Casement and Ireland

Extract

Such is the unity of all history that anyone who endeavours to tell a piece of it must feel that his first sentence tears a seamless web.’

These memorable words of Maitland naturally recur to the mind as one reads the direct and lucid story of the life and death of Roger Casement that Denis Gwynn has given to the world. In the course of his life—so abruptly ended—Roger Casement seemed to be the meeting-place of many strange forces; of the living and of the dead. Some of these forces reflect themselves or are reflected in the titles Mr. Gwynn has chosen for his contents page. The Congo; Putamayo; Ireland; Germany (The Great War); the Traitor’s Gate. The mere repetition of the names gives more than a hint of the strange cycle through which the life of Casement moved. In the beginning of his public career he was a figure of international power and reputation. Later, he declined (or ought I to say, developed?) into a person of some importance in Irish national politics. He ended as a lonely man upon the scaffold. He was so lonely at the end as to be out of touch and in a large measure out of sympathy with the counsel who defended him and with the arguments they used in his defence. And yet, just at the end, in the Divine Mercy, Roger Casement was reconciled to the Church of his Baptism, of which he had forgotten (if indeed he had ever realised) he was once a member. In truth he had received Catholic baptism as a small child at Rhyl while on holiday with his mother, who had been born a Catholic but who had ceased after marriage to practise her religion.