In April, the authorities, alarmed by the spirit of patriotism which was manifesting itself among the students of Trinity College, ordered the “Visitation,” of which Moore gives an account in his “Memoirs.”
In anticipation of the verdict of Lord Chancellor Fitzgibbon, Robert Emmet, who was looked on as the leader of the patriot youths, requested the Board of Fellows to take his name off the books of the college. During the wild excitement of the next few months: the bloody weeks of “the Rising” in May and June; the executions and court-martials of July; the French landing in August; the new executions which followed it, in September; the capture of Tone in October; his court-martial and death in November, all through the tragic calendar of the year 1798, Dr. Emmet and his wife Elizabeth had, at least, the comfort of their younger son’s constant presence with them.
In this year Dr. Emmet set the houses in Stephen’s Green, and took up his residence with his family (which now included his grandchildren) in a country house he had recently purchased for himself, Casino, Milltown. This historic house still stands, and Mr. Reynolds’s indications make it easy to locate: “at the corner of Bird Avenue on the eastern side of the Dundrum Road, midway between Milltown and Windy Arbour.”
Two events of much importance mark the following year (1799) in Elizabeth Emmet’s maternal calendar. The first was the removal of Thomas Addis and the other State prisoners to Fort George in the North of Scotland; the second was the marriage of her daughter, Mary Anne, to the distinguished barrister, Robert Holmes.
Early in 1800, Robert Emmet visited his brother in Fort George, passing from thence to the Continent where he remained until after the signing of the Peace of Amiens in 1802.
Later in the year, Jane Emmet made good the design which her conjugal affection had long inspired, and which no governmental rebuff could weaken—that of joining her husband in Fort George. She went there in July, escorted by her brother, John Patten, and accompanied by her three elder children, Robert, Margaret, and Elizabeth. With the grandparents at Casino were left John Patten, Thomas Addis, and a sturdy little chap called Christopher Emmet, who had joined the goodly company since we last made the enumeration of them.
During the years Thomas Addis and his wife spent in Fort George there was a constant interchange of letters between Casino and the grim northern keep in which the Irish State prisoners were so long interned. Sometimes the Casino news is conveyed by Dr. Emmet—whose letters remind us of St. John Mason’s description of his conversation; sometimes it is Mary Anne Holmes who holds the pen; sometimes it is Kitty, the orphan daughter of Christopher Temple and Anne Western Temple. But most frequently it is the mother and in these letters we get our best picture of the sort of woman Elizabeth Emmet was.[[13]] There are pleasant glimpses, too, of the home-life in Casino. We see the father, seeking solace for his anxieties in his labours in beautifying the house he fondly hoped was to be the home of his children, and his children’s children. The thirteen acres around Casino serve the purpose of Penelope’s web, and the loving wife finds comfort in watching the amusement he gets from his tree-planting and landscape gardening, his industry in gravelling the walks and raking them when they have been gravelled. Convinced that “the promises of hope are better than the gifts of fortune,” he has built a fine nursery ’gainst the happy day when all his grandchildren (and their parents) shall be gathered together under his patriarchal roof; and a certain cherry tree in full blossom makes him and his wife long to see Jane and her charming children gathered under it. The Doctor’s craze for transplanting trees which, to the rest of the family, seem to be perfectly well placed where they are, has grown into a family joke; but his wife is too well pleased to see the good effect the interest and occupation have on his health to protest now, as she was wont to do, even “tho’ from the earliness of the season and the age of the trees she despairs of ever seeing a leaf upon any of them.” “As we have a great demand for pea-rods,” she remarks jestingly, “they will not be useless.” She gathers up all the news she can about their friends, knowing how welcome such items are to exiles. Dr. Drennan, who has attended Mary Anne at the birth of her first-born baby, is happily “married to a very amiable, pretty young woman”; “he has waited to some good purpose.” We have a pretty etching of the author of the “Wake of William Orr,” and the famous “Orellana Letters,” “leaning over the cradle of his little heir, so anxious about it lest it should die.” Other friends, like Lady Anne Fitzgerald, Ally Spring, the Temples—and, above all, the Pattens and the Colvilles—find frequent mention. She does not hesitate to inculcate certain “musty precepts” as to health, which her knowledge of her son’s and her daughter-in-law’s dispositions seems to her to call for. Jane must refrain from “the great efforts of which she is so fond,” for “system is better than swiftness,” and though “we may admire the speed and power of a racehorse, a steady draft horse will in general be found as useful and much more durable.” Both Thomas Addis and Jane are fond, she knows, of heated rooms and late hours, and their prudent mother reminds them of the necessity of fresh air in their bed-chamber and living room, and preaches the doctrine of “early to bed and early to rise.”
[13]. They are published at length by Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet in his “Emmet Family” (pp. 71-101). They are models of grace and style, and one wishes they were in the hands of our women who have so largely lost the old-world accomplishment of letter-writing.
But what most people will think the most delightful thing in the letters are the pictures they give of the children. As has been already mentioned, the three elder were with their parents in Fort George, and almost all the State prisoners were lending a hand, each in his own speciality, to their education. The accounts of their progress interests their grandmother keenly, and she helps with comments on their dispositions as she had studied them. She is proud of Elizabeth’s beauty and goodness of disposition, of Margaret’s shrewdness of observation, and liberality and directness in dealing; but “the tenderness of Robert’s tones and the brightness of his countenance give him the advantage over all the other children whatever.” It is easy to see that Robert is his grandmother’s favourite, dear as all the children are to her. A letter from him gives her “great pleasure, for it is a true picture of his heart, overflowing with innocence, honesty, and good nature.” She begs for “minute accounts of the three children ...,” she and her husband “being glad to feed upon crumbs that fall from her son’s table.” In return she is almost as minute as her son and daughter-in-law could wish about the three from whom they are separated. She draws a funny little sketch of the “little fellow,” two-year-old Christopher Temple, “fighting hard in dumb show for his share in his grandfather’s claret,” and a little later on “engaging in his elder brother’s plays, and forcing himself into notice more than the others.” John is the other grandmother’s favourite, and Tom is pronounced by Ally Spring “the finest child you have,” but “the little fellow,” as Elizabeth always calls the baby namesake of her dead first-born, is of all the three confided to her care the nearest to her heart. We must, however, reserve further quotations from the letters, as far as they regard her grandchildren, until we come to discuss their education, at some length, in our memoir of their mother.
The letters paint the writer as a grave and somewhat reserved nature. She feels that she has not her husband’s “gracious manner,” which perhaps prevents her daughter-in-law judging of the strength of her love for her. She is inclined by nature to melancholy. “Solitude has through life stuck to me like an inner garment, and I find that it exceeds even those of the children of Israel; it is a habit that instead of wearing by time, grows stronger by constant use.” But she has the great anchors of Faith and Charity. She feels her blessings with a grateful heart, and wishes to discern and adore the healing hand which has been held out to her in the midst of trials and distresses, and without which her natural infirmities must have sunk under the scenes she has gone through. The most persistent note in this correspondence is that of deep and true religious feeling and, as we catch it, we seem to understand how it came about that in the midst of the corrupt society which was that of eighteenth century Dublin, this woman’s sons were kept chaste and undefiled—Moore’s tribute to the unspotted youth of Robert comes back to us, bringing with it unconscious tribute to the pure and exalting influence of Robert’s mother.