Roger Casement
1864 - 1916
Photo: Roger Casement
At the time of the Census in 1911 Roger Casement was in Putumayo in Peru.
Roger Casement was born in 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. His parents died when he was young and he was raised by his uncle, John Casement, in Co. Antrim.
After a varied career in West Africa, he entered the British Foreign Service in 1892 and for the next twenty years earned an international humanitarian reputation for his work in exposing the exploitation of natives in the Congo and then in Peru. He exposed a litany of abuses including flogging, mutilation and torture of men, women and children. His humanitarian work gained immense prestige for Britain and won Casement world-wide renown and high honours. His report on the Congo earned him CMG or Order of St. Michael and St. George in 19051, while his work in Peru, which was published in a Parliamentary Report in 1911, was acknowledged with a knighthood. Casement returned from Peru in bad health and in a state of deep distress. According to Hobson, Casement was a sensitive man and the tortures inflicted on native people in the Congo and Peru caused him nightmares and he felt the wrongs done as keenly as if they had been done to people in Ireland. In 1913 he retired from his post.
Before his retirement he had become very interested and involved in Irish Nationalist causes. He was greatly influenced by Alice Stopford Green, a patron of humanitarian movements and an Anglo-Irish enthusiast for the nationalist cause, and also by Bulmer Hobson, both of whom he met in 1904 when home on leave from the Congo2. Roger, Alice and Bulmer worked together to produce an anti-conscription pamphlet in 1905.
Casement was also a member of the Gaelic League for a number of years. He enjoyed the confidence and friendship of Dr. Douglas Hyde, President of the Gaelic League, and many of its leading personalities, including Eoin MacNeill, who was also from Co. Antrim and with whom he was close friends. He hoped it would be possible to persuade the Ulster Unionists to support Irish nationalism but became increasingly radicalised by their opposition to Home Rule. According to a Witness Statement by Bulmer Hobson, Casement “literally gave away everything he had to help the national movement. He raised money to defend prisoners, to feed school children in the Gaeltacht, to finance Gaelic colleges and to keep our small and insolvent newspapers in existence. He sometimes wrote articles for the United Irishman, the Peasant and Irish Freedom3.” He assisted his friend Pádraig Pearse, including with financial help, in the founding of St. Enda’s School in 1908.
Casement’s retirement from work in the Foreign Office however gave him time to devote to nationalist causes. He wrote and published in 1912 in the Irish Review “a monthly literary magazine rounded and edited by his friends Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett articles in which he set forth his views on the right of Ireland to complete independence4”. By the end of 1913 Casement was a member of the Provisional Committee of the Irish Volunteers. He travelled a lot throughout the country, addressing meetings and organising companies of Volunteers. In 1914, along with Alice Greene, he formed a London Committee to raise funds to purchase arms, which he saw as necessary if the Irish Volunteers were to fulfil their role to defend the introduction of Home Rule. “The rifles were bought from a personally subscribed fund of about £4,000 contributed to the two special collectors Roger Casement and The O’Rahilly, both of whom started this fund with £250 of their own private money5”. These arms were purchased and the plan was to import them aboard two yachts, Erskine Childer’s yacht, the Asgard and the Kelpie which was owned by Mary Spring Rice, a cousin of Childer’s wife. The Asgard landed in Howth on 26th July 1914 and the cargo of the Kelpie was transferred to another yacht, the Chotah which landed safely in Co. Wicklow in August 1914. The guns and ammunition were speedily unloaded and distributed.
At this time Casement was in America trying to raise funds for the Irish Volunteers. In his later defence Casement argued that the money raised here was in fact “Irish Gold” as it was raised from Irish men and their descendants. John Devoy, the Clan na Gael leader, was in contact with the German Ambassador in America about the possibility of using German support to overthrow the British in Ireland as war had been declared in 1914. Casement wanted to keep Ireland out of the war and he hoped to stop British Army recruitment in Ireland. Casement arranged to go to Germany and he had three aims: to recruit an Irish brigade from Irish soldiers in the British Army who were being held as prisoners of war in Germany, to secure German support for Irish Independence and to secure arms which would be brought to the Volunteers.
Thomas Clarke sent Robert Monteith to Germany to assist Casement with recruitment and train members of the Irish Brigade. At the Limburg camp only 56 Irish prisoners of war agreed to join the Brigade which was to be trained by the Germans and sent to assist the rebellion in Ireland. In April 1915 Joseph Plunkett was sent to Germany to find out if the German government would support a revolution in Ireland. An ambitious plan, the Ireland Report, was submitted which planned to land a force of 12,000 German soldiers in the West coast of Ireland who would incite a rebellion. The plan aimed for the combined Irish and German forces to defeat the British in Ireland, which would allow the Germans to establish naval bases in Ireland and use German U-boats to cut off British supply routes in the Atlantic. The German government rejected the plan but agreed to send a consignment of weapons to Ireland.
Casement was in poor health while in Germany. He was disillusioned with what he considered an unsatisfactory outcome to his attempts to get the Germans to provide assistance for a Rising. The Germans were agreeing to supply only a small amount of arms and only a few prisoners were willing to join the Irish Brigade. According to Jack Plunkett, his brother Joseph told Casement in Germany that the Rising was fixed for Easter Sunday but Casement wanted to delay it until June6.
Casement had been strongly opposed to a Rising without substantial German military support but decided to go back to Ireland and join the rebellion planned for Easter Sunday. On the 15th of April, 1916 Sir Roger Casement set sail from Wilhelmshaven in a German U-boat heading for Tralee Bay. The U-boat was to meet with a cargo ship, the Libau, off the Kerry coast which was disguised as an existing Norwegian steamer, the Aud. As well as carrying its usual cargo, the Aud also carried machine guns, rifles and ammunition. However the U-boat and the Aud failed to meet and Casement and his companions, Monteith and Bailey, landed in Banna Strand Co. Kerry. Casement was arrested and taken to Tralee Gaol. The Aud was intercepted by the British navy off the southern coast and was scuttled by its captain while it was being escorted to Queenstown, (now Cobh).
According to the Witness Statement of Bernard Reilly, the RIC constable at Ardfert, Co Kerry who was duty at the time, there had been reports of men acting suspiciously in the locality. The RIC went to investigate a boat and found three Amuser pistols and some ammunition. He met Roger Casement who insisted that he was Richard Morton from Buckinghamshire, an Englishman researching a book on St. Brendan. “As I entered the Fort, a man approached me from the shrubbery. He was a tall gentleman. He looked foreign to me and not generally the type one meets in the street. There was nothing unusual about his clothes. He wore a beard and had more or less an aristocratic appearance. I don’t remember that his clothes were wet at that stage7”. A milkmaid Mary Gorman confirmed that Casement was one of the men she had seen earlier that morning.
Monteith and Bailey managed to escaped and got to Tralee. Two Volunteers Austin Stack and Con Collins were arrested while out looking for Casement. Three other Volunteers who were trying to make contact with the German boats by radio, (Con Keating, Charles Monaghan and Donal Sheehan) drove off the Ballykissane pier in the dark and only the driver escaped drowning.
Roger Casement managed to send a message to the IRB leaders very early on Saturday morning. It was an agonised appeal to stop the Rising at all costs as he was convinced the Germans would leave the Volunteers in the lurch.
Casement was taken to the Tower of London and tried for high Treason at the Old Bailey. Many high profile individuals, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, WB Yeats and George Bernard Shaw appealed for a reprieve, especially in light of his human rights work during his time with the British Colonial Service. Before public sympathy could gain any momentum however, copies of diaries, purported to be belonging to Casement, were circulated by British officials. These diaries recorded his alleged homosexual activities with a Norwegian, Alder Christensen, who was employed by Casement as a servant. Public opinion then swayed against Casement, although some believed that these “Black Diaries” were forgeries. In a time of strong social conservatism, the Black Diaries undermined support for Casement.
According to Seán T. O’Ceallaigh, the trial of Casement began on June 26th 1916 on a charge of treason before the King’s Bench Division of the High court. Casement was tried for high treason under a statute dating from the reign of Edward III in 1351 “for adhering to the King’s enemies without the Realm8”.
Casement was defended by barrister A.M. Sullivan. Casement wanted it to be known that he had been striving to prevent the Rising of Easter week. Casement feared the Black Diaries would be used against him in court but his defence barrister thought that “it was the desire of the Government to assist in the establishment of a defence of insanity9. Casement’s defence was that the statute dating from 1351, under which he was charged with high treason, had no legal effect in Ireland until the passing of Poyning’s Law which stated that an Irish man could be indicated for high treason under the 1351 act only by the laws of the Realm of Ireland and in Ireland. The High Court in London was therefore to Casement a foreign court and not a court of his peers. Under Poyning’s Law he felt he had a right to be tried in Ireland before an Irish Court and by an Irish jury. He had not brought the arms to England but to Ireland. “If I did wrong in making the appeal to Irishmen to join with me in an effort to fight for Ireland, it is by Irishmen and them alone that I can be rightfully judged. It was not I who landed in England but the Crown who dragged me here, away from my own country. Place me before a jury of my own countrymen, be it Protestant or Catholic, Unionist or nationalist, Sinn Féineach or Orangemen, and I shall accept their verdict and bow to the statute and all its penalties10”.
Casement was found guilty of treason. Before his execution he was received officially into the Catholic Church. Roger Casement was executed by hanging at Pentonville Prison on 3rd of August 1916, unlike the leaders of the 1916 Rising in Dublin or Thomas Kent in Cork, who were executed by firing squad.
Casement was buried in the grounds of the prison but his remains were re-interred in Glasnevin cemetery on 1st March 1965, the year before the 50th anniversary commemorations, with full military honours. Approximately 30,000 people attended the ceremony and The President of Ireland, Éamon de Valera, gave the graveside oration11.
Norman Lamont, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer in England, said that Roger Casement's statement from the dock was the greatest speech of the 20th Century12.
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