Robert Emmet: A Survey of His Rebellion and of His Romance

THE four who lived to grow up of the seventeen children born to Robert Emmet, M.D., of Cork, later of Dublin, and Elizabeth Mason, his wife, were all, in their way, persons of genius. The Emmets were of Anglo-Norman stock, Protestants, settled for centuries in Ireland. The Masons, of like English origin, had merged it in repeated alliances with women of Kerry, where the Dane, the Norman, and later invaders from nearer quarters had never settled down to perturb the ancient Celtic social stream. Dr. Emmet was a man of clear brain and incorruptible honour. The mother of his children, to judge by her letters, many of which have been privately printed, must have been an exquisite being, high-minded, religious, loving, humorous, wise. Her eldest surviving son, Christopher Temple Emmet, was named for his two paternal grandparents, Christopher Emmet of Tipperary and Rebecca Temple, great-great-granddaughter of the first Baronet Temple of Stowe, in Buckinghamshire. The mention of that prolific, wide-branching, and extraordinary family of Temple as forebears of the younger Emmets is like a sharply accented note in a musical measure. It has never been played for what it is worth; no annalist has tracked certain Emmet qualities to this perfectly obvious ancestral source. The Temples had not only, in this case, the bygone responsibility to bear, for in a marked manner they kept on influencing their Emmet contemporaries, as in one continuous mood thought engenders thought. Says Mr. James Hannay: “The distinctive ηθος of the Temples has been a union of more than usual of the kind of talent which makes men of letters, with more than usual of the kind of talent which makes men of affairs.” The Emmets, too, shared the “distinctive ηθος” in the highest degree. Added to the restless two-winged intelligence, they had the heightened soberness, the moral elevation, which formed no separate inheritance. The Temples were, and are, a race of subtle but somewhat austere imagination, strongly inclined to republicanism, and to that individualism which is the norm of it. The Temple influence in eighteenth-century Ireland was, obliquely, the American influence: a new and heady draught at that time, a “draught of intellectual day.” If we seek for those unseen agencies which are so much more operative than mere descent, we cover a good deal of ground in remembering that Robert Emmet the patriot came of the same blood as Sidney’s friend, Cromwell’s chaplain, and Dorothy Osborne’s leal and philosophic husband. And he shared not only the Temple idiosyncrasy, but, unlike his remarkable brothers, the thin, dark, aquiline Temple face.

Rebecca Temple, only daughter of Thomas, a baronet’s son, married Christopher Emmet in 1727, brought the dynastic names, Robert and Thomas, into the Emmet family, and lived in the house of her son, the Dublin physician, until her death in 1774, when her grandchildren, Temple and Thomas Addis, were aged thirteen and ten, Robert being yet unborn. Her protracted life and genial character would have strengthened the relations, always close, with the Temple kin. Her brother Robert had gone in his youth from Ireland to Boston, where his father was long resident; and there he married a Temple cousin. This Captain Robert Temple died on April 13, 1754, “at his seat, Ten Hills, at Boston, in New England.” His three sons, the eldest of whom, succeeding his great-grandfather, became afterwards Sir John Temple, eighth Baronet of Stowe, all settled in New England and married daughters of the Bowdoin, Shirley, and Whipple families—good wives and clever women. John Temple had been “a thorough Whig all through the Revolution,” and had suffered magnanimously for it. He had to forfeit office, vogue, and money; and little anticipating his then most improbable chances of a rise in the world, he forfeited all these with dogged cheerfulness, in the hour when he could least afford to do so. The latter-day Winthrops of the Republic are directly descended from him, and the late Marquis of Dufferin and Ava from his brother. A certain victorious free spirit, an intellectual fire, whimsical and masterful, has touched the whole race of untamable Temples, and the Emmets, the very flower of that race. Love of liberty was, in both Robert Emmet and in Thomas Addis Emmet, no isolated phenomenon, but their strengthened and applied inheritance. Captain Robert Temple’s second son, Robert, came back with his wife, Harriet Shirley, after the Declaration of Independence, to Allentown, Co. Dublin. His widow eventually received indemnification for the loss of their transatlantic estates. It is thus proved that Robert Temple was a loyalist to some appreciable degree. Earlier and later, however, he did considerable thinking, cherished liberal principles, and had much to say of the rights of man and other large theses to his namesake first cousin, Robert Emmet, M.D., with whom he lived for eighteen months after his return. This community of ideas was further cemented by the marriage of Anne Western Temple, Robert Temple’s daughter, to Dr. Emmet’s eldest son, Temple Emmet. Dr. Emmet was faithful to the unpopular convictions which he found himself sharing in increased degree with his cousin. Up to 1783 he was always voluntarily abandoning one position of eminence after another, as he came to dissent from English rule in Ireland. He held among other offices that of State Physician; and from a bland condemnatory notice of his youngest son in The Gentleman’s Magazine for October 1803, we learn that he was also physician to the Lord-Lieutenant’s household. It is clear, then, that he also began his career as a trusted Conservative. But as his opinions changed, he gave up, Temple-like and Emmet-like, every position and emolument inconsistent with them; when the ’98 broke out he had even ceased to practise his profession. He and his wife and their children felt alike in these matters so adversely and intimately affecting their chances of worldly success. The boys and the girl were brought up to think first of Ireland and her needs. An amicable satirist and distinguished acquaintance was wont facetiously to report Dr. Emmet’s administration of what the visitor named “the morning draught” to his little ones: “Well, Temple, what are you ready to do for your country? Would you kill your sister? Would you kill me?” For after this perilous early Roman pattern the catechism ran. Even if only a beloved joke, it would have been enough to seal the young Emmets for fanaticism, had not their good angels intervened. As it turned out, they were all of a singularly judicial cast. The only daughter, Mary Anne, had what used to be called, by way of adequate eulogy, a “masculine understanding,” and wrote pertinently and well. Her husband was the celebrated barrister and devoted Irishman, Robert Holmes. He was the true friend and adviser of the whole Emmet family, and survived his wife, who died during his imprisonment in 1804, for five-and-fifty years. Of Dr. Emmet’s three sons, Temple, Thomas Addis, and Robert, the former had an almost incomparably high repute for “every virtue, every grace,” to quote Landor’s mourning line for another. It is no disparagement to him to say that this was partly owing to the pathos of so short a career, and to the fact that he died ten years before the great Insurrection, twelve before the Union; seeming to belong to a prior order of things, it was the easier to praise the Emmet who did not live long enough to get into trouble, at the expense of the Emmets who did.

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

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

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