“My life was he,
My death his taking.”
—Lament of Mothers of Bethlehem.
[2]. Authorities: Madden’s “United Irishmen,” Third Series, Second Ed. (London and Dublin, 1860); Dr. Thos. Addis Emmet’s “The Emmet Family” (New York, 1898); J. J. Reynolds’s “Footprints of Emmet” (Dublin, 1903); Smith’s “County and City of Cork,” edited by Day and Copinger (Cork, 1893).
“ON Tuesday, September 20th (1803), the day of the execution of Robert Emmet, he was visited at ten o’clock in the morning, by Mr. Leonard McNally, the barrister, who, on entering the room where Emmet had the indulgence of remaining all that morning in the company of the Rev. Dr. Gamble, the ordinary of Newgate, found him reading the litany of the service of the Church of England. Permission was given to him to retire with McNally into an adjoining room, and on entering it, his first enquiry was after his mother, whose health had been in a declining state, and had wholly broken down under the recent afflictions which had fallen on her. McNally, hesitating to answer the enquiry, Robert Emmet repeated the question, ‘How is my mother?’ McNally, without replying directly, said, ‘I know, Robert, you would like to see your mother.’ The answer was, ‘Oh! what would I not give to see her?’ McNally, pointing upwards, said, ‘Then, Robert, you will see her this day!’ and then gave him an account of his mother’s death, which had taken place some days previously. Emmet made no reply; he stood motionless and silent for some moments, and said, ‘It is better so.’ He was evidently struggling hard with his feelings, and endeavouring to suppress them. He made no further allusion to the subject but by expressing ‘a confident hope that he and his mother would meet in heaven.’”[[3]]
[3]. Madden, op. cit. p. 461. Madden’s account of this touching incident was furnished him by John Patten, brother of Mrs. Thos. Addis Emmet, and the devoted friend of the whole Emmet family, who was a prisoner in Kilmainham at the time of Robert Emmet’s trial and execution.
I have known one woman who, having been able to read, with dry eyes, the melting tale of Sarah Curran’s “Broken Heart,” and to listen, without a sob, to the voice of Sarah’s young lover, so soon to be stilled for ever, pleading from the brink of “the cold and silent grave,” for the last charity of the world’s silence, broke into a passion of weeping as the tragedy, which was Robert Emmet’s life-story, swept through every stage of gathering pathos to the almost intolerable poignancy of its climax—the picture, conjured up by Madden, of the mother who lay dead, of a broken heart, in her widowed home in Donnybrook, while her last-born son, her Benjamin, stood in the dock in Green Street on trial for his life.
And yet is there not comfort to be found in the thought that the mother’s loving spirit was liberated in time from the prison of the suffering flesh, to be made free of all the places out of which her boy’s anguish called to her? If, as was Robert Emmet’s fond hope, “the dear shade of his venerated father” looked down upon him, where he stood in the dock, ready to die for the principles which that father had first taught him, surely the soul of the mother was not far away. Surely it bore him company during the long nerve-wrecking, exhausting hours of the trial,[[4]] giving him the refreshment which the brutality of his captors and judges denied; surely it was close at hand when his poor body, on which the fetters of death were so soon to be laid, had to submit for the last time to the more galling fetters of the abominable gaoler of Newgate. Could we bear to think of what Robert Emmet was made to suffer during his last night on earth, if the conviction that his mother’s spirit hovered near him, did not bring us comfort? Brought to Newgate from Green Street about eleven o’clock at night, he was heavily ironed by Gregg, the gaoler, and placed in one of the condemned cells. About an hour after midnight an order came from the Secretary at the Castle that the prisoner must be at once conveyed to Kilmainham. What a journey was that through the darkness of the autumn night! What a journey back from Kilmainham to Thomas Street the next day, when through the seething crowds, the carriage which bore the young martyr to the place of his execution moved in the midst of its strong guard of horse and foot! Even his enemies, looking upon him, were fain to confess that never had they seen a man go forth “to die like this”—with such “unostentatious fortitude,” such marvellous absence of all signs of fear, such a conviction of the glory of dying “for Ireland.” Did the dear Lord make it easy for him “to die like this,” by permitting his mother to leave her place in heaven for a time to be with her boy in the supreme hours?
[4]. The trial of Robert Emmet lasted from 9.30 a.m. until 10.30 p.m. During “these thirteen hours of mortal anxiety, of exertion, of attention, constantly engaged, he had no interval of repose, no refreshment.”