by Mark Bailey
An Irish revolutionary dynasty had arrived.
The Emmets were affluent, respectable Protestants. But they also knew hardship and heartache. “Eight more pregnancies followed over the next nine years, but none of the children survived,” writes Trinity College Dublin professor Dr. Patrick M. Geoghegan, also the biographer of Thomas’s younger brother Robert who was born in March 1778.
By this time, the Emmet family had moved to Dublin’s Molesworth Street, near St. Stephen’s Green.
And the world was changing rapidly.
The American colonies had declared their independence from Britain in 1776. And though it would take seven more years before the Treaty of Paris officially established the United States of America, this revolt against British authority shed a particularly disturbing light on British rule in Ireland. Meanwhile, social and economic unrest in France erupted in July of 1789 with the storming of the Bastille and the subsequent French Revolution.
Though he held a government position, Dr. Robert Emmet sympathized with the American revolutionaries, as well as the Irish nationalists. Both were regular topics of discussion in the Emmet household. Indeed, Thomas would inherit many of his father’s principles, with his brother-in-law Robert Holmes once commenting: “Those who came into contact with [Thomas] felt the presence of a man of . . . fixed, well considered opinions.” True, Ireland did have its own parliament, but it mostly deferred to the British Parliament in London. And at the time, Catholics, as well as numerous non-Anglican Protestant denominations, were excluded from all of Ireland’s political activity, including voting. The American colonists’ war with Britain, challenging and preoccupying the empire, was seen as an opportunity by those seeking independence for Ireland. By the late 1770s, bands of militias—often with varying political agendas—took up arms: some to protest cruel landlords and high rents, others to defend Ireland from a possible French invasion, still others calling for greater Irish political power if not outright rebellion.
However, some nationalist reformers hoped to work with ballots rather than bullets. Henry Grattan was most prominent among them. A veteran of the Irish Volunteers movement, Grattan led the call for Catholic emancipation and the repeal of Poynings’ Law, which subjugated Ireland’s Parliament to London. “What was the case of Ireland, enslaved for a century, and withered and blasted with her Protestant ascendancy, like a shattered oak scathed on its hill by the fires of its own intolerance?” Grattan once proclaimed. “What lost England America, but such a policy, an attempt to bind men by a parliament wherein they are not represented, such an attempt as some would now continue to practice on the Catholics?”
Grattan and the forces of reform did win major concessions in 1782, though Catholics still could not vote, much less sit in Parliament. Still, it was a valuable lesson in protest and agitation for nationalist Irish reformers such as Thomas Addis Emmet.
DURING THE GRATTAN era, Thomas was finishing up his years as a student at Trinity College Dublin, where he was known for his sense of humor and sharp debating skills, not to mention a love of music. “I think those very lucky who can get through [life’s] troubles by dancing and singing,” he once said. After graduating in 1783, he moved to Edinburgh to follow in his father’s footsteps and study medicine. Dr. Emmet, for his part, was proud of Thomas, as well as his eldest son, Christopher, known by his middle name, Temple. In the spring of 1785, Dr. Emmet noted that “few parents can look with the contented pride and satisfaction which I do on both my grown-up sons.” His brother-in-law added that young Thomas “would not have committed a dishonourable act though secure of everlasting concealment.”
Then tragedy struck. Temple, a dazzling student who seemed destined for great things, died after a short illness. The death would cast a long shadow over the entire family and, says Trinity College Dublin professor Dr. Patrick M. Geoghegan, “altered the destiny of Thomas Addis forever.” First and foremost, Thomas abandoned medicine and gravitated toward Temple’s field—law. Politics followed soon enough, as Thomas watched the revolutionary changes of the late eighteenth century sweep across the globe. One question haunted him: Would such a revolution ever reach Ireland’s shores?
IN 1790, THOMAS joined a club dedicated to nationalist aims whose membership included a Dublin native by the name of Theobald Wolfe Tone, who would become one of Ireland’s most revered revolutionaries. Tone later called Emmet “a man . . . completely after my own heart; of a great and comprehensive mind; of the warmest and sincerest affection for his friends; and of a firm and steady adherence to his principles, to which he has sacrificed much, as I know, and would, I am sure, if necessary, sacrifice his life.”
In the wake of revolutionary movements in America and Europe, Thomas Paine published Rights of Man in 1791 to an immediate explosion of public interest, especially in Ireland. Paine’s pamphlet “Common Sense” had already helped spark the American Revolution, and in 1787’s “Prospects on the Rubicon,” he’d written of “his suspicion that England governs Ireland for the purpose of keeping her low to prevent her from becoming her rival in trade and manufacturing.” By some estimates, Rights of Man sold more than twice as many copies in Ireland as it did in England.
On Bastille Day in Dublin in 1791, public celebrations of Paine provoked a military response from outraged British authorities. That same year, the year Emmet would be admitted to the Dublin bar, Tone, though himself a Protestant, published a provocative essay titled “Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland.” After directly acknowledging Paine’s influence, Tone wrote, “If the odious distinction between Protestant, and Presbyterian, and Catholic were abolished, and the three great sects blended together, under the common and sacred title of Irishman, what interest could a Catholic member of Parliament have, distinct from his Protestant brother sitting on the same bench?”
It was in this revolutionary atmosphere that the Society of United Irishmen was born. Designed initially as a debating society of sorts, the United Irishmen had a strong presence in both Belfast and Dublin, and sought to bridge Ireland’s numerous religious traditions. This was, of course, a daunting task—just as it was when many Americans of my generation were asked to reassess their racial identity in the face of the brutality that led to the civil rights movement. Some white Americans were willing to join a multiracial coalition in the name of social justice. Too many, though, were instead looking to exploit—rather than soothe—racial fears.
THOMAS JOINED THE United Irishmen in 1792, the same year he defended prominent Irish nationalist James Napper Tandy, the first of several treason cases Emmet took up during the 1790s. During the Tandy trial, Emmet sought not only to prove Tandy’s innocence but also to undermine the concept of British rule in Ireland.
Thomas’s increasing public radicalism was a boon to the nationalist movement, though some thought it was excessive. Henry Grattan, for one, commented that Thomas was a “very clever man” with a “powerful and logical mind, great talent and spirit.” But he believed Emmet was drifting into dangerously radical territory.
The British authorities apparently agreed. In 1794, Thomas met with a former schoolmate of his late brother Temple’s. The man was serving as an intermediary for the British government. Thomas was given an offer: abandon the United Irishmen and leave behind the rebel’s life of persecution and hardship, and in exchange he would be guaranteed lucrative employment in his field, the law.
This must have been tempting. In many ways, Thomas had begun to build for himself a respectable middle-class life. Just three years earlier, he had married the former Jane Patten. They would go on to have ten children together. And as firm as his beliefs may have been, Thomas had already seen up close the price Irish nationalists were paying.
It must have been a tough decision. After all, isn’t this a question all reformers must face, however dedicated? My own upbringing could certainly be characterized as at least modestly comfortable. That could make it difficult to do the necessary work of identifying with society’s underdog
s and demanding an end to oppression. When I was drafting The Port Huron Statement for Students for a Democratic Society, a central theme was the complacency that can manifest itself in a society where material comfort coexists alongside terrible injustice. The statement’s very first line reads, “We are people of this generation bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.”
For all of his respectability, Thomas also looked with great discomfort on the world he and his children were inheriting, and in the end, he could not forsake his principles. “You said this was the crisis of my life,” he wrote in response to the British offer. “I believe you said truly and therefore it is the moment in which I thought to adhere most directly to those principles of honor and morality which I have been taught to consider unerring guides. I believe this is the crisis of my life. God grant [that] I may have decided prudently. I feel I have decided honestly.”
He had crossed a threshold. Within two years, blood, indeed, would be shed.
THE QUESTION INEVITABLY arises: Why did Thomas Addis Emmet commit himself so thoroughly to the cause of Irish freedom? What brought him out of his world of comfort? After all, as an Emmet family biographer, R. R. Madden, put it, “The charge of recklessness or unscrupulousness of conduct never has been brought against Emmet. . . . Under what circumstances or impelled by what motive, did such a person become a rebel?”
It was fairly simple, according to Madden: English treatment of the Irish, for so long, was simply too unjust to ignore.
Although the British had been gradually granting Catholics more rights through legislation such as the Catholic Relief Act of 1793, this was still a time of bitter religious division in general and virulent anti-Catholicism in particular. In September 1795 in Armagh, for example, a group of young Protestants known as the Peep o’ Day Boys murdered dozens of Catholics who belonged to a faction known as the Defenders, a resistance group Napper Tandy and other Protestant nationalists sought to build alliances with. (The Peep o’ Day Boys later evolved into the notorious Orange Order, an incendiary Protestant organization that began holding annual parades commemorating the 1690 defeat of Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne—a provocative procession that still fans flames of hatred in Northern Ireland to this day.)
The United Irish viewpoint, it should be stressed, went beyond mere sectarian Catholic nationalism. Wolfe Tone and Emmet were Republican to the core, and the movement they were part of ultimately represented a populist outpouring of rage against centuries of injustice.
If the forces of revolution in America and Ireland had already been released, the forces of reaction were also already coalescing. In 1795, British authorities passed the Treasonable Practices Act as well as the Seditious Meetings Act. These were designed to clamp down on revolutionary activity in the British kingdom. Punishments for such activity not only included beheading but also required that the executioner raise the severed skull and pronounce, “This is the head of a traitor.” Similarly, in the United States, Thomas Jefferson’s political opponents, the Federalists, were not above exploiting fears of Irish revolutionary activity, not to mention old fashioned nativism and anti-Catholicism.
Within eighteen months, from December 1796 to the fateful summer of 1798, the United Irishmen would indeed put a scare into plenty of people on both sides of the Atlantic. Tone would be dead. And Thomas Addis Emmet would be in prison.
THEY KNEW THE weather might be bad. But they took a chance anyway.
In 1796, United Irish leaders decided a full-scale invasion of Ireland—with French support—would once and for all overthrow the British. In an effort to surprise the British, the invasion was to take place not in the summer, when the weather would be most favorable, but instead in December. A fleet of ships sailed from France, in the hopes that once the invasion of Ireland was underway, the British would be stunned. Thousands of Irish troops, rallied by the United Irishmen, would then rise up and overwhelm the colonial power.
Bantry Bay, Cork, was the designated landing spot. The mission, however, was doomed from the start. Many of the French ships got lost in the poor weather, while others, including the Indomptable—with Wolfe Tone aboard—were unable to land for days. Some of the vessels eventually headed back to France.
“England has had its luckiest escape since the Armada,” Tone is said to have remarked.
The British were determined never to be caught off guard again. They proceeded to clamp down on all suspected revolutionary activity in Ireland. Members of the United Irishmen were driven underground as the British also set about establishing a network of spies and informers. In March 1798, British authorities received word of a United Irishmen meeting at the Dublin home of Oliver Bond. Over a dozen suspected rebels were arrested at the meeting, though not Thomas, who by then had been dubbed “the most dangerous man in Ireland” by one Crown informer.
Instead he was arrested the following morning. Brought before a committee at the House of Commons, he was asked directly, “Were you a United Irishman?”
Thomas’s answer was also direct.
“I am one.”
According to the Emmet family memoirs, Thomas initially endured terrible conditions in prison:
He was confined for six weeks in total darkness, but in a fairly dry cell under the prison. The cell was about seven feet in length, with the walls within reach on each side, and the only ventilation was from a loop-hole above the door. He was allowed no bed-clothing and lay on a stone shelf raised but a few inches from the floor. He had no change of underclothing during that time, and was deprived of every means of cleanliness, even of the facility for washing his hands and face. He was kept on bread and water, often insufficient in quantity to satisfy either his hunger or thirst. The bread was of the worst quality and the water always offensive both in taste and smell.
Even though the United Irish leadership was weakened significantly by this wave of arrests, Tone and others still wanted to move ahead with an uprising planned for 1798. Thomas would simply have to monitor events while imprisoned by the British.
REVOLUTIONS HAPPEN FOR three general reasons: first, a longstanding moral insult to dignity; second, a concrete material grievance that affects many people directly; and third, the rising of popular movements with visions of their own. With none of these issues having been addressed adequately by Great Britain, another Irish uprising was perhaps inevitable. The fighting began in late May 1798, mainly around Dublin. But rebel plans to seize the city were quickly dashed, and it seemed the rebels were drifting toward another swift defeat. Then on May 29 came a decisive rebel victory in Oulart, Wexford, with the locals passionately rallying alongside the rebels. The nationalist rebel forces were now fifteen thousand strong and next took Wexford town. This would turn out to be a high point of the 1798 rebellion. In the end, the rebels—poorly trained, with inferior weapons—faced too great a task. As many as thirty thousand of them lost their lives in the 1798 uprising, while those who were captured faced severe punishment clearly designed to exterminate once and for all the United Irish “threat.”
Father John Murphy, a popular nationalist priest who fought in Wexford, was beaten, whipped, and then hanged before his lifeless body was decapitated and burned. To ensure that a clear message had been sent to the other rebels, Murphy’s head was then impaled on a spike for all to see.
Wolfe Tone, meanwhile, was captured at sea coming from France. He might have been able to turn around and escape, but he refused. Instead he was taken to Dublin where he faced hanging.
In a letter from his Scottish jail cell, Thomas expressed concern for his friend and compatriot. “It is impossible for anyone to be more concerned or more anxious than we all are about the fate of Tone,” he wrote to fellow United Irishman Thomas Russell. “There is not a thing that would appear to us to have any chance of saving his life that we would not gladly do.”
Tone was put on trial November 10, 1798, and was unrepentant. “I have attempted t
o establish the independence of my country; I have failed in the attempt; my life is in consequence forfeited and I submit; the Court will do their duty and I shall endeavour to do mine.”
Rather than be executed by the Crown in the gruesome manner dictated by the Treasonable Practices Act, Tone took his own life with a razor, saying on his deathbed a week later, “What should I wish to live for?”
In his 1966 poem “Requiem for the Croppies,” Seamus Heaney wrote of what the rebels of 1798 had managed to accomplish, even in defeat. Seeds of liberation had been planted.
Until . . . on Vinegar Hill . . . the final conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August . . . the barley grew up out of our grave.
THE 1798 UPRISING in Ireland had consequences in the United States as well.
Fear of Irish Catholics and other immigrants ran high in the young nation during and immediately after the crisis in Ireland. The Irish alliance with the French unnerved many in the dominant U.S. Federalist Party, whose membership included Washington, Adams, and even Alexander Hamilton. (Hamilton has come to be associated with striving immigrants, thanks to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway hit, but Hamilton actually belonged to a political faction that feared immigrant influence.) One-time vice presidential candidate Rufus King spoke for many Federalists when he voiced his objection to settling United Irish exiles in America, boasting that he had earned the “cordial and distinguished hatred” of the United Irishmen—words that would rile the likes of Thomas Addis Emmet, and later come back to haunt King.