Chapter 7

“—surgesWhich wash both Heaven and Hell.”

“—surges

Which wash both Heaven and Hell.”

No credit need be given to the tale that as Emmetwent 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, onlyto 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’sLifeof his illustrious father, in Dr. Madden’s moving but chaoticMemoirs 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 everyone 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 imprisonmentwhen 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, calledAn 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, entitledThe Emmet Family, seems to have suspected the existence of the little personal note in which theAccountwas 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; hewill 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.”

“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; hewill 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. Accordingto 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 contriversof 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 pleasedto 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 havearisen 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.”

“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 pleasedto 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 havearisen 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 touchwith 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 toabjure 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 beenspilt 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. 191et 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 inThe 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, hecaught 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 theLondon 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 wasin 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, inThe BrokenHeart, 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.”

“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 theLiterary Souvenirfor 1831, there is an agreeable paper of fifteen pages entitledSome 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 definitelyrallied 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 aportrait 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 whichturned 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.”

“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 excitementand 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 ishere: 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 inadvertentlyin 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 afterher 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.”ToMrs. Henry W——.

“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 inadvertentlyin 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 afterher 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.”

ToMrs. 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 fromone 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——, andtell 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’sSome 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 militarycareer 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 fromThe War in the Peninsulawhat 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 thosewho 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 soulhas 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 definitegrace 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.” Heturned 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. Topoor 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 inThe 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 thepenal 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 thiscountry) 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.)

“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 conductof 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’sassurances 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!”

A postulate of true magnanimity is modesty. Emmet’s was unique. It is the testimony of John Patten, who was well aware of his kinsman’s immense self-reliance, that “Robert had not oneparticle of vanity in his composition. He was the most free from conceit of any man I ever knew. You might live with him for years . . . and never discover that he thought about himself at all. He was vain neither of his person nor of his mind.” La Comtesse d’Haussonville cannot refrain, in her graceful memoir, from contrasting him with another excellent youth of genius, André Chénier, who very properly expressed his pang of self-pity in face of the guillotine. “Et pourtant,” he cried, striking his forehead with that gesture of Gallic candour which is so odd to us and so winning: “et pourtant il y avait quelque chose ici!”Il y avait quelque chose iciin Emmet too, although it was not great lyric poetry. He had almost every other capacity. The Rev. Archibald Douglas, in his old age, when Robert Emmet had been nearly forty years in his grave, summed up his conviction about him to Dr. R. R. Madden: “So gifted a creature does not appear once in a thousand years.”

We have no portrait of Emmet which antedates his trial. Three artists in good repute sketched him, that day, on bits of waste paper or else on the backs of envelopes, and did it surreptitiously for dread of prohibition: these were Comerford, Brocas,and James Petrie. The two first, viewing Emmet in profile, gained better results than the third; yet Petrie’s drawing serves as the basis of the only well-known engraved pictures. It was Petrie, moreover, who was allowed to take the death-mask of Robert Emmet. The good material accumulated was put to no very memorable use. The Petrie Emmet is somewhat heavy and glowering, and distinctly wry-necked. It is meant, in fact, to be impressive; and the note of artificiality disqualifies it as a true representation of its subject, a man of shynesses and simplicities. Comerford, on the other hand, and Brocas, as effectively, have given us a face to look at which one instinctively believes in. It is stamped with concentration and resolve, but has in it something serene and gentle and sweet, and it harmonises with all we can learn of Emmet’s physical appearance from the printed page. He was about five feet seven inches in height, wiry, slender, erect, healthy, full of endurance, quick of movement. His dark eyes were small and rather deep-set, and sparkling with expression; his nose was straight and thin, his mouth delicately chiselled. He had the powerful chin and jaw-bonenever absent from the bodily semblance of a strong-willed personality. The fine pendulous hair bespoke the enthusiast, but it was not worn long save over the forehead, which was noticeably broad and high. What gave a faun-like idiosyncrasy to the whole countenance was the slight upward curve of the perfect eyebrows at the inner edge. If we are to accept Brocas as our best authority (though his hand at work has somehow captured a momentary scorn not seen by Comerford), this idiosyncrasy had in it no touch of frowning severity such as was foreign, according to all report, to Emmet, but added rather a final whimsical attraction to a sad young face which a child or a dog would readily love. As Anne Devlin said once of “Miss Sarah’s,” it was “not handsome, but more than handsome.” The one face it resembles is the Giotto Dante.

Some critics on the spindle side will find it easier to forgive an unsuccessful patriot than an uninventive and unauthoritative lover. Emmet in hiding near the Priory, between the no-rising and the arrest, had his almost certain chances of escape; but he could not persuade the girl, born, like Hamlet, to a tragic inaction, to strike hands withhim and make the dash for liberty. Habit sat too heavily on her defrauded spirit, and insufficient faith in herself kept her where she was. The secrecy of their relations seems to have hurt and weakened her. She could no more stand up then against her father’s displeasure than she could part long after with dejection and a sort of remorse, when the face of her outer world had beautifully, almost miraculously, changed. And Emmet loved her as she was, a day-lily on a drooping stem. To quarrel with them because no fleet-footed horse, as in a novel, pranced by night to Rathfarnham to bear them away together, is to quarrel with a perfected sequence. To mark the look of this Robert, hungry for the heroic, the look of this Sarah, mystical as twilight, is but to forecast casualties. Perhaps as every soul has a right to its own kind of welfare and happiness, so it has a right to its own kind of sorrow. The second alternative suits the innocent, although it shocks the moral sense of most persons far more than would the choice of error instead of truth. To be an Emmet at all meant to get into trouble for advanced ideals. To be a Curran meant to have a keen intelligencealways besieged hard, and eventually overcome, by melancholia, as John Philpot Curran’s was at the end, as Richard Curran’s was in his prime. Emmet and the young creature of his adoration were hardly used; but Fate chose not ill for them. Arévolution manquéewith an elopement; expatriation with a marriage certificate; a change of political front with the parental blessing—all look somehow equally incongruous and out of key with those sensitive faces elected, let us say, to better things. Their story, with all deductions which can be made, has already done something to deepen the sense of human love in the world, and to broaden the dream of human liberty. Perhaps either of those games may be considered as always worth the candle.

Rashness, and the immediate ruin consequent upon it, two things which men can taste, smell, handle, hear, and see, are not redeemed, in their opinion, by anything so unsubstantial as motive. History, a tissue of externals, cannot afford to take account of that. Hence it falls out that certain spirits are finally given over, with their illegitimate deeds in arm, to folk-lore and balladry. Of these are Charlotte Corday, and John Brown of Ossawatomie,and Robert Emmet. There is no need of exculpating them in the forum of the people, where they were never held to be at fault; and exculpation is a waste of words to the rest of us. We understand too well what social havoc these pure-eyed hot-hearted angels bring in their wake, when they condescend to interfere with our fixed affairs. They call into being in their own despite our most self-protective measures: measures, in short, which amount to an international coalition against the undesirable immigrant. Relentless inhospitality to such innovators, in every generation and in every clime, is the habit of this planet. Such as our affairs are, we do not seem to wish them made over into duplicates of those of the Kingdom of Heaven. The executed meddlers, however, often take on an unaccountable posthumous grace, and may even be approached upon anniversaries in a mood none other than that of affectionate congratulation. The anomaly of our own situation has passed with their death: though they never change, we grow up in time to be Posterity, and to see with them the ultimate correlations of things, in a region of intellectual space where nothing goes by its old name.To be unbiassed and Irish is to love Robert Emmet; to be generously English is to love him; to be American is to love him anyhow.

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