Michael Collins and the Women Who Spied For Ireland (15 page)

The taking over of army barracks countrywide continued, in some cases with violence between local IRA pro- and anti-Treaty factions. In Dublin pro-Treaty authorities ensured that evacuated barracks would remain loyal to whatever government would be elected, and Beggars Bush Barracks became headquarters of what was to become the uniformed National Army.

By 29 January 1922, Collins expressed his disappointment to Kitty at the anti-Treaty stance of Sinn Féin clubs: ‘Tralee after the Auxies had gone, Galway the same. God help us from them. They're beauties.'
15

He retained the loyalty of the Squad, as well as the majority of GHQ; but he bitterly regretted that in his own county of Cork, friends and colleagues such as Liam Deasy, Tom Barry, Liam Lynch, Seán Hyde, and his great friend Tom Hales opposed his views. Cathal Brugha and Liam Mellows, in keeping with their strong convictions, had begun to tour Ireland to meet Volunteer commands where they pledged them ‘to maintain the existing Republic'. They were sowing the seeds of revolt among impressionable young men.

Mick wrote to Kitty: ‘I am really and truly having an awful time and am rapidly becoming quite desperate. Oh Lord, it's honestly frightful'.
16

Notes

Since their official engagement at Christmas 1921, Mick had grown in his love for Kitty. He had given her an engagement ring, which she would sometimes call ‘a representative', at other times ‘a reminder' of him. Though circumstances prevented them from being together as often as they would have liked, they communicated their deep affection for one another in their letters. Mick's letters, though more discreet and subdued than Kitty's, nevertheless reveal his tender affection for her, his concern for her well-being and his anticipation of her becoming his wife.

He seldom omitted to tell her how much he looked forward to her letters, as she did to his, and he let her know that his family approved of her. ‘Mary is in love with you,' he wrote of his sister.

Constantly they were in each other's prayers. ‘Was at a Requiem Mass for the Holy Father today. Said a full rosary for you alone,' he wrote on 31 January 1922.

‘Badgered all day since my return [from Granard] and am off to a meeting now,' Mick wrote to Kitty on 3 February.

Despite the split on the Treaty Collins was careful to allow continued support money for Sinéad de Valera and her family. On 3 February she returned to him a cheque for £50 because, she wrote, ‘Éamon is no longer President since last month'. She signed the letter, ‘Your friend always'.

The next day the northern problem again hit him; he had a sudden call to London. In a note to Kitty he wrote, ‘The Craig business is serious, and if we don't find some way of dealing with it, all the bravos [Dublinites] will get a great chance of distinguishing themselves once more ... I wish you were coming to London with me tonight ... Must do a million things by 7 o'clock,' he wrote ‘in haste'.

Next morning, an early breakfast in foggy London, ‘then Mass, then conferences for the whole day'.
1
These meetings accomplished little. ‘Things do not appear to be very promising,' he told Kitty, but added, ‘perhaps it's a question of being ‘the darkest hour before the dawn ... With fondest love.'
2

Though there was some agreement, and Collins and the group returned to Ireland that night, the situation on the ground in the north-east deteriorated.

On 9 February Mick told Kitty he'd most likely get down on Saturday. ‘Honestly, Kit, you don't know the rush. It's awful. It was a good job you did not ask me if I enjoyed my time in London. It was heartbreaking simply. Fighting the English there. Fighting our own people here. It's the very frozen limit.'

On 10 February 1922, he had planned to visit her at the weekend. He had withdrawn sixty pounds to buy her a gold watch. Beforehand he wrote:

... – please dear dear Kit. When I meet you – and this much I'll ask also – you'll have to give me a couple of hours in the morning for work. Otherwise you'll have all my time ... Several people clamouring for me. Do forgive this scraggy note. You don't know how anxious I am to see you. I have a kind of feeling that I must go away with you – strain telling on me also. May God be with you.

Kitty's ‘fairy-like' beauty was commented on by an ex-serviceman, Major Harris, who saw her at the hunt dance and at private dances in Westmeath; afterwards he wrote that ‘one of the prettiest pictures in the
Express
has been that of Miss Kitty Kiernan, the intended bride of the Financial Minister of the Irish Free State ... whose presence would grace the life of any man however highly placed, and whose inborn native beauty is portrayed in every outline of her life.'
3

But for Mick there was more to a woman than beauty. Being an avid reader himself, he introduced Kitty to Edward Fitzgerald's translation of Omar Khayyam's
The Rubaiyat
– he wanted it to be a topic of conversation at their next meeting.
4

By mid-February they were discussing a house in Greystones which he had set his sights on. He asked her to be patient and understanding of him, he doesn't mind being ‘lectured to ... do not think too badly of me for all my headstrong ways and my bad temper, and my impatience at being given good advice'.
5
He had spent a day sick in bed. In her ‘good advice' Kitty tells him to take life a little easier: ‘I don't consider that you will really do Ireland or the people of Ireland any good by killing yourself working ... You are the one that, by living for Ireland, helps her'.
6

Just as he got her letter he was ‘rushing off to a meeting in the Mansion House' but as it could last longer than anticipated, he wrote, ‘I am not chancing leaving writing you until afterwards'.
7

Kitty had hesitated during the weekend when Mick had ‘suggested' a June wedding, so she said, ‘I went to chapel to-night to pray for you, and during that time thought that making the little sacrifices are no use if I couldn't make the big one, and it's June D.V. Now I don't mean it's really a sacrifice in that sense, but just putting it off until I'd be ready ... And so now I have proposed to you! Are you satisfied?' She agreed she could take care of him and he would be all the better for it if they were married.
8

Collins agreed with de Valera to postpone elections for three months. Meanwhile the country became increasingly anarchic, although bloodshed was for the time being avoided.

By mid-March Kitty had become of interest to photo-journalists. They descended on Granard, and pictures of her in her ‘black evening dress' were published widely. In the
Sketch
of 8 March, there are three photographs of ‘M. Collins' fiancée, Miss Kitty Kiernan' with Sir John Lavery's portrait of Collins on the opposite page. Kitty resented some of the write-ups about herself and asked Michael ‘to compose a little piece. I will take an action against them if they continue to publish the rot they
[The Irish Record]
are writing,' Kitty had written on 14 February. She resented the linking of herself and Lady Lavery in Michael's affections.
9

There were times when Mick expressed his affection for Kitty very strongly – ‘I want to see you and that's that. I do want to see you – Kitty Kiernan. I do badly. Just away from Sinn Féin Ard-Fheis for an hour's interval'. His love for her had to be slotted in between the multitude of political and military demands on him. ‘Isn't it nice to think of you in every free moment – oh! and in moments that are not free too? God be with you, my dear, dear Kitty.'
10

She had written to him about a problem she had had in finding one of her silk stockings. He responded: ‘I'd love to have seen you wandering around looking for a stocking – a single silk stocking'. In that letter of 10 March he told her, ‘I said a whole rosary for you last night'.
11

While Mick went about his gruelling task of countrywide pro-Treaty campaigning, liaising with various groups and endless meetings, Kitty was often off to a dance: ‘going to dance in the Gresham 17th [March]'. She had a dancing partner to take her ‘all to myself' she wrote. ‘I suppose there will be talk of my dancing with him a lot but, when
you
don't object, I hope they talk about something new for a change. I may see Harry too, but trust me.'

As Mick was about to travel to Cork to do his duty for Ireland, ‘my duty' she wrote, would be ‘to go and have a good time. And yet we have a grand feeling that we can trust each other, knowing that if either of us offends we will pay the penalty sooner or later in remorse ... By Saturday evening when you come back I'll be tired of everybody, and then will have
you
to amuse me'.
12

Meanwhile, Mick was asking her, ‘When are you coming up to town again? It is years and years since I saw you although indeed you are before my mind every bit as much as you could wish ... Am looking forward to seeing you'.
13

Collins was enthusiastically cheered when he addressed a crowd on the Treaty issue in Cork City early in March. A Mrs Agnellis in the crowd that night observed that: ‘He was at one and the same time the youthful dashing leader we had learned to love and admire; and yet a figure on which strain, worry, and overwork had taken its toll'.

Momentarily he paused. Mrs Agnellis, who stood quite close, called to him, ‘God bless you, Michael Collins!'

He looked down from the platform and said clearly, ‘I need it!'
14

Later that night as he and Seán MacEoin made their way to the house of his sister, Mary Collins-Powell, he narrowly missed being shot by a lone gunman.

As Mick's schedule became more crowded he found it ‘difficult to write a real letter.' On 24 March he sent her ‘a little note ... I am looking forward to seeing you in fifteen minutes. So goodbye until then. All my love. Mícheál'.

On 28 March in a note to Kitty he wrote, ‘I'm sorry I'm looking old! Am I really? And not so fresh? If you saw the way I've had to write this letter – about a thousand interruptions.' He was to go to Bangor for a meeting with Craig and intended calling on her on the way back but he got a wire to go to London instead. ‘Saw Harry today – he'll be with you I think on Thursday.' He wasn't worried about Harry because he knew that Kitty had now given her love to him.
15

Discussions were difficult. ‘These two days have been the worse [
sic
] days I have ever spent. The representatives from the North are very very difficult – they are in a way more difficult than the others, but even so one always hopes.' And next day: ‘Have had the devil's own day between the North and the English. Things are pretty serious, but there is always hope, so
that's that
. How are you? I wish you were here – am going to the Laverys to dinner this evening, so that means that we'll be back [home] early.'
16

Collins travelled a great deal to drum up support for the Treaty. He was in London on 30 March in an effort to solve the tensions in Northern Ireland which had been caused by rioting, burning of Catholic homes and conflicts with the B-Specials. In a three-pronged approach, delegates from the Provisional, Northern and British governments signed an agreement of cooperation and peace between the now separate parts of Ireland.

At the conference he met Lord Londonderry for the first time. Londonderry afterwards wrote: ‘I can say at once that I spent three of the most delightful hours that I ever spent in my life and I formed a conclusion of the character of Michael Collins which was quite different from the one which I would have formed if I had only known him as I had read of him before this particular interview.'
17

In a letter on 31 March, Mick apologised for inflicting his problems on Kitty and told her he was ‘sanguine about the future ... We came to an agreement ... with Craig yesterday,' regarding the release of prisoners. ‘But the news from Ireland is very bad, and the “powers that be” here are getting very alarmed and there may be a bust-up at any moment' – a reference to Rory O'Connor and anti-Treaty activities.
18

On and off Kitty's health was not good and by the end of March she was told by the doctor that she would have to take it easy for two months. Mick insisted that she should carry out the doctor's wishes and have a quiet holiday somewhere. On his return journey from Castlebar in early April he detoured to Granard, but ‘was not pleased' with her appearance so he insisted that a quiet holiday was essential for her. He said he had assembled a parcel of books and would send them direct to wherever she chose.

Harry Boland was still friendly with Kitty and he would often visit Granard for a day at the hunt. While Michael was writing that ‘things are rapidly becoming as bad as they can be, and the country has before it what may be the worst period yet,' Kitty was replying about ‘going to Longford races'.
19

In mid-April, when Kitty chastised Michael for not writing to her often, he appealed to her for understanding.

If you could only see the circumstances under which most of them [the letters] are written, you wouldn't be so mighty quick to disparage them. At any rate I won't mind you this time ... We did nothing at the Conference yesterday – except talk, talk all the time – it's simply awful. And the country! But they never think of the country at all – they only think of finding favour for their own theories, they only think of getting their own particular little scheme accepted.

In a postscript he noted, ‘The Rebel Army has taken over the Four Courts. God help them!'
20

Rory O'Connor, on behalf of the anti-Treatyite Executive Army Council which had split from GHQ, with Liam Mellows and other anti-Treaty leaders had seized the Four Courts in Dublin as headquarters. They fortified the building on the night of the 13–14 April. Liam Lynch, the chief of staff, did not share O'Connor's views; like Liam Deasy, commander of the First Southern Division, he was anxious to give civil administration a further chance. Michael Collins was reluctant to push O'Connor, Mellows and his followers – all former friends and colleagues – from the Four Courts.

‘It's simply awful,' he wrote to Kitty, as he appealed for understanding for not visiting her. ‘They [the Republican Executive] never think of the country at all – they only think of finding favour for their own theories ... this Rebel Army.'
21

On 16 April, Collins narrowly missed being shot in Dublin. This attack received widespread publicity. Kitty worried when she read of it and sent him a telegram, but he was quick to reassure her, ‘You knew I'd be all right, didn't you?' Ever the optimist, ‘God is better to us than we deserve ... Honestly I did not know that I was going to Naas ... It was immediately after our return the shooting took place. I think they must have meant to capture me only. They were great optimists. God help them, but they are carrying things a bit too far'.
22