British Conspiracy Theories and the Irish War of Independence

Historians have not paid enough attention to the part played by conspiracy theories in the war for Irish independence. A few have studied how conspiracy theories affected events before and after Ireland's revolutionary war. In 1974, for example, Alan J. Ward investigated the German Plot that was used to justify the mass arrest of Sinn Féin leaders in May 1918; surprisingly, he discovered that members of the cabinet, including the prime minister, believed in this plot's existence.¹ In a 1992 article Peter Hart considered the various conspiracy theories concerning the assassination of Sir Henry Wilson in 1922—especially those that attributed responsibility for Wilson's death to Michael Collins—and concluded that the assassins had acted on their own initiative.² More recently, James McConnel has discussed accusations that the Irish Parliamentary Party was conspiring against franchise reform in 1918 out of fear that young Irish men and women would vote for Sinn Féin.³ And of course there is a long-standing controversy concerning the Black Diaries of Roger Casement—the purported private journals of the former British consul turned Irish revolutionary who was executed for treason after the failed rising of 1916—are these diaries genuine, or are they forgeries?⁴ But not one historian has investigated what part, if any, conspiracy theories played in the war of independence itself, between the Irish declaration of independence in January 1919 and the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in January 1922. And this absence of specialized research is reflected in general histories: the six most recent histories of Ireland's revolutionary period do not even have entries for "conspiracy" in their indices.⁵

This is odd because the early twentieth century was a golden age for British conspiracy theories. The prewar period had been marked by spy fever, navy scares, fears of invasion, and even the first modern UFO sightings.⁶ Between 1912 and 1914 unionists had responded to "the present conspiracy to set up a home-rule parliament in Ireland" with a treasonable conspiracy of their own.⁷ During the war fear of Germany's hidden hand had been widespread and had produced sensational allegations of sexual corruption.⁸ After the war the "red menace" was a factor in British politics until at least 1924, when the publication of the Zinoviev Letter affected the result of the general election.⁹

In the meantime Nesta Webster was popularizing a conspiratorial theory of history in her books The French Revolution: A Study in Democracy (1919), World Revolution: The Plot against Civilization (1921), and Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (1924), and in her articles for The Patriot, a radical right-wing periodical founded by the eighth Duke of Northumberland, Alan Ian Percy, in 1922.¹⁰ And of course theories of a world Jewish conspiracy reached their high-water mark in Great Britain in 1920. The Jewish Peril, an English translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was published in January. Among those who were impressed was Winston Churchill, the secretary of state for war. In February he wrote in an article for the Illustrated Sunday Herald about a "sinister confederacy" of "international Jews"—a "worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization"—and how "the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others."¹¹ And in July the Morning Post published "The Cause of World Unrest," a series of articles on Jewish Bolshevism and Judeo-Masonic conspiracies.¹²

Even outside of the anti-Semitic milieu, however, the fear of conspiracy was widespread in postwar British politics, and in this case, by contrast, this fear was not without foundation. The Easter Rising had, after all, been the product of a conspiracy by members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who had infiltrated the Irish Volunteers, constituted a military committee within the Volunteer executive, coordinated their preparations with the leaders of the Irish Citizen Army...