The Manchester Martyrs E-Book

Joseph O'Neill

• Herausgeber: Mercier Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 358

Beschreibung

A thrilling account of the events surrounding the execution of three Fenians known as The Manchester Martyrs. Their execution during a turbulent period of Irish history in 1867 united the Irish people in a patriotic fervour and outrage not matched until 1916. The events surrounding the dramatic rescue of Fenian leaders (resulting in the Martyrs' execution) attracted worldwide attention and sparked anti-British protests across the globe. Their trial is one of the most infamous British court cases of the nineteenth century and their hanging was Britain's last public multiple execution. In 2006 Bertie Ahern announced that the Irish government would grant the Martyrs a full state funeral and re-inter them in a grave at Glasnevin Cemetery. The plan foundered because their remains could not be located at that time. This book reveals the location of the remains and explains why they will never be returned to Ireland.

Leseprobe

MERCIER PRESS

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© Joseph O’Neill, 2012

ISBN: 978 1 85635 951 1

Epub ISBN: 978 1 78117 056 4

Mobi ISBN: 978 1 78117 057 1

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

For Mick Corrigan and all those who have kept alive the memory of the Manchester Martyrs

Introduction

The hairs on my arms and neck bristled with the surge of a disquieting emotion. The silence was like none I had ever experienced. Beyond the silence, outside it, was the sound of rain gurgling in the gutters, the relentless Manchester rain falling in great skeins buffeted by the November winds. I was seven years old. It is a moment that will stay with me forever.

Throughout the 1950s, when I was growing up in Manchester, the minute’s silence at the spot where the Martyrs died was part of our annual commemoration, a fixture in the calendar of men like my father and many of their children. Together with the Mass, sometimes celebrated by the bishop of Salford, and the prayers at the Martyrs’ monument in St Joseph’s Cemetery, it did more than forge a bond between the Irish community and the men who, there in our adopted city, died for Irish freedom. Ritual has the power to express the inexpressible. It fashions our hearts.

In the 1960s, however, those who had commemorated the Martyrs became scattered and disparate. The city’s programme of slum clearance – the PR men had not yet coined the euphemism ‘inner city regeneration’ – meant that the wrecking ball smashed the flimsy walls of the cramped houses and pubs once thronged by the nineteenth-century Manchester Irish. The rubble filled in the old cellars and the rafters and floorboards fed bonfires that lit up the night. The Irish of Moss Side, Hulme, Ancoats and Chorlton-on-Medlock were physically and socially on the move.

Their children, with that chameleon plasticity that marks the Irish wherever they settle, assimilated, the next generation even more. As the conflict in Northern Ireland intensified, commemoration of the Martyrs became, for some, an expression of support for a strident and brutal ideology that invoked past injustices as a rationale for present atrocities. Many saw this development as a subversion of the Martyrs’ memory, a misappropriation of the past in the service of current political dogma. The inevitable conflict vitiated the tradition of remembrance and a welter of accusations and counter-accusations drove away most of those who for many years had been the mainstay of the commemoration.

As conflicting groups claimed the legacy of the Martyrs, the events surrounding their execution were forgotten and no one remembered their story. Were they terrorists justly executed for the slaying of a Manchester policeman or were they victims of ‘perfidious Albion’? Were they champions of the oppressed working-class, noble bearers of arms in the on-going struggle against international capitalism? Or were they simply Irish republicans, part of an unbroken tradition linking Wolfe Tone to the hunger strikers?[1]

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) for those who seek to manipulate the past in the service of the present, slogans and rallying cries are crude filters through which to view history. The past remains infuriatingly elusive, nuanced and contradictory and the complexity of people’s lives can never be reduced to a war cry. There is far more to the story than its political dimensions.

Certainly, it is a story about political idealism and nationalistic fervour. But it is also about personal bravery, faith and how a group of men prepared themselves to suffer with dignity a public death before a baying crowd eager for any sign of fear. It is about the intrigues of a secret, oath-bound revolutionary conspiracy. It is about one of the most infamous court cases of the nineteenth century. It is about injustice. It is about the fraught relations between England and Ireland. It is about the Irish in England and particularly in the damp, quixotic city of Manchester which has, in equal measure, welcomed us and resented our presence.

I became reacquainted with the story about fifteen years ago and the more I researched the more fascinated I became. Interviews with some of those who had participated in the commemorations, especially Gerry Finn, whose commitment to the memory of the Martyrs over many years gave him a unique insight into the development of the public remembrance, brought me inevitably to the late J. P. (Jimmy) McGill. I had known the latter’s bookshops since childhood, without ever realising that he was for decades a moving force in maintaining the commemoration of the Martyrs. Shortly before his death, Jimmy deposited the papers of the Manchester Martyrs Commemoration Committee and related items accumulated over a lifetime, with the Linen Hall Library, Belfast, and it was there that I did a great deal of the research for this book.

Having written many articles and given numerous talks on various aspects of the incident, my brother-in-law suggested that the story was deserving of an accessible account. He provided the first incentive to write this book and over a decade later I acknowledge my debt to him. Since then I have met numerous people in Manchester and Ireland who agree with him and without exception they have been unfailing in their generosity and support, always anxious to share information with me and explain what the Martyrs mean to them.

A Note on Sources

This book is not an academic tome, nor is it a work of fiction. It is a history book written for the general reader who prefers not to have every fact and opinion annotated by reference to obscure sources. It is not a polemic and I hope such views as I express or imply are reasonable. Throughout they are grounded in the evidence and nowhere do they go beyond the known facts. I have sought to step aside and let the story speak for itself. If there are morals or lessons to be drawn from it, I leave you to draw them and confine myself to turning facts into narrative.

Fortunately, there are a great number of relevant facts available, many of them previously unused. Foremost among these are those in the Linen Hall collection, a vast archive of diverse material relating to the Martyrs and their commemoration. It includes booklets, pamphlets, newspaper cuttings and correspondence, together with miscellaneous references to the Martyrs gathered by Jimmy McGill during a lifetime of study.

Newspapers have also proved invaluable sources. Luckily for the historian, Manchester for certain periods in the nineteenth century had up to seven newspapers. Many provide not only verbatim accounts of the court proceedings, but also statements made by a range of interested parties, together with detailed background information about the circumstances under which people were arrested, their appearance, employment and education.

Many of the principal characters also left accounts of these events and Fr Gadd, who ministered to the men while they awaited execution, recorded their reactions during their final days. Many journalists had both access to and contacts within the prison and reported on developments throughout.

Using these and many secondary sources I have sought to construct a narrative which captures the drama inherent in the events while at all times remaining true to the facts.

A Note on Dialogue

All the quotations and reported speech in this book are taken from contemporary newspaper reports, court records or the memoirs and accounts of those directly involved in the events described and other sources. In some cases, particularly in Chapters 8 and 9, I have depicted developments in scenes which involve dialogue. In all cases these scenes are based on the first-hand recollections of those involved and contemporary sources.

[1] For more details about the main characters and organisations see Appendix 1.

Prologue

New Bailey Prison, Salford,Saturday 23 November 1867, 8.03 a.m.

Calcraft drew the noose tight under Allen’s left ear. He could hear the prisoner snorting through the hood covering his head. Allen drew up his shoulders until they touched the noose, as if he would shrug off the rope. The crowd fell silent.

The hangman looked back along the scaffold at the other two hooded figures. O’Brien’s shoulders were flung back as if he would face down death. A string of spittle dangled from the hem of Larkin’s hood. This is it, Calcraft thought. He drew his hand down from his chin, pulling the white fibres of his beard into a rope.

Fr Gadd took one stride backwards from the drop, but Calcraft stayed, savouring the moment.

‘Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy,’ the priest intoned.

Pushing up against the barriers, the mob strained to see through the mist. The three men shot through the drop. The crowd gasped like a great beast startled.

Calcraft descended the ladder to the pit, his movements deliberate. Before he reached the bottom, he heard the breath rattling in Larkin’s throat. The man’s tethered legs thrashed as he gurgled.

Calcraft turned to Allen, swaying at the end of the rope, face snapped skywards. With two fingers the hangman touched his shoulder, spinning the body round. Stone dead, his neck snapped like a stick of charcoal.

Larkin’s body was still pulsing. Calcraft reached for the rope, drew it to him. Holding Larkin steady, he lifted his foot to the manacle that bound the twitching ankles. Carefully he placed his shoe on the shackle. His body flexing, he leaped up onto the back of the dying man, setting the rope pitching.

Again he levered and jerked, levered and jerked. Tendons popped. Bones cracked. He stepped down, his feet silent on the planks.

‘The soldiers are coming,’ rose the cry from below, beyond the black drape that hid the drop from the mob. Yelps and shrieks carried up from the street, the clatter of boots and clogs on the cobbles.

Calcraft patted his skullcap. He looked up at O’Brien, whose shoulders still twitched. He’d never seen a man go to the scaffold with such courage. He lifted his leg, ready to jump up on O’Brien’s back.

‘Leave that man alone!’ came a voice from the foot of the ladder. Calcraft turned in disbelief. The priest had appeared without a sound. Before the executioner could speak Fr Gadd advanced towards him, his right arm extended, the black book clutched against his black soutane. His face was as white as his Roman collar.

‘He ain’t dead, sir. I must finish him off,’ protested the old man.

The execution of the Manchester Martyrs Courtesy of Mercier Archives

‘Incompetent buffoon.’ The priest’s waxy skin was now shot through with rage. ‘Get back!’ The priest pointed his arm towards the ladder.

The old man’s mouth opened. He hesitated. ‘I must stay, sir. It’s my duty.’

‘So long as you keep your hands off him,’ said the priest.

Calcraft stepped back, his lips puckered like a scolded child’s. He folded his hands behind his back.

Fr Gadd wrapped the chain of the crucifix around O’Brien’s fingers and took the other hand in his.

‘Take courage, Michael,’ he whispered. ‘Your loving God has not deserted you. Nor shall I.’

He bent his head in prayer, causing the body to sway:

Out of the depths I cry to You, O Lord!

Lord, hear my voice!

Let your ears be attentive

To the voice of my supplications!

O’Brien groaned.

1 ‘Ireland Made Me’

It takes you by surprise. This part of the cemetery is as fresh and well tended as a military graveyard. Not far from the futuristic museum with its roof like a great axe head suspended in the air, where the paving, slick with rain, runs out, you reach a narrow tarmac path. The smell of damp earth is strong and even in the shelter of the monumental masonry the fitful wind tears at your hair and coat. Then you see it: the first of a Calvary of Celtic crosses. Bolted to the grave fence, which is as tall as a baby’s cot, is a heart-shaped plaque bearing the legend ‘God Save Ireland’. In the feeble December light the sandstone cross is gunmetal grey. Inscribed on the base are three names and below them, again, ‘God Save Ireland’. The grave itself is empty.

Not six strides away is the burial place, marked only by a grave curb, of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. On the other side of the path is a monument to the hunger strikers of 1981.

Here in Glasnevin Cemetery’s Republican Plot, where the elaborate headstones speak of a love of country now lost to us, Ireland’s past appears as an unbroken tradition of patriotic self-sacrifice. In this place where death is transmuted into imperishable glory, chisel and mallet have fused nationalism and religious faith.

Another empty grave, this one dug in a Kilkenny churchyard in 1848, is part of the story of James Stephens, the man who shaped the lives of so many of those now enshrined in Ireland’s nationalist pantheon. If it is possible to say some men’s lives were determined by a single year, then Stephens was such a man and the year was 1848. Just as he was to play a major role in Irish history in the years after this crucial pivotal point, he was the product of the nation’s development in the decades before that defining year. Ireland’s past had shaped James Stephens to such an extent that he could justly claim ‘Ireland made me’.

Stephens burned with a profound sense of grievance. Since the Union of 1801, Ireland had been ruled directly from Westminster, where MPs from Kerry and Connemara sat with their counterparts from Cornwall and Kendal. When Stephens was born in 1825, practising his faith, and that of almost the entire population, was not only illegal but entailed social and economic ostracism. It was only with Catholic Emancipation in 1829 that the British government dismantled the Penal Laws – legal prohibitions which made the practice of his faith a crime, restricted his ability to own property and limited his opportunities to move up the social hierarchy.

In his campaigns to achieve Catholic Emancipation, the man known as The Liberator, Daniel O’Connell, had called ‘monster meetings’, demonstrations attended by enormous numbers of people with no previous role in the political system or experience of activism. Though committed to non-violent campaigning, O’Connell nevertheless demonstrated the effectiveness of mobilising large numbers of the powerless and impoverished. The significance of this was not lost on Stephens, who was convinced that the poor and those with no voice in politics were not simply an inert and lethargic mass: effective organisation might shape them into a force to drive a revolution.

Though O’Connell was also known as ‘the king of the beggars’, nothing he did improved the economic plight of the Catholic population during Stephens’ formative years. Irish peasants were among the poorest in Europe and their privation appalled foreign visitors. Despite Catholic Emancipation, the land remained largely in the hands of absentee landlords and the descendants of Protestant settlers. As for the bulk of the population, by 1840 forty-five per cent of Irish farms consisted of fewer than five acres and half the population relied on potatoes, with two million entirely dependent on them. Many more eked out a living on miniscule holdings supplemented by work as farm labourers. Such industry as there was, chiefly around Dublin and especially Belfast, was insufficient to sustain a population that remained perilously dependent on an agricultural economy which for decades had teetered on the brink of catastrophe.

The sense of injustice which coursed through Stephens’ veins was neither abstract nor theoretical. He didn’t construct it from propagandist tracts or works of political philosophy. The evidence for it was all around him, everywhere he turned. It stunted the lives of millions of his compatriots who lived from day to day knowing that their very survival was questionable.

What’s more, Stephens’ Ireland was in many respects an occupied country. Barracks, manned by the Irish constabulary, an armed police force, and the presence of large numbers of British troops permanently stationed in the country, maintained crown control.

The consequences of Ireland’s economic structure and British control became apparent in the 1840s in a manner impossible to ignore. The failure of the potato crop in 1845 and the following years led first to hardship and then to starvation. It threatened the families of millions of small peasant farmers and landless labourers with annihilation. The great hunger of the last European famine – Ireland’s greatest calamity since the Black Death of the fourteenth century killed half the population – gnawed deep into the Irish mentality and shaped the country’s development for the next century and a half.

The Famine killed a million people and drove another million abroad. From a pre-Famine figure of 8,500,000, Ireland’s population, alone of European countries, fell for the next 125 years. Death, terror and depopulation stamped on the mind of every politically aware Irish person the conviction that Britain was unfit to rule them. The Famine proved, at the very least, that Britain’s attitude to Ireland was one of callous indifference. Some nationalists saw it in a more sinister light: it was genocide.

Nor was its impact confined to Ireland. As a child in Liverpool, the sight of those escaping the Famine had a profound effect on the future Fenian, John Denvir. Gaunt and spectral, they stank of poverty and death. Their degradation made an indelible mark on Denvir. ‘It will not be wondered,’ he wrote in The Life Story of an Old Rebel, ‘that one who saw these things should feel it a duty stronger than life itself to reverse the system of misgovernment which was responsible.’

James Stephens

Courtesy of Mercier Archives

What’s more, the Famine created the Irish diaspora, to which Stephens was later to attribute such a key role in his strategy for Irish independence. There were Irish people in North America and ‘mainland’ Britain long before the Famine, but it was the mass exodus fuelled by fear of death that accounts for the fact that today there are seventy million Americans and one in five people in Britain with Irish ancestry. It was this vast body of embittered exiles and their descendants, with their inherited anti-English sentiments, that Stephens sought to harness to the cause of Irish independence.

In 1848, however, when Stephens decided to throw in his lot with a group of idealistic, largely middle-class nationalists, known as Young Ireland, he was still virtually unknown. William Smith O’Brien, a leading figure in the Young Ireland movement, had a national reputation, and Stephens decided to take up arms with him. The group attempted a rising at Ballingarry, County Tipperary, although the result was a few inconsequential skirmishes with the police, contemptuously dismissed by the authorities as ‘the Battle of the Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch’. Stephens was wounded in the thigh and subsequently went to ground, seeking to escape the round-up that followed the incident. To put the authorities off the scent, his friends arranged his funeral and had a coffin buried in a Kilkenny churchyard. The Kilkenny Moderator even published his obituary, assuring its readers that Stephens had been an inoffensive young man and ‘an excellent son and brother’.

Stephens escaped to France, disguised as a servant. It was then, at the age of twenty-three, that the former engineering student made a decision: he would break the power of the British Empire. Where Young Ireland had failed, he would succeed. At that time, the empire he challenged was the greatest amalgam of territory and the mightiest economic and military power in the history of the world. It far exceeded the empires of Rome and Egypt, the Greeks and the Mongols in all their pomp. It controlled a quarter of the world’s population and was master of sub-continents and great swathes of territory in every region and zone on earth. Yet Stephens set himself the task of stunting its inexorable progress and rolling it back from the place of its inception, its first colony. He never allowed any setback, disappointment or reversal to deflect him from his goal. He bore poverty, imprisonment, betrayal, rejection by his comrades, accusations of treachery and even military defeat with the stoical resignation of the first Christian martyrs. His confidence in his ultimate triumph was, from the outset, unassailable.

Energising him through all his trials was a version of Ireland’s history which he summarised in his Fenian proclamation of 1867 and which he had imbibed growing up in a Catholic, nationalist family. It was a source of inexhaustible sustenance for him and became a central tenet for all those who sought Ireland’s independence by force of arms:

We have suffered centuries of outrage, enforced poverty, and bitter misery. Our rights and liberties have been trampled on by an alien aristocracy, who treated us as foes, usurped our lands, and drew away from our unfortunate country all material riches. The real owners of the soil were removed to make room for cattle, and driven across the ocean to seek the means of living, and the political rights denied to them at home, while our men of thought and action were condemned to loss of life and liberty. But we never lost the memory and hope of a national existence. We appealed in vain to the reason and sense of justice of the dominant powers.[2]

The significance of these beliefs for Stephens and other nationalists is impossible to exaggerate: what was at stake was not merely the freedom of the Irish nation but the survival of the Irish race. This was a theme to which Stephens returned again and again, first expressed in a speech he made in Brooklyn on 25 May 1866, when he was in New York to raise funds and galvanise support for an armed rising in Ireland. He stated this core Fenian tenet when he said, ‘unless our country is liberated the Irish race will be absorbed in this country, in England and in many other places. We will lose our identity and eventually disappear from the face of the earth.’

Though the Fenian proclamation conceded that ‘Our appeals to arms were always unsuccessful’, Stephens and the men who rose against the British government in 1848 nevertheless asserted their right to fight for independence and invoked solidarity with those who in earlier times had died in the effort, notably Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen who took up arms for an independent Irish republic in 1798. In so doing they drew on a powerful tradition of political martyrdom.

Nor was it simply the experience of combat during the Young Ireland rising that was seminal for the fledgling revolutionary. The movement’s propaganda, disseminated through John Mitchel’s newspaper, the United Irishman, convinced him that without a nationalist conscience Ireland’s distinctive culture would be lost. The ‘men of no property’, the embodiment of the nation’s soul to whom Mitchel appealed, were to become as important to Stephens’ thinking as the exaltation of violence, hatred of all things English and contempt for democratic politics also advocated by Young Ireland.

After Stephens fled to France, he eventually surfaced on Paris’ Left Bank. He and John O’Mahony, a cross-eyed fellow revolutionary exile from Limerick, with long hair swept back from his high brow, shared a room in a Paris tenement. Stephens, wielding a stick of charcoal, scrawled sweeping diagrams on its plaster walls. These illustrated his plans for a revolutionary organisation that would smash British power in Ireland. When not eking out a living as a translator, he lectured and hectored the international community of socialist, communist and anarchist exiles who made Paris of the 1850s a university of subversion.

Their Paris experience confirmed Stephens’ and O’Mahony’s conviction that Ireland would only achieve independence by force of arms. Fortunately for the prospects of his plans, Stephens had already concluded that he was a military genius and therefore fully equipped to lead such a rising. More realistically, however, both men agreed that if they were to succeed they must first build a new type of revolutionary organisation, financed and supported by the Irish in America. O’Mahony’s task was to mobilise the Irish in exile, while Stephens was to return home to construct the organisation that would succeed where the rising of 1848 had failed.

Unlike any previous Irish nationalist organisation, the one Stephens sought to create would combine the power of the Irish diaspora – what Stephens called ‘the new and greater Ireland’ – with that of the most virulent nationalist elements at home, to create an irresistible force for Irish independence. In order to build such an organisation he set himself the task of personally making contact with all the country’s advanced nationalist elements. To do this he walked, he later boasted, 3,000 miles. He chose, however, an inauspicious time.

In 1856, as James Stephens tramped the roads of Ireland, the whole country was one great ossuary. The Famine had hacked such a great swathe of death through the country that many were interred in burial mounds, unmarked graves and even on beaches. Visitors remarked on the deserted hamlets and abandoned settlements. On his long march across the south and west of Ireland, much of it on roads built as part of famine relief schemes, Stephens passed countless houses with their thatch decaying, rooks roosting in chimneys and nettles around the doorstep. In the west, rain and sun had bleached the stones that peeped like exposed skeletons from under sheets of moss.

But even more evident than the empty fields was the shame. None spoke of what had happened. Visitors found that if in a moment of forgetfulness a blacksmith, pointing out a house that was a landmark, mentioned a family who no longer lived there, or an innkeeper spoke of a townland now deserted, they at once averted their eyes and tried to bite back their words.

Though forewarned that national consciousness was at a depressingly low ebb, Stephens never doubted his ability to resurrect the spirit that had fired the United Irishmen, Robert Emmet and Young Ireland. In Marta Ramón’s biography A Provisional Dictator he is quoted as saying that ‘the cause is not dead, but sleeping’. Yet he did not delude himself about the magnitude of the task confronting him, adding, ‘Ireland lives and glows – but lives and glows in a trance.’

As he walked from town to town many must have taken Stephens for an actor in a melodrama, separated from his company. Leaning into the wind, his Penna Dutch hat casting a shadow over his watchful eyes and peevish mouth and his great cloak billowing in his wake, he strode with his head at a characteristically arrogant tilt.

Though he was a wanted man and every encounter carried the risk of betrayal, his stride never faltered. Like a medieval pilgrim or a mendicant preacher, his fervour powered his limbs and quickened his heart. He was a good judge of men and never doubted his instinct. He knew that government spies were everywhere and that a single word about arms or risings, conspiracies or plots, secret societies or drilling was enough to condemn him to imprisonment or exile.

This was Stephens at his best – inspiring, inexhaustible, meticulous, self-sacrificing and with an instinctive organisational genius. He was immensely and, for once, justifiably proud of the group he created, but like a doting father he was loath to do anything that might endanger his offspring. He was equally protective of his personal esteem; both his greatest strength and fatal flaw was his very high opinion of himself. In any discussion the sole opinion that mattered was his; the sole insightful observation was his; the sole genuine concern was his. Stephens would look vaguely beyond the person speaking and then when he had finished – often before he had finished – would make his point, which was frequently unconnected with anything that had been said.

Yet for all his personal foibles, the organisation that Stephens established flourished during the 1860s and spread through the trade unions, the big Dublin drapery stores and the building, shoe-making and tailoring trades in the capital and the other Irish cities. Equally important, it proved exceptionally attractive to the Irish in exile on both sides of the Atlantic.

The particular brand of revolutionary nationalism that Stephens dispensed intoxicated many sections of the Irish population and made it the obvious inheritor of Ireland’s political legacy. In Stephens’ own day it enthralled many of the Young Ireland rebels who, from prison cells, penal colonies and American exile, continued to embody an adamantine hatred of British rule in Ireland. With its emphasis on the role of the dispossessed in achieving independence it was attractive to all those who regarded themselves as victims of British rule: the landless, the exiled, those living in Irish towns and cities making a living in precarious employment. Democracy was not part of the experience of these groups; justice was a tool of British tyranny and violence the only means of striking against the oppressor. There was nothing in what Stephens proposed that seemed exotic or alien to the Irish. They were the product of a violent world. Eviction for a tenant farmer often meant destitution or death for him and his family. Throughout Europe nationalists struggling for independence assumed that they would not succeed without recourse to violence: Stephens was no different.

In the early stages of planning and building, Stephens kept in touch with O’Mahony through a number of emissaries. Finally, in the spring of 1858, O’Mahony asked him, on behalf of nationalists in America, to establish a revolutionary organisation in Ireland. Insisting on the titles ‘Chief Executive’ and ‘Provisional Dictator’, Stephens swore in the first members in Peter Lagan’s timber yard in Dublin’s Lombard Street on 17 March. Sometimes referred to as the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), but generally known as the Fenians – the name applied originally to the American branch – it was an oath-bound revolutionary organisation sworn to the establishment of an independent Irish republic by force of arms.

It is testimony to the impact of Stephens’ movement that by 1864 the word ‘Fenian’ had acquired the associations with which it still resonates today, and already conjured up the image of a ‘terrorist’ armed with gun and bomb, bent on political assassination and the destruction of the established order.

From the outset, Stephens realised that the authorities’ ability to infiltrate nationalist conspiracies, especially that of Wolfe Tone’s United Irishmen in 1798, was a major reason for the failure of previous risings. The need to counter this, together with what Stephens had learned of continental revolutionary organisations while in Paris, shaped the structure of the IRB. Stephens was much influenced by the organisation of secret revolutionary societies which he came into contact with in continental Europe. His concern for secrecy was obsessive and remarked on by all who knew him. He carried this to such lengths that he even refused to give the movement a name, referring to it only as ‘the organisation’. Its entire structure was designed to prevent penetration by the authorities. In theory each member knew the identity of no members other than his immediate associates. Michael Davitt, the founder of the Land League and an active Fenian, complained that the organisation was morbidly preoccupied with secrecy and that this was one of the things which prevented it from gaining wider support.

Another influence was the Irish tradition of secret agrarian societies of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as the Ribbonmen. Though these groups were chiefly concerned with settling grievances arising from their members’ position as tenant farmers and landless labourers, they adopted the rhetoric of national independence and viewed most of their hardships as the result of British rule.

The Fenians were divided into a number of ‘circles’, each comprising 820 men, under the command of an ‘A’ or a ‘centre’. Each centre was responsible for nine sub-centres, each under a captain also known as a sub-centre. In turn, each of the captains had charge of nine sergeants, each of whom controlled nine privates. In theory, no man knew the identity of any member outside his own section, thereby preventing damaging penetration by agents of the British government.

The men who joined the organisation were, Stephens was convinced, the keepers of the flame of Irish nationalism. The landless labourers and the small tenant farmers, the unskilled workers in the towns, the craftsmen, clerks and shop assistants still cherished hopes of an independent Ireland, free from the oppression of British rule. It suited the Fenian leadership that many followers came to believe that Irish independence would be accompanied by a redistribution of land and that returning exiles would once more take possession of what was rightfully theirs.

Yet, though Fenian talk of a redistribution of wealth alarmed the respectable classes and thrilled supporters, it had very little influence on their actions. First and last Stephens and his followers were nationalists, and he often spoke of the need to let nothing distract them from the goal of Irish independence. However, he did nothing to deter his followers from assuming that Irish independence would somehow solve their economic and status concerns.

Nor did Stephens want democratic diversions to distract the movement from revolutionary action. In this he was helped by the collapse in the late 1850s of the Tenant Right League, an organisation created to improve the legal position of tenant farmers and a precursor of the much more important Land League. It sought to develop a parliamentary adjunct, led by John Sadleir and William Keogh. Once in parliament, however, Sadleir and Keogh devoted their energies to personal advancement with a degree of cynicism seldom exceeded. For many nationalists this dalliance with constitutional politics proved a grave disappointment and convinced them that they would achieve their goals only through more robust methods. When Stephens dismissed democratic politicians as ‘corrupt, self-serving, demoralising and ineffective’, his words resonated with those who had put their trust in Sadleir and Keogh.

To others, however, Fenian ideas were anathema. Among the movement’s most resolute opponents was the formidable Archbishop of Dublin, Paul Cullen, who was convinced that the interests of the church lay in working with the established authorities to secure the position of the Catholic faith in Irish life. A consistent opponent of nationalist causes – which he associated with the threat of liberal ideas – he spoke against Young Ireland and the Tenant Right League. In his view, Fenianism was contaminated by the subversive ideology which characterised the oath-bound secret societies of which he had had such appalling experiences in Rome in 1848, when radicals had murdered the prime minister and driven Pope Pius IX from the Vatican.

There were, however, other prominent churchmen, notably Archbishop John McHale of Tuam, and many modest curates and obscure parish priests who had a favourable, or at least ambivalent, attitude to the movement. The tradition of strong clerical support for the national cause was embodied in the lives of Fr John Murphy, Fr Michael Murphy and Fr Philip Roche – heroes and legendary rebels of 1798. Nevertheless, John Devoy, acclaimed by Patrick Pearse – leader of the 1916 Easter Rising – as the greatest Fenian, was convinced that the opposition of Cullen and other leading church figures was a major reason why Fenianism ultimately failed.

Cullen’s opposition, however, was insufficient to deny Stephens a major triumph in 1861, when Terence Bellew McManus died in San Francisco. One of the Young Ireland rebels of the 1848 rising, McManus had been transported to Van Diemen’s Land, from where he had escaped and made his way to America. When he died, Stephens saw that the movement of the old rebel’s body, across America and then from Cork to Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery, provided a unique opportunity to channel nationalist and religious sentiments into a great display of patriotic fervour.

Beyond all expectations, the funeral was a political success. Episcopal opposition meant that McManus’ body lay in state not in a church but in the Mechanics’ Institute. Nevertheless, thousands filed past to pay their respects as much to the cause for which he fought as to his personal qualities. Countless thousands watched a torchlight procession, seven miles long, snake its way like a river of fire through the darkened city.

The medium-term effect of this event was a great upsurge in recruitment for the movement. What’s more, it cemented the union between the Irish and the American branches of Fenianism.

Yet conflict between Stephens and his associates across the Atlantic soon arose. Its cause, in Stephens’ view, was the failure of the Fenians in America to focus exclusively on their allotted task. In his opinion O’Mahony was simply required to provide men, arms and money for the Brotherhood which Stephens would employ as he saw fit. As O’Mahony later complained, Stephens envisaged the role of the American branch in strictly limited terms as ‘a money funder, not a directing mind’.

Meanwhile O’Mahony had constructed a powerful movement in America with headquarters in New York. From 1863 he convened conventions in major cities such as Chicago, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. He opened shops for the sale of bonds issued by the Irish Republic, redeemable against its future government. At the height of its power in the 1860s O’Mahony claimed 30,000 activists.

Yet, Stephens was not satisfied: the meagre financial support from America was not enough to arm the vast numbers of men he claimed were drilling by night in secluded spots all over Ireland. It was largely to fill this funding gap that in 1863 he launched a newspaper, the Irish People, from an office in Parliament Street, appropriately near Dublin Castle, the seat of British power in Ireland. Stephens threw himself into the enterprise with characteristic élan. Its message barely within the boundaries of legality, the paper provided a heady cocktail of altruistic nationalism, glorification of patriotic martyrs and constant reminders of the influence and power of Fenianism in America. It proved an effective propaganda vehicle and was particularly influential among the Irish in England and Scotland.

The men who produced the newspaper were all central figures in the movement. Thomas Clarke Luby, a member of the editorial team, played a part in the foundation of the Brotherhood and with John O’Leary, the editor, had fought in the 1848 rising. Edward Duffy and Hugh Francis Brophy – when not recruiting and training Fenians – were responsible for distribution. Charles Kickham, virtually deaf and blind, was another veteran of 1848 who wrote for the paper, while the flamboyant Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa was its manager. Later, as a prisoner, O’Donovan Rossa came to personify the suffering of those who fought for Irish independence, and was to become even greater in death when, in 1915, Patrick Pearse delivered his most famous oration over his grave, the grave of ‘our Fenian dead’. In life, O’Donovan Rossa was a gifted propagandist with a vitriolic tongue and a keen eye for an enemy’s weakness. Almost unnoticed in the Irish People’s print room was a man who folded the papers as they flopped from the presses: Pierce Nagle, a native of Tipperary, was a former teacher whose role in subsequent events was to prove crucial.

Meanwhile, in 1861, the cataclysm of the Civil War engulfed America. Inevitably – and in some cases with alacrity – many Irish-Americans were caught up in a brutal and destructive conflict that prefigured the carnage of the Great War. About 150,000 Irishmen fought for the Union and 40,000 for the Confederacy. There were even several Irish regiments, the most famous of which, the Corcoran Legion, included many men like John O’Mahony who saw the Civil War as a preamble to and preparation for a conflict across the water.

On this side of the Atlantic Stephens was seeking to exploit the strong Irish presence in the British army. John O’Leary undertook to spread Fenianism among the British forces, encouraged by the knowledge that of the 26,000 British troops stationed in Ireland in 1865, about half were Irish. Stephens boasted that 8,000 of them had taken the Fenian oath. He also claimed to have made major inroads among the 600,000 Irish immigrants and their children living in Britain. There is no doubt that exiles and their first-generation children found Fenianism extremely attractive.

In April 1865, Colonel Thomas J. Kelly arrived in Ireland as O’Mahony’s personal envoy. His task was to report back on the feasibility of a rising. He was the first of many veteran officers of the Civil War to arrive that spring and their numbers increased because of the report he sent back to America: there was good reason to hope for a successful rising. Kelly became the secretary to the committee Stephens set up in Dublin to plan the rising.

As 1865 opened, developments boded well for the long awaited rising. In January Stephens claimed to have 85,000 trained men, eager for action and wanting only weapons. During the summer, Fenians demobbed from both Union and Confederate armies made their way to Ireland. The build-up of arms was proceeding apace and though Stephens griped relentlessly about the inadequacy of American funds, the circulation of the Irish People continued to rise.

Additionally, the anticipation of the rank and file created an irresistible momentum: there was a feeling among the members that this was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to strike a decisive blow for Irish freedom. Everything suggested imminent action. Then the authorities swooped.

On the evening of 14 September 1865, police descended on the office of the Irish People while simultaneously arresting key figures in Clonmel, Leeds, Sheffield, Salford and Manchester. The effectiveness of this operation suggests detailed knowledge of the inner workings of the organisation. In Cork, they discovered a list of British army Fenians, while in Fleetwood, Lancashire and Belfast they uncovered significant arms caches.

Stephens, meanwhile, holed up in Fairfield House in the sedate Dublin suburb of Sandymount, avoided capture for two months. On 11 November, however, while he was conferring with Kickham, Duffy and Brophy, a squad of uniformed police, led by detectives, sealed off the street and surrounded the house. They arrested all four leading Fenians and hauled them off to Richmond Gaol.

Brought before the court, Stephens, displaying his genius for self-dramatisation and grandiose gestures, refused to acknowledge its legitimacy, declaiming from the dock, ‘I defy and despise any punishment it [British law] can impose on me.’ His followers expected nothing less of him.

What followed is the stuff of boys’ own adventure fiction and was proof, for many contemporary commentators, that in countering the Fenians the British authorities often displayed appalling incompetence. Stephens was housed at the heart of Richmond Gaol, in the hospital wing on the third floor. His cell was on a short corridor. At one end there was a locked door, guarded by two policemen. At the other, two doors: one timber and one iron, which could only be opened by a special pass key locked in the governor’s office.