William Butler Yeats on the Forgery Controversy

In 1936, William Maloney published "The Forged Casement Diaries," establishing the template for a debate that continues to this day. Maloney's case was comprehensive but entirely circumstantial, since no one had seen the actual diaries. The book also seeks to prove Casement wasn't gay, largely by presenting the testimony of a number of people saying "he couldn't have been."

"The Forged Casement Diaries" was financed and directed by the Clan na Gael in America (Maloney was a member) and Casement's political ally in Ireland, Bulmer Hobson. Hobson himself supplied the two main pillars upon which the forgery argument, at that point in time, depended: that Casement had had a romantic relationship with Ada MacNeill -- he hadn't -- and that the homosexual references in his diaries had been transcribed by Casement as evidence against a rubber station chief in the Putumayo -- they hadn't been.

It would be twenty more years before Britain allowed anyone a closer look at the diaries, and in that time Maloney's theories took hold in Ireland and Irish America.  Maloney's book, part of a coordinated effort by Republicans to reclaim Casement as an Irish hero, inspired a bitter polemic from William Butler Yeats.

Roger Casement

I SAY that Roger Casement
Did what he had to do.
He died upon the gallows,
But that is nothing new.

Afraid they might be beaten
Before the bench of Time,
They turned a trick by forgery
And blackened his good name.

A perjurer stood ready
To prove their forgery true;
They gave it out to all the world,
And that is something new;

For Spring Rice (1) had to whisper it,
Being their Ambassador,
And then the speakers got it
And writers by the score.

Come Alfred Noyes (2) come all the troop
That cried it far and wide,
Come from the forger and his desk,
Desert the perjurer's side;

Come speak your bit in public
That some amends be made
To this most gallant gentleman
That is in quicklime laid.

(1) Sir Cecil Spring Rice, the British Ambassador to the United States, was entrusted with the delicate task of publicizing the Black Diaries to American officials to forestall a negative reaction to Casement's execution

(2) Alfred Noyes, a poet working in the British propaganda office during the First World War, was shown the Black Diaries and wrote one of the first public accounts of them.  In the wake of Yeats' poem and Maloney's book, he recanted his belief in the diaries' authenticity,and Yeats took his name out of the poem and substituted "Tom and Dick."

The Ghost of Roger Casement

William Butler Yeats knew Roger Casement from Dublin; Yeats' Abbey Theatre was one of the many causes associated with the Gaelic cultural and political revival to which Casement contributed. 

Casement Memorial
Ballyheigue, Co Kerry

"The Ghost of Roger Casement" was one of two Casement-related poems Yeats wrote twenty years after Casement's execution -- inspired by the publication of a book that rigorously challenged the "Black Diaries" authenticity and insisted upon Casement's heterosexuality.  

Yeats said he didn't care whether Casement was gay or not, but he was outraged at Britain's use of private materials -- stolen, at the least, if not actually forged -- to blacken his reputation.  In this poem, he envisions Casement as the moral conscience of the British Empire, standing in judgment of all of imperialism's crimes. 

O what has made that sudden noise?

What on the threshold stands?

It never crossed the sea because

John Bull and the sea are friends;

But this is not the old sea

Nor this the old seashore.

What gave that roar of mockery,

That roar in the sea's roar?

The ghost of Roger Casement

Is beating on the door.

Sex, Lies, and the Black Diaries

Colm Tóibín  addresses the forgery controversy, and makes a case for the Black Diaries' authenticity.  He concludes...

"It is unlikely that the argument will end in the near future, especially since those who believe the diaries were forged remain passionate and committed to proving their case. It seems to me that both as a humanitarian and a gay martyr Roger Casement remains our contemporary. While his bones were laid to rest in Glasnevin in 1965, returned at the request of the Irish government, it is likely that his legacy will remain turbulent and open to debate."

The "Black Diaries"

Homosexuality as a capital crime in 19th-century Britain

An account of the two unfortunate men who were the last to be executed in Britain for the crime of homosexuality.  Roger Casement was executed for treason, but a good case can be made that his life would have been spared had he not been gay.

The last man to be executed by a western democracy for being gay?

South American dandies, 

photographed by Roger Casement

When Roger Casement was sentenced to death for treason, a broad-based international movement for clemency seemed certain to force Britain to commute his sentence to life imprisonment.  Support came from the Pope, the Archibishop of Canterbury, the U.S. Senate, William Randolph Hearst, from artists and writers and statesmen and religious leaders, and from ordinary ppeople around the world -- even from the impoverished Congo natives who Casement had worked so hard to help.  But the clemency movement collapsed when the British government began secretly circulating copies of what they said were Casement's private diaries -- revealing a long history of patronizing young male prostitutes in Africa and South America.  The clemency movement collapsed overnight, and Casement was hung on 3 August, 1916.  

Irish partisans claimed the diaries were forged, and although strong evidence for their authenticity has emerged, the controversy continues to this day.  With or without the diaries, most historians and biographers have come around to the view that Casement was gay, and Irish public opinion seems ready to accept him as a gay hero.

Although Casement was one of the pre-eminent figures in the pre-1916 Republican movement, he's never attained the iconic status of the other Easter martyrs. Cahir O'Doherty discusses the implications of Casement's sexuality for his role in the pantheon of Irish heroes.

Casement's Congo Report

Roger Casement first gained fame when, as a British consul in King Leopold's Congo, he demanded that the British government take action against the widespread abuse, enslavement and murder of native workers on the king's rubber plantations.  The European power had given the Congo to King Leopold -- not to Belgium -- to operate as a model colony; instead, it had turned into the living hell that Joseph Conrad describes in "Heart of Darkness."  As a signatory to the Berlin Conference that gave the Congo to Leopold, Britain had an obligation, Casement argued, to enforce the terms of the agreement.

Casement's Congo report shocked a Tory government into action, and helped establish the principle that colonial powers had some small measure of accountability for their subjects' welfare. 

Colm Tóibín reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's Casement biography

Like me, Tóibín was disappointed in Vargas Llosa's portrayal of Casement as a sexless, one-dimensional saint, and his difficult childhood as a leprechaun-movie dream of Irish myth. It's difficult to construct a recognizable human being out of Casement's biography if one writes out all the sexuality referenced in the "black diaries" and replaces it with nothing. 

Casement being led to his trial for high treason, 1916.