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.