Irish Political Prisoners 1848-1922

Theatres of War

Professor Sean Mcconville

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134600984
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

This is the most wide-ranging study ever published of political violence and the punishment of Irish political offenders from 1848 to the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922. Those who chose violence to advance their Irish nationalist beliefs ranged from gentlemen revolutionaries to those who openly embraced terrorism or even full-scale guerilla war.
Seán McConville provides a comprehensive survey of Irish revolutionary struggle, matching chapters on punishment of offenders with descriptions and analysis of their campaigns. Government's response to political violence was determined by a number of factors, including not only the nature of the offences but also interest and support from the United States and Australia, as well as current objectives of Irish policy.

1

THE YOUNG IRELANDERS

Personages and politics

No Irishman in 1845, at home or abroad, was held in greater esteem than Daniel O’Connell. Prophet and chieftain to the poorer classes, educated Roman Catholics and liberal Protestants admired his statesmanship, vision and political skills. In his sixty-ninth year he had received a sentence of one year’s imprisonment, the fruit of his revived campaign for repeal of the Act of Union and the incitement and threat of his monster meetings. His confinement in Richmond Prison must count among the most luxurious and least oppressive in the history of imprisonment. His conviction was overturned three months into the sentence, yet in the eyes of his compatriots he had added martyrdom to his other heroic attributes. His achievements, personality and capacity had given him a unique position in national life and had made the civilised world familiar with his country’s problems. But at the zenith of his fame and renown, a great change in spirit came upon him. His accelerating decline, physical and mental, contributed to the splintering of constitutional nationalism and thus to the Young Ireland insurrection of 1848.

Adulation and a long tenure in office engender proprietorial feelings; successes and failures and hard-won experience make for impatience and the intolerance of opposition. Add to these the protective dogmatism of old age, the fears and uncertainties of declining health, and an unhappy tendency to surround oneself with sycophants, and the result was reflexive and unthinking reaction.¹ And at precisely the time that O’Connell’s imperiousness and political inertia became most evident, he was challenged by a talented, educated and energetic group from within nationalist ranks.² Where the skills of his earlier days would have conciliated, assimilated or neutralised, O’Connell now bowed to the advice of his son John³ and sought their suppression or exclusion.

Of the several men of talent who came to oppose O’Connell, two in particular embodied distinctive impulses and forces which would shape Irish nationalism thereafter – William Smith O’Brien and John Mitchel. The former was a most unlikely candidate for nationalist leadership, whether of moral or physical force. Born in 1803 into an old Irish landowning family which had been Anglican for several generations, O’Brien was ever conscious of the descent which his family traced back to the last High King of Ireland, Brian Boru.⁴ For hundreds of years O’Briens had been the principal family in Co. Clare, and for seven generations had provided parliamentary representatives either for the county or for the county town, Ennis. They had served at Westminster and also in the Irish Parliament in Dublin, where they had opposed the Act of Union.

Educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge,⁵ and Lincoln’s Inn, the highly Anglicised William Smith O’Brien on his father’s nomination became MP for the pocket borough of Ennis in 1828. Given the weak and fluid nature of party politics at the time, it is not altogether easy to attach a party label to the man: Whig on some issues, Tory on others, in the parliamentary line-up he was Tory. He supported Catholic Emancipation, having joined the Catholic Association before his election as an MP. His patriotism was Irish as well as British. Unlike some of the Young Irelanders he was no republican, and expressed a strong attachment to the Crown – even in the political crisis of his life supporting the British constitution, save only that there should be a Dublin as well as a Westminster parliament. But these disputes lay ahead when in 1835 he was elected as member for Co. Limerick, with politics which were liberal and patriotic in tendency, but still evolving. In that election he was endorsed by O’Connell and the Roman Catholic clergy; thereafter he sat as an independent Liberal, in broad support of the Whig administration.

O’Connell’s final agitation for repeal acquired such momentum by 1843 that the British government took steps to counter it. O’Brien objected to some of these measures, particularly the dismissal as justices of various prominent men who had attended repeal meetings. Although not yet a repealer, O’Brien achieved national notice when he subsequently resigned his own commission; several other protesting landowners followed his lead.

In the summer of 1843 O’Brien commenced a tour of several continental countries, returning home with the conviction that there was ‘more misery in one county in Ireland than throughout all the populous cities and districts which I had visited’.⁶ A consciousness of the continuing misgovernment of his country, and the same sense of fairness which had led him to resign as a magistrate, moved him further into the repeal camp in October 1843. O’Connell’s fortunes and cause were at a particularly low ebb following his cancellation of the Clontarf monster meeting in the face of a government prohibition. It was at this moment that O’Brien publicly applied for Repeal Association membership. This support from a well-known Protestant landowner, a defector from Unionism, whose family claimed such a special place in Irish history, was a coup and an act of support which O’Connell never forgot. O’Brien’s application arrived in time to be read aloud at the first public meeting to be held in the Repeal Association’s new headquarters, Conciliation Hall. The reading was accompanied by repeated cheering and noisy appreciation.⁷

Just as O’Connell welcomed this unexpected bounty, the Young Irelanders, when O’Brien moved to their side, saw his support as a substantial strengthening of their cause. At that point one of the Young Irelanders wrote to him, arguing that ‘our chance of effecting anything important depends on your continuing our recognised Leader’. O’Brien, Duffy observed, was ‘providentially gifted with qualities and attributes for the time and place’. He was blunt in what he meant by this: ‘The Protestants and the landed gentry must be won, and you, a man of property and family, and a Protestant, can and will, win them. What chance of their listening to young men, most of whom are Catholics and all of them spring directly from the trading class.’⁸ O’Brien had determined to retire from parliamentary politics, and absented himself from Ireland for the 1847 elections. On his return he discovered that through the efforts of Young Irelanders and the Roman Catholic clergy of the diocese of Limerick he had been elected for that constituency.⁹ It was a measure of Young Ireland that so much depended on this complicated man, whose sensibilities and refinement of political beliefs periodically caught him in a paralysing vice. This was a leader with dangerously deceptive properties.

John Mitchel came to national notice several years later than O’Brien, but in times and with such a voice and antecedents that he was marked for gaol almost from the start. His instincts and energies contrasted with O’Connell’s Catholic nationalism and O’Brien’s Whiggish nationalism. O’Connell’s character and galvanic energy had turned him inexorably to populism and demagoguery, the arts of which he practised with historic genius. O’Brien would have been equally at home in an English shire, where they would have recognised his cool, distant and aristocratic liberalism. Mitchel was of a far more radical hue, of Ulster nonconformist stock (and of the least conformist strain of that highly individualistic breed). He was a type for whom political orientation was never difficult, since he lived in a state of permanent opposition: his compass always pointed away from the establishment.¹⁰ In all his writings it is difficult to find the Ulster nonconformist’s condemnation of the Roman Catholic Church; it is equally difficult to find any mention of England or things English that is not accompanied by a sneer or imprecation. Hatred of England drove him as much, if not more, than love of his own country.¹¹

John Mitchel was born into the manse in 1815. His maternal grandfather had been a United Irishman.¹² His father – a Presbyterian minister educated at the University of Glasgow – had embraced Unitarianism, incurring much condemnation from the Ulster Synod. Dissent and defiance were Mitchel’s family traditions, and faith in individual conscience and action was in his blood; there was much of the anarchist, though none of the democrat about him. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin (but was not a resident student) and became a solicitor in Banbridge, Co. Down. From an early age, and despite mutual love and regard, he brought much unhappiness upon his parents, commencing with a scandalous elopement when he was twenty-one and the girl, Jane Verner, only seventeen. Apprehended in Chester by Captain James Verner, Mitchel was committed briefly to prison. Despite Captain Verner’s efforts to keep the couple apart, and the strong disapproval of his own parents, Mitchel succeeded in carrying her off again, this time marrying by special licence. In best romantic fashion (and Mitchel was highly romantic in his makeup) the marriage succeeded, despite politics always coming first: to all appearances it was a happy union.

Mitchel’s character made cooperation and any form of collective discipline difficult; his career was punctuated by breaches with colleagues. In his writings and actions there is a manifest and continuing rejection of any authority. ¹³ The individual was the measure of things, and if that individual had the ability to push the levers of history, it was his right and duty so to do.¹⁴ Resentment and distaste extended to radical and revolutionary organisation – open individual action was preferred to the hierarchies, discipline and claustrophobia of conspiracy, not only on grounds of effectiveness, but also aesthetics – and aesthetics and temperamental incompatibility preceded and drove the functional arguments. The observations of a close relative (probably his brother William) throw light on this side of his character. While tolerant of human frailties, Mitchel was moved to ‘inappeasable wrath’ by the pretensions of authority, ‘whether it clothed itself in ermine or other official trappings, or walked at noon-day as cant, poisoning the general air’. He could bear criticism, the account continued, ‘but if there were any attempt to overbear, his manner changed instantly, and he became stern, almost fierce. At such times his speech was a cutting instrument, and one of the keenest. ’¹⁵

Exaggerated individualism fuels impulsiveness in judgement and haste in action; it can also make it impossible to work with others as equals. These aspects of Mitchel’s character were recognised by admirers and sceptics alike. An account of the man published by a sympathetic nationalist journal described him as being ‘at once gentle and impetuous, enthusiastic and sagacious; his impulses were irresistible’.¹⁶ A sometime comrade, later bitter opponent, Charles Gavan Duffy – the man who brought Mitchel from his Banbridge obscurity to work on the Nation – summed him up with a degree of kindness reserved for the dead. In his Young Ireland days, and throughout his career, Mitchel, Duffy insisted, lacked ‘the gift ordinarily called judgement’.¹⁷ John Martin, Mitchel’s devoted friend and follower, came to lose confidence in him because of his views on negro slavery and his tendency to antagonise rather than unite.¹⁸ Years before, in a mood of intense and despondent introspection during his confinement on board a convict hulk at Bermuda, Mitchel’s judgement had been equally harsh:

I wish no darker memories crowded upon me ... but my whole life lies mirrored before me; and it is not bright nor fair to see. I would that I could find in it one single good action (besides the action for which I was convicted as a felon). I wish the m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Irish Political Prisoners, 1848-1922
• Already Published
• Full Title
• Copyright
• For Sally James
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Young Irelanders
• 2 Gentlemen convicts
• 3 The Fenians: a dream of revolution
• 4 The Fenians in prison
• 5 Amnesty: Gladstone takes a chance
• 6 The convict Michael Davitt
• 7 The dynamitards
• 8 The dynamitards in prison
• 9 The Easter rising
• 10 Internment: a training camp in Wales
• 11 Imprisonment: war by other means
• 12 Roger Casement: a question of honour
• 13 Sinn Fein, 1917-19
• 14 'Frightfulness': Ireland, 1919-22
• 15 Bang and whimper, 1919-22
• Bibliography
• Index