[11]. The identification of the house is of much interest, as it was that in which Robert Emmet was born. A writer in Georgian Society Record (IV. 94) states that it is now numbered 22, and forms portion of Kilworth House.
In this same year, 1771, Dr. Emmet was appointed State Physician, and owing to his character and capacity, was soon in possession also, of a large private practice. He was a charming, genial man, and a great favourite with his patients. His wife’s nephew, St. John Mason, described him to Dr. Madden as “a man of easy and gentlemanly manners, remarkable for vivacity and pleasantry, but free from coarseness or that exaggeration of expression in moments of hilarity called grimace. He possessed humour but not of a caustic nature. In discourse he was fluent and happy in the choice of words, and in the use of classical quotations. He was remarkably punctual and precise in business and professional affairs.” By his professional skill and business prudence Dr. Emmet amassed a considerable fortune, and lived in a manner commensurate with it, entertaining much good company, and taking a leading part in the brilliant society of the day.
After the birth of their youngest child, Robert, in 1778, the Emmets moved from their house in Molesworth Street, to a splendid new mansion in Stephen’s Green. Those were the days of the Volunteers, and Ireland, stirred to the depths by the example of America’s struggle for freedom, was gathering her forces to make the same demand, which America had already secured—and to back it by the same arguments. Less fortunate than America—or less wisely and nobly led—Ireland did not force the question to the decision of the field of battle, but accepted in full settlement of her claim a something which only Grattan and his friends, blinded by their own verbal fire-works, could have mistaken for liberty. Dr. Robert Emmet was one of those who saw, from the beginning, the inadequacy of the Settlement of 1782; and there is no doubt but that it was from him that his sons learned that political creed—the doctrine of “Absolute Independence”—for which one of them was to suffer the “white martyrdom” of exile, and the other the “red martyrdom” of blood. Grattan and Curran and others of their ilk who could never forgive those who had the pluck and honesty to draw their logical conclusion from the premises which they themselves had instituted, have tried to discredit Dr. Emmet by throwing ridicule on him. Grattan’s son quotes his father as saying that “Dr. Emmet had his pill and his plan, and he mixed so much politics with his prescription, that he would kill the patient who took the one, and ruin the country that listened to the other.” And Curran loved to raise a laugh among his friends—Sir Jonah Barrington and other high-minded gentlemen—by “taking off” the Doctor administering “their morning draught” to his sons. “Well, Temple, what would you do for your country? Addis, would you kill your brother for your country? Would you kill your sister for your country? Would you kill me?” We can listen with equanimity to the bitter epigrams of Grattan, or the monkey-like buffoonery of Curran when we remember what his own sons thought of Dr. Emmet: “Dear shade of my venerated father,” cried Robert as he stood in the dock facing his iniquitous judges and accusers, “look down on your suffering son, and see has he for one moment deviated from those moral and patriotic principles which you so early instilled into his youthful mind, and for which he has now to offer up his life.” And Thomas Addis Emmet, writing to his mother from Brussels, on the receipt of the news of his father’s death (December, 1802), has drawn for his own, and his mother’s consolation, a noble portrait of him whom they had lost: “The first comfort you can know must spring up from within yourself, from your reflection and religion, from your recalling to memory that my father’s active and vigorous mind was always occupied in doing good to others. That his seventy-five years were unostentatiously but inestimably filled with perpetual services to his fellow-creatures. That although he was tried, and that severely, with some of those calamities from which we cannot be exempt, yet he enjoyed an uncommon portion of tranquillity and happiness, for, by his firmness and understanding, he was enabled to bear like a man the visitations of external misfortunes, and from within no troubled conscience or compunction of self-reproach ever disturbed his peace.”
The years from 1778 to 1789 were, doubtless, the happiest years in Elizabeth Emmet’s life. The elder boys, Christopher Temple and Thomas Addis, were at the University, and a mother even less tender than she, could not but be filled with pride and happiness at the brilliant records they were making for themselves. In one of these years there arrived from America kinsfolk of her husband’s, Sir John and Robert Temple, and the latter’s family, and in the hospitable eighteenth-century manner which its big houses and generous style of living fostered, they became inmates of Dr. and Mrs. Emmet’s house. The tie which bound the Emmets to the Temples was strengthened, when in 1784 Christopher Temple Emmet married his cousin, Miss Anne Western Temple, daughter of Robert. He had been called to the Bar a short time previously and was in extensive practice. I have already quoted Grattan’s opinion of his gifts. Even more significant was the testimony—spoken of all places in the world—in the very Court wherein Christopher’s youngest brother was awaiting the death-sentence—and by the lips that were so soon to pronounce it, the cruel lips of “Hanging Judge” Norbury. “You had an eldest brother whom death snatched away, and who when living was one of the greatest ornaments of the Bar. The laws of his country were the study of his youth, and the study of his maturer years was to cultivate and support them.” With Christopher marked out, by the judgment of all the competent men of his time for high advancement; with a charming and amiable new daughter added to her household in the shape of Christopher’s wife; with her second son, Thomas Addis, winning all sorts of distinctions for himself in the University of Edinburgh, whither he had gone to study medicine; with Mary Anne, growing into lovely womanhood, and showing a strength of character and a breadth of intellect, which stamped her as a true Emmet; with young Robert, earning praise from his masters and regard from his comrades; with the spectacle of her husband’s delight in all this to double her own—Elizabeth Emmet might well count herself, for one golden moment at least, that rare thing: a perfectly happy woman.
Alas! Alas! how short the moment to which we may cry with Faust, “tarry awhile, thou art so fair.” Very speedily, Elizabeth Emmet’s “fair moment” passed. In February, 1789, her son, Christopher Temple, went “circuit” in Munster—and one day to those who waited his return in the pleasant home in Stephen’s Green there came the tragic news of his death from smallpox. The blow was too severe for Christopher’s young wife. She died a few months after her husband, leaving their little daughter, Kitty, to the care of her grandparents. Elizabeth Emmet had to live on—to face the sorrows that yet awaited her.
At the desire of Dr. Emmet, the second son, Thomas Addis, anxious “to fill” as far as in him lay, “the place of his brother,” turned aside from the profession of medicine, in which he had already graduated, and took up that of law. He was called to the Bar in 1790. In 1791, he married Miss Jane Patten, daughter of Rev. John Patten of Clonmel, his choice of a bride giving the greatest satisfaction to his father and mother.
At first the young couple lived with the old Doctor and his wife, as part of the one household; but as the little grandchildren began to fill the nursery, it was found desirable to provide separate establishments. The Doctor, with this end in view, divided his house in Stephen’s Green, West, into two portions. It stood (and still stands, divided as the Doctor left it into two residences) at the corner of Lamb’s Lane and Stephen’s Green, West,[[12]] and the Doctor kept the corner portion for himself and assigned the inner to his son’s family. Thomas Addis Emmet had, also, as we know from Tone’s “Autobiography,” “a charming villa” at Rathfarnham, and doubtless the whole family were made welcome in it, whenever the call of the countryside overbid the attractions of the town, in the years previous to Dr. Emmet’s purchase of Casino—the country residence where he spent his last years.
[12]. Mr. Reynolds identifies them as 124 and 125 Stephen’s Green, West. In Dr. Emmet’s time the house was numbered 109.
The mention of Tone fitly introduces the years of Thomas Addis Emmet’s 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.