Unlikely Rebels

by Anne Clare

  My heart’s delight,

  My thousand treasures,

  My thousand loves,

  My secret love,

  My heart’s music.

  On 26 January 1916, Grace is again ‘Dearest Babbaly’, and he translates it this time for her as ‘Gate of God’. He quotes a love poem he wrote in Algiers, disclaiming it as a poor thing in a mixture of self-mockery and playfulness: ‘That’s no good I’m afraid. It was wrote [sic] to nobody at all (cross my heart) in Algiers.’

  The following day he explains that his left arm is stiff, due to too much beer drinking. His sister Geraldine asserted that Plunkett was often in pain during this time, but this is typical of how he made fun of it.

  There is great poignancy in the concluding words of another letter: ‘Nothing can ever separate us.’ The very next day, the first day of spring, he is writing to say how he misses Grace and describes how he has spent the evening ‘in fifty places and then a staff meeting and then more talk till all hours’. He was ‘not very chirpy and should not have had to go out at all’ and then banteringly asks, ‘Some sleuth told me you were at the Red Bank today – is that so?’[4]

  The following day he is confined at Kimmage with a heavy cold and a snow blizzard prevents her from visiting him. Two days later, the overworked postman delivers a letter in which Plunkett expresses his longing to see her. He is ‘cultivating patience’, but he details his worries about her, referring to her in the third person: ‘Perhaps she is not well and not able to come – perhaps she is tired out – perhaps something is worrying her – perhaps she is unhappy and, worse, fears that I won’t write – but never any doubt that she would love to come if she could.’

  St Valentine’s Day 1916 produces a brief letter: ‘My darling Grace, will you come and see me?’

  On 28 February his letter is headed ‘Hic et Nunc’ (here and now). He calls Grace ‘Our Live Artist at the Front’, a reference to her political propagandist cartoons. There are playful, repetitive expressions of love, an admission that he nearly came to blows when he was ordered to stay in bed ‘on account of the weather disagreeing with me’. Then he becomes playful: ‘Tomorrow I expect – sh! Tell it not in Rath – a leap year proposal.[5] Can you come early and avoid the rush?’

  On her birthday, 3 March, Grace receives good wishes for the year:

  … and every year thereafter and the wish of your heart and a nice husband – that’s me … you know I only snatch glimpses of you and we never have time to finish a talk … I’m an enchanted prince … I will love to do everything I can to make you happy … You must know how much and little that is … but it will be the whole of me.

  Even his own address he infuses with poetry: ‘At the Field of Larks near Kimmage. St Joseph his feast day, 1916’ and uses, sometimes, old Gaelic endearments like ‘A Rún’, ‘A chuid de’n tsaoighil’ (My share of the world). He admits finding it difficult to ‘love in black and white’. Poetry is the only vehicle for his love, but ‘Poems are like love, they will not come for wishing.’

  Joseph and Grace were to have been married in a double wedding ceremony, with his sister Geraldine and her fiancé Thomas Dillon, on Easter Sunday 1916. The Rising took over, however, and Joseph writes to Grace from Fitzwilliam Street on Holy Saturday 1916, when all is ready for taking over the General Post Office:

  My darling sweetheart, I got your dear letter by lunch as I was going out at 9 this morning and have not had a minute to collect my thoughts since (now 2.45) … here is a little gun which should only be used to protect yourself … Here is some money for you too and all my love forever. Joe.

  The gun and message were brought to Grace by Joseph’s aide-de-camp, Michael Collins, and she gave this gun to Nellie, who was leaving Temple Villas on her way to her Citizen Army outpost at the Royal College of Surgeons.[6]The following day, which was to have been the day of their marriage, Grace received Joseph’s final pre-Rising letter:

  Larkfield, Easter Sunday 1916, 9 p.m.

  My dearest heart, keep up your spirits and trust in Providence. Everything is bully. I have only a minute. I am going to the nursing home tonight to sleep. I am keeping well as anything but need a rest. Take care of your old cold, sweetheart. All my love for ever, darling, darling, Grace. Joe.

  These were among the letters sent by Joseph Plunkett to Temple Villas during the six months leading up to the Rising on Easter Monday 1916. It is unlikely that you would find anywhere else in the world a bundle of such letters opening with a definition of mystical love and concluding with a penultimate letter accompanying a gun. But they reflect Joseph’s life during these first months of 1916: a young man deeply in love and a young man determined to call England’s bluff about the ever promised, never granted Home Rule for a country which her liberators declared to be a separate nation.

  Notes

  [1]Bureau of Military History (1913–21): WS 257, file no. S.395.

  [2]The National Library, MS 21590.

  [3]Joseph Mary Plunkett, Letters to Grace Gifford, National Library of Ireland. Many thanks to Maeve Donnelly for her assistance in gaining access to these papers and permission to use them. All the quotations in this chapter from Joseph come from the same source.

  [4]The Red Bank was a Dublin restaurant.

  [5]‘Rath’ is probably a reference to the MacDonagh home in Rathmines.

  [6]The gun is housed, inscribed with identification, in Collins Barracks Museum, Dublin.

  15 - An Uneasy City

  For narrative purposes I must backtrack a little. While he wooed Grace, Plunkett was deeply involved in the politics of arming the Volunteers for a rebellion still not envisaged by either Roger Casement, an executive of MacNeill’s Dublin Brigade of the Irish Volunteers, or its chief officer, MacNeill himself. Both men resented how easy it had been for the Ulster Volunteers to arm to oppose Home Rule, and neither man supported Redmond’s solution to entice the granting of Home Rule by expending Irish lives in the trenches. Both did, however, see the need to improve their military strength against unionist aggression, and the Irish Volunteer Executive had sent Casement to Germany to seek help. The philologist and scholar Kuno Mayer disclosed that John Devoy actually cautioned the Germans about Casement, whom he mistrusted undeservedly. In fact, Joseph McGarrity, one of the most important men in Irish-American circles at this time, said it was a separate group – not Devoy’s Clan na Gael – who arranged Casement’s arms mission. Casement himself sought not only arms but also to create an Irish Brigade from the captured British army POWs who were Irish. The Devoy interference could not have helped his cause, and Casement met with a poor response from both the German diplomats and the POWs.

  When it was decided to send Joseph Plunkett to Germany to join Casement, he started to talk of his health requiring another trip abroad. He grew a beard and destroyed various photographs of himself. On his arrival in Berlin, whereas Casement had dealt with politicians and prisoners, Plunkett went to the military authorities and to the German high command. His extraordinary thoroughness was only disclosed in 1991 when papers were acquired by Lieutenant Colonel J. P. Duggan, having lain in German archives since 1915.[1]They were described by the late Fr F. X. Martin as ‘nothing short of sensational’, and, according to Dr Donal McCartney, ‘They show that it was not a question of a group of poets going out with a harebrained scheme.’[2]

  The documents fall into three categories:

  1. a briefing on the Irish Volunteers, 1915

  2. a detailed disposition of British forces in Ireland

  3. a survey of coastline and maritime counties of Ireland

  Dr McCartney agrees with Fr Martin’s assessment of their importance: ‘Maybe I expected that there was a military plan all along but I feel that this is not the complete outline. Obviously Joe Plunkett, apparently carrying all the details in his head, could not have spelled them out fully.’[3]

  To ensure the trustworthiness of any recruits from Germany for the Irish Brigade (a low figure of fifty is mentioned), their
bona fides would be established by the password ‘Aisling’ and also by the use of the old circle and sword emblem used on Plunkett’s letters to Grace.

  However, the strategic sketch unearthed in 1991 by the German archivists is the most impressive component of the find. It is all there, relayed enthusiastically supposedly from memory to the Germans by Plunkett: the British camps, the garrison towns, the troops, the artillery depots, the batteries of guns, the store depots, the number of infantry, the field howitzers, the forts, the RIC placements, the drop in manpower as British troops were deployed to Europe. Plunkett’s argument, it is believed, was that the Irish Volunteers needed hands-on help to meet their age-old enemy. He gave, it is alleged, all the above from memory and, also from memory, the number and deployment of the Volunteers. To have memorised and relayed such detail would be impressive but almost essential. Had such documentation been found on his person by a British agent, it would almost certainly have been the end for both the messenger and the message. Nevertheless, a grandson of Geraldine Plunkett, Dr John O’Donnell, has in his possession a hollowed-out walking stick belonging to his great-uncle Joseph Plunkett and it is believed this may well have been the hiding place for the aforesaid details. The only way to determine which story is correct would be to ascertain whose handwriting appears on the papers. Either way, Plunkett had to know facts and figures to argue them.

  Unfortunately for Irish hopes, the Germans, at this stage, were faced with heavy battles, including the notorious Somme. However, they did not totally reject the request for help. Plunkett went home to relay their promise of captured arms only, then went on to America, to give details there of a planned uprising. Back home again, his health deteriorated once more, but that did not prevent his working with Rory O’Connor on munitions and telegraphy, nor his pursuing of romance with Grace. He had also drawn up an operational plan for the Rising and showed it to an enthusiastic Connolly, who worked with him to improve it. Strategic, strong, Dublin buildings, forming a rough ring around the city centre, would be occupied, and the arms promised from Germany would be landed on the Kerry coast and distributed about the country. The stage was set, but the opening performance was to encounter several hitches. The wonder of it was that a military engagement took place at all.

  It was, in fact, an order made in code by the Castle authorities, the Castle Document, that precipitated the Rising. This proposed not only making sweeping arrests of leading Volunteers and of those with non-militant cultural interests, such as Gaelic Leaguers, but also launching raids for arms, occupying the homes of Volunteer leaders and surrounding some buildings, including the archbishop’s palace. A Volunteer undercover man named Smith in Dublin Castle had brought the document to the Volunteers, in stages, as secrecy allowed. Decoded by Plunkett, the translation was printed on a hand press at Larkfield by George Plunkett and Colm Ó Lochlainn.[4]

  The British authorities were anxious to wash their hands of any immediate responsibility for the rebellion, but the Castle Document showed their intention to be the first to strike. When the decoded version was published, the Castle denied its authenticity, causing it to be termed a bogus ploy of the insurgents. Grace left an unequivocal testimony to its veracity: ‘Although it was published in Holy Week, it had come from the Castle some time before that. It did come out from the Castle that is quite certain. I know who brought it … Mr Smith was in the Castle.’[5]

  There was chaos at Liberty Hall and at St Enda’s; indeed, there was chaos everywhere. The Dublin Castle authorities proposed to arrest about 100 Volunteers. Pearse’s reaction was immediate: it was a case of who would strike the first blow, Castle or Volunteer? It must be the Volunteers. At Liberty Hall, the reasoning was ‘now or never’.

  The non-belligerent Chief of Staff of the Volunteers, Eoin MacNeill, whose house was amongst those to be isolated by the British, instructed his men to resist arrest, but only defensively. On hearing a rumour that an armed Volunteer confrontation was planned, however, he stated angrily that the raison d’être of his Volunteers was not aggression and agreed to approve mobilisation only on hearing of the awaited German guns which made armed confrontation seem inevitable. The German vessel Aud, however, with its cargo of rifles and machine guns, was cornered by the British HMS Bluebell on 22 April 1916. Its quick-thinking German captain sank the ship – cargo included.[6] Moreover, Roger Casement, who had arrived back in Ireland on a German submarine, had been taken into custody shortly after landing the day before. MacNeill immediately cancelled the mobilisation order.

  The Rising was postponed for twenty-four hours, but on Monday, 24 April 1916, north of the Liffey, the GPO and Four Courts were occupied. South of the Liffey it was Bolands Mills, St Stephen’s Green (including the Royal College of Surgeons), Jacob’s factory and the South Dublin Union, with outposts. Dublin Castle and Trinity College were not occupied: this had been intended until the confusion of the counter-order and the loss of the Aud.

  It was as jumbled an army as you could find. There were in fact two armies: the Citizen Army under Connolly and the Irish Volunteers under Pearse. This division became blurred, however, and eventually they became known as the Irish Republican Army. The Hibernian Rifles also took part, and the fact that Britain continued to call them all Sinn Féiners (who never had an army at all), or Shinners, added to the mixture. There was also a great discrepancy in their training and their gear: Howth rifles, guns, historic pikes (acquired from Professor Donal Ó Buachalla), DMP and RIC batons, automatics, a Russian rifle from the Aud, even a Carson rifle from the north of Ireland inscribed ‘For God and Ulster’.

  As to dress, some wore the stipulated full uniform; others wore a bandolier as the only available indication of their military status. In between these two extremes various compromises were made to achieve a military look. Mostly those involved had paid for their gear from their own very limited resources.

  The participants and sympathisers were equally varied: two knights, Casement and Sir Thomas Myles (who assisted at the Howth gunrunning), a knight’s daughter (Louise Gavan Duffy), a countess, two professors, a lecturer, poets, novelists, Éamonn Ceannt (who had played Irish music for Pope Pius X), teachers, an auctioneer, a judge of the circuit court, trade-union leaders, an engineer, an alderman, a surgeon, medical students, a scientist, the head of an old Gaelic clan, printers, actors and actresses from the Abbey, a Protestant woman called Nellie Gifford who used to teach domestic science in rural Ireland, two Swedish sailors on leave who joined in enthusiastically, as well as a mêlée of clerks, carpenters, bricklayers, shop assistants, railwaymen, plumbers, decorators and some unemployed. A veritable conglomeration, but they showed an enthusiasm that soared when they saw the flag symbolising the Irish nation waving above the garrisons they held about the city.

  Thomas MacDonagh had bidden a tearful farewell to his wife Muriel. Plunkett sent the gun to Grace at Temple Villas. Emotions ran high as Pearse stood outside the GPO and declared the rebirth of a nation, reading from the statement headed, ‘Poblacht na h-Éireann: The Provisional Government of the Irish Republic to the People of Ireland.’ The seven names at the bottom of the statement were Thomas J. Clarke, Seán Mac Diarmada, Thomas MacDonagh, P. H. Pearse, Éamonn Ceannt, James Connolly and Joseph Plunkett.

  Notes

  [1]Lieutenant Colonel J. P. Duggan, ‘1916. Overall Plan: A Concept of Operations’, An Cosantóir, April 1991, pp. 23–29.

  [2]Ibid., p. 27.

  [3]Ibid., pp. 27–28.

  [4]J. Little, TD, Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, ‘A 1916 Document’, The Capuchin Annual, 1942, pp. 452–462.

  [5]Bureau of Military History: WS 257, file no. S.395.

  [6]Extract from logbook of HMS Bluebell for 22 April 1916: ‘9.28 a.m. Closed on S.S. Aud who blew ship up. 9.40 a.m. Vessel Aud sank.’

  16 - In the Garrisons

  There have been many cameos recorded of what went on in Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street) during that historic week, some unforgettable: the dignified Pearse stan
ding outside the GPO on Monday 24 April 1916 declaring the birth of their Republic to mostly disinterested passers-by; the building behind him being prepared for siege with sandbagged windows; those who had been on the premises already made prisoners; Pearse’s steady voice calling out the emotive phrases:

  In the name of God and of the dead generations … supported by her exiled children in America … We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland … In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom … six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms … we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic … The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty … We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God … no one who serves that cause will dishonour it by cowardice, inhumanity, or rapine.

  It has been said that this man’s proper milieu is among the church’s saints even though his detractors say otherwise. In a tribute, one of his pupils, Alfred Dennis, described Pearse’s relationship with his students: ‘They did not tell him lies, because he believed every word they said.’[1]General Blackadder, president of the court martial that tried the insurrectionists, observed regretfully, ‘I have had to condemn to death one of the finest characters I have ever come across. I don’t wonder that his pupils adored him.’

  When biographers undertake a description of Joseph Plunkett’s part in the GPO garrison, they seem committed to the inclusion of two matters and little else: his frailty and his jewellery, and that little else is not always accurate. Thomas Coffey mentions his filigree bangle and two antique rings, his emaciation, the surgical bandage around his throat (Plunkett had undergone surgery on his tubercular glands the previous week) and his uncertain step; yet he concedes that the young, post-surgery invalid showed an astonishing flow of nervous energy when the fighting got under way.[2]Charles Duff speaks of him tottering about but doing all he could, though he may have been ‘ready to fall at any moment’, but Duff admits his signing of the Proclamation and giving the Rising all his moral support.[3]Ruth Dudley Edwards records the particular contributions of Connolly, Pearse, Clarke and Mac Diarmada. She allots just one sentence to Plunkett: ‘Plunkett was dying of consumption.’[4]In Kenneth Griffith and Timothy O’Grady’s work, Curious Journey, the jewellery has proliferated into ‘an assortment of rings, bracelets and bangles’.[5]