I Signed My Death Warrant Read Online Free Page A

senior republicans in Mountjoy jail, such as Arthur Griffith, Eamonn Duggan and Eoin MacNeill, and he was instrumental in securing their release from prison, along with the release of Desmond Fitzgerald and Robert Barton. He also arranged the release of Erskine Childers, the editor of the Irish Bulletin , following his arrest. Cope actually met with Childers while he was being held at Dublin Castle on 9 May 1921. A couple of weeks later when British intelligence raided Collins’ finance office in Mary Street, they found a letter from Childers informing Collins of the ‘settlement outlined to me by Cope in the Castle a week ago’. Childers noted that Cope ‘is probably a good actor, but his ostensible attitude was one of almost feverish anxiety to get something done and the business over’.
    The assistant under–secretary’s efforts to initiate a negotiated settlement were bitterly resented by the military. One British officer noted that Cope was ‘universally detested by everyone in the Castle, it being generally supposed that he was going to sell us all to the rebels’.
    Sir John Anderson, the under–secretary for Ireland, warned assistant under secretary Mark Sturgis that if Cope succeeded in persuading Lloyd George to talk with Sinn Féin that the British military might ‘upset the apple cart not because they want to but out of a mixture of personal pride, soldierly prejudice and downright stupidity.’
    After the events in Dublin and the heavy crown losses during May, Sir Neville Macready, the general office in charge of British forces in Ireland, argued that the British had to change their policy in Ireland. If Sinn Féin did not accept the new southern parliament by the deadline of 14 July, he suggested that as many as a hundred men week should be executed, and that the government could not turn around and say ‘this cannot go on’ after the first week. ‘The Cabinet must understand that any man found with revolvers or bombs would be shot at once,’ he said. Sir Maurice Hankey, the chief cabinet secretary, told Lloyd George that General Macready asked him if the cabinet would go through with the coercion.
    â€˜Will they begin to howl when they hear of our shooting a hundred men a week?’ Macready asked. Maybe his argument was just designed as shock treatment to force the cabinet to think seriously about changing its Irish policy. The Irish Situation Committee of the cabinet was warned on 15 June that it has to be ‘all out or get out’.
    â€˜Military action to be effective must be vigorous and ruthless,’ Anderson told Chief Secretary Hamar Greenwood. ‘Dreadful things must happen. Many innocent people must inevitably suffer and the element of human error cannot be eliminated’. He added that resorting to such all-out coercion without the full support of parliament and the country would be ‘the wildest folly’.
    Collins learned that the British had decided to declare martial law throughout the twenty-six counties and intensify their campaign. British forces, which would be trebled, would intensify their operations, especially their searches and internment. ‘All means of transport, from push bicycles up, will be commandeered, and allowed only on permit,’ he warned de Valera.
    On 24 June de Valera was arrested, and Austin Stack was designated to take over from him as acting president. It was Collins who had taken over the previous November, following the arrest of Griffith, so he was obviously being relegated.
    At this point Cope succeeded in persuading the British cabinet, which was already shaken by doubts shown by the sce­nario outlined by Macready, to try to negotiate with the Irish first. ‘No British government in modern times has appeared to make so complete and sudden a reversal of policy,’ Churchill noted.
    Cope organised de Valera’s prompt release and asked him to make himself