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[Illustration: _Robert Emmet._

AET XXV.]




ROBERT EMMET

    A SURVEY OF HIS REBELLION
    AND OF HIS ROMANCE

    BY

    LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY

    WITH A PORTRAIT

    OF

    ROBERT EMMET

    LONDON
    DAVID NUTT, 57-59 LONG ACRE
    1904




    Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
    At the Ballantyne Press




                     _To_

                 LIONEL JOHNSON

    _in the Land of the Living to remind him of
       old thoughts and of things once dear_




PREFATORY NOTE


THE following unscientific monograph, a sort of little historical
descant, is founded upon all the accurate known literature of the
subject, and also largely on the Hardwicke MSS. These, in so far as
they relate to Emmet, the writer was first to consult and have copied,
last winter, before they were catalogued. But while these sheets were
in press, several interesting fragments from the MSS. appeared in
the _Cornhill Magazine_ for September, 1903, thus forestalling their
present use. This discovery will condone the writer’s innocent claim,
made on page 60, of printing the two letters there as unpublished
matter.

The portrait is after Brocas’s hurried court-room sketch, made the day
before the execution. The original print is in the Joly Collection of
the National Library of Ireland. The head is too sharp and narrow, and
yet it bears a marked resemblance, far exceeding that of either of the
other portraits, to some of Robert Emmet’s collateral descendants. On
such good _à posteriori_ evidence it was chosen.

    Oxford, _Dec. 9, 1903_.




ROBERT EMMET

A SURVEY OF HIS REBELLION AND OF HIS ROMANCE


THE four who lived to grow up of the seventeen children born to
Robert Emmet, M.D., of Cork, later of Dublin, and Elizabeth Mason,
his wife, were all, in their way, persons of genius. The Emmets
were of Anglo-Norman stock, Protestants, settled for centuries in
Ireland. The Masons, of like English origin, had merged it in repeated
alliances with women of Kerry, where the Dane, the Norman, and later
invaders from nearer quarters had never settled down to perturb the
ancient Celtic social stream. Dr. Emmet was a man of clear brain
and incorruptible honour. The mother of his children, to judge by
her letters, many of which have been privately printed, must have
been an exquisite being, high-minded, religious, loving, humorous,
wise. Her eldest surviving son, Christopher Temple Emmet, was named
for his two paternal grandparents, Christopher Emmet of Tipperary
and Rebecca Temple, great-great-granddaughter of the first Baronet
Temple of Stowe, in Buckinghamshire. The mention of that prolific,
wide-branching, and extraordinary family of Temple as forebears of the
younger Emmets is like a sharply accented note in a musical measure.
It has never been played for what it is worth; no annalist has tracked
certain Emmet qualities to this perfectly obvious ancestral source.
The Temples had not only, in this case, the bygone responsibility to
bear, for in a marked manner they kept on influencing their Emmet
contemporaries, as in one continuous mood thought engenders thought.
Says Mr. James Hannay: “The distinctive ηθος of the Temples has been
a union of more than usual of the kind of talent which makes men of
letters, with more than usual of the kind of talent which makes men
of affairs.” The Emmets, too, shared the “distinctive ηθος” in the
highest degree. Added to the restless two-winged intelligence, they
had the heightened soberness, the moral elevation, which formed no
separate inheritance. The Temples were, and are, a race of subtle but
somewhat austere imagination, strongly inclined to republicanism, and
to that individualism which is the norm of it. The Temple influence in
eighteenth-century Ireland was, obliquely, the American influence: a
new and heady draught at that time, a “draught of intellectual day.” If
we seek for those unseen agencies which are so much more operative than
mere descent, we cover a good deal of ground in remembering that Robert
Emmet the patriot came of the same blood as Sidney’s friend, Cromwell’s
chaplain, and Dorothy Osborne’s leal and philosophic husband. And he
shared not only the Temple idiosyncrasy, but, unlike his remarkable
brothers, the thin, dark, aquiline Temple face.

Rebecca Temple, only daughter of Thomas, a baronet’s son, married
Christopher Emmet in 1727, brought the dynastic names, Robert and
Thomas, into the Emmet family, and lived in the house of her son, the
Dublin physician, until her death in 1774, when her grandchildren,
Temple and Thomas Addis, were aged thirteen and ten, Robert being
yet unborn. Her protracted life and genial character would have
strengthened the relations, always close, with the Temple kin. Her
brother Robert had gone in his youth from Ireland to Boston, where
his father was long resident; and there he married a Temple cousin.
This Captain Robert Temple died on April 13, 1754, “at his seat, Ten
Hills, at Boston, in New England.” His three sons, the eldest of whom,
succeeding his great-grandfather, became afterwards Sir John Temple,
eighth Baronet of Stowe, all settled in New England and married
daughters of the Bowdoin, Shirley, and Whipple families—good wives
and clever women. John Temple had been “a thorough Whig all through
the Revolution,” and had