FROM THE ARCHIVES:IN THE weeks after the Easter Rising, much newsprint was devoted to trying to find out what had happened and the causes and consequences. A rare Sunday edition of
The Irish Timescontinued these efforts (although as much space was taken up in it with first World War news) and included this article comparing the Rising with the 1798 rebellion. The anonymous author used a history of 1798 by William Hamilton Maxwell, published in 1845, as his source for the earlier events. –
Maxwell's History of the Irish Rebellionis interesting reading just now. I took down the volume from shelves where it had lain untouched for 20 years, remembering only Cruickshank's illustrations of atrocities, in which the insurgents have the countenances of apes. The author of the history is, however, a fair-minded man, taking the strong Conservative standpoint, and he endeavours to do justice to the characters of the '98 leaders, whilst considering the rebellion an act of insane folly.
Any schoolboy could describe the differences between ’98 and ’16. ’98 was in one part due to the spread in Ireland of French Republican ideas; in another part it was the civil war of religious factions. All Roman Catholic disabilities have since been removed, and the foreign “connexion” of the ’16 insurgents was with a reactionary, not a liberal, Power.
Nor would the proposal to turn Gaelic into the political language of Ireland have been comprehensible to Wolfe Tone or to Fitzgerald; could Tone or Fitzgerald have translated the words which headed Pearse’s Republican Proclamation, Poblacht na h-Eirrin, or made a better shot at the pronunciation of Sinn Féin than the average English soldier now in Ireland?
There were some extreme socialists in the recent rising; but most of the insurgents of ’16 inherited their ideas less from the men of 1798 than from Young Ireland. The Sinn Féin movement, like that of Young Ireland in the ’40s, at one point repelled (eg in its insistence upon racial feeling), but at another point catered for, the support of the radical mind – woman’s suffrage seems to have been in the programme of the “Provisional Government”!
In detail and incident, rather than in essentials, the history of ’98 repeated itself in ’16. In both rebellions, the College Green district was defended, until the arrival of the troops, by a loyal corps of student volunteers.
Nothing (says Maxwell) could have been more easily effected in ’98 than the capture of the Castle – word for word the opinion of the press experts in ’16.
When the ’98 insurrection had been crushed there was a question, as there is today, whether it might not be an appropriate moment to turn quondam republicans into soldiers of the monarchy.
In one district of county Wexford, the people, who had been in arms two months before, tendered not only their allegiance, but also their services, to the Government.
Sir Roger Casement, according to the account given by Lord Lansdowne in the House of Lords, had two companions with him at the time of his arrest on the Kerry coast, and one escaped.
Some newspapers have called Casement “this modern Wolfe Tone”, and in search for historical parallel, I turned to the chapter in Maxwell’s history which describes the final exploit of the leader of the United Irishmen.
I was amply rewarded. Tone, too, negotiated with the enemies of England in wartime, and like Casement, he approached the shores of Ireland in an enemy ship, hoping to help a rebellion.
That much, of course, we all remember from our schooldays. But this is the curious thing. Tone, when taken by the British, was accompanied by two other rebel agents, one of whom (says Maxwell) eluded observation and escaped. It is not often that history repeats itself in details so minute.
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