Picture the scene. Two passionate thirty-something revolutionaries go to America to raise funds for their cause. There they fall in love and decide to marry. The marriage is a disaster due to her independent, bohemian spirit clashing with his Victorian ideals about women. Not to mention the fact she doesn't like sex, and he is financially dependent on her. He is freaked out by her strange spiritual beliefs, especially when she claims their new-born son is a reincarnation of her dead firstborn, an illegitimate son she had with another man.
Does this sound like a farfetched melodrama, if you just dress it up with a sweeping score, flaring nostrils and period costume? Maybe not yet. OK, we'll add a lovelorn poet who is hopelessly infatuated with her, but whom she sees only as a friend, and who understandably hates her new husband. Oh, and another illegitimate child, whom she passes off as her niece. They live in Paris of course, when they are not racing around the world doing noble things for the cause.
What then? A civilised break-up is impossible due to both parents wanting custody of their baby boy (this is beginning to sound very modern, perhaps we should drop the period costume). Aided by the lovelorn poet, she builds a case against her husband, claiming him to be a drunken lech. It goes to court. They get a judicial separation. The father never sees his infant son again, and gets shot after a famous uprising which he joins at the last minute, knowing it is doomed. His estranged wife wears widow's weeds for the rest of her life. The lovelorn poet writes a poem in honour of the uprising, describing his rival as "a drunken vainglorious lout".
And that is how history has tended to remember Major John MacBride, for it is his marriage to Maud Gonne we are describing, and Yeats' poem, "Easter 1916" which we have always taken as our frame of reference. Not so, says Anthony Jordan, whose new book, The Yeats Gonne MacBride Triangle, is published next week. Jordan, a biographer and principal of the CPI school in Sandymount, Dublin, is a Mayo man like MacBride and believes that MacBride has been given "a raw deal". "Could it be that those who seek to worship Yeats feel that they too must vilify Major John MacBride, in defence of their master?" he asks.
Jordan cites a list of well-known Yeatsians - from A. N. Jeffares to Terence Brown and Roy Foster - who have not, he believes, fully investigated the tarnished image of MacBride which, thanks to Yeats, persists: "The immorality charge against MacBride was not upheld in court." (This charge was a claim that MacBride forced himself upon Eileen Wilson, Maud's half-sister, and that there had been an incident - unspecified - with Iseult, Maud's daughter.)
Jordan used as his source material a cache of papers about MacBride (the Fred Allan papers) which, to his knowledge, have not been fully researched before. These documents contain the charges and counter-charges, efforts to settle out of court, preparations for the divorce case, and much more. They also contain significant biographical details, hitherto unclarified says Jordan, such as the exact year of MacBride's birth (1868) and where he went to school (St Malachy's, Belfast).
There are letters from Pearse, John O'Leary and Constance Markievicz. And there is MacBride's voice, sometimes bitter about his wife ("She was only the weak imitation of a weak man"; "She was incapable of rising above the level of a secondrate French mistress"), and sometimes stiffly formal as one might expect from a soldier who always did his duty (MacBride led an Irish Brigade to fight alongside the Boers in 1899). "She has shown me that she is dead to any sense of justice . . . I think only of Ireland and of my little boy and wish to be guided mainly by considerations for both, in all I do in this unhappy affair."
His painstaking self-defence during the bitterly contested divorce proceedings make alternately poignant and grimly hilarious reading. On being accused of flashing at a friend of Gonne's, he noted: "Her looks would not tempt any man and her age is such as to render the suggestion preposterous. I would not be seen dead with her in a five acre field." As for a cook he was accused of seducing: "If I wanted a woman I had plenty of money in my pocket and would have no difficulty in making a suitable choice in Paris, without trying to rape a hideously ugly old cook in my wife's house."
On being accused of drunkenness and leaving the house filthy, he itemised the few occasions when he had over-indulged in alcohol, and said that in spite of a weak stomach, he had only been sick from drinking twice in his married life, and on neither occasion did he "make filth" (in the end the court accepted the charge of drunkenness).
Jordan sees it as significant that while Gonne made claims about MacBride's interfering with Iseult to the MacBride family, she did not bring these allegations up in court: "It was MacBride himself who insisted on bringing her accusations about Iseult before the court. This was risky because if charges had been brought, he would have faced 20 years in prison. To take such a risk was not the action of a guilty man." Jordan points out that Iseult hated MacBride from the start. In court MacBride mentioned that, because of adjoining rooms, Iseult had once come upon him "with the chamber-pot in my hand".
He took copious notes to clarify the contradictory nature of the different dates the various witnesses chose for the alleged incident. The alleged sexual intercourse with Eileen Wilson (the grandmother of poet, Paul Durcan) was said to have occurred "in the summer of 1903, eighteen months prior to anyone saying anything to Gonne. When the case came to court Eileen denied it had happened. She was already married to a brother of MacBride's in Mayo. She made MacBride the godfather of her youngest daughter. The whole evidence rested on an unmarried servant's testimony that she had seen sperm stains on Eileen's linen."
Gonne desperately wanted to have custody of her son, Sean, having lost her first born. Jordan believes her case against MacBride was concocted, with the aid of certain women friends, to attain this. Maud got guardianship of Sean but MacBride was granted visiting rights. She stayed in France while MacBride was in Ireland, fearing that if she brought Sean to Ireland MacBride would take him away. The court's verdict meant that should she take Sean to Ireland, MacBride could legally claim him.
Jordan, who describes himself as "a traditional nationalist but not a republican with a big R", graduated in history from Maynooth, and has written biographies of Christy Brown and Conor Cruise O'Brien. He has "great admiration" for all three of the players in the Yeats-Gonne-MacBride triangle, but sees Yeats and Gonne as more flawed than perhaps many of us are ready to accept: "Maud Gonne was fundamentally an actress with a starring role in her own drama. Lady Gregory and Miss Horniman, both of whom were smitten with Yeats, were used by him mercilessly for his own purposes. But I admire his poetry, and his cultural work, just as I admire Gonne's work on behalf of prisoners."
As for MacBride, who ignored a chance of escape and went willingly to his execution 84 years ago on May 5th, 1916, it can perhaps be surmised that he was a good soldier who, even after making ill-advised choices, took his punishment with dignity and courage.'
The Yeats Gonne MacBride Triangle is published next week by Westport Books at £7.95.
