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The Original Great War Diploma for The French Legion of Honour Awarded to The Famous Irish Nationalist Major W.H.K. ‘Willie’ Redmond, Royal Irish Regiment Vellum award certificate for the Legion of Honour, inscribed ‘Temporary Major W. H. K. Redmond, 6th Royal Irish Regiment, 16th Irish Division’, dated 21 June 1917, 46cm by 39cm; together with French Legion of Honour, 5th class breast Badge, in silver, gilt and enamels, both items contained in a glazed display frame, good condition £1200-1500 Footnote The death in battle of the Irish nationalist and ‘folk hero’ Major ‘Willie’ Redmond, M.P., had an international impact in 1917 second only to Lord Kitchener’s. In 1914 after a lifetime’s struggle for a united self-governing Ireland, which cost him his liberty three times, he volunteered for active service in the British Army, despite being fifty-six years of age, and saw service as a company commander on the Western Front. In the field in France he saw political and religious differences between Irishmen from North and South put aside in the face of common danger and privation, and developed his near mystical belief that a new Ireland might be forged in the trenches. The ‘engaging renegade’ and onetime enfant terrible of Irish politics was born William Hoey Kearney Redmond in April 1861. He was a scion of the old Catholic gentry and a son of William Archer Redmond, a Home Rule Party M.P. for Wexford. He was educated with by Jesuits in Kildare, and afterwards in the harsh school of a merchant sailing ship. In 1879 he took a Second Lieutenant’s commission in the Wexford Militia battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment with a view to British Army career. There was an established family tradition here, both in the service of the Crown and hitherto in the Catholic armies of continental Europe. In 1880 Redmond senior died, and Willie’s elder brother John was elected M.P. for New Ross, thus becoming the youngest member of Charles Stewart Parnell’s Irish group striving constitutional change at Westminster. On a more pragmatic level the Parnellites, with the spectre of another Irish famine looming, entered into an alliance with extremists adherents of the Fenian tradition and initiated a campaign of land agitation. Willie, the aspiring British officer, was at once appalled and in a telegram sent from Wexford Barracks, implored his brother, ‘for God’s sake don’t disgrace the family by joining the Land League and Parnell’. But confronted by the stark evidence of the countryside and having long been subjected to talk of English injustices committed upon Ireland he began to drink in the opinions, teachings and doctrines of the arch-nationalists who were to become his political heroes. Within two years Willie Redmond’s conversion was complete. He resigned his militia commission and became a committed member of the Irish National Land League, a crony of Parnell, and an outspoken opponent of ‘landlordism’. The political temperature rose rapidly, and in October 1881 Parnell was arrested and the League outlawed. In February 1882 Redmond himself was apprehended putting up ‘no rent’ placards and sentenced to three months imprisonment, passing his 21st birthday in Kilmainham gaol and sharing a cell for a time with Parnell. He was released in May 1882, when Gladstone’s goverment agreed to land and rent concessions at ‘the Kilmainham treaty’. Parnell now wished to return to constitutional tactics but to continue the struggle in this way required finance and Willie Redmond was despatched on the first of many successful fund raising visits to Irish emigrant communities in America and the Empire. The British Empire was ‘as much Irish as it was English’, making Willie an ‘Imperial Nationalist’. In 1884 at Parnell’s invitation he was elected MP for his father’s old constituency and at the age of twenty-three became one of the most vociferous Irish nationalists at Westminster, and one who soon stood ‘high in the list of those ejected by imperious speakers’. Th