ABSTRACT

Rebecca West’s comment upon the case of William Joyce links seamlessly to the warning voiced by Woolf in Three Guineas. Impoverished ideological values occupy not only the individual, but through him inhabit and endanger the State and beneath his uniform lies the frail assemblage of disparate influences, identities; so very different from the rational, autonomous agent before the law. Of the ‘ideological’ William Joyce, who carried forward his father’s divided and conquered Irish identity, West wrote:

While of the ‘individual’ Joyce we learn:

Against this unacknowledged context, the trial of William Joyce1 was played out. In terms of law the case was from the outset uncertain. Joyce, although the holder of a British passport, was an American citizen of Irish descent; his subversive activities had been carried out beyond the realm.2 His trial for treason was therefore founded upon questionable legality. Technically, the affirmation of his conviction in the House of Lords

was founded upon the notion of reciprocity: the holder of a British passport may claim the protection of the Crown, and the Crown may claim the duty of allegiance. Nevertheless, it was a moot point argued strenuously on both sides. In terms of post-war national feeling, the decision might be characterised as almost unavoidable given the general antipathy towards Joyce created by his activities as ‘Lord Haw-Haw’. Yet as Rebecca West reports, ‘ground level’ debate on the case was not without expressions of public disquiet that the conviction might represent a substantial injustice; that however hated, an American citizen could not be at one and the same time, a British traitor.