A sergeant waited upon him, and delivered a verbal command from Major Sandys to surrender the cup. Mr. McNally refused, and commissioned the messenger to carry back such an answer as so daring a requisition suggested.[479] The sergeant ... respectfully remonstrated upon the imprudence of provoking Major Sandys. The consequences soon appeared: the sergeant returned with a body of soldiers, who paraded before Mr. McNally's door, and were under orders to proceed to extremities if the cup was not delivered up. Upon Mr. MacNally's acquainting Lord Kilwarden with the outrage, the latter burst into tears and, exclaiming that 'his own sideboard might be the next object of plunder, if such atrocious practices were not checked,' lost not an instant in procuring the restitution of the property. The cup was accordingly sent back with the inscription erased.[480]
Arthur Wolfe, Lord Kilwarden, was the Chief Justice of the King's Bench, and his alleged intimacy with McNally is probably exaggerated. The biographer says that Curran repeatedly told this episode of '98, and quotes a touching peroration regarding Kilwarden's alleged interposition: that, in fact, great was the odour of its memory and precious the balm of its consolation!
McNally's account of the robbery of his silver cup was part of his stock-in-trade, and I am sure that for twenty times the price he would not have been without it.
William Henry Curran knew not very much of his father, whose biographer he became. John Philpot Curran had excluded him from his domestic circle, and the letters to his son which appear in the book were addressed to Richard. Who can doubt that much detail which lends interest to the ever popular 'Life, by his Son,' was supplied to the youth by the practised old scribe Leonard McNally? Curran's gratitude to him for help afforded is freely expressed. McNally wrote a style clear as rock water and full of classic strength. Nothing can be finer than his secret letters to Pelham and Cooke—three of which he often despatched in one day. The wonderful anecdotes which made Curran's Life, by his son, almost a classic have been quoted over and over, including the dinner scene at McNally's, when the ill-fated Rev. Mr. Jackson was entertained. Curran's son tells how the talk had been getting imprudent, when the butler, beckoning his master to the door, warned him to be careful; 'for, sir, the strange gentleman who seems to be asleep is not so, but listening to everything said: I see his eye glistening through the fingers with which he is covering his face.'
Cockayne was, of course, a spy of Pitt's; but some of the sensational anecdotes which McNally told of him, as also of Reynolds and Armstrong, may have been overcharged to divert suspicion from himself. These are not the only instances in which the embellishments of the professional advocate seem traceable. As regards Jackson's death in the dock, we are told that he made an effort with his cold and nerveless hand to squeeze McNally's, muttering a quotation from Addison's 'Cato'; but the lines and the adjuncts would be more likely to occur at such a moment to an old playwright like McNally than to the dying clergyman.
Emmet's revolt took place on July 23, 1803, but was soon quelled. He remained in concealment at Harold's Cross, and chose that position in order that he might see Sarah Curran, with her father, pass daily to Dublin. On August 25 he was arrested by Major Sirr. Popular confidence in McNally had now reached its height. A special commission for trying the insurgent leaders began on August 24, 1803. 'Most of the prisoners chose Mr. McNally as their counsel, and Mr. L. McNally, junior, as their agent,' records the 'Evening Post' of the day.
McNally had long had his eye on the gifted young orator Robert Emmet: 'Emmet, junior, gone on business to France—probably to supersede Lewins,'[481] he writes to Cooke three years previous to the insurrection of 1803. On September 3, in the latter year, McNally sends one of his secret letters to Cooke, saying that he is authorised to treat on behalf of a person privy to the whole conspiracy.[482]
The remainder of McNally's letters during these troubles of 1803 are yet wanting. No doubt they remain among Wickham's papers of the period which are still a sealed book.[483] Among the sensational incidents of the hour was the outrage of searching Curran's house, and the capture of Emmet's love-letters to Sarah Curran—to whom the youth had been secretly engaged. Curran himself, we are told, though aware of Emmet's visits, was ignorant of the attachment. But there was a seemingly dear old friend, having access to Curran's domestic circle, whose eagle eye could penetrate still deeper secrets. In the absence of McNally's private reports of that month there is, however, no absolute proof against him on this point.
Mount Jerome,[484] the seat of John Keogh, the great Catholic leader, was also searched, and his papers seized. Dr. Madden mentions that, in 1802, Emmet had dined at Keogh's in the company of John Philpot Curran, when the probability of success in the event of a second rebellion was debated with great animation.[485] Whose was the whisper which betrayed this information never transpired. But Curran, the great depository of popular secrets, maintained, as will be shown, no reserve with McNally. So far back as 1797 McNally writes:—
Grattan and Curran are compleatly in the secret. Everything that's done or intended is communicated to them.[486]