Execution of Roger Casement

On the morning of 3 August 1916 Roger Casement, a former British consul and Irish nationalist who had landed in Ireland in April from a German submarine, was hanged in Pentonville Prison in London. He had been sentenced to death for high treason, that is for recruiting Irish prisoners of war to fight on the German side and for seeking German help for a rising in Ireland. He was the sixteenth and last man executed in connection with the Easter Rising, but the only one tried not by a court martial but by an ordinary court in London.

Trial and appeal

The trial took place from 26 to 29 June at the Royal Courts of Justice before three judges presided over by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Reading, that is Rufus Isaacs. The prosecution was led by the Attorney General, Frederick Edwin Smith, before the war a fierce opponent of Irish home rule. The defence, led by the Irish barrister Alexander Sullivan, argued that the medieval Treason Act of 1351, written without punctuation in Norman French, did not cover acts committed abroad. The court ruled otherwise, which Casement himself summed up with the words that he would be “hanged on a comma”. Immediately after the verdict the king stripped him of his knighthood and of the order he had received for his earlier service. On 17 and 18 July the Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed the appeal, and Smith refused his consent to a further appeal to the House of Lords.

Pleas for clemency

From then on the decision lay with the government of Herbert Henry Asquith. Arthur Conan Doyle, who knew Casement from the campaign against atrocities in the Congo, drew up a petition to the prime minister. Its signatories, among them G. K. Chesterton, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, Jerome K. Jerome and Beatrice and Sidney Webb, did not defend the condemned man’s acts but asked for clemency on account of his services, his health undermined by tropical diseases, and the effects of an execution in Ireland and America. A separate petition was prepared in Dublin by a committee whose members included Douglas Hyde and Colonel Maurice Moore. Its authors wrote that after the executions of the leaders of the Rising in May the feeling in Ireland was that enough blood had been shed. George Bernard Shaw warned in his own text that the gallows would make Casement an Irish martyr.

Working against a reprieve were typescripts of Casement’s alleged diaries, describing his homosexual life, which the authorities showed to politicians, journalists and diplomats, American ones included. Some of his potential defenders withdrew their support. On 29 July the United States Senate passed a resolution expressing the hope that the British government would show clemency to Irish political prisoners. According to State Department documents, the resolution reached the department from the White House only on the morning of 2 August and was cabled to London the same day. The American chargé d’affaires passed it to the Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, on 3 August, and in his report to Washington added that Casement had been executed early that morning.

The last day

On the day of his execution Casement, at his own request, was received into the Catholic Church, in which, according to his biographers, his mother had secretly had him baptised as a child. He was attended by two priests from the parish of Stepney in London, Timothy Ring and James Carey. The latter later said that Casement had been a saint. The sentence was carried out by the hangman John Ellis. The body, in accordance with the practice of the time, was buried in quicklime within the prison grounds, although Casement had wanted to rest by Murlough Bay in County Antrim, where he had spent his youth. The next day the government issued a statement that the circumstances of the case had been considered “carefully and repeatedly”. It called Casement “a willing agent of Germany”, declared that after the trial it had obtained evidence that his brigade of prisoners might have been used against the British in Egypt, and rejected the claim that Casement had come to Ireland to stop the Rising.

The execution, as the authors of the petitions had foreseen, strengthened the wave of sympathy in Ireland for the executed men that had been growing since May, and in the United States it damaged Britain among Irish Americans. The dispute over the authenticity of the so-called Black Diaries continues to this day. A handwriting examination carried out in 2002 found them to be genuine, but some researchers still consider them a forgery. In 1965 the British government agreed to hand Casement’s remains over to Ireland. He was buried with state honours in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.