Michael Barrett (Fenian)

Michael Barrett (184126 May 1868) was an Irish activist. He was a member of the Fenians. Barrett was the last man to be publicly hanged in England, for his part in the Clerkenwell explosion in December 1867. The bombing killed 12 bystanders and severely injured many more. Barrett was arrested with several others in a wide ranging sweep of sympathisers with the Irish Republican cause and was the only one found guilty.

Barrett was born in Drumnagreshial in the Ederney area of County Fermanagh. At the age of 27 he joined the Fenians, which, in the 1860s, was a political movement that dominated Irish Republican politics and defied the Catholic Church, middle class nationalists who advocated milder approaches and Irish Unionists. Tens of thousands of Irishmen in both Ireland and Great Britain were recruited into its ranks.

The Clerkenwell bombing was the most infamous action carried out by the Fenians in mainland Britain. It resulted in a long lived backlash that fomented much hostility against the Irish community in Britain. The events that led up to the bombing started with the arrest, in November 1867, of Ricard O'Sullivan Burke, a senior Fenian arms agent who planned the "prison van escape" in Manchester a few months earlier. O'Sullivan Burke was subsequently imprisoned on remand in the Middlesex House of Detention, Clerkenwell. On 13 December an attempt to rescue him was made by blowing a hole in the prison wall. The explosion was seriously misjudged; it demolished not only a large section of the wall, but also a number of tenement houses opposite in Corporation Lane (now Corporation Row), killing 12 people and wounding up to 120 more. The bombing had a traumatic effect on British working class opinion. Karl Marx, then living in London, observed:
The London masses, who have shown great sympathy towards Ireland, will be made wild and driven into the arms of a reactionary government. One cannot expect the London proletarians to allow themselves to be blown up in honour of Fenian emissaries. The Radical, Charles Bradlaugh, condemned the incident in his newspaper The National Reformer as an act "calculated to destroy all sympathy, and to evoke the opposition of all classes". The day before the explosion, the Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, had banned all political demonstrations in London in an attempt to put a stop to the weekly meetings and marches that were being held in support of the Fenians. He had feared that the ban might be challenged, but the explosion had the effect of turning public opinion in his favour.

Many people, including a number of Radical MPs, pressed for clemency. In Fermanagh, Barrett's aged mother walked several miles in the snow to appeal to the local Conservative MP, Captain Archdale, a staunch Orangeman, who rejected her. Barrett was executed outside the walls of Newgate Prison on 26 May 1868 before a crowd of two thousand who booed, jeered and sang Rule Britannia and Champagne Charlie as his body dropped. The hangman was William Calcraft. Until their transfer to the City of London Cemetery, Michael Barrett's remains lay for 35 years in a lime grave inside the walls of Newgate Prison. When the prison was demolished in 1903 his remains were taken to their present resting place. Today the grave is a place of Fenian pilgrimage and is marked by a small plaque.

After the explosion the Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli advocated the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act in Great Britain, as was already the case in Ireland. Greater security measures were quickly introduced. Thousands of special constables were enrolled to aid the police and at Scotland Yard a special secret service department was established to meet the Fenian threat. Although a number of people were arrested and brought to trial, Michael Barrett was the only one to receive the death sentence. Within days of the explosion, the Liberal leader, William Ewart Gladstone, then in opposition, announced his concern about Irish Nationalist grievances and said that it was the duty of the British people to remove them. Later, he said that it was the Fenian action at Clerkenwell that turned his mind towards Home Rule. When Gladstone discovered at Hawarden later that year that Queen Victoria had invited him to form a government he famously stated, "my mission is to pacify Ireland".