The Easter Rising
After returning permanently from Paris to Dublin in 1905 MacBride played an important part with other Irish nationalists in preparing for an Insurrection. Because he was so well known to the British the conspirators thought it wise to keep him outside their secret military group planning a Rising. As a result he happened to find himself in the midst of the Rising without notice. He was in Dublin early on Easter Monday morning to meet his brother Dr. Anthony MacBride who was arriving from Westport to be married on the Wednesday. The Major walked up Grafton St and saw Thomas MacDonagh in full uniform. He offered his services to Thomas MacDonagh and was appointed second-in-command at the Jacob's factory. MacBride, after a court martial under the Defence of The Realms Acts, was shot by British troops in Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin.
He was executed on 5 May 1916, two days before his forty-eighth birthday. Facing the British firing squad, he refused to be blindfolded, saying "I have looked down the muzzles of too many guns in the South African war to fear death and now please carry out your sentence." He is buried in the cemetery at Arbour Hill Prison in Dublin.
Yeats was jealous of MacBride for marrying Maud Gonne, and later heard negative reports of MacBride's treatment of Gonne in their marriage(from Gonne herself). He was also aware of MacBride's alleged sexual abuse of their step-daughter,Isault, who Yeats had proposed to.
He gave him the following ambivalent eulogy in his poem "Easter, 1916":
- "This other man I had dreamed
- A drunken, vain-glorious lout.
- He had done most bitter wrong
- To some who are near my heart,
- Yet I number him in the song;
- He, too, has resigned his part
- In the casual comedy;
- He, too, has been changed in his turn,
- Transformed utterly:
- A terrible beauty is born."
Maud Gonne wrote to Yeats "No I dont like your poem, it isn't worthy of you & above all it isn't worthy of its subject... As for my husband he has entered eternity by the great door of sacrifice...so that praying for him I can also ask for his prayers".
Read more about this topic: John MacBride
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