Captain Jack White. Leo Keohane

heard what was done as Dr Taggart [the North Antrim Liberal electoral organiser] did not seem anxious for me to be present, though on what grounds I cannot say, as the captain is anxious to enlist a number of Protestants who may not be ardent home rulers but who are opposed to Carson’s histrionics. I saw Captain White. He is strong for Home Rule and has been in communication with Lord Dunraven, though whether he is a Dunravenite pure and simple or not, I could not say. There was talk of holding the meeting immediately after Carson had discharged the last of his wooden guns in Ulster. His concluding play is to terminate during this month.59

      While not exactly the wholehearted support that White maintained it was, it could be said that the subsequent meeting held at Ballymoney was White’s brain-child, and it is a mark of the feeling of dismay among liberal Protestants opposed to Carson that such a meeting could be held so readily. White was joined by Sir Roger Casement on the platform, and from the very beginning White’s talent to exacerbate and disconcert was evident. He maintains that his original idea was to protest against the creed of ‘lovelessness’ that Carson promulgated but that on the insistence of Casement it was changed to an anti-Carson lawlessness.60 White’s appeal, he said, was to God, Casement’s to Caesar.61 His latent millenarianism, which becomes evident in his later letters, comes to the fore here in an esoteric flight of fancy about ‘Ireland as the pivot of a great world change’:

      Her little parochial rebellions achieve nothing but a morbid intensification of the martyr-mania of her people. Her real upheavals come in unison with world wide movements and connect her effort towards internal unity with the unity of mankind.62

      ‘We’ll get on alright if you’re honest’, he told Casement whose response was that this was ‘most insulting’; nevertheless, White, surprisingly, believed it cleared the air for ‘affection and humorous tolerance’ to develop.63

      White wrote that he was in Pentonville Prison serving three months for sedition and in an adjoining cell to Casement the night before he was hanged, and a note of criticism still lingered about the planning for the Ballymoney meeting, even after all the years. Casement, he said, was a man of ‘kingly presence’ marred by his training as a diplomat. ‘Do all diplomats think they can wrangle anything?’ 64 he asks when pointing out that Casement’s objection to the lawlessness of Carson was inconsistent with an incident in Cork when he called for three cheers for the same gentleman. White believed that Casement was mistaken, not just about the nationalist cause, which White never embraced; he also believed that Casement, when failed by the British Empire, turned to the Kaiser. Then, in his own idiosyncratic way White stated, ‘I knew by intuition, before I knew by reason, that the destiny of Ireland had nothing to do with Caesars or empires except to outlast the lot and rise on their ruins.’65

      A clue to White’s more ready antipathy lies in his frank remark that there was a ‘rival messiahship’ between them.66 Armour, who was more than aware of friction between them, wrote in a letter to his son that it was he who had invited Casement down after receiving a letter from him about a similar meeting to that which White was planning. After various discussions about the constitution of the panel of speakers and in particular the ‘lawlessness’ clause, Casement later told Armour that White had (some time earlier in Belfast):

      opened on Sir Roger, accused him of every kind of crime, winding up with the charge that he was not an honest man. […] Sir Roger told me that and bound me over to secrecy, [Casement’s] explanation of the matter is that there is a slate off. Certainly White is peculiar.67