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Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion
Now with a new preface for the centenary of the Easter Rising, a compelling interpretation of the rebellion that launched Ireland into a new world. Before Easter 1916 Dublin had been a city much like any other British city, comparable to Bristol or Liverpool and part of a complex, deep-rooted British world. Many of Dublin's inhabitants wanted to weaken or terminate London's rule but there remained a vast and conflicting range of visions of that future: far more immediate was the unfolding disaster of the First World War that had put 'home rule' issues on ice for the duration. The devastating events of that Easter changed everything. Both the rising itself and-even more significantly-the ferocious British response ended any sense at all that Dublin could be anything other than the capital of an independent country, as an entire nation turned away in revulsion from the British artillery and executions. As we approach the 90th anniversary of the rebellion it is time for a new account of what really happened over those fateful few days. What did the rebels actually hope to achieve? What did the British think they were doing? And how were the events really interpreted by ordinary people across Ireland? Vivid, authoritative and gripping, Easter 1916 is a major work.
464 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2005
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645 people want to read
About the author
Charles Townshend
42 books16 followersCharles Townshend FBA (born 1945) is a British historian with particular expertise on the historic role of British imperialism in Ireland and Palestine.
Townshend is currently Professor of International History at Keele University. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2008.
Townshend is currently Professor of International History at Keele University. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2008.
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October 21, 2007http://nhw.livejournal.com/601659.html[return][return]I guess most people reading this will at least be aware of what I was brought up to call the Easter Rising (Townshend prefers "rebellion", for reasons which are well argued), most memorably portrayed in the opening section of Neil Jordan's film about Michael Collins (where you may remember that Dev has mysteriously been transported to the GPO from the other side of the river, and the building appears to face south rather than east). A few hundred rebels seized control of central Dublin on Easter Monday, 1916, and eventually were shelled out by the British as they retook the city; while most of the leaders were shot by firing squad, the survivors became the nucleus of the political movement that fought for and then ruled the independent Irish state that emerged in 1921. It is generally regarded as one of the turning points in Irish history; and while Townshend tries to cast some doubt on that assessment, he doesn't really succeed, carried away as he is by the drama of the topic. There's lots of detail here, and some very interesting analysis as well.[return][return]The most extraordinary finding for me was the true extent of British repression in the run-up to 1916: specifically, that there was so little of it. MI5 employed 1453 people as postal censors in England, Scotland and Wales by the end of 1915. In Ireland there were precisely ten people doing the job, five in Belfast and five in Dublin. Of course, the Post Office, as it turns out, was pretty heavily infiltrated by militant nationalists anyway, so it might not have done any good; but they simply were not trying. (The fact that the GPO was the headquarters at Easter 1916 is not especially relevant here.) The government had no intelligence capability - or rather, there were a number of intelligence-gathering agencies, but they don't seem to have been reporting to anyone, and no effort appears to have been made to find out who exactly was in control of the various armed militias parading around the place, let alone what their political agenda and concrete plans might be. Even the Pope had been told that an Easter rebellion was planned, but the British were caught completely by surprise. The authorities had given up trying to enforce even the limited extra wartime repressive measures offered by the Defence of the Realm Act within six months of the war breaking out. No wonder that they were caught napping (or, to be more accurate, out at the races) when the rebellion began on Easter Monday. Townshend feels that the liberal character of British legal culture, even in its weaker Irish reflection, was too heavily engrained; I'm inclined to just put it down to sheer incompetence.[return][return]The legal theme continues through and after the rebellion. The Lord Lieutenant, desperately swigging brandy (like his first cousin Winston Churchill), declared martial law on the Monday, without any clear idea of what this would mean. This was then the justification for the most memorable and transformational episode of the entire affair - the execution in Dublin after secret court-martial of 14 of the rebels, including almost all the leadership. While this was by far the most drastic measure taken by the British state to defend itself, there were others, combining over-zealous repression with legal tail-spin: the internment without trial, on dubious grounds, of 1600 Irish prisoners (over a thousand of whom were then released because, essentially, there was no evidence against them); the authorities' refusal to publish the official records of the courts-martial at which prisoners had been condemned to death; the cabinet's repeated discussions of Roger Casement's pending execution - Townshend quotes Roy Jenkins, "There can be few other examples of a Cabinet devoting large parts of four separate meetings to considering an individual sentence - and then arriving at the wrong decision." (Townshend then notes that Jenkins was wrong - the Cabinet discussed the matter at least five times.)[return][return]Turning to the other side of the story, I also found very impressive Townshend's reconstruction, practically from the historiographical equivalent of trace fossils, of why Easter 1916 was planned as it was. Since all the people who actually knew what was going on had been executed within a few days of the end of the rebellion, and almost all the documentation, if it ever existed, had been lost, this was not an easy task. But he does a good job - significantly, many of the survivors among the rebels had been (or at least later claimed to have been) proponents of the guerilla warfare model that indeed was successful between 1919 and 1921, rather than the urban seizure which Pearse, fascinated as he was by Robert Emmett's 1803 adventure, had fixated on early in his career. Emmett, of course, didn't even manage to lead his rebels to the end of Thomas Street; but for Pearse, and for Joseph Mary Plunkett, who actually wrote the plan for 1916 (such as it was), that was hardly the point. William Irwin Thompson's The Imagination of an Insurrection argues that the entire Rising makes sense considered as a work of heroic literature to waken the country rather than as a military act, and if considered in those terms it must be considered a success. There is a certain desperate poetry in the only document of Plunkett's relating to the Rising that does survive, a notebook found lying in the street after it was all over, which ends with the scribbled notes:[return][return]"Food to Arnotts[return]"Order to remain all posts unless surrounded[return]"Barricades in front[return]"Henry St[return]"Food"[return][return]He's also very good on the actual events leading up to and surrounding the outbreak of the rebellion. There had been a scare from a leaked Dublin Castle document apparently planning for repressive measures to be taken in the event of introducing conscription. This led to the ramping up of tension and expectation, and seemed to offer an excuse to start the rebellion on Easter Sunday. Eoin MacNeill, of course, countermanded the orders; but as things turned out, he was not fully in control, and the rebellion went ahead, though on a smaller scale, on Easter Monday instead. A strength of the book is his description of what happened outside Dublin - more than is usually recounted, including relatively successful operations in Louth and Meath, and a dignified surrender with no lives (or even weapons) lost in Cork, for which both the British forces and the Cork rebels were duly chastised by their colleagues.[return][return]One of Townshend's more irritating habits is to describe the various military tactics pursued by the 1916 rebels, point out why they were flawed on any serious military analysis, and then wonder aloud why the rebels took this course. OK, so some decisions were indeed blindingly stupid - why the GPO, for heaven's sake (whatever Peter Berresford Ellis may say), rather than Dublin Castle, or the actual phone exchanges in Crown Alley and Store Street? Why St Stephen's Green, surrounded by tall buildings, rather than the citadel of Trinity College? Above all, why was no provision made for, well, provisions, so that by the end of the week the surviving rebels surrendered as much due to starvation as due to military defeat? But the answer, to me anyway, is pretty obvious: military victory was not, in fact, their chief goal. They did have a vague hope that they might hold out until the Germans came to rescue them, but no real evidence for this - indeed, Roger Casement was actually arrested on his way to tell the leadership explicitly that no German help would be forthcoming. (It's not entirely clear why the socialist radical James Connolly chose to unite his Irish Citizens Army with the larger nationalist - but not socialist group. He obviously wanted an armed revolution himself; did he imagine that a) the rebellion would succeed, and b) he would gain control of a post-revolutionary government? But of course he was also deluded enough to believe that the capitalists would not use heavy artillery against commercial property.)[return][return]Moving back a bit, I was very interested in the argument in an early chapter that Redmond and the Irish Party had irretrievably lost their credibility as early as 1915. Redmond, as leader of the Irish Nationalists, had taken a huge gamble by committing them to the service of the British during the first world war. He was comprehensively screwed over by two factors. First, the British army (Lord Kitchener in particular) decided not to incorporate the existing Irish Nationalist paramilitary structures into the army, with symbols and regimental identity etc, as was done for the Ulster Volunteers. The Commander of the 10th Division (in which my own grandfather fought) was "described in the divisional history as 'an Irishman without politics', but of course this meant he was a Protestant and an unthinking, not to say pig-headed conservative." Second, the war lasted a lot longer than people expected, which meant that Home Rule was now put off for far longer than the few months originally anticipated and that Redmond's main political role collapsed into being a British recruiting sergeant. Meanwhile the war was not going well. The only news most people were getting from the Western front was the telegram telling them their sons were dead. And while wages were frozen but prices rising all over the United Kingdom, it was in Ireland that wages were lowest and fewest jobs were created on foot of the war effort. In November 1915, Redmond was condemned in unprecedented terms by a Catholic bishop, who declared of the potential Irish recruits heading to America to escape any potential conscription, "Their blood is not stirred by memories of Kossovo, and they have no burning desire to die for Serbia."[return][return]It's an interesting and even slightly attractive argument, which goes completely against the orthodoxy that British repression following Easter 1916 turned Sinn Fein into a more credible political force than the tired Redmondites, but that up until then the older political party's position might have been salvageable. Rather to my surprise, after outlining his (to me) revolutionary and innovative analysis of the 1914-16 period, Townshend appears to retreat back into that orthodoxy in later chapters dealing with the 1916-18 period, which made me wonder if he really believed his own argument. He returns to it to speculate that, had there been no rebellion, there would have been a fatal crisis in 1918 anyway over conscription, leading to a political victory for more extreme nationalist forces, as Alvin Jackson seems to suggest in one of those alternate history books. Hmm.[return][return]A few other historiographical points. Townshend clearly sees himself as in the "revisionist" camp of Irish history, and will no doubt have been duly delighted by the republican rants against his book that I mentioned earlier. It's all a load of nonsense. Anyone interested in Irish history, of whatever political views, should be grateful to him for pulling this material together and in particular for the wealth of detail about the precise military facts of what happened. Havig said that, I was a bit unsatisfied on a couple of historical points. I was left unclear as to why Townshend believes that Bulmer Hobson was written out of the history of the Rising, in that he doesn't give examples of earlier accounts which omit or minimise him, and my own reading has tended to be from the more recent end of things anyway which counts him in. Likewise I was a little baffled by his defensiveness of the heads of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, W.V. Harrel and Sir John Ross of Bladensburgh (whose botanical correspondence I once riffled through, in a different life), who on any reasonable reading of the facts bore at least some responsibility for the Bachelor's Walk shootings in July 1914.[return][return]Three other peculiar little things noted here for completeness. Sean T. O'Kelly believed he had been appointed "Civil Administrator of the Government of the Republic". Almost thirty years later, he was elected President of the real thing. De Valera's surrender in Jacob's biscuit factory - Owen Dudley Edwards suggested that Dev was in the end over-ruled by his officers, but Townshend has him in control right the way through. And he quotes from an account of the defence of Trinity College, published anonymously, though I happen to know that the author was the TCD physicist John Joly.[return][return]Anyway, an excellent book. Though I would like to know more about the revolutionary implications of the bicycle.
December 1, 2013
The approach of the Centenary of 1916 should ensure a fresh batch of writings on the Rising, but I doubt few will come close to being as thoroughly well-researched as Townsend's account. Townsend's 1916 is a definitive, well-documented and impartial account of the rising which cuts through the myth to deliver a factual telling of the events of Easter week 1916, while avoiding any temptation towards revisionism.
The book deals extensively with the events that led to the rising - the radicalization of Irish Nationalism in response to the emergence of militant Ulster Unionism to oppose Home Rule, and the formation and the split of the Irish volunteer movement. The epilogue, which deals with the place of the rising in history, is engrossing, confronting the role the Rising may have played in cementing the future partition of the Island and examining the question as to whether, had the rising not occurred in 1916, would a greater armed conflict with the Crown have later emerged, most likely in response to conscription. Even at this stage Townsend backs off any tendency to wander down the road of revisionism.
What the book does lack though is any passion in bringing to life the tragedy, heroism, drama and human sides to the story of the rising. The dramatic and even comical Declaration of Independence outside the GPO by Pearse; the Wagnerian scenes of the GPO and Central Dublin ablaze; the high drama of Sir Roger Casement's capture coming ashore from a German vessel and his swift dispatch to London to face trial for high treason; the heroism of O'Rahilly's breakout dash up Moore Street to be cut down in a hail of bullets; the callous and cold-blooded murder of Sheehy-Skeffington by an insane British officer in Portobello barracks; the firefight at Mount Street bridge when a handful of snipers inflicted heavy casualties on troops moving into Dublin from Kingstown; the marriage of Joe Plunkett to Grace Gifford in his prison cell hours before his execution- all these events breathed vivid life into my schoolboy reading of the rising but are barely afforded a mention in Townsend's book.
Similarly, none of the rich cast of characters are explored in any dept - we learn nothing of the backgrounds, motives or personalities of the central cast of characters. Thus the flawed and romantic Pearse, the idealistic Connolly, the brilliant and tragic Plunkett, the driven and tireless McDermott, the complex and deep Casement fail to light up the pages. The result is a bland, plodding read which skips over key dramatic events and fails to bring to life a fascinating cast of characters.
Whilst Townsend's account will be difficult to surpass as the definitive account, one cannot feel somewhat unfulfilled by a missed opportunity to bring life and drama to the telling without compromising the integrity of the factual recounting of this pivotal event in 20th Century Irish History.
The book deals extensively with the events that led to the rising - the radicalization of Irish Nationalism in response to the emergence of militant Ulster Unionism to oppose Home Rule, and the formation and the split of the Irish volunteer movement. The epilogue, which deals with the place of the rising in history, is engrossing, confronting the role the Rising may have played in cementing the future partition of the Island and examining the question as to whether, had the rising not occurred in 1916, would a greater armed conflict with the Crown have later emerged, most likely in response to conscription. Even at this stage Townsend backs off any tendency to wander down the road of revisionism.
What the book does lack though is any passion in bringing to life the tragedy, heroism, drama and human sides to the story of the rising. The dramatic and even comical Declaration of Independence outside the GPO by Pearse; the Wagnerian scenes of the GPO and Central Dublin ablaze; the high drama of Sir Roger Casement's capture coming ashore from a German vessel and his swift dispatch to London to face trial for high treason; the heroism of O'Rahilly's breakout dash up Moore Street to be cut down in a hail of bullets; the callous and cold-blooded murder of Sheehy-Skeffington by an insane British officer in Portobello barracks; the firefight at Mount Street bridge when a handful of snipers inflicted heavy casualties on troops moving into Dublin from Kingstown; the marriage of Joe Plunkett to Grace Gifford in his prison cell hours before his execution- all these events breathed vivid life into my schoolboy reading of the rising but are barely afforded a mention in Townsend's book.
Similarly, none of the rich cast of characters are explored in any dept - we learn nothing of the backgrounds, motives or personalities of the central cast of characters. Thus the flawed and romantic Pearse, the idealistic Connolly, the brilliant and tragic Plunkett, the driven and tireless McDermott, the complex and deep Casement fail to light up the pages. The result is a bland, plodding read which skips over key dramatic events and fails to bring to life a fascinating cast of characters.
Whilst Townsend's account will be difficult to surpass as the definitive account, one cannot feel somewhat unfulfilled by a missed opportunity to bring life and drama to the telling without compromising the integrity of the factual recounting of this pivotal event in 20th Century Irish History.
June 26, 2023
The 1916 Easter Rising is probably the most important event in recent Irish history, and having learned about it in school, read many articles about it, especially during the 100yr commemoration and done the tours of Kilmainham Gaol, I was keen to finally pick up a book on the topic. The book starts off well, explaining the key players and organizations involved (Volunteers, IRB & ICA), which is necessary if you were to understand the hotchpotch collection of rebels who showed up on the day. The logistical problems facing the rebels are also explained, the difficulty in procuring arms, the inexperienced commanders and issues around drilling and parading are well detailed.
A key failing of the Rising was the split in the Volunteers, between John Redmond and Eoin MacNeill and then further division and leadership dispute between Pearse and his followers and MacNeill significantly hindered the forces at Pearse’s disposal when the Rising was proclaimed. The events of the Rising are well documented so, credit to the author for the research here, an interesting point was the critical analysis of the military plan drawn up by the leadership, which shows that the position taken up were very weak and almost very easy to surround.
It was as the author started to wind down the battle that the book becomes a dull account of events after the Rising. The executions of the leaders are barely mentioned, while the murder of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, by a British officer is very much elaborated. The execution of the leaders galvanized popular feeling to sympathy for them and anger towards the administration, the author goes on a very long-winded account to describe this and the grey area of martial law that Ireland found itself in immediately after the Rising.
It is this rather long conclusion which takes away from was to begin with an exciting and well researched book. The author spends almost a third of the book winding it down, resulting in a long drawn our boring finish.
A 3 star rating as I’m sure there are better accounts on the book market.
A key failing of the Rising was the split in the Volunteers, between John Redmond and Eoin MacNeill and then further division and leadership dispute between Pearse and his followers and MacNeill significantly hindered the forces at Pearse’s disposal when the Rising was proclaimed. The events of the Rising are well documented so, credit to the author for the research here, an interesting point was the critical analysis of the military plan drawn up by the leadership, which shows that the position taken up were very weak and almost very easy to surround.
It was as the author started to wind down the battle that the book becomes a dull account of events after the Rising. The executions of the leaders are barely mentioned, while the murder of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, by a British officer is very much elaborated. The execution of the leaders galvanized popular feeling to sympathy for them and anger towards the administration, the author goes on a very long-winded account to describe this and the grey area of martial law that Ireland found itself in immediately after the Rising.
It is this rather long conclusion which takes away from was to begin with an exciting and well researched book. The author spends almost a third of the book winding it down, resulting in a long drawn our boring finish.
A 3 star rating as I’m sure there are better accounts on the book market.
May 3, 2023
I have a genuine interest in the subject matter but GOOD LORD I could not wait for this to end. It reminds me of a book I once read on Byron's love life that managed to somehow put me into a coma. Taking thoroughly fascinating subjects and rendering them mind-destroyingly dull is a niche art form.
October 11, 2018
An objective account of this seminal period in Irish history: the Irish Rebellion on Easter Monday of 1916 and Irish independence from British imperialist rule.
July 20, 2025
6.5/10 very poignant ending and thought provoking but hard to understand, with many historical figures, political organizations, and events that the author expected u to be familiar with. Also the language was very flowery and used words that I could not understand.
March 29, 2018
Few events in modern Irish history are as pivotal as the “Easter Rising”, the dramatic seizure of the General Post Office and other parts of Dublin that marked the declaration of the Irish Republic. Yet for decades the event has never received the thorough examination it deserves, due in part, as Charles Townshend observes in his preface to this fine book, to the long-standing reticence to release the oral histories of the event contained within the archives of the Bureau of Military History. Their release in 2003 provides the best opportunity yet to study the uprising, and Townshend has risen to the challenge by providing a penetrating examination of the origins and the impact of the Rising.
Townshend traces the origins of the Rising to the development and definition of Irish identity in the late nineteenth century. Here the breadth of his examination is immediately apparent, as he moves beyond the political to study the role that the cultural movement known as the Celtic rising played in inspiring Irish nationalists to challenge British rule. A key figure bridging between the cultural and the political was Patrick Pearse, the president of the provisional republic claimed in the aftermath of the seizure of the General Post Office. By delving into Pearse’s past as a nationalist consumed with freeing Ireland not only from British political domination but its cultural domination as well, he illustrates just how important the cultural component was in inspiring the nationalists and driving them towards action.
Yet Irish politics in those years was dominated not by nationalism but the issue of Home Rule. Here Townshend focuses on the reaction to the Home Rule measure in Ireland, which catalyzed Unionist resistance in the north to the devolution of Irish government. The formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force, in turn, inspired southern nationalists to form their own armed group, the Irish Volunteers, a movement quickly subsumed by the Irish Parliamentary Party into their organization. Yet the outbreak of the First World War and the decision by Irish parliamentary leader John Redmond to support the war split the Irish Volunteers and came to undermine his standing.
The nationalist Irish Volunteers that broke away from main group were themselves divided over the next step, however. As they gained in standing with the growing unpopularity of Redmond’s decision, Pearse and other members sought to take advantage of Britain’s difficulty to throw off her rule of Ireland. Given the attitudes of the Volunteer leadership, such planning had to take place in secrecy, and one of the great strengths of this book is Townshend’s laudable effort to wade into the confused jumble of half-hidden events to detail the evolution of the Rising. What was initially envisioned as a nationwide rebellion quickly became a Dublin-centric event that would take advantage of a planned Easter Sunday mobilization to strike against British rule. The last-minute efforts by the nationalist Volunteer leadership to head off the rebellion, though, resulted in a confused and only partial assemblage of Volunteers on the following day.
The three chapters on the Rising itself form the heart of Townshend’s book, and they recount an event characterized by confusion on both sides. The poor preparations and questionable decisions by the rebels were equaled only by those of the British authorities, whose overreaction in the aftermath of the rebels’ inevitable defeat turned them from extremists into heroes. Townshend concludes the book by looking at the belated efforts by the British in the aftermath of the Rising to craft a settlement in response to the growing nationalist challenge to their control over Ireland – a challenge that in the end they failed to avert.
With its clear prose and painstaking reconstruction of the tangled events of the Easter Rising, Townshend’s book is a masterpiece of the historical craft. The thorough research and judicious analysis contained within its pages is unlikely to be bettered as a guide to the complicated and confused developments that led to this dramatic and exciting event. For anyone seeking a study that will help them understand the Easter Rising, its background, and its consequences, this is the one to read.
Townshend traces the origins of the Rising to the development and definition of Irish identity in the late nineteenth century. Here the breadth of his examination is immediately apparent, as he moves beyond the political to study the role that the cultural movement known as the Celtic rising played in inspiring Irish nationalists to challenge British rule. A key figure bridging between the cultural and the political was Patrick Pearse, the president of the provisional republic claimed in the aftermath of the seizure of the General Post Office. By delving into Pearse’s past as a nationalist consumed with freeing Ireland not only from British political domination but its cultural domination as well, he illustrates just how important the cultural component was in inspiring the nationalists and driving them towards action.
Yet Irish politics in those years was dominated not by nationalism but the issue of Home Rule. Here Townshend focuses on the reaction to the Home Rule measure in Ireland, which catalyzed Unionist resistance in the north to the devolution of Irish government. The formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force, in turn, inspired southern nationalists to form their own armed group, the Irish Volunteers, a movement quickly subsumed by the Irish Parliamentary Party into their organization. Yet the outbreak of the First World War and the decision by Irish parliamentary leader John Redmond to support the war split the Irish Volunteers and came to undermine his standing.
The nationalist Irish Volunteers that broke away from main group were themselves divided over the next step, however. As they gained in standing with the growing unpopularity of Redmond’s decision, Pearse and other members sought to take advantage of Britain’s difficulty to throw off her rule of Ireland. Given the attitudes of the Volunteer leadership, such planning had to take place in secrecy, and one of the great strengths of this book is Townshend’s laudable effort to wade into the confused jumble of half-hidden events to detail the evolution of the Rising. What was initially envisioned as a nationwide rebellion quickly became a Dublin-centric event that would take advantage of a planned Easter Sunday mobilization to strike against British rule. The last-minute efforts by the nationalist Volunteer leadership to head off the rebellion, though, resulted in a confused and only partial assemblage of Volunteers on the following day.
The three chapters on the Rising itself form the heart of Townshend’s book, and they recount an event characterized by confusion on both sides. The poor preparations and questionable decisions by the rebels were equaled only by those of the British authorities, whose overreaction in the aftermath of the rebels’ inevitable defeat turned them from extremists into heroes. Townshend concludes the book by looking at the belated efforts by the British in the aftermath of the Rising to craft a settlement in response to the growing nationalist challenge to their control over Ireland – a challenge that in the end they failed to avert.
With its clear prose and painstaking reconstruction of the tangled events of the Easter Rising, Townshend’s book is a masterpiece of the historical craft. The thorough research and judicious analysis contained within its pages is unlikely to be bettered as a guide to the complicated and confused developments that led to this dramatic and exciting event. For anyone seeking a study that will help them understand the Easter Rising, its background, and its consequences, this is the one to read.
April 4, 2010
The first two chapters of this history of the Easter uprising offer a background to the event, and introduce so many names and characters it’s quite head-spinning. I wanted one of those lists you get in Tolstoy novels to keep everyone straight. However once we’ve moved onto the rebellion itself, despite the chaos on the ground (neither the plans for the Irish or the British have survived to help any twenty-first century historian, indeed the British may not even have had a written plan) then it becomes a really sharp piece of narrative history. The confusion and madness of this early example of guerrilla warfare is captured with incredible skill.
Unfortunately the rest of the book feels somewhat dry in comparison. Townshend shows how the British managed to win the battle but lose the peace, but he doesn’t inject much life into it. All the post Easter 1916 moves feel flat on the page and almost perfunctory to the narrative. Obviously it’s hard to make discussions in dusty rooms in Westminster seem as vivid as street warfare, but it does have the effect of making the last sixty odd pages of this book a chore rather than a pleasure.
My Great Grandfather was injured in Dublin around the time Easter Uprising. We suspect it was neurological injury, but whether he was injured in the battle or merely fell off a ladder we don’t know. Unfortunately for the amateur historians within the family, he was in the British army.
One of the consequences of being on the British side of the “Irish Thermopylae” is that it’s the winning side, but the wrong side. Particularly as it took place at the same time as the Somme, the citations, medals and attention of historians has gone in other directions.
Unfortunately the rest of the book feels somewhat dry in comparison. Townshend shows how the British managed to win the battle but lose the peace, but he doesn’t inject much life into it. All the post Easter 1916 moves feel flat on the page and almost perfunctory to the narrative. Obviously it’s hard to make discussions in dusty rooms in Westminster seem as vivid as street warfare, but it does have the effect of making the last sixty odd pages of this book a chore rather than a pleasure.
My Great Grandfather was injured in Dublin around the time Easter Uprising. We suspect it was neurological injury, but whether he was injured in the battle or merely fell off a ladder we don’t know. Unfortunately for the amateur historians within the family, he was in the British army.
One of the consequences of being on the British side of the “Irish Thermopylae” is that it’s the winning side, but the wrong side. Particularly as it took place at the same time as the Somme, the citations, medals and attention of historians has gone in other directions.
August 5, 2015
The amount of work that went into this book was considerable and may have been even more daunting in light of the fact that the events of Easter 1916 seem to have fallen in and out of favor among those involved and those looking back. Coming into this with a limited background in Irish history, I appreciated the early chapters in particular as they provided important background and helped clarify somewhat the origins of the different individuals and groups involved or not involved. The middle chapters which dealt more with specific goings on during the rebellion and in the days immediately preceding it were slower going. At times this required rereading, and I'm not sure if this was due to my own lack of background or the events themselves. I recall finding such detailed analysis of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor much more interesting and easier to read in other history texts, so it may simply be an issue of familiarity. The later chapters dealing with the aftermath and fallout were easiest to read, and I am left with a better understanding of the various sources of ambivalence facing next year's 100th anniversary.
September 26, 2025
A fine history of 1916 in Ireland - I really do need to review this which means I may have to look at it again - although 1916 was, for me and my schoolmates ancient history when we were at school in Ireland in the 1970's (though I can remember being transfixed watching the elderly, nearly blind, but ramrod straight Eamon de Valera when he visited my school. It was like looking at a hero out of legend). But it was still something real both as something half hated and half loved - hated because the Irish state that emerged was in so many ways a disappointment, loved because idealism and self sacrifice for a doomed cause is always fatally attractive to the young and stupid.
I wrote that some time ago and haven't got round to reading this fine history again - and it is fine and I say that as someone who grew up reading the post 1916 fiftieth anniversary panegyrics. This good history but the history of Ireland is always too entwined with the present to be really past. There is much still to learn or perspectives to be reclaimed for any book to be definitive.
I wrote that some time ago and haven't got round to reading this fine history again - and it is fine and I say that as someone who grew up reading the post 1916 fiftieth anniversary panegyrics. This good history but the history of Ireland is always too entwined with the present to be really past. There is much still to learn or perspectives to be reclaimed for any book to be definitive.
October 29, 2008
Wow, I actually understand that whole Catholic - Protestant thing now. I had no idea that Ireland was so oppressed by the English for CENTURIES. While I was reading about the establishment of English schools and taking Irish children away from their families in an attempt to destroy language, culture and religion, I could not help but think of what happened to the Native folks of this country.
January 22, 2016
Not a bad book about the events lead up to, during and after the Easter rising in 1916 in Dublin. Some of the people that were supposed to have been the heroes do not come out so well and some of the lesser characters shine in the history telling.
June 5, 2025
"The Irish Volunteer organization has shewn itself to be disloyal and seditious, and revolutionary if the means and opportunity were at hand."
Major Ivor Price, RIC (Retd) and British Army Intelligence
This is a thoughtful, balanced and compelling narrative history of the Easter Rising - no mean feat considering the mythical status of those brief days, and the men involved, in Ireland’s national story. Charles Townshend places the Rising in context and humanises the men and women involved (and their opponents). He also manages to demonstrate the military futility (indeed, incompetence) of the Rising while simultaneously maintaining its significance in Ireland’s march to independent statehood in the early 20th Century.
Regarding the context, he pithily summarises it as the militarisation of politics. Recognising the need to nuance this statement, he helpfully explains that, “'Militarism' is a strong word. As it was used in Europe at this time, notably by critics of the Prussian-German monarchy, it meant the saturation of the entire political and social fabric by military values. In the German 'Second Reich', for instance, military uniform - even that of a reserve officer - gave greater status than any other social attribute. This would never quite happen in Ireland even in the crisis of the civil war. Though the word has been applied to Irish history in this period, it has usually been without precise definition. Those, like the German socialist Karl Liebknecht, who had to confront the 'real thing' up close, insisted on the need for precision. Merely putting people into military units, or uniforms, does not make them militarists. But the sudden emergence of large-scale military organizations to contest a political issue was a development that went far outside the normal conventions of liberal politics, and it is not misleading to call this 'militarization'. It happened because the intensity of this political issue stretched the tolerances of the liberal political culture to breaking point: the characteristic British values of reasonableness, compromise, and non-violence seemed unable to cope with the passions evoked by the threat of Home Rule.” This is fascinating, and I hadn’t considered before how much of the rise of armed militias in Ireland was the adoption of a mere aesthetic. The legacy of this thinking can be seen in the suspicion of and disregard for military force in contemporary Ireland.
Honing in on the immediate political context, Townshend again provides insightful analysis when he points out that, “Looking back, a century on, it may seem hard to grasp why Home Rule unleashed such passionate hostility. It was a cautious measure of devolution, and the degree of independence it offered Ireland was sharply limited. (Ireland would not have defence forces, for instance, or the power to levy customs duties.) For Gladstone and his Liberal successors, its central purpose and justification was to strengthen the Union not break it by reducing Irish discontent to a manageable level. It was presented as heralding a wider scheme of devolution which would give the rest of the regions of the UK similar autonomous powers, so eliminating the sense of Irish 'exceptionalism' that had unbalanced British politics since the Union itself. Sadly, the force that might have made this prophetic scheme work, the demand for English self-government, was simply not present. UK federalism, sometimes called 'home rule all round', had many intelligent advocates, but it remained a fringe idea; ironically, it was the weakness of English nationalism that made it a political non-starter. Instead of welcoming Irish Home Rule as a way of making the Union work better, Unionists saw it as a secessionist challenge like that of the Confederacy in the American civil war. It would destroy the integrity of the state, and threaten Britain's global power. It was the mutual incomprehension of these two views of Home Rule that made the resulting crisis so jarring.”
The narrative of the events of the Rising itself is brisk and well-written, and at no point did I feel lost concerning the parallel events taking place at different points around Dublin. What was most striking about Townshend’s account of the Rising was how ineffective it was militarily - hardly surprising since both leaders and led were novices in this regard. The British military response was relatively restrained as the Rising was suppressed, with one ominous exception: the declaration of martial law. Townshend explains, “Civil administration had unquestionably collapsed…the civil law was paralysed. Wimborne's action probably seemed mere common sense, albeit no doubt quite exhilarating after the frustrations of the preceding weeks. All the same, it was far from unproblematic, and it would cast a long shadow. Martial law was profoundly abhorrent to the English liberal outlook, and it had only ever been used in modern times in distant parts of the empire. Even in Ireland, it had not been declared since the early years of the Union - in the wake of the 1798 rebellion - and a variety of alternative legal powers had been found to deal with the various armed challenges to British rule in the nineteenth century. Where it had been used recently, as during the South African war, it had raised the spectre of militarism and led to serious judicial complications. The legal doctrine of martial law in English jurisprudence was dangerously unclear. And in 1916, of course, the government already had what might have been called a form of statutory martial law in the shape of the Defence of the Realm Act. This gave very large powers to military tribunals to try cases of collusion with the enemy - a charge which the rebels had, by trumpeting in the proclamation of the Republic their 'gallant allies in Europe', openly embraced.” Townshend hits the nail on the head when he adds, “There was a real danger that the declaration of martial law would antagonize moderate Irish opinion without delivering any real benefits to the authorities.”
The risk of things getting out of hand was further magnified by the impact of the war: “In normal times, Liberal ministers would have hung on to the principle of legality. But 1916 was a very abnormal time. The war had shifted the balance of power within the executive; if it had not eclipsed the principle of civil supremacy, it had hugely enhanced the mystique of the military authorities. The army's view, as the incoming Irish Commander-in-Chief was soon to make clear, was that the rebellion had been permitted by the weakness of the civil government. Such weakness would now end. When the Cabinet declared martial law across the whole of Ireland for an indefinite period, and placed Ireland under a military governor, it was sending a deliberate signal. The suppression of the rebellion, by whatever means, was the overriding priority.” The subsequent executions of the leaders and the resulting public outcry had a much greater impact in favour of the rebels than the direct action they took during Easter week.
In assessing the Rising, Townshend asks whether the rebels failed, “or had they, as Pearse and Connolly maintained, succeeded? In military terms, they had been defeated, but had they put up the best fight they could, and was it enough?” His analysis of the planning and execution of the rebellion is devastating, as he highlights several failures including the failure to seize key sites around the city, the defensive posture of the rebels that handed all the initiative to the authorities, the failure to organise the men into effective units, the failure to provide mutual support between rebel positions, the failure to sabotage communications out of Dublin, and a catastrophic failure in logistics - particularly concerning ammunition and food.
While rightly scathing of the military effectiveness of the rebels, Townshend is no less scathing when assessing the actions of the Liberal government following the Rising. Characterising it as a policy of drift, Townshend concludes that “Asquith indeed committed himself on paper to fundamental reform, but soon seems to have run out of enthusiasm. William Pitt's famously English adage about not repairing your roof during a thunderstorm no doubt reasserted its relevance, and it is not hard to see how the demands of the war ultimately distracted energy from awkward problems that could be classed as marginal.” General Maxwell was recalled, the internees were released unconditionally, and Redmond’s IPP was undercut at every turn. As the prisoners returned home to a triumphant welcome, “The releases began a hesitant revival of separatist activity, and a historic reorientation of Sinn Féin…The time spent in prison gave the internees the opportunity to develop future strategy. Michael Collins, in particular, came to see the importance of constructing a much broader political front than the old Volunteer organisation…It was the growing belief that the postwar international settlement - brokered by America - would deliver Irish independence, that gave Sinn Féin credibility. The parliamentary party, on the other hand, hobbled by the Irish Convention, could not even offer a clear vision of Home Rule as an attainable goal. Its commitment to the war may already have doomed it; and there was a grim symbolism to the death of Redmond's widely admired younger brother Willie in the Battle of Messines in June - a battle in which both the Irish and the Ulster Divisions fought side by side, 'the closest the army came to creating John Redmond's dearest hope'." Messines, 'the first completely successful single operation on the British front', would remain a poignant image of the war that might have been.” As the IPP floundered, especially in the face of the threat of conscription, Sinn Féin put on an “impressive display of unity and practicality.” The irony, as Townshend points out, is that “When the Great War at last ended, conscription had still not been implemented. But as with so many other parts of its Irish policy, the British government reaped all the political damage of the threat without achieving any concrete result. W. B. Yeats must have reflected the bafflement of many when he wrote to Lord Haldane just a month before the end of the war: ‘I read in the newspaper yesterday that over three hundred thousand Americans have landed in France in a month, and it seems to me a strangely wanton thing that England, for the sake of fifty thousand Irish soldiers, is prepared to hollow another trench between the two countries and fill it with blood.’”
The 1918 election proved to be the end of the IPP, as Townshend explains: “Thanks in part, at least, to Lloyd George's policies, the Irish Party which had worked for so long to achieve Home Rule within the framework of the Union was effectively wiped out at the end of 1918. The outcome of the December general election, in which Sinn Féin won all but six of the former 'Nationalist' seats, was an astounding reversal of the prewar political balance. It was not a mandate for renewed rebellion, certainly: Sinn Féin candidates tended to stress the primacy of peaceful methods, rather than invoking the memory of 1916. What Sinn Féin 'stood for' remained unclear to many. The Irish Times was not alone in saying 'Sinn Fein has swept the board, but we do not know does Sinn Fein itself know what it intends to do with the victory? What was clear was that this victory had been directly determined by the 'conscription crisis' and the reversion to military government. The conscription issue had run like a dark thread through the whole history of Ireland's war experience. The terms in which the issue was put in the spring of 1918 - of 'equity of sacrifice' - seemed unanswerable in England. But such terms had become irrelevant in Ireland, and because of this the Union could not survive if the threat of conscription became a reality. Those Volunteer leaders who, like MacNeill and Hobson, had argued against rebellion, had always rested their case on this fundamental point. They believed that English necessity would inevitably drive the government to alienate Irish opinion. In this way, they thought that a unifying crisis like that of 1918 would have happened whether or not the republicans had come out to do battle at Easter 1916. Were they, in the end, proved right?”
In this last section of the book, Townshend spends some time evaluating the changes in how the Rising has been viewed over time and attempts to sketch out how we should think about it today. His first observation is quite uncontroversial, as he points out that the War of Independence, the Civil War, and the rise of the Free State and later the Irish Republic had a chilling effect on any possible re-evaluation of the Rising: “The anti-treaty republicans of course took their stand on the rightness, indeed the holiness of the rebels, but even their fiercest opponents incorporated the rebellion in the Free State's political genealogy. This was not easy in principle, since it risked enshrining the very political violence that the Free State was denouncing as undemocratic during the civil war.” This unease about the place for and legitimacy of political violence is a key factor in the development of how the Rising, with the passage of time, began to be re-evaluated - though it would have been interesting if Townshend could have explored this question in relation to the impact of the Northern Irish Troubles on public opinion South of the border. Instead, he focuses is on the contention that “all the most important objectives of national liberation - including some, such as 'unity', that were lost as a result of 1916 - could have been achieved without bloodshed and violence. In a sense this was a restatement not only of MacNeill's and Hobson's objections to insurrection, but of the constitutionalist, 'Redmondite' commitment to negotiation. It derived its force from a hard-headed comparison of what was finally achieved in 1921 with what Britain was offering before the violence began…Though republicans denounced the Free State as a puppet regime, there was also a strong argument that its institutions, and in particular its constitution, were essentially republican. And though republicans argued that its 'independence' was a sham, which could be withdrawn any time Britain chose, it is clear in retrospect that for Britain there was no going back. The centuries-long attempt to dominate Ireland by force was over. But alongside such gains was the equally undeniable fact that the Irish polity consisted of twenty-six counties, just as it would have done under Home Rule. It could be argued that the gains were achieved not by the unmandated violence of 1916 but by the popular mandate of 1918, a product of the war in general rather than the rebellion in particular, while the setback - partition - was not mitigated but actually made worse by the rebellion…Opposition to conscription was the key motive for the expansion of both Sinn Féin and Volunteer membership during the war.”
Townshend sensibly concludes that “The problem with any such assessment is that of all 'counterfactual historical argument: we cannot know what 1918 would have been like if 1916 had not happened. The potent effect of martyrdom is obvious, for instance, but we may be sure that a rebellion was not necessary to create martyrs - Thomas Ashe was killed by the routine incompetence of British administration. What the rebellion surely did was to shift the horizons of possibility, both at the subliminal and the practical level. It has been well said that 1916 was above all a public drama, an astonishingly effective piece of street theatre.” This is a remarkable insightful statement, and points to the fact that the Rising (and even of how it was understood by some if not all of its leaders) as symbolic, perhaps even sacral, rather than as a serious and realistic attempt to throw off British rule by the force of arms. He also addresses the oft made comment that the 1916 rebels acted without a popular mandate, pointing out that “in this they were hardly different from any revolutionary insurrectionists of the nineteenth or the twentieth century…Most 'liberation struggles', indeed, have been violent, and though many have not been followed by stable democratic systems, Ireland's performance in this respect was impressive.” Indeed, it is arguable that Michael Collins and the IRA acted without a popular mandate, given the common understanding of Sinn Fein’s election victory in 1918 - in which case, this argument relates not only to the Rising but to the War of Independence and the establishment of the Irish State. That is not to say that it is an illegitimate question, or that we do not need to face up to and grapple with this complexity, but simply makes the point that such a critique is not unique to the 1916 rebels.
Finally, he highlights a feature of the thinking of the rebel leaders which can be characterised as an inconsistency, or perhaps as a lack of imagination, and which still appears in Irish Nationalist rhetoric today. In short, it is the assumption that their understanding of what it means to be Irish is the only valid one, and that a whole island political entity is the only valid expression of that identity: “The most damaging legacy of the Great War period was not political violence as such, but the finalization of partition…The leaders of the rebellion were undoubtedly guilty of failing to grasp the contradiction between their desire for an Irish Ireland and their assumption that the island must form a single political unit. The rebellion played a part in cementing partition, but it is not easy to argue that its part was decisive…The constitutional nationalists had only awoken reluctantly and belatedly to a realization that 'Ulster' was a problem they could not dismiss as an absurdity or a product of British manipulation.”
This is an excellent book that is thoughtfully and provocatively written and Townshend provides some compelling analysis that informs how we should understand the Rising, both as a historical event and as a key piece of Ireland’s national mythology. The events of Easter week, confused and muddled as they are, are pulled together into a sharply written and easy-to-follow narrative. I highly recommend this book, and look forward to reading his follow-up volume on the War of Independence.
“They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools! the fools! the fools! - they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.” Padraig Pearse
Major Ivor Price, RIC (Retd) and British Army Intelligence
This is a thoughtful, balanced and compelling narrative history of the Easter Rising - no mean feat considering the mythical status of those brief days, and the men involved, in Ireland’s national story. Charles Townshend places the Rising in context and humanises the men and women involved (and their opponents). He also manages to demonstrate the military futility (indeed, incompetence) of the Rising while simultaneously maintaining its significance in Ireland’s march to independent statehood in the early 20th Century.
Regarding the context, he pithily summarises it as the militarisation of politics. Recognising the need to nuance this statement, he helpfully explains that, “'Militarism' is a strong word. As it was used in Europe at this time, notably by critics of the Prussian-German monarchy, it meant the saturation of the entire political and social fabric by military values. In the German 'Second Reich', for instance, military uniform - even that of a reserve officer - gave greater status than any other social attribute. This would never quite happen in Ireland even in the crisis of the civil war. Though the word has been applied to Irish history in this period, it has usually been without precise definition. Those, like the German socialist Karl Liebknecht, who had to confront the 'real thing' up close, insisted on the need for precision. Merely putting people into military units, or uniforms, does not make them militarists. But the sudden emergence of large-scale military organizations to contest a political issue was a development that went far outside the normal conventions of liberal politics, and it is not misleading to call this 'militarization'. It happened because the intensity of this political issue stretched the tolerances of the liberal political culture to breaking point: the characteristic British values of reasonableness, compromise, and non-violence seemed unable to cope with the passions evoked by the threat of Home Rule.” This is fascinating, and I hadn’t considered before how much of the rise of armed militias in Ireland was the adoption of a mere aesthetic. The legacy of this thinking can be seen in the suspicion of and disregard for military force in contemporary Ireland.
Honing in on the immediate political context, Townshend again provides insightful analysis when he points out that, “Looking back, a century on, it may seem hard to grasp why Home Rule unleashed such passionate hostility. It was a cautious measure of devolution, and the degree of independence it offered Ireland was sharply limited. (Ireland would not have defence forces, for instance, or the power to levy customs duties.) For Gladstone and his Liberal successors, its central purpose and justification was to strengthen the Union not break it by reducing Irish discontent to a manageable level. It was presented as heralding a wider scheme of devolution which would give the rest of the regions of the UK similar autonomous powers, so eliminating the sense of Irish 'exceptionalism' that had unbalanced British politics since the Union itself. Sadly, the force that might have made this prophetic scheme work, the demand for English self-government, was simply not present. UK federalism, sometimes called 'home rule all round', had many intelligent advocates, but it remained a fringe idea; ironically, it was the weakness of English nationalism that made it a political non-starter. Instead of welcoming Irish Home Rule as a way of making the Union work better, Unionists saw it as a secessionist challenge like that of the Confederacy in the American civil war. It would destroy the integrity of the state, and threaten Britain's global power. It was the mutual incomprehension of these two views of Home Rule that made the resulting crisis so jarring.”
The narrative of the events of the Rising itself is brisk and well-written, and at no point did I feel lost concerning the parallel events taking place at different points around Dublin. What was most striking about Townshend’s account of the Rising was how ineffective it was militarily - hardly surprising since both leaders and led were novices in this regard. The British military response was relatively restrained as the Rising was suppressed, with one ominous exception: the declaration of martial law. Townshend explains, “Civil administration had unquestionably collapsed…the civil law was paralysed. Wimborne's action probably seemed mere common sense, albeit no doubt quite exhilarating after the frustrations of the preceding weeks. All the same, it was far from unproblematic, and it would cast a long shadow. Martial law was profoundly abhorrent to the English liberal outlook, and it had only ever been used in modern times in distant parts of the empire. Even in Ireland, it had not been declared since the early years of the Union - in the wake of the 1798 rebellion - and a variety of alternative legal powers had been found to deal with the various armed challenges to British rule in the nineteenth century. Where it had been used recently, as during the South African war, it had raised the spectre of militarism and led to serious judicial complications. The legal doctrine of martial law in English jurisprudence was dangerously unclear. And in 1916, of course, the government already had what might have been called a form of statutory martial law in the shape of the Defence of the Realm Act. This gave very large powers to military tribunals to try cases of collusion with the enemy - a charge which the rebels had, by trumpeting in the proclamation of the Republic their 'gallant allies in Europe', openly embraced.” Townshend hits the nail on the head when he adds, “There was a real danger that the declaration of martial law would antagonize moderate Irish opinion without delivering any real benefits to the authorities.”
The risk of things getting out of hand was further magnified by the impact of the war: “In normal times, Liberal ministers would have hung on to the principle of legality. But 1916 was a very abnormal time. The war had shifted the balance of power within the executive; if it had not eclipsed the principle of civil supremacy, it had hugely enhanced the mystique of the military authorities. The army's view, as the incoming Irish Commander-in-Chief was soon to make clear, was that the rebellion had been permitted by the weakness of the civil government. Such weakness would now end. When the Cabinet declared martial law across the whole of Ireland for an indefinite period, and placed Ireland under a military governor, it was sending a deliberate signal. The suppression of the rebellion, by whatever means, was the overriding priority.” The subsequent executions of the leaders and the resulting public outcry had a much greater impact in favour of the rebels than the direct action they took during Easter week.
In assessing the Rising, Townshend asks whether the rebels failed, “or had they, as Pearse and Connolly maintained, succeeded? In military terms, they had been defeated, but had they put up the best fight they could, and was it enough?” His analysis of the planning and execution of the rebellion is devastating, as he highlights several failures including the failure to seize key sites around the city, the defensive posture of the rebels that handed all the initiative to the authorities, the failure to organise the men into effective units, the failure to provide mutual support between rebel positions, the failure to sabotage communications out of Dublin, and a catastrophic failure in logistics - particularly concerning ammunition and food.
While rightly scathing of the military effectiveness of the rebels, Townshend is no less scathing when assessing the actions of the Liberal government following the Rising. Characterising it as a policy of drift, Townshend concludes that “Asquith indeed committed himself on paper to fundamental reform, but soon seems to have run out of enthusiasm. William Pitt's famously English adage about not repairing your roof during a thunderstorm no doubt reasserted its relevance, and it is not hard to see how the demands of the war ultimately distracted energy from awkward problems that could be classed as marginal.” General Maxwell was recalled, the internees were released unconditionally, and Redmond’s IPP was undercut at every turn. As the prisoners returned home to a triumphant welcome, “The releases began a hesitant revival of separatist activity, and a historic reorientation of Sinn Féin…The time spent in prison gave the internees the opportunity to develop future strategy. Michael Collins, in particular, came to see the importance of constructing a much broader political front than the old Volunteer organisation…It was the growing belief that the postwar international settlement - brokered by America - would deliver Irish independence, that gave Sinn Féin credibility. The parliamentary party, on the other hand, hobbled by the Irish Convention, could not even offer a clear vision of Home Rule as an attainable goal. Its commitment to the war may already have doomed it; and there was a grim symbolism to the death of Redmond's widely admired younger brother Willie in the Battle of Messines in June - a battle in which both the Irish and the Ulster Divisions fought side by side, 'the closest the army came to creating John Redmond's dearest hope'." Messines, 'the first completely successful single operation on the British front', would remain a poignant image of the war that might have been.” As the IPP floundered, especially in the face of the threat of conscription, Sinn Féin put on an “impressive display of unity and practicality.” The irony, as Townshend points out, is that “When the Great War at last ended, conscription had still not been implemented. But as with so many other parts of its Irish policy, the British government reaped all the political damage of the threat without achieving any concrete result. W. B. Yeats must have reflected the bafflement of many when he wrote to Lord Haldane just a month before the end of the war: ‘I read in the newspaper yesterday that over three hundred thousand Americans have landed in France in a month, and it seems to me a strangely wanton thing that England, for the sake of fifty thousand Irish soldiers, is prepared to hollow another trench between the two countries and fill it with blood.’”
The 1918 election proved to be the end of the IPP, as Townshend explains: “Thanks in part, at least, to Lloyd George's policies, the Irish Party which had worked for so long to achieve Home Rule within the framework of the Union was effectively wiped out at the end of 1918. The outcome of the December general election, in which Sinn Féin won all but six of the former 'Nationalist' seats, was an astounding reversal of the prewar political balance. It was not a mandate for renewed rebellion, certainly: Sinn Féin candidates tended to stress the primacy of peaceful methods, rather than invoking the memory of 1916. What Sinn Féin 'stood for' remained unclear to many. The Irish Times was not alone in saying 'Sinn Fein has swept the board, but we do not know does Sinn Fein itself know what it intends to do with the victory? What was clear was that this victory had been directly determined by the 'conscription crisis' and the reversion to military government. The conscription issue had run like a dark thread through the whole history of Ireland's war experience. The terms in which the issue was put in the spring of 1918 - of 'equity of sacrifice' - seemed unanswerable in England. But such terms had become irrelevant in Ireland, and because of this the Union could not survive if the threat of conscription became a reality. Those Volunteer leaders who, like MacNeill and Hobson, had argued against rebellion, had always rested their case on this fundamental point. They believed that English necessity would inevitably drive the government to alienate Irish opinion. In this way, they thought that a unifying crisis like that of 1918 would have happened whether or not the republicans had come out to do battle at Easter 1916. Were they, in the end, proved right?”
In this last section of the book, Townshend spends some time evaluating the changes in how the Rising has been viewed over time and attempts to sketch out how we should think about it today. His first observation is quite uncontroversial, as he points out that the War of Independence, the Civil War, and the rise of the Free State and later the Irish Republic had a chilling effect on any possible re-evaluation of the Rising: “The anti-treaty republicans of course took their stand on the rightness, indeed the holiness of the rebels, but even their fiercest opponents incorporated the rebellion in the Free State's political genealogy. This was not easy in principle, since it risked enshrining the very political violence that the Free State was denouncing as undemocratic during the civil war.” This unease about the place for and legitimacy of political violence is a key factor in the development of how the Rising, with the passage of time, began to be re-evaluated - though it would have been interesting if Townshend could have explored this question in relation to the impact of the Northern Irish Troubles on public opinion South of the border. Instead, he focuses is on the contention that “all the most important objectives of national liberation - including some, such as 'unity', that were lost as a result of 1916 - could have been achieved without bloodshed and violence. In a sense this was a restatement not only of MacNeill's and Hobson's objections to insurrection, but of the constitutionalist, 'Redmondite' commitment to negotiation. It derived its force from a hard-headed comparison of what was finally achieved in 1921 with what Britain was offering before the violence began…Though republicans denounced the Free State as a puppet regime, there was also a strong argument that its institutions, and in particular its constitution, were essentially republican. And though republicans argued that its 'independence' was a sham, which could be withdrawn any time Britain chose, it is clear in retrospect that for Britain there was no going back. The centuries-long attempt to dominate Ireland by force was over. But alongside such gains was the equally undeniable fact that the Irish polity consisted of twenty-six counties, just as it would have done under Home Rule. It could be argued that the gains were achieved not by the unmandated violence of 1916 but by the popular mandate of 1918, a product of the war in general rather than the rebellion in particular, while the setback - partition - was not mitigated but actually made worse by the rebellion…Opposition to conscription was the key motive for the expansion of both Sinn Féin and Volunteer membership during the war.”
Townshend sensibly concludes that “The problem with any such assessment is that of all 'counterfactual historical argument: we cannot know what 1918 would have been like if 1916 had not happened. The potent effect of martyrdom is obvious, for instance, but we may be sure that a rebellion was not necessary to create martyrs - Thomas Ashe was killed by the routine incompetence of British administration. What the rebellion surely did was to shift the horizons of possibility, both at the subliminal and the practical level. It has been well said that 1916 was above all a public drama, an astonishingly effective piece of street theatre.” This is a remarkable insightful statement, and points to the fact that the Rising (and even of how it was understood by some if not all of its leaders) as symbolic, perhaps even sacral, rather than as a serious and realistic attempt to throw off British rule by the force of arms. He also addresses the oft made comment that the 1916 rebels acted without a popular mandate, pointing out that “in this they were hardly different from any revolutionary insurrectionists of the nineteenth or the twentieth century…Most 'liberation struggles', indeed, have been violent, and though many have not been followed by stable democratic systems, Ireland's performance in this respect was impressive.” Indeed, it is arguable that Michael Collins and the IRA acted without a popular mandate, given the common understanding of Sinn Fein’s election victory in 1918 - in which case, this argument relates not only to the Rising but to the War of Independence and the establishment of the Irish State. That is not to say that it is an illegitimate question, or that we do not need to face up to and grapple with this complexity, but simply makes the point that such a critique is not unique to the 1916 rebels.
Finally, he highlights a feature of the thinking of the rebel leaders which can be characterised as an inconsistency, or perhaps as a lack of imagination, and which still appears in Irish Nationalist rhetoric today. In short, it is the assumption that their understanding of what it means to be Irish is the only valid one, and that a whole island political entity is the only valid expression of that identity: “The most damaging legacy of the Great War period was not political violence as such, but the finalization of partition…The leaders of the rebellion were undoubtedly guilty of failing to grasp the contradiction between their desire for an Irish Ireland and their assumption that the island must form a single political unit. The rebellion played a part in cementing partition, but it is not easy to argue that its part was decisive…The constitutional nationalists had only awoken reluctantly and belatedly to a realization that 'Ulster' was a problem they could not dismiss as an absurdity or a product of British manipulation.”
This is an excellent book that is thoughtfully and provocatively written and Townshend provides some compelling analysis that informs how we should understand the Rising, both as a historical event and as a key piece of Ireland’s national mythology. The events of Easter week, confused and muddled as they are, are pulled together into a sharply written and easy-to-follow narrative. I highly recommend this book, and look forward to reading his follow-up volume on the War of Independence.
“They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools! the fools! the fools! - they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.” Padraig Pearse
October 9, 2024
Easter 1916 remains the totemic historical event for Irish Republicanism, particularly its physical force variant.
Amidst confusion within the Irish Volunteers and lethargy bordering on delusion from British authorities, a small force took over much of central Dublin on Easter Monday 1916. Taken by surprise, Townshend shows that the rebels could have taken Dublin Castle that day and occupied really whatever site within Dublin they chose, only tiny garrisons and the OTC of Trinity College opposed them. Instead they were turned back at the Castle and set themselves up in often indefensible spots.
Taken by surprise, the Army’s response was remarkably brisk and ordered. Troops were rushed from Belfast, Curragh and England. The rebels were squeezed from the few strategic spots they held. Connolly, so sure that they would never risk damaging capitalist property, must have shown some confusion at the shells raining down upon Sackville Street and the GPO. The rebels had missed their chance to seize Dublin and within a few days had accepted the hopeless nature of their position and surrendered unconditionally.
By the point that Connolly tells his men that only he and the signatories of the Proclamation are likely to be shot, the book is only halfway through. Townshend dedicates time to the confusing and overlooked events of Easter Week across Ireland, gunboats on the West Coast, risings in many places and a peaceful surrender in Cork without a shot being fired.
He shows the crisis within the British government - how should the rebels be dealt with? One can hardly be surprised (and indeed the leaders themselves were not) that the leaders of insurrection during wartime were shot. Townshend does not give much critical analysis of Devlin’s famous and clearly spurious claim that no contemporary rebellion had been dealt with so harshly.
The book explores the paths not taken and the failures of different flavours of unionists. For those for a British union, would a more lenient, or at least more clearly legally based, response to the Rising have prevented the radicalisation of Irish society and therefore headed off Sinn Fein and a break from Britain? Would a less Liberal government than Asquith’s have found it easier to reign in the excesses of Maxwell, French and the military? Could the good faith of many Irish people evident in Easter Week have been better nurtured?
For those who wished for a United Ireland, Townshend makes few bones as to what Easter 1916 meant for the cause they allegedly held dear. There should have been no doubt that Ulster Unionism was no false consciousness nor propaganda exercise, and active rebellion during wartime was bound to entrench them against any form of accommodation with a Dublin government. The rebel blood sacrifice in Dublin of 1916 was of course matched by the loyal one at Thiepval. Moreover, the ascendancy of physical force made a schism with London (and therefore Belfast) the most likely constitutional outcome. As Townshend shows, Ireland was unlikely to escape the War without a crisis, and received one in 1918 with the spectre of conscription. By striking as it did in 1916, Irish nationalism ensured that the conscription crisis (inevitable in a long war) could never unite the whole island in demanding home rule and/or independence. The rising almost certainly delayed this crisis until the war was nearly over as well.
The grim child of Easter 1916 was ensuring that union between a Protestant North and a Catholic South was impossible. The continued flaring of Republican violence, always invoking the spirit of 1916, has contrived to maintain that split for over a century. Perhaps it is a permanent legacy. If offered this information as to what would come to pass, one wonders if Pearse, de Valera and the rest would have donned their uniforms and picked up their rifles that Easter Monday morning.
Amidst confusion within the Irish Volunteers and lethargy bordering on delusion from British authorities, a small force took over much of central Dublin on Easter Monday 1916. Taken by surprise, Townshend shows that the rebels could have taken Dublin Castle that day and occupied really whatever site within Dublin they chose, only tiny garrisons and the OTC of Trinity College opposed them. Instead they were turned back at the Castle and set themselves up in often indefensible spots.
Taken by surprise, the Army’s response was remarkably brisk and ordered. Troops were rushed from Belfast, Curragh and England. The rebels were squeezed from the few strategic spots they held. Connolly, so sure that they would never risk damaging capitalist property, must have shown some confusion at the shells raining down upon Sackville Street and the GPO. The rebels had missed their chance to seize Dublin and within a few days had accepted the hopeless nature of their position and surrendered unconditionally.
By the point that Connolly tells his men that only he and the signatories of the Proclamation are likely to be shot, the book is only halfway through. Townshend dedicates time to the confusing and overlooked events of Easter Week across Ireland, gunboats on the West Coast, risings in many places and a peaceful surrender in Cork without a shot being fired.
He shows the crisis within the British government - how should the rebels be dealt with? One can hardly be surprised (and indeed the leaders themselves were not) that the leaders of insurrection during wartime were shot. Townshend does not give much critical analysis of Devlin’s famous and clearly spurious claim that no contemporary rebellion had been dealt with so harshly.
The book explores the paths not taken and the failures of different flavours of unionists. For those for a British union, would a more lenient, or at least more clearly legally based, response to the Rising have prevented the radicalisation of Irish society and therefore headed off Sinn Fein and a break from Britain? Would a less Liberal government than Asquith’s have found it easier to reign in the excesses of Maxwell, French and the military? Could the good faith of many Irish people evident in Easter Week have been better nurtured?
For those who wished for a United Ireland, Townshend makes few bones as to what Easter 1916 meant for the cause they allegedly held dear. There should have been no doubt that Ulster Unionism was no false consciousness nor propaganda exercise, and active rebellion during wartime was bound to entrench them against any form of accommodation with a Dublin government. The rebel blood sacrifice in Dublin of 1916 was of course matched by the loyal one at Thiepval. Moreover, the ascendancy of physical force made a schism with London (and therefore Belfast) the most likely constitutional outcome. As Townshend shows, Ireland was unlikely to escape the War without a crisis, and received one in 1918 with the spectre of conscription. By striking as it did in 1916, Irish nationalism ensured that the conscription crisis (inevitable in a long war) could never unite the whole island in demanding home rule and/or independence. The rising almost certainly delayed this crisis until the war was nearly over as well.
The grim child of Easter 1916 was ensuring that union between a Protestant North and a Catholic South was impossible. The continued flaring of Republican violence, always invoking the spirit of 1916, has contrived to maintain that split for over a century. Perhaps it is a permanent legacy. If offered this information as to what would come to pass, one wonders if Pearse, de Valera and the rest would have donned their uniforms and picked up their rifles that Easter Monday morning.
February 28, 2023
This was a pretty good account of the Rising, but there were a few weaknesses.
I found Townshend to be fairly naive regarding the British Empire. At one point, he talked about how baffling the British politicians found Ireland since they were used to nonviolence and compromise... which is an absolutely ridiculous thing to say about the British Empire. And that's just one example. Throughout the book, he seemed to go above and beyond whenever it came to explaining British actions. When describing a massacre of civilians by British soldiers, he gave equal weight (or space at least) to the civilians' unanimous account and to the soldiers' account that the civilians were caught in a crossfire. I understand the need for history to be objective, but I don't feel that both "accounts" should be given in situations like this when one side is patently lying. He also seems confused by the ham-fistedness of British policy in Ireland in general, going to Herculean lengths to offer explanations for why the British government or the post-rising military dictatorship, (which he devotes the guts of a bamboozling legal talking chapter of technicality and loophole to argue that it wasn't technically a military dictatorship), made such catastrophic errors in their handling of Ireland. It never seems to occur to him that Britain simply never understood Ireland and was never really bothered to learn
A strength of the book is his peppering of the general account with vignettes and quotes from different players at all levels, from the top to the bottom to those on the sidelines
If you're interested in military history, then you will enjoy this book, which devotes the bones of two chapters to an analysis of the military potential and performance of each unit during the Rising, although a knowledge of the geography of Dublin is pretty important, (there's a map of the city at the beginning)
As Townshend is an academic, a lot of this account seems to have been written with the historian in mind. He takes it for granted that certain narratives about the Rising are understood by the reader (the blood sacrifice, the disastrousness of MacNeill's countermanding order...), and evaluates the accuracy of these narratives, so this book probably isn't the ideal place to begin if you're just trying to learn a basic gist of what happened. But if you already know the broad strokes, and you're willing to put up with an account that lets the British establishment away with a little bit more than it should, this is a good, technical, account of the Easter Rising which will deepen your knowledge
I found Townshend to be fairly naive regarding the British Empire. At one point, he talked about how baffling the British politicians found Ireland since they were used to nonviolence and compromise... which is an absolutely ridiculous thing to say about the British Empire. And that's just one example. Throughout the book, he seemed to go above and beyond whenever it came to explaining British actions. When describing a massacre of civilians by British soldiers, he gave equal weight (or space at least) to the civilians' unanimous account and to the soldiers' account that the civilians were caught in a crossfire. I understand the need for history to be objective, but I don't feel that both "accounts" should be given in situations like this when one side is patently lying. He also seems confused by the ham-fistedness of British policy in Ireland in general, going to Herculean lengths to offer explanations for why the British government or the post-rising military dictatorship, (which he devotes the guts of a bamboozling legal talking chapter of technicality and loophole to argue that it wasn't technically a military dictatorship), made such catastrophic errors in their handling of Ireland. It never seems to occur to him that Britain simply never understood Ireland and was never really bothered to learn
A strength of the book is his peppering of the general account with vignettes and quotes from different players at all levels, from the top to the bottom to those on the sidelines
If you're interested in military history, then you will enjoy this book, which devotes the bones of two chapters to an analysis of the military potential and performance of each unit during the Rising, although a knowledge of the geography of Dublin is pretty important, (there's a map of the city at the beginning)
As Townshend is an academic, a lot of this account seems to have been written with the historian in mind. He takes it for granted that certain narratives about the Rising are understood by the reader (the blood sacrifice, the disastrousness of MacNeill's countermanding order...), and evaluates the accuracy of these narratives, so this book probably isn't the ideal place to begin if you're just trying to learn a basic gist of what happened. But if you already know the broad strokes, and you're willing to put up with an account that lets the British establishment away with a little bit more than it should, this is a good, technical, account of the Easter Rising which will deepen your knowledge
July 29, 2021
A comprehensive & meticulously-researched treatment of a very divisive event in Ireland's violent history by a historian with no political or nationalistic axe to grind, as so many republican fanatics have...even after 100 years! (this was published in 2015!).
My own Irish grandfather - who I have never even seen in a photograph! - was obliged to remain an exile in London from his Dublin home after serving conscientiously in the Royal Army Medical Corps on the Western Front, 1914-18...& remained so...a brave man fighting the 'Kaiser' for King & country(which one?!)...& lumbering me, & my dad, inadvertently, with a name that has only meant a cold shoulder when a warm embrace was needed from our English compatriots!
I hold no candle for the demented fools that begun the vain-glorious Easter Rising...& succeeeded only in dividing their home country into two hostile parts when other more sensible, long-lasting solutions to the almost eternal 'Irish Problem' were available, as Britain's power suffered a mortal blow in the mud & barbed-wire of the Great War.
Charles Townshend cogently dissects the chaotic situation in which Ireland found itself as the 20th century found its feet; but, sadly, the Irish themselves never found theirs...stumbling & bustling their way to a disaster that only now seems to be resolving itself, as the Republic cravenly accepts the rule of continental Europeans - who care little for Ireland! - rather than an amicable, political relationship with the 'big island' to the east, so intertwined with them in so many ways.
For the life of me, I have never understood why the Irish never look at a map, or study birth certificates!...or query why a young Briton,(St) Patrick, was sold as a slave in the Emerald Isle...well before England even existed?!
My own Irish grandfather - who I have never even seen in a photograph! - was obliged to remain an exile in London from his Dublin home after serving conscientiously in the Royal Army Medical Corps on the Western Front, 1914-18...& remained so...a brave man fighting the 'Kaiser' for King & country(which one?!)...& lumbering me, & my dad, inadvertently, with a name that has only meant a cold shoulder when a warm embrace was needed from our English compatriots!
I hold no candle for the demented fools that begun the vain-glorious Easter Rising...& succeeeded only in dividing their home country into two hostile parts when other more sensible, long-lasting solutions to the almost eternal 'Irish Problem' were available, as Britain's power suffered a mortal blow in the mud & barbed-wire of the Great War.
Charles Townshend cogently dissects the chaotic situation in which Ireland found itself as the 20th century found its feet; but, sadly, the Irish themselves never found theirs...stumbling & bustling their way to a disaster that only now seems to be resolving itself, as the Republic cravenly accepts the rule of continental Europeans - who care little for Ireland! - rather than an amicable, political relationship with the 'big island' to the east, so intertwined with them in so many ways.
For the life of me, I have never understood why the Irish never look at a map, or study birth certificates!...or query why a young Briton,(St) Patrick, was sold as a slave in the Emerald Isle...well before England even existed?!
January 4, 2020
I struggled with this book, the story was inspiring and of historical significance but the prose is plodding and vacuous. You never really get into the whys and wherefore of the rebellion in a comprehensive way or relate to any of the main characters. If that was intentional by the author then the book reads as a pedestrian paced sad essay on the Irish struggle. Melancholic in fact, in the books sad depiction of a badly planned, badly led, largely unsupported act of civil disobedience. How this now widely celebrated historic ‘uprising’ led to independence for Ireland, can only really be believed if the reader accepts the blind messianic faith in the incompetent bungling insurgents, that managed to annoy the British Military enough to get themselves hanged. Of course the British handling or mishandling of the attempted coup, underlines the ‘English State’ response to any disloyalties of its subjects. Being met with vicious, violent retribution, unchecked by parliament, all happening of course under a ‘Liberal’ government.
November 23, 2018
This was a balanced and nuanced account of an event which, over 100 years from its occurrence, defies objective evaluation. Townshend paints a sympathetic picture of the Irish principals in the Easter Rising while at the same time avoiding the hagiography that too often accompanies histories of the Irish independence struggle. As the grandson of Irish immigrants who left for the USA during World War I, I found numerous insights which could explain my grandparents' decision to leave Ireland. Don't expect a page-turning read; while "Easter 1916" is well-written and fact-packed, its presentation is still quite scholarly, which can make it hard going at times. Nonetheless, it is a worthwhile read.
November 19, 2020
This is a great book but the author dives right in and does assume a certain amount of knowledge. A glossary of organisations and key people would have been great and drawn up with little effort, while some tactical illustrations of some of the movements and offensives would have been great, especially if you aren't familiar with Dublin's layout. I live in the city and even then regularly found myself on Google Maps tracing movements. All of this just demonstrates the level of depth and information in the book which is immensely researched. Particularly interesting is the amount of time given over to the consequences of the rising as the administration if Ireland by the UK begins to unravel.
March 12, 2024
the extent of the military detail covered here is, as far as my limited knowledge of the literature goes, unparalleled. mandatory reading for anyone seeking to understand the Rising. loses a star for its tendency to praise the sophistication and nous of mediocrities such as Arthur Griffith, Seán O'Casey, Bulmer Hobson and Eoin MacNeill and critiques of the simplicity / crudeness of Pearse, Connolly, Plunkett, Clarke and The O'Rahilly. We hear nothing about the distortions or oversights of British imperial ideology, of course!
May 10, 2017
The Easter Uprising killed more civilians than it did nationalist participants or British troops and allied police elements. It failed in its objectives until the British executed its primary leaders and came down heavy-handedly on those sympathetic to it. The ideological background to the rising is well but ploddingly done, as is the description of the long-range consequences. The rising itself is described interestingly and with some fire.
July 16, 2017
My interest in this time period in Irish history was initiated by my fascination with WWI and WWII. How Great Britain won the wars but forever lost its empire and its place as a great power. It turns out that Easter 1916 and its importance is still a debatable issue - suffice to say a tragedy for all - not unusual for for the people of the Emerald Isle. Very well researched, could have been better bringing to life the key players. Worth the effort to read
January 18, 2018
Excellent account of the formation of Republican politics from the mid-19th Century to 1916, as well as the British and Ulster Unionist elements that played a significant role in shaping the "Republican" response to the British in 1916. Townshend leaves no stones unturned and has produced and eminently readable account of the clash between British Power, Irish Nationalism, and Ulster intransigence that manifest itself in the 1916 Rising.
August 1, 2019
Brilliant document of the Easter Rising in Ireland, 1916. A unique case study of rebellion against Britain and British colonial rule in Ireland, which instigated the partition of Ireland in a war of Independence and a civil war, 1918-1923.
May 3, 2020
A masterful account
November 10, 2020
Wow, this is the go to book for the Easter 1916 Irish Rebelion. Plain and simple. Charles Townsend’s scholarship is awesome.
August 5, 2023
Took me 4 months to read but I did find it very interesting
December 5, 2023
great book to read for my research paper. very dense but provides great information and lays out the events before, during, and after the rebellion very well making it easy to understand
March 13, 2024
Fantastic detailed account
October 19, 2024
Good for info about the subject. Incredibly poorly written. Best if used for a reference and not as a intro to the subject.
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