Elizabeth "Liza" Butler was an Irish Citizen Army member who participated in the Easter Rising of 1916 as a runner and a medic. Butler came from a wealthy Anglo-Irish banking family, but she joined the socialist cause due to her horror at the treatment of the Irish by the British and of the working-class by rich people such as her own family. She was captured following the suppression of the rising on 29 April, and she declined offers to be released on the condition that she feign regret for her cause.
Biography[]
Elizabeth Butler was born in Dublin, County Dublin, Ireland, the daughter of the Anglo-Irish banker Edward Butler and his Irish Catholic wife Dolly Mulcahy; she was also the niece of Monsignor Robert Mulcahy and the sister of Harry Butler. She came from an upper-class family, and she performed as a theatre actress during the 1900s and 1910s (alongside her friends Frances O'Flaherty and May Lacy) before becoming involved with the Irish republican movement while studying medicine. Butler was affiliated with the socialist tendency of the movement, and she befriended Jimmy Mahon, another member of the movement; she secretly attended Irish Citizen Army meetings without the knowledge of her fiancee Stephen Duffy Lyons, who later went on to join the British Army during World War I. By 18 April 1916, she was an active Irish Republican Brotherhood member, and she was assigned to the battalion which would take St. Stephen's Green during the upcoming Easter Rising. Her wedding with Lyons was set for 23 April 1916 at Trinity Chapel, but the outbreak of the Easter Rising interrupted their plans; she ditched the wedding to join Mahon in preparing for the uprising. Flaherty - an IRB commander - told her to stay at the rear and help with the wounded as they marched on Dublin Castle. She accompanied Mahon throughout the first day of the uprising, and she stayed behind to take care of the wounded in a church as Mahon headed to fight. Butler later witnessed the death of Peter Mahon at the hands of a British sniper, and she was later forced to surrender alongside Michael Collins, Jimmy Mahon, and several other IRB members on 29 April. She rejected her mother and her friend George Wilson's advice to feign regret in order to be released, and she instead decided to be imprisoned alongside the other Easter Rising prisoners.
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