Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Last Defence
Sir Roger David Casement’s Case

by Giovanni Cappellini

This article is a very brief biography of Sir Roger David Casement. Particular attention is drawn to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s relationship to Sir Roger David Casement.

Sir Roger David Casement’s life and Career.

Roger David Casement was born on 1 September 1864, Sandycove, County Dublin. Roger Casement was a British Consul in Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique; 1895-98), Angola (1898-1900), " Congo Free State " (1901-04), and Brazil (1906-11). He gained international fame for revealing atrocious cruelty in the exploitation of native labour by white traders in the Congo and the Putumayo River region, Peru; his Congo report (published 1904) led to a major reorganisation of Belgian rule in the Congo (1908), and his Putumayo report (1912) earned him a knighthood.

In 1884 Roger Casement, a young man of twenty, arrived to take up the first of a series of employments in the Congo region. This was just seven years after Henry Morton Stanley completed his famous three year journey across Africa (1874-77), in which he discovered the course of the Congo River. The Scramble for Africa was beginning. Roger Casement was to spend the next twenty years of his life in Africa, stationed in the Congo, the Niger Coast, Lourenco Marques, South Africa and St. Paul de Loanda (Angola). His career in Africa was to end with one of his most notable achievements, his investigation into and Report on atrocities perpetrated by officials of the " Congo Free State " against its native population. The Report was published in early 1904; for it Roger Casement received the C.M.G. (1904).

After Africa came, first, the beginnings of his immersion in Irish affairs, during a protracted period of leave (1904-06), and, then, his appointment to Brazil, where he served in Santos, in Pará and, as Consul General, in Rio de Janeiro (1906-10). He was to repeat his Congo feat with a similar Report on the wholesale exploitation of Indian peoples in the Putumayo region of the Upper Amazon, in Peruvian territory (1910-12). He was knighted afterwards.

Returning home, he was soon to resign, turn completely to Irish affairs, involve himself in the Irish Volunteer organization, travel to Germany after the outbreak of World War I, be captured in Ireland on the eve of the Easter Rebellion in 1916, be tried and hanged.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle & Sir Roger David Casement: two champions of victims of injustice.

Arthur Conan Doyle stood as Liberal Unionist in Edinburgh in 1900 and on the Scottish borders in 1906, loosing both times. But his support for Roger David Casement’s campaign against the cruelties of King Leopold’s regime in the Congo drew him closer to Roger Casement, whom he seems to have portrayed as Lord John Roxton in The Lost World, and Roger Casement converted him to Irish Home Rule about 1912. The Unionist readiness to employ physical violence against the working of a Home Rule Act absolutely disgusted him. When World War I came his path and Sir Roger Casement’s diverged, he insisted this was Ireland’s opportunity to prove itself and win British gratitude, Sir Roger Casement chose a solitary diplomatic line for Ireland which he tried to implement by treating with the Germans. But Sir Arthur Conan Doyle subscribed most of the money for Sir Roger Casement’s defence when he was captured and tried for treason, and he controversially repelled the emissaries of the British Government who came touting the pornographic homesexual diaries ascribed to Casement - and, as he (and he alone) said, these could have no bearing on a charge of treason which was graver than anything they might contain. In this refusal to drop Sir Roger Casement’s defence when the diaries were produced he was unique among public figures of his time who had good standing with the Government.

Two Criminal Cases: Mr. George Edalji and The Case of Pony Molester, Mr. Oscar Slater and The Case of an Upholsterer’s Hammer (and Other Injustices).

The theme has been explored in detail by Mr. Martin Booth:

"From the earliest days of Sherlock Holmess, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was frequently asked to solve crimes or mysteries, even being sent clues to assist him, and he collected newspaper cuttings of crimes that interested him. On occasion, he responded to pleas for help whilst, on others, he took an interest of his own volition.

As a doctor, he possessed many of the attributes of a good detective. His memory was exceptional, his powers of observation finely sharpened, and his ability to assimilate and co-ordinate random information superb. Writing the Sherlock Holmes stories had sharpened his deductive skills, although he was always quick to point out that in these the solution came before the mystery unfolded or the crime was committed, at least on paper.

In the main, he was requested to look into disappearances ".

"Justice and injustice were at the core of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s thinking. Sherlock Holmes saw thay justice was done or injustice prevented and that was his role, too ".

"On two famous occasions, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took up the call to arms to fight for what he deemed to be cases of injusticebrought about by an ineffectual application of the law. The first concerned George Edalji.

Towards the end of 1906, in an edition of the " Umpire ", primarily a sporting magazine which also included general news items, he came upon an article entitled "Edalji Protests His Innocence". The sincerity of the piece caught his eye, although he had unknowingly already been approached by Edalji. Alfred Wood, Conan Doyle’s secretary, had opened the correspondence but had set it aside as one of those matters his employer might be interested in when his spirits were higher. Conan Doyle was, at the time, in mourning for Louise.

This was not the end of the matter. A judge R. D. Yelverton, organised a 10,000-signature petition, many of the signatories being Barristers and Solicitors, presenting it to the Home Office. After serving three years, George Edalji was unexpectedly released from prison without compensation, explanation or a pardon. Having lost his law career, he pleaded his side of the story in the periodical " Truth ", other papers taking it up and exposing the farce of the investigation and trial.

When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle read about it, he was convinced. writing " the unmistakable accent of truth forced itself upon my attention, and I realized that I was in the presence of an appalling tragedy, and that I was called upon to do what I could to set it right ". From December 1906 to August 1907, he investigated the matter in detail. For inspiration and guidance, he studied the decumentation that the Crime Club had amassed referring to the Adolph Beck case, which had been reopened. Beck had been released as innocent of his crime in 1901 but rearrested in 1904, and was only saved from a second stretch of imprisonment by virtue of the guilty criminal being uncovered as a result of a joint Crime Club/" Daily Mail " newspaper investigation.

Satisfied that he was familiar with all the details, Conan Doyle met Edalji early in January 1907. Immediately, he saw a flaw in the Police case. It was blatantly obvious to him. Edalji, apart from being a man of slight and almost weedy stature, was severely myopic with a pronounced squint. There was no way he could have crossed a field in darkness, then manhandled and maimed a pony. After closely questioning him, Conan Doyle visited the Staffordshire Police and examined their evidence. This done, he set to work with his pen. His first in-depth article was published in the " Daily Telegraph " on 11 and 12 January. It summarised the case and drew the deduction that Edalji was innocent. This was followed up with a large number of letters to the press. He was stirring the pot. The " Daily Chronicle " published an editorial on the matter which could not have pleased him, for its central point was that, at last, Sherlock Holmes was having a real adventure. " It is a tribute to the force ", the editorial read, " with which he has impressed the personality of his hero upon the reader’s mind that one instinctively merges the creator in his creation, and thinks of this special investigation as the work of the great Sherlock. So far as the story goes at present, nobody who makes this identification will be disappointed ". Next, knowing the influence his Boer War pamphlet had exercised, he published an 18,000-word booklet on 20 January, "The Story of Mr. George Edalji", in which he condemned Edalji’s persecution and attacked Police prejudice and inefficacy.

Believing Edalji to be innocent, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle then set out to try to discover who was guilty. His suspicions fell upon two brothers, Royden and Wallace Sharpe. The former had been expelled from Walsall Grammar School (where he was a contemporary of Edalji), had a reputation for forging letters, had been accused of ripping up railway carriage seats, had been a butcher’s apprentice, and had gone away to sea on a cattle boat on which he learnt to handle livestock, his absence at sea coinciding with the cessation of the anonymous letters to the Edalji family. Furthermore, he was a racist, had a grudge against Edalji and was considered easily capable of cruelty to animals. In his booklet, Conan Doyle did not name the Sharpes because the Police had warned him he would be prosecuted for libel if he did, so he called them by a pseudonym. When it was presented to them, officialdom would not accept any of this research and declared there would be no further opening of the investigation to consider the Sharpes’ involvement.

Edalji became an instant national " cause of célèbre ". An Edalji Committee was instituted with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jerome K. Jerome amongst its members, demanding to know why no pardon had been issued. The Home Secretary was forced to instigate a Commission which published its findings in May. These stated that Edalji was innocent of the pony attack but guilty of writing the letters, thus still denying Edalji any compensation because he had perverted the course of justice. A pardon, but no payment, was forthcoming. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was livid and wrote in his autobiography, " The sad fact is that officialdom in England stands solid together, and that when you are forced to attack it, you need not expect justice ". He had good reason to think this: one of the three-man Commission members was Sir Albert de Rutzen, Chief Magistrate of the Metropolitan Police Courts but also a second cousin of Captain George Anson. Four years on, with a new Home Secretary in office, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle attempted to get Edalji a retrial but was unsuccessful. The ruckus he had caused, however, did bring into question the efficiency of the law and led to the establishment of the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907.

The wedding ceremony, in St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, was a private family affair but it was reported around the world. The " Buenos Aires Standard " ran the headline " Sherlock Holmes Quietly Married " ".

" The second noted criminal case in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle involved himself was that of Oscar Slater. At first, he was loath to have anything to do with the matter but, after reading a report of the case in April 1910, and having been contacted by Slater’s Lawyers, who admired what he had done for Edalji, he came to believe that a severe miscarriage of justice had once more occurred.

Slater was an ideal scapegoat. A German Jew from Silesia, whose real name was Joseph Leschziner, he was known to the Police as an illegal gambling-den operator. He had only lived in Glasgow for six weeks, just a street or two from Miss Gilchrist. Five days after the murder, Slater and his young French mistress boarded the liner Lusitania in Liverpool, bound for New York, booking their berth under false names. His photograph was shown to the maid and Mary Barrowman, wbo agreed he was the man they had seen. The Police telegraphed New York, Slater was arrested when the liner docked, and the witnesses were sent to America to identify him. In his possession, the New York Police found a small upholsterer’s hammer which, it was claimed, was the murder weapon. Slater waved aside extradition and agreed to return of his own volition to prove his innocence. He thought this would be easy as the pawn ticket was for a brooch he had put into hock well before the murder.

Slater, who was a petty criminal and possibly a pimp, spent three weeks in the condemned cell but, on 25 May, two days before his execution, his sentence was commutted to imprisonment with hard labour for life. Slater’s Lawyer had waited until the clamour of the trial subsided, then organised a petition of twenty thousand signatures. The commuting of the sentence, the many inconsistencies in the prosecution case and the general sense that Slater was being framed aroused Conan Doyle’s curiosity. " I went into the matter ", he wrote, " most reluctantly, but when I glanced at the facts, I saw that it was an even worse case than the Edalji one, and that this unhappy man had in all probability no more to do with the murder for which he had been condemned than I had ".

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did not like Slater. He was a member of the criminal underclass but, that notwithstanding, he was innocent and still deserved justice. With his usual thoroughness, Conan Doyle read through the transcripts of the trial and, after assessing these and corresponding with the prosecution witnesses, he published a booklet, "The Case of Oscar Slater", in August 1912. In it, he drew attention to the flimsy prosecution case, the contradictory evidence of the witnesses and the date of the pawning of the brooch which Slater had used to raise money for the voyage to America. He also explained how Slater and his mistress had used false names to give Slater’s wife the slip, but that they had used their real names when booking into a hotel in Liverpool, prior to embarking on the Lusitania. He went on to show that the upholsterer’s tack hammer was too light to inflict the wounds from which Miss Gilchrist had died, and that it was too long to be a concealed weapon. If he had been carrying it from the scene of the crime, the witnesses would have noticed it. He added that there was no blood on it or on Slater’s clothing. From the crime scene evidence report, he deduced that the murderer had been more interested in the victim’s documents than her jewellery, and that the theft of the brooch was a red herring. The victim, he concluded, must have known her killer.

The booklet sold only because it bore Conan Doyle’s name. The public generally had little interest in the innocence of a low life. Yet it did create enough of a stir to raise a question in Parliament and demands for a retrial. A Commission of Inquiry was appointed in 1914. It met " in camera " but some new evidence was presented to it. Slater’s alibi was upheld by a grocer called MacBrayne. A Glasgow detective, Lieutenant John Trench, confirmed that the maid had actually named the murderer to Miss Gilchrist’s niece, Miss Birrell, but that his superiors had told him to suppress it. Both women denied this. Trench was disgraced, sacked from the Police and stripped of his pension. In spite of the new evidence, the Commission members still decided not to overrule the sentence. It was a hollow victory, Conan Doyle not achieving all he wanted, at least for the time being ".

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle & Sir Roger David Casement: the Crime of the Congo.

We shall now follow the detailed reconstruction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s relationship to Sir Roger David Casement as offered in Martin Booth’s biography of Sherlock Holmes’ creator.

" As if national injustices were not enough, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took on some that were foreign, most notably his attack on the situation in the Belgian Congo.

During the nineteenth-century dismemberment of Africa by white colonialists, the International Association of the Congo had been founded by the Belgian King Leopold II, the Congress of Berlin handing over the administration of the Congo to him in 1885. He declared it the Congo Free State. It was in effect neither free nor a state but a private estate belonging to the King of the Belgians, who owned and exploited it. Roger Casement, appointed British consul in the capital of Boma, began to be concerned about the ill-treatment, mutilations, executions and forced labour of disenfranchised natives employed in the rubber industry. He drew the situation to the attention of the British government and, in 1904, founded the Congo Reform Association with Edmund Dene Morel, a journalist and African shipping line agent in Liverpool, as secretary, Lord Beauchamp as president and with the support of Evelyn Baring, now the first Earl of Cromer, as well as over a hundred Members of Parliament. It was agreed by Parliament that a report should be published based upon Casement’s findings. This was duly done and sent to all the other European nations, including Belgium. King Leopold, faced with no other alternative, sent out a commission to look into the accusations. They carried out a thorough whitewash and, in 1908, the King passed the administration of the Congo Free State to the Belgian government, which made no real effort to address the iniquities.

The Congo Reform Association wrote to many influential writers for their support, amongst them Joseph Conrad and Arthur Conan Doyle, who thought the evidence so atrocious he had to do something. After meeting Morel in the summer of 1909, he put his back to the wheel and, as always in such cases, went into a Sherlock Holmesian retreat in his study, drinking coffee to keep himself going through long hours of reading. His son was to mention how, on such occasions when he got the bit between his teeth, he would not remove his slippers or leave the house for days on end. The whole building would fall silent with family and servants creeping about like mice. Trays of food left by his door went uneaten. On one occasion, he was so engrossed that his son noticed wearing odd shoes.

The result of his endeavours was " The Crime of the Congo ", 45,000 words long and written in eight days, the effort sustained " by a burning indignation, which is the best of all driving power ".

The treatise written, the entreaties began. Conan Doyle wrote to the papers, including a circular to sixty American publications, and to influential politicians and leaders ranging from Kaiser Wilhelm II to President Theodore Roosevelt, whom he was to meet the following year when he was in London, returning from one of his wildlife slaughtering safaris in Africa. Copies of the book were mailed to a large number of power-brokers on both sides of the Atlantic, and Conan Doyle went on a three-month national lecture tour on the subject. The book received international notice although it was criticised for its strong language which he defended by stating, " There are times when violence is a duty ". It was graphically illustrated with pictures of mutilated natives. Conan Doyle once more accepted no payment.

He was not as successful as in some of the national cases in which he was involved. The Congo was far away an international political problem. The American government, having no holdings in Africa and not wanting any after the iniquities of the slave trade, were lukewarm about the problem. Roosevelt wrote to Conan Doyle that his motto was " Never draw unless you intend to shoot ". The European colonial powers were also loath to intervene. It was one thing to be indignant but altogether another to get involved.

Conan Doyle, now regarded as social crusader " par excellence ", was praised for his humanitarian zeal but, although other forces were also at work, he had his impact. By 1913, with a new Belgian monarch on the throne, reforms in the Belgian Congo were in place and what Conan Doyle had rather histrionically termed " the sack of a country, the spoilation of a nation, the greatest crime in all history " was considerably lessened, although Belgian atrocities continued to occur for the next forty-five years ".

" It was to become his most famous story apart from the Sherlock Holmes tales. Entitled The Lost World, it was published in 1912 and was the first appearance of a new character, Professor Challenger […].

Another source of inspiration for the novel was the eminent zoologist, Sir Edwin Ray Lankester, director of natural history at the British Museum, with whom he was friendly. Lankester, to whom Conan Doyle alluded in the novel, gave suggestions for twists in the story and Conan Doyle relied for his research in part on Lankester’s book, Extinct Animals . Further research included studying Lieutenant-Colonel P. H. Fawcett’s accounts of his expeditions in Mato Grosso do Sol in Brazil, in the area of the Guaporé River system, and the Ricardo Franco Hills in the Serra dos Parecis, and reading H. W. Bates’s important work, The Naturalist on the River Amazon, published in 1863. Also, in 1910, Conan Doyle sent an outline of his story to Roger Casement, who was leaving for a diplomatic assignment in Peru where he was instructed to look into the treatment of native labour by the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company, asking him to send back any information that might be of use. A final and seminal influence was Sir Charles Wyville Thomson’s scientific expedition on HMS Challenger, from wich he drew the name of his enigmatic hero.

Professor George Edward Challenger was as complex a character as Sherlock Holmes. He was unorthodox, eccentric, ill-mannered, doctrinaire, arrogant and coarse, yet he was also a pioneer scientist and explorer, as fully developed and as fascinating as the detective. He was, in all probability, based upon Professor William Rutherford, Conan Doyle’s physiology lecturer at Edinburgh who, in later life, lost his reason for some time and provided the idea of the brilliant but mad professor. Challenger’s capricious temper, bursts of energy and fantasising owe more than a passing debt to Budd, but his love of adventure and controversy are pure Conan Doyle […].

The plot of The Lost World concerns an expedition led by Challenger to discover a plateau in the Amazon basin on which, it was said, prehistoric animals had survived. With over 70 per cent of South America still unmapped, the premise had a distinct ring of feasibility about it. Accompanying him was a scientific opponent, Professor Summerlee, who frequently quarrelled with Challenger, providing a comic sub-plot and relief from the tension of main story, John Roxton, an explorer and fighter for natives’ rights, and a young journalist, Edward Dunn Malone, who is the narrator. Summerlee bore similarities to Christison, Roxton was more firmly based upon Roger Casement, and Malone was modelled on Edmund Dene Morel ".

The Ghost of Roger David Casement

Illness forced Roger Casement to retire to Ireland in 1912. Although he came from an Ulster Protestant family, he had always sympathised with the predominantly Roman Catholic Irish Nationalists. Late in 1913 he helped form the "Irish National Volunteers ", and in July 1914 he travelled to New York City to seek American aid for that anti-British force. After World War I broke out on 2 August 1914, Roger Casement hoped that Germany might assist the Irish independence movement as a blow against Great Britain. On arriving in Berlin in November 1914, he found that the German government was unwilling to risk an expedition to Ireland and that most Irish prisoners of war would refuse to join a Brigade that he intended to recruit for service against England.

Later, Roger Casement failed to obtain the loan of German army officers to lead the Irish rising planned for Easter 1916. In a vain effort to prevent the revolt, he sailed for Ireland on April 12 in a German submarine. Put ashore near Tralee, County Kerry, he was arrested on April 24 and taken to London and kept in the Tower of London. The British Government eventually decided that Roger Casement should be tried for High Treason.

" Arthur Conan Doyle may have been fiercely patriotic throughout the war but there was one period when his patriotism fell temporarily by the wayside, although not dishonourably. It was again a matter of seeing justice done and it concerned Sir Roger Casement, knighted in 1911 for his consular work. Casement was an Irishman with his roots going back as far as the Doyles’; like them, he had French ancestors. Unlike the Doyle family, however, his ancestors moved from southern Ireland to Ulster early in the eighteenth century, embracing the Protestant religion and becoming, by the time of his birth in 1864, a part of the Ulster establishment. Yet Casement had read widely about Irish history and became an Irish patriot. Despite being a British diplomat, he was clandestinely in touch with the Irish nationalists even before accepting his knighthood.

He and Conan Doyle had met in 1910, shortly before Casement left for Peru, and they kept in correspondence. Sometime around 1911 or 1912, probably partially as a result of Casement’s influence, Conan Doyle changed his mind about the Irish Question. Until then, he had not been in favour of a completely autonomous Ireland but, swayed by Casement’s argument, he began to believe in the principle of Home Rule, although when, at the outbreak of war, the " Sinn Feiners ", the separatist antecedents of I.R.A., violently opposed Britain and sided with Germany, he was scathing of them and took every opportunity to denounce them. This no doubt led to some of the death threats he received, although it must be added that he was just as caustic about the Unionists’ preparedness to use violence against Home Rule. In short, he was in favour of Home Rule in Ireland if it meant the country staying loyal and within the Empire, considering this a better alternative to continued civil strife.

Arthur Conan Doyle believed that Casement had lost his reason, describing him in his autobiography as " a fine man afflicted with mania ". " He was " - he wrote in the "Daily Chronicle" in 1914, when Casement was in Berlin - , " a man of fine character, and that he should in the full possession of his senses act as a traitor to the country which had employed and honoured him is inconceivable to anyone who knew him [ …]. He was a sick man, however, worn by tropical hardships, and he complained of pains in his head ". Recalling Casement’s humanitarian work in the Congo and Peru, he considered him to be a true Irish patriot who had behaved treasonably because of his mental collapse of which his homosexuality was but a symptom. He also thought that if Casement were executed, the British government would be making not only a martyr for the Irish separatists but also a propaganda coup for the Germans.

Because he presumed Casement was insane and therefore not being justly treated, Conan Doyle wrote and organised a petition to Mr. Herbert Henry Asquith, the Prime Minister. In it, he stated that Casement was guilty as tried but should not be executed. He had, he outlined, " for many years been exposed to severe strain during his honourable career of public service, that he had endured several tropical fevers … [and that] some allowance may be made in his case for an abnormal physical and mental state ". He went on to argue that the execution " would be helpful to German policy " and could be used "as a weapon against us in the United States and other neutral countries … Magnanimity upon the part of the British government ", he concluded, " would soothe the bitter feelings in Ireland and make a favourable impression throughout the Empire and abroad". The petition was signed by a wide range of influential people. Through his literary connections, Conan Doyle gained the support of Arnold Bennett, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, John Galsworthy, John Drinkwater, Israel Zangwill, Jerome Klapka Jerome and John Masefield. George Bernard Shaw organised his own petition. Only Herbert George Wells and Rudyard Kipling refused to sign either.

On top of the petition, Conan Doyle paid £ 700 towards Casement’s legal defence, nearly half the total amount, but Casement was ungrateful and scorned him for his motives, which further convinced him that the traitor had lost his sanity. Even when he learnt of Casement’s pornographic homosexual diaries, discovered by the police in his house in Dublin, he did not waver in his support. He was disgusted by the revelations they contained but went on to state, quite rightly, that they bore no relevance to the charge of treason. When the British government sent transcripts of the diaries to President Thomas Woodrow Wilson and the Pope, bolstering their political determination for the death sentence, a number of the signatories to the petitions withdrew their support but Conan Doyle did not. Instead, he attempted to have Casement classified as a prisoner-of-war. All the petitioning and arguments went unheeded and Casement was executed in Pentonville Prison in London on 3 August 1916. After the execution Conan Doyle, who was still well connected in high places, continued to maintain that it was wrong but the government ostensibly failed to grasp his argument ".

At the Central Criminal Court ( known as " the Old Bailey " ) in London, on 29 June 1916, Sir Roger David Casement was convicted of treason and sentenced to death. After his conviction, Casement made a famous speech from the dock.

Following his conviction of High Treason, Roger Casement was asked if he had anything to say before he was sentenced. Roger Casement then made the eloquent speech which is shown below .

The Speech.

" My Lord Chief Justice, as I wish my words to reach a much wider audience than I see before me here, I intend to read all that I propose to say. What I shall read now is something I wrote more than twenty days ago. I may say, my lord, at once, that I protest against the jurisdiction of this court in my case on this charge, and the argument, that I am now going to read, is addressed not to this court, but to my own countrymen.

There is an objection, possibly not good in law, but surely good on moral grounds, against the application to me here of this old English statute, 565 years old, that seeks to deprive an Irishman today of life and honour, not for " adhering to the King’s enemies ", but for adhering to his own people [ …].

Loyalty is a sentiment, not a law. It rests on love, not on restraint. The government of Ireland by England rests on restraint, and not on law; and since it demands no love, it can evoke no loyalty [...].

If I did wrong in making that appeal to Irishmen to join with me in an effort to fight for Ireland, it is by Irishmen, and by them alone, I can be rightfully judged. From this court and its jurisdiction [...]. This is so fundamental a right, so natural a right, so obvious a right, that it is clear that the Crown were aware of it when they brought me by force and by stealth from Ireland to this country. It was not I who landed in England, but the Crown who dragged me here, away from my own country to which I had returned with a price upon my head, away from my own countrymen whose loyalty is not in doubt, and safe from the judgment of my peers whose judgment I do not shrink from. I admit no other judgment but theirs. I accept no verdict save at their hands.

Conquest, my Lord, gives no title; and, if it exists over the body, it fails over the mind. It can exert no empire over men’s reason and judgment and affections; and it is from this law of conquest without title to the reason, judgment, and affection of my own countrymen that I appeal ".

An appeal was dismissed, and he was hanged at Pentonville Prison (London) on 3 August 1916.

Roger David Casement was executed despite attempts by influential Englishmen to secure a reprieve in view of his past services to the British government.

Since Arthur Conan Doyle presumed Roger David Casement was insane and therefore not being justly treated, he wrote and organised a petition to Mr. Herbert Henry Asquith, the Prime Minister. The petition was signed by a wide range of influential people. Through his literary connections, Conan Doyle gained the support of Arnold Bennett, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, John Galsworthy, John Drinkwater, Israel Zangwill, Jerome Klapka Jerome and John Masefield.

George Bernard Shaw organised his own petition.

Following the passing of Roger Casement’s death sentence, there was a campaign to commute the sentence. Several people wrote letters to British newspapers, and oversea newspapers especially in the then neutral USA. Most of the British newspapers reflected the official line that Roger Casement was a traitor who had justly been sentenced to death, and that the sentence should be carried out. It was during this period that passages were leaked from Casement’s private diaries showing Casement’s homosexuality.

Also Arthur Conan Doyle, man of honour and principle, sacrificed the peerage for his beliefs. It was possibly the first time he lost a chance to be elevated to the House of Lords: his support for Roger Casement had, it is thought, cost him a baronetcy during the war.

In 1965 Casement’s remains were returned to Ireland and, after a state funeral, reinterred in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.

Roger David Casement’s grave is one of a group located around the O’Connell Tower and crypt.

Roger Casement
(After reading " The Forged Casement Black Diaries " by William J. Maloney, M.D.)

(William Butler Yeats)