live; but if it was the last moment, and the power of
utterance was leaving me, I would thank you from the
bottom of my heart for your generous expressions of
affection and forgiveness to me. If there was any one
in the world in whose breast my death might be supposed
not to stifle every spark of resentment, it might be
you. I have deeply injured you; I have injured the
happiness of a sister that you love, and who was formed
to give happiness to every one about her, instead
of having her own mind a prey to affliction. Oh,
Richard! I have no excuse to offer, but that I meant
the reverse: I intended as much happiness for Sarah
as the most ardent love could have given her. I never
did tell you how much I idolised her. It was not with
a wild or unfounded passion, but it was an attachment
increasing every hour, from an admiration of the purity
of her mind, and respect for her talents. I did dwell
in secret upon the prospect of our union; I did hope
that success, while it afforded the opportunity of our
union, might be a means of confirming an attachment
which misfortune had called forth. I did not look to
honours for myself; praise I would have asked from
the lips of no man: but I would have wished to read,
in the glow of Sarah’s countenance, that her husband
was respected. My love, Sarah! it was not thus that I
thought to have requited your affection. I did hope
to be a prop round which your affections might have
clung, and which would never have been shaken; but a
rude blast has snapped it, and they have fallen over
a grave. This is no time for affliction. I have had
public motives to sustain my mind, and I have not
suffered it to sink; but there have been moments in my
imprisonment when my mind was so sunk by grief on her
account that death would have been a refuge. God bless
you, my dearest Richard. I am obliged to leave off
immediately. ROBERT EMMET.”
This touching letter has been printed before, but the two which follow,
long lost and newly found, have never been made public. The original
letters seem to have disappeared. The contemporary copies figure in
the Hardwicke or Wimpole collection, which has very recently been
made accessible to readers by the issue of the current Catalogue of
Additional Manuscripts at the British Museum. The shorter of them was
intended by Emmet for Thomas Addis Emmet and his wife Jane Patten, his
brother and sister-in-law. With it was sent a long historical document,
called _An Account of the late Plan of Insurrection in Dublin, and the
Causes of its Failure_. Hurriedly penned, in order to give the beloved
relatives a unique and direct knowledge of all that the writer had
meant and missed, it is a masterly detailed statement, as free from
all traces of morbidity, or even of agitation, as if it had been drawn
up “on happy mornings with a morning heart,” in the tents of victory.
Thanks to the practised duplicity of Dr. Trevor, to whose care it was
confided, Mr. Thomas Addis Emmet, then in Paris, never received it;
he complained bitterly of its suppression, and was only towards the
close of his life enabled to read it through the medium of the press.
But neither he nor any of his American descendants, inclusive of the
distinguished compiler of the quarto, privately printed in New York,
entitled _The Emmet Family_, seems to have suspected the existence
of the little personal note in which the _Account_ was enclosed. The
official draft of it figures in Hard. MS. 35,742, f. 197:—
“MY DEAREST TOM AND JANE: I am just going to do my
last duty to my country. It can be done as well on the
scaffold as in the field. Do not give way to any weak
feelings on my account, but rather encourage proud ones
that I have possessed fortitude and tranquillity of
mind to the last.
“God bless you, and the young hopes that are growing
up about you. May they be more fortunate than their
uncle, but may they preserve as pure and ardent an
attachment to their country as he has done. Give
the watch to little Robert; he will not prize it
the less for having been in the possession of two
Roberts before him. I have one dying request to make
to you. I was attached to Sarah Curran, the youngest
daughter of your friend. I did hope to have had her
my companion for life; I did hope that she would not
only have constituted my happiness, but that her
heart and understanding would have made her one of
Jane’s dearest friends. I know that Jane would have
loved her on my account, and I feel also that, had
they been acquainted, she must have loved her for her
own. None knew of the attachment till now, nor is it
now generally known; therefore do not speak of it to
others. [I leave her][2] with her father and brother;
but if those protectors should fall off, and that no
other should replace them, [take][2] her as my wife,
and love her as a sister. Give my love to all friends.”
It is to be feared that “little Robert” (the eldest of the children,
afterwards Judge Robert Emmet of New York) did not receive his legacy.
According to what testimony can be gathered, the watch which Emmet
carried to the last was either presented to the executioner, or passed
over to him with some understanding which has not transpired. Poor
Emmet’s seal, a beautiful design of his own for the United Irishmen,
went safely into friendly keeping; but most of his personal belongings
worn on the scaffold, including his high Hessian boots and the stock
with the precious hair sewed inside the lining, were actually sold
at auction in Grafton Street, Dublin, during December, 1832. In this
letter to his brother and sister, how piercing is the “I did hope,”
iterated to them as to Richard Curran! It reminds us what a network
of beneficent will and forethought made up that intense nature, and
how the perishing leaf was but in the green. When the Lord Lieutenant,
in the course of his industrious correspondence with his brother,
sent to him, as a literary curio, a copy of Robert Emmet’s letter
(Robert himself being newly dead), in reference to it, he hastens to
add this significant sentence: “The letter to his brother will not
be forwarded; but the passage respecting Miss Sarah Curran has been
communicated to her father.” The Chief Secretary and Lord Hardwicke
were joint contrivers of what seems to us (from the point of view of
the most helpless of the persons chiefly concerned) an unnecessary if
not unfeeling move. And Mr. Curran promptly replied to the former, the
Right Honourable William Wickham, on the morrow (Hard. MS. 35,703, f.
158):—
“_Sept. 21st, 1803._
“SIR: I have just received the honour of your letter,
with the extract enclosed by desire of His Excellency.
I have again to offer to His Excellency my more than
gratitude, the feelings of the strongest attachment
and respect for this new instance of considerate
condescension. To you also, sir, believe me, I am most
affectionately grateful for the part that you have been
so kind as [to] take upon this unhappy occasion; few
would, I am well aware, perhaps few could, have known
how to act in the same manner.
“As to the communication of the extract, and the motive
for doing so, I cannot answer them in the cold parade
of official acknowledgment; I feel on the subject the
warm and animated thanks of man to man, and these I
presume to request that Lord Hardwicke and Mr. Wickham
may be pleased to accept: it is, however, only justice
to myself to say, that even on the first falling of
this unexpected blow, I had resolved (and so mentioned
to Mr. Attorney-General), that if I found no actual
guilt upon her, I would act with as much moderation
as possible towards a poor creature that had once
held the warmest place in my heart. I did, even then,
recollect that there was a point to which nothing but
actual turpitude or the actual death of her parent
ought to make a child an orphan; but even had I thought
otherwise, I feel that this extract would have produced
the effect it was intended to have, and that I should
think so now. I feel how I should shrink from the idea
of letting her sink so low as to become the subject of
the testamentary order of a miscreant who could labour,
by so foul means and under such odious circumstances,
to connect her with his infamy, and to acquire any
posthumous interest in her person or her fate. Blotted,
therefore, as she may irretrievably be from my society,
or the place she once held in my affection, she must
not go adrift. So far, at least, ‘these protectors will
not fall off.’
“I should therefore, sir, wish for the suppression of
this extract, if no particular, motive should have
arisen for forwarding it to its destination. I shall
avail myself of your kind permission to wait upon you
in the course of the day, to pay my respects once more
personally to you, if I shall be so fortunate as to
find you at leisure. I have the honour to be, with very
great respect, your obliged servant, JOHN P. CURRAN.”
But it is time to return to our death-doomed “miscreant.” At half-past
one, on the afternoon of September 30, the order was given to start.
The scaffold had been built in Thomas Street, nearly opposite S.
Catherine’s Church. He was dressed all in black, and maintained the
serene and undemonstrative demeanour which was thought scandalously
unbefitting by some spectators and some scribes. On the principle
that the game was up, that “no hope can have no fear,” Robert Emmet
became, not indifferent, but beautifully gay towards the end, as gay
in irons as Raleigh or Sir Thomas More. He was quite sure that he had
nothing to repent of, now that the account was cast and cancelled. Of
course his care-free conduct was misconstrued: it passed officially
for “effrontery and nonchalance,” and the single-minded Christian,
never quite out of touch with the Church in which his holy mother
had brought him up, was darkly given forth as an impenitent atheist.
The ordinary attitude of the revolutionary late eighteenth-century
mind was irreligious enough, but it was not Robert Emmet’s. One of his
colleagues in the dream and the disaster, Thomas Russell, an elder
figure in Emmet’s never-marshalled “army,” and a nobly interesting one,
was extraordinarily pious: as pious as General Gordon. On the scaffold
at Downpatrick (brought to that by his thwarted outbreak in the North),
he recalled, for a memory well suited to encourage him, “my young
hero, my great and dear friend, a martyr to the cause of his country
and to liberty.” Russell’s hospitality of mind was not such that he
could have made an exemplar of an infidel. But there is so much proof
on this point, that the old charge may be laid aside in that limbo of
all inaccuracies for which the invention of printing is responsible.
The Englishman at the helm of affairs in Dublin, by no means (as we
have seen) a wholly unsympathetic annalist, bequeaths us an account
of Emmet’s final interview with the chaplains. It cannot escape the
reader that two distinct issues were, in the minds of those worthy
gentlemen, vaguely blended. No person in Mr. Robert Emmet’s situation,
unless he repented of his politics, had any chance of being considered
otherwise than unsound in his religion. Individualism, looked upon as
the exact science it undoubtedly is, was not quite at its best in the
self-righteous era of George the Third, and under the Establishment
which was regulated by a now almost obsolete basilolatry.
“Mr. Gamble, the clergyman who attends the prisoners in Newgate,
visited [Mr. Emmet] yesterday evening, and again this morning, in
Kilmainham Prison, in company with the Reverend Mr. Grant, a clergyman
who resides at Island Bridge. In the report which they have made to
me of what passed in their communications with Mr. Emmet, they state
that though their conversation did not produce all the good they had
hoped, it had nevertheless the effect of bringing him to a more calm,
and in some respects a better temper of mind, than they had reason to
expect from a person professing the principles by which they supposed
him to be directed. They repeatedly urged to him those topics which
were likely to bring him to a better feeling, and acknowledgment of
the crime for which he was to suffer, but were not successful in
persuading him to abjure those principles by which he was actuated in
his conspiracy to overthrow the Government. He disclaimed any intention
of shedding blood; professed a total ignorance of the murder of Lord
Kilwarden, before which, he declares, he had left Dublin; and also
professed an aversion to the French. He declared that though persons
professing his principles, and acting in the cause in which he had
been concerned, were generally supposed to be Deists, that he was a
Christian in the true sense of the word; that he had received the
Sacrament, though not regularly and habitually, and that he wished to
receive it then; that what he felt, he felt sincerely, and would avow
his principles in his last moments; that he was conscious of sins, and
wished to receive the Sacrament. The clergymen consented to join in
prayer with him, and administered the Sacrament to him, considering
him as a visionary enthusiast, and wishing him to bring his mind to a
proper temper and sense of religion.
“On their way to the place of execution they conversed with him upon
the same topics, but could never persuade him to admit that he had
been in the wrong. In answer to their question whether, if he had
foreseen the blood that had been spilt in consequence of his attempt,
he would have persisted in his design to overthrow the Government, he
observed that no one went to battle without being prepared for similar
events, always considering his attempt as free from moral reproach in
consequence of what he conceived to be the goodness of the motive that
produced it. At the place of execution he was desirous of addressing
the people. He intended to have declared that he had never taken any
oath but that of the United Irishmen, and by that oath he meant to
abide. The clergymen who were present explained to him that an address
to that effect might possibly produce tumult and bloodshed, and that
it ought not to be permitted. He was therefore obliged to acquiesce,
and did so without appearing to be disturbed or agitated.” (Hard. MS.
35,742, ff. 191 _et seq._)
What Robert Emmet did say to the people, a sentence seemingly of
puzzling platitude, was, in him, one of profound truth: “My friends,
I die in peace, and with sentiments of love and kindness to all men.”
There is another and more animated contemporary account of his exit in
_The Life and Times of Henry Grattan_. The whole passage may as well be
quoted:—
“Robert Emmet [was] devoid of caution, foresight, and prudence: ardent,
spirited, and impetuous. ... He was an enthusiast, he was a visionary.
Without a treasury, without officers, without troops, he declared war
against England and France, and prepared to oppose both!—the one, if
she sought to retain possession of Ireland, and the other, if she
attempted to invade it. With a few followers, he rose to take the
Castle of Dublin and defeat a disciplined garrison. He put on a green
coat and a cocked hat, and fancied himself already a conqueror. If no
lives had been lost he probably would not have suffered, although Lord
Norbury was the judge who tried him.... When asked the usual question
why sentence should not be passed on him, he exclaimed: ‘Sentence of
death may be pronounced: I have nothing to say. But sentence of infamy
shall not be pronounced: I have everything to say.’ He was as cool and
collected before his death as if nothing was to happen. Peter Burrowes
saw him on his way, and related a circumstance that occurred as he was
going to execution. He had a paper that he wished to be brought to Miss
Curran, to whom he was strongly attached: he watched his opportunity,
and in passing one of the streets, he caught a friendly eye in the
crowd, and making a sign to the person, got him near; then he dropped a
paper. This was observed by others, and the person who took it up was
stopped: the paper was taken from him and brought to the Castle. Mr.
Burrowes and Charles Bushe saw it, and said it was a very affecting and
interesting letter.”
And so to poor Emmet, Fate, in her most diabolical mood, had for
the last time played the postman. He shook hands with the masked
executioner, removed his own stock, and helped to adjust both the cap
and the noose. The correspondent of the _London Daily Chronicle_, after
a fervent “God forbid that I should see many persons with Emmet’s
principles!” adds in unwilling tribute—and those were the days when a
hanging was a favourite spectacle with persons of elegant leisure—“As
it was, I never saw one die like him.” When all was over, and the head,
with every feature composed and pale as in life, had been held up with
the formula proper to traitors, that and the body were brought back to
the gaol, and shortly after buried in the common ground, Bully’s Acre,
none of Emmet’s few living kindred appearing then to claim it. His
parents were not long dead; his only brother was in exile; his sister
was a delicate woman, probably crushed by her latest grief, and her
husband, Mr. Robert Holmes, a most serviceable friend, was in prison;
John Patten, Thomas Addis Emmet’s brother-in-law, was far away; St.
John Mason, a cousin of the Emmets, and one heart and soul with them
in all that pertained to the wished-for welfare of Ireland, was, like
Mr. Holmes, and for the same reason, the tenant of a cell. Others,
more remotely connected by affection with Robert Emmet, might have
come forward in time had any one realised the blight, the paralysis,
which events had imposed simultaneously on the entire family. It seems
pretty conclusive from a valuable pamphlet just published by Mr. David
A. Quaid (though the facts are not yet verified), that Robert Emmet
was laid to rest in his father’s vault in the churchyard of St. Peter,
Aungier Street. There one may leave that sentinel dust until the day of
conciser habit than his own shall carve the good word above it which he
foreknew.
Sarah Curran’s quiet annals are ungathered by any one hand, but the
main outlines are henceforth discernible, and some celebrated writers
have found them of interest. Washington Irving, in _The Broken
Heart_, has given her an exquisite immortality; and the pathetic
central incident of his narration is also the inspiration of Moore’s
haunting song: _She is far from the land_. It was not, however, at
the Rotunda in Dublin, but in a festal room in the friendly house
where, after the death of her betrothed, she lived on in a dispirited
convalescence, that she wandered away from the company, and sitting
alone on the stair, began singing softly a plaintive air, “housed in
a dream, at distance from the kind.” This happened at Woodhill, in
Cork. Her voice seems to have been singularly beautiful: there was
a general development of musical genius in her father’s family. The
incident was reported at firsthand to Irving, as to Moore. To those who
knew her story, the little forgetful act was poignant enough: for she
was singing to the dead. In her sorrow, her deprivations, her entire
withdrawal from the world, Miss Curran was blest with tender friends
and champions. The poet just named, who was one of Robert Emmet’s early
comrades, knew how admiration followed her like her shadow.
“And lovers are round her, sighing:
But coldly she turns from their gaze, and weeps,
For her heart in his grave is lying.”
Among those who looked with infinite sympathy and respect on the
gentle girl moving like a soulless phantom in an unreal world, was a
very young Englishman, barely her senior, a newly commissioned captain
of Royal Engineers, a lineal descendant of Strafford, and full of
Strafford’s strong singleness of heart. Henry Robert Sturgeon was
third son of William Sturgeon, Esquire, and the Lady Henrietta Alicia
Watson-Wentworth; grandson of the first, and nephew of the second
Marquis of Rockingham. He conceived for Sarah Curran an instinctive
affection, ardent and profound, and free from stain of self as Emmet’s
own. It was as if Emmet, absented for ever, had breathed himself into
another for the comfort and protection of the well-beloved. But the
well-beloved would not be comforted nor protected: not though she knew,
as she knew perfectly, both what her suitor’s worth was, and what
were his fortune and standing in the great world; not though every
member of the Penrose family, devoted to him, encouraged his hope; not
though all of them, of their own accord, interceded with their ward
and guest. In the _Literary Souvenir_ for 1831, there is an agreeable
paper of fifteen pages entitled _Some Passages in the History of Sarah
Curran_, signed “M.” It has been conjectured that the writer was one
of the Crawfords of Lismore, who had been very kind to Sarah when her
mother’s flight broke up the Curran household. Whoever “M.” was, her
devotion to her friend, of whose character and mental qualities she had
the highest opinion, is conspicuous, and one may glean much information
from what she has to tell us. Captain Sturgeon, she says in the
slightly stilted Georgian phrases, was everything which is good. “Had
not her heart been seared by early grief and disappointment, he could
not have failed to have experienced the most flattering reception.”
Sarah herself was entirely open with him: one would expect no less of
her nobly sweet nature. “She pleaded his own cause for him by proving
how little he deserved a divided affection;” but “the constancy and
tenderness of her attachment to Emmet seem only to have rendered her
the more interesting.” Two difficult years and more went by for Henry
Sturgeon. He never wavered in his purpose: much as society sought after
him, there was but one woman in the world to that patient and dedicated
lover. Time was on their side. Sarah was gaining some measure of
content and also of health, although she never definitely rallied from
the heartbreak of 1803. It touched her at last that as she was, as she
had told him so often that she was, with no life to live and nothing to
give him, he prayed her still to become his wife, to lend him the one
ultimate privilege of humblest service, from which otherwise he would
be debarred. Some expectation of leaving the south of Ireland, or the
actual arrival of orders from headquarters, seems to have lent a sudden
heightened earnestness to his addresses; and Sarah, being pressed, gave
her sad consent. They were married at Glanmire Church, near Woodhill,
in the February of 1806.
A dismal wedding it must have been! “M.” was told by one of the
bridesmaids, long after, of the melancholy drive in the closed
carriage, with the bride in tears. For a time Captain Sturgeon’s
affairs kept him in England; then he was transported, with his
regiment, to Malta and Sicily. The first journey, fully a half-year
after the marriage, must have taken him and his wife through the
capital, the Dublin of all racking memories, for we hear of Mrs.
Sturgeon visiting Mr. James Petrie’s studio there. From the sketches he
had made of Robert Emmet in the court-room, and from the mask in his
possession, he had painted a portrait unhappily not wholly successful.
But we know what peculiar interest belongs to a portrait, when there
is, and can be, but one; and no person, surely, in all the world, can
have longed to scan this one with the longing of Sarah Sturgeon. Dr.
William Stokes, the biographer of George Petrie, says that George, then
the artist’s little son, happened to be alone, playing in his father’s
studio, when a veiled lady entered and went over to the easel. He never
forgot her nor the moment. “She lifted her veil, and stood long in
unbroken silence, gazing at the face before her; then suddenly turning,
moved with an unsteady step to another corner of the room, and bending
forwards, pressed her head against the wall, heaving deep sobs, her
whole form shaken with a storm of passionate grief. How long that agony
lasted the boy could not tell; it appeared to him to be an hour. Then
with a supreme effort she controlled herself, pulled down her veil, and
quickly and silently left the room. Years after, the boy learned from
his father that this was Sarah Curran, who had come by appointment to
see her dead lover’s portrait, on the understanding that she should
meet no one of the family.”
Captain Sturgeon was glad of the duty which turned his face
southwards, as he could not but believe that the softer climate would
help his frail Sarah. It is curious that Moore, in making her the
unconscious heroine of his lovely lyric, should have placed the scene
of her abstracted singing “the wild song of her dear native plains,”
and of her abstracted turning from “lovers around her sighing,” in
Italy! quite as if Captain Sturgeon, “curteis and mylde, and the most
soofering man that ever I met withal,” had no existence. The poet, in
all probability, heard late of the incident, and thus did not assign it
to Woodhill. Only too accurate was one foreboding stanza:
“Nor soon will the tear of his country be dried,
Nor long will his love stay behind him.”