Tales From the Tower of London

by Donnelly, Mark P.

  Certainly the conditions of Laurens’ captivity were more lenient than a convicted spy and traitor had any right to expect. He was allowed frequent visits from his son, Henry, whom he had not seen for six years, along with any other guests who chose to visit him. Old friends, business associates and members of the government sympathetic to the American cause flowed in and out of the Tower in a constant stream. With them they brought gifts of food and good wine, which Laurens dutifully shared with his guards and Lieutenant Vernon and his family. The notoriety of the Tower’s latest guest also brought the curious and bored aristocratic glitterati that constantly sought out new and novel diversions – a category into which Henry Laurens definitely fell. Among the more scandalous characters to frequent his rooms were Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, and her lover Lady Ann Erskine.

  Whenever possible, Laurens plied his visitors with the cause of American independence. He urged influential businessmen and politicians like Edmund Burke to urge the king and government to bring the hostilities to an end. The sooner the war ended, he argued, the sooner relations between the two countries could return to normal – and if the conflict did not stop soon, the economic and political damage to both sides could be irreparable.

  Word of Laurens’ pleas evidently spread and found fertile ground. Both Edmund Burke, in England, and Benjamin Franklin, in America, began petitioning the crown for Laurens’ release. Despite his advancing age and deteriorating health, the government twice refused to grant a pardon – insisting that pardon would come only if Laurens agreed to help the British win the war in America. The price was unacceptable. Laurens would remain in the Tower and continue petitioning anyone who would listen to him.

  To support his position, and that of America, Laurens began turning out a stream of letters and articles for what was called ‘the rebel press’: a chain of London underground newspapers sympathetic to the American cause. To get the letters out of the Tower and into the right hands, Laurens enlisted the aid of Elizabeth Vernon, the teenage daughter of the Lieutenant General of the Tower. Week after week, Elizabeth smuggled Laurens’ manuscripts past the eyes of her father’s guards. Swept up in the thrill of clandestine meetings, spy games and secret messages, the impressionable girl soon found herself passionately involved with the middle-aged revolutionary. Inevitably, the all-too-frequent meetings aroused the guards’ suspicions and the situation was reported to Vernon. Overnight, Laurens’ privileges and lenient treatment disappeared. He was subjected to random searches for paper and ink, and periods of harsh deprivation followed even minor infractions of the rules. Even the occasional walk through the Tower grounds was now prohibited.

  On 19 October 1781, one year and two weeks after Henry Laurens entered the Tower, Lord Cornwallis surrendered his contingent of the British colonial forces in America to General George Washington at Yorktown, Virginia, effectively ending the American Revolutionary War. Ten weeks later, the pleas of Edmund Burke and Benjamin Franklin were answered; Henry Laurens was released on parole, ostensibly for health reasons, pending final settlement of the war. On his release, he was presented with a bill for £100 to pay the cost of maintaining a guard on his rooms for the past fifty-four weeks. Insisting he had not personally employed the guard, Laurens declined to honour the bill.

  With the dawn of the new year, Laurens travelled to Bath to take the spa waters for his health. While there he took time to have his portrait painted by John Singleton Copley, the most famous portrait painter of his day and an expatriate American. By June 1782 word came that Henry Laurens was to be unconditionally released in exchange for none other than Lord Cornwallis who, ironically, had long held the title of Constable of the Tower.

  As Laurens prepared to return to the newly independent United States, a letter arrived from Benjamin Franklin requesting that he join the American peace delegation in Paris. The diplomatic mission already included Franklin, John Adams and John Jay and while they were capable of negotiating a treaty between America and Great Britain, Laurens was the only American diplomat who had spent any significant amount of time in England. His insights into the British character would be an invaluable asset. Laurens dutifully changed his plans and attended the negotiating sessions and the signing of the preliminaries of the Treaty of Paris in September 1782. But before the final draft could be signed, Franklin had yet another assignment for Laurens. He was to return to London where he would serve as America’s first, if unofficial, ambassador to the Court of St James. The war was over, Laurens had been released from the Tower, but he just could not escape the British.

  For the next eighteen months Henry Laurens shuttled back and forth between Paris and London carrying out the tasks of an ambassador, trying to rebuild the shattered relations between the two countries. Whenever his duties allowed, he spent time with old friends like Edmund Burke and his former trading associates, but records indicate that he also visited Lieutenant General Vernon, his wife and daughter Elizabeth at the Tower. Finally, in 1784, Henry Laurens was given permission to return home. His ship landed in New York on 3 August and by January he was back in Charleston – but it was not to be a joyous homecoming.

  The war had ravaged Laurens’ plantations with a loss estimated at more than £45,000. If more bad news were possible after already having suffered so much, Laurens now learned that his son John had been killed in the closing days of the war. Bitter and despondent, Laurens occupied his time writing a book about his adventures entitled A Narrative of the Capture of Henry Laurens, of his Confinement in the Tower of London. It was not particularly complimentary. But evidently there were a few good memories to compensate for all the pain and suffering. Somewhere along the way, friends and associates on both sides of the Atlantic had taken to calling him ‘Tower’ Laurens and the nickname seems to have genuinely amused him.

  When Henry Laurens died in 1792, seven years after his return to the United States, his will instructed that two endowments be left to people he had known in England; one to Mrs Vernon, wife of the Lieutenant General of the Tower, and another to the Vernons’ daughter Elizabeth, who had befriended, and loved, an ageing rebel and convicted traitor.

  PART IV

  A Home for Spies and Tourists

  14

  THE BLACK BOOK

  Sir Roger Casement 1914–16

  Intrigue, sexual betrayal and cloak-and-dagger deception somehow seem most at home amid the romance of the Middle Ages and renaissance. But where love of country and people’s private lives collide with politics and war, time and place become irrelevant. When Sir Roger Casement’s divided loyalties were put to the test during the turbulent years of the First World War, the results were as harrowing for him and his nation as anything in a medieval chronicle.

  England’s rule of Ireland dates back to the reign of Henry II who invaded his island neighbour in 1171 and subdued the Irish kings to extract tribute from them. As much as the Irish resented foreign rule, their ire increased after Henry VIII reformed the church, replacing traditional Catholicism with his new Church of England. The staunchly Catholic island nation now had two enemies, the English and their church, and the tension more than once pushed the two nations over the brink of war.

  By 1800 Ireland had gained representation in Great Britain’s House of Commons and by 1900 the British government was seriously considering allowing them to govern themselves under the Home Rule Bill. According to the terms of Home Rule, Ireland would govern its own internal affairs with the English government retaining control of foreign policy and the military. With its protectorates Canada, Australia and South Africa already governing themselves, it seemed a logical step to grant Ireland the same autonomy. It was, however, a step that deeply divided the Irish people. The 75 per cent of Ireland’s population who were Catholic desperately wanted autonomy, but the Protestant minority, concentrated mostly in Ireland’s six northern counties, demanded a continuation of full ties with Great Britain. On 25 May 1914, the Irish Times reported that ‘The Home Rule Bill is carried in the House o
f Commons for the third and last time, provoking Unionist [sic, Protestant] attacks on Catholic property in Belfast.’

  But a mere three months after the above report, Great Britain (along with the rest of Europe) was dragged into the hell of the First World War. With the entire continent going up in flames and German submarines destroying millions of tons of British shipping, the Irish question was laid aside.

  In Ireland it was a time of desperate soul-searching. The vast majority of the people understood the necessity of supporting England in its struggle against imperial Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Over the course of the war more than two hundred thousand Irishmen would volunteer to serve in Britain’s armed forces. There were some, however, who were so desperate for independence that they actively supported Germany, hoping that a pro-German stance would entice the German Kaiser to take an active part in Ireland’s fight for independence. In the ensuing confusion, Ireland tore itself apart in a series of devastating strikes and riots. Simple reason, along with religious and political loyalties, became blurred by anger and hate. Into this maelstrom of controversy walked Sir Roger Casement, a retired consular official with more than twenty years of distinguished service in the British Foreign Office.

  Casement had come from a wealthy Irish family, his father a Protestant and his mother a Catholic, but Roger had been raised in his father’s church and educated at the best schools in England. In 1884, at the age of twenty, Roger went to work for the African International Association but left seven years later when he began to suspect that the association was involved in the exploitation of the native African labour force. The following year, 1892, he went to work for the British Foreign Service, serving as consul to Portuguese East Africa. Cited in government dispatches as ‘brave, diplomatic and unusually observant’, Casement was chosen to investigate reports of extreme racial oppression in the Belgian Congo. While there, he exposed some of the most horrific working conditions on earth and tied them directly to King Leopold II of Belgium. The work drew such international criticism of Belgian policies that American author Mark Twain demanded the overthrow of King Leopold.

  With a worldwide reputation for humanitarianism, Casement was sent in 1910 to the Putumayo region of Peru to investigate conditions similar to those he had uncovered in the Congo. His reports on the systematic exploitation of Indian labourers at the hands of international rubber conglomerates were so well documented that international laws could be instituted to halt such atrocities. Within a year, Casement’s work in Peru had earned him a knighthood and the thanks of a grateful British nation. In 1913, at the age of fifty, Casement retired from the Foreign Office on the grounds of health problems dating from his years in the tropics. In retirement, he returned to Northern Ireland.

  But Casement’s relocation to Ireland ran far deeper than nostalgia for his childhood home. As early as 1902 he had become fascinated by the issue of Irish independence and began donating money to various Republican causes. Soon, he became a devoted advocate of a free Ireland and although his position in the British government forced him to work anonymously, he began writing articles for the Irish Review. In 1912, the year before his retirement, he wrote an article in which he said that should war break out between Great Britain and Germany, the situation could be used to Ireland’s advantage. If the Irish people refused to support Britain, it might induce Germany to aid them in their struggle for independence. The following year he helped organise the Irish Volunteer Force (IVF), a paramilitary group dedicated to driving the English out of Ireland. He also joined the Irish National Volunteers (INV) and helped them organise a London committee to raise funds from London’s Irish immigrant population.

  It must have been an odd association. Most of the Irish rebels were working-class Catholics with few of the social graces of a trained diplomat. In contrast, the tall, almost emaciated Casement was well spoken, well dressed and a career diplomat. Because of his long association with the British government, the Irish Nationalists never quite accepted, nor trusted, Casement, but if he were sincere, they were more than willing to use his services and connections in high places.

  When the First World War broke out in August 1914, Casement was in the United States addressing a pro-Irish rally in Philadelphia in support of the Irish National Volunteers and their radical political wing, Sinn Fein. Obviously, news of the war changed Casement’s plans dramatically. With Britain now embroiled in a war with Germany, Casement’s plan to enlist German help in securing a free Ireland could be put into action. In a letter to his comrades back in Ireland, he insisted that Ireland was not strong enough to gain its own independence without outside help. Any move towards an uprising without foreign aid would be doomed to disastrous failure, but he would support the ‘cause’ no matter what course of action they chose. He wrote ‘if you are bent upon this act of idiocy, I will come and join you [although] . . . I . . . regard it as the wildest form of boyish folly . . . I . . . have always stood for action, but not this action and not under these circumstances . . .’

  Hoping to convince the INV and Sinn Fein that his plan could work, Casement hurried to Washington DC, where he arranged a meeting with the German military attaché. The Germans seemed interested, but with the war only a month old it was impossible to commit themselves to any such radical deviation from their original plans. They would, however, arrange for Casement to go to Germany and meet members of the High Command and make his case personally. In October 1914, Roger Casement booked passage to Germany on a neutral Norwegian freighter. Travelling with him was a man named Adler Christensen, an out-of-work Norwegian seaman who Casement claimed was his butler.

  Once in Berlin, Casement held a series of meetings with members of the Military High Command, up to and including Germany’s Foreign Minister Count Arthur von Zimmerman, who was always eager to gain new allies for the German cause. Casement laid out his plans carefully and clearly. If Germany would agree to supply the Irish rebels with two hundred thousand guns and ammunition, along with a substantial war loan and an invasion force of fifty thousand German troops with orders to land in Ireland, the Germans and the Irish people could force the English to fight a two-front war, dividing British forces, and pulling tens of thousands of men off the Western Front. This would allow Germany to push through France clear to the English Channel. The Germans may have had no interest in Irish independence, but anything that would help weaken English forces on the continent seemed like a good idea. To test Casement’s sincerity and his organisational abilities, the Germans suggested he visit prisoner-of-war camps and try to recruit a fighting unit from among the thousands of Irish PoWs being held by the Germans. Casement readily agreed but, as he would soon discover, the Irish were less enthusiastic.

  For more than a year, from late 1914 till spring 1916, Roger Casement travelled from one PoW camp to another talking to every Irish internee he could find, in an attempt to convince them that the cause of a free Ireland outweighed any loyalty they may have had to the British Empire. Although he did convince nearly two thousand men to begin training, only fifty-five of them openly supported the idea of siding with the hated Germans – even if it meant gaining national freedom.

  Trading English domination for autonomy might have been desirable, but betraying King George to the Kaiser was quite another matter. Besides, they argued, if Germany won the war, what assurance did they have that Ireland would not become a vassal state of the German Empire just as it now was to England? Casement tried to convince them by providing encouraging dispatches from Irish Nationalists back home, but all communiqués had to be routed from Berlin, through Germany’s American Embassy and back to Ireland – it took forever and too often the answers simply never came.

  Casement’s ultimate failure to raise a fighting force of Irish volunteers did nothing to convince Germany that supporting Ireland was in the Fatherland’s best interests, and Casement’s own growing frustration led many in the High Command to conclude that he was either a crackpot or simply a man on a fool’
s errand. Casement’s position was not strengthened by the fact that his close association with his companion Adler Christensen caused many in the German government to whisper.

  In early April 1916, the Germans finally agreed to provide Casement with twenty thousand Mauser rifles and one million rounds of outdated ammunition. There would be no monetary loan and no invasion force. Casement would be returned to Ireland by submarine and the arms would be delivered shortly thereafter by the German navy. It was only one-tenth the number of arms he had requested, and lacked the badly needed money and military back-up, but it was the best he was going to get. Reluctantly, Roger Casement accepted the offer.

  Casement knew that the great uprising, scheduled to take place on Easter Sunday – now less than two weeks away – could not hope to succeed. The Irish could not win their independence without help and he had to persuade them to call off the insurrection. If they went ahead without help the cause was doomed and they would probably all be slaughtered. Casement was devastated. But had he known the full extent of his problems, he would have been even more disheartened.

  Since the beginning of the war British Intelligence (MI5) had been monitoring messages between the German ambassador in Washington and his superiors at home as well as with Sinn Fein. At least thirty-two messages had been intercepted and London knew all about the planned uprising. To make matters worse for Casement, his lover, Adler Christensen, was on the payroll of MI5. His companion had duly reported every move Casement had made since he left New York over a year earlier. The only thing the British were unsure of was whether the Germans were actually going to support the expected Irish rebellion.