On the 3rd of August1916 Sir Roger Casement was hanged for high treason for his part in trying to smuggle German weapons to Ireland for the Easter Rising of 1916. He was the last knight of the realm to befall such a fate in the United Kingdom.
Roger Casement was born on the 1at of September 1864 in Sandycove, Co. Dublin, the son of Captain Roger Casement of the British Army and Anne Jephson from Mallow Co. Cork1. Roger’s father and his family were natives of Co. Antrim and were of Ulster Protestant stock. Roger was raised as a Protestant by his father. When he was five years old however his mother secretly baptised him and his siblings (Charlie, Tom and Agnes) into the Catholic faith while on holidays in Aberystoyth, Wales. Like his country, Casement was a
study in contradictions, he has variously been called “a microcosm of Ireland:”
Dubliner, Ulsterman, Catholic, Protestant, poet, and patriot.
Orphaned at a young age, he he was raised by his uncle, John Casement, in Co. Antrim.He was a child of promising intellect who wrote poetry and immersed
himself in Celtic myths. Unwilling to accept the charity of relatives,
Casement left school at 15 to work for a shipping company in Liverpool.
He had always dreamed of far-off places and now the handsome,
hardworking clerk was soon promoted to be the British Consul, serving in
West Africa.
Word of the brilliant Casement had reached the British Foreign
Office. So, too, had word of the atrocities in King Leopold II’s private
fiefdom, the Belgian Congo. Leopold, a staunch imperialist was
perpetuating genocide there, eventually killing 10 million natives. He
became, thanks to Congo resources, the richest man in Europe. The
Foreign Office sent Casement into the Congo to investigate, photograph,
and bear witness.He took the testimony of Africans who told stories that were simply shocking , tales of , murder, whippings, maiming and rapes. The
collection of ivory and rubber was not done by farming but by a forced
terror system. The local people were given quotas to bring in rubber
from the forest. If they failed to meet them they were tortured or their
families held at ransom and abused. They were not bought, like slaves,
but simply seized in a systematic and barbaric way.
Casement published his report in 1904 and then campaigned with others
for change via the Congo Reform Association. By 1908 the Congo Free
State was replaced by the Belgian Congo and the personal rule of King
Leopold II ended. The hellish conditions in the Congo provide the background to Joseph
Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness. Conrad and Casement met in the
Congo, sharing a flat for a few weeks, with Conrad declaring that
Casement was one of the few decent white men he met in the Congo.
Casement’s courage, compassion and determination were put to further use
when he was asked by the British government to travel to Putanamayo in
Peru to report on the human price of the rubber trade in the Amazon,
where once again human rights and so many lives were being sacrificed
heedlessly for private profit and greed. The Peruvian Amazon Company was
a London-registered enterprise with three British directors, John
Russell Gubbins, a friend of Peruvian President Augusto Leguía; Herbert
Reed, a banker; and Sir John Lister-Kaye, an aristocrat. This forced the
British government to order an investigation into the ruthless search
for rubber, enslavement of indigenous people and terrible atrocities
that came close to wiping them out in a sustained act of ethnocide. Over
100,000 innocent people are thought to have been killed.
All that he witnessed would forever change his
life too. Exploitation and greed, he realized, were business as usual
for empires, including the world’s largest, the British Empire. His
dormant Irish nationalism awoke; he shed his Anglo skin and found the
Irishman underneath. Having sparked the world’s first human rights campaigns, Casement was
awarded one of Great Britain’s highest citations, the Order of St.
Michael and St. George.
But after identifying with the oppressed rather than the oppressor. that same year Roger Casement joined the
Gaelic League and signed, for the first time, his name as Ruairí Mac
Easmainn. The British Empire had forever lost her international hero.. Casement's increasingly radical views ,and an interest in Irish history, and a deepening
critique of European Imperialism, that drew him ever more firmly into
the nationalist fold. In 1913 he resigned from the Foreign Office and he became deeply involved with the Irish
Volunteers, and by the time war broke out in 1914, Casement was in America plotting
with prominent Irish-Americans to secure German support for the Irish
cause.
During World War I, operating on the principle, “
The enemy of my
enemy is my friend,” Casement and Devoy met with a German diplomat. They
promised Ireland would remain neutral if Germany helped the coming
Easter Rising by supplying guns and expertise. In Germany, Casement
tried to secure arms and persuade Irish P.O.W.s to form an Irish
Brigade. After two years, both initiatives were disappointments. There
was no brigade – Irish soldiers wouldn’t dishonor their oath to the King
– and Germany could only deliver some 20,000 guns, a fraction of the
weaponry needed. Worse, British Intelligence was intercepting his
messages.
The Easter Rising was imminent. Believing that there were not
sufficient arms for the rebellion, Casement slipped out of Germany by
submarine to warn the leaders. He placed the armaments on a separate
boat, the Aud, flying under a Norwegian flag, which he planned to meet
on the Irish shoreline.
First to arrive was the Aud, but it was ambushed by the waiting British navy and taken to Cork.
Unaware of the plight of the gun-runner, Casement had moved from the
submarine to a dinghy. But this capsized, leaving him to swim onto Banna
Strand in County Kerry.
It was 3:00 a.m., Good Friday, 1916. Once on land, Casement, ill,
drenched, and exhausted, found there was no one to meet him. Still, he
rejoiced:
“I was for one brief spell happy and smiling once more… all round
were primroses and wild violets and the singing of the skylarks in the
air and I was back in Ireland again.”
His happiness was short-lived. Ge was arrested and when the Easter rising began and the Proclamation of the Irish Republic
was read, Casement was in the Tower of London charged with high treason.. .
His trial at the Old Bailey lasted four days and on 29 June was found guilty, stripped of his knighthood and sentenced to death by hanging .
After his sentencing he would deliver one of the greatest political statements of all time that would resonate long after his death.. He
stated, logically – and ironically, since he had a cultured British
accent – that he couldn’t commit treason against England since he wasn’t
an Englishman to begin with. Then he railed against the colonial
system, “
His admirers and friends launched a campaign for clemency, arguing that
he had acted out of conscience and in the interests of his country –
Ireland. Those admirers included George Bernard Shaw, Conan Doyle,
Bishops and politicians. The campaign looked as if it might succeed
until the British government discovered
and published salacious extracts ftom his diary, that
outlined his sexual exploits, in order to discredit him with the British
and Irish public. The Republican movement was a deeply socially
conservative body instilled with Catholic morality, if anything even
more homophobic than the British. It was horrified by the accusations,
denying them as true but reacting by downplaying Casement’s role as a
great Irish martyr. Members of Casement’s
family, Irish Republicans and others have claimed in the past that the
Casement diaries are forgeries, but most historians to day believe them
to be genuine. Whether they are genuine or forgeries, there is no
doubting the effect the extracts had on public opinion in 1916: But for Casement judging by his diary, the acceptance of
homosexuality was an aspect of African society and
unlike other empire-builders in the field, he saw the African not as a
body to exploit but as an equal to love..
After receiving the last rites of the Catholic Church, Roger Casement
was executed on August 3, 1916, at Pentonville Prison at 9 a.m the sixteenth and final leader of the
Rising to be executed. Standing in the gallows Casement was
asked by the governor if he had any final words. He did,' Bury me in Ireland'.' John Ellis, his executioner, called him "the bravest man it ever fell to my unhappy lot to execute".He was the last knight of the realm to befall such a fate in the United Kingdom.
Even after his execution his corpse was violated, his anus “examined” to
provide further proof of his “perversity.” His body was buried on the
prison grounds, and the Irish government and his family spent decades
demanding the right to return his body to Ireland. British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s government
denied that wish and released the remains only on condition that they
could not be brought into Northern Ireland, as “the government feared
that a reburial there could provoke Catholic celebrations and Protestant
reactions.”
His death would inspire W.B. Yeats to write, “The Ghost of Roger Casement” – in which the poet
sees Casement’s spirit coming across the sea, knocking on the door,
still wanting to come home:
The Ghost of Roger Casement - W.B. Yeats
O WHAT has made that sudden noise?
What on the threshold stands?
It never crossed the sea because
John Bull and the sea are friends;
But this is not the old sea
Nor this the old seashore.
What gave that roar of mockery,
That roar in the sea's roar?
The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.
John Bull has stood for Parliament,
A dog must have his day,
The country thinks no end of him,
For he knows how to say,
At a beanfeast or a banquet,
That all must hang their trust
Upon the British Empire,
Upon the Church of Christ.
The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.
John Bull has gone to India
And all must pay him heed,
For histories are there to prove
That none of another breed
Has had a like inheritance,
Or sucked such milk as he,
And there's no luck about a house
If it lack honesty.
The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.
I poked about a village church
And found his family tomb
And copied out what I could read
In that religious gloom;
Found many a famous man there;
But fame and virtue rot.
Draw round, beloved and bitter men,
Draw round and raise a shout;
The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.
Casement was late to enter the pantheon of 1916 martyrs,
marginalized, no doubt, by his sexuality. Finally, in 1965, an Irish
military escort removed his remains from the prison graveyard in London
and accompanied them to Ireland for a state funeral. Hundreds of
thousands came to pay him tribute including the very conservative
President de Valera, a veteran of the Easter Rising, who delivered his
eulogy. He lies today in the Heroes section of Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery
where his name, Ruairí Mac Easmainn is carved on a gravestone reading,
in Gaelic, “He died for Ireland.”
As we remember the other brave men and women who fought for Irish independence
against colonial oppression, we must remember and honor this remarkable
man who risked his own life, health and wellbeing to tell the world the
true story of their enslavement, who died in the defense of the Irish
people, isolated, alone and reviled by so many because of his sexuality. Now at least recognised as an Irish patriot and father of the human rights movement. The lesson of his life remains a vital one: when the status quo is injustice, the right thing to be is a rebel. We should continue .to honor the memory of a great man whose life was cut short by a cruel,
dishonest and vindictive state, and whose own life was dedicated to
others and the fine virtues of true, indivisible, human rights.
