I wrote last week in Part I that the Dublin Easter Rising was a short-lived military engagement, and the Risers were thoroughly defeated. The leaders chose unconditional surrender in order to save their men on April 29, 1916, after five days of fighting.
Public reaction during and immediately after the Rising was strongly (though not entirely) negative among the people of Dublin.
On being marched away as prisoners the rebels were jeered at by the crowds. [One] witness, Joe Good, recalled: ‘Crowds of women were in the side streets and they shouted “Bayonet them”.’
Lorcan Collins writes in
The Easter Rising, A Guide to Dublin in 1916:
Particularly vocal were the "shawlies", whose income was dependent upon British pensions and income from relatives in the British Army. The insurrection threatened their livelihoods and they threw invective along with rotten vegetables and filth at the columns of prisoners being led through the Ccity.
The
Irish Independent editorialized on May 4, 1916:
No terms of denunciation that pen could indict would be too strong to apply to those responsible for the insane and criminal rising of last week. Around us in the centre of Ireland’s capital, is a scene of ruin which it is heartrending to behold. Some of the proudest structures in what was one of the finest streets in Europe are now reduced to shapeless heaps of smouldering ashes. It is as if foreign invaders, as ruthless as those who have devastated Belgium and Poland had wrought their evil will upon the erstwhile peaceful city of Dublin....
....The men who fomented the outbreak, and all who were responsible for the devastation surrounding us have to bear a heavy moral and legal responsibility from which they cannot hope to escape. They were out, not to free Ireland, but to help Germany.
Yet a year later, when prisoners interned in England and Wales after the Rising were returned to Ireland, huge crowds greeted and cheered them. In 1918, Sinn Fein endorsed the aims of the Rising, and ran candidates like Michael Collins, Eamon de Valera, and Countess Markievicz, who had participated in it. They swept the Irish elections, winning 73 of 105 seats.
And in New York, Boston, and San Francisco, Irish Americans like my grandfather raised money, bought guns, and shipped them back to Ireland in preparation for the next Rising, the Irish War of Independence in 1919.
What brought about the change?
Well, in short, the British bungled the aftermath and the Risers were great martyrs. General John "Bloody" Maxwell, who took command at the beginning of May, declared martial law and initially detained 3500 people, at least twice as many as had participated in the Rising -- which is hardly surprising. But the British also tried to cover up the outright murder by a deranged British captain (subsequently promoted) of four men who were not participants in the Rising. One of them, Francis Sheehy Skeffington, was a well known and well liked pacifist, feminist, vegetarian, anti-draft advocate and soup kitchen operator. At the time, Skeffington was trying to stop spasmodic looting which broke out in the first days of the Rising.
Then Maxwell executed the seven of the signers of the Proclamation plus seven others in Dublin, as well as Thomas Kent in Cork. Months later, Sir Roger Casement would be tried and hanged in England.
It was the timing and the manner of the executions that so shocked and enraged the Irish in Ireland and elsewhere, especially the United States. They were carried out from May 3 through May 12, 99 years ago this month, in Kilmainham Gaol, on a few hours notice to each condemned man, after secret, summary courts martial. The public could hear the volleys of the firing squads, but the executions were only announced publicly after they were carried out.
A pro-Union journalist, Warren Wells, described the reaction of the Irish in an open letter to the British public:
I am not asking you to regard the executions of the rebel leaders, the sentences of penal servitude, the deportations, announced baldly day after day without publication of the evidence which justified the infliction of the capital penalty, from behind the closed doors of Field Court-Martial, from the point of view of their justice, or even of their expediency. I am simply inviting you to endeavour to understand their effect on that Irish public which read of them with something of the feeling of helpless rage with which one would watch a stream of blood dripping from under a closed door.
On May 3, 1916, the executions began with three signers of the Proclamation, Padraig Pearse (Provisional President of the Republic), Thomas MacDonagh, and Thomas Clarke.
The interior of Kilmainham Gaol
British Sgt. Major Samuel Lomas was present and wrote in his
diary
...At 3.45 the first rebel MacDonoghue [Thomas MacDonagh] was marched in blindfolded, and the firing party placed 10 paces distant. Death was instantaneous. The second, P.H. Pierce [Pádraig Pearse] whistled as he came out of the cell (after taking a sad farewell of his wife.) The same applied to him. The third, J.H. [Thomas] Clarke, an old man, was not quite so fortunate, requiring a bullet from the officer to complete the ghastly business (it was sad to think that these three brave men who met their death so bravely should be fighting for a cause which proved so useless and had been the means of so much bloodshed).
Lomas got a few details wrong; Pearse wasn't married and said farewell only to Father Aloysius, a Capuchin priest. His brother Willie was supposed to get a farewell visit but was brought into the jail just in time to hear his brother being shot. And Thomas Clarke was only 58.
I wonder if Lomas mixed up Pearse with MacDonagh. MacDonagh wasn't visited by his wife either; they couldn't find her in time, but his sister, a nun, came to see him, and another British officer said MacDonagh was the one who whistled. MacDonagh's friend James Stephens wrote in August 1916:
He had reserves to fall back on when the end came -- reserves of pride and imagination and courage. An officer who witnessed the executions said, 'They all died well, but MacDonagh died like a Prince.'"
On May 4, Edward Daly, Pearse's brother Willie, Joseph Plunkett (another signer), and Michael O'Hanrahan were executed. Willie Pearse had played only a minor role in the Rising, and was executed because of his brother. Padraig did not foresee that; he
wrote to his mother from Kilmainham Gaol:
Our hope and belief is that the Government will spare the lives of all our followers, but we do not expect that they will spare the lives of the leaders. We are ready to die and we shall die cheerfully and proudly. Personally I do not hope or even desire to live, but I do hope and desire and believe that the lives of all our followers will be saved including the lives dear to you and me (my own excepted) and this will be a great consolation to me when dying.
Joseph Plunkett,who had signed the Proclamation, was allowed to
marry his fiancee, Grace Gifford, a few hours before he was shot.
At about 5pm on Wednesday 3 May 1916, a young lady drove up to a jeweller's shop in Grafton Street. The jeweller had put his stock away for the night, and was about to shut the shop. The lady asked for any kind of wedding ring. The jeweller went over his stock, and gave the lady a ring.
At 1.30am on 4 May 1916, Grace Gifford was led into the small chapel of Kilmainham Jail and stood waiting until the handcuffed Josef Plunkett was brought in, and led up the aisle to stand beside her at the chapel's altar. As there was no electricity available, the marriage ceremony was conducted by Reverend Eugene MacCarthy, using candles for light. Twenty British soldiers, with fixed bayonets, lined the walls of the chapel. Immediately after the conclusion of the ceremony Joseph Plunkett was taken away.
Before Plunkett's execution by firing squad, Grace was allowed to see him for a further ten minutes. During this time, 15 soldiers stood guard in the cell, and the duration of the meeting was timed by a soldier with a watch.
On May 5, John MacBride, the "drunken, vainglorious lout" of Yeats's
"Easter, 1916" was shot. He had joined the Rising on a whim and played a relatively minor part; it was almost certainly his former marriage to Maud Gonne that led to his execution. He had fought the British in the Boer War and was one of the three who refused to be blindfolded,
saying "I have looked down the muzzles of too many guns in the South African war to fear death and now please carry out your sentence."
On May 8, Conn Colbert, Sean Heuston, Michael Mallin and Eamonn Ceannt, also a signer of the Proclamation, were executed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/... was 27:
The night before his execution [Conn Colbert] sent for Mrs. Ó Murchadha who was also being held prisoner. He told her he was "proud to die for such a cause. I will be passing away at the dawning of the day." Holding his bible, he told her he was leaving it to his sister. He handed her three buttons from his volunteer uniform, telling her "They left me nothing else," before asking her when she heard the volleys of shots in the morning for Éamonn Ceannt, Michael Mallin and himself would she say a Hail Mary for the souls of the departed. The soldier who was guarding the prisoner began crying according to Mrs. Ó Murchadha, and recorded him saying "If only we could die such deaths."
Captain H. V. Stanley
told another British officer:
"I was the Medical Officer who attended the executions of the first nine Sinn Féiners to be shot. After that I got so sick of the slaughter that I asked to be changed. Three refused to have their eyes bandaged … they all died like lions. The rifles of the firing party were waving like a field of corn. All the men were cut to ribbons at a range of about 10 yards."
Well, these stories began to get out as the executions proceeded. The condemned wrote letters and statements and, of course,
poems. The public began to see them not as agents of the "Huns," but as statesmen. And the "shapeless heaps of smouldering ashes" in Dublin that the Irish Independent had deplored -- they were the result of British shelling (Connolly, as a socialist, had believed that the British would not destroy property they saw as theirs. He underestimated the threat the Rising presented to the British Empire).
As the BBC puts it:
[In May 1916,] symptoms of the change in attitudes included the following: the increasing frequency of memorial masses for the executed rebels; the growing sales of photographs of them; the setting up of aid funds for their families; the appearance of songs and ballads celebrating their actions; the ubiquity of republican flags and badges; the sight of young men marching military style at Gaelic football matches, and the shouting of rebel slogans anywhere people gathered anonymously together, such as at railway stations. The government also observed that recruitment levels to the British army had diminished to a trickle.
On May 9, with moderate Irish leaders making appeals to Prime Minster H. H. Asquith, and Irish-Americans following proceedings in the New York Times' excellent coverage and making a big and ominous fuss, the British commuted the death sentences of Eamon de Valera and Thomas Ashe. Asquith was due to arrive in Dublin on the 12th. It looked as though the executions were over.
But not so fast. Two of the signers of the Proclamation, James Connolly and Sean MacDairmada, were still alive. William Murphy controlled the Irish Independent and as leader of the employers in the bitter Dublin Lock-out of 1913-1914, he really, really hated Connolly and made this clear in his newspaper. Maxwell did too. And Sean MacDiarmada had done more, as the only full time recruiter of the signers, to make the Rising possible than anyone else. They had to go.
There was a problem with the optics, though. MacDiarmada had had polio in 1911 and walked with a cane. And Connolly was at the infirmary in Dublin Castle, near death from his wounds, which had turned gangrenous.
On May 12, both were executed. MacDiarmada wrote beforehand "I feel happiness the like of which I have never experienced. I die that the Irish nation might live."
Connolly was brought by ambulance to Kilmainham Gaol in his pajamas, leaving grieving doctors and weeping nurses in the Castle, and tied to a chair immediately inside the gate rather than at the other end, where the other executions took place, because he couldn't stand.
The yard at Kilmainham Gaol, where 14 of the executions took place.
He wasn't much a of a Catholic, but Father Aloysius was with him (poor Father Aloysius. He'd had a busy two weeks of it). He
told Connolly's daughter Nora he had not expected Connolly to be executed:
It was a terrible shock to me, I'd been with him that evening and I promised to come to him this afternoon. I felt sure there would be no more executions....Such a wonderful man - such a concentration of mind. They carried him from his bed in an ambulance stretcher down to a waiting ambulance and drove him to Kilmainham Jail. They carried him from the ambulance to the jail yard and put him in a chair. He was very brave and cool. I said to him, "Will you pray for the men who are about to shoot you" and he said: "I will say a prayer for all brave men who do their duty."
The story is that he added with a wicked grin, "Forgive them for they know not what they do."
The 16 men executed for their roles in the Easter Rising.
After the executions, all 13 men were buried in a mass grave, without coffins, in Arbor Hill Prison Yard and covered with quicklime.
The grave of the 14 executed in Dublin as it looks today.
Millions of people went to violent deaths in 1916. Many of them went just as bravely as these failed revolutionaries. I think it was the humanness -- and especially the Irishness -- of the details of their deaths that so fired the imaginations and the anger of their countrymen.
The New York Times gave a surprisingly prescient analysis of the Rising just as the military engagement ended, on April 30, 1916:
Irish separatists in this country do not believe that the uprising in Dublin was the formal planned beginning of a revolution … But they do believe that Ireland’s golden opportunity for revolution has come, and that the Dublin incident … will serve very well for the historian of a Free Ireland as a picturesque point of departure — in short, another Boston Tea Party or Battle of Lexington.
A "picturesque point of departure." It was that, all right. And more.