Part 4

“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 With it was sent a long historical document, called _An Account of the late Plan of Insurrection in Dublin, and the Causes of its Failure_.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.