[Illustration: _Robert Emmet._
AET XXV.]
ROBERT EMMET
A SURVEY OF HIS REBELLION
AND OF HIS ROMANCE
BY
LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY
WITH A PORTRAIT
OF
ROBERT EMMET
LONDON
DAVID NUTT, 57-59 LONG ACRE
1904
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
At the Ballantyne Press
_To_
LIONEL JOHNSON
_in the Land of the Living to remind him of
old thoughts and of things once dear_
PREFATORY NOTE
THE following unscientific monograph, a sort of little historical
descant, is founded upon all the accurate known literature of the
subject, and also largely on the Hardwicke MSS. These, in so far as
they relate to Emmet, the writer was first to consult and have copied,
last winter, before they were catalogued. But while these sheets were
in press, several interesting fragments from the MSS. appeared in
the _Cornhill Magazine_ for September, 1903, thus forestalling their
present use. This discovery will condone the writer’s innocent claim,
made on page 60, of printing the two letters there as unpublished
matter.
The portrait is after Brocas’s hurried court-room sketch, made the day
before the execution. The original print is in the Joly Collection of
the National Library of Ireland. The head is too sharp and narrow, and
yet it bears a marked resemblance, far exceeding that of either of the
other portraits, to some of Robert Emmet’s collateral descendants. On
such good _à posteriori_ evidence it was chosen.
Oxford, _Dec. 9, 1903_.
ROBERT EMMET
A SURVEY OF HIS REBELLION AND OF HIS ROMANCE
THE four who lived to grow up of the seventeen children born to
Robert Emmet, M.D., of Cork, later of Dublin, and Elizabeth Mason,
his wife, were all, in their way, persons of genius. The Emmets
were of Anglo-Norman stock, Protestants, settled for centuries in
Ireland. The Masons, of like English origin, had merged it in repeated
alliances with women of Kerry, where the Dane, the Norman, and later
invaders from nearer quarters had never settled down to perturb the
ancient Celtic social stream. Dr. Emmet was a man of clear brain
and incorruptible honour. The mother of his children, to judge by
her letters, many of which have been privately printed, must have
been an exquisite being, high-minded, religious, loving, humorous,
wise. Her eldest surviving son, Christopher Temple Emmet, was named
for his two paternal grandparents, Christopher Emmet of Tipperary
and Rebecca Temple, great-great-granddaughter of the first Baronet
Temple of Stowe, in Buckinghamshire. The mention of that prolific,
wide-branching, and extraordinary family of Temple as forebears of the
younger Emmets is like a sharply accented note in a musical measure.
It has never been played for what it is worth; no annalist has tracked
certain Emmet qualities to this perfectly obvious ancestral source.
The Temples had not only, in this case, the bygone responsibility to
bear, for in a marked manner they kept on influencing their Emmet
contemporaries, as in one continuous mood thought engenders thought.
Says Mr. James Hannay: “The distinctive ηθος of the Temples has been
a union of more than usual of the kind of talent which makes men of
letters, with more than usual of the kind of talent which makes men
of affairs.” The Emmets, too, shared the “distinctive ηθος” in the
highest degree. Added to the restless two-winged intelligence, they
had the heightened soberness, the moral elevation, which formed no
separate inheritance. The Temples were, and are, a race of subtle but
somewhat austere imagination, strongly inclined to republicanism, and
to that individualism which is the norm of it. The Temple influence in
eighteenth-century Ireland was, obliquely, the American influence: a
new and heady draught at that time, a “draught of intellectual day.” If
we seek for those unseen agencies which are so much more operative than
mere descent, we cover a good deal of ground in remembering that Robert
Emmet the patriot came of the same blood as Sidney’s friend, Cromwell’s
chaplain, and Dorothy Osborne’s leal and philosophic husband. And he
shared not only the Temple idiosyncrasy, but, unlike his remarkable
brothers, the thin, dark, aquiline Temple face.
Rebecca Temple, only daughter of Thomas, a baronet’s son, married
Christopher Emmet in 1727, brought the dynastic names, Robert and
Thomas, into the Emmet family, and lived in the house of her son, the
Dublin physician, until her death in 1774, when her grandchildren,
Temple and Thomas Addis, were aged thirteen and ten, Robert being
yet unborn. Her protracted life and genial character would have
strengthened the relations, always close, with the Temple kin. Her
brother Robert had gone in his youth from Ireland to Boston, where
his father was long resident; and there he married a Temple cousin.
This Captain Robert Temple died on April 13, 1754, “at his seat, Ten
Hills, at Boston, in New England.” His three sons, the eldest of whom,
succeeding his great-grandfather, became afterwards Sir John Temple,
eighth Baronet of Stowe, all settled in New England and married
daughters of the Bowdoin, Shirley, and Whipple families—good wives
and clever women. John Temple had been “a thorough Whig all through
the Revolution,” and had suffered magnanimously for it. He had to
forfeit office, vogue, and money; and little anticipating his then
most improbable chances of a rise in the world, he forfeited all these
with dogged cheerfulness, in the hour when he could least afford to do
so. The latter-day Winthrops of the Republic are directly descended
from him, and the late Marquis of Dufferin and Ava from his brother.
A certain victorious free spirit, an intellectual fire, whimsical and
masterful, has touched the whole race of untamable Temples, and the
Emmets, the very flower of that race. Love of liberty was, in both
Robert Emmet and in Thomas Addis Emmet, no isolated phenomenon, but
their strengthened and applied inheritance. Captain Robert Temple’s
second son, Robert, came back with his wife, Harriet Shirley, after
the Declaration of Independence, to Allentown, Co. Dublin. His widow
eventually received indemnification for the loss of their transatlantic
estates. It is thus proved that Robert Temple was a loyalist to some
appreciable degree. Earlier and later, however, he did considerable
thinking, cherished liberal principles, and had much to say of the
rights of man and other large theses to his namesake first cousin,
Robert Emmet, M.D., with whom he lived for eighteen months after his
return. This community of ideas was further cemented by the marriage
of Anne Western Temple, Robert Temple’s daughter, to Dr. Emmet’s
eldest son, Temple Emmet. Dr. Emmet was faithful to the unpopular
convictions which he found himself sharing in increased degree with his
cousin. Up to 1783 he was always voluntarily abandoning one position
of eminence after another, as he came to dissent from English rule in
Ireland. He held among other offices that of State Physician; and from
a bland condemnatory notice of his youngest son in _The Gentleman’s
Magazine_ for October 1803, we learn that he was also physician to
the Lord-Lieutenant’s household. It is clear, then, that he also began
his career as a trusted Conservative. But as his opinions changed,
he gave up, Temple-like and Emmet-like, every position and emolument
inconsistent with them; when the ’98 broke out he had even ceased to
practise his profession. He and his wife and their children felt alike
in these matters so adversely and intimately affecting their chances
of worldly success. The boys and the girl were brought up to think
first of Ireland and her needs. An amicable satirist and distinguished
acquaintance was wont facetiously to report Dr. Emmet’s administration
of what the visitor named “the morning draught” to his little ones:
“Well, Temple, what are you ready to do for your country? Would you
kill your sister? Would you kill me?” For after this perilous early
Roman pattern the catechism ran. Even if only a beloved joke, it would
have been enough to seal the young Emmets for fanaticism, had not their
good angels intervened. As it turned out, they were all of a singularly
judicial cast. The only daughter, Mary Anne, had what used to be
called, by way of adequate eulogy, a “masculine understanding,” and
wrote pertinently and well. Her husband was the celebrated barrister
and devoted Irishman, Robert Holmes. He was the true friend and adviser
of the whole Emmet family, and survived his wife, who died during his
imprisonment in 1804, for five-and-fifty years. Of Dr. Emmet’s three
sons, Temple, Thomas Addis, and Robert, the former had an almost
incomparably high repute for “every virtue, every grace,” to quote
Landor’s mourning line for another. It is no disparagement to him to
say that this was partly owing to the pathos of so short a career,
and to the fact that he died ten years before the great Insurrection,
twelve before the Union; seeming to belong to a prior order of things,
it was the easier to praise the Emmet who did not live long enough to
get into trouble, at the expense of the Emmets who did.
Temple Emmet, with his beautiful thought-burdened head, a little like
the young Burke’s, passed by like a wonderful apparition in his day.
His success at Trinity College was complete; it is said the examiners
found their usual maximum of commendation, _Valde bene_, unequal to
the occasion, and had a special _O quam bene!_ given to him with his
degree. This has a sort of historic parallel in the incident at Wadham
College, Oxford, just a century before, when Clarendon, Lord Chancellor
of the University, set a kiss for eulogy upon the boyish cheek of John
Wilmot, Master of Arts. Again serving as his own precedent, Temple
Emmet became King’s Counsel at twenty-five. Two years later he was
in his grave, whither his young wife quickly followed him. All his
contemporaries qualified to appraise his worth, deplored him beyond
common measure. Said the great Grattan, long after: “Temple Emmet,
before he came to the Bar, knew more law than any of the judges on
the Bench; and if he had been placed on one side and the whole Bench
opposed to him, he could have been examined against them, and would
have surpassed them all; he would have answered better both in law and
divinity than any judge or bishop in the land.” His premature death
called his next brother from the University of Glasgow, where he had
just graduated in medicine, to the profession of the law.
The Emmet name was not destined to rise like a star where it had
fallen, for bitter times were drawing nigh, and his own generosity and
integrity were to bring Thomas Addis Emmet into fatal difficulties.
With a great number of other zealous spirits, he flung himself with
all his force of protest against the legalised iniquities destroying
Ireland. Examined before the secret committee of the House of Lords,
August 10, 1798, the young man, then as always quietly intrepid, let
fall brave prophetic words. Asked if he had been an United Irishman,
he righted the tense in answering: “My Lords, I am one”; then he
continued: “Give me leave to tell you, my Lords, that if the Government
of this country be not regulated so that the control may be wholly
Irish, and that the commercial arrangements between the two countries
be not put upon a footing of perfect equality, the connection [with
England] cannot last.” Lord Glentworth said: “Then your intention was
to destroy the Church?” Mr. Emmet replied: “No, my Lord, my intention
never was to destroy the Church. My wish decidedly was to overturn the
Establishment.” Here Lord Dillon interrupted: “I understand you. And
have it as it is in France?” “As it is in America, my Lords.” When the
chance for self-expatriation came, when “to retract was impossible, to
proceed was death,” Thomas Addis Emmet followed the ancestral trail,
and founded a new family in his approved America. The only one of
his circle spared to continue the Emmet name, he came to flower sadly
enough, because his hopes were broken, on what was not to him alien
soil. Everyone knows the rest: how, admitted to the New York Bar by
suspension of rules, without probation, he died in all men’s honour, in
1827, Attorney-General of the State.
Robert Emmet was even surer of an illustrious career. Alas! There is
no documentary proof forthcoming for it as yet, but it is painfully
probable that his little afterglow of a rebellion was long fostered,
for reasons of their own, by great statesmen, and that their secret
knowledge of it arose from Irish bad faith; that, in short, he was let
dream his dream until it suited others to close the toils about him.
The two or three highest in authority in Dublin, Lord Hardwicke chief
among them, were kept ignorant as himself. Emmet was really victim and
martyr. But to die prodigally at twenty-five, and to be enshrined with
unwithered and unique passion in Irish hearts; to go down prematurely
in dust and blood, and yet to be understood, felt, seen, for ever, in
the sphere where “only the great things last,” is perhaps as enviable
a privilege as young men often attain. His is one of several historic
instances in which those who have wrought little else seem to have
wrought an exquisite and quite enduring image of themselves in human
tradition. With none of the celebrities of his own nation can he in
point of actual service, compare; but every one of them, whether known
to ancient folk-lore or to the printed annals of yesterday, is less
of a living legend with Thierry’s “long-memoried people,” than “the
youngest and last of the United Irishmen,” “the child of the heart of
Ireland.” A knot of peasants gathered around a peat fire in the long
evenings, pipe in hand, are the busy hereditary factors of apocryphal
tales beginning “Once Robert Emmet (God love him),” &c.; and a certain
coloured print, very green as to raiment, very melodramatic as to
gesture, hangs to-day in the best room of their every cabin, and stands
to them for all that was of old, and is not, and still should be.
He was born March 4, 1778, in his father’s house in St. Stephen Green
West, Dublin, now numbered 124-125. As a boy he was active out of
doors, yet full of insatiable interest in books, and developed early
his charming talent for drawing and modelling. He was always rather
grave than gay; but the best proof, if any were needed, that he had
nothing of the prig in him, is that he was a favourite at school;
the potential Great Man, in fact, to whom the others looked up. His
one serious early illness was small-pox, which left his complexion
slightly roughened. He entered Trinity College, in his native city,
at fifteen. Either at this time, or just before, occurred an incident
so characteristic as to be worth recording, for it illustrates both
his power of mental concentration, and his still courage in facing
the untoward haps of life alone. Like Shelley, he had a youthful
fascination for chemistry. He had been dabbling with corrosive
sublimate, not long before bedtime. Instead of going upstairs, he sat
down, later, to figure out an allotted algebraic problem which, by way
of whetting adventurous spirits, the author of the book in question
acknowledged to be extremely difficult. Poring earnestly over the
page, the boy fell to biting his nails. He instantly tasted poison,
and pain and fear rushed on him. Without rousing a single person from
sleep, he ran to the library, got down his father’s encyclopædia,
turned to the article he needed, and learned that his antidote was
chalk and water; then he went in the dark to the coach-house where
he had seen chalk used, got it, mixed and drank it, and returned to
his interrupted task. His tutor could not fail to notice the agonised
little face at breakfast. Robert confessed the mischance, and that he
had lain perforce awake all night; but he added, modestly, that he had
mastered the problem. One of Plutarch’s heroes, at that age, could
hardly have done better. The antique world, with its heroic simpleness,
was indeed Robert Emmet’s own ground. At Trinity he earned, without
effort, a golden reputation, partly due to his scientific scholarship,
partly to his goodness, partly, again, to his possession of a faculty
of animated fluent speech, a faculty dear to the Irish, as to every
primitive people. He had a presence noticeably sweet and winning, with
“that gentleness so often found in determined spirits.” His classmate,
Moore, the poet, bore witness long after to his “pure moral worth
combined with intellectual power.... Emmet was wholly free from the
follies and frailties of youth, though how capable he was of the most
devoted passion events afterwards proved.” Mr. Charles Phillips wrote
in 1818: “[Emmet at Trinity] was gifted with abilities and virtues
which rendered him an object of universal esteem and admiration. Every
one loved, every one respected him; his fate made an impression on the
University which has not yet been obliterated. His mind was naturally
melancholy and romantic: he had fed it from the pure fountain of
classic literature, and might be said to have lived not so much in the
scene around him as in the society of the illustrious and sainted dead.
The poets of antiquity were his companions, its patriots his models,
and its republics his admiration. He had but just entered upon the
world, full of the ardour which such studies might be supposed to have
excited, and unhappily at a period in the history of his country when
such noble feelings were not only detrimental but dangerous.”
When Emmet was in his twentieth year the so-called Rebellion, in which
Wolfe Tone and Lord Edward Fitzgerald were leaders, broke out. In the
agitation which led up to it and sustained it, Thomas Addis Emmet was
deeply implicated, nor did his younger brother go unsinged by the
travelling flame. Sitting once by the pianoforte in Thomas Moore’s
rooms, listening to _Let Erin Remember_, he stood up suddenly, with a
brief pregnant speech, such as was habitual with him: “O that I were
at the head of twenty thousand men, marching to that air!” As it was,
he made one of the nineteen of her best spirits whom his University
then thought fit to dismiss without benisons. One of these was no fiery
undergraduate, but a Fellow and a famous scholar, Dr. Whitley Stokes.
Their chief offence was that they had refused to tell what they knew
of others who shared their outspoken opinions. There is no need here
to dwell upon the memorable rising of 1798, or upon the rooted general
opposition to that Union with Great Britain which wholesale bribery was
so soon to consummate. One need but bear in mind that the Anglo-Irish
(chiefly the Presbyterians and members of the dominant Church, the
landed classes, who had nothing to gain and everything to lose by their
championship of disenfranchised Catholics and the countless poor)
came angrily to the fore as the defenders of nationalism, at a time
when exile, the dungeon, and the axe, active for two generations, had
deprived Ireland of the last of her native Jacobite gentry. Saurin, the
great jurist, had written: “Whether it would be prudent in the people
to avail themselves of that right would be another question; but if a
Legislative Union were forced on the country against the will of its
inhabitants, it would be a nullity: ... [To take issue with it] would
be a struggle against usurpation, not resistance against law.” Emmet
had only to cross the street from his College to hear the debates in
either House of Parliament, to hear the like doctrine from Grattan in
his glory; and with “malignants” of the loftiest character, like Lord
Cloncurry, then the Rt. Hon. Valentine Lawless, he and his associated
every day. It was inevitable, with such counsels of perfection brought
to bear upon his daring and his entire disinterestedness, that Robert
Emmet should attempt a popular emancipation, and succeed but in ruining
himself. It was a poignant case of chronological and topographical
misplacement. In his expulsion, or rather, withdrawal from College
(for he had anticipated the action of the authorities), his father, of
course, approved and stood by him, although Robert’s entry upon any
professional career was fatally compromised. His “highly distinguished
family, striking talents, and interesting manners,” could not mend
that. He may even have taken at once the plain godly oath of the
United Irishmen, and become an active agent for the cause. Within the
twelvemonth he had bestirred himself so effectually that a warrant
was actually issued for his arrest. For some reason or other it was
not put in force: even thus early there began to be woven about him
the web of curious cross-purposes in which, in the end, he was to be
caught and strangled. It became advisable to go to France, to see the
First Consul and Talleyrand on an all-important matter. It would be
well to reach a quiet place beyond espionage, where inhibited rites
might go on. The young conspirator had military histories in process
of annotation, plans of campaign in mountainous districts to perfect,
seditious conferences to hold with colleagues and subordinates, and,
incidentally, even poems to commit for his sad country’s sake. And
there was another excellent reason why he found it convenient to go
away.
One of Robert Emmet’s college mates was Richard, youngest son of the
John Philpot Curran, “ugly, copious, full of wit and ardour and fire,”
the Curran of “fifty faces and twice as many voices,” of Byron’s
lasting admiration. Richard had a sister Sarah, aged not quite eighteen
when Robert Emmet, three years her senior, fell in love with her.
Sentimental invention has placed their first meeting at a ball in a
Wicklow country-house; but it would rather seem as if, in the compact
society of a gay little city like Dublin before the Union, they must
have known each other fairly well from childhood, especially as the
two families were then acquainted. That fatal mutual affection was to
endure long vicissitudes and to prove invincible.
We must infer from a passage in Mr. W. H. Curran’s _Life_ of his father
that Emmet’s reserve, for once, but imperfectly concealed evidences
of some strong passion, political or extra-political, or both, from
the oracular host of the Priory at Rathfarnham. Parenthetically, and
without emphasis, Mr. Curran saw fit to warn his household against too
implicit a cherishing of their engaging visitor. That Sarah’s interest
in him was particular, that it was already awakened and deepening,
seems never to have been surmised. According to such evidence as we
have, it looks as though he had declared to her the state of his
feelings before he went to Paris. It was not an hour, however, when
Sarah dared to be happy. Her family had but just gathered together
after a most harrowing break-up; she herself had been away for several
years under the roof of a beloved clergyman in Lismore, and her
homecoming was recent. Her mother, how driven to that point of revolt
we know not, had eloped in 1794 with a too sympathetic neighbouring
vicar. Sarah was fourteen then, and of a peculiarly sensitive
temperament; and she had worshipped her mother. Her sensitiveness was
not allayed by her father’s increased mental aloofness from his family,
after his misfortune. Incomparably genial, when he chose, to strangers,
he visited his resentments in private upon his children, her children,
especially upon his son Henry, who stood in lifelong dread of him.
The one little daughter of his inordinate love, Gertrude, had died by
accident at twelve years old.
Sarah’s sad young face was typically Irish, her noble and touching
beauty stamped in every feature with irony, melancholy, and fatalism.
To her lover, with his head full of all poetic ideas, she must have
looked like the very spirit of Innisfail. His intensely sanguine and
resolute nature may have kept him from reading in such a face their
own common rune of sorrow. It is clear that his forgetting her, while
he was absorbed in the grave business abroad, was out of the question.
No one knows, he tells Mme. la Marquise de Fontenay, in one of his
few recovered letters, what his return to Ireland and to “the sorrows
before him” is costing. Memories of the past (of that long-distanced
past which is proper to blasted youth) must assail him; and it will be
hard to affect that he has not known “tender ties, perhaps,” which he
is forbidden to resume. The lad was writing in French, and does it in
character. But then, as ever, he was radically sincere. His thoughts
seem to have turned towards Dublin, from motives of filial duty. His
father and mother had agreed to the elder brother’s first suggestion
from Paris that Robert should be induced to go to America with him; and
Robert felt that so generous a permission laid its own obligation on
him not to accept the parting. Everything seemed to conspire to restore
him to Ireland. And with his yet-to-be-liberated Ireland, like
“Flame on flame and wing on wing,”
shone the remote sweetness of Sarah Curran. He was told that
revolutionary hopes were ripening fast; he was thus lured back in
October, 1802. His absence had lasted nearly three years.
The separation had probably taught Sarah something more of her own
heart. Immediately Emmet’s visits to the Priory were resumed, as if
in the general stream of homage which brought so many enthusiastic
young men into Mr. Curran’s presence, at evening, to listen and gather
wisdom. Dr. Emmet died in April, much lamented, and by his will
Robert came into possession of considerable ready money. He spent
it instantly, effectively, and entirely on preparations for armed
resistance. No one suspected it; those in his confidence were yet
faithful. Still less did others suspect the now plighted attachment,
the innocent love hungry for joy, and yet hurried on to dark ends
through devious and hidden ways. Mr. Curran’s strenuous opposition, on
all grounds, was necessarily taken for granted, until some prodigious
success should befall Emmet, and as if by a spell free the daughter who
so feared her father. Sarah knew detail by detail of the conspiracy as
it arose, and was fain with all her soul to encourage its progress. For
the two sensitive creatures under so complicated a strain there passed
an anxious and exciting year. The most disagreeable surprise of Mr.
Curran’s life was yet to come before it ended.
Robert Emmet took lodgings under an assumed name in Butterfield
Lane, in the suburb of Rathfarnham. His agents came to him by night
and reported their progress. The record of all he had meant to do,
drawn up with manly composure at the brink of the grave, may be read
elsewhere. As has been noted, his plan for the capture of Dublin and
the summoning of the patriotic Members of Parliament was clearly
founded on an inspiring precedent, that of the Revolution of 1640
in Portugal, when but two-score clever and resolute men served to
deliver the whole country from the yoke of Spain. But when the hour of
Ireland’s destiny struck, every clock-wheel went wrong. If the failure
were not so piteous, because of one’s interest in the doomed wizard
and his suddenly disenchanted wand, it would be grotesque. Emmet had
studied with enormous industry, and arranged with masterly precision,
directing, among pikes and powder in his dingy depôts, each needful
move and counter-move for a concerted rising; he thought it strange
that in every conceivable way, major and minor, the whole scheme
simultaneously miscarried.
If one could believe him as free as he believed himself, one might
regret that he maintained too perfect a secrecy, and counted too much
upon the elasticity of Irish impulse. He had been careful to avoid
what he thought the error of the United Irishmen in establishing
too many posts for revolutionary action, and confiding knowledge of
preliminaries to innumerable persons all over the country, some of
whom would be almost certain to play him false. He worked in the
dark, with but a dozen friends at his elbow, spending his money
freely but heedfully on manufacturing and storing weapons of war in
Dublin. He looked towards a moment when a disaffected legion would
arise at a summons, like the men from the heath in _The Lady of the
Lake:_ a legion which he could arm and command and weld, in one magic
moment, for Ireland’s regeneration. He leaned overmuch, not on human
goodness, but on human intelligence in making opportunity: and it
failed him. He was like the purely literary playwright labouring with
the average theatre audience; he was never in the least, for all his
wit, cunning enough to deal scientifically with a corporation on whom
hints, half-tones, adumbrations, are thrown away; the law of whose
being is still to crave a presentation of the “undisputed thing in
such a solemn way.” As drama through its processes, act after act,
does well to assume that we are all blockheads, and then, as the
case requires, to modify, so any flaming revolutionary genius would
do well to trust nothing whatever to a moral inspiration only too
likely to be non-existent. It is a terribly costly thing to be, as
we say, equal to an emergency, before the emergency is quite ready
to be equalled. And that was Emmet’s plight. A French fleet had been
promised to begin military operations towards the end of August, but
an unforeseen explosion in one of Emmet’s Dublin magazines led him
to declare his toy war against the English Crown prematurely. The
local volunteer troops were to be reinforced by others, well armed,
from the outlying counties, at the firing of a rocket agreed upon;
the Castle was to be seized as the chief move, and a Provisional
Government, according to printed programme, set up. The time for
assembling was hurriedly fixed for July 23, 1803, early in the evening.
The gentlemen leaders and the trusty battalions failed to appear,
kept away by mysterious quasi-authentic advices; appeared instead, as
time wore on, many unknown, unprepossessing insurgents, the drunken
refuse of the city taverns. The cramp-irons, the scaling-ladders, the
blunderbusses, the fuses for the grenades, were not ready; signals
had been delayed or suppressed; the prepared slow-matches were mixed
in with others; treachery was at work and running like fire in oil
under the eyes of one who could believe no ill of human kind. Beyond
Dublin, the Wicklow men under Dwyer, an epic peasant figure, received
no message; the Wexford men waited in vain for orders all night; the
Kildare men, whom Emmet meant to head in person, actually reached the
city, and left it again. They had met and talked with him, and were
not satisfied with the number and quality of the weapons, chiefly
primitive inventions of his own; and because Dublin confederates were
not produced for inspection (such was Emmet’s caution where others were
concerned), the canny farmers returned homewards, spreading the ill
word along the roads that Dublin had refused to act. Each imaginable
prospect grew darker than its alternative. But the curtain had to
rise now, let results be what they might. About nine o’clock, Emmet
being in such a state of speechless agitation as may be conceived, one
Quigley rushed in with the false report that the Government soldiery
were upon them. There was nothing to do but sally forth in the hope
of augmented numbers, once the move was made. The poor “General,” in
his green-and-white-and-gold uniform, at the head of some eighty
insubordinates, took in the bitter situation at a glance: he foresaw
how his holy insurrection would dwindle to a three-hours’ riot, how his
dream, with all its costly architecture, was ending like snow in the
gutter. Hardly had he set out on foot, with drawn sword, through the
town, accompanied by the faithful Stafford and two or three associates,
followed confusedly by the uncontrollable crowd, when an uproar rose
from the rear; there was a sudden commotion which ended in wounds and
death to a citizen and an officer; then the spirit of rowdyism, private
pillage, and indiscriminate slaughter took the lead. While it ran high,
Arthur Wolfe, Lord Kilwarden, Lord Chief-Justice, the one unfailingly
humane and deservedly beloved judge in all Ireland, was killed. He
was driving in from the country with his daughter and his nephew, the
Rev. Richard Wolfe; finding the carriage stopped in Thomas Street, he
put his grey head out at the window in the pleasant evening light,
announcing the honoured name which, as he thought he knew, would be
his passport through the maddest mob ever gathered. A muddle-brained
creature, quite mistaken as to facts, and acting in revenge for a
wrong never inflicted, unmercifully piked him: a fate paralleled only
by the unpremeditated assassination in our own time of that other
kindest heart, Lord Frederick Cavendish. It is significant that some in
the ranks afterwards made separately in court the unasked declaration
that had they been near enough, Lord Kilwarden’s life should have
been saved at the expense of their own. Such, indeed, was the general
feeling. It has been carelessly stated that Emmet was not far from the
scene of the outrage, and arrived, in a fury, just too late to prevent
the second horror, the stabbing to death of Mr. Wolfe; and that it
was he who took the unfortunate Miss Wolfe, to whom no violence was
offered, from the carriage. But records now show conclusively that (as
he once said) he had withdrawn from that part of Dublin before the
murders came to pass. He had addressed his followers in Francis Street,
setting his face against useless bloodshed, and made for the mountains
hard by, commanding those who retained any sense of discipline to go
along with him. A quick retreat was the only sagacious course to follow
in this gross witless turmoil, so contrary to his purpose: for his
printed manifesto had expressly declared life and property were to
be held sacred. His secret, up to this point, was practically safe,
and his losses reparable. The “rebels” abroad that night were but
diabolical changelings; he would break away with the few he could rely
upon, nurse hope to life with the courage that never failed, and take
his chances to fight again. He reached safety, unchallenged; Dwyer even
then implored for leave to call out on the morrow his disappointed
veterans for a new assay; but Emmet was firm. No lust of revenge on
fate, no recoil from being thought, for one hot moment, a coward, could
shake him from his shrewd and rational acceptance of present defeat.
He had no personal ambition, no vicarious tax to pay it. Ireland could
wait the truer hour. He seems never once to have bewailed aloud the
miserable end of his own long minute study of military strategy, the
foul check to aspirations founded in honour, and breathed upon by the
dead of Salamis and Thermopylæ.
It is an almost incredible fact that the authorities, meanwhile,
whether aware or unaware of the projected outbreak, were virtually off
their guard, and the garrison was so little in condition to repel an
onset that not a ball in the arsenal would fit the artillery! Public
attention in Great Britain was fixed on the difficulties with France,
and this preoccupation everywhere affected social life. Dublin had been
almost deserted on July 23; the Castle gates stood wide open, without
sentries. Two entire hours passed before the detachments of horse and
foot arrived to clear the streets. “Government escaped by a sort of
miracle,” as _The Nation_ remarked half a century after, “by a series
of accidents and mistakes no human sagacity could have foreseen, and no
skill repair.” Though there was treachery behind and before as we now
see, Emmet, mournfully closing his summary of events, took no account
of it. “Had I another week [of privacy], had I one thousand pounds, had
I one thousand men, I would have feared nothing. There was redundancy
enough in any one part to have made up in completeness for deficiency
in the rest. But there was failure in all: plan, preparation, and men.”
Three days after the abortive rising, the disturbance was completely
over and the country everywhere quiet. The whole number of the slain
was under fifty.
None among those who have written of Robert Emmet have noted for what
reason the news of the death of Lord Kilwarden must have been to him
a last desperate blow. Quite apart from his natural horror of the
blundering crime, he had the most intimate cause to lament it. Lord
Kilwarden was the person in all the world whom John Philpot Curran most
revered: “my guardian angel,” he was wont to call him, summing up in
the words all his tutelary service of long years to a junior colleague.
It would have gone hard with Mr. Curran, so high was partisan passion
at the time, if, in his defence of the State prisoners during the
terrible series of prosecutions in the ’98, he had not been protected,
day after day, by the strong influence of Kilwarden. Emmet, if he
could have leaned for once on a merely selfish motive, might have
looked forward, as to the blackness of hell, to that hour when Curran
should learn that his dearest friend’s indirect murderer was none other
than his daughter’s betrothed lover. Apprehensions of danger to his
sweetheart must have haunted Robert Emmet through the sleepless nights
among the outlawed folk on the wild fragrant Wicklow hillsides. Below,
in a little port, was a fishing-smack under full sail, which meant
liberty and security, would he but abandon all and come away. But the
insistent beat of his own heart was to see his beautiful Sarah again;
to learn how she looked upon him, or whether she would fly with him now
that his first great endeavour was over, and only the rag of a pure
motive was left to clothe his soiled dream and his abject undoing.
It was a mad deed; but Robert Emmet, in relics of his tarnished
regimentals, stole back to Dublin. He was so young that the adventure
took on multiple attractions.
He hid himself in a house at Harold’s Cross, where he had masqueraded
once before, when his country’s need constrained him. Now he was there
chiefly because the road in front ran towards Rathfarnham, and because,
at least, he could sometime or other watch his own dear love go by. A
servant, a peasant wench who was devoted to him, Anne Devlin, carried
letters under her apron to the Priory, carried letters “richer than
Ind” back to the proscribed master. She was a neighbouring dairyman’s
daughter, and her coming and going were unquestioned. Forty years
after, in her pathetic old age, she told Dr. Madden how Miss Sarah’s
emotion would all but betray her: “When I handed her a letter, her
face would change so, one would hardly know her.” And again: “Miss
Sarah was not tall, her figure was very slight, her complexion dark,
her eyes large and black, and her look was the mildest, the softest,
and the sweetest look you ever saw!” All this is beautifully borne out
by the Romney portrait, save that the pensive face which Romney must
have begun to paint before the time of her betrothal (for after 1799
he painted hardly at all) is not olive-skinned and not black-eyed. The
eyes are, in truth, very dark, but of Irish violet-grey. Every Anne
Devlin in the world would have called them “black.” But one hastens to
contradict a hasty phrase: there is but one Anne Devlin, a soul beyond
price, who suffered afterwards and without capitulation, for her “Mr.
Robert’s” sake, tortures of body and mind which read like those in the
_Acta Sanctorum_. Her name will be with his when that “country shall
have taken her place among the nations of the earth;” until then there
is no fear but that those who care for him will keep a little candle
burning to his most heroic friend.
At every house where Emmet lived, as “Mr. Huet” or “Mr. Ellis,” during
his fugitive and perilous months, he had his romantic trap-doors, and
removable wainscots, and sliding panels. Even at Casino, his own home
in the country, closed after his father’s death, with its summer-house
and decaying garden, he provided like subterfuges and inventions of
his own, for he had a turn for mechanism as well as for the plastic
arts. It is hard to be both a hunted rebel and an anxious lover, to
have equal necessity for staying in and for sallying forth! Just so
had “Lord Edward,” dear to every one who knew him, managed to exist,
in and out of a hole, before his seizure and death. It has been justly
said that “a system of government which could reduce such men as Robert
Emmet and Lord Edward Fitzgerald to live the life of conspirators,
and die the death of traitors, is condemned by that alone.” It seems
hardly possible but that Robert and his Sarah made out to meet again,
as they had met after the lamentable no-rising, when for a night and a
morning he had lingered in the alarmed city before escaping into the
mountains. One may be not far wrong in believing that the girl was by
this time too overwrought, dismayed, and grief-stricken, to come to any
immediate decision about joining him, and breaking away while there was
yet opportunity. He must have realised fully the alternative, whether
she did so or not, that to remain in Ireland was but to beckon on his
fate. At any rate, on August 23, at his humble dining-table, he was
suddenly apprehended. The informer has never been discovered; from the
Secret Service Money books we know that he received his due £1000. The
captor was Major Sirr, the unloved fowler of that other young eagle of
insurrection but just mentioned, Lord Edward Fitzgerald. He was able to
recognise Emmet by the retrospective description obligingly furnished
by Dr. Elrington, Provost of Trinity, of an undergraduate whom he
had not loved. The captive was bound and led away, bleeding from a
pistol wound in the shoulder. He had tried to get off, and some rough
treatment followed, for which apologies were tendered. “All is fair in
war,” said the prince of courtesy. The Earl of Hardwicke, then Lord
Lieutenant of Ireland, writes two days after, in his usual covertly
kind way, of the arrest of young Emmet, now consigned to Kilmainham
Gaol on the charge of high treason. “I confess I had imagined that
he had escaped,” he says to his brother, his confidential daily
correspondent. “His having remained here looks as if he had been in
expectation of a further attempt.” Not yet was the Lord Lieutenant
aware of the love-story intertwined with the one-man insurrection.
When enclosed in his cell, Emmet became the object of apparent concern
and affection on the part of two acquaintances: the accomplished
advocate and litterateur, Mr. Leonard M’Nally, and Dr. Trevor,
Superintendent of Prisons. If these persons had stepped out of an
ancient epic or some fancied tragedy to show what human genius could
do by way of creating hypocrites, no plaudit ever yet given could be
worthy of the play. They were both moral monsters, paragons of evil,
beyond the Florentine or Elizabethan imagination. How they played
with the too noble and trusting creature in their hands, how they
tricked him with illusory plans of escape, and beguiled him into
inditing documents which were promptly handed over to headquarters,
need not detain us, though it supplies a long thrilling chapter in the
humanities. Emmet’s first move was to empty his pockets of coin for
the gaoler, under the man’s promise that he would carry in person a
communication to Miss Curran. The recipient was not that distracted
maid, but the Attorney-General. The Lord Lieutenant wrote to the Hon.
Charles Yorke on September 9 as follows: “A curious discovery has
been made respecting Emmet, the particulars of which I have not time
to detail to you fully. There were found upon him two letters from
a woman, written with a knowledge of the transactions in which he
had been engaged, and with good wishes for the success of any future
attempt. He has been very anxious to prevent these letters being
brought forward, and has been apprehensive that the writer was arrested
as well as himself. Till yesterday, however, we were entirely ignorant
of the person who had written these letters, which are very clever and
striking. The discovery was made last night by a letter from Emmet,
intercepted on its passage from Kilmainham Prison to Miss Sarah Curran,
youngest daughter of Curran the lawyer. Wickham has seen him, and he
professes entire ignorance of the connection; but I think he must
decline being counsel for Emmet in a case in which his daughter may
be implicated. It is a very extraordinary story, and strengthens the
case against Emmet.” A rumour of the fate of his letters was allowed
to reach Emmet, and cut him to the quick. He wrote at once begging
that the third letter (surely with news of his arrest, and with such
assurances and sorrowful endearments as the occasion called for), might
not be withheld; and in exchange for the service demanded, knowing
that the Government already feared what that eloquent tongue might
have to say in court, he offered to plead guilty, and go dumb to the
grave. He who had staked so much on the purity of his public motive,
he who cared only, and cared fiercely, for the clearing of his name
from the misconceptions of posterity, he who was one of the elect
souls loving his love so much because he loved honour more—he, Robert
Emmet, was willing to forfeit every chance of his own vindication
for the sake of the sad girl brought into abhorrent publicity by his
rashness. He said he had injured her; he pleaded for the delivery of
the letter, and offered his own coveted silence as the price of it.
“That was certainly a fine trait in his character,” said Grattan, who
looked upon him as a visionary broken justly upon the wheel of things
ordained. Sarah never received her letter. But the discovery that
there had been a correspondence between herself and the arch-rebel
was a highly important-looking circumstance, and with all apologies
to its distinguished owner, the Priory at Rathfarnham was ordered to
be searched. Mr. Curran was not at home, but he returned in season to
meet Major Sirr and the armed escort riding down his drive-way, and
aglow with virtuous wrath at the possibility of suspicion alighting
upon him or his, he went to clear himself before the Privy Council.
Though his action secured its ends, being voluntary and merely formal,
it was a singular humiliation to the paternity concerned. But the
culminating shock he had to endure arose from another cause. Sarah’s
apartments had been searched; Emmet’s glowing letters, openly alluding
to his purposes, had been seized, and tied up and carried away. Here
was complicity indeed! and the knowledge of it came upon him like a
thunderbolt.
Within a few days, towards the end of this month of August, Mr. Curran
himself received a letter from Robert Emmet. It was neither signed
nor dated, and opened abruptly, waiving all formalities, not from any
hidden defiance, but from entire absorption in the mournful retrospect
it called up. As we know from Lord Hardwicke’s communication, Emmet
had retained Mr. Curran for his counsel, and it was thought fitting
that the latter should decline the brief for the defence. Of course Mr.
Curran threw it up; no man could have done otherwise. But his general
turmoil, and the apparent motives of it, are not a particularly noble
spectacle. The young prisoner, meanwhile, had something to say to him.