Roger Casement was a friend and correspondent of Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle based a character in The Lost World on Casement, and Holmes’ last case, “His Last Bow,” was influenced by Casement, as well. Casement’s life as civil servant, human rights advocate, convicted traitor, and ultimately, “infamous” homosexual had a powerful influence in Edwardian England.
Roger Casement was knighted for his role in exposing disgusting mistreatment of forced laborers on the Congo, and his 1903 Casement Report was instrumental in removing the colony from the personal control of Leopold II of Belgium. Casement went on to expose abuses in Peru as well.
Casement was Irish, and a passionate advocate of Home Rule—so passionate, he collaborated with Germany against Great Britain in an effort to overthrow English rule in Ireland. The effort failed. Casement was convicted of treason and stripped of his knighthood, then executed.
Casement had always passed as straight and normatively masculine, but during his prosecution for treason, it emerged that he had also kept diaries detailing his long record of anonymous sex with working-class British and native prostitutes and strangers in public places. These “Black Diaries” were found and manipulated by the British Government, who showed them to Casement’s supporters during the trial and aftermath to weaken support for him. And indeed, many did back off from their support for the former national hero when faced with first-hand accounts of his “depravity.”
Significantly to the British government’s smear campaign, Casement wasn’t just queer—he was a “bottom.” (This element of his sexuality was so important to the case for Casement’s depravity and dehuminization that after his execution, a medical exam confirmed it from an examination of his anus and this report was circulated.) Casement’s diaries were cursory—but often included the measurements of the size of his penetrators’ penises. These were the excerpts circulated among journalists and Casement’s supporters—Conan Doyle included—in efforts to influence opinion against him even in (Catholic) Ireleand.
Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the unsuccessful letter that argued against his execution on the grounds that Casement was mentally unstable and further that martyring him would harm the British cause. Doyle saw the Black Diaries as further evidence of mental illness. This argument failed and Casement was executed in August 1916.
In Sherlock Holmes last (chronological) case, we find he has been “passing” as an Irish American member of Sinn Fein, pretending to sell military secrets to Germany in an effort to support The Irish rebellion. The case, set-up, and even the anti-British statements Holmes makes as “Altamont” directly echo Casement’s trial. Altamont, furthermore, was the name of Doyle’s father (himself a patriot).
The end of the story closes on a famously propagandistic, pro-English note. But, Holmes closes his career “passing” as a character based not only on a traitor, but on a man publicly exposed as a more notorious homosexual even than Oscar Wilde. “it’s complicated.”
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