By James P. Cavanaugh
My thesis is that Sherlock Holmes was employed by the British Foreign Office off and on from about 1876 through 1920 to, among other things, infiltrate and spy upon the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
The context in which the IRB was established can be found in the state of Anglo-Irish affairs in the mid 19th century. This can be briefly described as a policy of genocidal practices by the British on the Irish. The most spectacular example of this is, of course, the so-called "potato famine" in Ireland from 1846- 1850, during which time, the population of the island was halved. Most of this decrease was due to death by starvation. During those same years, Ireland--under British absentee landlords and military control--was a net exporter of food. In the aftermath of this holocaust, the surviving Irish--at home and increasingly, in exile around the world--harbored one burning desire, i.e. to rid Ireland forever of British rule. Not surprisingly, they viewed the British Empire as a worldwide criminal enterprise bent on their annihilation.
Consequently, in the next half century, the Irish took increasingly militant steps to get the British out of Ireland. Examples of these include the establishment of the Young Ireland movement in the late 1840's and the rebellion of 1848, agitation for Irish land ownership, and the establishment of the boycott--named after its target, Capt. Boycott, an English land agent in County Mayo. By the 1860's, the tempo had quickened with the establishment of the Feinians--an underground military organization. This group was the first Irish revolutionary effort to receive substantial support from the Irish in exile in America: money, weapons and Irish veterans of the American Civil War were sent to Ireland in support of the Feinian rebellion of 1867.
It was in the context of this struggle IRB was formed. The Irish, faced with the imperial might of the British Empire at its height, determined a change in tactics was necessary to achieve their goal because they were faced with a highly centralized world-wide colonial empire they could not match in a conventional war. They turned the equation around and invented modern guerrilla warfare and terror. The Irish in exile were scattered across the globe--this was advantageous to a decentralized organizational structure that would prove impossible for the British to destroy entirely in any one conflict. This was the backbone of the IRB. Established in Dublin in 1858 by James Stephens, the IRB was made up of thousands of "cells". These three to five person groups swore a secret oath and operated unknown and independently of each other under a secret chain of command.
This was the group Holmes was sent to America to infiltrate in the late 1870's, with the cover of an actor with the Sasanoff Shakespearian Company. See Baring-Gould, Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street. He was recruited by his brother Mycroft--a senior and very shadowy British Foreign Office secretary--who, in effect, was establishing the British Secret Service.
That Mycroft moved in the very highest circles is clear from the reported references to ministerial and even prime ministerial contact and consultation with both Mycroft and his agent Sherlock. As Holmes best put it "Again and again, Mycroft's words had decided the national policy."(BRUC) Just as clearly, Mycroft repeatedly employed Sherlock as his secret agent--Mycroft, the home office of the British Empire, his Pall Mall lodgings, the Diogenes Club and Whitehall--Sherlock the field agent who in his long career traveled the global empire from East to West. This distinction is so pronounced that Mycroft's carriage ride to Victoria Station is given far more comment than Sherlock's trip to Tibet.(FINA)
So if Mycroft is a senior British Government official in the late 19th and early 20th century period--with what would he be concerned? Two things, above all else, dominate this period of British history: 1) the Irish question--considered the chief domestic concern with foreign implications and 2) the rise of Germany-- considered the chief foreign concern with domestic implications.
Using the Baring-Gould chronology, it would appear the original Valley of Fear, set in the Pennsylvania coal fields, occurred about 1868. The secret agent in this story--Birdy Edwards--a.k.a. Jack McMurdo a.k.a. John Douglas--is an Irishman recruited by Pinkerton to infiltrate a secret Irish-American labor group-- the Scrowers a.k.a. the Molly McGuires--with links to the IRB. Edwards is able to convict most of the leaders of the Scrowers but is forced to flee for the next 20 years across America and ultimately, back to the U.K. pursued by a shadowy group bent on revenge. The only Irish-American group of this period with this reach over time and space was the IRB--which had agents on every steamship line and railroad from London to Ladysmith, Australia.
The IRB had a particularly good network of agents in the imperial capitol itself--London. Who were these people? How were they viewed by the nomenclature of this time? Simply, they were viewed as criminals. They supported themselves through the use of criminal schemes--especially robbery, which they termed "expropriation". Lenin and Stalin, during this same period, organized a series of successful bank robberies to support the Russian revolutionary movement. A similar unsuccessful attempt by a London group on the imperial Capital can be found in The Adventure of the Red Headed League. Here a scheme to rob a bank is masterminded by the Anglo-Irish duo of Moriarty and Moran.
They killed people. In 1882, shortly after Watson meets Holmes, Britain's highest official in Ireland, Lord Cavendish, is assassinated in Phoenix Park, Dublin. The IRB-Moriarty connection in London is made clear to Holmes' brother by the role of Moriarty in the pursuit and the ultimate elimination of Birdy Edwards, the informer. This revelation clearly set off all kinds of bells and whistles in Whitehall with the results that Sherlock, at Mycroft's direction, makes Moriarty and Company his primary target for the next three years.
Holmes is, by now in 1889, virtually a full-time agent of the British Foreign Office. During this time, he is called in to sort out The Naval Treaty mess at Whitehall and begins an association with the Admiralty--also one of Mycroft's special areas of operation--which we know from the The Adventure of the Bruce Partington Plans. Events reach a climax in the early 1890's. By 1891, the cat and mouse game between the Holmes' brothers and Moriarty and Moran has become a titanic struggle, literally to the death. Holmes, pursued by Moriarty's assassins, flees London, with Mycroft's singular assistance and apparently kills Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls.(FINA) But Moriarty's organization does not die. Holmes, now is forced into the full retreat of the Great Hiatus. He is pursued with vigor by Moriarty's surviving associates, headed by the ruthless Col. Sebastian Moran.(EMPT)
During the Great Hiatus, two men join the British government, Roger Casement, just down from Oxford to enter the British Consular Services and Erskine Childers, an Anglo-Irish gentleman who becomes a clerk in the House of Commons bureaucracy. We will hear more of them shortly.
In 1894, Holmes returns to London and is immediately beset by Moran's agents, culminating in Moran's personal air-gun assassination attempt, a gun of German manufacture incidentally, resulting in Moran's arrest.(EMPT) The Holmes brothers now move from triumph to triumph, for in 1895, Mycroft assigns Sherlock to the most sensitive of national security cases: The Adventure of the Bruce Partington Plans, previously noted as an Admiralty case. At this time, the "Star Wars" of defense projects dealt with submarine technology. For a maritime empire such as Britain, there was no more important area of technological military development. The same was true of Britain's principal rival, imperial Germany. Holmes' recovery of the stolen British submarine plans from German spies results in his highest honor. His is received by Queen Victoria and presented with an imperial pin. Thus begins a twenty year struggle between the Holmes brothers and their German counterparts which culminates in the Canon in the events of WWI and His Last Bow.
During this period, Erskine Childers and Roger Casement steadily advanced their careers in the British Civil Service. Indeed, both achieved a certain level of fame. Childers published The Riddle of the Sands in1903, the first modern spy novel, involving a German naval plan to invade Britain, which shook the complacent British Admiralty and brought about the creation of the modern Royal Navy. Casement achieved a worldwide reputation for his report on human rights abuses in Africa and South America for which he was knighted in 1905. An honor incidentally, Holmes chose to forgo in 1903.
Both men were well known to the Holmes brothers by this time. The command and control cadre of the British Empire formed, after all, a small village. During these years, Sherlock retired to Sussex, Mycroft moved even deeper into the shadowy halls of power at Whitehall. The IRB continued in its struggle to oust the British from Ireland by opening negotiations for arms with the Germans, utilizing two newly recruited agents, Sir Roger Casement and Mr. Erskine Childers.
By 1912, British Foreign Office's concern has reached such a high level the Prime Minister himself, Herbert Asquith, visits Homes in Sussex to ask him to accept a counter-espionage assignment aimed at the Irish-German connection.
Holmes again travels undercover to America to infiltrate the IRB in Buffalo, New York. For two years, he works inside the IRB in the US, Britain, and Ireland, following up on the German-Irish connection.(LAST) Again we find the same theme, the Germans are after British naval secrets, and the Irish are involved on the German side.
In His Last Bow, Holmes, now 60 years old, ultimately uncovers a German spy network headed by Von Bork and supported by Baron von Herling, head of the German legation. Significantly, Holmes uses his Irish-American, i.e. IRB identity as Altamont to gain Von Bork's confidence. He discovers Von Bork is helping to foment rebellion in Ireland, while at the same time stealing British naval codes. Contemporaneously, Casement and Childers are in Berlin and London respectively dealing with the Germans on behalf of the IRB to smuggle guns into Ireland to arm the same rebellion.
Days before Holmes captures Von Bork, Childers, an accomplished sailor, successfully pilots his yacht filled with arms and ammunition from Germany through the British fleet and lands north of Dublin. These same arms are unloaded and stored by the IRB and are used in 1916 to arm the Irish rebels of the Easter Rising who seize Dublin and proclaim the Irish Republic. Childers is never caught and in fact goes on to serve with distinction in the Royal Navy during WWI. He later goes on to fight on the Irish side in the Irish War of Independent of 1919-1922.
After Von Bork's capture, the Irish-German network is seriously compromised and a second attempt to smuggle arms to Ireland by Casement is intercepted off Skibbereen, County Cork. This is a small harbor and fishing village on the Southwest Irish coast specifically mentioned by Holmes in His Last Bow as a place he visited disguised as an Irish rebel. Captured by a British naval detachment, Casement is charged with treason and hanged. He holds the distinction of being the only British Knight so punished by his government in the twentieth century. At this point, darkness falls, and we hear no more of either Holmes or his brother. What happened?
Presumably, Mycroft, now pushing 70, dies in office as he literally had no other life. He went on his powerful but obscure Pall Mall-Whitehall--Diogenes Club circuit until he dropped and survived by his bachelor brother, was quietly buried with full imperial honors.
Sherlock, I believe, rode the tiger to the end. As WWI raged, the level of Anglo-German savagery was without parallel. In early 1916, just after Holmes' return to England from Ireland, the IRB led, German-armed Irish rebels seized Dublin and proclaimed Ireland's independence. The British response reduced the Empire's second city to ashes.
At this point, the British flooded Ireland with secret agents intent on infiltrating the IRB, now rechristened the IRA or Irish Republican Army after the proclamation of the Irish Republic in 1916. Certainly, Holmes would have been the ideal man for this type of operation. A secret war now developed in Ireland. This IRA vs. the British Secret Service struggle ultimately culminates in the successful Irish infiltration of the British organization, and the resulting assassination of almost all British agents in Dublin on "Bloody Sunday", November 21, 1920. British intelligence in Ireland was dealt a blow from which it never recovered.
Considering what we know of His Last Bow and of Holmes generally, it is inconceivable he would have gone back to beekeeping during the British Empire's ultimate hour of trial. I feel it far more likely he, like the old war horse he was, would have jumped at the chance to repay those he must have felt betrayed King and country by rebelling during war time. If so, he fought his last battle in Ireland. Too old for the fields of Flanders and too knowledgeable about the IRB to sit passively by, he fixed on the Irish problem as his way to help save the embattled British Empire. Consequently, I believe, based on the available evidence, an aging Holmes fought his last fight in the Irish War of Independence and joined his departed brother among the dim departed souls of those who lived and died for the British Empire in those terrible years.
On a contemporary note, two curious composite characters appear in the recent film Michael Collins which deals with the life of that brave and brilliant Irish hero. Collins was the man who masterminded the IRA infiltration of the British Secret Service during the Irish War of Independence. In the film, Collins has an agent inside the British spy headquarters in Dublin Castle. Also, in the film, the British bring a tall, thin, imperious, English agent to head up their counter-intelligence efforts to kill Collins and his associates. Collins, alerted by his own agent in the Castle, beats this mysterious super-spy to the punch and has him killed in his room at the stylish Shellbourne Hotel in Dublin on "Bloody Sunday". In fact, the Collins' agent in Dublin Castle was a man named Joseph Kavanagh. The true identity of the British agent remains shrouded in secrecy.