The diaries that destroyed a campaign for clemency
His diaries sealed his fate: how homosexuality cost an Irish national hero his life.
On 3 August 1916, the Irish diplomat and human rights activist Sir Roger Casement was hanged in Pentonville Prison in London. A court had convicted him of high treason because during the First World War he had organised arms support in Germany for the Irish Easter Rising. In court, Casement argued in vain that the Treason Act of 1351 could not apply to an Irishman who had never regarded himself as a British subject. Casement had previously become world-famous as a British consul: his reports on the atrocities in Leopold II's Congo and in the Peruvian Amazon caused international outrage and earned him a knighthood in 1911.
A prominent campaign for clemency formed against the death sentence. Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw and William Butler Yeats publicly supported Casement, as did voices from the US Senate. To undermine this campaign, the British government deliberately circulated handwritten extracts from Casement's private diaries, which became known as the "Black Diaries". In them he described homosexual encounters in Africa and South America in detail. The texts were shown to King George V, the US ambassador and the Archbishop of Canterbury, among others. Their effect was devastating: prominent supporters withdrew their backing, and the plea for clemency was rejected.
For decades, Irish nationalists dismissed the diaries as a British forgery, because a homosexual patriot seemed unthinkable in their view of the world. In 1959 the British Home Office released the diaries for research, and forensic examinations confirmed their authenticity in 2002. In 1965 Casement's remains were returned to Ireland and honoured with a state funeral in Dublin, attended by President Éamon de Valera. He was only recognised as a queer icon later, because patriotism and homosexuality were long considered incompatible.