Delusion: The True Story of Victorian Superspy Henri Le Caron

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

The threat posed by the Fenian Brotherhood to the young Dominion of Canada is today mostly an historical footnote, or worse: a tale of comic-opera buffoons who inanely schemed to capture Canada as a way of securing independence for Ireland. To their contemporary Canadians, however, they were a frightening threat. During the American Civil War, border tensions led John A. Macdonald, then attorney general of Canada West, to create Canada’s first undercover security force, and after the war, with thousands of unemployed Union veterans of Irish parentage said to be arming near our border, Prime Minister Macdonald had more reason to be concerned. His government engaged agents to discover “the existence of any plot, conspiracy or organization whereby peace would be endangered, the Queen’s Majesty insulted…”, but a man who had already been reporting to England about Irish nationalist activity became the most important spy recruited.

Born Thomas Beach, in England, he called himself Henri Le Caron when he joined the Union Army for adventure and served in the US Civil War. His letters about Irish plots in North America were forwarded by his father to an MP at Westminster and this led to Le Caron’s extraordinary double life. For a quarter century he lived as a doctor and pharmacist in the United States, raising a family with a devoted and courageous wife while working his way into influential positions in Irish secret societies and reporting on their activities. He informed Ottawa where Fenian attacks would occur, and all were met and defeated. After the military threat to Canada, such as it was, dissipated, Le Caron informed London of plots to explode bombs in England and even to murder Queen Victoria. (The book’s title has several meanings, the oddest being that in Ireland, “dynamite attacks were referred to as ‘the delusions’.”)

Journalist and author Peter Edwards takes us into the world of Irish nationalism in the late Victorian era. For a time focus shifts to the more moderate, but tragically doomed, Charles Parnell. Le Caron’s precarious double life ended in 1888 when he appeared as a witness at a commission of inquiry about Parnell’s activities, and quotations from the court transcripts make for gripping reading.

This well-documented and illustrated narrative, the first biography of Le Caron since 1984, also relates a bizarre time in his life that not all previous accounts mention: for a time he supplemented his income as one of a ring of body snatchers that supplied corpses to medical schools. Edwards devotes an intriguing chapter to this grotesque crime, which ended for Le Caron when he was involved in digging up the recently deceased son of the president of the United States.