Roger Casement, currently in Germany, released to the newspapers a letter he has written to Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary. In it, Casement accuses British officials in Norway of conspiring with his man-servant, Adler Christensen, a Norwegian, to kill him. It is further alleged that Christensen was promised a sum of $25,000 to $50,000 for carrying out the murder.

Video | Dr Angus Mitchell on Sir Roger Casement’s trip to Germany during the First World War

To support his allegations of a conspiracy, Casement released a second letter said to have been sent from the British Embassy in Norway setting out to Christensen the amount of money he was to be paid and giving a promise of personal immunity and passage to America.

Casement has asked the Norwegian government for the promise of protection so that he might lay before it proof of the events he claims.

Meanwhile, there are reports from Brooklyn in America that Professor Kuno Meyer, in the course of a public speech, referred to meeting Casement: ‘When I met him the words of the old song kept running in my head, with some slight variations:

‘I met with Roger Casement and I took him by the hand
And said, ‘How is poor Ireland and how does she stand?’
‘Oh, she’s the most distressful country that ever yet was known,
For they’re shooting men and women in the streets of Dublin town.’’

Source | Century Ireland| Featured Image | German newspaper Hamburger Fremdenblatt draws attention to the plot against Sir Roger Casement | Hamburger Fremdenblatt, Nr. 65b, March 6, 1915 | Joseph McGarrity Collection | Digital Library@Villanova University | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License