Through the history of England's domination of Ireland, Ireland's revolutionary movements have lived by a basic tenet: England's agony is Ireland's opportunity. The Irish Republican Brotherhood was split -- many in the IRB were ready to move, they believed the timing would never be better. England was deep into the most savage war the world had ever seen. Millions had died already, millions more would die yet (many of them Irishmen fighting for England), and the British were threatening conscription in Ireland, which was absolutely opposed by the vast majority of the country. But many other IRB members believed that the country was not ready for a rising, especially with so many Irish boys fighting in the trenches of France. In many ways, looking back with the clarity of over 80 years of history, both sides may have been right. Chief among those who opposed the rising was the Irish Volunteer's Chief of Staff, Eoin MacNeil. In the end, Pearse and the others in the Volunteers, along with James Connolly and his Citizen Army, planned a rising for April 25th, Easter Sunday, using the Volunteers scheduled maneuvers in Dublin as a cover. These plans were made without MacNeil's knowledge. MacNeil found out on Thursday and at first, after being told of the shipment of German arms that Roger Casement was bringing to the southwest, he agreed to support it. However, when MacNeil found out the Casement had been captured and the weapons lost, he canceled the maneuvers and got word to the countryside that the rising was off. In military terms there was nothing for Pearse and his cohorts to do but call off the rising, but Pearse was not a military man, he was a visionary. He saw a destiny for himself and his country. Six years earlier he had written in a poem: "I have turned my face to the road before me, to the deed that I see and the death I shall die." With that deed, that near certain death, now staring him in the face, he didn't blink.
MacNeil tried his best to stop the rising, in the end a force of less than 1,700 rose, and those only in Dublin. The rebels quickly captured several key points in the city, including the General Post Office (GPO). There on the steps, Pearse proclaimed the Irish Republic. Pearse and six others signed the document the day before. The man given the honor of signing the proclamation first was 59-year-old Tom Clarke. He signed with tears in his eyes, no doubt remembering the fifteen years he spent in a British prison under the harsh conditions the English reserved for Irishmen who dreamt of freedom. Given the situation regarding MacNeil and the rest of the Volunteers around the island, each signer must have realized, as hand and pen moved across the proclamation, that they were very likely signing their own execution order.
By early afternoon the tricolor of the Irish Republic and a green flag with a gold harp in the center, the ancient symbol of Ireland which had been carried in so many different forms by Irish military units around the world, flew defiantly above the GPO. Across Dublin the rebels occupying numerous strategic portions, and were awaiting the British response. Among them were names that every Irishman would come to know in the years ahead; men like Michael Collins, Eamon de Valera, Cathal Brugha and many more, and women as well, such as Constance Markievicz, who commanded a group of Volunteers who occupied the College of Surgeons at St. Stephen's Green. But in the next few days, as fighting spread across the city, the predictions of those opposed to the rising proved to be true, the city and the country were not ready to rise up, and the rebels were isolated and surrounded by 20,000 British troops.
Still, the rebels fought on, and well. At Mount Street Bridge on Wednesday, 12 of De Valera's men held off two battalions of British troops for 9 hours. On Thursday the British began an artillery bombardment of the GPO, fire began to spread around the building, and a cordon had been thrown around the city center. The end was near. Finally, on Saturday, having been blasted out of the GPO and taken up positions in other buildings on Moore Street, the leadership had to face the futility of their situation. Patrick Pearse watched the city he loved blazing around him and the people of that city being killed, some before his eyes. He fully expected to die in this rising and certainly would have preferred dying in a blaze of glory in the battle to the execution he must have known awaited him if he surrendered. He turned to the old rebel, Tom Clarke and told him, " For the sake of our fellow citizens and our comrades across the city who are likely to be shot or burned to death, I propose ...... we surrender." Tom Clarke could not speak, he turned his face to the wall and wept like a child for the lost dream of the republic. Pearse surrendered and sent an order to other outposts that were still holding out to surrender also. On Sunday the rest surrendered, at five o'clock on the 30th of April, the tricolor was pulled down off the top of the remains of the GPO, the dream of the republic seemingly pulled down with it.

As the rebels were marched off to jail they were shocked by the reaction of the people of Dublin. People screamed invective at them and even threw objects a them. The people of Dublin had been unable to work for a week, of course, and were going hungry; others had lost family members or had their homes destroyed and many had sons or brothers fighting in France and considered the rising a betrayal of those men. Perhaps this outpouring of anger toward the rebels gave the British a false sense of the underlying feeling of Irish people. Perhaps they were even foolish enough to think that it constituted some sort of endorsement of British rule over the island. The fact was that many of the people in those angry crowds agreed completely with the aims of the rising -- freedom from English domination. It was only the means and the timing of it they objected to.
The British commander, General Maxwell, courtmartialed the rebels leaders. Within days, in closed trials before courts made up of three British officers in which the defendants had no lawyers and were allowed to call no witnesses, they found every defendant guilty and condemned them to death.
During the few minutes that his trial lasted, Pearse told the court, "You cannot conquer Ireland. You cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom. If our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom, then our children will win it by a better deed." Pearse wanted to be remembered with the martyred heroes Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, and the British had every intention of granting that wish. Later at a dinner party, General Blackadder, who was in charge of the trials, told a friend, "I have just performed one of the hardest tasks I ever had to do. Condemned to death one of the finest characters I ever came across. A man named Pearse. Must be something very wrong in the state of things, must there not, that makes a man like that a rebel?" When the sentences of death were later relayed to the men in their cells, Tom Clarke breathed a sigh of relieve, not because he dreamed of martyrdom, but because he feared more time in an English prison much more than death. When Patrick Pearse heard the sentence, there in his cell in Kilmainham jail, where Napper Tandy, O'Donovan Rossa and so many others, most especially Robert Emmet had also been held, he must have realized his destiny had come to pass just as he had envisioned it. His spirit would have sunk though, had he known that his brother William, who was not really one of the leaders of the rising, was also condemned to death. Willie's major offense, of course, was being the brother of Patrick Pearse.
In a last letter home to his mother on May 3rd, Pearse wrote, "I will call you in my heart at the last moment." Father Aloysius, who was attending the men, asked to stay with them to the end. He was refused. He gave Pearse a ten-inch crucifix of brass to carry with him. As he walked to his execution, Pearse heard two volleys of shots; Clarke and his old friend Thomas MacDonagh had preceded him in death. With a soldier on each side and blindfold already in place, Pearse was hustled to a corner of the prison walls, past the pooled blood of Clarke and MacDonagh. At that very moment, his brother Willie was being led up to the jail. A British officer had decided to allow them a moment to speak before Patrick died, but he didn't inform Willie where he was being taken, or why, and he was sure it was to his own death.
In the northwest corner of the compound, where a blindfolded Patrick Henry Pearse stood, the order rang out, "Aim." When one of the soldiers allowed his rifle to dip, the officer in charge ordered, "As you were." Pearse must have flinched as those words in place of the expected, "FIRE," were heard. Now the officer ordered, "Aim," again and then finally, "FIRE!" At the gates of the jail, where Willie Pearse was being led in, he heard the sound and a warder turned to his guards and said, "Too late." They turned him around and took him back to Richmond Barracks, no one told him he had just heard the sound of his brother being killed. Willie's turn would come the next day. In all, 97 participants in the rising were condemned to death; most had those sentences reduced when the British belatedly learned how counterproductive the executions were. If we count Sir Roger Casement, executed in August, 16 were actually killed. It would be this act, their executions by the British, that would turn a large portion of the population of Ireland from critics of their actions to supporters and emblazon their names into the pantheon of Irish revolutionary heros. Had the British simply jailed all those involved the effect of their rising would probably have been minimal; they chose, instead, to give the Irish people another example of just how insignificant they considered Irish life. Patrick Pearse's last words at the graveside of O'Donovan Rossa in 1915 would have been the perfect eulogy for the men of '16, as well: