Mary Anne Emmet
Mary Anne Emmet, sister of Thomas Addis and Robert, was worthy, both in character and brains, of her family. Born in 1773 she showed herself from her earliest years dowered with her full share of the remarkable Emmet intellect. She was carefully educated, mostly by her father, and acquired a knowledge of Classics of which many a University Don might well be vain. She was a vigorous writer; and her grand-nephew, Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet, tells us that he has in his possession several political pamphlets from her pen. “These clearly show that she must have possessed a profound knowledge of political economy, a familiarity with history and the body politic, gained only after careful reading and to an extent few public men of her day possessed.” Her most celebrated pamphlet was “An Address to the People of Ireland, showing them why they ought to submit to an Union.” Its method of advocating an Union is, as Dr. Madden points out, sufficiently indicated by its title:
“Of comfort no man speak;
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs.”
—Shakespeare.
Such scorn as is poured from it in the new-born “patriotism” of the Beresfords, the Fosters, the Whaleys, the Saurins, the Verekers, who had already alienated every right through which an Irishman could call himself a free man! “You are called on to oppose this Union, to preserve your rights. Now I ask the men who call on you what rights you have to support? I ask parliament what right they have not wrested from you? They adjure you to support the constitution. Alas! for that constitution, originally a shadow, now embodied a substance of corruption. You are called on to resist—what? Not oppression, it has been protected. Not injustice, it has been legalised. Not cruelty, it has been indemnified.... Is it for the Convention, the Insurrection, the Indemnity Acts, that you are to resist the annihilation of the parliament that passed them? While these Bills stand recorded on their Journals parliament ought to know that the country cannot dread their extinction. And if the minister of England wishes to use any argument but military force for the accomplishment of this measure, let him present that statute-book to the people, and ask them—‘Why should you wish the duration of this parliament? do you not feel that I am omnipotent in it? are not my mandates written here in blood?...’
“I shall not dwell more on the advantages than I have done on the justice of this measure. I do not believe that one advantage will result from it, or from any other convention between Ireland and Great Britain which the English minister proposes, and which the English mercantile interest approves of: no convention or community of interests ever will be equitably conducted where both parties are not equally able to assert their own rights, and to resist the innovations or injustice of the other.... I know that our part of the treaty will be signed and most strictly performed, and that the English part of it will be filled up how and when it suits the interests of the minister.”
When the order came from the Castle to the State prisoners in Kilmainham on March 18th, 1799, instructing them to be ready for embarkation the following morning, Mary Anne Emmet, “at a late hour the same evening, on hearing of the order, proceeded immediately to the Castle, and demanded an interview with the viceroy for the purpose of ascertaining the fate that was destined for her brother. She presented herself to the viceroy with the spirit that seemed to be characteristic of her race. Lord Cornwallis was moved even to tears at the earnestness of her supplication, the anxiety exhibited in her looks, the strength of feeling, the energy of character displayed in the effort she had made. He treated her with kindness, and assured her that ‘no harm should occur to her brother.’... Miss Emmet returned to her family, and the intelligence she brought, little as it was, relieved the minds of her parents of much of their alarm.”[[90]]
[90]. Madden’s “United Irishmen,” Third Series (Second Edition). p. 91.
Sometime in 1799 she married Robert Holmes, a rising barrister. The young couple took up their residence with old Dr. and Mrs. Emmet, first in Stephen’s Green, and later in Casino; and the correspondence of her mother with Thomas Addis in Fort George, makes frequent mention of Mary Anne. In a letter dated April 10th, Elizabeth Emmet informs her son of the comfort she and her husband found in “Mary Anne’s happiness in consequence of having married a very worthy man, of whom she is very fond, and he equally so of her. She has grown so stout that scarcely a day passes without her walking to town, about town, and out again. The pleasure of her husband’s company has, I believe, wrought this change, and her health is greatly benefitted by the exertion.” In July, 1800, her first baby, a little boy, was born, but the many and great anxieties its mother had undergone before its birth told on it, and it only lived one week. Poor Mary Anne was long in recovering, and perhaps her mother did not make sufficient allowance for the drain made on her delicate constitution by the intensity of her feelings. The indolence, the disinclination to make any exertion except on a great occasion of which her mother frequently complained, were due to physical weakness, and of this her mother did not seem to take account. “Mary Anne is very much better, but you know of old that she has one complaint of which I have no hope she will be cured: indolence has still, and always will have, domination over her, except when exertion becomes necessary; then, indeed, no person can exceed her in efforts. I wish, however, for her own sake that her exertions were brought more into the practice of every day, and not reserved for great occasions. She has a very strong mind, and I think it would operate more upon the body if more frequently called forth.”
Six days after the outbreak of Robert Emmet’s Insurrection, Robert Holmes, who had been in England on business, and knew nothing of his brother-in-law’s plans, was arrested in the streets of Dublin, on his way home. About the same time John Patten, Jane Emmet’s brother, was arrested, and the wildest rumours of Robert’s fate were brought to the ladies of the Emmet family, who were now in residence at Donnybrook. The anxiety proved too much for Elizabeth Emmet, and while her youngest son lay in prison awaiting his tragic destiny, she died in her daughter’s arms.
Think of what Mary Anne Holmes had to endure during those terrible weeks. One brother was in exile, another in the prison from which the only egress was up the steps to the scaffold; her husband a prisoner with an uncertain fate. Truly “the strong mind” had heavy drains on it when she followed her mother’s coffin to the churchyard of St. Peter’s in Aungier Street, whither Dr. Emmet’s had only a little time preceded it. Small wonder that the end of her sad story came with tragic swiftness, and in tragic circumstances.
Mr. Holmes was kept for a whole year a prisoner in Dublin Castle, and then suddenly released. He walked directly home. “In response to his ring his wife unfortunately opened the door, only to drop dead into his arms from the suddenness of the shock and the excess of her joy at seeing him. It is said that Mr. Holmes never recovered from the shock he thus received, and to the day of his death he was seldom seen to smile.”[[91]] He lived to be a very old man—to see the men of ’48 stand in the same dock as the men of ’98 and ’03—and for the same crime. In his eightieth year he acted as counsel for Duffy in the Nation prosecution of 1846; in his eighty-second year he defended John Mitchel. “We thought we heard the blood of Emmet crying aloud from the ground,” said Mitchel, of the great speech made by Holmes on the former occasion. But in the ears of the old man, himself, as he made his immortal indictment of England, there was ringing the voice of his dead love—the woman whom England’s cruelty had murdered in his very arms two-and-forty years before!
[91]. “The Emmet Family,” p. 54. The circumstances of Mary Anne Holmes’s death were communicated to Dr. T. A. Emmet by Sir Bernard Burke.