Birth Pains

Nevertheless, despite all the hoopla surrounding the centennial, it is remarkable how little attention has been paid to the nationalism that inspired the uprising. The Seven is a brilliant exception. Written with great verve and zest, as well as judicious tough-mindedness, this is an overdue reexamination of the remorseless nationalist faith that led not only to the Easter Rebellion but to the Troubles beyond. For anyone keen on understanding why the question of Irish identity and Irish nationhood remains so vexed, Ruth Dudley Edwards’s study is essential.

One governing virtue of this book is that, as a revisionist, Edwards has not come simply to scoff where others have prayed. She understands how British misrule stoked the fires of Irish nationalism as well as the idealism that often imbued that nationalism. And she certainly understands the sacrifices that individual nationalists made as witness to their faith. Some of her liveliest passages re-create those sacrifices in a narrative full of pathos, irony, and wit—proof that good storytelling always distinguishes good history.

Edwards’s treatment of the Fenian Thomas Clarke (1857-1916), so much of whose sacrificial zeal animated the Easter Rebellion, nicely demonstrates this. After being dispatched by the Irish-American Clan na Gael to blow up London Bridge, Clarke was betrayed by an informer and sentenced in 1883 to life imprisonment. It was not until 1898, after 15 years behind bars, in conditions that were often gratuitously barbarous, that he was released. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes Thomas Clarke as “shadowy.” Edwards’s account of the “disciplined, focused teetotaller,” who sought “neither status nor recognition” for the work he did to advance his beloved cause, brings the man and his trials entirely to life.

Indeed, her vivid account is a model of critical sympathy. It might be true that Clarke, impelled “by a desire for vengeance, an all-pervading hatred for the British, an implacable ambition to get them out of Ireland, a steely determination to do whatever it took and exceptional strength of character .  .  . was readying himself to start a revolution.” But it is also true (as Edwards shows) that he chose to live in “an Irish republican bubble” and had no interest in anything unless it could somehow help to “damage the British.” And this included Irish culture—the genuine article, in all of its richness, not the counterfeit culture peddled by the nationalists. Denied any proper reading material by his British captors, Clarke was desperately parochial, and the crude, narrow, fanatical view of Irish identity and Irish nationhood that he bequeathed to the new republic cast a long, lamentable shadow.

In Edwards’s brilliant portrait of the leader of the nationalist republicans, Patrick Pearse (1879-1916), she shows how this perfervid schoolmaster, poet, and barrister paved the way for the Easter Rebellion in an oration he gave at the graveside of the Fenian Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa (1831-1915) by reaffirming a central tenet of the Fenian faith. The nationalists, he insisted, would acknowledge “only one definition of freedom: It is Tone’s definition; it is Mitchel’s definition; it is Rossa’s definition. Let no one blaspheme the cause that the dead generations of Ireland served by giving it any other name and definition than their name and definition.” And his conclusion could not have been starker: “Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.”

In this bravura piece of nationalist propaganda, Edwards recognizes what would become a pattern: “The use of the dead to justify as well as dictate the policy of the living .  .  . would be enthusiastically adopted by subsequent generations of violent republicans”—though using Rossa in this way was especially cynical because, before his death, the old Fenian had already begun to accept the constitutionalism anathema to Pearse and the nationalists. Nevertheless, no one can read Edwards on Pearse without seeing her solicitude for a man whose talents were so terribly misapplied. She quotes the British colonel superintending Pearse’s court-martial, who would remark that he had “just done one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. I have had to condemn to death one of the finest characters I have ever come across.”

Edwards is unsparing about the role that Irish Americans played in fomenting and funding the nationalists’ campaigns of violence at a time when the barrister and member of Parliament John Redmond (1856-1918)—who was never unsympathetic to the aspirations of the separatists—was trying to put together a constitutional solution acceptable not only to nationalists and the British but to Ulster as well. While appreciative of the hurdles in his way, Redmond was confident that independence might still be won without bloodshed, especially after the shared sacrifices exacted by the Great War, in which over 49,000 Irishmen—from both the South and the North—would die. As it was, the Easter Rebellion was tragic proof that the men of violence, backed to the hilt by bloody-minded Irish America, would prevail over the constitutionalists.

In her conclusion, Edwards quotes the Jesuit Francis Shaw to show how the nationalists radically impoverished Ireland’s sense of identity and nationhood: “In the commonly accepted view of Irish history,” he wrote,

Worse still, in Shaw’s words, he is told that he “must despise as unmanly those of their own country who preferred to solve problems, if possible, by peaceful rather than by violent means.” Here was the issue of Irish nationalism in all of its arrogance and divisiveness.

The Easter Rebellion has inspired fine historians, from F. S. L. Lyons and J. J. Lee to Charles Townshend and Lord Bew. Now, to their illustrious company, we add Ruth Dudley Edwards.

Edward Short is the author, most recently, of Adventures in the Book Pages: Essays and Reviews.