public life—his efforts for Catholic Emancipation, his connection with
the United Irishmen. But, as we shall speak more fully of these years
when we come to tell the story of Thomas Addis Emmet’s wife, we shall
content ourselves here with a thought of the anxieties, which must have
been the constant companions of a woman so clever and far-sighted as his
mother. Where was all this leading to? Her son, himself with his clear
grave eyes and resolute heart, knew perfectly well—like the majority of
the leaders of the United Irishmen—that the course in which he was
embarked was one which would, most probably, call for the sacrifice of
all that men hold dear. Brilliant professional prospects; the elegance
and comfort of a home adorned by a charming wife and a band of lovely
children; property and position and the interest in a settled order of
things which they bring with them; life itself—all these Thomas Addis
Emmet saw himself called upon at any moment to renounce for the loyal
service of Ireland. “It is a hard service they take,” indeed, “who serve
the _Poor Old Woman_”! “But, for all that, they think themselves well
paid.”
On March the 12th, 1798, when the Government, acting on the information
of Thomas Reynolds, swooped down on the Leinster Directory of United
Irishmen, assembled in Oliver Bond’s house, Emmet was arrested in his
home in Stephen’s Green and committed to Newgate, from whence he was
afterwards conveyed to Kilmainham. Of his wife’s heroic conduct on that
occasion we shall have an inspiring tale to tell. While her
daughter-in-law shared her husband’s imprisonment, Elizabeth Emmet found
merciful occupation in the care of the five little grandchildren whom
they had confided to her: Robert, Margaret, Elizabeth, John Patten,
Thomas Addis.
In April, the authorities, alarmed by the spirit of patriotism which was
manifesting itself among the students of Trinity College, ordered the
“Visitation,” of which Moore gives an account in his “Memoirs.”
In anticipation of the verdict of Lord Chancellor Fitzgibbon, Robert
Emmet, who was looked on as the leader of the patriot youths, requested
the Board of Fellows to take his name off the books of the college.
During the wild excitement of the next few months: the bloody weeks of
“the Rising” in May and June; the executions and court-martials of July;
the French landing in August; the new executions which followed it, in
September; the capture of Tone in October; his court-martial and death
in November, all through the tragic calendar of the year 1798, Dr. Emmet
and his wife Elizabeth had, at least, the comfort of their younger son’s
constant presence with them.
In this year Dr. Emmet set the houses in Stephen’s Green, and took up
his residence with his family (which now included his grandchildren) in
a country house he had recently purchased for himself, Casino, Milltown.
This historic house still stands, and Mr. Reynolds’s indications make it
easy to locate: “at the corner of Bird Avenue on the eastern side of the
Dundrum Road, midway between Milltown and Windy Arbour.”
Two events of much importance mark the following year (1799) in
Elizabeth Emmet’s maternal calendar. The first was the removal of Thomas
Addis and the other State prisoners to Fort George in the North of
Scotland; the second was the marriage of her daughter, Mary Anne, to the
distinguished barrister, Robert Holmes.
Early in 1800, Robert Emmet visited his brother in Fort George, passing
from thence to the Continent where he remained until after the signing
of the Peace of Amiens in 1802.
Later in the year, Jane Emmet made good the design which her conjugal
affection had long inspired, and which no governmental rebuff could
weaken—that of joining her husband in Fort George. She went there in
July, escorted by her brother, John Patten, and accompanied by her three
elder children, Robert, Margaret, and Elizabeth. With the grandparents
at Casino were left John Patten, Thomas Addis, and a sturdy little chap
called Christopher Emmet, who had joined the goodly company since we
last made the enumeration of them.
During the years Thomas Addis and his wife spent in Fort George there
was a constant interchange of letters between Casino and the grim
northern keep in which the Irish State prisoners were so long interned.
Sometimes the Casino news is conveyed by Dr. Emmet—whose letters remind
us of St. John Mason’s description of his conversation; sometimes it is
Mary Anne Holmes who holds the pen; sometimes it is Kitty, the orphan
daughter of Christopher Temple and Anne Western Temple. But most
frequently it is the mother and in these letters we get our best picture
of the sort of woman Elizabeth Emmet was.[13] There are pleasant
glimpses, too, of the home-life in Casino. We see the father, seeking
solace for his anxieties in his labours in beautifying the house he
fondly hoped was to be the home of his children, and his children’s
children. The thirteen acres around Casino serve the purpose of
Penelope’s web, and the loving wife finds comfort in watching the
amusement he gets from his tree-planting and landscape gardening, his
industry in gravelling the walks and raking them when they have been
gravelled. Convinced that “the promises of hope are better than the
gifts of fortune,” he has built a fine nursery ’gainst the happy day
when all his grandchildren (and their parents) shall be gathered
together under his patriarchal roof; and a certain cherry tree in full
blossom makes him and his wife long to see Jane and her charming
children gathered under it. The Doctor’s craze for transplanting trees
which, to the rest of the family, seem to be perfectly well placed where
they are, has grown into a family joke; but his wife is too well pleased
to see the good effect the interest and occupation have on his health to
protest now, as she was wont to do, even “tho’ from the earliness of the
season and the age of the trees she despairs of ever seeing a leaf upon
any of them.” “As we have a great demand for pea-rods,” she remarks
jestingly, “they will not be useless.” She gathers up all the news she
can about their friends, knowing how welcome such items are to exiles.
Dr. Drennan, who has attended Mary Anne at the birth of her first-born
baby, is happily “married to a very amiable, pretty young woman”; “he
has waited to some good purpose.” We have a pretty etching of the author
of the “Wake of William Orr,” and the famous “Orellana Letters,”
“leaning over the cradle of his little heir, so anxious about it lest it
should die.” Other friends, like Lady Anne Fitzgerald, Ally Spring, the
Temples—and, above all, the Pattens and the Colvilles—find frequent
mention. She does not hesitate to inculcate certain “musty precepts” as
to health, which her knowledge of her son’s and her daughter-in-law’s
dispositions seems to her to call for. Jane must refrain from “the great
efforts of which she is so fond,” for “system is better than swiftness,”
and though “we may admire the speed and power of a racehorse, a steady
draft horse will in general be found as useful and much more durable.”
Both Thomas Addis and Jane are fond, she knows, of heated rooms and late
hours, and their prudent mother reminds them of the necessity of fresh
air in their bed-chamber and living room, and preaches the doctrine of
“early to bed and early to rise.”
Footnote 13:
They are published at length by Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet in his “Emmet
Family” (pp. 71-101). They are models of grace and style, and one
wishes they were in the hands of our women who have so largely lost
the old-world accomplishment of letter-writing.
But what most people will think the most delightful thing in the letters
are the pictures they give of the children. As has been already
mentioned, the three elder were with their parents in Fort George, and
almost all the State prisoners were lending a hand, each in his own
speciality, to their education. The accounts of their progress interests
their grandmother keenly, and she helps with comments on their
dispositions as she had studied them. She is proud of Elizabeth’s beauty
and goodness of disposition, of Margaret’s shrewdness of observation,
and liberality and directness in dealing; but “the tenderness of
Robert’s tones and the brightness of his countenance give him the
advantage over all the other children whatever.” It is easy to see that
Robert is his grandmother’s favourite, dear as all the children are to
her. A letter from him gives her “great pleasure, for it is a true
picture of his heart, overflowing with innocence, honesty, and good
nature.” She begs for “minute accounts of the three children ...,” she
and her husband “being glad to feed upon crumbs that fall from her son’s
table.” In return she is almost as minute as her son and daughter-in-law
could wish about the three from whom they are separated. She draws a
funny little sketch of the “little fellow,” two-year-old Christopher
Temple, “fighting hard in dumb show for his share in his grandfather’s
claret,” and a little later on “engaging in his elder brother’s plays,
and forcing himself into notice more than the others.” John is the other
grandmother’s favourite, and Tom is pronounced by Ally Spring “the
finest child you have,” but “the little fellow,” as Elizabeth always
calls the baby namesake of her dead first-born, is of all the three
confided to her care the nearest to her heart. We must, however, reserve
further quotations from the letters, as far as they regard her
grandchildren, until we come to discuss their education, at some length,
in our memoir of their mother.
The letters paint the writer as a grave and somewhat reserved nature.
She feels that she has not her husband’s “gracious manner,” which
perhaps prevents her daughter-in-law judging of the strength of her love
for her. She is inclined by nature to melancholy. “Solitude has through
life stuck to me like an inner garment, and I find that it exceeds even
those of the children of Israel; it is a habit that instead of wearing
by time, grows stronger by constant use.” But she has the great anchors
of Faith and Charity. She feels her blessings with a grateful heart, and
wishes to discern and adore the healing hand which has been held out to
her in the midst of trials and distresses, and without which her natural
infirmities must have sunk under the scenes she has gone through. The
most persistent note in this correspondence is that of deep and true
religious feeling and, as we catch it, we seem to understand how it came
about that in the midst of the corrupt society which was that of
eighteenth century Dublin, this woman’s sons were kept chaste and
undefiled—Moore’s tribute to the unspotted youth of Robert comes back to
us, bringing with it unconscious tribute to the pure and exalting
influence of Robert’s mother.
The letters end in 1802, when Thomas Addis Emmet was released from Fort
George and awaited in Brussels certain developments which were to
determine his future movements. Here the news of his father’s death
reached him, and his own letter on that occasion to his mother, which I
have already quoted, brought forth one from her which, apart from its
intrinsic interest, must have ever borne in the eyes of her son a
priceless value, for when he received it, the hand that had penned it
was long mouldering into dust. It was addressed to the _Poste Restante_,
New York, and only reached its addressee on his arrival in that city in
November 11th, 1804.
In the interval the race of Emmet had been practically exterminated in
the land for which they had given so much. The death of Elizabeth Emmet
on September 9th, 1803, was followed by her youngest son’s execution a
few weeks later. In 1804 Mary Anne Holmes died most tragically in the
arms of her husband, newly liberated from prison. One guesses that the
little children, John, and Tom, and Temple, were then taken care of by
their Grandmother Patten, until an opportunity could be found of sending
them across the Atlantic to their parents. They had gone with
Grandmother Emmet, when she left Casino, after her husband’s death, to
take up her residence in Blomfield, Donnybrook. And, no doubt, Mary Anne
Holmes and poor cousin Kitty did what they could to care for them and
comfort them. But if the pathos of the scene drawn by Madden of the
death chamber of Elizabeth Emmet could have borne any heightening,
doubtless he would have introduced in it the tiny figures of three
little frightened, sable-clad boys, standing hand in hand for comfort,
and weeping—though they knew it not—for the tragedy of the passing of
their house from Irish soil.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Mother of Lord Edward Fitzgerald
EMILIA MARY, DUCHESS OF LEINSTER (1731-1814)[14]
“And the flower I held brightest of all that grew in soil or shall ever
grow
Is rotting in the ground, and will spring no more to lift up my heart.”
—_A Father’s Keen_, by Patrick O’Hegarty.
Footnote 14:
_Authorities_: Moore’s “Life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald”; Campbell’s
“Edward and Pamela Fitzgerald,” “Letters of Horace Walpole,” works of
Mrs. Delaney, etc.
“GREATER love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for
his friends.”—(_John_ xv. 13). Ever since that June dawn, when its first
sweet rays, stealing through the bars of the prison window in Newgate,
fell on the form that lay rigid and still on the prison bed, we know
what was “the greatest love” in Lord Edward’s life. For on that sad bed,
still disordered from the tossings of his fever-racked limbs, still
stained with his life-blood, there lay one _who had died for Ireland_.
By the supreme test, therefore, vouched for by the Supreme Lover, we
know that the love of Ireland was Lord Edward’s “greatest love,” and
that all other loves of his had to yield to its supremacy. But we can
only measure the magnitude of his love for Ireland, if we have the
measure of his other loves to set beside it. And so it falls out, that
we have a particular need, if we would estimate Lord Edward aright, and
would understand what he had to offer to Ireland, to know something of
his other loves, and of those who inspired them. Above all we must know
something of his extraordinary love for his mother.
His letters are full of it: “I am never so happy as when with you,
dearest mother, you seem to make every distress lighter, and I bear
everything better, and enjoy everything more when with you.” And again:
“You cannot think how I feel to want you here. I dined and slept at
Frescati the other day, Ogilvie and I, _tête-à-tête_. We talked a great
deal of you. Though the place makes me melancholy, yet it gives one
pleasant feelings. To be sure, the going to bed without wishing you a
good night; the coming down in a morning, and not seeing you; the
sauntering about in the fine sunshine, looking at your flowers and
shrubs without you to lean upon one, was all very bad indeed. In
settling my journey that evening, I determined to see you in my way,
supposing you were even a thousand miles out of it.”
There is one letter to the “dearest of mothers,” in which he places his
love for her above all else: “I assure you I miss you very, very much. I
am not half so merry as I should be if you were here. I get tired of
everything, and want to have you to go and talk to. _You are, after all,
what I love best in the world._ I love you more than I think I do; but I
will not give way to such thoughts, for it always makes me grave. I
really made myself miserable for two days since I left you, by this sort
of reflections; and in thinking over with myself what misfortunes I
_could_ bear, I found there was one I _could not_; but God bless you.”
Was it Lord Edward’s surpassing love for his mother, that made her, on
her side, single him out among all her children to lavish her tenderness
on; or did she recognise in his great capacity for love a heritage from
her own nature which drew this son closer to her than any other child
she had ever borne? It is certain that of her numerous children—they
counted twenty-one in all—Lord Edward was his mother’s favourite, and
was accepted as such by the rest of the family. Mr. Gerald Campbell
thinks her very frankness in avowing her preference for him prevented
any jealousy among the others. Among the seventy or eighty letters of
the Duchess to her daughters and others which Mr. Campbell examined
before writing his charming book, “Edward and Pamela Fitzgerald,” there
is hardly one, he tells us, “in which she does not express her exceeding
love for him above all the rest.” He quotes: “Dear, dear Eddy! How
constantly he is in my thoughts!” “In Edward nothing surprises me, dear
angel; he has always loved me in an uncommon degree from childhood.” “I
do not pretend to say that Dearest Angel Edward is not the first object:
you have all been used to allow me that indulgence of partiality to him,
and none of you, I believe, blame me for it, or see my excessive
attachment to that Dear Angel with a jealous eye.” The truth is that
Lord Edward had to an extraordinary degree, the gift, so often accorded
as a birthright to persons with a great work to do in the world, of
winning hearts. And probably his own brothers and sisters were as ready
to succumb to his magnetism as the rest of the world.
It would not be surprising if Lord Edward inherited his power of winning
hearts, as well as his capacity for love, from his fascinating mother,
and she, in her turn, wielded it in virtue of her Stuart blood. For she
was the great-granddaughter of Charles II and the beautiful Louise de
Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth. Of the numerous daughters of her
father and mother, the Duke and Duchess of Richmond, four grew to
womanhood, and of these Lady Emilia Mary was the second. All four were
famous for their great beauty and charm; and all four have played a
notable part in history. Lady Caroline, who married Stephen Fox,
afterwards Lord Holland, was the mother of the brilliant statesman,
Charles James Fox. Lady Louisa married Mr. Connolly, of Castletown. Lady
Sarah, some years after the unfortunate termination of her first
marriage with Sir Charles Bunbury, married Colonel Napier and became the
mother of many distinguished soldier sons, including Sir William Napier,
the historian of the Peninsular Wars, and Sir Charles Napier, the
conqueror of Scinde.
I do not know why the novelists who have found in the life romance of
the four beautiful Lennox girls such a wealth of material should have
passed over the love-story of their parents. It is, if possible, more
romantic than any of them. The story is told by their grandson, Mr.
Henry Napier, and published in the introduction to the “Life and Letters
of Lady Sarah Lennox” (pp. 85-87), his mother:
“My grandfather, the second Duke of Richmond, was one of the Lords of
the Bedchamber to King George the Second, who then resided at Kensington
Palace. He had been, as was the custom in those days, married while yet
a boy to Lady Sarah Cadogan.... This marriage was made to cancel a
gambling debt, the young people’s consent having been the last thing
thought of; the Earl of March[15] was sent for from school, and the
young lady from her nursery, a clergyman was in attendance, and they
were told they were immediately to become man and wife! The young lady
is not reported to have uttered a word; the gentleman exclaimed, ‘They
surely are not going to marry me to that dowdy!’ The ceremony, however,
took place; a postchaise was ready at the door, and Lord March was
instantly packed off with his tutor to make the ‘_grand tour_,’ while
his young wife was returned to the care of her mother, a Dutch woman,
daughter of William Munster, Counsellor of Holland. After some years
spent abroad Lord March returned, a well-educated handsome young man,
but with no very agreeable recollections of his wife. Wherefore, instead
of at once seeking his own home, he went directly to the Opera or
Theatre, where he amused himself between the acts in examining the
company. He had not long been occupied in this manner when a very young
and beautiful woman more especially struck his fancy, and turning to a
gentleman beside him he asked who she was. ‘You must be a stranger in
London,’ replied the gentleman, ‘not to know the toast of the town, the
beautiful Lady March.’ Agreeably surprised at this intelligence, Lord
March proceeded to the box, announced himself, and claimed his bride—the
very dowdy whom he had so scornfully rejected some years before, but
with whom he afterwards lived so happily that she died of a broken heart
within the year of his decease, which took place in Godalming, in
Surrey, in August, 1750, when my mother was only five years and a few
months old.”
Footnote 15:
The title borne by the hero of the story while his father, the first
Duke of Richmond, was still alive.
[Illustration:
EMILY, COUNTESS OF KILDARE
The Mother of Lord Edward Fitzgerald
]
The conjugal affection which ever afterwards united the hero and heroine
of this pretty romance receives emphatic testimony from Horace Walpole.
In the gossip he gathers up for his correspondents their names figure
frequently; and while he jests maliciously about the Duke’s “pride and
Stuartism,” and the Duchess’s “grandeur,” he is an enthusiastic admirer
of her Grace’s beauty, and his cynicism is not proof against the
spectacle of her love for her husband, and her devotion to her children.
Like her daughter, the Duchess of Leinster, she had an extraordinarily
large family—twenty-six, as we learn from Horace Walpole[16]—but as was
so often the case in these enormous eighteenth-century families—but a
small proportion of them survived their infancy. We have a pretty
picture of the Duchess and her husband (“who sat by his wife all night
kissing her hand”) at the ball given by “long Sir Thomas Robinson” for
“the Duke’s little girl,” Lady Caroline Lennox, in October, 1741. “The
beauties,” he informs his Florentine correspondent, Sir Horace Mann,
“were the Duke of Richmond’s two daughters,[17] and their mother, still
handsomer than they.” At the Duchess of Norfolk’s great “masquerade” of
February 17th, 1742, to which Royalty went, ablaze with diamonds, and
where “quantities of pretty Vandykes, and all kinds of old pictures
walked out of their frames,” the “two finest and most charming masks,”
in Mr. Walpole’s opinion, “were their Graces of Richmond, like Henry the
Eighth and Jane Seymour, excessively rich, and both so handsome!”[18]
Footnote 16:
“Letters,” II., 221.
Footnote 17:
“Letters,” I., 85. The editor of the Walpole “Letters,” identifies the
second of these girls as Lady Emily, our heroine, but it seems very
unlikely, as she was only ten years old at the date of this ball.
Footnote 18:
_Ibid._, p. 146.