Feckers Read Free

Gonne
    M ajor John MacBride, executed for his part in the Rising of Easter Week 1916, is remembered mainly by his characterization by W. B. Yeats in the poem ‘Easter 1916’ as a ‘drunken vainglorious lout’. These three words have come to outweigh the glories and sacrifices of his life and death. There are many lies in Irish poetry, but this is probably the worst.
    Until recently, accounts of the domestic conflict between MacBride and his wife, Maud Gonne, which gave rise to the Yeats smear, told an entirely one-sided version of events. In the course of divorce and custody proceedings arising from the breakdown of their disastrous marriage, Gonne accused MacBride of drunkenness, cruelty, violence, infidelity and immorality. In addition to Yeats’s writings, published accounts of their relationship by historians and biographers, infatuated beyond reason or fairness by the Yeats legend, repeated the prejudices and untruths arising from Gonne’s version and Yeats’s determination to believe it.
    Not until Anthony J. Jordan’s 2000 book, The Yeats-Gonne-MacBride Triangle , did Major MacBride’s side of the story become widely available, and this has been largely ignored. Jordan undertook the simple endeavour of visiting the National Library of Ireland to read Major MacBride’s papers, bequeathed to the State by the family with whom MacBride had been staying before his death. The content of these is interrogative of any sense of complacency we may have about what we have come to ‘know’ about history and how we ‘remember’ the three pivotal Irish figures comprising this triangle.

    The immorality charges, including the allegation that MacBride indecently molested his wife’s eleven-year-old daughter, Iseult Gonne, and committed adultery with her half-sister, eighteen-year-old Eileen Wilson, are rebutted in MacBride’s version. By his own admission, marrying Gonne was foolish. ‘I gave her a name that was free from stain and reproach and she was unable to appreciate it once she had succeeded in inducing me to marry her.’ Gonne became pregnant soon after their wedding in Paris in 1903 and gave birth in January 1904 to a son, Seaghan, later Sean MacBride, the eminent IRA chief of staff, lawyer and human rights activist. Major MacBride was determined his son should grow up in Ireland, but his wife had other ideas. She issued MacBride with an ultimatum: either he would admit the charge of indecency, renounce rights to his son and emigrate to America, or he would face an action for criminal assault.
    There is every indication that, far from the injured heroine of popular mythology, Maud Gonne was a cunning manipulator, who, on deciding to divorce her husband, manufactured the evidence to banish him not just from her own life but also from that of his son, using Yeats as her Chief Minister of Propaganda. Yeats had an obvious vested interest in condemning MacBride: he was in love with Gonne and devastated by her marriage.
    In the ensuing divorce proceedings in Paris, a close friend and confidante of Maud Gonne’s gave evidence on behalf of MacBride, saying Gonne had spoken to her in the warmest terms of her husband just weeks before the proceedings began. To one charge, that of sexual assault on a cook, MacBride responded: ‘If I wanted a woman I had plenty of money in my pocket and would have no difficulty in making a suitable choice in Paris, without trying to rape a hideously ugly old cook in my wife’s house.’ A midwife said she had seen MacBride ‘kissing’ Eileen Wilson, with whom MacBride said he had never been alone in the house. Of a servant who claimed to have found sperm marks on Eileen Wilson’s bedclothes, MacBride declared: ‘It is incomprehensible how this woman (an unmarried woman) can swear positively, as she does, that the marks on Eileen Wilson’s linen were spots of sperm.’ MacBride also pointed out that Eileen Wilson and Iseult Gonne slept in the same room. Of the incident in which he