Death of a Patriot

She was a tall, dreamy girl, a crack shot with a pistol, and she rode to hounds like a hussar. Horses were in the family, for her Irish father was hard-riding Tommy Gonne of Donnybrook, a colonel in the British army. She had been born (of an English mother, who died in her childhood) within cannon shot of Aldershot, and privately educated in France by a governess with Republican views. At 16, she was head of her father's household in Dublin, where he was Assistant Adjutant General. She was presented in 1881 at the viceregal court, and she "danced with the Duke of Clarence, who trod excruciatingly on my satin-slippered toes." Visiting a great Irish country house a few months later, she saw Irish peasants being evicted, and their stone & thatch cottages being demolished by battering rams. "These people must be taught a lesson," said her host. "That damned Land League is ruining the country." When she asked her father about it, he said: "The people have a right to the land." Later, in France, someone asked her: "Why don't you free Ireland as Joan of Arc freed France?" It was like a mandate.

Diamond Thought. On a white horse, wearing a green dress and her bronze knee-length hair done up in thick braids, Maud Gonne rode into Donegal, where the British battering rams had made a thousand people homeless. She organized resistance meetings, put hope into the peasants, fear into landlords' agents. Once, riding through a mountain glen, she came upon police guarding four young prisoners. Said she, in a voice of authority: "Let them go now; I take full responsibility," and waved the prisoners away. The peasants called her a Woman of the Sidhe, one with magic powers. Her fame spread. An elderly English liberal baronet followed her to a Donegal cottage, thrust a diamond pendant into her hand as he unsuccessfully proposed. Said Maud: "I thank you for the gracious thought, and your kindness shall not be wasted. This jewel will save this family from eviction."

Poet William Butler Yeats fell madly in love with her, addressed many of his loveliest lyrics to her. She starred in his play, Cathleen ni Houlihan. Very tall (6 ft.), wearing her Paris clothes carelessly in those days, she was, in George Bernard Shaw's words, "outrageously beautiful." She wore a clasp in which was set an English musket ball that had killed a Frenchman fighting for Ireland. Yeats's love turned to despair when he found that neither spiritualism nor poetry could purge her mind of the British, and he wrote sadly:

Why should I blame her that she filled

my days With misery, or that she would of late

Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,

Or hurled the little streets upon the great,

Had they but courage equal to desire?

Said Maud: "You make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness, and you are happy in that. The world should thank you for not marrying me." She began campaigning for the release of Irish fighters serving life sentences in England's jails, and, after three trips to the U.S. raising funds and commotion, had the British government so worried that they freed the prisoners.

In Paris she heard that some private letters, stolen by British agents, had fallen into the hands of a newspaper editor. She found the editor in a shooting gallery on the Champs Elysees, challenged him to a shooting match, put her six pistol shots into the center of the card. Said she, in a loud voice: "If any man insulted me in a way detrimental to my work, I should take the insult as the challenge, and that," pointing to the perforated card, "would be my answer."

Widow's Weeds. In Paris, finally, she met the man she wanted to marry: John MacBride, "a wiry, soldierly looking man, with red hair and skin burned brick red by the South African sun" (where he had been commander of a volunteer brigade fighting for the Boers against the British). Wrote Sinn Feiner Arthur Griffith to them: "For your own sakes and for the sake of Ireland to whom you both belong, don't get married." But they did, with joy plotting together enough potential terrorism to sink the British Empire. But temperament drove them apart, and two years later they separated. In the 1916 Easter Rebellion, the British captured John MacBride and shot him.

Maud Gonne wore widow's weeds for MacBride, but also for Ireland. She did not agree with Eamon de Valera's government. She wrote her memoirs, and was outraged when Communist organizers came to Ireland in 1930 and "one young puppy had the cheek to tell me they had come to teach us how to fight." Bedridden but still a political force, she backed her son, Sean MacBride, and his Republican Party in a successful campaign against De Valera in 1948, but when she went to the polls, one who saw her cried: "That woman is exactly like a ruined cathedral." All those who had known her in her great days were gone.

In his best known poem about her, Yeats had written:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep

Last week, in a rambling, old-world mansion outside Dublin, old and grey and full of sleep, Maud Gonne died at 87.

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