James Stephens (Fenian)
James Stephens was an Irish Republican, the founding member of an unnamed revolutionary organisation in Dublin. This organisation, founded on 17 March 1858, was to become known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood referred to by contemporaries as the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood. References to his early life, according to one of his biographers, Desmond Ryan, are obscure and limited to Stephens' own vague autobiographical recollections. James Stephens was born and spent his childhood at Lilac Cottage, Blackmill Street, Kilkenny, on 26 January 1825. No birth records have been located, but a baptismal record from St. Mary's Parish is dated 29 July 1825. According to Marta Ramón, there is reason to believe that he was born out of wedlock in late July 1825; the son of John and Anne Stephens, he had five brothers and sisters: Walter, Francis, who died when James was ten, who had died by July 1848, Anne, who died just after his flight into exile, as did his father. By 1856, Stephens' remaining family vanished according to Ramón.
For many years, his father had been a clerk to auctioneer and bookseller William Jackson Douglas whose offices and warehouses were on High Street, Kilkenny. Ryan has the order of the name as William Douglas Jackson, of Rose Inn Street, in his Stephens' biography Fenian Chief. John Stephens, as well as his earnings as a clerk had some small property in Kilkenny. Little is known of Stephens’s mother and according to Ryan, it is possible he had no memory of her. Only does Stephens mention her in his writings, although her name appears on Stephens' marriage certificate in 1863, his mother’s people, the Caseys, were shopkeepers. In April 1846 James and his sister, became sponsors to their cousin, Joseph Casey, at his baptism in St. Mary’s Cathedral, Kilkenny. Joseph Casey would be acquitted of charges of suspected Fenian activities in England in 1867. During Stephens' second exile in Paris, he would spend much time with the Caseys, who emigrated to France after the trial of Joseph. Stephens would be expelled from France on 12 March 1885 because of a series of press interviews given by Patrick Casey advocating the "dynamite war," which Stephens had repudiated consistently.
Because his father was intent on giving his son the best education his means would allow, Stephens was registered as a day pupil at St. Kieran's college for at least one quarter in 1838. Prior to this, he had attended St. Kieran's school beside his home, before the school moved to College Road. An omnivorous reader, according to Ryan, was a silent and aloof student with a thirst for knowledge, a characteristic throughout his life. Aged 20, Stephens was apprenticed to a civil engineer and obtained a post in a Kilkenny office for work in progress on the Limerick and Waterford Railway in 1844. Stephens was in a romantic relationship with a young lady, Miss Hilton, at this time, although she did not share his nationalist sentiments; this relationship ended shortly after the rising. According to Ryan, for an unexplained reason, Stephens had become a "revolutionary in spirit" by his mid twenties; the one influence he mentions in this period was that of Dr. Robert Cane a former Mayor of Kilkenny, a cultural propagandist, a moderate Young Irelander.
As a young man, Stephens had declined to affiliate with any political organisation. He distrusted the conciliatory Repealers of the O'Connell school, describing the Repeal agitator as "a wind-bag", his father was a strong sympathiser and was moderately active in local politics. The Kilkenny Irish Confederation club would lend some economic assistance to Stephens during his Paris exile. Ireland in the 1840s was devastated by the Great Famine. Stephens sympathies lay more with the Mitchel and Lalor brand of republicanism, than with Charles Gavan Duffy's and William Smith O'Brien's mild constitutionalism; this would come to a head with the revolutions sweeping Europe from the Paris barricades of February 1848. According to Ryan, Stephens was caught up in these impulses and added secret drilling to his work of railway construction; the only written accounts of Stephens political opinions prior to 1848 are the letters he wrote just after the insurrection and his recollections published in the Irishman newspaper beginning on 4 February 1882, his “Notes on a 3,000 miles walk through Ireland” published in the Weekly Freeman from 6 October 1883.
With John Mitchel transported to Van Diemen's Land by a packed jury under the purposely enacted Treason Felony Act, leadership of the Confederation fell to William Smith O'Brien. O'Brien arrived in Kilkenny on 24 July 1848 to call on the people to confront "the perils and the honours of a righteous war." The next day, at a meeting of the Confederate clubs, Stephens was called upon to appear on the platform by his friends where he delivered his maiden speech. A Mr. Kavanagh, present at the meeting asked who would come with him to take the detective prisoner, which Stephens agreed to do; this would be th
Irish War of Independence
The Irish War of Independence or Anglo-Irish War was a guerrilla war fought in Ireland from 1919 to 1921 between the Irish Republican Army and British forces: the British Army, along with the quasi-military Royal Irish Constabulary and its paramilitary forces the Auxiliaries and Ulster Special Constabulary. It was an escalation of the Irish revolutionary period into warfare. In April 1916, Irish republicans launched the Easter Rising against British rule and proclaimed an Irish Republic. Although it was crushed after a week of fighting, the Easter Rising and the British response led to greater popular support for Irish independence. In the December 1918 election, the republican party Sinn Féin won a landslide victory in Ireland. On 21 January 1919 they declared Irish independence; that day, two RIC officers were shot dead in the Soloheadbeg ambush by IRA volunteers acting on their own initiative. The conflict developed gradually. For much of 1919, IRA activity involved capturing weaponry and freeing republican prisoners, while the Dáil set about building a state.
In September, the British government outlawed the conflict intensified. The IRA began ambushing RIC and British Army patrols, attacking their barracks and forcing isolated barracks to be abandoned; the British government bolstered the RIC with recruits from Britain—the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries—who became notorious for ill-discipline and reprisal attacks on civilians, some of which were authorized by the British government. Thus the conflict is sometimes called the Tan War; the conflict involved civil disobedience, notably the refusal of Irish railwaymen to transport British forces or military supplies. In mid-1920, republicans won control of most county councils, British authority collapsed in most of the south and west, forcing the British government to introduce emergency powers. About 300 people had been killed by late 1920. On Bloody Sunday in Dublin, 21 November 1920, fourteen British intelligence operatives were assassinated in the morning. A week seventeen Auxiliaries were killed by the IRA in the Kilmichael Ambush in County Cork.
The British government declared martial law in much of southern Ireland. The centre of Cork city was burnt out by British forces in December 1920. Violence continued to escalate over the next seven months, when 1,000 people were killed and 4,500 republicans were interned. Much of the fighting took place in Munster and Belfast, which together saw over 75 percent of the conflict deaths; the conflict in north-east Ulster had a sectarian aspect. While the Catholic minority there backed Irish independence, the Protestant majority were unionist/loyalist. A Special Constabulary was formed, made up of Protestants, loyalist paramilitaries were active, they attacked Catholics in reprisal for IRA actions, in Belfast a sectarian conflict raged in which 500 were killed, most of them Catholics. In May 1921, Ireland was partitioned under British law by the Government of Ireland Act, which created Northern Ireland. Both sides agreed to a ceasefire on 11 July 1921; the post-ceasefire talks led to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty on 6 December 1921.
This ended British rule in most of Ireland and, after a ten-month transitional period overseen by a provisional government, the Irish Free State was created as a self-governing Dominion on 6 December 1922. Northern Ireland remained within the United Kingdom. After the ceasefire, violence in Belfast and fighting in border areas of Northern Ireland continued, the IRA launched a failed Northern offensive in May 1922. In June 1922, disagreement among republicans over the Anglo-Irish Treaty led to the ten-month Irish Civil War; the Irish Free State awarded 62,868 medals for service during the War of Independence, of which 15,224 were issued to IRA fighters of the flying columns. Since the 1880s, Irish nationalists in the Irish Parliamentary Party had been demanding Home Rule, or self-government, from Britain. Fringe organisations, such as Arthur Griffith's Sinn Féin, instead argued for some form of Irish independence, but they were in a small minority; the demand for Home Rule was granted by the British Government in 1912 prompting a prolonged crisis within the United Kingdom as Ulster unionists formed an armed organisation – the Ulster Volunteers – to resist this measure of devolution, at least in territory they could control.
In turn, nationalists formed the Irish Volunteers. The British Parliament passed the Third Home Rule Act on 18 September 1914 with an amending Bill for the partition of Ireland introduced by Ulster Unionist MPs, but the Act's implementation was postponed by the Suspensory Act 1914 due to the outbreak of the First World War in the previous month; the majority of nationalists followed their IPP leaders and John Redmond's call to support Britain and the Allied war effort in Irish regiments of the New British Army, the intention being to ensure the commencement of Home Rule after the war. But a significant minority of the Irish Volunteers opposed Ireland's involvement in the war; the Volunteer movement split, a majority leaving to form the National Volunteers under Redmond. The remaining Irish Volunteers, under Eoin MacNeill, held that they would maintain their organisation until Home Rule had been granted. Within this Volunteer movement, another faction, led by the separatist Irish Republican Brotherhood, began to prepare for a revolt a
French Foreign Legion
The French Foreign Legion is a military service branch of the French Army established in 1831. Legionnaires are trained infantry soldiers and the Legion is unique in that it was, continues to be, open to foreign recruits willing to serve in the French Armed Forces; when it was founded, the French Foreign Legion was not unique. Commanded by French officers, it is open to French citizens, who amounted to 24% of the recruits in 2007; the Foreign Legion is today known as a unit whose training focuses on traditional military skills and on its strong esprit de corps, as its men come from different countries with different cultures. This is a way to strengthen them enough to work as a team. Training is described as not only physically challenging, but very stressful psychologically. French citizenship may be applied for after three years' service; the Legion is the only part of the French military that does not swear allegiance to France, but to the Foreign Legion itself. Any soldier who becomes injured during a battle for France can apply to be a French citizen under a provision known as "Français par le sang versé".
As of 2008, members come from 140 countries. Since 1831, the Legion has suffered the loss of nearly 40,000 men on active service in France, Morocco, Madagascar, West Africa, Italy, the Crimea, Indo-China, Loyada, Chad, Zaïre, Central Africa, Kuwait, Djibouti, former Yugoslavia, Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, Mali and others; the French Foreign Legion was used to protect and expand the French colonial empire during the 19th century. The Foreign Legion was stationed only in Algeria, where it took part in the pacification and development of the colony. Subsequently, the Foreign Legion was deployed in a number of conflicts, including the First Carlist War in 1835, the Crimean War in 1854, the Second Italian War of Independence in 1859, the French intervention in Mexico in 1863, the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, the Tonkin Campaign and Sino-French War in 1883, supporting growth of the French colonial empire in Sub-Saharan Africa and pacifying Algeria, the Second Franco-Dahomean War in 1892, the Second Madagascar expedition in 1895, the Mandingo Wars in 1894.
In World War I, the Foreign Legion fought in many critical battles on the Western Front. It played a smaller role in World War II than in World War I, though having a part in the Norwegian and North African campaigns. During the First Indochina War, the Foreign Legion saw; the FFL lost a large number of men in the catastrophic Battle of Dien Bien Phu. During the Algerian War of Independence, the Foreign Legion came close to being disbanded after some officers and the decorated 1st Foreign Parachute Regiment took part in the Generals' putsch. Operations during this period included the Suez Crisis, the Battle of Algiers and various offensives launched by General Maurice Challe including Operations Oranie and Jumelles. In the 1960s and 1970s, Legion regiments had additional roles in sending units as a rapid deployment force to preserve French interests – in its former African colonies and in other nations as well; some notable operations include: the Chadian–Libyan conflict in 1969–1972, 1978–1979, 1983–1987.
In 1981, the 1st Foreign Regiment and Foreign Legion regiments partook to the Multinational Force in Lebanon. In 1990, Foreign Legion regiments were sent to the Persian Gulf and took part in Opération Daguet, part of Division Daguet. Following the Gulf War in the 1990s, the Foreign Legion helped with the evacuation of French citizens and foreigners in Rwanda and Zaire; the Foreign Legion was deployed in Cambodia, Sarajevo and Herzegovina. In the mid- to late-1990s, the Foreign Legion was deployed in the Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville and in Kosovo; the Foreign Legion took part in operations in Rwanda in 1990–1994. In the 2000s, the Foreign Legion was deployed in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, Operation Licorne in Ivory Coast, the EUFOR Tchad/RCA in Chad, Operation Serval in the Northern Mali conflict. Other countries have tried to emulate the French Foreign Legion model; the contemporary French Foreign Legion relates the most to that of the Spanish Legion. The French Foreign Legion was created by Louis Philippe, the King of the French, on 10 March 1831 from the foreign regiments of the Kingdom of France.
Recruits included soldiers from the disbanded Swiss and German foreign regiments of the Bourbon monarchy. The Royal Ordinance for the establishment of the new regiment specified that the foreigners recruited could only serve outside France; the French expeditionary force that had occupied Algiers in 1830 was in need of reinforcements and the Legion was accordingly transferred by sea in detachments from Toulon to Algeria. The Foreign Legion was used, as part of the Armée d'Afrique, to protect and expand the French colonial empire during the 19th century, but it fought in all French wars including the Franco-Prussian War, World War I and World War II; the Foreign Legion has remained an important part of the French Army and sea transport protected by the French Navy, surviving three Republics, the Second F
Easter Rising
The Easter Rising known as the Easter Rebellion, was an armed insurrection in Ireland during Easter Week, April 1916. The Rising was launched by Irish republicans to end British rule in Ireland and establish an independent Irish Republic while the United Kingdom was engaged in the First World War, it was the most significant uprising in Ireland since the rebellion of 1798, the first armed action of the Irish revolutionary period. Organised by a seven-man Military Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Rising began on Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, lasted for six days. Members of the Irish Volunteers—led by schoolmaster and Irish language activist Patrick Pearse, joined by the smaller Irish Citizen Army of James Connolly and 200 women of Cumann na mBan—seized key locations in Dublin and proclaimed an Irish Republic; the British Army brought in thousands of reinforcements as well as artillery and a gunboat. There was fierce street fighting on the routes into the city centre, where the rebels put up stiff resistance, slowing the British advance and inflicting heavy casualties.
Elsewhere in Dublin, the fighting consisted of sniping and long-range gun battles. The main rebel positions were surrounded and bombarded with artillery. There were isolated actions in other parts of Ireland, with attacks on the Royal Irish Constabulary barracks at Ashbourne, County Meath, County Cork and in County Galway, the seizure of the town of Enniscorthy, County Wexford. Germany had sent a shipment of arms to the rebels, but the British had intercepted it just before the Rising began. Volunteer leader Eoin MacNeill had issued a countermand in a bid to halt the Rising, which reduced the number of rebels who mobilised. With much greater numbers and heavier weapons, the British Army suppressed the Rising. Pearse agreed to an unconditional surrender on Saturday 29 April, although sporadic fighting continued until Sunday, when word reached the other rebel positions. After the surrender the country remained under martial law. About 3,500 people were taken prisoner by the British, many of whom had played no part in the Rising, 1,800 of them were sent to internment camps or prisons in Britain.
Most of the leaders of the Rising were executed following courts-martial. The Rising brought physical force republicanism back to the forefront of Irish politics, which for nearly 50 years had been dominated by constitutional nationalism. It, the British reaction to it, led to increased popular support for Irish independence. In December 1918, represented by the reconstituted Sinn Féin party, won 73 seats in a landslide victory in the general election to the British Parliament, they did not take their seats, but instead convened the First Dáil and declared the independence of the Irish Republic. The Soloheadbeg ambush started the War of Independence. 485 people were killed in the Easter Rising. About 54% were civilians, 30% were British military and police, 16% were Irish rebels. More than 2,600 were wounded. Many of the civilians were killed as a result of the British using artillery and heavy machine guns, or mistaking civilians for rebels. Others were caught in the crossfire in a crowded city.
The shelling and the fires it caused left parts of inner city Dublin in ruins. The Acts of Union 1800 united the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, abolishing the Irish Parliament and giving Ireland representation in the British Parliament. From early on, many Irish nationalists opposed the union and the ensuing exploitation and impoverishment of the island, which led to a high level of depopulation. Opposition took various forms: constitutional and revolutionary; the Irish Home Rule movement sought to achieve self-government for Ireland, within the United Kingdom. In 1886, the Irish Parliamentary Party under Charles Stewart Parnell succeeded in having the First Home Rule Bill introduced in the British parliament, but it was defeated; the Second Home Rule Bill of 1893 was passed by the House of Commons but rejected by the House of Lords. After the fall of Parnell and more radical nationalists became disillusioned with parliamentary politics and turned toward more extreme forms of separatism.
The Gaelic Athletic Association, the Gaelic League and the cultural revival under W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory, together with the new political thinking of Arthur Griffith expressed in his newspaper Sinn Féin and organisations such as the National Council and the Sinn Féin League, led many Irish people to identify with the idea of an independent Gaelic Ireland; this was sometimes referred to by the generic term Sinn Féin. The Third Home Rule Bill was introduced by British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith in 1912. Unionists, who were Protestant, opposed it, as they did not want to be ruled by a Catholic-dominated Irish government. Led by Sir Edward Carson and James Craig, they formed the Ulster Volunteers in January 1913. In response, Irish nationalists formed a rival paramilitary group, the Irish Volunteers, in November 1913; the Irish Republican Brotherhood was a driving force behind the Irish Volunteers and attempted to control it. Its leader was Eoin MacNeill, not an IRB member; the Irish Volunteers' stated goal was "to secure and to maintain the rights and liberties common to all the people of Ireland".
It included people with a range of political views, was open to "all able-bodied Irishmen without distinction of creed, politics or social group". Another militant group, the Irish Citizen Army, was formed by trade unionists as a result of the Dublin Lock-out of that year
Charles Stewart Parnell
Charles Stewart Parnell was an Irish nationalist politician who served from 1875 as Member of Parliament in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, whose party held the balance of power in the House of Commons during the Home Rule debates of 1885-1890. Born into a powerful Anglo-Irish Protestant landowning family, he was a land reform agitator, founder in 1879 of the Irish National Land League, he became leader of the Home Rule League, operating independently of the Liberals, winning great influence by his balancing of constitutional and economic issues, by his skillful use of parliamentary procedure. He was imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol in 1882 but released when he renounced violent extra-Parliamentary action; the same year, he reformed the Home Rule League as the Irish Parliamentary Party, which he controlled minutely as Britain's first disciplined democratic party. The hung parliament of 1885 saw him hold the balance of power between William Gladstone's Liberals and Lord Salisbury's Conservatives.
His power was one factor in Gladstone's adoption of Home Rule as the central tenet of the Liberal Party. His reputation peaked in 1889–90 when letters published in The Times linking him to the Phoenix Park killings of 1882 were shown to have been forged by Richard Pigott. However, the Irish Parliamentary Party split in 1890 after the revelation of Parnell's long adulterous love affair, causing many English Liberals to refuse to work with him, strong opposition from Catholic bishops, he headed a small minority faction until his death in 1891. Parnell is celebrated as the best organiser of a political party up to that time, one of the most formidable figures in parliamentary history. Many believe that Home Rule could have been achieved without bloodshed, if he had not been brought down by personal circumstances. Charles Stewart Parnell was born in County Wicklow, the third son and seventh child of John Henry Parnell, a wealthy Anglo-Irish landowner, his American wife Delia Tudor Stewart of Bordentown, New Jersey, daughter of the American naval hero, Admiral Charles Stewart.
There were eleven children in all: six girls. Admiral Stewart's mother, Parnell's great-grandmother, belonged to the Tudor family, so Parnell had a distant relationship with the British Royal Family. John Henry Parnell himself was a cousin of one of Ireland's leading aristocrats, Viscount Powerscourt, the grandson of a Chancellor of the Exchequer in Grattan's Parliament, Sir John Parnell, who lost office in 1799 when he opposed the Act of Union; the Parnells of Avondale were descended from a Protestant English merchant family, which came to prominence in Congleton, early in the 17th century where as Baron Congleton two generations held the office of Mayor of Congleton before moving to Ireland. The family produced a number of notable figures, including Thomas Parnell, the Irish poet, Henry Parnell, 1st Baron Congleton, the Irish politician. Parnell's grandfather William Parnell, who inherited the Avondale Estate in 1795, was a liberal Irish MP for Wicklow from 1817–1820. Thus, from birth, Charles Stewart Parnell possessed an extraordinary number of links to many elements of society.
Parnell belonged to the Church of Ireland, disestablished in 1871 though in years he began to drop away from formal church attendance. Yet it was as a leader of Irish Nationalism. Parnell's parents separated when he was six, as a boy he was sent to different schools in England, where he spent an unhappy youth, his father died in 1859 and he inherited the Avondale estate, while his older brother John inherited another estate in Armagh. The young Parnell studied at Magdalene College, Cambridge but, due to the troubled financial circumstances of the estate he inherited, he was absent a great deal and never completed his degree. In 1871, he joined his elder brother John Howard Parnell, who farmed in Alabama, on an extended tour of the United States, their travels took them through the South and the brothers neither spent much time in centres of Irish immigration nor sought out Irish-Americans. In 1874, he became High Sheriff of Wicklow, his home county in which he was an officer in the Wicklow militia.
He was noted as an improving landowner who played an important part in opening the south Wicklow area to industrialisation. His attention was drawn to the theme dominating the Irish political scene of the mid-1870s, Isaac Butt's Home Rule League formed in 1873 to campaign for a moderate degree of self-government, it was in support of this movement that Parnell first tried to stand for election in Wicklow, but as high sheriff was disqualified. He failed again in 1874 as home rule candidate in a County Dublin by-election. Historian Kevin Flynn reports: When Gladstone came to know him in years, he was astonished to find that Parnell was ignorant of the basic facts of Irish history; the romantic vision that characterised Young Ireland and the Fenians escaped him completely. He knew little of figures like Sarsfield, Tone or Emmett and appeared unsure of who won the Battle of the Boyne. Flynn argues that the
Treason
In law, treason is criminal disloyalty to the state. It is a crime that covers some of the more extreme acts against one's sovereign; this includes things such as participating in a war against one's native country, attempting to overthrow its government, spying on its military, its diplomats, or its secret services for a hostile and foreign power, or attempting to kill its head of state. A person who commits treason is known in law as a traitor. In common law countries, treason covered the murder of specific social superiors, such as the murder of a husband by his wife or that of a master by his servant. Treason against the king was known as high treason and treason against a lesser superior was petty treason; as jurisdictions around the world abolished petty treason, "treason" came to refer to what was known as high treason. At times, the term traitor has been used as a political epithet, regardless of any verifiable treasonable action. In a civil war or insurrection, the winners may deem the losers to be traitors.
The term traitor is used in heated political discussion – as a slur against political dissidents, or against officials in power who are perceived as failing to act in the best interest of their constituents. In certain cases, as with the Dolchstoßlegende, the accusation of treason towards a large group of people can be a unifying political message. Treason is considered to be different and on many occasions a separate charge from "treasonable felony" in many parts of the world. In English law, high treason was punishable by being hanged and quartered or burnt at the stake, although beheading could be substituted by royal command; those penalties were abolished in 1790 and 1973 respectively. The penalty was used by monarchs against people who could reasonably be called traitors. Many of them would now just be considered dissidents; the words "treason" and "traitor" are derived from the Latin tradere, to hand over. Christian theology and political thinking until after the Enlightenment considered treason and blasphemy as synonymous, as it challenged both the state and the will of God.
Kings were considered chosen by God, to betray one's country was to do the work of Satan. Many nations' laws mention various types of treason. "Crimes Related to Insurrection" is the internal treason, may include a coup d'état. "Crimes Related to Foreign Aggression" is the treason of cooperating with foreign aggression positively regardless of the national inside and outside. "Crimes Related to inducement of Foreign Aggression" is the crime of communicating with aliens secretly to cause foreign aggression or menace. Depending on a country, conspiracy is added to these. In Australia, there are federal and state laws against treason in the states of New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria. To Treason laws in the United States, citizens of Australia owe allegiance to their sovereign, the federal and state level; the federal law defining treason in Australia is provided under section 80.1 of the Criminal Code, contained in the schedule of the Commonwealth Criminal Code Act 1995. It defines treason as follows: A person commits an offence, called treason, if the person: causes the death of the Sovereign, the heir apparent of the Sovereign, the consort of the Sovereign, the Governor-General or the Prime Minister.
A person is not guilty of treason under paragraphs, or if their assistance or intended assistance is purely humanitarian in nature. The maximum penalty for treason is life imprisonment. Section 80.1AC of the Act creates the related offence of treachery. The Treason Act 1351, the Treason Act 1795 and the Treason Act 1817 form part of the law of New South Wales; the Treason Act 1795 and the Treason Act 1817 have been repealed by Section 11 of the Crimes Act 1900, except in so far as they relate to the compassing, inventing, devising, or intending death or destruction, or any bodily harm tending to death or destruction, maim, or wounding, imprisonment, or restraint of the person of the heirs and successors of King George III of the United Kingdom, the expressing, uttering, or declaring of such compassings, inventions, devices, or intentions, or any of them. Section 12 of the Crimes Act 1900 creates an offence, derived from section 3 of the Treason Felony Act 1848: 12 Compassing etc deposition of the Sovereign—overawing Parliament etc Whosoever, within New South Wales or without, imagines, devises, or intends to deprive or depose Our M
Roger Casement
Roger David Casement, known as Sir Roger Casement, CMG, between 1911 and 1916, was a diplomat and Irish nationalist. He worked for the British Foreign Office as a diplomat and became a humanitarian activist and Easter Rising leader. Described as the "father of twentieth-century human rights investigations", he was honoured in 1905 for the Casement Report on the Congo and knighted in 1911 for his important investigations of human rights abuses in Peru. In Africa as a young man, Casement first worked for commercial interests before joining the British Colonial Service. In 1891 he was appointed as a profession he followed for more than 20 years. Influenced by the Boer War and his investigation into colonial atrocities against indigenous peoples, Casement grew to distrust imperialism. After retiring from consular service in 1913, he became more involved with Irish republicanism and other separatist movements. During World War I he made efforts to gain German military aid for the 1916 Easter Rising that sought to gain Irish independence.
He was arrested and executed for high treason. He was stripped of other honours. Before the trial, the British government circulated excerpts said to be from his private journals, known as the Black Diaries, which detailed homosexual activities. Given prevailing views and existing laws on homosexuality, this material undermined support for clemency for Casement. Debates have continued about these diaries: a handwriting comparison study in 2002 concluded Casement had written the diaries, but this was still contested by some. Casement was born in Dublin to an Anglo-Irish family, living in early childhood at Doyle's Cottage, Lawson Terrace, Sandycove, his father, Captain Roger Casement of the Regiment of Dragoons, was the son of a bankrupt Belfast shipping merchant, Hugh Casement, who moved to Australia. Captain Casement had served in the 1842 Afghan campaign, he travelled to Europe to fight as a volunteer in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 but arrived after the Surrender at Világos. After the family moved to England, Roger's mother, Anne Jephson, of a Dublin Anglican family, purportedly had him secretly baptised at the age of three as a Roman Catholic in Rhyl, Wales.
According to an 1892 letter, Casement believed his mother was descended from the Jephson family of Mallow, County Cork. However, the Jephson family's historian provides no evidence of this; the family lived in England in genteel poverty. They returned to Ireland to County Antrim to live near paternal relatives; when Casement was 13 years old his father died in Ballymena, he was left dependent on the charity of relatives, the Youngs and the Casements. He was educated at the Diocesan Ballymena, he left school at 16 and went to England to work as a clerk with Elder Dempster, a Liverpool shipping company headed by Alfred Lewis Jones. Roger Casement's brother, Thomas Hugh Jephson Casement, helped establish the Irish Coastguard Service, he drowned in Dublin's Grand Canal on 6 March 1939. and is buried in Deansgrange Cemetery. Casement worked in the Congo for Henry Morton Stanley and the African International Association from 1884. Casement worked on a survey to improve communication and recruited and supervised workmen in building a railroad to bypass the lower 220 miles of the Congo River, made unnavigable by cataracts, in order to improve transportation and trade to the Upper Congo.
During his commercial work, he learned African languages. In 1890 Casement met Joseph Conrad, who had come to the Congo to pilot a merchant ship, Le Roi des Belges. Both had come inspired by the idea that "European colonisation would bring moral and social progress to the continent and free its inhabitants'from slavery and other barbarities.' Each would soon learn the gravity of his error." Conrad published his short novel, Heart of Darkness, in 1899. Casement would take on a different kind of writing to expose the conditions he found in the Congo during his official investigation for the British government. In these formative years, he met Herbert Ward, they became longtime friends. Ward left Africa in 1889, devoted his time to becoming an artist, but his experience there influenced his work. Casement joined the Colonial Service, under the authority of the Colonial Office, first serving overseas as a clerk in British West Africa before in August 1901 transferring to the Foreign Office service as British consul in the eastern part of the French Congo.
In 1903 the British government commissioned Casement its consul at Boma in the Congo Free State, to investigate the human rights situation in that colony of the Belgian king, Leopold II. Setting up a private army known as the Force Publique, Leopold had squeezed revenue out of the people of the territory through a reign of terror in the harvesting and export of rubber and other resources. In trade, Belgium shipped guns and other materials to the Congo, used chiefly to suppress the local people. Casement travelled for weeks in the upper Congo Basin to interview people throughout the region, including workers and mercenaries, he delivered a long, detailed eyewitness report to the Crown that exposed abuses: "the enslavement and torture of natives on the rubber plantations," becoming known as the Casement Report of 1904. King Leopold had held the Congo Free State since 1885, when the Berlin Conference of European powers and the United States gave him free rein in the area. Leopold had exploited the territory's natural resources as a
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