The Countess Markiewicz was born Constance Georgine Gore-Booth on 4 February, 1868, to an old Anglo-Irish family that owned a large estate in County Sligo in the West of Ireland. She lived a privileged life and thoroughly enjoyed being a young lady of the manor hunting, fishing, and in time becoming an accomplished horsewoman. She was deemed to be a great beauty and had a great many male admirers and suitors, and was indeed at one point presented to Queen Victoria as a potential fiancee for her wayward son the future Edward IV. But she had no relish for the ornamental life, she wanted to achieve things. So she studied art, first in London and later in Paris where she met Count Casimir Markiewicz, a Ukranian Count of Polish descent. They married in 1901. Though not an unhappy marriage, Contance was not cut out to be a spouse and help-mate and overtime their relationship became increasingly estranged.

Despite her marriage, her art, and mixing in the best social circles, Constance remained unfulfilled. She needed some purpose in life. In 1905, she wrote, ” Nature should provide me with something to live for, something to die for. ” Disastisfied with life she came late to politics and the Irish nationalist cause.

In 1908, she joined Sinn Fein and in the same year stood for election in Manchester. Her candidacy made little impact and she lost her deposit. Also in the same year she joined Maud Gonne’s (W.B Yeat’s great unrequited love) women’s organisation. She plunged enthusiastically into its activities and her work soon got her noticed. In 1909, she founded Fianna Eireean an organisation which surreptitiously provided young boys with military training. By 1911, she held an executive position within Sinn Fein.

In the years immediately preceding the outbreak of World War One she was heavily involved in the many industrial disputes that plagued Dublin. Working closely with James Connolly, the socialist trade unionist and Irish nationalist leader, she rallied the women and ran soup kitchens and organised collections for the strikers. With the outbreak of the war and as a result the shelving of the Irish Home Rule Bill the political situation was stretched to breaking point.

On 24 April, 1916, Padraig Pearse, the leader of the Irish Republican Brotherhood stood upon the steps of the General Post Office in Sackville Street, Dublin, and read out the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, ” In the Name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for freedom” the Irish Nationalists had risen in open rebellion. The Easter Rising, as it became known, though it didn’t seem so at the time was a pivotal moment in the struggle for Irish freedom and independence. They had little popular support but they were willing to make a stand. The response of the British Government was immediate and determined, and troops were dispatched from the mainland to crush the rebellion. From the start Constance was in the thick of the action. She was second-in-command of the forces stationed at St Stephen’s Green where she oversaw the building of barricades, distributed ammunition and took up arms herself. The fighting was fierce and bloody, numerous British assaults on the Irish defences were repulsed. but after six days, following the introduction of heavy artillery and with ammunition running low, the Republicans were forced to surrender. British casualties had been high with 116 killed and 368 wounded. The Republicans had lost 64 killed and 300 wounded. But as in so many conflicts it was the civilian population that had suffered most of all with 220 killed and more than a 1,000 injured. The entire operation had been borne of a forlorn hope, Pearse had known this, it had been a blood sacrifice. Marched through the streets of Dublin to captivity the Republican prisoners were shocked to find themselves jeered at and spat upon by the crowds. This antipathy was to change when just a few weeks later the British executed the 16 leaders of the rebellion including all 7 of the signatories of the Proclamation.

Countess Markiewicz, who had, ironically, surrendered to one of her own relatives was imprisoned at Kilmainham Jail and kept in solitary confinement. She expected to be executed. At her trial she said, ” I did what was right and I stand by it.” She was correct in her assumption and she was indeed sentenced to death but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment on the grounds of her sex. Hearing of the news she remarked, ” I wish they’d had the decency to shoot me.” She served little time in prison, however, and was released along with the other Irish Republican prisoners in the political amnesty of 1917.

Upon her release, as reconfirmation of her devotion to the nationalist cause, she converted to Catholicism. She wasted no time in becoming politically active again and was jailed in early 1918, for opposing conscription. In the General Election of 1918, she became Britain’s first female Member of Parliament, but like the other 73 Sinn Fein members elected to that Parliament she refused to take the oath of allegiance to the Crown and was therefore unable to take her seat.

She fought in the Irish War of Independence though her effectiveness was severely restricted by her need to remain constantly in hiding. Even so she remained a staunch defender of the Irish Republican Army’s Commander-in Chief Michael Collins. But she fell out badly with him over the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty which saw the creation of Northern Ireland and the requirement for the new Southern State to remain part of the British Commonwealth and take an oath of allegiance to the Crown. On the day it was debated in a fractious Dail she rowed furiously with Collins. After the vote was taken endorsing the treaty she along with the other anti-treaty politicians, refusing to accept the vote, walked out, as she did so she accused Collins of being a traitor, he, in turn, witheringly accused her of being, English.

In the Civil War that inevitably followed she fought for the anti-treaty forces and even found herself jailed by the Free State Government. In 1926, she joined Eamonn de Valera’s newly formed Fianna Fail Party and was elected to the Dail in, 1927. But she never had the opportunity to serve as a peacetime politician dying just a months later of tuberculosis or possibly cancer.