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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made on page 60, of printing the two letters there as unpublished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 suffered magnanimously for it. He had to
forfeit office, vogue, and money; and little anticipating his then
most improbable chances of a rise in the world, he forfeited all these
with dogged cheerfulness, in the hour when he could least afford to do
so. The latter-day Winthrops of the Republic are directly descended
from him, and the late Marquis of Dufferin and Ava from his brother.
A certain victorious free spirit, an intellectual fire, whimsical and
masterful, has touched the whole race of untamable Temples, and the
Emmets, the very flower of that race. Love of liberty was, in both
Robert Emmet and in Thomas Addis Emmet, no isolated phenomenon, but
their strengthened and applied inheritance. Captain Robert Temple’s
second son, Robert, came back with his wife, Harriet Shirley, after
the Declaration of Independence, to Allentown, Co. Dublin. His widow
eventually received indemnification for the loss of their transatlantic
estates. It is thus proved that Robert Temple was a loyalist to some
appreciable degree. Earlier and later, however, he did considerable
thinking, cherished liberal principles, and had much to say of the
rights of man and other large theses to his namesake first cousin,
Robert Emmet, M.D., with whom he lived for eighteen months after his
return. This community of ideas was further cemented by the marriage
of Anne Western Temple, Robert Temple’s daughter, to Dr. Emmet’s
eldest son, Temple Emmet. Dr. Emmet was faithful to the unpopular
convictions which he found himself sharing in increased degree with his
cousin. Up to 1783 he was always voluntarily abandoning one position
of eminence after another, as he came to dissent from English rule in
Ireland. He held among other offices that of State Physician; and from
a bland condemnatory notice of his youngest son in _The Gentleman’s
Magazine_ for October 1803, we learn that he was also physician to
the Lord-Lieutenant’s household. It is clear, then, that he also began
his career as a trusted Conservative. But as his opinions changed,
he gave up, Temple-like and Emmet-like, every position and emolument
inconsistent with them; when the ’98 broke out he had even ceased to
practise his profession. He and his wife and their children felt alike
in these matters so adversely and intimately affecting their chances
of worldly success. The boys and the girl were brought up to think
first of Ireland and her needs. An amicable satirist and distinguished
acquaintance was wont facetiously to report Dr. Emmet’s administration
of what the visitor named “the morning draught” to his little ones:
“Well, Temple, what are you ready to do for your country? Would you
kill your sister? Would you kill me?” For after this perilous early
Roman pattern the catechism ran. Even if only a beloved joke, it would
have been enough to seal the young Emmets for fanaticism, had not their
good angels intervened. As it turned out, they were all of a singularly
judicial cast. The only daughter, Mary Anne, had what used to be
called, by way of adequate eulogy, a “masculine understanding,” and
wrote pertinently and well. Her husband was the celebrated barrister
and devoted Irishman, Robert Holmes. He was the true friend and adviser
of the whole Emmet family, and survived his wife, who died during his
imprisonment in 1804, for five-and-fifty years. Of Dr. Emmet’s three
sons, Temple, Thomas Addis, and Robert, the former had an almost
incomparably high repute for “every virtue, every grace,” to quote
Landor’s mourning line for another. It is no disparagement to him to
say that this was partly owing to the pathos of so short a career,
and to the fact that he died ten years before the great Insurrection,
twelve before the Union; seeming to belong to a prior order of things,
it was the easier to praise the Emmet who did not live long enough to
get into trouble, at the expense of the Emmets who did.

Temple Emmet, with his beautiful thought-burdened head, a little like
the young Burke’s, passed by like a wonderful apparition in his day.
His success at Trinity College was complete; it is said the examiners
found their usual maximum of commendation, _Valde bene_, unequal to
the occasion, and had a special _O quam bene!_ given to him with his
degree. This has a sort of historic parallel in the incident at Wadham
College, Oxford, just a century before, when Clarendon, Lord Chancellor
of the University, set a kiss for eulogy upon the boyish cheek of John
Wilmot, Master of Arts. Again serving as his own precedent, Temple
Emmet became King’s Counsel at twenty-five. Two years later he was
in his grave, whither his young wife quickly followed him. All his
contemporaries qualified to appraise his worth, deplored him beyond
common measure. Said the great Grattan, long after: “Temple Emmet,
before he came to the Bar, knew more law than any of the judges on
the Bench; and if he had been placed on one side and the whole Bench
opposed to him, he could have been examined against them, and would
have surpassed them all; he would have answered better both in law and
divinity than any judge or bishop in the land.” His premature death
called his next brother from the University of Glasgow, where he had
just graduated in medicine, to the profession of the law.

The Emmet name was not destined to rise like a star where it had
fallen, for bitter times were drawing nigh, and his own generosity and
integrity were to bring Thomas Addis Emmet into fatal difficulties.
With a great number of other zealous spirits, he flung himself with
all his force of protest against the legalised iniquities destroying
Ireland. Examined before the secret committee of the House of Lords,
August 10, 1798, the young man, then as always quietly intrepid, let
fall brave prophetic words. Asked if he had been an United Irishman,
he righted the tense in answering: “My Lords, I am one”; then he
continued: “Give me leave to tell you, my Lords, that if the Government
of this country be not regulated so that the control may be wholly
Irish, and that the commercial arrangements between the two countries
be not put upon a footing of perfect equality, the connection [with
England] cannot last.” Lord Glentworth said: “Then your intention was
to destroy the Church?” Mr. Emmet replied: “No, my Lord, my intention
never was to destroy the Church. My wish decidedly was to overturn the
Establishment.” Here Lord Dillon interrupted: “I understand you. And
have it as it is in France?” “As it is in America, my Lords.” When the
chance for self-expatriation came, when “to retract was impossible, to
proceed was death,” Thomas Addis Emmet followed the ancestral trail,
and founded a new family in his approved America. The only one of
his circle spared to continue the Emmet name, he came to flower sadly
enough, because his hopes were broken, on what was not to him alien
soil. Everyone knows the rest: how, admitted to the New York Bar by
suspension of rules, without probation, he died in all men’s honour, in
1827, Attorney-General of the State.

Robert Emmet was even surer of an illustrious career. Alas! There is
no documentary proof forthcoming for it as yet, but it is painfully
probable that his little afterglow of a rebellion was long fostered,
for reasons of their own, by great statesmen, and that their secret
knowledge of it arose from Irish bad faith; that, in short, he was let
dream his dream until it suited others to close the toils about him.
The two or three highest in authority in Dublin, Lord Hardwicke chief
among them, were kept ignorant as himself. Emmet was really victim and
martyr. But to die prodigally at twenty-five, and to be enshrined with
unwithered and unique passion in Irish hearts; to go down prematurely
in dust and blood, and yet to be understood, felt, seen, for ever, in
the sphere where “only the great things last,” is perhaps as enviable
a privilege as young men often attain. His is one of several historic
instances in which those who have wrought little else seem to have
wrought an exquisite and quite enduring image of themselves in human
tradition. With none of the celebrities of his own nation can he in
point of actual service, compare; but every one of them, whether known
to ancient folk-lore or to the printed annals of yesterday, is less
of a living legend with Thierry’s “long-memoried people,” than “the
youngest and last of the United Irishmen,” “the child of the heart of
Ireland.” A knot of peasants gathered around a peat fire in the long
evenings, pipe in hand, are the busy hereditary factors of apocryphal
tales beginning “Once Robert Emmet (God love him),” &c.; and a certain
coloured print, very green as to raiment, very melodramatic as to
gesture, hangs to-day in the best room of their every cabin, and stands
to them for all that was of old, and is not, and still should be.

He was born March 4, 1778, in his father’s house in St. Stephen Green
West, Dublin, now numbered 124-125. As a boy he was active out of
doors, yet full of insatiable interest in books, and developed early
his charming talent for drawing and modelling. He was always rather
grave than gay; but the best proof, if any were needed, that he had
nothing of the prig in him, is that he was a favourite at school;
the potential Great Man, in fact, to whom the others looked up. His
one serious early illness was small-pox, which left his complexion
slightly roughened. He entered Trinity College, in his native city,
at fifteen. Either at this time, or just before, occurred an incident
so characteristic as to be worth recording, for it illustrates both
his power of mental concentration, and his still courage in facing
the untoward haps of life alone. Like Shelley, he had a youthful
fascination for chemistry. He had been dabbling with corrosive
sublimate, not long before bedtime. Instead of going upstairs, he sat
down, later, to figure out an allotted algebraic problem which, by way
of whetting adventurous spirits, the author of the book in question
acknowledged to be extremely difficult. Poring earnestly over the
page, the boy fell to biting his nails. He instantly tasted poison,
and pain and fear rushed on him. Without rousing a single person from
sleep, he ran to the library, got down his father’s encyclopædia,
turned to the article he needed, and learned that his antidote was
chalk and water; then he went in the dark to the coach-house where
he had seen chalk used, got it, mixed and drank it, and returned to
his interrupted task. His tutor could not fail to notice the agonised
little face at breakfast. Robert confessed the mischance, and that he
had lain perforce awake all night; but he added, modestly, that he had
mastered the problem. One of Plutarch’s heroes, at that age, could
hardly have done better. The antique world, with its heroic simpleness,
was indeed Robert Emmet’s own ground. At Trinity he earned, without
effort, a golden reputation, partly due to his scientific scholarship,
partly to his goodness, partly, again, to his possession of a faculty
of animated fluent speech, a faculty dear to the Irish, as to every
primitive people. He had a presence noticeably sweet and winning, with
“that gentleness so often found in determined spirits.” His classmate,
Moore, the poet, bore witness long after to his “pure moral worth
combined with intellectual power.... Emmet was wholly free from the
follies