to have done so might have appeared remarkable. Had Mr. ——[1] been
in town, I did not even wish to have seen you, but as he was not, I
wrote to you to come to me at once. I know that I have done you very
severe injury, much greater than I can atone for with my life; that
atonement I did offer to make before the Privy Council by pleading
guilty if those documents were suppressed.... My intention was not to
leave the suppression of those documents to possibility, but to render
it unnecessary for anyone to plead for me, by pleading guilty to the
charge myself. The circumstances that I am now going to mention I do
not state in my own justification. When I first addressed your daughter
I expected that in another week my own fate would have been decided. I
knew that in case of success many others would look on me differently
from what they did at that moment; but I speak with sincerity when
I say that I never was anxious for situation or distinction myself,
and I did not wish to be united to one who was. I spoke to your
daughter, neither expecting nor (under those circumstances) wishing
that there should be a return of attachment, but wishing to judge
of her dispositions, to know how far they might be not unfavourable
or disengaged, and to know what foundation I might afterwards have
to count on. I received no encouragement whatever. She told me she
had no attachment for any person, nor did she seem likely to have any
that could make her wish to quit you. I stayed away till the time
had elapsed, when I found that the event to which I allude was to be
postponed indefinitely. I returned, by a kind of infatuation, thinking
that to myself only was I giving pleasure or pain. I perceived no
progress of attachment on her part, nor anything in her conduct to
distinguish me from a common acquaintance. Afterwards I had reason to
suppose that [political] discoveries were made, and that I should be
obliged to quit the kingdom immediately. I came to make a renunciation
of any approach to friendship that might have been formed. On that very
day she herself spoke to me to discontinue my visits; I told her it was
my intention, and I mentioned the reason. I then for the first time
found, when I was unfortunate, by the manner in which she was affected,
that there was a return of affection, and that it was too late to
retreat. My own apprehensions also I afterwards found were without
cause; and I remained. There has been much culpability on my part in
all this, but there has also been a great deal of that misfortune which
seems uniformly to have accompanied me. That I have written to your
daughter since an unfortunate event [the arrest], has taken place, was
an additional breach of propriety for which I have suffered well; but
I will candidly confess that I not only do not feel it to have been
of the same extent, but that I consider it to have been unavoidable
after what had passed. For though I shall not attempt to justify in the
smallest degree my former conduct, yet, when an attachment was once
formed between us (and a sincerer one never did exist), I feel that,
peculiarly circumstanced as I then was, to have left her uncertain of
my situation would neither have weaned her affections nor lessened her
anxiety; and looking upon her as one whom, if I lived, I hoped to have
had my partner for life, I did hold the removing of her anxiety above
every other consideration. I would rather have the affections of your
daughter in the back settlements of America, than the first situation
this country could offer without them. I know not whether this will
be any extenuation of my offence; I know not whether it will be any
extenuation of it to know that if I had that situation in my power at
this moment I would relinquish it to devote my life to her happiness;
I know not whether success would have blotted out the recollection of
what I have done; but I [do] know that a man with the coldness of death
on him need not to be made to feel any other coldness, and that he may
be spared any addition to the misery he feels, not for himself, but for
those to whom he has left nothing but sorrow.”
It is apparent from this page that the great Mr. Curran had not
withheld from one under misfortune some crumbs of that verbal opulence
for which he was famous. Emmet’s disclaimer of any eagerness on
Sarah’s part in reciprocating his devotion is a knightly one. The
interpretation of her maidenly conduct, purely chivalric, was designed
to exculpate her in her over-lord’s eyes.
Poor Sarah, thus rudely informed by events of her Robert’s arrest, in
an hour of unprecedented torment, did not lack the tender consideration
from the Chief Secretary and the Attorney-General, which her innocent
misery deserved. Lord Hardwicke, too, directed that no action of any
kind should be taken against her. But the stress of this last summer
day was too much for her after the intense emotional life she had been
bearing so long alone. In the breath of her love’s exposure and of her
father’s anger head and heart seemed to break together, and for months
to come she was to be wholly and most mercifully exempt from the “rack
of this rough world.” On September 16, the Home Secretary was able to
felicitate the Lord Lieutenant from Whitehall on his generous treatment
of the implicated rebel at the Priory: “Your delicacy and management,”
he says, “with regard to the Curran family is highly applauded. The
King is particularly pleased with it. It is a sad affair. Mademoiselle
seems a true pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft.” This, of course, amounts to
the accusation that gentle little Sarah, with her sweet eyes and her
“most harmonious voice,” was guilty of doing her own thinking, and of
doing it, which was worst of all, upon political matters. It supplies
us, at any rate, with evidence of the wide and deep grounds for Emmet’s
true passion for the girl whose national ideals could so fearlessly
keep pace with his own. Heart and brain, soul and body, she would have
been his perfect mate. Her father’s harshness was the one element
needed to perfect Sarah’s desolation. Her real life closed without
conscious pain, and remained for a decent space buried. She never had
to look in the face the day of Emmet’s death, the all-significant day
“under her solemn fillet;” for that had tiptoed past her while her
reason slept. The good sister Amelia, afterwards Shelley’s friend
and portrait-painter in Italy, as soon as Sarah could be moved, took
her away from the intolerable home, and left her with loving Quaker
friends, the Penroses of Cork. During all the time of her affliction
and illness at the Priory, Mr. Curran is said never to have looked upon
his youngest daughter’s face; and from the hour of her leaving Dublin,
presumably under an allowance made for her support, he seems neither
ever to have sent her a message, nor to have thought of her again.
There are several historic instances of a like fatherliness in fathers,
a century ago. Mr. Curran doubtless felt outraged in every fibre, and
not more indignant at the independent conduct of his meek domestic
vassal than at the astounding ignorance in which she had contrived to
keep him. Yet there were powerful pleas for compassion in such a case
inherent in his own history. In early manhood he himself had figured
as collaborator in a similar headlong falling in love, a similar
breach of parental discipline. John Philpot Curran had been for a
short time tutor in the family of a fellow-Whig, Dr. Richard Creagh
of Creagh Castle, near Spenser’s Doneraile, when with Miss Creagh, a
young lady of beauty and of moderate fortune, he contracted a private
marriage. The discovery brought on storms; but on further reflection
Dr. Creagh saw fit to forgive the offenders, to receive them once
more beneath his roof, and even to allow his daughter’s portion to be
expended without stint on Mr. Curran, until he had completed his legal
studies in London, and begun to establish his inevitable ascendancy
at the Bar. The match, however, seems never to have been a happy one.
Conjugal differences seldom lack their annotation. Without adopting
the adjective missiles of either faction, let it suffice to say that
they parted, in the summary fashion of which we are already aware.
Mr. Curran had earned a right, he may have thought, to his opinion of
women. The memory of his calamity may well have operated to make him
both excessively exacting as to female behaviour and pitiless towards
any supposed violation of it. In one touching story of domestic ruin,
at least, he had a deplorable influence. Mr. W. J. Fitzpatrick, in his
_Life, Times, and Contemporaries of Lord Cloncurry_, records that after
the Lady Cloncurry’s trespass, her generous husband would have taken
her back, “were it not for his well-beloved J——n P——t C——n, who urged
him, in strong and persuasive language, to the contrary.” Moreover,
an Irish father is as likely as not to cherish spacious ideas of his
own governing prerogative, and refuse to be tied in the matter to
“anything so temporal,” as Lowell says in another application, “as a
responsibility.” Mr. Curran could have bespoken for his children other
destinies if they had ever known freedom of the heart at home.
Again, his attitude towards Emmet may have seemed to him no exaggerated
hatred, but the mere tribute of virtuous scorn. In that, however,
he was self-deceived. To any publicist in Ireland with the seed of
compromise in him, even if the compromise never amounted to the
smallest sacrifice of actual principle, Robert Emmet’s straight career
must have been like a buffet in the face. Naked logic was Emmet’s
element, and the expedient his negligible quantity. Every agitation
sincerely founded on a popular need breeds, in time, its extremists.
They are the glory and the difficulty of all reform. It might have been
said of Emmet, as at the outset of the Oxford Movement it was said of
Hurrell Froude, that “the gentleman was not afraid of inferences.”
Curran’s thoughts dwelt in no such simplified worlds. Like all the
best Irishmen of his blazingly brilliant day, he was for Parliamentary
Reform and Catholic Emancipation, and against the Union. It was even
he who appeared to defend the revolutionists of 1798, who had obtained
the writ of _habeas corpus_ for Wolfe Tone on the very morning set for
his execution under court-martial (a reprieve frustrated by suicide),
and who was the first to plead, though with vain eloquence, at the
bar of attainder for the Fitzgerald heirs. But though his convictions
seemed close enough to Emmet’s, there was wide variance in their
bearing and momentum. Initial or generic differences take on an almost
amatory complexion when contrasted with those springing from the final
consideration in like minds. Both men vehemently desired the framing
of fresh good laws, and the unhampered operation of existing good
laws, for Ireland. To Curran, incorruptible as he was, England was an
excellent general superintendent and referee to set over the concerns
of other nations, including his own, provided that she could be got to
abstain scrupulously from undue interference, and hold tenure under
a more than nominal corporal withdrawal. Poor Emmet’s ideal of Irish
independence was remote enough from this. He had read somewhere that
his country used to be a proud kingdom, and not a petted province.
Surely, Curran in his latter years, when he “sank” (the word is
Cloncurry’s, and used of his friend) to office, could have no patience
with a Separatist son-in-law. But the Master of the Rolls continued to
be a great man, and Emmet at twenty-five ceased to be a fool.
The trial came off before Lord Norbury, Mr. Baron George, and Mr. Baron
Daly on September 19, 1803, at the court-house in Green Street. It is
an extraordinary circumstance that it lasted eleven hours in a crowded
room, the prisoner standing for all that time in the dock without
proper food or rest. Mr. Emmet firmly refused to call any witnesses,
to allow any statement by his counsel, or to furnish any comment upon
the evidence. Long afterwards, Mr. Peter Burrowes told Moore of the
continual check put upon his own attempts to disconcert those who were
giving testimony. “No, no,” Emmet would protest, “the man is speaking
the truth.” The indictment was in part strengthened by the reading in
court of passages of his own captured love-letters to Miss Curran.
Thanks to the consideration of the Attorney-General the reading was
brief and as non-committal as possible, Miss Curran’s name being of
course suppressed. The Attorney-General (Mr. Standish O’Grady) showed,
throughout the poor girl’s troubles, a most fatherly solicitude towards
her, and pleaded for her with her own father, without appreciable
results.
Emmet had other annoyances to bear. Mr. Conyngham Plunkett, as counsel
for the Crown, took an unfair advantage of the silence of the counsels
for the prisoner (Messrs. Ball, Burrowes, and M’Nally), and delivered
at great length a very able oration, in which, _more Hibernico_, he had
rather more to say of the Creator of men, and of His implicit support
of the existing Government, than was strictly necessary; neither did he
forget to recommend “sincere repentance of crime” to “the unfortunate
young gentleman.” And when Emmet himself was invited to speak, and
did so, or would have done so, to really magnificent purpose, he
was causelessly and continually interrupted by the presiding judge,
lectured on the virtues and the standing of his long-deceased elder
brother, and on the abominable anomaly of “a gentleman by birth”
associating with “the most profligate and abandoned ... hostlers,
bakers, butchers, and such persons!” A sprig of lavender was handed
him by some woman in the close court-room; it was snatched away as
soon, on the groundless suspicion that it had been poisoned by one
who would save the youth from his approaching fate. The jury, without
leaving the box, brought in a verdict of guilty. It was to them a clear
case. As the Earl of Hardwicke wrote to his brother, the Honourable
Charles Yorke, “it was unanimously admitted that a more complete case
of treason was never stated in a court of justice.” Of Emmet himself he
adds conclusively: “He persisted in the opinions he had entertained,
and the principles in which he had been educated.”
It was late in the evening when the Clerk of the Crown, following
the usual form, ended: “Prisoner at the bar, what have you therefore
now to say why judgment of death and execution should not be awarded
against you according to law?” Emmet was weary, but had body and mind
under triumphant control, and he filled the next half-hour with words
which were overwhelming at the time, and will never fail to thrill the
most casual reader who can discern in them the victory of the human
spirit over the powers which crush it. It is an immortal appeal. The
rich phrases, the graceful, quick gestures, were unprepared and born
of the moment. We are told that Emmet walked about a little, or stood
bending hither and thither, in his earnestness. “He seemed to have
acquired a swaying motion, when he spoke in public, which was peculiar
to him; but there was no affectation in it.” It was a habit which
the young man shared with a great contemporary singularly free from
mannerisms: the Grattan to whom he used to listen, spell-bound, in his
early years. Emmet has been misreported in one important particular.
He had a fine understanding of the uses of irony; but it is his praise
that he was also scrupulously, persistently, and invincibly courteous.
To know him is to know that sentences such as those figuring in some
reports of his speech, about “that viper,” meaning (Mr. Plunkett),
or “persons who would not disgrace themselves by shaking your (that
is, Lord Norbury’s) blood-stained hand,” are, as attributed to him,
all but impossible. The truth seems to be that his admirers, finding
him unaccountably lacking in invective, and the vituperative power of
the Gael, have amended, between them, this evidence of his undutiful
shortcomings. It were a pity to summarise or paraphrase that living
rhetoric, so fit in its place. We are disposed to forget nowadays that
emotional speech is natural speech: its many and seemingly exuberant
colours are but primal and legitimate, whereas it is our subdued daily
chatter which is artificial. Emmet did not occupy himself with refuting
the charge of having revolted against existing political conditions
with “the scum of the Liberties behind him,” for he had a concern more
intimate. It had been reported broadcast, and it had been taken for
granted at the trial, that he had become an agent of France because
he sought to deliver the country over to French rule. Hopeless, there
and then, of being understood on the main issue, he was determined to
make himself plain in this. He admitted that he had indeed laboured
to establish a French alliance, but expressly under bond that aided
Ireland, once freed, should be as completely independent of France as
he would have her of England. He sought, as he said, such a guarantee
as Franklin had secured for America. For the reassertion of his own
position as a patriot, Emmet spent his last energies. Like some few
other selfless reformers known to history, he had taken little pains
to proclaim himself, and in consequence had been translated into terms
of expected profit and personal ambition, in the generalising minds
of bystanders. It was nothing to him to go to his untimely grave
legally convicted of Utopianism, precipitation, madness, or even of
monstrous wickedness; but why he had plunged into such folly, or such
crime, or such pure passion for freedom, as the case might be, seemed
to demand some explanation from the person best qualified to give
it. To risk that his informing intent should be misread hereafter,
was more than he could bear. And thus it came about that, reserved
as he always was, humble as he always was, he blazed out at last,
and feared not to base himself proudly on “my character.” The word
recurs: its numerical strength is almost equal to that of the beloved
other one, “my country.” This was clearly a tautologous egotist, this
young belated Girondin, to those who knew him not. As he talked on,
in his beautiful round tones, into the night, the dingy lamps begun
to sputter as if tired of their unexpected vigil. “My lamp of life is
nearly extinguished,” he said, looking sadly down. And then: “My race
is run. The grave opens to receive me, and I sink into its bosom. I
have but one request to make, at my departure from this world: it is
the charity of its silence. Let no man write my epitaph; for as no man
who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice nor
ignorance asperse them. Let them rest in obscurity and peace; let my
memory remain in oblivion, and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other
times and other men can do justice to my character. When my country
shall have taken her place among the nations of the earth, then, and
not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.” There was
perceptible emotion in every breast but his, when sentence of death by
hanging and beheading was given at half-past ten o’clock, and ordered
to take place next day.
Emmet’s strong slight frame had stood the long ordeal perfectly, and
his mood had wings. He whispered cheerfully through the grating: “I
shall be hanged to-morrow!” as he passed John Hickson’s cell on his way
back to his own.
We know he read the Litany there; and he also indulged a turn for
secular, and even profane employment. In fact, it pleased Mr. Robert
Emmet to draw himself (he drew exquisitely) as a posthumous serial in
two parts. Some one found and recognised the grim _R. E., head_, the
disconcerted _R. E., body_, on separate scraps of paper: they lay on
his little table, when all was over, witnesses to the detached humour
possible to an easy conscience. His industry was great during the few
remaining hours. He possessed a lock of his absent Sarah’s hair, which
she may have given him years before: this he wished to wear in his
dying hour. As he sat plaiting it minutely, and tenderly fastening
it into the fold of his velvet stock, he was noticed and questioned.
Fearing that the treasure might be taken from him, he said that his
occupation was “an innocent one.” The only persons allowed to see him
were the chaplains and M’Nally, the fine flower of infamy, happy in
Government pay, who to the end played with success the part of the
assiduous friend. It was he who brought to Emmet on his final morning
the news, then ten days old, of his mother’s death. The son took it,
as he took all his losses, with what Mr. W. H. Curran briefly calls
his “unostentatious fortitude.” After an instant of silence he looked
up and found his voice. “It is better so,” he answered quietly. Her
delicate proud heart had broken at the menace hanging over her darling:
that much he had divined at once. She had written, during that last
year, that she was “a parent supremely blest” in the virtues and
dispositions of her children.
Mr. M’Nally was intimate with Mr. Curran, for whom he had an
affection as genuine as he was capable of feeling. It was like
“Janus” Wainewright’s affection for Charles Lamb, and as exempt from
the poison-cup otherwise dealt impartially to divers and sundry.
It is possible, therefore, that Mr. M’Nally chose to acquaint his
much-deceived client with the true state of Sarah’s health: a
life-in-death which also was surely “better so.” But this is mere
conjecture, as Emmet would never have inquired; rather than name his
“nut-brown maid,” the truly “banished man” would still have endured all
the inner turmoil of lonely love,
“—surges
Which wash both Heaven and Hell.”
No credit need be given to the tale that as Emmet went forth to his
death through the Dublin streets, a young lady, believed to be Miss
Curran, was seen in a carriage despairingly taking leave of him, and
fluttering a handkerchief until he was out of sight, when she sank in
a swoon. It is not the fashion of persons of deep feeling, save on the
stage, to have recourse at solemn moments to fluttering handkerchiefs.
If any young lady interested in Robert Emmet were abroad in a carriage
on that autumn morning, it would be his only sister, Mrs. Holmes, fated
to outlive him but one melancholy year. As for poor lovely Sarah, she
had disappeared like an underground stream during his last weeks and
days, ever since her letters were seized as spoils of war. Major Sirr
is believed to have destroyed them all, in due course, not without a
flow of tears! The sweet lady was indeed an object of pity; and Emmet,
putting in never a stroke of conscious work, had a most unaccountable
faculty for melting hearts. The reign of Sensibility was not over;
able-bodied persons in 1803 were only beginning to be carried out of
the pit, more dead than alive, when Mrs. Siddons played. But something
in Emmet’s uncomplaining presence overcame stern men habituated to
political offenders. The honest turnkey at Kilmainham fell fainting
at his feet, only to hear the affectionately-proffered good-bye; and
it was generally noticed that Lord Norbury, facing him, could with
difficulty steady his voice, though he was popularly believed to revel
in pronouncing capital sentence.
Emmet busied himself with letters in his cell. He slept and ate as
usual; and his firm handwriting witnessed the unshaken soul within.
Several of his last letters have been recovered; two or three have been
published, in Mr. W. H. Curran’s _Life_ of his illustrious father, in
Dr. Madden’s moving but chaotic _Memoirs of the United Irishmen_, and
elsewhere. On the day set for his execution Robert Emmet wrote to his
old friend Richard Curran:—