We have already learned in our memoir of Elizabeth Emmet, that her son, Thomas Addis, shortly after having been called to the Bar, married, in 1791, Miss Jane Patten, the twenty-year-old daughter of Rev. John Patten, of Annerville (near Clonmel), and his wife Margaret Colville. After Rev. Mr. Patten’s death in 1787, his widow, with her children, Jane and John, came to live in Dublin where her brother, Mr. Colville was a wealthy merchant, and in this city Thomas Addis Emmet met Miss Patten. It is probable enough that the intimacy between the families—which was very affectionate—was of longer standing; for both the Colvilles and the Emmets were Tipperary folk.
In a letter to his daughter Elizabeth, written on the eve of the latter’s marriage to Mr. Le Roy, Thomas Addis Emmet recalls the happiness it gave him when, as a young husband, he witnessed the tenderness with which his father and mother took to their hearts, as a veritable new daughter, the bride he had brought home to them: “To this day,” he writes (and “this day” was forty years after the event to which his memory goes back) “I remember I never loved your Mother so much, or looked at her with so much delight, as when I saw from my father’s and mother’s actions that they cherished her as their own daughter.”
The tender little phrase throws a pleasing light on the relations that existed between the two ménages, which shared between them Dr. Emmet’s fine mansion on Stephen’s Green. Shortly after his son’s marriage the doctor divided his house (No. 109 Stephen’s Green, West) into two separate dwellings, keeping the corner house for himself, and assigning the other to the young couple. In this inner house Jane Emmet’s elder children, Robert (September 8th, 1792), Margaret (September 21st, 1793), Elizabeth (December 4th, 1794), John Patten (April 8th, 1796), Thomas Addis (May 29th, 1797) were born.
During the years when her nursery was thus rapidly filling, Jane Emmet’s husband was making his mark at the Bar. He was engaged as counsel (with Hon. Simon Butler and Leonard MacNally) in the celebrated case of Napper Tandy against the Lord Lieutenant, the Lord Chancellor and some members of the privy council, who had signed a proclamation offering a reward for the apprehension of Tandy. The object of the whole proceedings on the part of Tandy’s advisers was “to contest the validity of the Lord Lieutenant’s patent, as having been granted under the great seal of England, instead of that of the Chancellor of Ireland.” In the course of Emmet’s address he caused a sensation by boldly asserting that there had been “no legal viceroy in Ireland for the last ten years, and not only the counsel for Lord Westmoreland will not deny that fact, but they will not dare to let his patent come under a train of legal investigation.”
Other notable cases in which Emmet was engaged included the trial at Tralee in 1793 of Lieutenant Carr who had shot a Mr. O’Connell in a duel, and the trial of a Mr. O’Driscoll, at Cork assizes in the same year, on a charge of seditious libel. In this case Emmet was associated with the Sheareses and Leonard MacNally. So successful was he, according to his cousin, St. John Mason’s statement to Dr. Madden, that the first year of his practice he realised £700.
In 1795 he took the oath of the United Irishmen under very sensational circumstances, thus detailed by Madden: “A case occurred before Prime Serjeant Fitzgerald, in which a conviction was obtained on a charge of administering the United Irishmen’s oath, then a capital offence. Emmet appeared for the prisoners on a motion in arrest of judgment. He took up the pleadings in which the words of the oath were recited, and he read them in a very deliberate manner, and with all the gravity of a man who felt that he was binding his soul by the obligations of a solemn oath. ‘I, Thomas Addis Emmet, in the presence of God, do pledge myself to my country that I will use all my abilities and influence in the attainment of an impartial and adequate representation of the Irish nation in parliament; and as a means and absolute and immediate necessity in the establishment of this chief good of Ireland, I will endeavour, as much as lies in my ability, to forward a brotherhood of affection, an identity of interests, a communion of rights and an union of power, among Irishmen of all religious persuasions, without which, every reform in parliament must be partial, not national, inadequate to the wants, delusive to the wishes, and insufficient to the freedom and happiness of this country.’
“Having read the text, and defended its obligations with a power of reasoning and a display of legal knowledge, in reference to the subject of the distinction between legal and illegal oaths, which the counsel for the prosecution described as producing an extraordinary impression, he said:
“‘My lords, here in the presence of this legal court, this crowded auditory, in the presence of the Being that sees, and witnesses, and directs this judicial tribunal—here, my lords, I, myself, in the presence of God, declare I take the oath.’ He then took the book, kissed it, and sat down. No steps were taken by the court against the newly-sworn United Irishman; the amazement of its functionaries left them in no fit state of mind either for remonstrance or reproval. The prisoners received a very lenient sentence.”
Though Emmet took the oath thus publicly, he was not publicly identified with the United Irishmen until a period considerably later. He was rarely engaged as their counsel in the trials of 1797 and 1798—acting rather as chamber lawyer to their committees. He became a member of the directory in 1797 after the arrest of Arthur O’Connor.
But long before that date he had worked for the objects for which the United Irishmen were founded, Reform and Emancipation; and he had been associated, in the closest manner with their founder. He was a member of the political club which Tone formed in the winter of 1790, and Tone found him a man completely after his own heart: “of a great and comprehensive mind, of the warmest and sincerest affection for his friends, and of a steady adherence to his principles, to which he has sacrificed much, as I know, and would, I am sure, if necessary, sacrifice his life. His opinions and mine square exactly.”