Chapter II: Part 2

Poor Sarah, thus rudely informed by events of her Robert’s arrest, in an hour of unprecedented torment, did not lack the tender consideration from the Chief Secretary and the Attorney-General, which her innocent misery deserved. Lord Hardwicke, too, directed that no action of any kind should be taken against her. But the stress of this last summer day was too much for her after the intense emotional life she had been bearing so long alone. In the breath of her love’s exposure and of her father’s anger head and heart seemed to break together, and for months to come she was to be wholly and most mercifully exempt from the “rack of this rough world.” On September 16, the Home Secretary was able to felicitate the Lord Lieutenant from Whitehall on his generous treatment of the implicated rebel at the Priory: “Your delicacy and management,” he says, “with regard to the Curran family is highly applauded. The King is particularly pleased with it. It is a sad affair. Mademoiselle seems a true pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft.” This, of course, amounts to the accusation that gentle little Sarah, with her sweet eyes and her “most harmonious voice,” was guilty of doing her own thinking, and of doing it, which was worst of all, upon political matters. It supplies us, at any rate, with evidence of the wide and deep grounds for Emmet’s true passion for the girl whose national ideals could so fearlessly keep pace with his own. Heart and brain, soul and body, she would have been his perfect mate. Her father’s harshness was the one element needed to perfect Sarah’s desolation. Her real life closed without conscious pain, and remained for a decent space buried. She never had to look in the face the day of Emmet’s death, the all-significant day “under her solemn fillet;” for that had tiptoed past her while her reason slept. The good sister Amelia, afterwards Shelley’s friend and portrait-painter in Italy, as soon as Sarah could be moved, took her away from the intolerable home, and left her with loving Quaker friends, the Penroses of Cork. During all the time of her affliction and illness at the Priory, Mr. Curran is said never to have looked upon his youngest daughter’s face; and from the hour of her leaving Dublin, presumably under an allowance made for her support, he seems neither ever to have sent her a message, nor to have thought of her again.

There are several historic instances of a like fatherliness in fathers, a century ago. Mr. Curran doubtless felt outraged in every fibre, and not more indignant at the independent conduct of his meek domestic vassal than at the astounding ignorance in which she had contrived to keep him. Yet there were powerful pleas for compassion in such a case inherent in his own history. In early manhood he himself had figured as collaborator in a similar headlong falling in love, a similar breach of parental discipline. John Philpot Curran had been for a short time tutor in the family of a fellow-Whig, Dr. Richard Creagh of Creagh Castle, near Spenser’s Doneraile, when with Miss Creagh, a young lady of beauty and of moderate fortune, he contracted a private marriage. The discovery brought on storms; but on further reflection Dr. Creagh saw fit to forgive the offenders, to receive them once more beneath his roof, and even to allow his daughter’s portion to be expended without stint on Mr. Curran, until he had completed his legal studies in London, and begun to establish his inevitable ascendancy at the Bar. The match, however, seems never to have been a happy one. Conjugal differences seldom lack their annotation. Without adopting the adjective missiles of either faction, let it suffice to say that they parted, in the summary fashion of which we are already aware. Mr. Curran had earned a right, he may have thought, to his opinion of women. The memory of his calamity may well have operated to make him both excessively exacting as to female behaviour and pitiless towards any supposed violation of it. In one touching story of domestic ruin, at least, he had a deplorable influence. Mr. W. J. Fitzpatrick, in his _Life, Times, and Contemporaries of Lord Cloncurry_, records that after the Lady Cloncurry’s trespass, her generous husband would have taken her back, “were it not for his well-beloved J——n P——t C——n, who urged him, in strong and persuasive language, to the contrary.” Moreover, an Irish father is as likely as not to cherish spacious ideas of his own governing prerogative, and refuse to be tied in the matter to “anything so temporal,” as Lowell says in another application, “as a responsibility.” Mr. Curran could have bespoken for his children other destinies if they had ever known freedom of the heart at home.

Again, his attitude towards Emmet may have seemed to him no exaggerated hatred, but the mere tribute of virtuous scorn. In that, however, he was self-deceived. To any publicist in Ireland with the seed of compromise in him, even if the compromise never amounted to the smallest sacrifice of actual principle, Robert Emmet’s straight career must have been like a buffet in the face. Naked logic was Emmet’s element, and the expedient his negligible quantity. Every agitation sincerely founded on a popular need breeds, in time, its extremists. They are the glory and the difficulty of all reform. It might have been said of Emmet, as at the outset of the Oxford Movement it was said of Hurrell Froude, that “the gentleman was not afraid of inferences.” Curran’s thoughts dwelt in no such simplified worlds. Like all the best Irishmen of his blazingly brilliant day, he was for Parliamentary Reform and Catholic Emancipation, and against the Union. It was even he who appeared to defend the revolutionists of 1798, who had obtained the writ of _habeas corpus_ for Wolfe Tone on the very morning set for his execution under court-martial (a reprieve frustrated by suicide), and who was the first to plead, though with vain eloquence, at the bar of attainder for the Fitzgerald heirs. But though his convictions seemed close enough to Emmet’s, there was wide variance in their bearing and momentum. Initial or generic differences take on an almost amatory complexion when contrasted with those springing from the final consideration in like minds. Both men vehemently desired the framing of fresh good laws, and the unhampered operation of existing good laws, for Ireland. To Curran, incorruptible as he was, England was an excellent general superintendent and referee to set over the concerns of other nations, including his own, provided that she could be got to abstain scrupulously from undue interference, and hold tenure under a more than nominal corporal withdrawal. Poor Emmet’s ideal of Irish independence was remote enough from this. He had read somewhere that his country used to be a proud kingdom, and not a petted province. Surely, Curran in his latter years, when he “sank” (the word is Cloncurry’s, and used of his friend) to office, could have no patience with a Separatist son-in-law. But the Master of the Rolls continued to be a great man, and Emmet at twenty-five ceased to be a fool.

The trial came off before Lord Norbury, Mr. Baron George, and Mr. Baron Daly on September 19, 1803, at the court-house in Green Street. It is an extraordinary circumstance that it lasted eleven hours in a crowded room, the prisoner standing for all that time in the dock without proper food or rest. Mr. Emmet firmly refused to call any witnesses, to allow any statement by his counsel, or to furnish any comment upon the evidence. Long afterwards, Mr. Peter Burrowes told Moore of the continual check put upon his own attempts to disconcert those who were giving testimony. “No, no,” Emmet would protest, “the man is speaking the truth.” The indictment was in part strengthened by the reading in court of passages of his own captured love-letters to Miss Curran. Thanks to the consideration of the Attorney-General the reading was brief and as non-committal as possible, Miss Curran’s name being of course suppressed. The Attorney-General (Mr. Standish O’Grady) showed, throughout the poor girl’s troubles, a most fatherly solicitude towards her, and pleaded for her with her own father, without appreciable results.

Emmet had other annoyances to bear. Mr. Conyngham Plunkett, as counsel for the Crown, took an unfair advantage of the silence of the counsels for the prisoner (Messrs. Ball, Burrowes, and M’Nally), and delivered at great length a very able oration, in which, _more Hibernico_, he had rather more to say of the Creator of men, and of His implicit support of the existing Government, than was strictly necessary; neither did he forget to recommend “sincere repentance of crime” to “the unfortunate young gentleman.” And when Emmet himself was invited to speak, and did so, or would have done so, to really magnificent purpose, he was causelessly and continually interrupted by the presiding judge, lectured on the virtues and the standing of his long-deceased elder brother, and on the abominable anomaly of “a gentleman by birth” associating with “the most profligate and abandoned ... hostlers, bakers, butchers, and such persons!” A sprig of lavender was handed him by some woman in the close court-room; it was snatched away as soon, on the groundless suspicion that it had been poisoned by one who would save the youth from his approaching fate. The jury, without leaving the box, brought in a verdict of guilty. It was to them a clear case. As the Earl of Hardwicke wrote to his brother, the Honourable Charles Yorke, “it was unanimously admitted that a more complete case of treason was never stated in a court of justice.” Of Emmet himself he adds conclusively: “He persisted in the opinions he had entertained, and the principles in which he had been educated.”

It was late in the evening when the Clerk of the Crown, following the usual form, ended: “Prisoner at the bar, what have you therefore now to say why judgment of death and execution should not be awarded against you according to law?” Emmet was weary, but had body and mind under triumphant control, and he filled the next half-hour with words which were overwhelming at the time, and will never fail to thrill the most casual reader who can discern in them the victory of the human spirit over the powers which crush it. It is an immortal appeal. The rich phrases, the graceful, quick gestures, were unprepared and born of the moment. We are told that Emmet walked about a little, or stood bending hither and thither, in his earnestness. “He seemed to have acquired a swaying motion, when he spoke in public, which was peculiar to him; but there was no affectation in it.” It was a habit which the young man shared with a great contemporary singularly free from mannerisms: the Grattan to whom he used to listen, spell-bound, in his early years. Emmet has been misreported in one important particular. He had a fine understanding of the uses of irony; but it is his praise that he was also scrupulously, persistently, and invincibly courteous. To know him is to know that sentences such as those figuring in some reports of his speech, about “that viper,” meaning (Mr. Plunkett), or “persons who would not disgrace themselves by shaking your (that is, Lord Norbury’s) blood-stained hand,” are, as attributed to him, all but impossible. The truth seems to be that his admirers, finding him unaccountably lacking in invective, and the vituperative power of the Gael, have amended, between them, this evidence of his undutiful shortcomings. It were a pity to summarise or paraphrase that living rhetoric, so fit in its place. We are disposed to forget nowadays that emotional speech is natural speech: its many and seemingly exuberant colours are but primal and legitimate, whereas it is our subdued daily chatter which is artificial. Emmet did not occupy himself with refuting the charge of having revolted against existing political conditions with “the scum of the Liberties behind him,” for he had a concern more intimate. It had been reported broadcast, and it had been taken for granted at the trial, that he had become an agent of France because he sought to deliver the country over to French rule. Hopeless, there and then, of being understood on the main issue, he was determined to make himself plain in this. He admitted that he had indeed laboured to establish a French alliance, but expressly under bond that aided Ireland, once freed, should be as completely independent of France as he would have her of England. He sought, as he said, such a guarantee as Franklin had secured for America. For the reassertion of his own position as a patriot, Emmet spent his last energies. Like some few other selfless reformers known to history, he had taken little pains to proclaim himself, and in consequence had been translated into terms of expected profit and personal ambition, in the generalising minds of bystanders. It was nothing to him to go to his untimely grave legally convicted of Utopianism, precipitation, madness, or even of monstrous wickedness; but why he had plunged into such folly, or such crime, or such pure passion for freedom, as the case might be, seemed to demand some explanation from the person best qualified to give it. To risk that his informing intent should be misread hereafter, was more than he could bear. And thus it came about that, reserved as he always was, humble as he always was, he blazed out at last, and feared not to base himself proudly on “my character.” The word recurs: its numerical strength is almost equal to that of the beloved other one, “my country.” This was clearly a tautologous egotist, this young belated Girondin, to those who knew him not. As he talked on, in his beautiful round tones, into the night, the dingy lamps begun to sputter as if tired of their unexpected vigil. “My lamp of life is nearly extinguished,” he said, looking sadly down. And then: “My race is run. The grave opens to receive me, and I sink into its bosom. I have but one request to make, 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 nor ignorance asperse them. Let them rest in obscurity and peace; let my memory remain in oblivion, and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times and other men can do justice to my character. When my country shall have taken her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.” There was perceptible emotion in every breast but his, when sentence of death by hanging and beheading was given at half-past ten o’clock, and ordered to take place next day.

Emmet’s strong slight frame had stood the long ordeal perfectly, and his mood had wings. He whispered cheerfully through the grating: “I shall be hanged to-morrow!” as he passed John Hickson’s cell on his way back to his own.

We know he read the Litany there; and he also indulged a turn for secular, and even profane employment. In fact, it pleased Mr. Robert Emmet to draw himself (he drew exquisitely) as a posthumous serial in two parts. Some one found and recognised the grim _R. E., head_, the disconcerted _R. E., body_, on separate scraps of paper: they lay on his little table, when all was over, witnesses to the detached humour possible to an easy conscience. His industry was great during the few remaining hours. He possessed a lock of his absent Sarah’s hair, which she may have given him years before: this he wished to wear in his dying hour. As he sat plaiting it minutely, and tenderly fastening it into the fold of his velvet stock, he was noticed and questioned. Fearing that the treasure might be taken from him, he said that his occupation was “an innocent one.” The only persons allowed to see him were the chaplains and M’Nally, the fine flower of infamy, happy in Government pay, who to the end played with success the part of the assiduous friend. It was he who brought to Emmet on his final morning the news, then ten days old, of his mother’s death. The son took it, as he took all his losses, with what Mr. W. H. Curran briefly calls his “unostentatious fortitude.” After an instant of silence he looked up and found his voice. “It is better so,” he answered quietly. Her delicate proud heart had broken at the menace hanging over her darling: that much he had divined at once. She had written, during that last year, that she was “a parent supremely blest” in the virtues and dispositions of her children.

Mr. M’Nally was intimate with Mr. Curran, for whom he had an affection as genuine as he was capable of feeling. It was like “Janus” Wainewright’s affection for Charles Lamb, and as exempt from the poison-cup otherwise dealt impartially to divers and sundry. It is possible, therefore, that Mr. M’Nally chose to acquaint his much-deceived client with the true state of Sarah’s health: a life-in-death which also was surely “better so.” But this is mere conjecture, as Emmet would never have inquired; rather than name his “nut-brown maid,” the truly “banished man” would still have endured all the inner turmoil of lonely love,

“—surges
Which wash both Heaven and Hell.”

No credit need be given to the tale that as Emmet went forth to his death through the Dublin streets, a young lady, believed to be Miss Curran, was seen in a carriage despairingly taking leave of him, and fluttering a handkerchief until he was out of sight, when she sank in a swoon. It is not the fashion of persons of deep feeling, save on the stage, to have recourse at solemn moments to fluttering handkerchiefs. If any young lady interested in Robert Emmet were abroad in a carriage on that autumn morning, it would be his only sister, Mrs. Holmes, fated to outlive him but one melancholy year. As for poor lovely Sarah, she had disappeared like an underground stream during his last weeks and days, ever since her letters were seized as spoils of war. Major Sirr is believed to have destroyed them all, in due course, not without a flow of tears! The sweet lady was indeed an object of pity; and Emmet, putting in never a stroke of conscious work, had a most unaccountable faculty for melting hearts. The reign of Sensibility was not over; able-bodied persons in 1803 were only beginning to be carried out of the pit, more dead than alive, when Mrs. Siddons played. But something in Emmet’s uncomplaining presence overcame stern men habituated to political offenders. The honest turnkey at Kilmainham fell fainting at his feet, only to hear the affectionately-proffered good-bye; and it was generally noticed that Lord Norbury, facing him, could with difficulty steady his voice, though he was popularly believed to revel in pronouncing capital sentence.

Emmet busied himself with letters in his cell. He slept and ate as usual; and his firm handwriting witnessed the unshaken soul within. Several of his last letters have been recovered; two or three have been published, in Mr. W. H. Curran’s _Life_ of his illustrious father, in Dr. Madden’s moving but chaotic _Memoirs of the United Irishmen_, and elsewhere. On the day set for his execution Robert Emmet wrote to his old friend Richard Curran:—

“MY DEAREST RICHARD: I find I have but a few hours to
live; but if it was the last moment, and the power of
utterance was leaving me, I would thank you from the
bottom of my heart for your generous expressions of
affection and forgiveness to me. If there was any one
in the world in whose breast my death might be supposed
not to stifle every spark of resentment, it might be
you. I have deeply injured you; I have injured the
happiness of a sister that you love, and who was formed
to give happiness to every one about her, instead
of having her own mind a prey to affliction. Oh,
Richard! I have no excuse to offer, but that I meant
the reverse: I intended as much happiness for Sarah
as the most ardent love could have given her. I never
did tell you how much I idolised her. It was not with
a wild or unfounded passion, but it was an attachment
increasing every hour, from an admiration of the purity
of her mind, and respect for her talents. I did dwell
in secret upon the prospect of our union; I did hope
that success, while it afforded the opportunity of our
union, might be a means of confirming an attachment
which misfortune had called forth. I did not look to
honours for myself; praise I would have asked from
the lips of no man: but I would have wished to read,
in the glow of Sarah’s countenance, that her husband
was respected. My love, Sarah! it was not thus that I
thought to have requited your affection. I did hope
to be a prop round which your affections might have
clung, and which would never have been shaken; but a
rude blast has snapped it, and they have fallen over
a grave. This is no time for affliction. I have had
public motives to sustain my mind, and I have not
suffered it to sink; but there have been moments in my
imprisonment when my mind was so sunk by grief on her
account that death would have been a refuge. God bless
you, my dearest Richard. I am obliged to leave off
immediately. ROBERT EMMET.”

This touching letter has been printed before, but the two which follow, long lost and newly found, have never been made public. The original letters seem to have disappeared. The contemporary copies figure in the Hardwicke or Wimpole collection, which has very recently been made accessible to readers by the issue of the current Catalogue of Additional Manuscripts at the British Museum. The shorter of them was intended by Emmet for Thomas Addis Emmet and his wife Jane Patten, his brother and sister-in-law. With it was sent a long historical document, called _An Account of the late Plan of Insurrection in Dublin, and the Causes of its Failure_. Hurriedly penned, in order to give the beloved relatives a unique and direct knowledge of all that the writer had meant and missed, it is a masterly detailed statement, as free from all traces of morbidity, or even of agitation, as if it had been drawn up “on happy mornings with a morning heart,” in the tents of victory. Thanks to the practised duplicity of Dr. Trevor, to whose care it was confided, Mr. Thomas Addis Emmet, then in Paris, never received it; he complained bitterly of its suppression, and was only towards the close of his life enabled to read it through the medium of the press. But neither he nor any of his American descendants, inclusive of the distinguished compiler of the quarto, privately printed in New York, entitled _The Emmet Family_, seems to have suspected the existence of the little personal note in which the _Account_ was enclosed. The official draft of it figures in Hard. MS. 35,742, f. 197:—

“MY DEAREST TOM AND JANE: I am just going to do my
last duty to my country. It can be done as well on the
scaffold as in the field. Do not give way to any weak
feelings on my account, but rather encourage proud ones
that I have possessed fortitude and tranquillity of
mind to the last.

“God bless you, and the young hopes that are growing
up about you. May they be more fortunate than their
uncle, but may they preserve as pure and ardent an
attachment to their country as he has done. Give
the watch to little Robert; he will not prize it
the less for having been in the possession of two
Roberts before him. I have one dying request to make
to you. I was attached to Sarah Curran, the youngest
daughter of your friend. I did hope to have had her
my companion for life; I did hope that she would not
only have constituted my happiness, but that her
heart and understanding would have made her one of
Jane’s dearest friends. I know that Jane would have
loved her on my account, and I feel also that, had
they been acquainted, she must have loved her for her
own. None knew of the attachment till now, nor is it
now generally known; therefore do not speak of it to
others. [I leave her][2] with her father and brother;
but if those protectors should fall off, and that no
other should replace them, [take][2] her as my wife,
and love her as a sister. Give my love to all friends.”

It is to be feared that “little Robert” (the eldest of the children, afterwards Judge Robert Emmet of New York) did not receive his legacy. According to what testimony can be gathered, the watch which Emmet carried to the last was either presented to the executioner, or passed over to him with some understanding which has not transpired. Poor Emmet’s seal, a beautiful design of his own for the United Irishmen, went safely into friendly keeping; but most of his personal belongings worn on the scaffold, including his high Hessian boots and the stock with the precious hair sewed inside the lining, were actually sold at auction in Grafton Street, Dublin, during December, 1832. In this letter to his brother and sister, how piercing is the “I did hope,” iterated to them as to Richard Curran! It reminds us what a network of beneficent will and forethought made up that intense nature, and how the perishing leaf was but in the green. When the Lord Lieutenant, in the course of his industrious correspondence with his brother, sent to him, as a literary curio, a copy of Robert Emmet’s letter (Robert himself being newly dead), in reference to it, he hastens to add this significant sentence: “The letter to his brother will not be forwarded; but the passage respecting Miss Sarah Curran has been communicated to her father.” The Chief Secretary and Lord Hardwicke were joint contrivers of what seems to us (from the point of view of the most helpless of the persons chiefly concerned) an unnecessary if not unfeeling move. And Mr. Curran promptly replied to the former, the Right Honourable William Wickham, on the morrow (Hard. MS. 35,703, f. 158):—

“_Sept. 21st, 1803._

“SIR: I have just received the honour of your letter,
with the extract enclosed by desire of His Excellency.
I have again to offer to His Excellency my more than
gratitude, the feelings of the strongest attachment
and respect for this new instance of considerate
condescension. To you also, sir, believe me, I am most
affectionately grateful for the part that you have been
so kind as [to] take upon this unhappy occasion; few
would, I am well aware, perhaps few could, have known
how to act in the same manner.

“As to the communication of the extract, and the motive
for doing so, I cannot answer them in the cold parade
of official acknowledgment; I feel on the subject the
warm and animated thanks of man to man, and these I
presume to request that Lord Hardwicke and Mr. Wickham
may be pleased to accept: it is, however, only justice
to myself to say, that even on the first falling of
this unexpected blow, I had resolved (and so mentioned
to Mr. Attorney-General), that if I found no actual
guilt upon her, I would act with as much moderation
as possible towards a poor creature that had once
held the warmest place in my heart. I did, even then,
recollect that there was a point to which nothing but
actual turpitude or the actual death of her parent
ought to make a child an orphan; but even had I thought
otherwise, I feel that this extract would have produced
the effect it was intended to have, and that I should
think so now. I feel how I should shrink from the idea
of letting her sink so low as to become the subject of
the testamentary order of a miscreant who could labour,
by so foul means and under such odious circumstances,
to connect her with his infamy, and to acquire any
posthumous interest in her person or her fate. Blotted,
therefore, as she may irretrievably be from my society,
or the place she once held in my affection, she must
not go adrift. So far, at least, ‘these protectors will
not fall off.’

“I should therefore, sir, wish for the suppression of
this extract, if no particular, motive should have
arisen for forwarding it to its destination. I shall
avail myself of your kind permission to wait upon you
in the course of the day, to pay my respects once more
personally to you, if I shall be so fortunate as to
find you at leisure. I have the honour to be, with very
great respect, your obliged servant, JOHN P. CURRAN.”

But it is time to return to our death-doomed “miscreant.” At half-past one, on the afternoon of September 30, the order was given to start. The scaffold had been built in Thomas Street, nearly opposite S. Catherine’s Church. He was dressed all in black, and maintained the serene and undemonstrative demeanour which was thought scandalously unbefitting by some spectators and some scribes. On the principle that the game was up, that “no hope can have no fear,” Robert Emmet became, not indifferent, but beautifully gay towards the end, as gay in irons as Raleigh or Sir Thomas More. He was quite sure that he had nothing to repent of, now that the account was cast and cancelled. Of course his care-free conduct was misconstrued: it passed officially for “effrontery and nonchalance,” and the single-minded Christian, never quite out of touch with the Church in which his holy mother had brought him up, was darkly given forth as an impenitent atheist. The ordinary attitude of the revolutionary late eighteenth-century mind was irreligious enough, but it was not Robert Emmet’s. One of his colleagues in the dream and the disaster, Thomas Russell, an elder figure in Emmet’s never-marshalled “army,” and a nobly interesting one, was extraordinarily pious: as pious as General Gordon. On the scaffold at Downpatrick (brought to that by his thwarted outbreak in the North), he recalled, for a memory well suited to encourage him, “my young hero, my great and dear friend, a martyr to the cause of his country and to liberty.” Russell’s hospitality of mind was not such that he could have made an exemplar of an infidel. But there is so much proof on this point, that the old charge may be laid aside in that limbo of all inaccuracies for which the invention of printing is responsible. The Englishman at the helm of affairs in Dublin, by no means (as we have seen) a wholly unsympathetic annalist, bequeaths us an account of Emmet’s final interview with the chaplains. It cannot escape the reader that two distinct issues were, in the minds of those worthy gentlemen, vaguely blended. No person in Mr. Robert Emmet’s situation, unless he repented of his politics, had any chance of being considered otherwise than unsound in his religion. Individualism, looked upon as the exact science it undoubtedly is, was not quite at its best in the self-righteous era of George the Third, and under the Establishment which was regulated by a now almost obsolete basilolatry.

“Mr. Gamble, the clergyman who attends the prisoners in Newgate, visited [Mr. Emmet] yesterday evening, and again this morning, in Kilmainham Prison, in company with the Reverend Mr. Grant, a clergyman who resides at Island Bridge. In the report which they have made to me of what passed in their communications with Mr. Emmet, they state that though their conversation did not produce all the good they had hoped, it had nevertheless the effect of bringing him to a more calm, and in some respects a better temper of mind, than they had reason to expect from a person professing the principles by which they supposed him to be directed. They repeatedly urged to him those topics which were likely to bring him to a better feeling, and acknowledgment of the crime for which he was to suffer, but were not successful in persuading him to abjure those principles by which he was actuated in his conspiracy to overthrow the Government. He disclaimed any intention of shedding blood; professed a total ignorance of the murder of Lord Kilwarden, before which, he declares, he had left Dublin; and also professed an aversion to the French. He declared that though persons professing his principles, and acting in the cause in which he had been concerned, were generally supposed to be Deists, that he was a Christian in the true sense of the word; that he had received the Sacrament, though not regularly and habitually, and that he wished to receive it then; that what he felt, he felt sincerely, and would avow his principles in his last moments; that he was conscious of sins, and wished to receive the Sacrament. The clergymen consented to join in prayer with him, and administered the Sacrament to him, considering him as a visionary enthusiast, and wishing him to bring his mind to a proper temper and sense of religion.

“On their way to the place of execution they conversed with him upon the same topics, but could never persuade him to admit that he had been in the wrong. In answer to their question whether, if he had foreseen the blood that had been spilt in consequence of his attempt, he would have persisted in his design to overthrow the Government, he observed that no one went to battle without being prepared for similar events, always considering his attempt as free from moral reproach in consequence of what he conceived to be the goodness of the motive that produced it. At the place of execution he was desirous of addressing the people. He intended to have declared that he had never taken any oath but that of the United Irishmen, and by that oath he meant to abide. The clergymen who were present explained to him that an address to that effect might possibly produce tumult and bloodshed, and that it ought not to be permitted. He was therefore obliged to acquiesce, and did so without appearing to be disturbed or agitated.” (Hard. MS. 35,742, ff. 191 _et seq._)

What Robert Emmet did say to the people, a sentence seemingly of puzzling platitude, was, in him, one of profound truth: “My friends, I die in peace, and with sentiments of love and kindness to all men.” There is another and more animated contemporary account of his exit in _The Life and Times of Henry Grattan_. The whole passage may as well be quoted:—

“Robert Emmet [was] devoid of caution, foresight, and prudence: ardent, spirited, and impetuous. ... He was an enthusiast, he was a visionary. Without a treasury, without officers, without troops, he declared war against England and France, and prepared to oppose both!—the one, if she sought to retain possession of Ireland, and the other, if she attempted to invade it. With a few followers, he rose to take the Castle of Dublin and defeat a disciplined garrison. He put on a green coat and a cocked hat, and fancied himself already a conqueror. If no lives had been lost he probably would not have suffered, although Lord Norbury was the judge who tried him.... When asked the usual question why sentence should not be passed on him, he exclaimed: ‘Sentence of death may be pronounced: I have nothing to say. But sentence of infamy shall not be pronounced: I have everything to say.’ He was as cool and collected before his death as if nothing was to happen. Peter Burrowes saw him on his way, and related a circumstance that occurred as he was going to execution. He had a paper that he wished to be brought to Miss Curran, to whom he was strongly attached: he watched his opportunity, and in passing one of the streets, he caught a friendly eye in the crowd, and making a sign to the person, got him near; then he dropped a paper. This was observed by others, and the person who took it up was stopped: the paper was taken from him and brought to the Castle. Mr. Burrowes and Charles Bushe saw it, and said it was a very affecting and interesting letter.”

And so to poor Emmet, Fate, in her most diabolical mood, had for the last time played the postman. He shook hands with the masked executioner, removed his own stock, and helped to adjust both the cap and the noose. The correspondent of the _London Daily Chronicle_, after a fervent “God forbid that I should see many persons with Emmet’s principles!” adds in unwilling tribute—and those were the days when a hanging was a favourite spectacle with persons of elegant leisure—“As it was, I never saw one die like him.” When all was over, and the head, with every feature composed and pale as in life, had been held up with the formula proper to traitors, that and the body were brought back to the gaol, and shortly after buried in the common ground, Bully’s Acre, none of Emmet’s few living kindred appearing then to claim it. His parents were not long dead; his only brother was in exile; his sister was a delicate woman, probably crushed by her latest grief, and her husband, Mr. Robert Holmes, a most serviceable friend, was in prison; John Patten, Thomas Addis Emmet’s brother-in-law, was far away; St. John Mason, a cousin of the Emmets, and one heart and soul with them in all that pertained to the wished-for welfare of Ireland, was, like Mr. Holmes, and for the same reason, the tenant of a cell. Others, more remotely connected by affection with Robert Emmet, might have come forward in time had any one realised the blight, the paralysis, which events had imposed simultaneously on the entire family. It seems pretty conclusive from a valuable pamphlet just published by Mr. David A. Quaid (though the facts are not yet verified), that Robert Emmet was laid to rest in his father’s vault in the churchyard of St. Peter, Aungier Street. There one may leave that sentinel dust until the day of conciser habit than his own shall carve the good word above it which he foreknew.

Sarah Curran’s quiet annals are ungathered by any one hand, but the main outlines are henceforth discernible, and some celebrated writers have found them of interest. Washington Irving, in _The Broken Heart_, has given her an exquisite immortality; and the pathetic central incident of his narration is also the inspiration of Moore’s haunting song: _She is far from the land_. It was not, however, at the Rotunda in Dublin, but in a festal room in the friendly house where, after the death of her betrothed, she lived on in a dispirited convalescence, that she wandered away from the company, and sitting alone on the stair, began singing softly a plaintive air, “housed in a dream, at distance from the kind.” This happened at Woodhill, in Cork. Her voice seems to have been singularly beautiful: there was a general development of musical genius in her father’s family. The incident was reported at firsthand to Irving, as to Moore. To those who knew her story, the little forgetful act was poignant enough: for she was singing to the dead. In her sorrow, her deprivations, her entire withdrawal from the world, Miss Curran was blest with tender friends and champions. The poet just named, who was one of Robert Emmet’s early comrades, knew how admiration followed her like her shadow.

“And lovers are round her, sighing:
But coldly she turns from their gaze, and weeps,
For her heart in his grave is lying.”

Among those who looked with infinite sympathy and respect on the gentle girl moving like a soulless phantom in an unreal world, was a very young Englishman, barely her senior, a newly commissioned captain of Royal Engineers, a lineal descendant of Strafford, and full of Strafford’s strong singleness of heart. Henry Robert Sturgeon was third son of William Sturgeon, Esquire, and the Lady Henrietta Alicia Watson-Wentworth; grandson of the first, and nephew of the second Marquis of Rockingham. He conceived for Sarah Curran an instinctive affection, ardent and profound, and free from stain of self as Emmet’s own. It was as if Emmet, absented for ever, had breathed himself into another for the comfort and protection of the well-beloved. But the well-beloved would not be comforted nor protected: not though she knew, as she knew perfectly, both what her suitor’s worth was, and what were his fortune and standing in the great world; not though every member of the Penrose family, devoted to him, encouraged his hope; not though all of them, of their own accord, interceded with their ward and guest. In the _Literary Souvenir_ for 1831, there is an agreeable paper of fifteen pages entitled _Some Passages in the History of Sarah Curran_, signed “M.” It has been conjectured that the writer was one of the Crawfords of Lismore, who had been very kind to Sarah when her mother’s flight broke up the Curran household. Whoever “M.” was, her devotion to her friend, of whose character and mental qualities she had the highest opinion, is conspicuous, and one may glean much information from what she has to tell us. Captain Sturgeon, she says in the slightly stilted Georgian phrases, was everything which is good. “Had not her heart been seared by early grief and disappointment, he could not have failed to have experienced the most flattering reception.” Sarah herself was entirely open with him: one would expect no less of her nobly sweet nature. “She pleaded his own cause for him by proving how little he deserved a divided affection;” but “the constancy and tenderness of her attachment to Emmet seem only to have rendered her the more interesting.” Two difficult years and more went by for Henry Sturgeon. He never wavered in his purpose: much as society sought after him, there was but one woman in the world to that patient and dedicated lover. Time was on their side. Sarah was gaining some measure of content and also of health, although she never definitely rallied from the heartbreak of 1803. It touched her at last that as she was, as she had told him so often that she was, with no life to live and nothing to give him, he prayed her still to become his wife, to lend him the one ultimate privilege of humblest service, from which otherwise he would be debarred. Some expectation of leaving the south of Ireland, or the actual arrival of orders from headquarters, seems to have lent a sudden heightened earnestness to his addresses; and Sarah, being pressed, gave her sad consent. They were married at Glanmire Church, near Woodhill, in the February of 1806.

A dismal wedding it must have been! “M.” was told by one of the bridesmaids, long after, of the melancholy drive in the closed carriage, with the bride in tears. For a time Captain Sturgeon’s affairs kept him in England; then he was transported, with his regiment, to Malta and Sicily. The first journey, fully a half-year after the marriage, must have taken him and his wife through the capital, the Dublin of all racking memories, for we hear of Mrs. Sturgeon visiting Mr. James Petrie’s studio there. From the sketches he had made of Robert Emmet in the court-room, and from the mask in his possession, he had painted a portrait unhappily not wholly successful. But we know what peculiar interest belongs to a portrait, when there is, and can be, but one; and no person, surely, in all the world, can have longed to scan this one with the longing of Sarah Sturgeon. Dr. William Stokes, the biographer of George Petrie, says that George, then the artist’s little son, happened to be alone, playing in his father’s studio, when a veiled lady entered and went over to the easel. He never forgot her nor the moment. “She lifted her veil, and stood long in unbroken silence, gazing at the face before her; then suddenly turning, moved with an unsteady step to another corner of the room, and bending forwards, pressed her head against the wall, heaving deep sobs, her whole form shaken with a storm of passionate grief. How long that agony lasted the boy could not tell; it appeared to him to be an hour. Then with a supreme effort she controlled herself, pulled down her veil, and quickly and silently left the room. Years after, the boy learned from his father that this was Sarah Curran, who had come by appointment to see her dead lover’s portrait, on the understanding that she should meet no one of the family.”

Captain Sturgeon was glad of the duty which turned his face southwards, as he could not but believe that the softer climate would help his frail Sarah. It is curious that Moore, in making her the unconscious heroine of his lovely lyric, should have placed the scene of her abstracted singing “the wild song of her dear native plains,” and of her abstracted turning from “lovers around her sighing,” in Italy! quite as if Captain Sturgeon, “curteis and mylde, and the most soofering man that ever I met withal,” had no existence. The poet, in all probability, heard late of the incident, and thus did not assign it to Woodhill. Only too accurate was one foreboding stanza:

“Nor soon will the tear of his country be dried,
Nor long will his love stay behind him.”

But before 1808 set in, Sarah’s strength seemed to be establishing itself in the kindly foreign air; in that and in her growing happiness her husband began to reap the moral reward he had so hardly won. Abruptly, and not without alarm, the English in Sicily were driven homewards by the descent of the French on those shores. Captain and Mrs. Sturgeon hurried aboard a crowded transport bound for Portsmouth. The poor lady had great excitement and considerable hardship to undergo, and in the course of that most luckless voyage was prematurely born her only child. The deep-seated sadness of her soul, as if unjustly alienated from her, returned in all its fulness after his death. She settled with her husband at Hythe in Kent, and there she made haste to die. The laburnums were coming into blossom when she entered upon her eternity, six-and-twenty years old. She had a meek request to make of her father, who was oftentimes as near to her new home as London: it was that she might be buried in a garden grave at the Priory, where the sister who died in childhood had been laid. One need have no very romantic imagination to guess that the remote green spot bordering the lawn (a natural trysting-place screened by great trees that grow near the little grave), was dear to her also for another’s sake, for some old association with him who loved her in his hunted youth. For his own reasons, Mr. Curran, approached on the subject, saw fit to refuse. During the first week of May, 1808, Sir Charles Napier thus wrote his mother: “I rode over to Hythe this morning to see poor Sturgeon, who has lost his little wife at last, the betrothed of Emmet. Young Curran is here: his sister was gone before his arrival. They are going to take the body to Ireland.” It was Richard Curran, faithful in every human relationship, who went on to his brother-in-law. The bereaved two brought Sarah home to her own country, to the tomb in Newmarket of the grandmother of whom she had been fond, and for whom she was named: Sarah Philpot. The headstone was prepared, and seen by some local antiquary, and remembered; but it disappeared before it was placed. Emmet’s love sleeps, like Emmet, without an epitaph.

The letter which Richard Curran wrote to “M.” about his dead sister was printed by her twenty-three years after. In it was enclosed a fragment of Sarah’s own:—

“RADISH’S HOTEL, ST. JAMES’S STREET,
“LONDON, _May 8, 1808_.

“MY DEAR MADAM: I know how heartily you’ll participate
in the feelings with which I announce to you the
death of your poor friend, my lamented Sarah. I would
willingly spare myself this distressing office; but
I cannot expose one whom she so loved to the risk of
stumbling inadvertently in a public paper on a piece
of intelligence so affecting.... I wish also to convey
to you a testimony that her thoughts never strayed from
you, and that to the hour of her death you were the
object of her affection. The enclosed unfinished letter
is the last she ever wrote. In it you will find a very
mitigated statement of her sufferings. I can anticipate
the satisfaction you will derive from the strong sense
of religious impressions which marks her letters; and
I at the same time congratulate and thank you for
having cultivated in her the seeds of that consoling
confidence which cheered her departing moments, and
stripped death, if not of its anguish, yet of its
greatest horrors. The hopes held out by her physicians
were, alas! more humane than well-grounded: she expired
at half-past five, on the morning of the 5th inst.,
of a rapid decline. To describe my sorrow would be
but to write her eulogy. You know all the various
qualities with which she was so eminently gifted, and
the consequent pangs I must feel at so abrupt and
calamitous a dispensation. I am now on my way, with her
afflicted widower, accompanying her remains, which she
wished to lie in her native land. I enclose you a lock
of her hair; it was cut off after her death. Adieu,
my dear madam. I make no apology for this melancholy
intrusion, and I beg to assure you that one in whose
acquirements and disposition she found so much that was
kindred to her own, can never cease to be an object of
most respectful esteem and attachment to a brother that
loved her as I did.—I remain, your obliged friend and
humble servant, RICHARD CURRAN.”

_To_ MRS. HENRY W——.

[_Enclosure._]

“MY DEAR M——: I suppose you do not know of my arrival
from Sicily, or I should have heard from you. I must
be very brief in my detail of the events which have
proved so fatal to me, and which followed our departure
from that country. A most dreadful and perilous
passage occasioning me many frights, I was, on our
entrance into the Channel, prematurely delivered of a
boy, without any assistance save that of one of the
soldiers’ wives, the only woman on board except myself.
The storm being so high that no boat could stand out
at sea, I was in imminent danger till twelve next
day, when at the risk of his life a physician came
on board from one of the other ships, and relieved
me. The storm continued, and I got a brain fever,
which, however, passed off. To be short: on landing
at Portsmouth, the precious creature for whom I had
suffered so much God took to Himself. The inexpressible
anguish I felt at this event, preying on me, has
occasioned the decay of my health. For the last month
the contest between life and death has seemed doubtful;
but this day, having called in a very clever man here,
he seems not to think me in danger. My disorder is a
total derangement of the nervous system, and its most
dreadful effects I find in the attack on my mind and
spirits. I suffer misery you cannot conceive. I am
often seized with icy perspirations, trembling, and
that indescribable horror which you must know, if you
have ever had the fever. Write instantly to me. Alas,
I want everything to soothe my mind. O my friend!
would to Heaven you were with me: nothing so much as
the presence of a dear female friend would tend to my
recovery. But in England you know how I am situated:
not one I know intimately. To make up for this, my
beloved husband is everything to me. His conduct,
throughout all my troubles, surpasses all praise.
Write to me, dear M——, and tell me how to bear all
these things. I have, truly speaking, cast all my
care on the Lord; but ah, how our weak natures fail;
every day, every hour, I may say. On board the ship,
when all seemed adverse to hope, it is strange how an
overstrained trust in certain words of our Saviour gave
me such perfect faith in His help, that although my
baby was visibly pining away, I never doubted his life
for a moment. ‘He who gathers the lambs in His arms,’
I thought, would look down on mine, if I had faith in
Him. This has often troubled me since——”