The letters end in 1802, when Thomas Addis Emmet was released from Fort George and awaited in Brussels certain developments which were to determine his future movements. Here the news of his father’s death reached him, and his own letter on that occasion to his mother, which I have already quoted, brought forth one from her which, apart from its intrinsic interest, must have ever borne in the eyes of her son a priceless value, for when he received it, the hand that had penned it was long mouldering into dust. It was addressed to the Poste Restante, New York, and only reached its addressee on his arrival in that city in November 11th, 1804.
In the interval the race of Emmet had been practically exterminated in the land for which they had given so much. The death of Elizabeth Emmet on September 9th, 1803, was followed by her youngest son’s execution a few weeks later. In 1804 Mary Anne Holmes died most tragically in the arms of her husband, newly liberated from prison. One guesses that the little children, John, and Tom, and Temple, were then taken care of by their Grandmother Patten, until an opportunity could be found of sending them across the Atlantic to their parents. They had gone with Grandmother Emmet, when she left Casino, after her husband’s death, to take up her residence in Blomfield, Donnybrook. And, no doubt, Mary Anne Holmes and poor cousin Kitty did what they could to care for them and comfort them. But if the pathos of the scene drawn by Madden of the death chamber of Elizabeth Emmet could have borne any heightening, doubtless he would have introduced in it the tiny figures of three little frightened, sable-clad boys, standing hand in hand for comfort, and weeping—though they knew it not—for the tragedy of the passing of their house from Irish soil.
The Mother of Lord Edward Fitzgerald
Emilia Mary, Duchess of Leinster (1731-1814)[[14]]
“And the flower I held brightest of all that grew in soil or shall ever grow
Is rotting in the ground, and will spring no more to lift up my heart.”
—A Father’s Keen, by Patrick O’Hegarty.
[14]. Authorities: Moore’s “Life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald”; Campbell’s “Edward and Pamela Fitzgerald,” “Letters of Horace Walpole,” works of Mrs. Delaney, etc.
“GREATER love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”—(John xv. 13). Ever since that June dawn, when its first sweet rays, stealing through the bars of the prison window in Newgate, fell on the form that lay rigid and still on the prison bed, we know what was “the greatest love” in Lord Edward’s life. For on that sad bed, still disordered from the tossings of his fever-racked limbs, still stained with his life-blood, there lay one who had died for Ireland.