Albert Ellis, the hangman, said that Roger Casement "appeared to me the bravest man it fell to my unhappy lot to execute." Albert Pierrepoint, Ellis's successor as Britain's most notable executioner, considered that the "bravest man" he ever killed was John Amery, the son of a British cabinet minister, who was hanged for treason in 1945. Gallows courage, suggests Adrian Weale, was not the only way in which Casement's and Amery's "careers as traitors paralleled each other. Their crimes, and the outcomes of their crimes, were as identical as two separate and unrelated events in history can possibly be."
Weale's project, then, is to productively juxtapose two lives that are, he confesses, of merely "superficial" and "coincidental" similarity. Nonetheless there is a lot, he argues, that's mutually instructive about the conduct and fate of two men who were, in the end, "fairly convicted of high treason according to the law of (their)own country." As a starting-point, this is weirdly tendentious (Casement's claim to innocence rested precisely on the proposition that the "English-made" law of high treason did not apply to his actions as an Irishman) and anachronistically Britannic. In the observation of George Bernard Shaw, arguing for Casement's non-execution: "the word traitor as applied to a rebel has always been a mere vituperation from the days of Wallace to those of Sir Edward Carson and Sir Frederick Smith...Certainly, no one outside Great Britain will have any desire to apply it, even for vituperative purposes, to Casement."
Adrian Weale, then, writes from inside Great Britain; and, although adroit and engaging as a chronicler, he can venture opinions with an officiousness and sweeping impatience that suggest he hasn't entirely shaken off habits of mind developed during his seven-year stint as British army intelligence officer.
In the case of John Amery, it has to be said, tut-tutting seems pretty unavoidable. Almost from infancy, Amery was compulsively drawn to deceit, subversion, and betrayal. His nurse recalled "an extremely abnormal boy" and his prep school headmaster described him as having "no moral code at all".
Amery went on to appal the boys and masters at Harrow (from where he was expelled) and to dismay a succession of private tutors appointed by his father, the helpless and blameless Conservative MP, Leo Amery. An alcoholic, woman-beating fraudster and bankrupt who turned tricks as a rent boy even after he'd married a prostitute, Amery was a prodigy of personal vice. In 1936, he left England for Europe. He remained in Vichy France after the German invasion, nursing his fanatical anti-semitism and anti-communism. In 1942, the Secretary of State for India's dropout son was suddenly recognised as a figure of propaganda value and was invited to Berlin. There, he fatefully tried to create an anti-Russian unit of British soldiers to fight in the Waffen SS. He also made pro-Axis broadcasts and speeches. In April, 1945, he was arrested in Italy by Captain Alan Whicker, the future television personality. In London, Amery pleaded guilty to high treason. Despite cogent psychiatric evidence that he was a psychopath and "moral imbecile and despite his father's moving pleas for a reprieve, he was hanged in December, aged 33.
William Joyce, "Lord Haw-Haw" was also executed for treason after the second World War. Since, unlike numerous other renegades, Amery was never an active member of the German armed forces and posed no real threat, why was he picked out? Answer: he was "of a type that was particular anathema to the British state - the borderline establishment figure who rejects, for whatever reason, the values that he is supposed to hold dear." Roger Casement, Weale argues, was also such a figure.
This insight is unobjectionable but hardly original. It certainly does not make good the ludicrous innuendo that inevitably arises from the extended comparison of the two men: that Casement, who as a British consul publicised appalling human rights violations in the Belgian Congo and the Peruvian Amazon, is of a like moral stature to the psychopathic Jew-hating Amery. Both, according to Weale, were undone by "self-importance" and a "lack of social and moral restraint", the latter characteristic being partly evident from their "bizarre sexual behaviour". In fact, Weale asserts, Casement is "primarily remembered now because of the continuing controversy over the three diaries" in which he "is shown to be an actively (compulsively, almost) homosexual, finding his sexual partners in the lowest strata of society".
It's this barely suppressed detestation of its subjects that undermines Patriot Traitors and its claim to illuminating "the real meaning of treason." There is scope for a searching critique of vaunted self-sacrificial figures like Casement; but this book, which depends on and too readily assumes the reader's assent to its brusque intolerance, is no such thing.
Joseph O'Neill is a writer and barrister. His book, Blood-Dark Track: A Family History, was published earlier this year