Part 5

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——”

Richard Curran, who took pains to send that broken letter to a woman who valued it above fine gold, was always a good brother. Concerning his dear Sarah he had to be reticent, too, in reticent company. A lady who knew W. Henry Curran long and well, heard him mention his youngest sister only once. They were searching for something in a garret, when an exquisite picture standing laced with cobwebs, the picture of a girl about eighteen, caught her eye. “My sister Sarah, by Romney,” Henry said shortly, seeing that he had to say something. “Family pride had been deeply hurt by the publicity attached to poor Sarah’s unfortunate love-episode.” The Romney, sold by auction when Henry Curran died, is now the property of the Hon. Gerald Ponsonby; it has been beautifully engraved for Miss Frances A. Gerard’s _Some Fair Hibernians_, 1897. The delicately powdered hair, the low frilled dress with the line of black velvet about the neck, the gracious shoulders, the purely Irish mouth and eyes, half-scornful of life, half-resigned to it, which never knew illusion, and can never know abiding joy—-these are most tenderly painted, and remain among the things one does not forget. The last word of this haunting personality shall be loyal “M.’s”:—

“In person Mrs. Sturgeon was about the ordinary size, her hair and eyes black. Her complexion was fairer than is usual with black hair, and was a little freckled. Her eyes were large, soft, and brilliant, and capable of the greatest variety of expression. Her aspect in general indicated reflection, and pensive abstraction from the scene around her. Her wit was keen and playful, but chastised [_sic_]; although no one had a quicker perception of humour or ridicule. Her musical talents were of the first order: she sang with exquisite taste. I think I never heard so harmonious a voice.”

As for Captain Henry Sturgeon, he only betook himself anew to his post. His more active military career was now to begin. Throughout the Peninsular War he served as Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel, and later as Colonel of South Guides on the Duke of Wellington’s staff; and Wellington’s despatches ring again and again with his commended name. Riding across a vineyard during the fight near Vie Begorre, on a March morning of 1814, in the sixth year of his widowerhood, and the thirty-second of his age, he was shot dead in the saddle. He never had his dues in a profession where official recognition was then not stinted; and perhaps he cared little that it was so. _The Dictionary of National Biography_, which does not mention his all-significant marriage, yet quotes from _The War in the Peninsula_ what is said of Henry Sturgeon: “Skilled to excellence in almost every branch of war, and possessing a variety of accomplishments, he used his gifts so gently for himself and so usefully for the service that envy offered no bar to admiration, and the whole army felt painfully mortified that his merits were passed unnoticed.” This is one comrade’s glowing praise of another. Has it gone unguessed, the cause of the neglect at home of one of the most brilliant and devoted officers of his generation? Can the cause be hidden from those who have scrutinised the Government of that day, with its spites, its partisanships, its incapacity for distant outlooks, its severance from ideals? This Englishman, whatever his eminence of courage and skill might be, had been the husband of Emmet’s sweetheart; and Emmet was an Irish rebel and felon. The young soldier had probably weighed well what he was inheriting, before his marriage, and found all that endurable enough, until he died. In a world where earthly accidents wither away at a breath, and men of like temper see each other as they are, Henry Sturgeon must have smiled from the blood-wet Spanish grass straight into Robert Emmet’s eyes.

One likes the unexpected epilogue, as one likes the mournful play. It is all satisfactory: “nothing but well and fair, and what may quiet us,” in the odd pattern of the plot. Emmet lives in it, and outlives. It is the compensation of a lot cast in a planet where even our own honourable action has a trick of turning hostile and smearing us, that there is something in the best of us which cannot be smeared. Robert Emmet’s large soul has, like a magician, pieced together his broken body, the symbol of his broken, mistimed, and because mistimed, unhallowed effort. But only his own soul has done it, and by a power within, shaking herself clear of censure. Mr. Henry Curran devotes to him a reticent paragraph obliquely affectionate. “He met his fate with unostentatious fortitude; and although few could ever think of justifying his projects or regretting their failure, yet his youth, his talents, the great respectability of his connections, and the evident delusion of which he was the victim, have excited more general sympathy for his unfortunate end, and more forbearance towards his memory, than are usually extended to the errors or sufferings of political offenders.” At the end of a hundred years, the feelings which may temperately be described as sympathy and forbearance do survive, ranged on the side of this political offender; but is it to be thought for a moment that five-and-twenty years of life, intellectuality, social standing, above all the capacity for being fooled (adorable as that may sometimes be), are alone able to commend any man to the remembrance of posterity? No: to dominate a moral distance there must be moral height. Emmet was magnanimous. The word was nobly applied to him by Lord Hardwicke, the head of the Government which hanged and beheaded him. Now to be magnanimous is not to possess a definite grace or virtue: magnanimity, like a sense of humour, is a spirit, a solvent merely; to exercise it in any one emergency is to show greatness equal to all. Robert Emmet said that he had received, immediately on his return from France, official invitations from conspirators in high quarters at home: the “first men in the land” were those who “invited him over.” Of his truthfulness there was but one opinion. Said Curran, who loved him little: “I would have believed the word of Emmet as soon as the oath of any other man I ever knew.” The Attorney-General at the trial referred to the prisoner as “a gentleman to whom the rebellion may be traced, as the origin, life, and soul of it.” This was Emmet’s reply, when, after nightfall, his turn came to speak: “My lords, let me here observe that I am not the head and lifeblood of this rebellion. When I came to Ireland I found the business ripe for execution: I was asked to join in it.” And again: “I have been charged with that importance in the efforts to emancipate my country as to be considered the keystone of the combination of Irishmen, or, as it has been expressed, the life and soul of this conspiracy. You do me honour overmuch. You have given to the subaltern all the credit of the superior.” He turned half-smiling to the presiding judge. “There are men concerned in this conspiracy who are not only superior to me, but even to your own conception of yourself, my lord.” At the final moment of his life Emmet stood motionless with a handkerchief in his hand, the fall of which was to be the signal for the cart to be drawn away. To the usual “Are you ready, sir?” he twice answered “No.” As it was, another and obeyed signal was impatiently given before he had dropped the handkerchief. Why did he hesitate? Was he perhaps expecting these concealed associates, his leaders and long-silent abettors, to reprieve or rescue him? So romantic a fancy, implying so much belief in human generosity, was only too natural to Robert Emmet. Many thinking heads, even under coronets, had been hot for reform in that unfavourable hour; there were many who desired the removal of religious disabilities, popular representation in Parliament, death to the vile system of local laws under which one witness, and only one witness, was sufficient to convict a man of high treason. Reform being disallowed, they declared themselves eloquently as ready to be driven to armed resistance against England: that is, towards total divorce and reconstruction. To poor Emmet alone, the thing so unavoidable which was good enough to long for and to talk about, was the thing good enough to do. The “first in the land” kept their heads; and in death as in life he kept their secret. There is a great unwritten chapter of perfidy behind his lonely ineffectual blow struck for national freedom. Anyone who has studied well these events of 1803, and weighed well the astonishing confidential information about the historical papers at Dublin Castle, which was given not long ago to Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet, of New York, by Sir Bernard Burke, and incorporated in _The Emmet Family_, can hardly doubt that revelations on that subject are yet to come which will lengthen the story of Mr. Pitt, Lord Castlereagh, Mr. Under-Secretary Marsden, and their dealings with Ireland. And English gold and English terrorism had too truly won their way at last with Emmet’s humble colleagues at home.

There are minor instances of Emmet’s magnanimity no less striking in their way. “We are all Protestants!” he said in a delighted and congratulatory spirit to Russell, implicated with him; he could not forget how much more heavily suspicion would bear upon those others yet shackled by the penal laws. To this beautiful inborn openness of mind was due his allusion before Lord Norbury (a judge as well-hated as Jeffreys, and for much the same reasons), to “that tyranny of which you are only the intermediate minister.” From his cell, within a few hours of the end, he sent a manly letter of thanks to the Chief Secretary, in which he addresses him thus:—

“SIR: Had I been permitted to proceed with my vindication, it was my intention not only to have acknowledged the delicacy with which (I feel with gratitude) I have been personally treated, but also to have done the most public justice to the mildness of the present Administration in this country; and at the same time to have acquitted them, as far as rested with me, of any charge of remissness in not having previously detected a conspiracy, which, from its closeness, I know it was impossible to have done. I confess that I should have preferred this mode if it had been permitted, as it would thereby have enabled me to clear myself from an imputation under which I might in consequence lie, and to have stated why such an Administration did not prevent, but (under the peculiar situation of this country) perhaps rather accelerated my determination to make some effort for the overthrow of a Government of which I do not think equally highly. However, as I have been deprived of that opportunity, I think it right now to make an acknowledgment which justice requires from me as a man, and which I do not feel to be in the least derogatory from my decided principles as an Irishman.—I have the honour to be, sir, with the greatest respect, your most obedient humble servant,

“ROBT. EMMET.”

(Hard. MS. 35,742, f. 196.)

The Lord Lieutenant makes a comment on this, in that letter to his brother, the Home Secretary, from which much has already been cited:—

“I enclose copies of two letters which he wrote this morning [September 20, 1803]. One of the acts of kindness to which he particularly refers, in his letter to Mr. Wickham, was his being removed from the cell at Newgate, in which he had been placed after the sentence, to his former apartment at Kilmainham, as had been originally intended. He had alluded to this in his conversation with the clergymen, and admitted that the general conduct of those who administered the Government was likely to conciliate the people, though he did not approve the form of the Government and the British connection, both of which he had been desirous to overthrow.”

In regard to this forwarded letter, the Home Secretary utters his congratulatory mind, and gives his opinion of our hero:—

“At the same time that one cannot but deplore the wicked malignity and wonder at the enthusiastic wildness which appears to have actuated the conduct of this miserable man, one cannot but admire the judgment, the temper, and delicacy which appear to have been manifested in the conduct of your Excellency’s Government towards this person, and all concerned or in any manner connected with him. I cannot but take advantage of this occasion to express the satisfaction I feel in observing that the justice, moderation, and mildness of your Excellency’s Government have extorted even from a condemned traitor the same sentiments of respect and reverence which we have been accustomed to hear from the loyal part of the community.”

It does not seem to have been revealed to the Hon. Charles Yorke, that what “extorted” Emmet’s assurances was his own extreme, almost fantastic, chivalry; and that those assurances set off deeply by contrast, as he vehemently meant they should do, his abhorrence of the underlying system of which Lord Hardwicke’s conduct was merely the agreeable accident. Lord Hardwicke, at least, had understood.

Even one intelligent modern has fallen foul of Emmet’s unusually scrupulous care in such matters, and of his attitude of regal courtesy, like that of the battling foes on Crécy field: such a care and such an attitude indicate, it is thought, “weakness of character!” What it really indicates is a diplomacy so high that if generally practised it might render human intercourse very difficult. We cannot all be as Apollo Musagetes, daring to employ nothing but the amenities, the major force, in a universe inured to cheap thunderbolts. As Thoreau shrewdly says: “The gods can never afford to have a man in the world who is privy to any of their secrets. They cannot have a spy here: they will at once send him packing!”