By Joseph E. Gannon

Perhaps on Nov. 10, 1879, at 27 Great Brunswick St., Dublin, as the mother and father gazed down at their newborn son, they had a vision of what his future held. That may explain why they named him Patrick Henry Pearse. Their son would grow to be the very embodiment of the words of the American patriot Patrick Henry, whose name he bore, who uttered in the Virginia Convention on March 23, 1775: "I know not what course others might take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" Indeed, these words would have formed a very proper epitaph on the gravestone of Pearse, the leader of the Easter Rising 1916.

Like many other uncompromising Irish rebels, Pearse was not of pure Irish blood; he was the product of a mixed English-Irish marriage. His father was a monumental sculptor and an Englishman, his mother was a native of County Meath. Pearse began his life-long study of the Irish language at age 11; perhaps his strident nationalism was a byproduct of his study of the language that the British had tried so hard to destroy over the centuries.

After graduation from Royal University of Ireland he was called to the Bar, but he never practiced. He joined the Gaelic League in 1895. In 1908, along with friends Thomas MacDonagh, Con Colbert, and his brother William, Pearse founded an Irish language school called St. Enda's at Cullenwood House in Rathmines, outside Dublin. Their school prospered, and in 1910 they moved it to The Hermitage, Rathfarnham, where Robert Emmet had courted Sarah Curran. The school operated until 1935, run eventually by Pearse's mother and sister, but none of the four founders of the school would see that day all four would be executed within five days of each other in May 1916.

Through these years Pearse was writing a great deal of prose and poetry, some in Irish and some in English, much of which was published after his death, and contributing articles to Arthur Griffith's newspaper, The United Irishman. He was becoming more and more radical in his outlook on Irish nationalism, evolving from a supporter of Home Rule to a republican. In 1913, he was one of the founders of the Irish Volunteers, a native Irish militia that would evolve into the Irish Republican Army. Later the same year Pearse joined the secretive Irish Republican Brotherhood.

In February 1914, Pearse traveled to the United States seeking money from the Irish-American community for his school and for the Irish Volunteers. He made contact with Joseph McGarrity and former Fenian John Devoy, who helped him on both counts. In July 1914, in the famous Howth gun-running incident, the Irish Volunteers obtained weapons and ammunition. The organization now had the weapons and financial support it needed to consider the military action that many of them, including Pearse, believed necessary to end British rule in Ireland. "There are many things more horrible than bloodshed," Pearse had once written, "and slavery is one of them." In the militants' view, the circumstances were now rife for action, with the republicans possessing organization and weapons. Pearse felt ready to strike for his dream.

In the summer of 1915 the body of Fenian Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa was brought home from New York for burial. At Dublin's Glasnevin Cemetery, Pearse delivered one of the most famous graveside orations in the long history of the Irish revolutionary movement. His speech stirred the Irish nation.

"But I hold it a Christian thing, as O'Donovan Rossa held it, to hate evil, to hate oppression, and hating them, to strive to overthrow them," said Pearse. "... Life springs from death; and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations." Pearse's clarion call to armed revolt reverberated through the length and breadth of Ireland. On April 24, 1916, words became action.

Part 2: 'In the Name of God and of the Dead Generations'

Through the history of England's domination of Ireland, Ireland's revolutionary movements have lived by a basic tenet: England's agony is Ireland's opportunity. The Irish Volunteer leadership was split with many of those in the IRB ready to strike, believing the timing would never be better. England was deep into the most savage war the world had ever seen.

Millions had died already, millions more would die yet, many of them Irishmen fighting for Britain. Meanwhile, the British were threatening conscription in Ireland, which was absolutely opposed by the vast majority of the country. But many other IRB members believed that the country was not ready for a rising, especially with so many Irish boys fighting in the trenches of France. In many ways, looking back with the clarity of over 90 years of history, both sides may have been right.

Chief among the Volunteers who opposed the rising was its chief of staff, Eoin MacNeil. In the end, Pearse and the others in the Irish Republican Brotherhood, along with James Connolly and his Citizen Army, planned a rising for April 23, Easter Sunday, using the Volunteers' scheduled maneuvers in Dublin as a cover. These plans were made without MacNeil's knowledge. MacNeil found out on Thursday and at first, after being told of the shipment of German arms that Roger Casement was bringing to the southwest, he agreed to support it. However, when MacNeil found out that Casement had been captured and the weapons lost, he canceled the maneuvers and got word to the countryside that the rising was off. In military terms, there was nothing for Pearse and his cohorts to do but call off the rising, but Pearse was not a military man, he was a visionary. He saw a destiny for himself and his country. Six years earlier he had written in a poem: "I have turned my face to the road before me, to the deed that I see and the death I shall die." With that deed, that near-certain death, now staring him in the face, he didn't waver.

At right, Fenian veteran Thomas Clarke, one of the signatories of the Proclamation.

MacNeil tried his best to stop the rising, but on Easter Monday, a force of less than 1,700 rose in Dublin, with smaller forces taking the field in Wexford, Galway, and in north County Dublin, where Thomas Ashe's Volunteers captured four police barracks. In Dublin, the rebels quickly captured several key points, including the General Post Office (GPO). There on the steps, Pearse proclaimed the Irish Republic. Pearse and six others has signed the document the day previous. The man given the honor of signing the proclamation first was 59-year-old Tom Clarke. He signed with tears in his eyes, no doubt remembering the 15 years he spent in a British prison under the harsh conditions the English reserved for Irish revolutionaries. Given the situation regarding MacNeil and the rest of the Volunteers around the island, each signer must have realized, as hand and pen moved across the proclamation, that they were very likely signing away their lives.

By early afternoon, the tricolor of the Irish Republic and a green flag with a gold harp in the center, the ancient symbol of Ireland that had been carried in so many different forms by Irish military units around the world, flew defiantly above the GPO. Across Dublin, the rebels occupied numerous strategic portions, and were awaiting the British response. Among these men and women were names that every Irishman would come to know in the years ahead, including Michael Collins, Eamon de Valera, Cathal Brugha, and Constance Markievicz, who commanded a group of Volunteers who occupied the College of Surgeons at St. Stephen's Green. But in the next few days, as fighting spread across the city, the predictions of those opposed to the rising proved true. The city and the country were not ready to rise up, and the rebels were isolated and surrounded by 20,000 British troops.

The proclamation declaring the "Irish Republic as a Sovereign and Independent State." (Click the thumbnail for a more detailed view. 109KB)

Still, the rebels fought on, and fought well. At Mount Street Bridge on Wednesday, 17 of de Valera's men held off two battalions of British troops for 9 hours. On Thursday, the British began an artillery bombardment of the GPO, fire began to spread around the building, and a cordon was thrown around the city center. The end neared. Finally, on Saturday, having been blasted out of the GPO and forced to take up positions in other buildings on nearby Moore Street, the leadership had to face the futility of further bloodshed.

Pearse watched the city he loved blazing around him and the people of that city being killed, some before his eyes. He fully expected to die in this rising and certainly would have preferred dying in battle to the execution he believed awaited him if he surrendered. He turned to Clarke and told him, "For the sake of our fellow citizens and our comrades across the city who are likely to be shot or burned to death, I propose ... we surrender." Clarke, who had struggled for decades to bring about a rising, could not speak — he turned his face to the wall and wept. Pearse surrendered and sent an order to other outposts to surrender also. On Sunday all organized resistance ended. At 5 p.m. April 30, the tricolor was pulled from the top of the remains of the GPO, the dream of the republic seemingly pulled down with it.

The men of 1916 were not the first Irish rebels, nor the last. Read about Irish rebels through history in A Pocket History of Irish Rebels

As the rebels were marched off to jail, they were shocked by the reaction of bystanders. People screamed invective at them and even threw objects at them. The people of Dublin had been unable to work for a week, of course, and were going hungry; others had lost family members or had their homes destroyed and many had sons or brothers fighting in France and considered the rising a betrayal of those men. Perhaps this outpouring of anger toward the rebels gave the British a false sense of the underlying feeling of Irish people. Perhaps they were even foolish enough to think that it constituted some sort of endorsement of British rule over the island. Many of the people in those angry crowds, in fact, agreed completely with the aims of the rising — freedom from English domination. It was only the means and the timing of it they resented.

Below right, British artillery destroyed Dublin's magnificent General Post Office, and Pearse and his men emerged under guard to curses from the outraged citizens of the city.

The British commander, General John Maxwell, court-martialed the rebel leaders. Within days, the leaders faced closed trials before courts made up of three British officers in which the defendants had no lawyers and were allowed to call no witnesses. The British officers found every defendant guilty and condemned them to death.

During the few minutes that his court-martial lasted, Pearse told the court: "You cannot conquer Ireland. You cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom. If our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom, then our children will win it by a better deed." Pearse wanted to be remembered with the martyred heroes Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone. Later at a dinner party, Brig. Gen. C.G. Blackader, who was in charge of the trials, told a friend, "I have just performed one of the hardest tasks I ever had to do. Condemned to death one of the finest characters I ever came across. A man named Pearse. Must be something very wrong in the state of things, must there not, that makes a man like that a rebel."

When the sentences of death were later relayed to the men in their cells, Clarke breathed a sigh of relieve, not because he dreamed of martyrdom, but because he feared more time in an English prison much more than death. When Pearse heard the sentence, there in his cell in Kilmainham jail, where Napper Tandy, O'Donovan Rossa and especially Emmet had also been held, he must have realized his destiny had come to pass just as he had envisioned it. His spirit would have sunk though, had he known that his brother William, who was not one of the leaders of the rising, was also condemned to death. Willie's capitol offense was being the brother of Patrick Pearse.

In a last letter home to his mother May 3rd, Pearse wrote, "I will call you in my heart at the last moment." Father Aloysius, who was attending the men, asked to stay with them to the end. He was refused. He gave Pearse a 10-inch crucifix of brass to carry with him. As he walked to his execution, Pearse heard two volleys Clarke and his old friend MacDonagh had preceded him in death. With a soldier on each side and blindfold already in place, Pearse was hustled to a corner of the prison walls, past the pooled blood of Clarke and MacDonagh. At that moment, his brother Willie was being led to the jail. A British officer had decided to allow them a moment to speak before Patrick died, but he didn't inform Willie where he was being taken, or why, and Willie was sure it was to his own death.

In the northwest corner of the compound, Patrick Henry Pearseswhere Pearse stood, the order rang out, "Aim." When one of the soldiers allowed his rifle to dip, the officer in charge ordered, "As you were." Pearse must have anguished as those words, in place of the expected "FIRE," were heard. Now the officer ordered, "Aim," again and then finally, "FIRE!" At the gates of the jail, where Willie was being led in, he heard the sound, and a warder turned to his guards and said, "Too late." They turned him around and took him back to Richmond Barracks — no one told him he had just heard the sound of his brother being killed. Willie's turn would come the next day.

In all, 97 participants in the rising were condemned to death; most had those sentences reduced when the British learned how counterproductive the executions were. If one counts Casement, executed in August, 16 were actually killed. These executions by the British would turn a large portion of the Irish from critics of the Rising to supporters and emblazon those slain into the pantheon of Irish revolutionary heroes. Had the British simply jailed those involved, the ripples from their rising may never have grown into the waves that ultimately rocked British rule in Ireland, virtually ending it in 26 of 32 counties by 1922. With decades more strife in store for Ireland, Pearse's last words at the graveside of O'Donovan Rossa in 1915 proved prophetic:

The Irish in Britain Who Heeded the Call By Kieron C. Punch / TheWildGeese.com COVENTRY, ENGLAND On November 25, 1913, the Irish Volunteers were established to ". . . secure the rights and liberties common to all the people of Ireland . . . " and to counter the threat posed to Home Rule by the Ulster Volunteers. Nationalists among Britain's 550,000-strong Irish-born population also responded to this call-to-arms, and companies of Volunteers were formed in Liverpool, Glasgow, Newcastle and London. As was the case in Ireland, the Irish Volunteer movement in Britain was heavily infiltrated by the secretive Irish Republican Brotherhood, many of whose members were old Fenians who had participated in the "Dynamite Campaign" in Britain during the 1880s. Michael Collins, one time postal worker, later commander in chief of the Free State army. Younger members of the IRB in Britain included Charles Carrigan from Denny, Stirlingshire, and a postal worker named Michael Collins. Collins drilled in No. 1 Company of the London Volunteers, while also serving as treasurer of the IRB for London and the south of England. Meanwhile, Carrigan combined his role as Scottish representative on the Supreme Council of the IRB with serving in "A" Company of the Glasgow Irish Volunteers. The strength of the Irish Volunteers in Britain was seriously affected by a split in the organisation in 1914, after the outbreak of war between Britain and Germany. In the journal article "Operations Abroad: The IRA in Britain, 1919-21," author Peter Hart states that Volunteer companies existed in several British cities during the Home Rule crisis but that "... they dwindled to near nothingness after the outbreak of the Great War." One book mentions that there were over 2,000 Volunteers in Scotland by October 1914, a gross exaggeration, and that after the split, Glasgow was reduced to a mere two companies, which drilled under the name of the "Celtic Miniature Rifle Club." Most of the men who enlisted in the pre-war Volunteers in Britain were no doubt "fair-weather" recruits, and so the idea that an Irish Volunteer "company" represented anything like the strength of a regular army company is nonsense. This can be seen from the estimates of Volunteers serving in Britain after the reestablishment of the Irish Volunteers/IRA in 1919. London's four companies could only field some 200 men, and Liverpool's peak strength only reached 150 in November 1920. Manchester/Salford, Birmingham, and Sheffield had less than 100 men each, Newcastle had slightly more, while Scotland's paper-strength of 21 companies in August 1920, in reality, only comprised 600 men. In January 1916, however, a mortal blow to the Volunteer movement in Britain was struck when conscription was introduced there. In response, the most fervent members of the Irish Volunteers crossed the Irish Sea, believing that if they had to fight for anyone they would rather fight for Ireland. Without the presence of such dynamic men, the Irish Volunteers in Britain collapsed, underscoring the organization's weakness by then.Back in Ireland, Irish Nationalist party leader John Redmond secured the allegiance of the bulk of the Volunteers when he pledged that the organisation would support Britain's war effort. Despite this, delegates from Liverpool, London and Glasgow were in attendance during the 1st Volunteer convention, held in Dublin's Abbey Theatre in October 1914. There, they and other militants in the Irish Volunteers, under Eoin MacNeil, reaffirmed that the Volunteers' objective was, in MacNeil's words, to "... save the Home Rule Act from disaster and avert Partition." Some 56 of these returning Wild Geese lived rough for three months in an old mill on Count Plunkett's farm at Larkhill, Kimmage, within Dublin City, where they manufactured home-made bombs, bayonets and pikes. There were also several women from Cummann na mBan who traveled to Ireland then, such as Margaret Skinnider, from Glasgow, who fought and was wounded at St. Stephen's Green. On Easter Monday, 1916, these "Kimmage Men," including Collins, were a major component of the headquarters detachment of the Army of the Irish Republic. With other Volunteers, they seized the GPO and fought with distinction alongside Patrick Pearse and James Connolly. WGT

OTHER RESOURCES

More About the Heroes of the Easter Rising

• Constance Markievicz: The Countess of Irish Freedom
• Countess Markievicz: The Polish Connection
• Maud Gonne: Ireland's Joan of Arc
• WGT Shop: Buy a Commemorative T-Shirt Recalling 1916's Heroes

The Irish War of Independence's Forgotten 10 (6-part series)

• Part 1: 'Just a Lad of 18 Summers'
• Part 2: 'An Example Has To Be Made'
• Part 3: 'Proud To Die for the Republic'
• Part 4: 'Down Into the Mire'
• Part 5: 'England Executes Prisoners of War'
• Part 6: 'Death With No Tremblings'
• Part 7: 'Fight On, Struggle On'
• Liam Lynch: Victim of the Irish Civil war
• The Anglo-Irish Treaty: Seed of 'The Troubles'
• Roots Web: The Easter Rising
• 1917-20: The road to partition
• Chronology of Pádraic Pearse

  Bibliography

   

• Boylan, Henry, A Dictionary of Irish Biography, St. Martins Press - 1988
• ****De Rosa, Peter, Rebels : The Irish Rising of 1916, Fawcett Columbine Books - 1990
• de Valera, Eamon, Foreword, The Irish Uprising 1916-1922, CBS Legacy Collection Book - 1966

• Hickey, D.J. and Doherty, J.E., A dictionary of Irish history since 1800, Barnes and Noble - 1981
• Wallace, Martin, Famous Irish lives, Appletree Press Ltd. - 1991

 

Easter Monday was one of the most critical days in the history of Ireland. On that day, Irish Volunteer units and the Irish Citizen Army, led by Patrick Pearse and James Connolly, began their famous Easter Rising, seizing the General Post Office and other key locations around Dublin. Commemorate the men and woman who took on the British Empire against all odds with one of our "Heroes of the Easter Rising" items .