Word: casement
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...ghost of Roger Casement Is beating on the door...
...years since Roger Casement was hanged in England's Pentonville Prison and laid away in a grave of quicklime, successive British governments have been haunted by Yeats's doggerel...
Dublin-born Roger Casement, knighted in 1911 for services to His Majesty's consular service, had been caught after being put ashore on a wild stretch of the Irish coast by a German U-boat on Good Friday, 1916, when an Irish rebellion was in the making. What seemed to the British government a clear case of treason was to many an Irishman patriotism...
Many Englishmen, including G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy and the Webbs, pleaded in vain that Casement's life be spared. When he was hanged, a storm of anti-British feeling rose among the Irish in the U.S. just at a time when the British were eager to get the U.S. into World War I on their side. Something had to be done and quickly, the British government decided, to discredit the name of Roger Casement. Soon prominent figures on both sides of the Atlantic began to hear strange tales about Casement's scandalous "black diaries...
Apart from its inherent drama, the Casement story is compelling today because it raised political passions as strong as those later provoked by a Klaus Fuchs or an Alger Hiss. Bernard Shaw, Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton ringingly defended Casement. Others, including Poet Alfred Noyes, equally ringingly denounced him (this year, at 77, Poet Noyes published an emotional book reversing his earlier stand). It may have been a kind of Irish Faust who disappeared through the trap on the gallows of Pentonville Prison. Yet objective readers of Author MacColl's biography must agree that he was truly and justly...