Within a few days, towards the end of this month of August, Mr. Curran himself received a letter from Robert Emmet. It was neither signed nor dated, and opened abruptly, waiving all formalities, not from any hidden defiance, but from entire absorption in the mournful retrospect it called up. As we know from Lord Hardwicke’s communication, Emmet had retained Mr. Curran for his counsel, and it was thought fitting that the latter should decline the brief for the defence. Of course Mr. Curran threw it up; no man could have done otherwise. But his general turmoil, and the apparent motives of it, are not a particularly noble spectacle. The young prisoner, meanwhile, had something to say to him.
“I did not expect you to be my counsel. I nominated you, because not 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.