Ireland: Closing the Account

Under glaring floodlights one chill night last week, three warders of London's Pentonville prison opened the grave of a hanged man. At midnight they reached the quicklimed corpse of Sir Roger Casement,* wrapped it in sacking, and placed it gently in a wooden coffin. Before his 1916 execution as a traitor, Casement's last request was: "When they have done with me, don't let my bones lie in this dreadful place. Take me back to Ireland and let me lie there." In a long-delayed but gracious gesture, Prime Minister Harold Wilson granted Casement's dying wish.

Parliament hailed the news with a cheer. An M.P. from Northern Ireland thanked the Prime Minister "for this wonderful news." Wilson replied cautiously, "I would not myself call it wonderful news. I think it is a satisfactory end to an unhappy chapter." The British mood was well expressed by the Daily Telegraph: "However heinous his guilt may still be thought, he paid for it in full: it is time to close the account."

Investigated Horrors. Casement's treason occurred in World War I. Like most Irish patriots, he believed the axiom that "England's extremity is Ireland's opportunity." Casement went to Germany and tried to raise an Irish Brigade from among British prisoners-of-war, but could get only 53 volunteers. In April of 1916, Casement and two other Irishmen landed on the Galway coast from a German submarine; they were captured the next day. The result was one of the century's most notorious treason trials. In its mixture of nationalist hate and sexual perversion, it seemed to expose a whole dread, unsuspected side of the Edwardian era.

Born into a Protestant Irish family in Ulster, which had given generations of its sons as army officers and civil servants to the crown. Casement was raised in County Antrim and eventually joined the foreign service. A handsome bachelor, he spent nearly a third of his life in Africa, and while serving as a British consul in the Belgian Congo exposed the brutalities imposed on the natives by the administrators of Belgium's King Leopold.

Later Casement investigated conditions on the rubber plantations of the Putumayo Valley in Peru and found horrors of mutilation and murder even more shocking than those of the Congo. He was a man of passionate idealism and undoubted courage. Joseph Conrad thought him "a limpid personality" with "a touch of the conquistador in him." After Casement resigned from the consular service in 1913, he was caught up in Ireland's seething demand for home rule, denouncing Britain as the "bitch and harlot of the North Sea."

Black Diaries. At his trial, Casement seemed to one observer "by far the noblest man in court, and the happiest." George Bernard Shaw supplied a plan for the defense; but it was refused by Casement, who made a ringing speech from the dock that compares favorably with the classic delivered by Robert Emmet in similar circumstances.

When Casement was found guilty, a clamor rose from Ireland, the U.S. and even Britain that he be reprieved. But the prosecution had a weapon of great power: the "black diaries" said to have been found in a trunk Casement left behind in his old London lodgings.