King
was
born in Paris, France,
on 3rd November, 1901.
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Last updated: 14th March, 2002
(1)
William O'Brien
Shortly before noon, Connolly came down the stairs and spoke to me
on the
landing. Putting his head close to mine, and dropping his voice,
he said: 'We are
going out to be slaughtered.' I said: 'Is there no chance of success?'
and he replied:
'None whatever.' He then said: 'Go straight home now and stay there.
There is
nothing that you can do now, but you may be of great service later
on'."
I went downstairs to get my bicycle. I found difficulty in getting
it out owing to the
' large number passing out through the front door. While I awaited
an opportunity
Connolly passed down the stairs and shook hands without speaking.
As I cycled
across Abbey Street I saw the Irish Republican troops breaking the
windows of'Kelly
for Bikes", and dragging bicycles and motor-cycles across the
street to form a barricade
... The fight was on."
(2)
A nurse in Dublin
Castle during the Easter Rising afterwards wrote an account of the
events that took place.
The arrival of James Connolly caused an unusual stir. From the window
I could see him lying on the stretcher, his hands crossed,
his head hidden from view by the archway. The stretcher was
on the ground, and at either side stood three of his officers,
dressed in National Volunteer Uniform; a guard of about thirty soldiers
stood around. The scene did not change for ten minutes
or more; somebody gruesomely suggested they were discussing
whether he should be brought in, or if it would be better to shoot
him at once. It is more likely they were arranging where he
should be brought, and a small ward in the Officers' Quarters,
where he could be carefully guarded, was decided upon.
The nurses in charge of him acknowledged, without exception,
that he was entirely different from their expectations: no one
could have been more considerate, or have given less trouble.*
About a week after his arrival he had an operation on the leg.
He was strongly opposed to this himself, but until he had been
tried, he had to be treated entirely from a medical point of view.
When he was coming round after the ether, the sentry changed,
and he turned to the nurse who was minding him and asked,'
"Have they come to take me away? Must I really die so soon?'^
All through, his behaviour was that of an idealist. He was calm
and composed during the court-martial, and said, "You can
shoot me if you like, but I am dying for my country." He showed
no sign of weakness till his wife was brought to say good-bye
to him, the night he was to be shot. When she had left, he saw
the monks, and about 3 A.M. he was carried down on a stretcher
to the ambulance that was to bring him to Kilmainham.
(3)
Countess Markievitcz, Prison Letters (1934)
The memory of Easter Week with its heroic dead is sacred to
us who survived. Many of us could almost wish that we had died
in the moment of ecstasy when, with the tri-colour over our heads
we went out and proclaimed the Irish Republic, and with guns
in our hands tried to establish it.
We failed, but not until we had seen regiment after regiment
run from our few guns. Our effort will inspire the people who
come after us, and will give them hope and courage. If we failed
to win, so did the English. They slaughtered and imprisoned,
only to arouse the nation to a passion of love and loyalty, loyalty
to Ireland and hatred of foreign rule. Once they see clearly that
the English rule us still, only with a new personnel of traitors
and new uniforms, they will finish the work begun by the men
and women of Easter Week.
(3)
Roger Casement's cousin, Gertrude Parry wrote about the trial after
the First World war.
Roger's speech from the dock was a wonderful piece of
oratory, beautifully worded and perfectly delivered. His voice
was calm and his manner simple and direct. F. E. Smith was
referred to in an allusion to the Ulster leader's playing with
treason "but the difference is that in the case of my accusers
their
treason leads to the Woolsack, mine to the dock". A prophecy
which was fulfilled when years later the same F. E. Smith was
made Lord Chancellor of England. Smith, to show his contempt
of Roger, got up ostentatiously and lounged from the court
with his hands in his pockets and a most unpleasant sneer on his
face.
After the trial Roger was not taken back to Brixton but was
taken to Pentonville and put into the condemned cell. He was
dressed in a blue convict's dress and given a dreadful cap - "A
felon's cap's the brightest thing an Irish head can wear", he
quoted to me the first time I was allowed to visit him and saw
him thus clothed.
(3)
Eva Gore-Booth, Prison Letters (1934)
At the same time, talking to Mrs. Sheehy Skeffington that
afternoon, one realised there was much more in the story of her
husband's murder than mere military carelessness and indifference.
Both she and her husband were strong pacifists and they possessed
no weapons, but the windows of the room in which she sat were
still broken by the volley fired into it by the soldiers when there
was no one in the house but herself and her little boy of seven.
Since then the story other husband's murder has been often told,
but at that time the horror of it was still fresh. She showed us the
poor little parcel returned from the barracks, containing a watch,
a tie and a collar, worthless things that bore pathetic witness to
the almost insane truth, - that those who did not scruple to steal
human lives were yet most honourable and honest in their deal-
ings with property - to them a much more important matter.
Hearing Mrs. Skeffington talk, one realised that though her
husband never had a weapon in his hand, militarism was wise in
its generation, and in Sheehy Skeffington militarism had struck
down its worst enemy - unarmed yet insurgent Idealism. It was
not for nothing that the half-mad officer who carried out the
murder was promoted a week afterwards.
The authorities knew their business well.
All his life Skeffington had never "ceased from mental fight"
against all forms of tyranny, oppression and cruelty. He was a
bom rebel, a questioner of ancient traditions, a shaker of ancient
tyranny. He refused to go out against tyranny with a gun, not
because he acquiesced in authority, but because he did not
acquiesce in ^ny violence between human beings.
In a social state founded entirely on blind obedience to certain
traditions and ideas, mental freedom means disaster, and the man
who knows no obedience is the enemy.
If the unthinkable had happened and Skeffington had been in
the British Army, he would not have shot James Connolly or
Padraic Pearse. Not only would he have died protesting against
these terrible crimes, but he would have tried to rouse the con-
science of every soldier he came near. Individual conscience in
the
Army means mutiny. It is the deadly and most fatal enemy of
militarism.
(3)
George Bernard Shaw, Preface (?)
THE SEQUEL TO THESE EVENTS
CONFIRMED MY UNHEEDED
warning with a sanguinary completeness of which I had no
prevision. At Easter 1916 a handful of Irishmen seized the Dublin
Post Office and proclaimed an Irish Republic, with one of their
number, a schoolmaster named Pearse, as President. If all Ireland
had risen at this gesture it would have been a serious matter for
England, then up to her neck in the war against the Central
Empires. But there was no response: the gesture was a complete
failure. All that was necessary was to blockade the Post Office
until its microcosmic republic was starved out and made ridi-
culous. What actually happened would be incredible if there were
not so many living witnesses of it. From a battery planted at
Trinity College (the Irish equivalent of Oxford University), and
from a warship in the river Liffey, a bombardment was poured
on the centre of the city which reduced more than a square mile
of it to such a condition that when, in the following year, I was
taken through Arras and Ypres to shew me what the German
artillery had done to these cities in two and a half years, I laughed
and said, "You should see what the British artillery did to my
native city in a week." It would not be true to say that not
one
stone was left upon another; for the marksmanship was so bad
that the Post Office itself was left standing amid a waste of
rubbish heaps; and enough scraps of wall were left for the British
Army, which needed recruits, to cover with appeals to the Irish
to remember Belgium lest the fate ofLouvain should befall their
own hearths and homes.
Having thus worked up a harebrained romantic adventure into a heroic
episode in the struggle for Irish freedom, the victorious
artillerists proceeded to kill their prisoners of war in a drawn-out
string of executions. Those who were executed accordingly be-
came not only national heroes, but the martyrs whose blood was
the seed of the present Irish Free State. Among those who escaped
was its first President. Nothing more blindly savage, stupid, and
terror-mad could have been devised by England's worst enemies.
It was a very characteristic example of the mentality produced by
the conventional gentleman-militarist education at Marlborough
and Sandhurst and the conventional gentleman-diplomatist
education at Eton and Oxford, Harrow and Cambridge. Is it
surprising that the Russian Soviet Government, though fanatically
credulous as to the need for popular education, absolutely refused
to employ as teachers anyone who had been touched by the
equivalent public school and university routine in Russia, and
stuck to its resolution even at the cost of carrying on for some
years with teachers who were hardly a day ahead of their pupils?
But the Post Office episode was eclipsed by an event which
was much more than an episode, as it shattered the whole case
for parliamentary government throughout the world. The Irish
Nationalists, after thirty years of constitutional procedure in the
British Parliament, had carried an Act to establish Irish Home
Rule, as it was then called, which duly received the royal assent
and became a statute of the realm. Immediately the British officers
on service in Ireland mutinied, refusing to enforce the Act or
operate against the northern Orangemen who were openly
arming themselves to resist it. They were assured of support by
their fellow-officers at home. The Act was suspended after
prominent English statesmen had taken part in the military
manoeuvres of the Orangemen. The Prime Minister publicly
pledged himself that Belfast, the Orange capital, would not in
any case be coerced. In short, the Act was shelved under a threat
of civil war; and the Clan na Gael, which in America had stead-
fastly maintained that the constitutional movement was useless,
as England would in the last resort repudiate the constitution and
hold Ireland against the Irish by physical force, and had been
rebuked, lectured, and repudiated by the parliamentary Home
Rulers for a whole generation for saying so, was justified. The
l
(3)
Karl
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