The actual passing of the Union turned out to be something of an anticlimax at the time. The issue had always given rise to more calculation than passion and such passion as had been generated was spent. From all over the country, including Dublin, came reports of perfect tranquillity.1 Even those forces which by definition existed to disturb Irish tranquillity seem hardly to have been affected one way or the other. Agrarian disturbances came and went, as they had done for decades, in Lecky’s phrase ‘like the passing storms that sweep so rapidly over the inconstant Irish sky’.2 Part of the pro-Union argument had in any case always been that it would in time work to eradicate such disaffection. As for the United Irishmen, they had been opposed not particularly to the Union but to the British connection which existed whether there were a union or not. They had been broken not by the Union but by their own incompetence and lack of effective organization three years before, and by the consequent military defeats both of the rebels and the French. But there was to be one last attempt to revive their cause. And total failure and puny in scale though it was, it was to echo through history with almost as much effect as the convulsion of 1798 itself.
While the Union arguments had been proceeding in the course of 1799 the government had received information that a new United Irish executive had been formed in Dublin and that one of its guiding spirits was the Protestant Robert Emmet, youngest son of a sometime physician to the Vice-Regal Lodge and younger brother of Thomas Addis Emmet, then a state prisoner in Fort George in Scotland. The year before, Robert had been a noticeably brilliant student at Trinity College where he had studied science, but he had been expelled for holding radical political views like those for which his brother had got himself into much more serious trouble. Robert had visited his brother and MacNeven, O’Connor and the rest in Kilmainham gaol before they were moved to Scotland. The prisoners had had considerable latitude and freedom of association in Kilmainham, and Robert had taken out instructions from them to such members of the United Irish executive as were still at large, and had himself become a member of the executive. Now, in 1799, on receipt of information about his activity from an informer, the government ordered his arrest. They found that he had already fled.
Robert Emmet’s whereabouts for the next year or so are obscure though he undoubtedly had contacts with his brother and the others in Fort George, where conditions were even more lax and civilized than they had been in Kilmainham. Early in 1801 he went to France, where for about a year he seems to have been the Paris representative of such United Irish directory as was functioning in Ireland. But the apparent half-heartedness of the French towards the cause made it an unrewarding post. Certainly it seems that Bonaparte was more interested in making the British fear an invasion of Ireland than in actually carrying one out. Emmet optimistically studied military textbooks, including a history of the Seven Years War.3 Among acquaintances he made was the American engineer and armaments specialist, Robert Fulton, who was then trying to sell the idea of a submarine to Bonaparte and who imparted to Emmet his fascination with rockets and explosives. But the chances of putting theory into practice receded further than ever when France concluded the Peace of Amiens with England in 1802.
The United Irish prisoners were now released from Fort George in delayed implementation of their compact with the British Government, and it was Robert Emmet’s first wish to join his brother in exile in America. But the loneliness of his ageing parents in Ireland troubled him and he eventually decided with some reluctance to return there.4 Presumably he felt free to do so because Habeas Corpus, which had been suspended when the government wanted to arrest him earlier, had now been restored, and there was probably little solid evidence against him which would have held up in front of a jury. The private letter in which he writes of the difficulty this decision caused him also makes clear that he was not then contemplating anything in the way of radical conspiracies, but rather reluctantly considering them a thing of the past.5
He returned to Ireland in October 1802, leading for a time a purely social life, dining out in merchants’ houses in Dublin and emphasizing that he had come about private and not public affairs.6 But there was in fact already a conspiracy on foot in Dublin, with which in its first stage he apparently had no connection. This was a curious affair timed to coincide with a three-part rising of radical republicans in the British Isles – in England, Scotland and Ireland simultaneously. The chief branch of the conspiracy was in England, where it was headed by an eccentric military figure of previous good standing named Colonel Despard. Despard had had a respectable public career up to a point but had developed a bitter sense of grievance against the British Government when they dismissed him from a post in the West Indies, and this sense of grievance transformed him into a violent republican. The London end of the plot, which was to begin by blowing George III to bits with a cannon aimed at him from the park, was foiled in plenty of time. Despard was arrested, tried with six other conspirators, found guilty and hanged in a row with them, in spite of a recommendation to mercy by the jury on account of past services to the nation and personal testimony to his character from Lord Nelson. Altogether, Despard in fact appears as a rather absurd and pathetic figure in history who only keeps his place there thanks to his tenuous connection with another conspiratorial failure to whom myth was kinder: Robert Emmet.
It seems unlikely that Emmet had any part in the Irish end of the conspiracy while Despard was alive, but it must have been soon after Despard’s execution that he once again became entangled in United Irish activity in Dublin. In his Proclamation of July 1803, headed very like another more famous proclamation of over a century later, ‘The Provisional Government to the People of Ireland’, Emmet declared that such a government had been organizing for eight months and referred to the ‘failure of a similar attempt in England’, clearly meaning Despard’s.7 It must therefore have been around the end of 1802 that he entered into his plan for a new United Irish rising in Dublin. Certainly the police began to show an interest in him again about that time, because they paid a visit to his father’s house where he was living at the end of December 1802, but he evaded them by means of an elaborate series of trap-doors, ropes, pulleys and concealed hiding-places which he had constructed there.8
Emmet does not appear to have been the prime mover in the new conspiracy at first, though it is not clear who was. Certainly, by the time his ill-assorted band took to the streets in the following July he, in his general’s uniform of green and lace with gold epaulettes on each shoulder, was the chief person in authority – though authority is an inappropriate word in the circumstances.
In spite of past disappointments with France, the conspirators had been plainly encouraged by the renewal of the war in May 1803, and a messenger was sent to France, to Robert’s brother Thomas, with the familiar sort of wildly optimistic assertions about the state of affairs in Ireland. There was ‘a new and closer plan’ … communication between North and South had been thoroughly established … respectable men had come forward … Kildare, Wicklow and Dublin were in a very forward state … one depot in Dublin alone held 2,500 pikes already fitted with handles … the government did not seem to have the slightest suspicion, etc.9 Thomas Emmet was to procure arms and money and officers from Bonaparte, but in this he proved unsuccessful, being unable even to obtain personal access to Bonaparte, a problem aggravated by a split among the exiled revolutionaries in Paris.** In any case, after past experience the Dublin men do not seem to have been relying too heavily on the French, stressing in their application for help that they were disgusted with France and would not take her assistance if they could do without it.10 In Emmet’s excited proclamation, it was positively stated that the conspiracy had been conducted ‘without the hope of foreign assistance’.11 Certainly, whether hoped for or not, French help was not forthcoming, for, in what was to become the tradition of Irish nationalist rebellions, the rising went off at half-cock.
The plan itself was reasonable and practical, its execution lamentable to the point of farce. Bad luck played its part but need not have played such a disastrous one if organization and leadership had been efficient. The chief objective was Dublin Castle, the seat for centuries of the Irish executive which had been retained intact after the Union, though responsible now directly to the British Parliament. The Pigeon House fort in the harbour and the Artillery Barracks at Islandbridge were to be captured first. Meticulous care had been given to the planning of this operation. Points in between the main objectives where loyalist forces might be expected to give trouble were detailed, and an elaborate defensive system worked out whereby certain streets were to be chained and padlocked and strategic nearby houses occupied. The bridges over the Liffey were to have boards covered with long nails fixed into the roadway to impede entry. A special feature of the rising was to be the ingenuity of weapons employed. In secret arms depots in Dublin men had for weeks been manufacturing not only the conventional pikes in use five years before but also an improved version which folded in half so that it could be carried concealed under a man’s greatcoat, and, more revolutionary still, a great quantity of explosives including rockets, grenades and fixed wooden blocks full of explosive and shrapnel which could be set to go off in the street like mines. It was in fact the preoccupation with explosives that set off the disastrous sequence of events in which Emmet’s attempt ended. On 16 July 1803 an accidental explosion took place in one of the depots in Patrick Street, Dublin, drawing the attention of the police to the house.
One of the most remarkable features of Emmet’s ill-starred attempt was that, unlike the business of five years before, the secret of the conspiracy had been kept very close. This part at least of the message to his brother in France had been no boast. Although the government had some general uneasy feelings that something was afoot they had no suspicion of what it was, or who was involved in it. Even after the explosion in Patrick Street the police were unable to discover anything like the real nature or extent of what had been going on there. Many of the remaining arms had been removed before the police arrived; others were stored in specially prepared hiding-places which were not discovered. But Emmet reasonably concluded that it would only be a matter of time before the government were on to him and decided not to postpone the date of the rising already fixed for the following Saturday, 23 July 1803. Thomas Russell, Tone’s old friend, the only one of the exiled prisoners from Fort George to come over from France to join him, was sent off to alert the North which, he assured Emmet, was all ready to rise.
It had been a conscious part of Emmet’s strategy not to try to organize the country outside Dublin to any large extent. He thus hoped to avoid the pitfalls of conspiratorial bureaucracy which had helped undo the men of ’98. His assumption was that large areas of the country were ready to rise in any case if given the proper signal, and that there could be no more proper signal than the taking of the Castle and victory in Dublin. This replaced the old previously awaited signal of a French landing.
In his Proclamation Emmet said he was counting on the support of nineteen counties. When he finally launched his abortive attempt that Saturday, the country so conspicuously failed to rise that it is easy to say his assumptions were ludicrous. But then, no signal was given. Not only did Emmet fail to take Dublin; he came nowhere near any success at all. And the cautious and individualistic nature of the discontent in the country was such that without any very clear indication of success it inevitably remained inert.
The trail of disasters after the accident of the Patrick Street explosion was almost continuous. There was a remarkable lack of any firm leadership or preparedness to deal with them. Apart from sending Russell off to the North, the only practical arrangements Emmet had made with forces other than his own were with the men of Kildare and those remnants of the ’98 rebellion still holding out under Michael Dwyer in Wicklow. But these arrangements, and Emmet’s entire system of communications, proved highly unreliable. Through a failure of the messenger sent to summon Dwyer’s men from Wicklow, they never arrived at all. The men from Kildare did come into Dublin, principally on the evening before, but did not like what they found. Emmet had to spend hours arguing with them not only about whether the arms provided were sufficient but also, at this absurdly late stage, about whether or not the rising ought to wait for a French landing. These Kildare men spent much of the day itself waiting for the zero hour of 9 p.m. in the Dublin public houses, and many actually moved out of the city about 5 p.m. on receipt of a false report that Dublin was not going to rise after all. A message had been circulated by some treacherous or cowardly person, wrote Emmet later, that the rising was off till the following Wednesday.12 The Wexford men who did assemble at the right place in Dublin waited in vain on the night for their prearranged signal – the firing of a rocket. It was never fired, because by then Emmet had been so overwhelmed by the magnitude of the other disasters that he had decided to call the whole adventure off.
‘There was failure in all,’ Emmet wrote afterwards, ‘plan, preparation and men.’13 Until as late as five o’clock on the day of the rising he was desperately trying to find money to buy more blunderbusses. The last two days, which should have been spent in perfection of plans, had to be devoted to making good the shortage of pikes after losses in the Patrick Street explosion. ‘… Even this, from the confusion occasioned by men crowding into the Depot, from the country, was almost impossible.’ The man who was to make the fuses for the wooden explosive devices forgot about them. The man in charge of the depot ‘mixed, by accident, the slow matches that were prepared with what were not, and all our labour went for nothing. The fuses for the grenades he had also laid by, where he forgot them, and could not find them in the crowd. The cramp irons could not be got in time from the smiths, to whom we could not communicate the necessity of dispatch; and the scaling ladders were not finished (but one).’
At Dublin Castle itself the government had had many indications to supplement their vague suspicions of the past few weeks. On the morning of 23 July itself a publican came in to report that he had heard some men discussing over breakfast a rising due for that evening, and an employer arrived to say that some of his men had asked to be paid off early that night so that they could take part in it.14 A state of increased alert was maintained but no positive move made and the government was afterwards heavily criticized for not having taken the situation more seriously.
Meanwhile, the Proclamation of the Provisional Government was arriving wet from the presses** in the depot where Emmet in his general’s green uniform and his feathered cocked hat was assembling his men. Three hours – from six to nine – had been allotted for the assembly of two thousand men. By nine o’clock eighty had arrived.15 ‘You are now called upon,’ began the Proclamation, ‘to show the world that you are competent to take your place among the nations; that you have a right to claim their recognisance of you as an independent country …. We have now, without the loss of a man, with our means of communication untouched, brought our plans to the moment when they are ripe for execution …. We therefore solemnly declare that our object is to establish a free and independent republic in Ireland …’16 The ‘Provisional Government of the Republic’ appended to the Proclamation a list of thirty decrees, abolishing tithes, making Church lands the property of the nation, and suspending all transfers of land and securities until the formation of a national government. A new sovereign assembly was to be elected on universal suffrage by secret ballot, to consist of three hundred representatives as in the old Parliament but now elected in proportion to the population of the thirty-two counties.17
Over such matters at least considerable care had been taken, and this evidence of it may at the last moment have given some confidence to the group assembled round their small uniformed general in the confusion of the Thomas Street depot. If so, it could not have lasted long. News suddenly arrived that the horses pulling the coaches on which they had been counting to carry the assault force under cover to Dublin Castle had bolted on their way there, after an incident in which one of the escorting rebels had fired his pistol at a patrol. Soon after, a near panic ensued when word came that the military were approaching. The news was to prove false but there and then Emmet drew his sword and, accompanied by about a hundred men, sallied forth into the night in the name of the Irish Republic. The streets were filled with the usual Saturday night crowds, many of them drunk.
An indeterminate mob was soon rampaging through the streets with pikes and blunderbusses. It eventually found itself, quite fortuitously, surrounding the coach of Lord Kilwarden, the Lord Chief Justice, and a remarkably humane man, who with his son-in-law was now savagely piked to death. Emmet, striding on with a band of followers which soon dwindled to about twenty, was quite unaware of this grisly occurrence, and afterwards wholeheartedly deplored it. But the catastrophic nature of his failure was already plain to him, and, refusing to give the signal for the Wexford men to move to the now useless shedding of blood, he took himself off into hiding. As he himself conceded, what had happened did not even have the respectability of insurrection.18 About thirty lives were lost in the course of the desultory rioting that completed the night.
Elsewhere in Ireland, almost nothing happened at all. The faithful Russell, as ‘General of the Northern District’, issued a proclamation that ‘vast multitudes in all parts of the country were engaged’,19 but this was quickly recognized as untrue and treated accordingly. One claim Emmet could, and did, justifiably make for the whole disastrous undertaking. It had always been predicted that any new attempt at a rising would fail, but for quite different reasons. It was impossible, it was said, to hatch a conspiracy that was not known at the Castle. This at least Emmet had proved to be not so. When the government afterwards discovered the scale on which preparations had been made, unknown to them, they took considerably more fright than the actual events of the rising seemed to justify. There was an internal political row and the army commander was rather unfairly made the scapegoat.
But Emmet’s real contribution to the cause in which he had so far cut such a forlorn and ludicrous figure was still to come. Under the name of Mr Ellis, his nom-de-guerre throughout the whole affair, he remained at large for nearly a month but, once caught, the result of his trial was a foregone conclusion. His speech from the dock must have had considerable effect in the darkening court room even at the time, for a number of his fellow students from Trinity days who were in court wearing the king’s uniform went up and shook him by the hand afterwards, and the judge who sentenced him to be hanged, drawn and quartered, a notoriously callous man, is said to have been profoundly moved.20 But the effect of the speech at the time was as nothing compared with the force it was to have as, with increasingly romantic persistence, it echoed through the history of the next hundred years into our own time. Since it was as a legend that this speech took wings it seems unimportant that the exact text is probably not wholly accurate. Certainly Emmet’s words must have been close to the form in which they so popularly and effectively survived. He concluded:
I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world. It is the charity of its silence. Let no man write my epitaph; for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them rest in obscurity and peace, my memory be left in oblivion and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times and other men can do justice to my character. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then and not till then, let my epitaph be written.
There is said to have been a curious delay at the scaffold. Emmet, who was allowed by the hangman to give the signal for his own drop by letting go of a handkerchief, continually replied, ‘Not yet’ to the hangman’s repeated question: ‘Are you ready, sir?’ Finally, the hangman lost patience and tipped him into eternity in mid-sentence. The incident gave rise to some speculation as to whether or not Emmet was hoping for a last-minute rescue by some of Dwyer’s men from Wicklow. But no rescue could have achieved the dramatic effect of the execution itself. After hanging for half an hour his unconscious form was cut down and, in accordance with the judicial custom of the day, his head was cut off with a butcher’s knife. It was exhibited by the hangman who strode about the scaffold crying, ‘This is the head of Robert Emmet, a traitor’. Dogs were seen licking up the blood. Handkerchiefs were dipped in the blood and jealously prized and preserved. Metaphorical handkerchiefs were dipped in it for over a century.
A few years later Emmet’s old friend and fellow student at Trinity, the poet Tom Moore, wrote some lines which he included in his Irish Melodies without a title:
Oh! breathe not his name, let it sleep in the shade,
Where cold and unhonoured his relics are laid;
Sad, silent and dark be the tears that we shed,
As the night dew that falls on the grass o’er his head.
But the night dew that falls, though in silence it weeps,
Shall brighten with verdure the grave where he sleeps,
And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls,
Shall long keep his memory green in our souls.
Moore’s poem, picking up Emmet’s own last words from the dock, set the tone for the future of the legend.
The reason why exactly the Emmet débâcle should have become transformed into a myth of such powerful emotive force, and thus indirectly of political importance, is not immediately easy to see. His failure could hardly have been more ignominious and complete. It is true that the myth gained incidental colour from Emmet’s romantic attachment to Sarah Curran, the daughter of the prominent barrister John Philpot Curran. Letters compromising her in his treason were found on Emmet at the time of his arrest. She was disowned by her father and there is a story of her waiting down a street in a closed carriage and waving a last farewell to him as he proceeded to the scaffold. But what still needs explaining is why it should be such a romantic ethereal figure so much closer to the sentimental balladist’s heart than to practical politics who was to become Ireland’s noblest hero. Why was it Robert Emmet’s portrait above all others that was to go up along with the crucifix in countless small homes in Ireland for over a century and may even be seen there still?
The proximity of the crucifix may provide a clue. The success of the Emmet myth lay in the very need to ennoble failure. For tragic failure was to become part of Ireland’s identity, something almost indistinguishable from ‘the cause’ itself.**