with Sinn Feiners’, and that ‘the dividing line between the two should be generously on the side of the Nationalists’, the issue of who was a ‘dangerous’ Sinn Feiner proved to be a tricky one. On 6 May Maxwell reiterated the ‘importance of arresting only dangerous Sinn Feiners, the object being to secure the leaders of the movement and those who are known to have taken (or have borne arms with intent to take) an active part in the rising’.²⁵ He sent a stronger warning signal on 14 May, noting that ‘in some districts Sinn Fein followers have been arrested who cannot be considered as leaders exercising dangerous influence’. He made clear that the only people to be arrested were ‘A. men against whom there is evidence to try by Court-Martial on a charge of having taken part in rebellion. B. Those known to be inciting others to retain arms or to resist authority and whose continued presence is considered likely to lead to further bloodshed.’26 Maxwell himself, however, took the MI5 line that it was virtually impossible to distinguish between Sinn Feiners and Redmondites, and so, evidently, did some of his subordinates. When, for instance, the northern column raided the houses of nationalists in Omagh without consulting the police, the result was to ‘give rise to a very bitter and hostile feeling amongst a very large section of the Nationalist population who were hitherto stongly opposed to the Sinn Fein movement in all its forms’.²⁷

When the Prime Minister sprang a visit to Ireland in mid-May, he went to see the prisoners in Richmond Barracks. He found that they were ‘for the most part, men and lads from the country, who had taken no part in the Dublin rising’, and concluded that many of them ‘ought never to have been sent to Dublin. A process of “combing out” should be at once set on foot.’²⁸ A few days later, Irish Command assured the War Office that they were ‘doing all in their power to expedite’ the process of ‘combing out “innocents” with vigour’. They had taken on a leading Dublin barrister, and hoped to get through about 150 cases a day.²⁹ (In fact, 1,424 of the 3,430 men arrested were released within a fortnight.) But by this time, the whole policy had come under acute scrutiny. John Dillon had made several private efforts to persuade Maxwell of the unwisdom of – as he wrote on 8 May – ‘instituting searching and arrests on a large scale in districts in which there has been no disturbance’. On 11 May he took his complaint into the open in a blistering speech in the House of Commons. ‘Would not any sensible statesman think’, he asked, ‘he had enough to do in Dublin and other centres where disturbance broke out, without doing everything possible to raise disturbance and spread disaffection over the whole country?’ Describing the effect of military searches in Limerick, Clare and Mayo, he charged that ‘you are doing everything conceivable to madden the Irish people’ and turn friends into enemies of the government. ‘If Ireland were governed by men out of Bedlam you could not pursue a more insane policy.’30

Dillon’s fierce invective found ready echoes in the nationalist press in Ireland. The military authorities soon had to threaten even the Freeman’s Journal (no admirer of Sinn Féin) with ‘immediate action’ under DORA for criticizing the military regime. They accepted that ‘the suppression of the rising inevitably entailed the regrettable arrest and detention of a number of persons who neither encouraged nor took part in the rebellion’, but press comments ‘dwelling upon and emphasising in flamboyant and incendiary language’ such cases of hardship and injustice could only have ‘a prejudicial effect on the peace of the country’. Maxwell held that ‘if Dillon had not made that unfortunate speech I think things would have very nearly got back to normal’ by the 20th; but, as it was, ‘he has provoked a good deal of racial feeling’.³¹

The Home Secretary, Herbert Samuel, soon faced the tricky problem of how to deal with the burgeoning mass of Irish prisoners. Maxwell had addressed the issue as soon as he arrived in Dublin, by which time some ninety prisoners had already been taken. Initially, ‘Sir John was very keen to try everybody “under military courts” held under martial law’, according to his DAG, Joseph Byrne, ‘but I persuaded him against this.’ Byrne held that the Defence of the Realm Regulations were adequate, and, more importantly, ‘will not raise any difficulties afterwards’.³² Maxwell proposed to French on 28 April that ‘in cases where clear evidence is not immediately available, or trial is not desirable, to send the accused out of the country to suitable internment camp. I suggest vicinity of Holyhead.’³³ Two days later, by which time he had some 600 in custody, he confirmed that he was ‘sorting them out keeping only those I intend to deal with here’.³⁴ One of his early ideas, that some of the prisoners should be ‘allowed to expiate their crime by serving the Empire as soldiers’ (he thought they ‘might usefully garrison such places as Sollum and elsewhere’), received short shrift from the War Office.³⁵

Then the beautiful simplicity of the military mind began to run into the tangle of the law. During the first week of May, the Irish Law Officers, the Irish executive’s chief legal advisers, began to consider the implications of the wholesale despatch of captured rebels and arrested suspects to England. Many had been ‘taken red-handed either as the result of the storming of certain strongholds or capitulation and surrender’, and the rest had been rounded up on the basis of ‘a strong suspicion of complicity’. Unfortunately, proper records had not been kept, and even with those taken red-handed it was ‘fairly certain that it would be practically impossible to ascertain either the particular overt acts alleged against them or even the names of the particular military officers or men by whom they were made amenable’. For the rest, there was nothing against them beyond suspicion. It would be ‘practically useless to bring them back to Ireland with a view to being disposed of by Courts Martial’; yet it would be ‘dangerous and disastrous’ to allow them to return free to Ireland. So what was to be done with them? They might be tried under DORA in England. But that would involve ‘the great expense and delay of collecting’ the materials needed to convict them. And, thanks to the Amendment Act, they could exercise the right to elect to be tried by the ordinary courts. If they were held until they could safely be taken back for civil trial in Ireland, such trials would mostly ‘prove abortive owing to the sympathy, apathy and cowardice of the jurors’; and worse, would destroy the prospect of pacification by ‘keeping alive in an aggravated form the burning embers of the recent conflagration’. The Law Officers advised drafting a new DOR Regulation, combining elements of DRR 14 and 14B, but specifically dealing with the rebellion.36

By the time the Home Secretary addressed the problem in mid-May, there were nearly 1,600 Irish prisoners in England. They had overflowed the ordinary military prisons, and many were being held in ‘certain civil prisons lent for the purpose by the Prison Commissioners and temporarily certified by the War Office as military prisons’. Housing them was one problem, but now that the outbreak had been completely suppressed, there was a possibility that they might apply for writs of habeas corpus; and it was ‘not clear what valid answer there would be’. In Home Office language, this was a shrieking alarm bell. Samuel reiterated for his Cabinet colleagues the problems outlined by the Irish Law Officers, though he did not favour their solution. Special legislation might be difficult to pass through parliament, and a new regulation ‘would be open to the grave objection of being ex post facto legislation’. He proposed to stick to Regulation 14B, allowing the internment of enemy aliens. But how could Irish men and women, who were indisputably British citizens, in law if not in their own aspirations, be classified as enemy aliens? Samuel suggested that the phrase ‘hostile origins or associations’ in the Regulation could cover the rebels because of ‘the known connection of the Sinn Fein movement with Germany’. This might be proved by the landing of Casement and the attempted arms landing, and ‘by the passage in the rebels’ proclamation which refers to the Irish Republic’s “gallant allies in Europe”’.37 This was not entirely promising, however, and Samuel added that, as his colleagues were aware, Regulation 14B had already been attacked as a breach of civil liberties. ‘These criticisms will probably become more widespread if the procedure is now applied to this large body of persons, particularly since their connection with Germany is only indirect.’ Given ‘the importance of the issue involved’, Samuel asked for a Cabinet decision.

In spite of these drawbacks, the Cabinet approved the use of Regulation 14B to legalize the detention of the rebellion prisoners. This meant that, as the Regulation stipulated, there would be an Advisory Committee to which prisoners could ‘make representations’ that they had been wrongly imprisoned. (Not appeals as such, since the committee was not bound by judicial rules.) In the case of the Irish prisoners, the Advisory Committee, chaired by Justice Sankey, did not wait for representations, but set about interviewing the lot in order to push ahead with ‘combing out’ of the ‘innocents’. Sankey would eventually release all but 579 of the detainees on the grounds that they were not dangerous – in other words, should never have been arrested. This was a swingeing indictment of the police intelligence services on which the army had relied in making its sweep. (Maxwell was guilty of some naivety, perhaps, in believing the assurances he had from ‘the RIC and Police that no Sinn Feiners can escape them’.) It would not be the last.

Maxwell’s decision to send the untried prisoners out of Ireland landed the government with a troublesome problem. His treatment of those he did not send out, however, became a much more serious one. On 2 May, chafing against the advice he had been given not to ‘deal with them under Martial Law’ he told Kitchener that he hoped nonetheless ‘to get through with the Courts Martial’. He planned to have three courts sitting simultaneously, and to ‘be through with this part in a week to ten days’. The first courts were sitting as he wrote. (Their Presidents had immediately ‘begun to raise legal difficulties’, but he hoped to get over these.)38 The first batch of rebels were sentenced to death later that day, on a charge of ‘waging war against His Majesty the King, with the intention and for the purpose of assisting the enemy’.³⁹ They were Patrick Pearse, Tom Clarke and Thomas MacDonagh. The three were taken from Richmond Barracks to Kilmainham gaol, a grim disused prison nearby, and shot in the yard at dawn on 3 May. The government suddenly took note. The Prime Minister summoned Lord French and ‘expressed himself as “surprised” at the rapidity of the trial and sentences’. French ‘pointed out’ (as he reassured Maxwell) ‘that you are carrying out your instructions exactly and correctly and in strict accordance with Military and Martial Law’. Asquith apparently ‘quite understands’, but asked French ‘to warn you not to give the impression that all the Sinn Feiners would suffer death’.⁴⁰ The Prime Minister, a famous procrastinator (and a lawyer), was plainly ill at ease, and well he might be (since neither military nor martial law was involved in the trials, French was hardly taking him seriously). Yet while he was also already preparing his political damage-limitation exercise, he did not yet see the need to intervene directly.

In French’s view, the fact that three rebel prisoners had also received ‘much less severe sentences was evidence enough’ of Maxwell’s sensitivity, and Asquith agreed to leave him ‘to his own discretion’. But he sent a telegram directing that ‘no sentence of death on any woman, including Countess Markievitz [sic] should be confirmed and carried out without reference to the Field-Marshal Commanding in Chief and himself’. Even in the case of men, Asquith added, ‘the greatest care should be taken that the extreme sentence is not carried out except on proved ringleaders or persons found to have committed murder’.⁴¹ Over the next two days, another five men were executed (Ned Daly, Willie Pearse, Joe Plunkett and Michael O’Hanrahan on the 4th, followed by John MacBride on the 5th) and five more sentenced to death (Eamonn Ceannt, Seán Heuston, Con Colbert, Michael Mallin, and Thomas Kent). Now the politicians jumped. At midnight the Adjutant General, Macready, telegraphed Maxwell. ‘PM has told me to impress upon you the necessity of avoiding anything which might give rise to a charge of hasty procedure or want of due care and deliberation in confirming sentences.’ Asquith made clear his view that ‘anything like a large number of executions would excite a swift revulsion of feeling here’, and ‘sow the seeds of lasting trouble in Ireland’. He said he had no reason to doubt that justice had been done, ‘but desires that you weigh thoroughly the points I am bringing to your notice for future guidance’.42 Although he concluded by assuring Maxwell that ‘there is no intention to hamper your freedom of judgment or your initiative’, this was a heavy political warning. The general was haled before the Cabinet to explain his policy, the ministers stressing once more that no woman should be executed. Once he gave them that assurance, however, he was again left to his own discretion ‘subject to a general instruction that death should not be inflicted except upon ringleaders and proven murderers’, and an urging that the executions should be brought to a close as soon as possible.⁴³

In fact, the most doubtful cases – notably Pearse’s younger brother (who as he said at his trial was no more than an aide-de-camp) – had already been despatched. Colbert, Ceannt, Mallin and Heuston, executed on the 8th, had held independent commands, and Thomas Kent (executed at Cork on the 9th) was convicted of killing a policeman. About the two last ‘ringleaders’, James Connolly and Seán MacDermott – eventually convicted on 9 May – there was not likely to be much doubt. Although Asquith sent a final instruction on the 10th ‘that no further executions are to take place until further orders’, he allowed these to go ahead. Neither was there any doubt of the impact of even this limited programme of military justice. As early as 3 May, John Redmond protested to Asquith that ‘if any more executions take place in Ireland, the position will become impossible for any Constitutional Party or leader’.⁴⁴ Two days later the London Daily Chronicle carried a leader arguing that the executions should have stopped after 3 May. Of the four men executed on the 4th, only one (Plunkett) was a signatory of the Proclamation, and the killing was beginning to look like private vengeance.⁴⁵ ‘The feeling is becoming widespread and intensely bitter’, John Dillon told Maxwell on the 8th. ‘It really would be difficult to exaggerate the amount of mischief the executions are doing.’

In case the C.-in-C. thought such views prejudiced, he heard a similar opinion from a very different source the same day. The Viceroy (who knew that in the public mind he would be held responsible for the policy, and nobody would believe he was ‘without influence’) protested that the execution of ‘three comparatively unknown insurgents’ meant that ‘in the popular estimation nearly a hundred others are liable to the same penalty with it will be held in many cases more justification’. Although he accepted that Maxwell did ‘not mean to create this impression’, Wimborne felt ‘bound to tell you that it exists and is capable of producing disastrous consequences’. As if aware that words were the only influence he had left, he poured them out: ‘I must respectfully urge you in the most serious manner’ that public opinion would not support further executions ‘of any save perhaps one or two very prominent and deeply implicated “insurgents”’. A public statement ‘of a reasoning character’ by Maxwell was ‘urgently needed to allay the feeling aroused by this morning’s action and to define the limits of your contemplated policy’.46

This extraordinary intervention pointed up just how completely the civil government in Ireland had been superseded by the military. Birrell had already resigned, taking Nathan with him on 5 May. Wimborne himself resisted, since unlike the others he felt vindicated rather than condemned by the outbreak, but Asquith had decided to take out the whole Irish Executive.⁴⁷ (For one heady day, Wimborne thought he had survived, writing to Maxwell that ‘I am for the present head of the Irish Executive.’)⁴⁸ The result was a yawning political vacuum. The damage this might inflict was suggested in Dillon’s highly charged Commons speech on 11 May. In terms seldom if ever heard in parliament, Dillon reiterated and amplified the warning he had issued to Maxwell; now less a warning than a cry of despair. ‘You are washing out our whole life work in a sea of blood.’ ‘What is poisoning the mind of Ireland, and rapidly poisoning it, is the secrecy of these trials and the continuance of these executions.’ Thousands of people in Dublin ‘who ten days ago were bitterly opposed to the whole Sinn Fein movement and the rebellion, are now becoming infuriated against the Government’. Dillon asked the Prime Minister directly to stop the executions: ‘this series of executions is doing more harm than any Englishman in this House can possibly fathom’. The men being executed were not guilty of murder, as the government said; they were ‘insurgents who have fought a clean fight, a brave fight, however misguided’. By this time Dillon’s speech had opened up an all too familiar ethnic (or as Maxwell said, racial) gulf. As the English MPs heckled him, Dillon became passionate. ‘It would be a damned good thing for you if your soldiers were able to put up as good a fight as did these men in Dublin.’ He was ‘proud of their courage, and if you were not so dense and stupid, as some of you English people are, you could have had these men fighting for you’. What they needed was ‘not a Military Service Bill’, but ‘to find a way to the hearts of the Irish people’.49

What may have struck Asquith most uncomfortably was Dillon’s denunciation of military rule. ‘You have swept away every trace of civil administration in the country’, he alleged with perhaps pardonable exaggeration. The only guarantee of civil liberty left was ‘the well-known high character of Sir John Maxwell’ he said, adding sharply, ‘I confess I never heard of him before in my life. I refuse, and the Irish people will refuse, to accept the well-known high character of Sir John Maxwell as the sole guarantee of their liberty.’ The MPs were outraged, but Dillon went on, ‘I say deliberately that in the whole of modern history, taking all the circumstances into account, there has been no rebellion or insurrection put down with so much blood and so much savagery as the recent insurrection in Ireland.’

Maxwell certainly believed that he was following the injunction (frequently repeated both by him and by the Prime Minister) to execute only the ‘ringleaders’ of the rebellion and those guilty of ‘coldblooded murder’. But nobody undertook to define the term ‘ringleader’, and the Courts Martial were given no usable definition. The evidence presented to these tribunals was, it is fair to say, slapdash. Willie Pearse, for instance, who on no plausible definition could have been called a ringleader, was convicted on the basis of the testimony of a captured officer of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in the GPO that ‘I know that William Pearce was an officer but do not know his rank.’⁵⁰ He was tried alongside three others, and though all four were condemned to death, only Pearse’s sentence was confirmed by Maxwell. Admittedly Pearse was the only prisoner to plead guilty. But it remains hard, as it was for Wimborne, to grasp the logic of Maxwell’s selection process. Immediately after confirming the sentences on Connolly and MacDermott, Maxwell sent Asquith a wire classifying all the cases under three headings: ‘(a) Those who signed proclamation on behalf of provisional Government and were also leaders in actual rebellion in Dublin. (b) Those who were in command of rebels actually shooting down troops, police and others. (c) Those whose offence was murder.’51 He placed Willie Pearse in category (b), though the worst thing he could find to say about him was that he ‘was associated with the Sinn Fein movement from its inception’. Also in category (b) were Daly, MacBride, Colbert, Mallin, Heuston and O’Hanrahan. Only two of these were battalion commandants, and though four battalion commanders were executed, one was not. Eamon de Valera, most famously, escaped death for reasons that are still not clear, while the sentence on O’Hanrahan was justified by nothing more than the statement that he had been ‘employed at the office of the Headquarters of the Irish Volunteers’, was ‘one of the most active members of that body’, and had been ‘arrested in uniform and armed’.⁵² Dozens of others would have fulfilled these criteria. (Indeed, since O’Hanrahan had been in the Jacob’s garrison, he was less likely than most to have been involved in any fatal action.)

The simplest explanation, of course, is that the inconsistencies were due to the irregularity of the available evidence. As Maxwell noted, ‘naturally we have to depend largely on police reports’. He had to weigh the need for solid evidence against the need for despatch. That he was not blind to the political ramifications of the military trials was clear in two particularly tetchy cases. The first was that of Eoin MacNeill. Maxwell told French on 4 May that he was ‘a little perplexed what to do about this man McNeill, he is no doubt one of the most prominent in the movement’. Though Maxwell accepted that ‘he did try and stop the actual rebellion taking place when it did’, Maxwell evidently wanted to convict him, and reflected gloomily, ‘the priests and politicians will try and save him’.⁵³ Many soldiers took the view that the countermanding order was a ruse to put the authorities off guard, and believed that MacNeill was ultimately responsible for the rebellion; but the absence of any direct evidence was a big problem. The steps taken to secure a conviction speak volumes about the weakness of the British system in Ireland. While the soldiers might be forgiven for their vague assumption of MacNeill’s responsibility, it was more surprising that the chief intelligence officer, Major Price, was convinced of it. When MacNeill went to military headquarters to try to secure an interview with Maxwell, Price excitedly gripped his arm and declared ‘I am arresting you on the charge of being a rebel.’ His interrogation of MacNeill revealed a farrago of misinformation that would have been laughable had its implications not been so serious. ‘Price made a number of statements’, MacNeill recorded, ‘designed to convey the impression that he was in possession of much inner knowledge.’ The actual impression, however, ‘was distinctly the contrary. In fact, in view of the open character of the Volunteer organization, the ignorance shown by the Intelligence Department was surprising.’54

Maxwell received political direction as early as 3 May that ‘one of the leaders in particular, John McNeile [sic], an ex-professor, should not be shot without reference here’. Why he was singled out in this way is not clear, but the injunction was not necessary. There was no question of shooting MacNeill, though his case raised awkward problems: Maxwell reported after two weeks that ‘the Law Officers advised me that to hold MacNeill’s trial in public would have a most serious effect and would cause danger to the public safety’. As late as 23 May, his chief of staff was grumbling that ‘the McNeill trial is taking longer than we thought, but I hope it will be finished tonight’.⁵⁵ When at last MacNeill was sentenced to life imprisonment, it was on comparatively trivial charges – eight separate charges of attempting to spread disaffection, and four of acting in a way likely to prejudice recruiting. All the same, Maxwell sent the proceedings to Asquith with the suggestion that ‘we ought to make a great deal of them public’. He believed that the evidence proved that if the arms shipment had got through, MacNeill would have backed the rebellion and it would have been much more formidable.⁵⁶

The Markievicz case raised a different set of issues. During the rebellion, as Maxwell reported, seventy-four women surrendered or were arrested. From the start, the soldiers were uncomfortable with them. Most of those who surrendered, including the emotional Countess Markievicz, were quietly spirited away in motor cars rather than being forced (or permitted) to march into detention with the men. Special prison accommodation was found for them. Maxwell fretted about ‘all those silly little girls’, and as soon as the capital courts martial were done with, he sent a legal officer to sort them out. William Wylie, a barrister and 2nd Lieutenant in the Trinity College OTC, who was serving as a junior Assistant Provost Marshal with the 177th Brigade during Easter week, had been co-opted by Maxwell’s Deputy Adjutant-General, Byrne, to conduct the prosecution of the leading rebels. The day Connolly and Ceannt (‘the most dignified of any of the accused’) were executed, Wylie went to interview the ‘girls’ in Richmond Barracks. ‘I wisely got the C.-in-C. to give me a chit; the officer in charge turned out to be a major of the old and peppery kind who did his damnedest first to keep me out and second to keep the girls in.’ Wylie found the process of interviewing them ‘really amusing. Some of them began by being truculent and ended by being tearful. Others reversed the process.’57

With an effortless display of masculine superiority, he sent the great majority home, ‘putting back’ a few who were ‘older, better educated and real believers in a free Ireland’. Maxwell reported to London on 11 May that he had released sixty-two of them with a caution, and detained eighteen ‘prominent and dangerous’ women, whom he had placed ‘in the female portion of Mountjoy prison where they can receive suitable attention’. He proposed to deport eight of these, including Kathleen Lynn, ‘B. Lorerench Mullen’ (Madeleine Ffrench Mullen), Helena Molony and Winifred Carney (whose deadliest weapon had been her typewriter). But this turned out to be harder than he thought. After three weeks of negotiations with the Home Office, he decided to release another five (including Ffrench Mullen), and deport only seven. But it was made clear to him that the Prime Minister ‘did not desire these deportations to be carried out’. He explained again at the end of May that ‘in view of their sex I considered that it would be desirable that they should be granted their liberty, but at the same time I could not allow them to be at large in this country’.⁵⁸ On 5 June he was still waiting for arrangements to be made to receive the rest in England – Countess Plunkett was to be deported under DRR 14B to Oxford, Kathleen Lynn to Bath, and five others (Winifred Carney, Marie Perolz, Helena Molony, Breda Foley and Ellen Ryan) to Aylesbury.⁵⁹

None of these, of course, was quite so ‘prominent and dangerous’ as the colourful Constance Markievicz, the only woman to be court-martialled. Like everything else about her, her trial was a sensation. Wylie, the prosecuting officer, noticed the court president, Brigadier-General Blackader ‘getting out his revolver and putting it on the table beside him’ as she was called in. Her theatrical spirit was catching. What followed was less edifying, at least according to the rumour that reached Elsie Mahaffy, the daughter of the Provost of Trinity College. ‘All her “dash” and “go” left her’ – ‘she utterly broke down, cried and sobbed and tried to incite pity in General Blackadder [sic]: it was a terrible scene – the gaunt wreck of a once lovely lady.’60 Where the rumour started we can only guess. It may have been with Wylie himself. In a private memoir written for his daughter during the Second World War, Wylie recollected that Markievicz had ‘curled up completely’.

‘I am only a woman, you cannot shoot a woman, you must not shoot a woman.’ She never stopped moaning the whole time she was in the Court room … We were all slightly disgusted. She had been preaching rebellion to a lot of silly boys, death and glory, die for your country etc., and yet she was literally crawling. I won’t say any more, it revolts me still.⁶¹

Unsurprisingly, none of this appeared in the formal record of the trial, where she was recorded as stating, ‘I went out to fight for Ireland and it doesn’t matter what happens to me. I did what I thought was right and I stand by it.’ Some historians regard Wylie’s account as a malicious fabrication – though, if so, his motive is obscure.⁶²

But no matter how she had behaved, the question was whether she should share the fate of her male comrades. The soldiers took a robust view: Maxwell thought her ‘bloodguilty and dangerous’; she was ‘a woman who has forfeited the privileges of her sex’. Although she had ‘a following who see something to admire in her’, or perhaps because of that, ‘we can’t allow our soldiers to be shot down by such like’. French told him, ‘Personally I agree with you – she ought to be shot.’⁶³ But for Asquith and the Cabinet this was an impossibility. From the start they reiterated their insistence that no woman should be executed, and the court martial, while finding her guilty and sentencing her to death, accordingly recommended mercy ‘solely & only on account of her sex’. Maxwell commuted her sentence to penal servitude for life.

In the final count, Maxwell commuted all but fifteen of the ninety death sentences handed down by his courts martial (replacing them by prison sentences ranging from six months to life).64 He strove to be just, and believed that the whole trial process had been fair. He maintained to Redmond on 12 May, ‘I am giving everyone all opportunities of proving their innocence.’⁶⁵ This must be doubted. One or two capital sentences were delayed by a few hours while the police sought witnesses requested by the accused, but the speed of the trial process rested on the absence of any defence counsel. Wylie objected to this at the outset, and also urged that the trials should be held in public, but the Attorney General, James Campbell, sent him off with a flea in his ear. ‘He wouldn’t hear of it, said he would give them no public advertisement, that he wouldn’t be satisfied unless 40 of them were shot.’ Wylie declared that he ‘would defend them to the best of my ability and bring out every damn thing I could in their favour’. The absence of a formal defence was normal procedure in military courts, but this was unlikely to improve the public image of the process. There was a suspicion – amply borne out by the evidence presented to the courts martial – that secrecy was imposed to cover the weakness of the cases made by the prosecution.

Interestingly, when Maxwell prepared a political dossier to explain his decisions, he included a lot of intelligence material that had not been offered in evidence to the courts. He also redrafted several times a public statement of the fundamental justification for his policy. This was that ‘the gravity of the rebellion’, its ‘connection with German intrigue and propaganda’, and the resulting ‘great loss of life and destruction of property’ made it ‘imperative to inflict the most severe sentences on the known organizers of this detestable rising and on those commanders who took an active part in the actual fighting’. It was hoped that ‘these examples will be sufficient to act as a deterrent to intriguers and to bring home to them that the murder of His Majesty’s liege subjects or other acts calculated to imperil the safety of the Realm will not be tolerated’.⁶⁶ The deliberate adoption of ponderous legal language (an earlier draft read more simply, ‘We hope to deter by these examples & make the intriguers realise that we will not tolerate murder of loyal subjects, or any acts against the safety of the Realm’) may have indicated a certain unease.

Whether or not she feared death, Markievicz surely expected to be condemned. Pearse certainly did, and so did MacDonagh (though Wylie thought his death ‘particularly unnecessary’). Indeed many, not just the leaders, feared the worst. As they marched to Richmond Barracks the surrendered rebels were treated to lurid warnings about the digging of mass graves. But some seemed oddly optimistic. Joseph Plunkett himself wrote to Grace Gifford, ‘I have no notion what they intend to do with me, but I have heard a rumour that I am to be sent to England.’ No doubt Plunkett was trying to reassure his fiancée, though in these extreme circumstances deception would hardly have been kind. He may well have been genuinely uncertain; as he remarked to her, ‘We have not had one word of news from outside since Monday 24th April, except wild rumour.’ His verbal style was certainly relaxed; he went on conversationally, ‘Listen, if I live it might be possible to get the Church to marry us by proxy – there is such a thing but it is very difficult.’ He ended ‘I am very happy.’ The outcome of this was to provide the rebellion with its great romantic icon, the wedding of Plunkett and Gifford in the chapel at Kilmainham gaol a few hours before his execution. This would make her a nationalist heroine, with her own ‘instant traditional’ style ballad (‘God bless thee, Grace Plunkett, thy faithful devotion / Has won the great heart of a Nation to thee …’).67

Grace had just converted to Catholicism: she claimed to be uninterested in politics – though she had been present at the foundation of the Inghinidhe, she was not an active member of Cumann na mBan – and it was their shared religious enthusiasm that brought her and Plunkett together. Their relationship had a chummy rather than romantic feel. In the week before the rebellion, she did not visit his house. On Easter Saturday, the day before they were due to be married (alongside Plunkett’s sister Philomena), she heard nothing from him about the impending jolt to their plans. On Sunday she did not see or apparently hear from him. Though the intention was that ‘I was to go out with them in the Rising, I did not.’ Thirty-three years on, she could not recall why. During Easter week she had two notes from him, one from the GPO, the last from ‘somewhere in Moore Street’. He does not seem to have tried to dissuade her from going to the GPO, and she does not seem to have thought of trying to do so. When she eventually felt drawn (by a psychic force) to visit him in Kilmainham, she was ‘never left alone with him – even after the marriage ceremony’ (though the guards thoughtfully removed his handcuffs while he was in the prison chapel). She rejected the widely reported tale that they had been left together ‘for a few hours’.68 When she returned on the evening before his execution, ‘a man stood there with his watch in his hand, and said “Ten minutes”’. To her annoyance, ‘Min Ryan and Father Brown were allowed to stay a long time with Sean MacDermott’ that evening. But she seems, on her account, to have left without making a fuss.⁶⁹ According to one of the military guards, she was smiling.

James Connolly’s situation was different from the rest: seriously but not fatally wounded, he posed an awkward question for the authorities. Should they wait until he was well enough to be shot? Maxwell avoided such grim irony by his absolute insistence that he be tried. When Wylie demurred, Maxwell said ‘The court can be convened in the hospital.’⁷⁰ Absurdly enough, Connolly was found ‘not guilty’ on one of the two charges brought – ‘attempting to cause disaffection among the civilian population’. There was no political consultation. It later transpired that ‘nothing was known in London’ of Connolly’s wounded condition until a question was asked in parliament. His execution ‘was a purely local affair’.⁷¹ But the impact of the ghastly execution procedure, in which Connolly had to be propped up in a chair in order to be shot, was more than local, and it was not short-lived. The politicians’ lack of interest in Connolly’s fate, in sharp contrast with the concern for MacNeill, raises interesting questions about their grasp of the situation.

By the time Asquith arrived in Ireland on 12 May, serious political damage had already been done. And while executions could be suspended, other damaging proceedings would linger on. Two key events began to be seen as defining the nature of the military regime. Dillon launched his 11 May tirade by pointing out that the Prime Minister ‘never heard anything about’ the shooting of Frank Sheehy-Skeffington until the end of the first week of May.

A more lurid light on military law in Ireland could not possibly be imagined than that a man is to be shot in Portobello Barracks – it must have been known to at least 300 or 400 military men, the whole city of Dublin knew it … and the military authorities turn round and say they knew nothing whatever about it until the 6th of May.

Dillon charged that nothing would ever have come out ‘if Skeffington had not been one of the leading citizens in Dublin’; Dubliners could hardly be blamed for believing that ‘dozens of other men have been summarily shot in the barracks’. These ‘horrible rumours’ were ‘doing untold and indescribable mischief’.72

The killing of Sheehy-Skeffington raised two grave issues. One was the behaviour of Bowen-Colthurst, which seemed to confirm the worst fears about how martial law powers could be abused by local military officers. (Maxwell, demonstrating the ‘insight into racial characteristics’ that had recommended him to Kitchener, said in mitigation that Colthurst was ‘a hot-headed Irishman’.) The other was the tardy response of the higher military authorities, which looked suspiciously like a cover-up. The authorities in turn faced two issues. The first was what judicial procedure to apply. Though few soldiers (apart from the eccentric Sir Francis Vane, whose reward was a sudden lack of military employment) showed much remorse for Skeffington’s death, none questioned the illegality of Colthurst’s action.⁷³ The problem was that, in the opinion of the Judge Advocate General’s office, even if he was on active service, he could not be tried by a military court for a criminal offence committed in the UK. On 19 May, two days after this opinion was reached, a high-powered legal conference was convened in London by the Lord Chief Justice, with the Solicitor-General and the Director of Public Prosecutions present as well as the Irish Attorney-General and Maxwell’s DAG, Brigadier Byrne. They decided that a new DOR regulation should be drafted to permit civil offences to be tried by court martial. While it was being drafted, however, Tim Healy started another alarm by drawing the government’s attention to Section 162 of the Army Act, ‘from which we were somewhat concerned to learn’, as the DPP told Byrne, ‘that a trial by court martial would not be a bar to a second trial in a Civil Court’. Since the Law Officers said that to leave ‘such a contingency even remotely possible’ was ‘not to be thought of’, the draft had to be adjusted again to obviate this.⁷⁴ It was sent to Dublin for promulgation on 22 May.

Unfortunately, when the Lords Justices of Appeal in Ireland saw it, they were unimpressed. They could ‘find nothing to authorise the King to interfere with the trial of any offence, except an offence against the Regulations’, nor could they find ‘any authority to make a regulation depriving the civil courts of their power to deal with all offenders against the criminal law.’ Murder was very definitely a criminal offence. As James Campbell, the Irish Attorney-General, pointed out, this would mean that the new regulation was ultra vires ‘in so far as it seeks to exclude the jurisdiction of the civil courts in cases of persons subject to Military Law who are to be tried for offences other than offences against the Regulations’. Things looked bad. But he concluded more encouragingly after ‘the fullest consideration’ that the Regulation was not really necessary after all ‘for the Skeffington trial and similar cases’. They could be tried under the existing provisions of the Army Act either by general court martial or field general court martial.75 In effect, Campbell simply reversed the original Judge Advocate’s opinion. Then the English Law officers came to the same conclusion, though by a significantly different route, holding that ‘the main object of the regulation is to prevent the jeopardy which would be caused to the public peace and safety by a civil trial’. The Irish Law Officers’ opinion that ‘the delay, excitement and popular agitation which would result from a civil trial of this case would possibly lead to disturbance’ was decisive.⁷⁶

Now at last the court martial could go ahead; but this was just the beginning of the problem.⁷⁷ Asquith had insisted from the start that because of ‘the exceptional character of the Skeffington case, the interest and anxiety which it excites in Parliament and elsewhere’, the ‘Court Martial proceedings should be open to the public and press’.⁷⁸ But his hope that this would ‘make clear that it was adequately and impartially dealt with’ was not borne out. Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington’s solicitor, Henry Lemass, told John Dillon that the court martial was unacceptable: they were permitted to attend it, but not intervene. ‘We fear this Court-Martial may be construed as fulfilment of the Prime Minister’s promise to hold a full public inquiry.’ At best it might serve as a preliminary hearing, ‘enabling us to elucidate what happened after the arrest of Mr Skeffington, as to which we are absolutely in the dark’.⁷⁹ After the court martial found Colthurst guilty but insane, Lemass bombarded Asquith and Maxwell with complaints about the inadequate evidence presented to it.80 Asquith grasped the damaging potential of the whole issue, and a Royal Commission of Inquiry was set up in August, chaired by Sir John Simon.

This concluded that the problem lay in the misunderstanding of martial law. Simon reiterated that the proclamation of martial law did not ‘in itself confer upon officers or soldiers any new powers’. Yet Colthurst had clearly thought it did, and he was not alone; tellingly, ‘the young officer who was left at Portobello Bridge while Captain Bowen-Colthurst went forward’ (to attack Alderman Kelly’s shop) had seen ‘nothing “strange” in the order that he was to shoot Mr Sheehy-Skeffington in the event of anything happening’ to Bowen-Colthurst’s party. Simon gravely insisted that ‘the shooting of unarmed and unresisting civilians without trial’ was murder, whether martial law had been proclaimed or not.⁸¹ Predictably enough, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington was unimpressed by what was ‘largely a whitewashing report’. Although it was ‘valuable for its strictures on martial law’, she thought, ‘it does not fasten the blame on the real culprits, the military authorities’.⁸² Certainly the authorities would have been relieved by Simon’s acceptance that Major Rosborough was not at fault in failing to prevent the murders, or in failing to place Bowen-Colthurst under arrest afterwards. This aspect of the case had been their primary concern.⁸³

The formidable Mrs Skeffington remained a thorn in the side of the authorities, pursuing her demand for the two large trunks, attaché cases and portfolios (containing Sheehy-Skeffington’s papers), and the stock of household linen that Bowen-Colthurst had removed in his armed raid on her house in Ranelagh on Friday evening. She raised the question of the financial value of her husband’s manuscripts, and insisted to Dillon that the whole issue must continue to be pursued. ‘It was taken for granted by everyone that there would be a debate in Parliament in connexion with the infamies of Martial Law as revealed in the Report.’⁸⁴ Even without this, the memory of the Portobello killings remained a potent source of anti-government feeling. Yet the army may have done worse things still in Easter week. Whether or not Bowen-Colthurst’s plea of insanity was accepted, the authorities could plausibly portray him as a rogue individual. The allegation that several civilians had been summarily killed in North King Street suggested a much wider indiscipline, perhaps even a deliberate policy of exemplary violence.

The charge that thirteen innocent civilians had been shot out of hand by troops of the 2/6th South Staffordshire regiment during the fighting in North King Street was addressed by Maxwell in his first full report on the rebellion, on 26 May.

No doubt in districts where the fighting was fiercest, parties of men under the great provocation of being shot at from front and rear, seeing their comrades fall from the fire of snipers, burst into suspected houses and killed such male members as were found.

It was ‘perfectly possible’ that some were innocent, but, he maintained, they could have left their houses had they so wished; and ‘the number of such incidents that have been brought to notice is happily few’.85 Allegations were being ‘most carefully enquired into’, but Maxwell held that ‘under the circumstances the troops as a whole behaved with the greatest restraint’. The defensive tone was unmistakable; and Maxwell privately told Kitchener that there were ‘one or two other cases’ to be looked into.⁸⁶ French did his best to reassure Maxwell that ‘“regrettable incidents” such as those you refer to are absolutely unavoidable in such a business as this’, and he agreed that ‘the only wonder is there have been so few of them’. ‘You must not think too much about what goes on in Parliament’, French added with feeling; ‘We soldiers have always to put up with that.’⁸⁷

The military court of inquiry into the North King Street killings opened in late May, a week or so before the Colthurst trial. But considerably less care and resources were lavished on these proceedings, and it soon became clear that no steps had been taken to prevent military witnesses from being posted out of Ireland in the interim. Within these limits, there seems no reason to doubt that the courts – presided over by the commander of the 177th Brigade, Colonel Maconchy – were conducted with reasonable care.⁸⁸ But Maconchy was naturally loyal to his subordinates; he thought ‘the South Staffords a quiet and very respectable set of men’ and his conclusion, that no direct responsibility for any of the deaths could be apportioned to any specific soldier, did not look entirely convincing.⁸⁹ Maxwell’s verdict was predictably more pugnacious: in the case of the two men killed at No. 177, for instance, he concluded that ‘the responsibility for their death rests with those resisting His Majesty’s troops in the execution of their duty’. In the case of the four men killed at No. 27, he impatiently noted that ‘the women concerned have been given every opportunity of identifying the men they allege were last seen with these four men. They cannot do so.’ He concluded that he could ‘obtain no evidence that soldiers killed these four men’, and ‘no evidence as to who buried them in the yard’.90 Surprisingly, Asquith, a former barrister, told the House of Commons in July that he ‘had himself read the evidence taken by the courts of inquiry, and was of opinion that further enquiry would not be likely to lead to any different result’.

We now know that the Prime Minister had significantly different advice on the question of responsibility – an evaluation that went to the heart of the military regime in Ireland. Sir Edward Troup, the senior Home Office civil servant and a veteran of many disputes about military aid to the civil power, prepared a careful assessment of the military inquiry proceedings for the Prime Minister’s benefit. Although he took the view that the majority of verdicts could be sustained (usually because of the lack of reliable evidence of any kind), in one case – that of James Moore – there was no doubt that ‘if the evidence were published there would be a demand that [Sergeant Floods] should be tried for murder’. In other cases it seemed ‘that the soldiers did not accurately distinguish between refusing to make prisoners and shooting immediately prisoners they had made’. There was no evidence that the soldiers were ‘exasperated or reckless’, rather the problem was that they ‘had orders not to take any prisoners, which they took to mean that they were to shoot anyone whom they believed to be an active rebel’. ‘The root of the mischief’, Troup concluded, was this order: in itself it may have been justifiable, but ‘it should have been made clear that it did not mean that an unarmed rebel might be shot after he had been taken prisoner: still less did it mean that a person taken on mere suspicion could be shot without trial’. His advice was unequivocal: it would be ‘undesirable’ to publish the evidence. Though it had been ‘fairly and carefully’ taken, ‘there are many points that could be used for the purpose of hostile propaganda, and I have no doubt its publication would be followed by a strong demand for a further inquiry’. And ‘nothing but harm’ could come of this.91

The issue of publication of the capital court-martial proceedings would smoulder on into 1917. Asquith himself promised in parliament that they would be published, and in mid-November 1916 the government repeated that arrangements were being made to do this. But when the military legal authorities were asked to provide the copies, they stalled.⁹² The Adjutant General, Macready, suggested that since the lives of witnesses would be in jeopardy if their names were made public, ‘the whole matter is one for decision by the cabinet’. Asquith clearly still felt that his pledges were ‘too definite to get out of’, but thought that the names of witnesses at risk could be omitted from the published records.⁹³ But Macready had unerringly touched a sensitive nerve. After Lloyd George replaced Asquith as prime minister, the government responded to repeated parliamentary questions by saying that the whole issue was ‘a question of policy’. The military legal authorities stepped up the pressure to maintain secrecy. They argued that publication would imply that Maxwell had been wrong to hold the trials in camera, and would certainly betray the understanding on which witnesses had testified, even if it did not actually endanger their lives.⁹⁴

The War Office also admitted that some of the evidence was ‘extremely thin’, while other parts would not play well in public (in Ceannt’s case, for instance, the record showed that one of the witnesses summoned – MacDonagh – was ‘not available as he was shot that morning’).⁹⁵ General Macready then raised the stakes even higher. ‘The inevitable result of publication’ would be that nationalists would ‘urge that the sole reason for trial in camera was that the authorities intended to execute certain of the Sinn Feiners whether there was evidence against them or not’. In his ‘humble judgement’, this argument ‘would be extremely difficult to meet successfully’. And Macready, who would have been military governor of Ulster if the March 1914 crisis had broken (and who would later direct the attempt to suppress the IRA campaign in 1920–21), added a still more ominous warning. Such publicity would make any ‘successful and hasty suppression of rebellion’ in the future much more difficult, and indeed ‘I doubt that any general officer would consent to undertake the repression of rebellion without the assurance that in all cases where he might deem it necessary to administer justice in secrecy that such secrecy should be maintained.’96

The political vacuum of May 1916 was also to linger on, with baleful consequences. After Birrell and Nathan resigned, followed more reluctantly by Wimborne, the Irish Executive was paralysed. ‘In my humble judgment’, Maxwell told French (with doubtless the same humility as Macready), ‘the Government of Ireland is rotten from A to Z.’ Its mainstay, the RIC, was ‘a farce – a magnificent body of men certainly, but singularly out of sympathy with the people’. There was ‘too much reporting & nothing happening, because no one has authority to act on even trivial things’.⁹⁷ Asquith sprang his visit to Ireland on the night of 11–12 May in part because he could not find anyone to succeed Birrell as Chief Secretary. He had immediately cast about among his Liberal colleagues such as Montagu and Runciman, none of whom wanted the job. (Montagu pleaded ‘his own Jewish race, his lack of physical courage and interest in the Irish race’.)⁹⁸ Simon was unavailable. Asquith fought shy of Unionist pressure to install Walter Long, a former Chief Secretary and a persistent influence on Unionist thinking about Ireland. He had toyed with a return to the nineteenth-century pattern by installing Lord Crewe as Viceroy with a Cabinet seat and ‘some underling’ as Chief Secretary, but Redmond was against it. He sent over a new Under-Secretary, Sir Robert Chalmers, to get a grip of the administration.

But he was ‘in despair for a Chief Secretary’.⁹⁹ He decided to take the job on himself for the time being, and the visit to Ireland gave substance to this. But the problem was not just the limited pool of political talent. Asquith agreed that the whole structure of the Irish government was rotten. The Viceroyalty had ‘become a costly and futile anachronism’, and he had ‘come very clearly to the conclusion that no successor ought to be appointed’ to Wimborne. The ‘fiction of the Chief Secretaryship’, another key part of the problem, would also ‘disappear’. ‘There must’, Asquith insisted on 21 May, ‘be a single Minister controlling and responsible for Irish administration.’¹⁰⁰ Such reconstruction needed time, however, and he also launched the classic mechanism for buying it, a Royal Commission of Inquiry. Some inquiry into the causes of the rebellion was of course inevitable, but the Royal Commission chaired by Lord Hardinge that began its hearings on 18 May (while Asquith was still in Dublin) embraced a comprehensive review of the administrative system. ‘Such deep ignorance I never heard as they displayed’, noted an observer who attended one of the hearings in the Shelbourne Hotel.101 The Commission was clearly taken aback by the extensive evidence of the Irish government’s supine tolerance of the armed militias. Its report, published on 26 June, held that ‘the main cause of the rebellion’ was that for several years Ireland ‘had been administered on the principle that it was safer and more expedient to leave the law in abeyance if collision with any faction of the Irish people could thereby be avoided’. While it avoided direct criticism of the police, it sharply identified the weakness of the intelligence system. Its judgement on the ‘Irish system of government’ as a whole mirrored the Prime Minister’s: it was ‘anomalous in quiet times, and almost unworkable in times of crisis’.¹⁰² Yet immediately after the commission’s report, Asquith restored the old system. At the end of June he finally appointed a new Chief Secretary, Henry Duke, a Unionist fellow-lawyer; and next month he allowed Wimborne to return as Viceroy. Futility and fiction were thus both restored. Maybe this was intended as a caretaker regime, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that he was too tired, or too distracted by the war, to carry through his intention of serious reform.

For three months, therefore, Maxwell remained – or appeared – the effective ruler of Ireland. At the time, Asquith seems to have seen little wrong with this situation. ‘On the whole – except the Skeffington case – there have been fewer bad blunders than one might have expected with the soldiery for a whole week in exclusive charge’, he noted quite cheerfully. During his visit he confined his intervention to the settlement of compensation claims and the demand to comb out the innocent prisoners more energetically. Compensation was of course a major political question. The former Treasury Secretary, Sir Robert Chalmers, took a robust view of the issue – ‘personally I would not concede anything whatever’ – but seems to have found Asquith’s ruling in favour of ex gratia grants acceptable. On 16 May the government accepted ‘the same liability as would have fallen on insurance companies if the risk had been covered by policies in force at the time of the recent disturbances’. (Looting might be ‘deemed to be burning’, but ‘no consequential damages of any kind’ would be covered.) Chalmers was alarmed, however, when Herbert Samuel followed Asquith to Dublin and seemed to be more flexible than the prime minister. (Chalmers gratuitously opined that ‘Jews are at a discount here and ’Erb will be viewed with suspicion among the warm-hearted Irishry’ – adding ‘I hope no more Cabinet ministers are en route.’) Privately he warned that ‘this is a big thing and the C of Ex [Chancellor of the Exchequer] may be let in for millions beyond what has been conceded, if the PM is not firm in upholding what he approved.’103 We may note that one small segment of this threatening mountain was a claim by the Norwich Union Insurance Society for the £500 they had paid out on Frank Sheehy-Skeffington’s life policy.¹⁰⁴

Asquith tackled the issue of the detainees by his visit to Richmond Barracks. In a rather odd public relations exercise (exasperated Unionists like Lord Midleton were much less polite about it) he fraternized amiably with the suspected rebels, and issued a bizarre instruction that they should be given the best food possible, ‘regardless of expense’. As a result they got a better diet than the troops guarding them. (This provoked ‘some grumbling’ among the Sherwood Foresters.)¹⁰⁵ One of the prisoners cheerfully wrote that they were ‘better off than at the Gresham [Hotel]’, adding ‘I have never spent a more enjoyable holiday in my life.’ Another fondly recalled ‘eggs and ham for breakfast, tins of jam, genuine butter and porridge (if anyone liked it). For dinner roast beef or perhaps mutton and plenty of vegetables (far more than we could eat), more bread, jam, butter and tea.’ Carrying their meals from the cookhouse to their quarters they were ‘besieged by hungry soldiers begging hunks of cheese or bread or anything that could be conveniently handled’.¹⁰⁶ Asquith evidently enjoyed his time in Ireland; he was pleasantly surprised to find little if any hostility. ‘I myself went one day partly on foot through a considerable crowd, and was received … with remarkable warmth.’¹⁰⁷ He allowed himself to think that a rosier future could be secured by more frequent royal visits to Ireland. The viceroys, even with the best of intentions, had been ‘incapable of evoking and stimulating the latent sense of personal loyalty and devotion which is inherent in the Irish temper and character’. Indeed, he immediately went to see the king and got him to agree ‘to arrange for an annual residence of himself, the Queen, and the Court in Ireland’.

Such a sanguine view would very soon come to look implausible. Optimism was waning even in the week after Asquith returned to England. Though Maxwell thought that the PM’s visit ‘has done a lot of good’, he added that ‘things would have got very nearly back to normal’ – if only ‘Dillon had not made that unfortunate speech’.108 Ministers started to worry about the situation in the USA, where criticism of the army’s repressive methods was sharper than in Ireland itself. Asquith suggested that Maxwell give an interview to an American journalist explaining his policy. (The practised Maurice Bonham-Carter, the PM’s private secretary, explained to the general that the ‘interview’ was ‘almost a matter of form 10 minutes or a quarter of an hour just to give the journalist some slight acquaintance with his subject’. The ‘substance of what is wished to appear’ would take the form of a written statement ‘which he will translate into his own words’.)¹⁰⁹ Maxwell duly explained that the courts martial had been ‘absolutely fair’, and the officers acting as judges ‘in all cases inclined to leniency’. If any innocent people had been arrested, this was because ‘suppressing a rebellion must be quick. The greater the delay, the greater the loss of life and property.’ The army had done its duty, and deserved praise rather than blame. Even before the interview could be published, however, the War Office was beginning to feel uneasy. ‘From secret sources’, wrote Colonel Brade on 8 June, ‘we are receiving much evidence to shew that there is a strong public opinion against our methods of handling the Irish rebellion.’ This was fostered by ‘our own silence as to the actual facts, coupled with the publication of the proceedings of the Court Martial on Sheehy Skeffington’. Brade worried that the language of the official despatches so far ‘looks as though we were glossing over a bad record’.¹¹⁰