Markievicz: A Most Outrageous Rebel - preview

Contents Acknowledgements and Note on Sources vi Prologue viii 1. Alien Class, Alien Race

1

2. Under Ben Bulben

16

3. Casi and Con

34

4. The Play’s the Thing

47

5. Extremists and Fire-eaters

62

6. Na Fianna – Scouting for Ireland

73

7. ‘The cause of labour is the cause of Ireland’

87

8. Locked Out

105

9. Two Cathleen Ní Houlihans

121

10. ‘Ireland is waking’

141

11. Easter Week 1916 – Year One of Irish History

155

12. Condemned to Live

175

13. Sinn Féin – We Ourselves

199

14. Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen

217

15. The Shadow of a Gunman

231

16. ‘I have seen the stars’

246

17. Anarchy is Loosed

265

18. No Enemy but Time

277

Sources and Bibliography

293

Index 306



O

Prologue

n Sunday, 30 April 1916, with the six-day Irish rebellion that became known as the Easter Rising almost over, a nurse called Elizabeth Farrell was driven to Grafton Street in Dublin by a British army officer. From there, she walked to the Royal College of Surgeons on St Stephen’s Green carrying a white flag and a surrender order.

Farrell went to the side door of the college and, when it opened, she asked for Commandant Mallin. Since he was sleeping, Farrell gave the surrender order to Countess Markievicz, his second-in-command and one of only two female officers in the Irish Citizen Army.

‘Surrender? We’ll never surrender!’ said the Countess, before waking Mallin. Despite her fighting words, there was no alternative but to surrender and so Mallin and Markievicz led the small group of exhausted rebels out of the college and on to the street, where they surrendered to Captain de Courcy Wheeler of the Kings’ Royal Rifle Corps. After smartly saluting the captain, Constance kissed her revolver before handing it over.

De Courcy Wheeler offered Constance transport to Dublin Castle, which she refused, preferring to march with Mallin and her comrades down Grafton Street and into Dame Street. By now, crowds were lining the streets, with many waving Union Jacks and celebrating the end of the six days of misery they had endured during an insurrection that had devastated their city.

On 4 May, Constance was tried for her part in the Rebellion and sentenced to be shot, a sentence that was commuted to life imprisonment on the grounds of her sex. By then, the swiftness and savagery of the British response to the insurrection was changing public opinion and the rebels were on their way to becoming revered as martyrs for the Irish cause.

Prologue | ix After women were finally given the vote in 1918, Constance – from Holloway prison – would become the first woman in Britain or Ireland to be elected to the House of Commons and, later, only the second female cabinet minister anywhere in the world. In 1926, realising that the political posturings that followed 1916 were leading nowhere, she became a founding member of Fianna Fáil, supporting her friend Éamon de Valera.

She had come a long from way from her origins as a privileged member of the landlord class in Sligo, rejecting not only the ‘black English blood’ that ran through her veins, but throwing off the conventions of her class and her sex.

As any Jane Austen reader knows, a woman’s success or failure in life was entirely dependent on whether she found herself a husband, and any husband, however ugly or old, was better than none. The fight for women’s equality began with the arrival of convenient birth control.

With her life no longer circumscribed by continuous child-bearing, women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had the time and energy to begin the fight for their rights to a proper education, for work and for the vote.

It would be a long, hard battle, and it is far from over today. Women in the public eye were viewed with suspicion. They were attentionseekers, derided as shrill and even hysterical. Their views could not be trusted, because – as everyone knew – women were flighty, unreliable and inconsistent.

That, certainly, was how Markievicz was seen. Begrudgers, such as Seán O’Casey, berated her for playing the revolutionary. Others, like James Connolly and Patrick Pearse, recognised her brilliance as an organiser and motivator. Her outstanding contribution to the fight for Irish freedom was the Fianna – a boy’s brigade formed with the specific purpose of training boys to take arms against the English. By the time of the Easter Rising, these boys were disciplined and organised young men, trained in the use of arms. Had the Fianna not been formed in 1909, there would have been no Volunteers in 1913 and no Rising in 1916, Pearse later said.

Ordinary Dubliners saw Constance for what she was – an immensely open-hearted and generous woman – and she won their lasting respect.

When the woman they affectionately called ‘Madame’ died in 1927,

x | Prologue they gave her one of the biggest funerals ever seen in Dublin. ‘Official’ Ireland stayed away.

She had died, officially of appendicitis, at the relatively early age of fifty-nine, worn out by too many hard battles and a succession of arduous jail stretches. Although she had famously avoided execution and lived for eleven years after the terrible events of 1916, she gave up her life for her country, as surely as her friends James Connolly, Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, Tom Clarke and Francis Sheehy Skeffington.

Her vision of a kinder, better society, where all men and women were equal, where resources and wealth were shared, where no one starved or died of the cold, and where all children were cherished remains a worthy aspiration.

 CHAPTER ONE

W

Alien Class, Alien Race

hen Countess Markievicz was sentenced to death for her part in the 1916 Rebellion in Ireland, she risked putting half of Debrett’s into mourning – or so said her husband. Her social awareness, her generosity and her kindness were firmly rooted not only in her privileged background but in her native County Sligo. All her life she cursed the drop of ‘black English blood’ that ran through her veins.

She was never to forget the great wrongs her ancestors had committed against the native Irish and, from the age of forty, making amends became her life’s work.

Her family had come to Ireland in Cromwellian times but, by the 1860s, when Constance Gore-Booth was born, its great days were numbered, along with those of the Ascendancy class in Ireland. At a time of rapid industrialisation and mechanisation, the Irish economy was stagnating and, since the Act of Union in 1800; it was closely tied to a rapacious British economy that saw Ireland purely as a market to be exploited.

When cheap manufactured goods from Britain flooded into Ireland, thousands of craftsmen, particularly textile workers, were left without work. At the same time, rural workers were hit hard by the rapid advances in agricultural machinery, which made farming less labour-intensive. With work scarce, those living on the land could barely feed their families, much less pay their rent or leave anything to their children. Unlike the rest of the United Kingdom, Ireland had few big industrial centres outside Belfast and Dublin and, with nowhere else to go, these two cities became magnets for impoverished

2 | Markievicz families desperate for work. This situation was not helped by a growing population; with early marriage and large families the norm, the Irish population increased by 75 per cent between 1780 and 1821.

Even before the Great Famine of the mid-1840s, Irish men, women and children were starving; in some areas, infant mortality was a staggering 50 per cent. The steady stream of emigration began and, in the thirty years between 1815 and 1845, nearly a million Irish emigrants – twice the total for the preceding two hundred years – packed up their meagre possessions and went in search of the better life that newspaper articles and advertising promised in countries such as the USA, Canada and Australia. Later on, the land wars took their toll and, like other land-owners, the Gore-Booths had to work hard to make the estate pay.

It was a troubled country to which the infant Constance returned after her birth in London in 1868; her grandfather’s cousin, Captain King, had been murdered during that year’s election campaign and Lissadell, the family home, was turned into a fortress, with windows sandbagged and guns mounted on the roof.

Sligo was solidly unionist, with a high proportion of Protestants in its population and four military barracks. Loyalists controlled business and commerce, forming the Sligo Association as early as 1688. William Butler Yeats described Sligo, home to his mother’s people, the Pollexfens, as a place where ‘everyone despised nationalists and Catholics’. When jobs were advertised, notices often baldly stated that ‘No Catholics need apply’. Meetings of the local Orange Order branch were held in Lissadell House.

You saw the landlords in their big demesnes, mostly of Norman or Saxon stock, walled in and aloof, an alien class, sprung from an alien race; then there were the prosperous farmers, mostly Protestants and with Scotch names, settled in snug farmsteads among the rich undulating hills and valleys, while hidden away among rocks on the bleak mountainsides, or soaking in the slime and ooze of the boglands or beside the Atlantic shore, where the grass is blasted yellow by the salt west wind, you find the dispossessed people of the old Gaelic race in their miserable cabins.

So wrote Constance in a 1923 article for Éire newspaper.

1. Lissadell House in Co. Sligo where Constance Markievicz grew up. (Photograph by the author)

2. Eva and Constance Gore-Booth dressed as Drumcliff Co-Operative dairy maids for a fund-raising fancy dress ball in 1895. (Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Ireland)

3. Portrait of Constance Markievicz from about 1908. (Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Ireland)

4. Constance Markievicz with a group of Fianna boys (undated). (Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Ireland)

5. Address presented to Constance Markievicz by the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union for her work during the 1913 lock-out. (Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Ireland)

6. Constance Markievicz as Joan of Arc appearing to a woman political prisoner played by Kathleen Houston in a tableau vivant, 1914. (Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Ireland)

7. Seated studio portrait of Constance Markievicz, around 1915. (Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Ireland)

8. Surrey House on Leinster Road in Rathmines, Dublin (on left), where Constance Markievicz was living in 1916. Next door is Dorset House. (Photograph by the author)

9. Constance Markievicz in military uniform, around 1915. (Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Ireland)