George Bernard Shaw's Defense of Roger Casement
On 21 April 1916 a German submarine put Roger Casement ashore at Banna Strand in Tralee Bay, County Kerry. For his efforts to procure German arms for the Easter Rising, which would take place three days later, he was arrested on charges of high treason, sabotage and espionage against the Crown.
Casement’s trial opened at the Royal Courts of Justice on 26 June 1916. He was found guilty and hanged, one of sixteen Irish men executed in the immediate aftermath of the Rising for their attempts to free their country from the most powerful Empire on the face of the earth.
The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, recommended to Casement that he abandon a traditional legal defense, appeal directly to the jury on the basis of Ireland’s claim to sovereign nationhood, and wrote a speech for him to this end. Casement did not adopt the strategy and Shaw’s speech was not delivered in the course of the case. As I can’t find it the text of it anywhere online, I’ve transcribed it. It appears here, any edits are those present in the source and are not my own.
Gentlemen of the jury I plead not guilty to the charge of high treason. But I ask you not to take this as a denial of the essential facts relied on by the Crown. What I deny rather, is that any guilt attaches to those facts. I have spared you the tedium of calling witnesses to prove facts which I do not dispute, and of which I am not ashamed. Indeed, rather than seeking to repudiate the Crown’s case, I embrace it.
It is quite true that I made up my mind that my country ought to achieve her independence of English rule by force of arms. I hope that, in a very humble way, I might do for my country what Garibaldi has been honoured in England for doing for his country, Italy. You may smile at my vanity now that I have failed, but you know that nations are not freed by personal modesty any more than by personal vanity, and a nation which cannot produce a Garibaldi has to be content with Roger Casements. And the Casements, must do their best.
I concluded, that it was no more possible for Ireland to free herself without foreign alliances than it had been possible for Italy to free herself without the help of France. I sought to obtain the assistance of the German Empire in this enterprise. I have no apology whatever to make for that. It was my plain duty to my country. I did not want German troops in Ireland. What I wanted from Germany was money, munitions and Irish soldiers, and this was all accepted. The German authorities collected their Irish prisoners and invited me to persuade them to take part in my enterprise. I did my best. I need hardly say I did not ask any English soldier to fight against his own country. I know how to respect other peoples’ nationality because I know how to respect my own.
An attempt has been made to prejudice me on the ground that I was formally in the pay of the British Empire and that I was knighted for my services to it. I am glad of that now, because the fact that I served England well enough to have my services publicly acknowledged and especially rewarded, shows that I have no quarrel with England except the political quarrel which England respects and applauds in Italy, Poland, Belgium and in short, in every country except those conquered and denationalised by England herself. Almost all the disasters and difficulties that have made the relations of Ireland with England so mischievous to both countries have arisen from the failure of England to understand Ireland is not a province of England, but a nation, and to negotiate with her on that assumption. If you persist in treating me as an Englishman you bind yourself thereby to hang me as a traitor before the eyes of the world.
Now, as a simple matter of fact I am neither an Englishman, nor a traitor. I am an Irishman, captured in a fair attempt to achieve the independence of my country, and you can no more deprive me of the honours of that position or destroy the effects of my effort than the abominable cruelties inflicted 600 years ago on William Wallace in this city when he met a precisely similar indictment with a precisely similar reply, have prevented that brave and honourable Scot from becoming the national hero his country.
It may seem to some of you gentlemen of the jury that I ought not to be hanged for being a traitor; I ought to be hanged for being a fool. I will not plead that if men are to be hanged for errors of judgement in politics we should have such a mortality in England and Ireland that hardly one of us will be left to hang the other. But I may ask you, if you nevertheless lean to that opinion on my case, whether my attempt, desperate as it seems, has been after all, so disastrous a failure. I am not trying to shirk the British scaffold; it has been the altar which the Irish saints have been canonised for centuries but I confess, I shrink a little from the pillory in which the public opinion of the word places man who, with the best of intentions, can do nothing but mischief to the cause they embrace. But I do not think I shall occupy that pillory.
Will you understand me when I say that those days of splendid fighting against desperate odds on the streets of Dublin have given Ireland back her self-respect? We were beaten, indeed, never had a dog’s chance of victory, but you were also beaten, in a no less rash and desperate enterprise, in Gallipoli. Are you ashamed of it? Did your hearts burn any less? Did your faith in the valour of your race flag and falter because you were at last driven into the sea by the Turks? Well, what you feel about the fight in Gallipoli, Irishmen feel all over the world about the fight in Dublin. Even if it had no further consequences, even if it had not sent your prime minister, who had shelved the Home Rule act as if it had been a negligible parish by-law, scuttling to Dublin, I should still glory in the feat of arms.
And now gentlemen, you may hang me, if you like. I will not even add: and be damned to you, because I feel no more ill will to you than I did in the days when you were glad enough to claim my public work, as the work of an English consul. You have no immediate vengeance to fear for it. It cannot be said that you dare not kill me; I hope that my countrymen, whatever happens, will not waste their energy and degrade their souls with idle dreams of vengeance, even if the fortune of war should make it possible for them to give effect to them. My neck is at your mercy, if it amuses you to break it. My honour and reputation are beyond your reach.
The Lord Chief Justice will presently tell you, I could anticipate the inevitable summing up for you if I doubted his ability to express it far more weightily than I, he will tell you, as he must, that legally I am a traitor. But history, will not, on that account, absolve you from the most sacred duty of a jury. The duty of standing at the side of right, truth and justice between all honest laymen, and that part of the law, which was made against their own consent, to destroy them. The question for you is not whether I have broken this law or that, nor whether what I have done comes under this or that legal classification. The question for you is whether I am guilty, or not guilty, and if you allow any judicial direction to distract you from that issue, you will betray not only me — your political enemy — but every man alive who has nothing but a jury between him and the worst that the dead letter of unjust laws can do to him.
I hope that I have spoken here today as you would desire an Englishmen speak in a German court if your country shared the fate of mine. I ask for no mercy, no pardon, no pity. I sincerely and humbly beg your pardon if at any moment during this trial my inextinguishable pride in being an Irishman and my exaltation in the bravery and devotion of my countrymen has betrayed me into an exhibition of vanity or arrogance. Of any trace of malice I know I am entirely free, for I feel none, and shall feel none. Whatever the upshot may be gentlemen, I have done my duty. Now, it is your turn.