Robert Emmet: A Survey of His Rebellion and of His Romance

by Louise Imogen Guiney

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.