The British Empire administered its last execution for mutiny on this date in 1920 — that of Irish Private James Daly of the Connaught Rangers.

A Dublin cemetery preserves a monument to Daly and his comrades.

You can take the Irishman out of Ireland, but not Ireland out of the Irishman. Something like that.

Daly was shot in Dagshai prison, India, but the reason for his death was that old familiar of his homeland’s history: nationalism.

Half a world away, London was playing the bad guys in the Irish War of Independence.

It was a conflict uniquely suited for dividing comrades; little wonder that it also divided comrades in arms.

Having lately bled for His Majesty in the War to End All Wars, plenty of Irish enlistees were nonplussed to see troops deployed to their own neighborhoods, Black and Tans shooting up their friends and family.*

From June 1920, a number of Irish Connaught Rangers “grounded arms” for their brethren in Eire, refusing to serve Britain while British troops occupied Ireland. One thing led to another, and a group (led by Daly, and his brother William) ended up trying to rush an armory to recover its weapons, opposed by other Rangers who remained loyal to the crown.

Fourteen death sentences were handed down for this show of indiscipline, but Daly’s was the only one actually carried out. The Rangers were disbanded two years later with the formation of the Irish Free State. And everyone lived happily ever after.

* Connaught Rangers had been used (without incident) to suppress the Easter Rising in 1916.

On this day..

• 1984: The Hondh-Chillar Massacre
• 1675: Boyarina Morozova, Old Believer
• 1907: Afanasi Matushenko
• 1715: Seven at Tyburn
• 1803: Ludovicus Baekelandt, Vrijbos bandit
• 1483: Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham
• 82 BCE: The defeated populares of the Battle of the Colline Gate
• 1984: Velma Barfield, the first woman in the modern era
• 1801: James Legg, crucified ecorche
• 1972: Evelyn Anderson and Beatrice Kosin, missionaries
• 1924: Ali Reshti and Sayyid Husain, to placate America
• 2001: Mona Fandey, witch doctor
• 1963: Ngo Dinh Diem