Hamil Grant

Away back in the later eighties, when Ireland was in the throes of her penultimate fight for the principle of self-government, all true sons of Erin had marked out for their particular obloquy two individuals who have since become notorious—namely, Piggott, the forger, and Major Le Caron, the spy. Those whose memories travel back easily to the famous Times Commission will recollect how offensively both names stunk in the nostrils of all who supported the late Irish leader. Among Nationalists, it will be remembered, the spy was invariably spoken of under the name "Le Carrion," and even those who gave him the benefit of a proper pronunciation of his pseudonym were wont to utter it with that peculiarly hissing emphasis with which Irishmen, among all men, seem able to invest the names of those who run counter to their political bias. The positive venom which certain eloquent Nationalists seem actually to instil into the pronunciation of names like "Dublin Castle," "Major Trant," "Lord Clanricarde" lingers long afterwards in the memory of English listeners, just as the rattle of certain snakes is said ever afterwards to linger in the ears of those who have escaped them in the jungle. To hear the late Mr Biggar, for instance, utter the nom de guerre of the famous British spy was a real lesson in the onomatopoeic art, and on his lips the name, otherwise inoffensive and, indeed, on English tongues a liquid enough quantity, was made to attain a sibilancy which was truly weird in its effect.

Henri Le Caron

By permission of Mr. William Heinemann

How came the Major by his adopted name, and was it really meant to portend anything? It was humorously said at the time that the spy had taken his pseudonym from the French form of the name of that mythical boatman of classic memory who was wont for a few halfpence to ferry the souls of the damned across the river Styx, Charon, to wit. Le Caron is, however, a common enough French name, and the Major had lived some years in France previously to migrating to the United States, in which country Thomas Beach first became Henri Le Caron. Born at Colchester, Essex, in 1841, Beach belonged to a type of family which was clearly of old-fashioned puritanical stock, and the point is important enough in view of his later claim to have acted the rÔle of traitor purely on the ground of moral principle. In his autobiography he tells how from his earliest days he had been brought up to cherish the Bible and to loathe all forms and quantities of alcoholic liquor. His home life was altogether not a very bright one and dull domestic repression soon began to exert its own particular reaction on a character which was already bursting with the spirit of adventure and derring-do. He records it that the routine of his existence grew too monotonous for the larger soul within him, and how he ran away from home and a Quaker's shop at least three times before his sixteenth year, breaking his apprentice bonds and travelling far and wide, yet managing, at whatever town he made a halt, to earn what he calls a respectable living. Like most characters of his obviously crude and untutored kind, in whom the spirit of romance is a considerable, if a somewhat jumbled, equation, there was not a little of the megalomaniac in the boy, and even in those early days his soul thirsted after the big things of life. In young Beach, too, there was a bit of artistry of sorts, and just as it was a chief ambition of Spy Schulmeister to dance like a marquis of the old regime, and a foible of Spy Stieber to accumulate pectoral decorations testifying to his honour, so also the youthful Le Caron discovered a precocious passion for hymns and the music of the church organ. At Colchester he became a leading and decorous choir lad, and according to himself it was his love for psalmody rather than any regard for his puritanical parents which invariably brought about his return, prodigal-wise, to the paternal roof. One is obliged in that spirit of fairness which gives the devil all that is due to him, to insist on what are otherwise prosaic enough details, and all the more so because, to the man's admirers, his piety provides an argument for the rÔle he afterwards adopted in life.

Having spent some years in Paris, where he worked as an agent for that now-extinct old worthy, John Arthur, earning a living which enabled him to present a highly respectable figure, he clearly felt a call, he tells us, to join the North in 1861, when the kindling American Civil War made the States a kind of promised land for all sorts of adventurous spirits, most of whom, it may be supposed, were still feeling the influences of the comparatively fresh Napoleonic legend. Taking out a passport in the name of Henri Le Caron, young Beach shipped on the Great Eastern, then about to take her maiden trip across the Atlantic, and landed duly in New York, where the military authorities enlisted him as a private in the Pennsylvania Reserves. Le Caron—he was never after 1861 known by the name of Beach—passes over his military career with unexpected haste in his autobiography, it must be said. He was present, he tells, at important engagements during the course of the war, first as an infantry soldier, subsequently as a cavalryman, receiving promotion and being especially detailed for scouting operations. In 1864 he was gazetted second lieutenant and by 1865 had attained the rank of regimental adjutant with the title of Major—a rank which became, it may be said in passing, at the close of the war, so common throughout the States, that humorists were wont to tell how in 1866 it was impossible to throw a brick in any given direction where men happened to assemble without hitting an officer of that standing.

Le Caron, it is interesting to note, records his act of religious faith in the following words:—"We are impelled by some unknown force to carry out, not of our own volition or possible design, the work of this life, indicated by a combination of circumstances to which unconsciously we adapt ourselves." This, it may be remembered, was the religion of the late Prince Bismarck, and it must be allowed that it is a highly convenient and elastic hypothesis of life. It goes far to explain how he came to be associated with Fenianism. Le Caron declares, however, that he was far from having gone in search of the Fenians; on the contrary, he insists, the Fenians came in search of Le Caron. The Major disappoints us rather badly, nevertheless, by failing to show how it was that the Irish in America, even in those days a powerful community, should have sought out the psalmodical soldier who abhorred alcohol in all its forms and possible quantities, and why he, a Briton, of all men, should have been singled out to put life into the Irish-American movement for the emancipation of the Sister Isle. At the head of that movement in 1865 was James Stephens, who directed the organisation both in Ireland and America, while his agents on American soil included some of the shrewdest Irishmen of that age and, indeed, some of the most prosperous. Le Caron explains briefly how he first entered the movement as a spy. A fellow-officer had informed him quite casually that the main object of the Irish-American agitation of that date was the invasion of Canada. This startling bit of news proved more than sufficient to call out the fires of the old puritanical moralist dormant in the Major, who proceeds to inform us in the language of tragic passion which one applies to a tailor who has omitted a minor detail, that he "felt quite indignant at learning what was being done against the interests of my native country." Accordingly, and in order to unload his chest of the perilous secret, he addressed a letter to his father, a local tradesman, at Colchester, informing the sire that an attack was contemplated on the Dominion by a group of bold bad Irishmen. Evidently there was in the Beach tribe a congenital incapacity for holding a secret, for no sooner had the old man read his son's letter than, "startled and dismayed at the tidings it conveyed, he, true Briton that he was," made over the letter to the then sitting member for Colchester, a Mr Rebow. It was this gentleman who was instrumental in procuring Le Caron his salaried commission to act in America as a spy for the British police authorities.

In 1867, Major Le Caron, freed from military service, was looking around him for the means of maintaining his family, and in the course of a visit to England, was instructed by the British Government to ally himself with the Fenian organisation in America, "in order," as he frankly admits, "to play the rÔle of spy in the rebel ranks." His adventurous nature welcomed the work as congenial, he says, while his British instincts made him a willing worker from a sense of right. Accordingly, on his return to America, he offered his services as a military man to General O'Neill, who was to lead the anti-British forces in the event of another uprising. On his cordial acceptance by O'Neill, as well as initiation, on his solemn oath, into the Fenian Brotherhood under that soldier's sponsorship, Le Caron returned to his Western home and lost no time "in commencing to lead my double life," as he puts it. At Lockport, Illinois, he set about the organisation of a Fenian "circle" in which he took the position officially known by the title of "center," or commander, a post which entitled him to receive all official reports and communications issued by O'Neill. These reports were duly transmitted to London by the Major and one pauses here to reflect that in this supplementary office Le Caron might not inappropriately have borne the subsidiary title of "scenter." The soul of the Major was clearly one of no ordinary beauty and versatility, for in order to supplement his gains as a secret-service agent, he accepted about this time a comfortable post as hospital steward in a vast gaol in Illinois. Here, he naÏvely admits, he felt at home, because, as he writes, "in such a vast assembly of criminals, there were many whose characters and careers formed subjects for very interesting study to me. I was fortunate in being connected with the prison at a time when some more than usually clever and facile scoundrels were temporarily resident there." O'Neill was, however, on the look-out for energetic agents, and Le Caron was not suffered to remain long in the comparatively inactive life of an Illinois gaol. In response to a telegram from headquarters, he proceeded hurriedly—and apparently without giving due notice to his employers—to New York, where he was engaged as "major and military organiser of the Irish Republican Army," at a salary equivalent to £650 a year, a rare exchange for the few pounds he was being paid weekly as a prison official in Illinois. With his commission he received instructions to proceed on an organising tour, in the course of which, the Major learned, to his deep disgust, that he was expected to address public meetings as a sworn advocate of the Irish cause. He knew nothing whatever about Irish politics and was well aware that ignorance of Irish aspirations meant, in the opinion of most Irishmen, wholesale indifference, which was hardly worse than active hostility itself. Once, indeed, he found himself in a tight fix which called for all the undoubted nerve the spy possessed. The occasion was a Convention of the Fenian Brotherhood at Williamsburg. The Major tells the story in the course of his autobiography in the following words:—

Fenian Conventions came and passed; the organisation had grown to extraordinary proportions, as is shown by the fact that in 1868, when the Brotherhood made a demonstration at Philadelphia, not fewer than 6000 armed and uniformed Fenian soldiers paraded the city, with General O'Neill at their head and Le Caron among the staff. In the course of his work in the Eastern States, the Major had already distributed, he tells, 15,000 stands of arms and 3,000,000 rounds of ammunition for the prospective raid which promised shortly to be undertaken, on the prime condition, however, that the funds should be forthcoming to finance the adventure. In the spring of 1870 it was decided to make the projected move upon Canada, O'Neill declaring with a Kelt's enthusiasm that "no power on earth could stop it." Le Caron, who was, of course, already in active touch with the Ottawa authorities, met the British agents at Buffalo, giving them full particulars and details as to the Raid which was about to take place. On their departure to make complete preparations for all eventualities, O'Neill arrived at Buffalo, whence, and accompanied by Le Caron, he left for the Front. "O'Neill," writes the Major, "was full of enthusiasm and firmly believed that the Canadians would be taken entirely by surprise, while I myself was laughing at his coming discomfiture." Arrived at the frontier, O'Neill, who expected to find at least 1000 Fenians under arms—the nucleus of an army which was to attract another 500,000 Irishmen from all parts of America—discovered to his dismay that only 250 men had assembled; this number was swelled by the arrival of 250 more on the morrow, when the General, fearful of the effects of hesitation and delay, ordered his force to cross the border from Vermont into Canadian territory. The simple Irishman addressed his troops in early-Bonapartian fashion as follows:— "Soldiers! This is the advance guard of the Irish-American army for the liberation of Ireland from the yoke of the oppressor. For your own country's sake you enter that of the enemy. The eyes of your countrymen are upon you. Forward—March!"

The spy himself, from the crest of a slope, watched the advance of the little band of invaders as it crossed the border-line into British territory, some in Fenian uniform of green and gold, others in ordinary "Sunday" garb. Not a soul was in sight, nor anything like a force to oppose their progress. Le Caron well knew, however, that behind the ridge towards which the Fenian army advanced deployed, cheering wildly and with bayonets fixed, at least 1000 Canadian volunteers were lying in wait. As the invaders touched the slope, the Canadian rifles opened fire, the Army of Liberation ceased forthwith to exist, and the last the Major saw of General O'Neill was that officer's passing in a hackney-coach seated between the two policemen who had arrested him. Le Caron of course fled with the rest of the invaders, and immediately made his way to Ottawa for the purpose, he says somewhat unconvincingly, of personally "reporting" to the authorities as to the raid, the result of which had in all probability been telegraphed to Government House ten minutes after the fiasco. Duly he arrived at the political capital, where he was, he says, received with the honours that usually fall to the carriers of military dispatches. Here a significant enough incident occurred. Wishing to return home at once, Le Caron prepared for the journey only to find at the last moment that he was without funds for the ticket; he thereupon applied to a certain Judge, who wrote him a cheque for the unusually generous sum of £70—generous seeing that the sum was at least ten times the amount of his fare supposing him still to have lived in the West, while the fare from Ottawa to New York State does not exceed fifteen dollars at the farthest. With his usual dispatch in regard to matters in which one's curiosity not unnaturally looks for relief, Le Caron passes from the episode without volunteering any explanation of a satisfactory kind.

In the intervening time between the failure of O'Neill's rising and the advent of the society of United Irish Brothers, the Clan-na-gael, in 1873, Le Caron spent his time studying medicine. As a practitioner he claims to have had successes. His taste for spying seems nevertheless to have exceeded his love for medicine, for in 1873, with the coming of the Clan, we find him laying his plans to deal with that important body, which, it may be said, differed from all other Irish-American societies in the technical excellence of its organisation. Its primary object was to unite throughout America and the world all Irishmen who loved their country. Naturally the Major, although supposedly French, presented himself as a candidate for membership in the new organisation, and having improvised an Irish grandmother to fortify his candidacy, was in due course admitted to the Brotherhood on his sworn oath to be loyal to its covenants. From the very first, however, he became an object of suspicion to several prominent leaders of the movement, and it was only after a pressing fight for recognition that he was eventually appointed to such a position as should enable him to penetrate the arcana of the society's inner shrines. As with the Fenian body, he became in the Clan a member of the Military Board. Every document of value which afforded evidence of the Brotherhood's dynamite propaganda directed against English cities was, as in the F.B. days, transmitted to the British Home Office, the correspondence being actually carried on between Le Caron's wife and another member of her sex in London. Accordingly, one may readily believe the spy's own statement that while he was a member of the military councils of the Clan, he was also shaking hands with danger and discovery at every turn and only saved his skin by a miracle. In the course of his association with the Brotherhood Le Caron of course made the acquaintance of some of the most prominent Irishmen in America's anti-British movements of the past generation, among them Messrs Egan, O'Donovan Rossa and the late Patrick Ford. The last of this trio was never, he says, a member of the Clan nor any other secret society, however much he may have supported in his early days the physical-force views which were advocated by extremists of all kinds. Mr Ford owed his prominence, says the Major, to the wide influence of his paper, The Irish World, in the conduct of which was also associated his brother, Mr Austin Brendan Ford, as a business director. It was undoubtedly the force which kept together the various elements of the Irish community in the States; edited with great ability, it had a vast circulation, which went well into the hundreds of thousands and had its readers among Irishmen in every quarter of the globe. Mr Ford, though not a member of the Brotherhood, allowed himself, says Le Caron, to voice its policies through his paper.

Some idea of the influence of the Clan may be formed when one realises that between 1876 and 1880, Russian revolutionary societies were treating with the American organisation to carry out any part of the propaganda in which a common co-operation was possible. In return for Irish-American financial aid, in the event of an Anglo-Russian war, the Muscovite revolutionaries pledged assistance to the Irish in the cause of complete emancipation from the English bond. Two extremely wealthy Irish-Americans were prepared, it was understood, to support this strange Russo-Irish alliance with many millions of dollars. Included in a somewhat lengthy programme were the three items, assassination of Queen Victoria, the kidnapping of the Prince of Wales and the killing of the Tsar. All of these intentions Le Caron ferreted out, conveying due information to Scotland Yard. The late Mr Parnell the Major also met in America, becoming instrumental in "promoting" the Irish leader's Land League ideas in the States. Of Parnell Le Caron expressed the view that he was out wholly and solely for what financial rewards there were to be found in political agitation. Davitt he regarded as a simple soul, but a born conspirator and one who could not long be induced to tread a constitutional path. It is clear that Major Le Caron made the acquaintance of all who were prominently engaged in the Parnell movement, and it is a remarkable tribute to his powers of deception that until he returned to England for good and proved his real quality before the Commission, not one of the actors in the last phase of that memorable struggle ever suspected him of being a secret-service man.

It is not the purpose of this story to follow the Major throughout the whole of his career as a spy. His work, which differed but little in regard to its methods at any time or in any undertaking, cannot at all be said to have been of a class which required a very high type of mentality or any diplomacy worthy of that description. For all his prominence in the profession, it cannot be said that Le Caron, at any point in his career, ever rose above the status of a common informer. He himself admits that he owed much of his success to the fact that, finding himself among a hard-drinking society, he was one of the rare men who never allowed a taste for fire-water to endanger the operation of his business. Nor can we suppose that the Clan-na-gael men, whom he deceived so long, were at all adept in the deeper arts of political intrigue, or that they possessed any of that finesse which marked the type of men with whom Schulmeister had on nearly every occasion to measure his nimble wits. Le Caron claimed to be considered on a different level from all other spies and for the reason that he adopted the profession purely in the interests of his patriotism. A close study of his confessions discloses, however, a positive disposition towards the mercenary aspect of things and the Major's art—in literature, at least—is far too feeble to conceal the fact. There is in many of his reflections upon the parsimony of British secret-service paymasters the suggestion of a whimper in regard to the small pecuniary rewards he obtained for services which he himself naturally appraised very highly, but which really only provided results which were certain to have been arrived at even if the British Government had never employed an official spy upon the Irish-American brotherhoods.

Le Caron owed much of that quasi-heroic reputation which grew up around him and his career to the fact that he appeared on a drab enough stage as the only figure with melodramatic possibilities inherent in it at a time when the Americanised type of journalism was creeping into England and when journalists were being gradually initiated into the mysteries of writing up what is technically known among newspaper men as the "human interest" side of all persons and things. In the personal cast of the Parnell Commission and its long-drawn sessions, there was nothing of picturesque interest outside the occasional appearance in the witness-box of Irish peasants who were called upon to bear witness, in Doric accents, to the truth. Apart from these, the individuals who gave testimony were a bunch of frock-coated, plug-hatted Philistines of the most "orn'ery" description, as they say out West, men who used unfailingly to put the special writers to sleep. In Parnell there was nothing, externally at least, which could be said to be in any way picturesque, and Biggar only came up to the specifications of a very curious picture. Along, then, came Le Caron, a veritable godsend to the correspondents who were gaping for a bit of decent colour. The Major may be trusted, as a man who had touched hands with the American journalist, to have realised and seized his opportunity. The obvious Napoleon pose, the arms folded across the breast, the sharp sibilant tones, the Westerner's "yus, yus" and "no, siree," the Machiavellian suggestion of knowing all there was to be known about mystic shrines and tangled intrigues, the obvious consciousness of being the apparent villain of the piece who was finally, he thought, to issue as its real hero, the glacial fixity of the stare, the pose of long-suffering righteousness—yes, the spy in the witness-box was exactly what the New Journalists were looking for, and in making Le Caron they were helping to make themselves.