Newgate: 12 o'clock at night, July 13.[706]
The Proclamation which brought John Sheares to the scaffold (Henry had no part in it, and died, so far, innocent) ended with these words:—
Vengeance, Irishmen, vengeance on your oppressors! Remember that thousands of your dearest friends have perished by their merciless orders! Remember their burnings—their rackings—their torturings—their military massacres, and their legal murders. Remember Orr!
These declamatory words of a young barrister and amateur tragedian, who probably had no serious design of going red-handed into revolution, were by no means confined to his mouth. In the Appendix will be found some account of William Orr. Meanwhile, the late Henry Grattan, son of the greater Grattan, writes:—
'Remember Orr!' were words written everywhere—pronounced everywhere. I recollect, when a child, to have read them on the walls—to have heard them spoken by the people. Fortunately I did not comprehend their meaning. The conduct of the Irish Government was so reprobated, that at a public dinner in London, given in honor of Mr. Fox's birthday, in one of the rooms where the Duke of Norfolk, Lord Oxford, Mr. Erskine, Sir Francis Burdett, and Horne Tooke sat, two of the toasts were,—'The memory of Orr—basely M—D—D. May the execution of Orr provide places for the Cabinet of St. James's at the Castle!'
The fate of the Sheareses was soon forgotten, but occasionally a pilgrim in thoughtful mood wended his way to their last resting place. William Henry Curran sent to the 'New Monthly Magazine,' in 1822, an account of St. Michan's crypt, Church Street, Dublin. This vault possesses the rare virtue of preserving human remains.[707] He was struck on entering to find that decay had been more busy with the tenement than the tenant:—
In some instances the coffins had altogether disappeared; in others the lids or sides had mouldered away, exposing the remains within, still unsubdued by death from their original form.... I had been told that they (the Sheares) were here, and the moment the light of the taper fell upon the spot they occupy, I quickly recognised them by one or two circumstances that forcibly recalled the close of their career—the headless trunks and the remains of their coarse, unadorned penal shells. Henry's head was lying beside his brother; John's had not been completely detached by the blow of the executioner—one of the ligaments of the neck still connects it with the body. I knew nothing of these victims of ill-timed enthusiasm except from historical report; but the companion of my visit to their grave had been their cotemporary and friend, and he paid their memories the tribute of some sighs, which, even at this distance of time, it would not be prudent to heave in a less privileged place.
The late Richard Dalton Webb, when a boy, also went to see these reliques. With a penknife he severed the ligament mentioned by Curran, and carried away the head to his own home, where it remained twenty years. He finally regretted having taken it, and offered it to Dr. Madden, at whose door the gruesome relic duly arrived.
The head was finely formed [he writes], but the expression of the face was that of the most frightful agony. The mark of very violent injuries, done during life to the right eye, nose, and mouth, were particularly apparent; the very indentation round the neck, from the pressure of the rope, was visible; and there was no injury to the cervical vertebræ occasioned by any instrument.
These horrible marks were doubtless caused by the brutal and bungling way in which the executioner had done his work. Madden, in good taste, restored to the shrunken trunk its long-lost head. When John Sheares, in his last letter, spoke of 'an affectionate tear shed over his dust,' he little foresaw the grim irony by which the words of the Burial Service—'Dust to dust, ashes to ashes'—were to be thwarted. He never married. Roche, in his 'Essays of an Octogenarian,' says that, happening to occupy the rooms in Dublin where John Sheares had once lived, he discovered, in a recess, a package of his letters, which, on finding them addressed to a lady, he instantly burned. Rich material for romance was thus, happily, lost.