Rebels

by Peter De Rosa

Genres: Action & Adventure; Historical Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

"A WORK OF GREAT DRAMATIC POWER climaxing in the final hundred pages where he writes a full, searing narrative of the patriot leaders' last days . . . It's powerful stuff."
--The Sunday Press (Ireland)

On Easter Monday of 1916, a thousand Irish men and women, armed with pikes and rifles, took over the center of Dublin and proclaimed a republic. It was a rash, doomed, symbolic uprising, and the rebel leaders knew it. Crack British troops killed and wounded hundreds of the rebels in the week of fighting, and British artillery shells left Dublin's city center in ruins.

But the Rising of 1916 was not in vain. The short-lived insurrection and the subsequent executions of sixteen rebel leaders galvanized the Irish people. The overthrow of seven centuries of British rule in Ireland began on Easter Monday, 1916.

In Rebels, Peter de Rosa, author of the bestselling Vicars of Christ, tells the story of the 1916 Rising in all its terror and beauty. With the dramatic flair of a novelist and the scrupulous accuracy of a professional historian, de Rosa brings to life the people, passions, politics, and repercussions of this historic event.

Release date: October 14, 2009

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Print pages: 560

Sample

On Sunday 12 July 1914, on a morning heavy with a golden-ochre mist, the Gladiator, a tug from Hamburg, headed for the Roetigen Lightship, at the mouth of the River Scheldt. On the bridge, the skipper, a burly, bearded and unblinking German, glanced at his watch. Ten o’clock. In a couple of hours, two yachts should arrive and rid him of his accursed cargo.
 
With Dover, England, twenty-five miles to the west, the tug hove to off the Belgian coast, using the mist to keep out of sight as it rocked in a gentle North Sea swell. At the rail stood an anxious young Irishman. His high forehead half-hidden by a tweed bucket-type hat, he kept peering ahead and telling the crew, mainly through gestures, that there would be no delay.
 
Minute succeeded minute and midday came. Neither of the expected yachts had engines; maybe they were far away, becalmed on that uncannily still sea. The Irishman, Darrell Figgis, was beginning to peck at his chiselled chestnut beard. From time to time, he smiled soothingly at the skipper.
 
In the afternoon, the clouds cleared and the mist turned silver. Figgis’s apprehension grew. So far fortune had favoured him. The day before on the Elbe, he had even managed to bribe the pilotcum-customs officer with cigars and a few big English notes to turn a blind eye to what was in the hold. Surely things were not going to turn sour now.
 
‘Where,’ Figgis muttered to himself, ‘are those bloody yachts?”
 
 
In Belfast, in the north of Ireland, Protestants were on the streets for the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne. On 12 July in 1690, King Billy, William III, the Sovereign imported from Holland, had defeated the Catholic King James II. That famous victory had guaranteed the supremacy of Orange over Green in Ulster.
 
The Twelfth was, by custom, the day when Protestants throughout the province remembered their heritage. It was a colourful day of drum-banging and fifing, of sticks twirled and tossed, of bright Orange Lodge banners held aloft, of bowler-hatted Lodge members with rolled-umbrellas and decorated sashes marching proudly through streets draped in Union Jacks and flags of the Red Hand of Ulster.
 
But for three years Protestant supremacy had been under threat. The British government was intent on giving Ireland, the whole of Ireland, Home Rule. If that happened, Dublin, by sheer force of numbers, would have the whip-hand. And Dublin was dominated by a Catholic hierarchy. That, Ulster Protestants thought, would demolish their three-centuries-old tradition. But if it was to be war, they were armed, they were ready.
 
This was why sixty-year-old Sir Edward Carson, the most brilliant and best-paid lawyer of the day, a healthy hypochondriac, lean, with sleek black hair and Punch-like profile, was in Belfast. He had achieved fame through cases that made legal history. Most renowned was his cross-questioning of Oscar Wilde, his contemporary at Trinity College, the ancient university of Dublin. At first Wilde had run rings round him; it led him to underestimate his foe. Then Carson enquired, drily, whether Wilde had kissed a servant boy at Oxford. ‘Oh, dear no,’ Wilde had replied, ‘he was, unfortunately, extremely ugly.’ After a telling pause that had the whole courtroom on the edge of their seats, Carson demanded to know why Wilde had said that. Why? Why? Why? Was not the implication that had he been handsome, Wilde would have wanted to kiss him? That one point pressed ruthlessly home again and again turned the trial and led ultimately to Wilde’s disgrace and imprisonment.
 
The same formidable Carson now wanted to demolish something far more threatening than Oscar Wilde. In the dock now was Rome Rule in Ulster. As an Irishman, he could not bear the thought of any division of his country; and Home Rule would certainly dismember it in a way that, to Protestant loyalists like himself, was intolerable.
 
Next to Carson stood James Craig, his junior by seventeen years, the big bucolic-looking MP for East Down. With a pugilist’s nose and pendulous ears, Craig was first and foremost an Ulsterman, then British, but in no way Irish.
 
On this sombre Sunday 12 July 1914, rifles that had been smuggled into Larne on the east coast of Ulster in a marvellous gun-running exploit ten weeks earlier were on show for the first time, on the shoulders of thousands of marching Ulster Volunteers.
 
The celebration was climaxed by Carson’s speech.
 
‘I see no hopes of peace,’ he roared, in a southern brogue that contrasted with the northern accents around him.
 
No one doubted that tragedy was soon to burst on their quiet, prosperous community. No simple boundaries could be drawn. In the other three provinces of Munster, Leinster and Connaught, there were as many Unionists as in Ulster, though they were scattered over a large area. In Ulster, Home Rulers made up 40 per cent of the population; in five of the nine counties they were in the majority.
 
Civil war was bound to be long and bloody.
 
Carson clenched his fist and thrust it out like a lance. ‘I see nothing at present but darkness and shadows.’
 
When the fiery address was over, the great civilian army, waving Union Jacks and lustily singing ‘God Save the King’, broke up and went sadly to their homes.
 
 
By the Roetigen Lightship, it was 5 in the evening, with a swirling mist returning, when, to Figgis’s relief, a battered black-hulled yacht appeared from the west. On its side it bore the name, Kelpie. From its deck, a strong Irish voice called out over the eerie silence of the sea, ‘Is that the boat with the rifles for the Irish Volunteers?’
 
‘Jesus Christ!’ Figgis hissed. He called back warningly, in bad Gaelic, that it was.
 
The skipper of the Gladiator muttered, ‘You are speaking the Mexican, ja?’
 
Figgis nodded. It was imperative for the German at least to pretend that the cargo they were about to transfer to the yachts was destined for a rebellion in Central America.
 
For a couple of hours, Conor O’Brien, a Dublin journalist whose chief hobby after sailing was climbing mountains in his bare feet, directed his small crew with unflagging energy. Great bundles wrapped in canvas and heavy wooden boxes were lowered from the tug. All the while O’Brien hummed rebel songs, happy in the knowledge that soon the Irish Volunteers who wanted Home Rule would start to match the Ulster Volunteers in weaponry.
 
At 7 o’clock, as the Kelpie was casting off, a second shape loomed out of the fog, a smart white yacht with white sails. The 28-ton, 49-foot ketch bore the legend, Asgard, an old Norse word meaning, ‘Home of the Gods’. Its skipper was Erskine Childers, aged forty-four, Irish-born, trim and handsome. A former clerk of the House of Commons in London, he had made a name for himself in 1903 with his brilliant sea-novel, The Riddle of the Sands. His crew consisted of twenty-nine-year-old Gordon Shephard, a British airman, two Donegal fishermen, and two women.
 
Mary Spring-Rice was in her early thirties. She had a sparkling personality and a waspish nose. Her father was an Anglo-Irish peer and her cousin the British Ambassador in Washington.
 
The second woman was Childers’s wife Molly, an American beauty with thick hair pinned in a bun and soft languid eyes. As a child, she had fractured both hips; she had, as a result, lain for twelve years on her back and walking was never easy. It was love at first sight when Childers met Mary Alden Osgood, whose family went back to the Mayflower, at a party in her home-town of Boston. That was ten years before and the Asgard had been her parents’ wedding gift. Molly had insisted on coming on this trip, leaving their sons, Erskine aged eight and Robert aged three, in the care of her husband’s maiden aunts.
 
“Sorry,’ Figgis called down to Childers, ‘the Kelpie has left you 900 rifles and 29,000 rounds.’
 
The Gladiator’s crew jabbered unceasingly as they handed the cargo down to the Asgard. The Donegal fishermen lowered it through the main hatch. It was a sultry night. Soon their muscles ached and sweat poured off them.
 
Shephard and Mary Spring-Rice stored bundles of twenty rifles in the saloon with the barrels towards the centre. The men had chopped up the bunks to increase storage space but the rifles were soon at table-level. The cabins were next filled, then the passage way, then the foot of the companion hatch. Childers had the rifles taken out of the canvas and the straw wrapping removed so they could be tucked away in drawers and cupboards. Soon everyone was coated with thick black grease.