Roger Casement was hanged in Pentonville Prison, London, on 3 August 1916. His hands were pinioned behind his back, his feet bound and a white wrap drawn over his head. The executioner – John Ellis, a hairdresser from Rochdale – pulled the noose around his neck. Casement had been well measured and weighed for the drop and his death was instantaneous, although he was left hanging for up to an hour by way of insurance. People outside on the Caledonian Road cheered when the bell tolled to herald his execution. Casement was taken down, wrapped in a shroud and buried in quicklime in the prison grounds.
A few weeks before the execution – following his conviction for high treason having conspired with Germany to create revolution in Ireland – Casement was stripped of the knighthood he’d been awarded in 1911 by George V. After his death, his last letters were destroyed, an autopsy was conducted to provide further proof of homosexuality (it spoke of “unmistakable evidence of the practices to which it was alleged the prisoner… had been addicted”), and he was denied burial in Ireland.
Since his execution, Casement has been remade for every generation. There are over a dozen biographies, various annotated editions of his diaries, a poem by WB Yeats, a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa – as well as, in Ireland, an annual summer school, a 3m-tall statue, a sports stadium, a train station, public parks and an aerodrome named in his honour. There are T-shirts, walking tours, ballads, stamps, fridge magnets, academic conferences. In 1965, Dublin hosted a state funeral where some of his bones were returned from the UK.
The enduring fascination with Casement is reasonable. His life contains multitudes; it was lived in the fault lines between empire and nation, colonised and coloniser, public face and private sexual activity. His was a fragmented personality in a fragmented age: he was brave and egotistical, idealistic and impossible, impetuous and romantic. All of this is handled with great care in Roland Philipps’ accessible new biography.
Casement was born into Protestant minor gentry in Dublin in 1864 and like many Europeans of his generation he joined the “Scramble for Africa” in the 1880s, firstly employed by various companies and then by the British Consular Service. Initially, he was a relatively enthusiastic imperialist and supported the Boer War, but ultimately his sensibilities did not allow him to fit easily into this world. There was only so much bridge or billiards he could play.
Unlike so many who lived in the service of empire or of their own pockets, Casement chose to look and to see. Hiding in plain sight was the systematic abuse of fellow human beings and he was unable to pretend it was acceptable. In his diary, he later wrote that he had “broken into the thieves’ kitchen” by his investigations into the “horrible reality” which he witnessed.
The outrages that he set down in his reports on the Congo Free State (1904) and the Putumayo region of Peru (1911) were possible only because the perpetrators dehumanised the enslaved. The Congo was essentially a personal colony of the Belgian king, Leopold II, who sought to mine from it as much wealth as he could. Similarly, in the Putumayo region, the Peruvian Amazon Company’s savage treatment of indigenous people was driven by boundless greed as extractive capitalism made a modern industry out of rubber production. In both instances, those who facilitated the brutality and profited from it made the moral accommodation that these were lesser people, uncivilised and therefore unworthy of real consideration.
Casement was different. He placed indigenous voices at the centre of his reports, documenting murder, mutilation, rape and abduction. In the Congo, these voices told of boys and men who had their hands cut off, and others who were sold into slavery. In Peru, bodies were marked by livid weals from tapir-hide whips; indigenous people were thrown into fires, buried alive, and lined up one after the next to see how many a single bullet might pass through.
What was it that brought Casement to react in revulsion when so many contemporaries were willing to acquiesce, or at least to ignore? Philipps finds the answers in his subject’s childhood, in “the emotional hole left by his upbringing”. Casement’s parents, probably alcoholics, certainly dysfunctional, were both dead by the time he was 13. He then lived with relatives in County Antrim, Ulster, and in Liverpool, where he began work as a clerk for a shipping company when he was 15. The connection with Antrim gave him an interest in Irish nationalism; he read widely in history, was supportive of the Irish cultural revival, and tried to learn Irish as an expression of his commitment to the idea of an independent Ireland outside the United Kingdom.
In the years between his trips to Africa and South America, he began moving from cultural nationalism to a profound anti-imperialism. As Philipps points out, Casement came to equate the case of his native island with that of all the colonised peoples of the world.
Even as his sense of Irishness was evolving, however, Casement was still happy to accept a knighthood from the British government, which honoured him for his humanitarian work in Africa and South America. The complexity of such overlapping identities in Ireland defies those who wish to paint the past only in stripes of green or orange. That he was perceived as an Ulster Protestant nationalist is vital. He was proud to be a knight of the realm and an Ulster Protestant – but his increasingly strident nationalism saw him depicted by the Times as someone who could not be considered “a typical citizen of Ulster”. This depiction infuriated him.
The shifting complexities of Ireland in the late-19th and early-20th centuries are not easily distilled, however, and Philipps succumbs to a number of errors. Patrick Pearse (the rebel leader) was shot and not hanged: a detail that is vital to the manner in which the Irish revolution is remembered. The portrait of John Redmond, the leader of the moderate Irish Parliamentary Party lacks depth and nuance. And the description of Eoin MacNeill as chairman of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (a secret revolutionary organisation dedicated to the overthrow of British rule) is simply wrong. In fact, MacNeill was at odds with the Brotherhood and this had a profound impact on the failure of the armed rebellion in 1916.
Nonetheless, there is much to admire about the writing in this biography. It does not claim to reveal new information; instead it draws heavily on the pioneering work of Angus Mitchell, Jeffrey Dudgeon, Michael O’Sullivan and Séamas Ó Síocháin, among others, and paints vivid portraits of Casement’s friends and enemies. The best chapters explore his days in Germany and his subsequent trial for high treason.
War, of course, transforms the meaning of every political position. For someone who lived on the impulses of his high emotions – Philipps writes with sympathy of his temperament, his tendency to “rush to extremes”, his humanity – this was critical for Casement. When the First World War started, he increasingly associated with Irish nationalists determined on armed rebellion and was central to the successful importation of guns from Germany to Dublin in July 1914.
After that summer, he went to Germany and over the following 18 months tried to organise German support for a rebellion in Ireland. He wrote in his diary: “For me there is no after the war – or hereafter at all. All I am and have and shall be is here now. It is all for Ireland and I refuse to think of anything else or of any personal consequences.” He laboured to establish an “Irish brigade” among captured Irish soldiers serving in the British army who were being held as prisoners of war, hoping to persuade the Germans to free them and send them back to Ireland.
The Germans rejected Casement’s approaches, and his already uncertain health worsened. In early 1916, he collapsed under the strain of his disappointments. He recovered just enough to travel on a German submarine to Ireland in time for the planned Irish nationalist rebellion on Easter 1916. His negotiations had resulted in a ship carrying guns from Germany, but this was intercepted and when Casement arrived at Banna Strand in County Kerry, he was arrested almost immediately. He was brought across the Irish Sea, interrogated in Scotland Yard and placed in the Tower of London.
Philipps does a fine job in setting out the main events of the subsequent trial (the jury took less than an hour to find Casement guilty) and appeal (a hopeless failure). There was a campaign for clemency, but this was undermined by the blackening of his reputation. The British establishment, which had lauded him as a great humanitarian, now sought to destroy him as a moral degenerate. Casement had kept diaries which included descriptions of many sexual encounters with young men and teenage boys. Even before his trial, diary extracts had been shown to journalists and influential figures. The objective was two-fold: defy the campaign to save Casement’s life and deny him a future as a martyred hero of Irish nationalism.
The first of these objectives was met; the second was not. After Casement’s execution, his supporters claimed the diaries were forgeries. A dispute on their authenticity was hotly contested for the rest of the 20th century until a forensic examination in 2002 proclaimed their authenticity. As well as his enduring status in the pantheon of Irish nationalist leaders and the deep regard for his humanitarian work, Casement is also now cast as a figure in gay history in Ireland with a prominence bested only by Oscar Wilde.
Paul Rouse is professor of history at University College, Dublin. His books include “Sport and Ireland: A History” (Oxford University Press)
Broken Archangel: The Tempestuous Lives of Roger Casement
Roland Philipps
Bodley Head, 400pp, £25
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This article appears in the 12 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Reformation