The champion of Arabia never got to write the book, but gave Roland Phillips a title for his, a valuable but flawed study of a man whose actions and fate continue to ripple through British-Irish relations more than a century after his execution in 1916.
Casement gazes from a cover that splices two portraits into a discomfiting whole, preparing the reader for immersion in a life that crossed sexual, geographic and ideological boundaries, and a journey that made him a martyr for some, a traitor for others.
Just as Casement shifted roles – imperialist consul, humanitarian trailblazer, British knight, Irish rebel – the lens through which he is viewed has kept changing focus. Phillips has managed to net, and make sense of, quite a few Casements.
The author sets out his stall in a prologue that declares Casement “a force for good made fallible by the repressive tenets of the era and his own emotions. He poured those emotions into causes that deflected from his own, mysterious inner being.” The errant knight, says Phillips, was driven by moral courage, romantic patriotism and passionate striving, to be undone by secrecy, unworldliness and treachery.
The bare facts of Casement’s life are remarkable. Born in Dublin in 1864, he was part of the Protestant gentry but his parents were dysfunctional, possibly alcoholic and died young, leaving 13-year-old Roger to be raised by relatives in County Antrim. He clerked at a Liverpool shipping company before sailing to Africa where he became a roving consul for the Foreign Office.
His exposé of atrocities in the Congo, which Belgium’s King Leopold II had turned into a vast slave labour camp, disgraced the monarch and prompted sweeping reforms. He repeated the feat in South America where he revealed the rubber industry’s horrific abuse of Indigenous people. Casement was knighted in 1911, an Edwardian hero and one-man precursor to Amnesty International.
He then quit the Foreign Office and plunged into a new cause – Irish independence. These final, fateful few years fill the second half of the book. After the outbreak of the first world war he travelled to Berlin to seek German aid for a rebellion, returned to Ireland in a U-boat three days before the 1916 Easter Rising, was captured, tried in London and convicted of high treason.
The authorities squelched a clemency campaign by leaking excerpts of Casement’s secret diaries, for 1903 and 1910-11, that chronicled exuberant, prolific – and illegal – sex with sailors, male sex workers and teenagers. When he was hanged at Pentonville prison on 3 August 1916 the crowd outside cheered farewell to a degenerate Judas.
Phillips is sympathetic to his subject and a careful chronicler of the diplomatic and intelligence intrigues. A former publisher and editor, he has written acclaimed books about Donald Maclean and the second world war spy Mathilde Carré. Drawing on the work of previous biographers such as BL Reid, Angus Mitchell and Jeffrey Dudgeon, he makes a persuasive case that Casement was a fractured personality who embraced causes to fill an emotional void. He accepts the “black diaries” are authentic – the forgery thesis has long been discredited – but absolves Casement of accusations of grooming.
This psychological analysis is marred by perfunctory and in some cases muddled treatment of the politics, however. Phillips calls Eoin MacNeill the chairman of the clandestine Irish Republican Brotherhood, when in fact he headed the Irish Volunteers militia and was manipulated by the IRB. There are other errors, such as the nationalist writer Darrell Figgis supposedly defecting to the crown. He didn’t.
More serious is the skimming over of Casement’s contradictory role in the emergence of armed republicanism and Ireland’s partition. This is a pity because Ireland, north and south, is still coming to terms with that legacy.
Now also an LGBTQ+ hero, Casement is the subject of seminars, plays and novels, including Mario Vargas Llosa’s 2010 The Dream of the Celt. In 2021 a three-metre bronze statue was unveiled near his birthplace. A Casement summer school organises debates, essay competitions and an annual wreath-laying.
His notoriety among Northern Irish unionists prevented burial at his beloved Murlough Bay in Antrim, so the man who grew up an Ulster Protestant and converted to Catholicism on the eve of execution remains at Dublin’s Glasnevin cemetery, an unquiet ghost on a divided island.
• Rory Carroll is the Guardian’s Ireland correspondent and the author of Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown. Broken Archangel: The Tempestuous Lives of Roger Casement by Roland Philipps is published by Bodley Head (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
