Roger Casement's Speech from the Dock
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.
After the verdict of guilty was returned Casement delivered a speech in defense of Ireland’s right to rebellion.
My Lord Chief Justice, as I wish my words to reach a much wider audience than I see before me here, I intend to read all that I propose to say. What I shall read now is something I wrote more than twenty days ago. I may say at once, my lord, that I protest against the jurisdiction of this court in my case on this charge, and the argument that I am now going to read is addressed not to this court, but to my own countrymen. There is an objection, possibly not good in law, but surely good on moral grounds, against the application to me here of this old English statute, 565 years old, that seeks to deprive an Irishman today of life and honour, not for adhering to the King’s enemies, but for adhering to his own people.
When this statute was passed in 1351, what was the state of men’s minds on the question of a far higher allegiance — that of a man to God and His kingdom? The law of that day did not permit a man to forsake his Church, or deny his God, save with his life. The ‘heretic’, then, had the same doom as the ’traitor’. Today a man may forswear God and His heavenly kingdom without fear or penalty — all earlier statutes having gone the way of Nero’s edicts against the Christians; but that constitutional phantom ’the King’ can still dig up from the dungeons and torture-chambers of the Dark Ages a law that takes a man’s life and limb for an exercise of conscience.
If true religion rests on love, it is equally true that loyalty rests on love. The law that I am charged under has no parentage in love, and claims the allegiance of today on the ignorance and blindness of the past. I am being tried, in truth, not by my peers of the live present, but by the fears of the dead past; not by the civilization of the twentieth century, but by the brutality of the fourteenth; not even by a statute framed in the language of the land that tries me, but emitted in the language of an enemy land — so antiquated is the law that must be sought today to slay an Irishman, whose offence is that he puts Ireland first! Loyalty is a sentiment, not a law. It rests on love, not on restraint. The government of Ireland by England rests on restraint, and not on law; and since it demands no love, it can evoke no loyalty.
But this statute is more absurd even than it is antiquated; and if it be potent to hang even one Irishman, it is still more potent to gibbet all Englishmen. Edward III was king, not only of the realm of England, but also of the realm of France, and he was not king of Ireland. Yet his dead hand to-day may pull the noose around the Irishman’s neck, whose sovereign he was not, but it can strain no strand around the Frenchman’s throat, whose sovereign he was. For centuries, the successors of Edward III claimed to be kings of France, and quartered the arms of France on their royal shield down to the Union with Ireland on January 1st, 1801. Throughout these hundreds of years, these ‘kings of France’ were constantly at war with their realm of France and their French subjects, who should have gone from birth to death with an obvious fear of treason before their eyes. But did they? Ddid the ‘kings of France’ resident here at Windsor or in the Tower of London hang, draw and quarter as a traitor every Frenchman for four hundred years who fell into their power with arms in his hands? On the contrary, they received embassies of these traitors, presents from these traitors, even knighthood itself at the hands of these traitors, feasted with them, tilted with them, fought with them — but did not assassinate them by law.
Judicial assassination today is reserved only for one race of the King’s subjects — for Irishmen, for those who cannot forget their allegiance to the realm of Ireland. The Kings of England as such had no rights in Ireland up to the time of Henry VIII, save such as rested on compact and mutual obligation entered into between them and certain princes, chiefs, and lords of Ireland. This form of legal right, such as it was, gave no King of England lawful power to impeach an Irishman for high treason under this statute of King Edward III of England until an Irish Act, known as Poyning’s Law, the tenth of Henry VII, was passed in 1494 at Drogheda by the Parliament of the Pale in Ireland and enacted as law in that part of Ireland. But if by Poyning’s Law an Irishman of the Pale could be indicted for high treason under this Act, he could be indicted only in one way, and before one tribunal — by the law of the Realm of Ireland and in Ireland. The very law of Poyning, which, I believe, applies this statute of Edward III to Ireland, enacted also for the Irishman’s defence ‘all those laws by which England claims her liberty’.
And what is the fundamental charter of an Englishman’s liberty? That he shall be tried by his peers. With all respect, I assert this court is to me, an Irishman, charged with this offence, a foreign court – this jury is for me, an Irishman, not a jury of my peers to try me on this vital issue, for it is patent to every man of conscience that I have a right, an indefeasible right, if tried at all, under this statute of high treason, to be tried in Ireland, before an Irish court and by an Irish jury. This court, this jury, the public opinion of this country, England, cannot but be prejudiced in varying degrees against me, most of all in time of war. I did not land in England. I landed in Ireland. It was to Ireland I came; to Ireland I wanted to come; and the last place I desired to land was in England.
But for the Attorney-General of England there is only England; there is no Ireland; there is only the law of England, no right of Ireland; the liberty of Ireland and of an Irishman is to be judged by the power of England. Yet for me, the Irish outlaw, there is a land of Ireland, a right of Ireland, and a charter for all Irishmen to appeal to, in the last resort, a charter that even the very statutes of England itself cannot deprive us of — nay more, a charter that Englishmen themselves assert as the fundamental bond of law that connects the two kingdoms. This charge of high treason involves a moral responsibility, as the very terms of the indictment against myself recite, inasmuch as I committed the acts I am charged with to ’the evil example of others in the like case’. What was the evil example I set to others in the like case, and who were these others? The ’evil example’ charged is that I asserted the right of my own country, and ’the others’ to whom I appealed to aid my endeavour were my own countrymen. The example was given, not to Englishmen, but to Irishmen, and the ’like case’ can never arise in England, but only in Ireland. To Englishmen I set no evil example, for I made no appeal to them. I asked no Englishman to help me. I asked Irishmen to fight for their rights. The ’evil example’ was only to other Irishmen, who might come after me and in ’like case’ seek to do as I did. How, then, since neither my example nor my appeal was addressed to Englishmen, can I be rightfully tried by them?
If I did wrong in making that appeal to Irishmen to join with me in an effort to fight for Ireland, it is by Irishmen, and by them alone, I can be rightfully judged. From this court and its jurisdiction I appeal to those I am alleged to have wronged and to those I am alleged to have injured by my ’evil example’ and claim that they alone are competent to decide my guilt or innocence. If they find me guilty, the statute may affix the penalty, but the statute does not override or annul my right to seek judgment at their hands.
This is so fundamental a right, so natural a right, so obvious a right, that it is clear that the Crown were aware of it when they brought me by force and by stealth from Ireland to this country. It was not I who landed in England, but the Crown who dragged me here, away from my own country to which I had returned with a price upon my head, away from my own countrymen whose loyalty is not in doubt, and safe from the judgment of my peers whose judgment I do not shrink from. I admit no other judgment but theirs. I accept no verdict save at their hands.
I assert from this dock that I am being tried here, not because it is just, but because it is unjust. Place me before a jury of my own countrymen, be it Protestant or Catholic, Unionist or Nationalist, Sinn Féineach or Orangemen, and I shall accept the verdict, and bow to the statute and all its penalties. But I shall accept no meaner finding against me than that of those whose loyalty I have endangered by my example and to whom alone I made appeal. If they adjudge me guilty, then guilty I am. It is not I who am afraid of their verdict — it is the Crown. If this is not so, why fear the test? I fear it not. I demand it as my right.
This is the condemnation of English rule, of English-made law, of English government in Ireland, that it dare not rest on the will of the Irish people, but exists in defiance of their will: that it is a rule, derived not from right, but from conquest.
But conquest, my Lord, gives no title; and, if it exists over the body, it fails over the mind. It can exert no empire over men’s reason and judgment and affections; and it is from this law of conquest without title to the reason, judgment, and affection of my own countrymen that I appeal. I would add that the generous expressions of sympathy extended to me from many quarters, particularly from America, have touched me very much. In that country, as in my own, I am sure my motives are understood, and not misjudged — for the achievement of their liberty has been an abiding inspiration to Irishmen, and to all men elsewhere, rightly struggling to be free in like cause.
My Lord Chief Justice, if I may continue, I am not called upon, I conceive, to say anything in answer to the inquiry your lordship has addressed to me why Sentence should not be passed upon me. Since I do not admit any verdict in this Court, I cannot, my lord, admit the fitness of the sentence that of necessity must follow it from this Court. I hope I shall be acquitted of presumption if I say that the Court I see before me now is not this High Court of Justice of England, but a far greater, a far higher, a far older assemblage of justices — that of the people of Ireland. Since in the acts which have led to this trial it was the people of Ireland I sought to serve — and them alone — I leave my judgment and my sentence in their hands.
Let me pass from myself and my own fate to a more pressing, as it is a far more urgent theme — not the fate of the individual Irishman who may have tried and failed, but the claims and the fate of the country that has not failed. Ireland has not failed. Ireland has outlived the failure of all her hopes — and she still hopes. Ireland has seen her sons — aye, and her daughters too! — suffer from generation to generation, always for the same cause, meeting always the same fate, and always at the hands of the same power. Still, always a fresh generation has passed on to withstand the same oppression. For if English authority be omnipotent — a power, as Mr Gladstone phrased it, that reaches to the very ends of the earth — Irish hope exceeds the dimensions of that power, excels its authority, and renews with each generation the claims of the last. The cause that begets this indomitable persistency, the faculty of preserving through centuries of misery the remembrance of lost liberty — this surely is the noblest cause ever man strove for, ever lived for, ever died for. If this be the cause I stand here to-day indicted for and convicted of sustaining, then I stand in a goodly company and a right noble succession.
My counsel has referred to the Ulster Volunteer movement, and I will not touch at length upon that ground save only to say this, that neither I nor any of the leaders of the Irish Volunteers who were founded in Dublin in November 1913, had any quarrel with the Ulster Volunteers as such, who were born a year earlier. Our movement was not directed against them, but against the men who misused and misdirected the courage, the sincerity and the local patriotism of the men of the north of Ireland. On the contrary, we welcomed the coming of the Ulster Volunteers, even while we deprecated the aims and intentions of those Englishmen who sought to pervert to an English party use — to the mean purposes of their own bid for place and power in England — the armed activities of simple Irishmen. We aimed at winning the Ulster Volunteers to the cause of a United Ireland. We aimed at uniting all Irishmen in a natural and national bond of cohesion based on mutual self-respect. Our hope was a natural one, and if left to ourselves, not hard to accomplish. If external influences of disintegration would but leave us alone, we were sure that Nature itself must bring us together. It was not we, the Irish Volunteers, who broke the law, but a British party. The Government had permitted the Ulster Volunteers to be armed by Englishmen, to threaten not merely an English party in its hold on office, but to threaten that party through the lives and blood of Irishmen.
The battle was to be fought in Ireland in order that the political ‘outs’ of to-day should be the ‘ins’ of to-morrow in Great Britain. A law designed for the benefit of Ireland was to be met, not on the floor of Parliament, where the fight had indeed been won, but on the field of battle much nearer home, where the armies would be composed of Irishmen slaying each other for some English party gain; and the British Navy would be the chartered ’transports’ that were to bring to our shores a numerous assemblage of military and ex-military experts in the congenial and profitable exercise of holding down subject populations abroad. Our choice lay in submitting to foreign lawlessness or resisting it, and we did not hesitate to choose. But while the law-breakers had armed their would-be agents openly, and had been permitted to arm them openly, we were met within a few days of founding of our movement — that aimed at a United Ireland from within — by Government action from without, directed against our obtaining any arms at all.
The Manifesto of the Irish Volunteers, promulgated at a public meeting in Dublin, November 25th 1913, stated with certainty the aims of the organisation, as I have outlined them. If the aims set out in that manifesto were a threat to the unity of the British Empire, then so much the worse for the Empire. An Empire that can only be held together by one section of its governing population perpetually holding down and sowing dissension among a smaller but none-the-less governing section, must have some canker at its heart, some ruin at its root. The Government that permitted the arming of those whose leaders declared that Irish national unity was a thing that should be opposed by force of arms, within nine days of the issue of our manifesto of good-will to Irishmen of every creed and class, took steps to nullify our efforts by prohibiting the import of arms into Ireland as if it had been a hostile and blockaded coast. And this Proclamation of the 4th December 1913, known as the Arms Proclamation, was itself based on an illegal interpretation of the law, as the Chief Secretary has now publicly confessed. The Proclamation was met by the loyalists of Great Britain with an act of still more lawless defiance — an act of widespread gun-running into Ulster, that was denounced by the Lord Chancellor of England as ‘grossly illegal and utterly unconstitutional’.
How did the Irish Volunteers meet the incitements to civil war that were uttered by the party of law and order in England? I can answer for my own acts and speeches. While one English party was responsible for preaching a doctrine of hatred, designed to bring about civil war in Ireland, the other, and that the party in power, took no active steps to restrain a propaganda that found its advocates in the Army, Navy, and Privy Council — in the House of Parliament and in the State Church — a propaganda the methods of whose expression were so ‘grossly illegal and utterly unconstitutional’ that even the Lord Chancellor of England could find only words and no repressive action to apply to them. Since lawlessness sat in high places in England and laughed at the law as at the custodians of the law, what wonder was it that Irishmen should refuse to accept the verbal protestations of an English Lord Chancellor as a sufficient safeguard for their lives and liberties? I know not how all my colleagues on the Volunteer Committee in Dublin reviewed the growing menace, but those with whom I was in closest cooperation redoubled, in face of these threats from without, our efforts to unite all Irishmen from within. Our appeals were made to Protestant and Unionist as much almost as to Catholic and Nationalist Irishmen. We hoped that, by the exhibition of affection and goodwill on our part toward our political opponents in Ireland, we should yet succeed in winning them from the side of an English party whose sole interest in our country lay in its oppression in the past, and in the present in its degradation to the mean and narrow needs of their political animosities.
It is true that they based their actions — so they averred — on ‘fears for the empire’ and on a very diffuse loyalty that took in all the peoples of the empire, save only the Irish. That blessed word empire that bears so paradoxical resemblance to charity! For if charity begins at home, empire begins in other men’s homes, and both may cover a multitude of sins. I, for one, was determined that Ireland was much more to me than empire, and, if charity begins at home, so must loyalty. Since arms were so necessary to make our organization a reality, and to give to the minds of Irishmen, menaced with the most outrageous threats, a sense of security, it was our bounden duty to get arms before all else. I decided, with this end in view, to go to America, with surely a better right to appeal to Irishmen there for help in an hour of great national trial, than those envoys of empire could assert for their weekend descents on Ireland, or their appeals to Germany.
If, as the right honourable gentleman, the present Attorney-General, asserted in a speech at Manchester, Nationalists would neither fight for Home Rule nor pay for it, it was our duty to show him that we knew how to do both. Within a few weeks of my arrival in the United States, the fund that had been opened to secure arms for the Volunteers of Ireland amounted to many thousands of pounds. In every case the money subscribed, whether it came from the purse of the wealthy man, or from the still readier pocket of the poor man, was Irish gold.
Then came the war! — which, as Mr Birrell said, ‘upset all calculations’. It upset mine no less than Mr Birrell’s, and put an end to my peaceful effort in America. A constitutional movement in Ireland is never very far from a breach of the constitution, as the loyalists of Ulster have been so eager to show us. A constitution, to be maintained intact, must be the achievement and the pride of the people themselves, must rest on their own free will and on their own determination to maintain it, instead of being something resident in another land, whose chief representative is an armed force — armed not to protect the population, but to hold it down. We had seen the workings of ’the Irish Constitution’ in the refusal of the Army of Occupation at the Curragh to obey the orders of the Crown. And now that we were told the first duty of an Irishman was to enter that army, in return for a promissory note, payable after death — a scrap of paper that might or might not be redeemed — I felt, over there in America, that my first duty was to keep Irishmen at home in the only army that could safeguard our national existence. If small nationalities were to be the pawns in this game of embattled giants, I saw no reason why Ireland should shed her blood in any cause but her own, and, if that be treason beyond the seas, I am not ashamed to avow it, or to answer for it here with my life. And when we had the doctrine of Unionist loyalty at last — ‘Mausers and Kaisers, and any king you like’, and I have heard that at Hamburg, nor far from Limburg on the Lahn — I felt that I needed no other than that these words conveyed, to go forth and do likewise.
The difference between us was that the Unionist champions chose a path which they felt would lead to the woolsack, while I went a road I knew must lead to the dock. The difference between us was that my ’treason’ was based on a ruthless sincerity that forced me to attempt in time and season to carry out in action what I said in words, whereas their treason lay in verbal incitements that they knew would never be made good in their bodies. And so I am prouder to stand here to-day, in the traitor’s dock, to answer this impeachment, than to fill the place of my right honourable accusers.
We have been told, we have been asked to hope, that after this war Ireland will get Home Rule as a reward for the lifeblood shed in a cause which, whomever else its success may benefit, can surely not benefit Ireland. And what will Home Rule be in return for what its vague promise has taken, and still hopes to take away from Ireland? It is not necessary to climb the painful stairs of Irish history — that treadmill of a nation, whose labours are as vain for her own uplifting as the convict’s exertions are for his redemption, to review the long list of British promises made only to be broken — of Irish hopes, raised only to be dashed to the ground. Home Rule, when it comes, if come it does, will find an Ireland drained of all that is vital to its very existence unless it be that unquenchable hope we build on the graves of the dead.
We are told that if Irishmen go by the thousand to die, not for Ireland, but for Flanders, for Belgium, for a patch of sand in the deserts of Mesopotamia, or a rocky trench on the heights of Gallipoli, they are winning self-government for Ireland. But if they dare to lay down their lives on their native soil, if they dare to dream even that freedom can be won only at home by men resolved to fight for it there, then they are traitors to their country, and their dream and their deaths are phases of a dishonourable phantasy.
But history is not so recorded in other lands. In Ireland alone, in this twentieth century, is loyalty held to be a crime. If loyalty be something less than love and more than law, then we have had enough of such loyalty for Ireland or Irishmen. If we are to be indicted as criminals, to be shot as murderers, to be imprisoned as convicts, because our offence is that we love Ireland more than we value our lives, then I do not know what virtue resides in any offer of self-government held out to brave men on such terms. Self-government is our right, a thing born in us at birth, a thing no more to be doled out to us, or withheld from us, by another people than the right to life itself — than the right to feel the sun, or smell the flowers, or to love our kind. It is only from the convict these things are withheld, for crime committed and proven, and Ireland, that has wronged no man, has injured no land, that has sought no dominion over others — Ireland is being treated today among the nations of the world as if she were a convicted criminal.
If it be treason to fight against such an unnatural fate as this, then I am proud to be a rebel, and shall cling to my ‘rebellion’ with the last drop of my blood. If there be no right of rebellion against this state of things that no savage tribe would endure without resistance, then I am sure that it is better for men to fight and die without right than to live in such a state as this. Where all your rights have become only an accumulated wrong, where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to gather the fruits of their own labours, and, even while they beg, to see things inexorably withdrawn from them — then, surely, it is a braver, a saner and truer thing to be a rebel, in act and in deed, against such circumstances as these, than to tamely accept it, as the natural lot of men.
My lord, I have done. Gentlemen of the jury, I wish to thank you for your verdict. I hope you will not take amiss what I said, or think that I made any imputation upon your truthfulness or your integrity when I spoke and said that this was not a trial by my peers. I maintain that I have a natural right to be tried in that natural jurisdiction, Ireland, my own country, and I would put it to you, how would you feel in the converse case, or rather how would all men here feel in the converse case — if an Englishman had landed here in England and the Crown or the Government, for its own purposes, had conveyed him secretly from England to Ireland under a false name, committed him to prison under a false name, and brought him before a tribunal in Ireland under a statute which they knew involved a trial before an Irish jury? How would you feel, yourselves, as Englishmen if that Englishman was to be submitted to trial by jury in a land inflamed against him and believing him to be a criminal, when his only crime was that he had cared for England more than for Ireland?