The former Czarina Alexandra 
Gabriel Doherty
The pages of The Irish Catholic for Saturday, October 26, 1918, contained an eclectic assortment of items. No one topic dominated, in comparison to the recent extensive coverage of the sinking of the Leinster, but two themes were common to nearly all stories: the growing belief that the end of the war was nigh, and a gnawing uncertainty as to whether peace would bring good news or bad, for Ireland and the world.
One small paragraph on page one alluded to the ongoing tragedy inside Russia. It referred to the efforts being made by Pope Benedict XV to facilitate the departure from that country of the ex-Czarina Alexandra and her daughters, the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia. Of course the Pope’s efforts were doomed to failure, as the Tsar’s entire family had all been executed on the same day, some months before, on the orders of the Bolshevik regime – although the official communiqué issue at the time had suggested that only the Tsar himself had been killed.
The report noted the response from the Bolshevik government to the Pope’s request, to the effect that it had no knowledge of the whereabouts of the family – a denial both palpably false and undeniably true, given the fact that the mutilated remains had, at the behest of local officials, been interred in shallow graves in a wooded area near Yekaterinburg, the precise location of which it took many decades to find.
The story was a grim reminder of the sheer enormity of the change that had been visited upon the ancien régime in Europe over the four years of the war, and of the fact that this process of revolutionary change was far from exhausted.
Captured
Change of a different, more hopeful, sort was also on the minds of many at home. This spirit was well captured in the report of an address delivered a few days before by the Bishop of Cork, Daniel Cohalan to the city’s Dr Young Men’s Society. Bishop Cohalan, was at this stage only two years into a 36-year term, although in his previous role as auxiliary bishop he had already had some experience of the demanding subtleties of the national question.
This has occurred when facilitating the peaceful surrender of both men and weapons of the Cork brigade of the Irish Volunteers at the end of the 1916 Rising, which had proved abortive in the rebel city and county.
The theme of his address was the object of the war as far as it related to Ireland, and it is indicative of just how far the terms of the debate on this question had changed that the once-ubiquitous phrase ‘home rule’ was conspicuous by its absence, with the words ‘Peace Conference’ punctuating his talk at several places.
Recalling the coalition of forces that had come together six months before to resist the proposed extension of conscription to the country, he argued that a similar national gathering should assemble to consider and agree the political demands that could be presented to the conference as the authentic expression of the nation’s right to self-determination.
This apparently anodyne demand, of course, was anything but. It placed the bishop firmly in the ranks of those who demanded the ‘internationalisation’ of the Irish Question, and was a repudiation of the type of internal settlement offered by the British Government with the passage of the Government of Ireland Act back in the Autumn of 1914.
Whether the bishop would have accepted, or appreciated, the description or not, the speech placed him close to, if not actually in, the Sinn Féin camp on this crucial question, which, in his own words was “of greater import to them than all other questions put together”. Given his subsequent relations with republicans in his diocese, the speech has more than a passing interest to the historian.
The paper’s editorial also addressed the potential of diplomacy to solve contested demands for self-government elsewhere in the continent of Europe. Entitled ‘Germany’s extremity’, it surveyed the most recent developments in the conflict, and concluded that both the external military, and domestic political, environment facing Germany was nothing short of catastrophic.
It welcomed the certainty of Germany’s defeat and hoped that it come much sooner rather than any later, both to spare the affected civilian population unnecessary suffering, and also to forestall the boost to socialism that would be facilitated by any continuation of the fighting.
