WOMEN OF ’NINETY-EIGHT

  PAMELA
  The Wife of Lord Edward Fitzgerald
]

                                WOMEN OF
                             ’NINETY-EIGHT

                     BY MRS. THOMAS CONCANNON, M.A.

Author of “The Life of St. Columba,” “A Garden of Girls,” “The Sorrow of
Lycadoon,” Etc.

                       M. H. GILL AND SON :: LTD.
                   50 UPPER O’CONNELL STREET, DUBLIN
                                  1919

                           PRINTED AND BOUND

                                   BY

                         M. H. GILL & SON, LTD.

                                 DUBLIN

                               In Memory

                                   OF

                           All the Dead Women

                                  AND

                               In Homage

                                   TO

                          All the Living Women

                             WHO HAVE GIVEN

                            Their Dear Ones

                                   TO

                                Ireland

                                CONTENTS

                                                          PAGE
          INTRODUCTION                                      ix
          THE MOTHERS OF ’NINETY-EIGHT                       3
             _The Mother of the Emmets_                      6
             _The Mother of Lord Edward Fitzgerald_         28
             _The Mother of the Sheareses_                  53
             _The Mother of the Teelings_                   68
          THE WIVES OF ’NINETY-EIGHT:
             _The Wife of Theobald Wolfe Tone_             103
             _The Wife of Thomas Addis Emmet_              146
             _The Wife of Samuel Neilson_                  165
             _The Wife of Lord Edward Fitzgerald_          186
          THE SISTER OF HENRY JOY MCCRACKEN                215
          SOME OTHER SISTERS OF ’NINETY-EIGHT:
             _Mary Anne Emmet_                             243
             _Mary Tone_                                   247
             _Lady Lucy Fitzgerald_                        249
             _Julia Sheares_                               253
             _Miss Byrne_                                  257
             _Miss Teeling_                                259
             _Miss Hazlett_                                259
          SARAH CURRAN AND ANNE DEVLIN                     267
          SOME OTHER ROMANCES OF ’NINETY-EIGHT             297
          SOME OBSCURE HEROINES OF ’NINETY-EIGHT           311

                              INTRODUCTION

           Alas! how sad by Shannon’s flood,
             The blush of morning sun appears!
           To men who gave for us their blood,
             Ah! what can women give but tears!
             —DRENNAN: _Lament of the Women after the Battle_.

“THEY tell a beautiful and poetical story about the croppies’ graves in
Wexford. Many of them carried in their coat pockets wheat seed gathered
in the fields to satisfy their hunger. When they were buried in their
shallow graves the seed sprouted and pushed its way up to the light, and
the peasants, seeing the patches of waving grain here and there by field
or wayside, knew that there a poor croppy slumbered. Was not the waving
grain an emblem that the blood they shed for Ireland would yet nurture
the harvest of Freedom?”

Twenty years ago, when in the pages of the _Shan Van Vocht_, that moving
and lovely tale was told to the faithful few whom the centenary of
’Ninety-Eight had rallied around the croppies’ graves, it needed a
poet’s vision, a patriot’s heart, to see in

            “The grain that was fed on the dust of the dead”

a promise of the mighty harvest of freedom. To-day, we look around us,
and, lo!—even to the blindest and coldest of us—the fields are white.

Ere we go forth to the reaping, shall we not consider with ourselves
what culture the buried seeds of freedom received to ensure a yield so
rich? It is not alone the blood of the men who died for Ireland that has
nurtured the harvest of her freedom. The seed has been abundantly
watered by the tears of heartbroken women: mothers and wives,
sweethearts and sisters, daughters and comrades. Some of these grieving
women I have tried, in the following pages, to make better known to
their country-women of to-day, whose joy has been purchased, in such
large part, by their sorrow.

And not with their tears alone did our sisters of ’Ninety-Eight sprinkle
the red furrows of that tragic seed-time. In many a forgotten grave,
from Antrim to Wexford, lies the dust of the women who died victims of
the brutality of the yeomanry and military, let loose on the country to
goad its manhood into a rising. Beneath the unmarked site of many a
vanished cabin lie the charred bones of countless women who were burnt
to death when the drunken soldiery fired their homes. Among the outrages
tabulated by Cloney as having been perpetrated by the military in the
county of Wexford alone, we find record of seven young women violated
and murdered near Ballaghkeene by the Homperg Dragoons, after the
retreat from Vinegar Hill; of four women shot after the flight from
Wexford; and of three women bayonetted in Enniscorthy; of nine women and
six children slain by the yeomanry between Vinegar Hill and Gorey, on
the high road; of three women shot by the yeomanry in the village of
Aughrim; of four women murdered by “the supplementary yeomen” between
Gorey and Arklow.

Anne Devlin was not the only woman of those times who bore to the day of
her death on her tender skin the cicatrized marks of the wounds
inflicted by the bayonets of the soldiers in the design of extorting
from her information. Some of the atrocities suffered by women had not
even the excuse of any purpose—save that of satisfying a monstrous lust
of cruelty. A dreadful case is that of Mrs. O’Neill, whose son, a
clerical student, had been taken up and confined in New Geneva barracks,
preparatory to being shipped off to work in the salt-mines of the King
of Prussia. The poor woman had come all the way from Antrim, a distance
of one hundred and fifty miles, to take a last farewell of him. When she
reached her destination she was refused access to him, and only
succeeded in seeing him after she had bribed his guards. Unfortunately,
she yielded to the violence of her grief when the time to leave him
came, and the anguished cries of the poor mother betrayed her forbidden
presence in her boy’s cell. She was torn from his arms, hurried into the
presence of the colonel, and by him delivered to the tender mercies of
the soldiers, who dragged her into the courtyard, and proceeded to toss
her in a blanket. When the savage pastime of the soldiers ceased, a few
rags were thrown to the unfortunate woman; she crawled to a neighbouring
cabin, and there she died.

Those who are best entitled to speak of the causes of the Rising of
’Ninety-Eight are singularly unanimous in their exposition of them.
During Thomas Addis Emmet’s examination before the Secret Committee of
the House of Lords (August 10th, 1798) he stated in reply to Lord
Clare’s query as to what caused the late insurrection: “the free
quarters, the house-burnings, the tortures, the military executions in
the counties of Kildare, Carlow and Wicklow.” Mary McCracken used to
quote her brother, Henry Joy’s opinion that “if it had not been for the
free quarters and the flogging, there would have been no rebellion after
all, for it is not easy to get the people to turn out of their
comfortable homes, if they _have_ any comfort in them.” It was the sight
of his burning chapel and the blazing homesteads of his flock which
turned Father John Murphy from a man of peace into the intrepid leader
of fighting men. When his people fled to him in the woods from the
flames of their farmhouses and the outrages of the yeomanry, he told
them that “they had better die courageously in the field than be
butchered in their houses; that, for his own part, if he had any brave
men to join him, he was resolved to sell his life dearly and prove to
these cruel monsters that they should not continue their murders and
devastations with impunity.”

The same motives which urged the priest to become the soldier animated
many of the women. Better, it seemed to them, to die fighting side by
side with their men in the field than to be violated and butchered in
their houses. And so we find among the Women of ’Ninety-Eight more than
one Irish Joan of Arc. There was Molly Weston who fought at Tara, Betsy
Grey at Ballynahinch, Mary Doyle at New Ross and many a brave woman who
died fighting on Vinegar Hill.

Another _rôle_ filled by the Women of ’Ninety-Eight was that of
inspiring their men to patriotic action, aiding them by their counsels,
putting their women’s wit at the service of the patriots as messengers
and intelligence officers. Charles H. Teeling informs us that “the
enthusiasm of the females exceeded the ardour of the men; in many of the
higher circles, and in all the rustic festivities, _that_ youth met a
cold and forbidding reception from the partner of his choice, who,
either from apathy or timidity, had not yet subscribed to the test of
union.” “A green velvet stock, or a silk robe with a shamrock device,
were the emblems of national feeling; and the former was not
unfrequently presented to the youthful patriot by the fair daughter of
Erin, as the pledge of a more tender regard.” We see Pamela and Lady
Lucy Fitzgerald shedding the bright influence of their beauty over the
circle of patriotic and romantic young Irishmen whom Lord Edward
gathered around him in Kildare Lodge. Numerous women were so deep in the
secrets of the United Irishmen that it was considered necessary for them
to take the oath. Of these, the most notable, Miss Moore, will receive
more extended notice in subsequent pages of this book. Among others we
find mention of Mrs. Risk, whose husband having fallen a victim to his
patriotic principles in ’Ninety-Eight, devoted herself and all she had
in the world to the Cause for which he died. It was to her house in
Sandymount that Lord Edward was to have been removed the night of the
day on which he was arrested. We subsequently find her visiting the
prisoners at Fort George and carrying back messages from them to their
friends in Ireland. Rose McGladdery, wife of William McCracken, was “a
sworn United man,” and did good service to the cause for which her
husband was imprisoned and for which her brother-in-law, Harry, died, as
she passed out and in of Kilmainham jail to visit her captive husband.
It is very probable that Mrs. Oliver Bond was also “a sworn United man.”
Her name lives in their records for a clever device by which she enabled
the State prisoners of 1796 to keep in touch with the outside world. The
story is told by Charles Teeling, who was one of them:

“On that great festival, which is respected in every quarter of the
Christian world, this excellent lady, having addressed a polite message
to the first authority of the prison, requested through him to furnish a
dish for the table of the prisoners of State.... This dish was
accompanied by one of smaller dimensions, but of similar appearance,
which was presented to the good lady, the governor’s spouse. Never did
the governor or his gentle rib partake of a dish more agreeable to their
palates. It was a pasty of exquisite flavour, and seasoned by no
parsimonious hand. Dainties of this kind were novel to the captives, but
still more novel the design; choice, indeed, were the materials of which
our dish was composed, and most acceptable to those for whose
entertainment it was prepared. With the full permission of the governor,
the pie was placed on our table, the turnkey received his Christmas-box,
smiled as he turned the money in his hand, and retired. Under cover of
the encrustment, which was artfully, but with apparent simplicity,
arranged, the dish was filled with writing materials, foreign and
domestic newspapers, communications with friends.” Writing his
recollections thirty years later, Charles Teeling recalls, in all their
vivid freshness, the sensations to which this discovery gave birth, and
the happiness which the poor prisoners felt when they were thus made
acquainted with the true sentiments of their fellow-countrymen in their
regard.

One more pious duty the Women of ’Ninety-Eight took upon themselves, and
that was to guard the memory of the fallen, and to keep bright their
names. Again and again, Dr. Madden has found occasion to pay tribute to
the faithful women to whom his researches owe so much. “With few
exceptions,” he writes, “the materials collected for the memoirs of the
United Irishmen would in all probability have perished, had they not
fallen into the hands of women, who clung to the memories of their
departed friends with feelings of attachment commensurate with the
calamities which had overtaken the objects of their affection or regard.
It would seem that in man’s adversity, when his fellow-men fall away
from his sinking fortunes, or detach their thoughts from his maltreated
memory, there is a steadfastness in the nature of woman’s love, a
fidelity in her friendship, which gives to the misfortunes of her
kindred a new claim to her solicitude for everything that concerns their
interests or their fame.” Very touching instances are those of Mary
McCracken, the daughters of Samuel Neilson, the daughter of Dr.
MacNevin.

Finally, it is not to be forgotten that to a woman of ’Ninety-Eight we
are indebted for the first and, when all is said, perhaps, the best—the
most authentic, and vivid and enlightening—story of the Rising which
takes its name from that year. Charles Hamilton Teeling’s “Personal
Narrative,” published in 1828, three years before Moore’s “Life of Lord
Edward Fitzgerald,” was dedicated by the author in words, as touching as
they are noble, to “My wife and my children at whose request solely, it
has been undertaken.... Respected and beloved, they are entitled to this
mark of my remembrance, the only inheritance which the enemies of my
country have left me to bequeathe.” We are allowed to catch, in the
final page of the “Narrative,” a fleeting whisper of the romance of
Charles H. Teeling and Catherine Carolan. We know that when the
Insurrection was suppressed, young Charles Teeling, for true love’s
sake, preferred to take anew the outlaw’s track on the mountain rather
than to seek safety beyond the seas. We would fain know a little more of
the girl who won her place side by side with “the Little Black Rose” in
that most knightly and constant heart. We sense in her story one of the
most tender, and sweet, and pure of the romances of ’Ninety-Eight.

I cannot but feel proud of the fact that, in writing this book, I have
received the constant help of two of the grandsons of Charles Teeling,
and Catherine Carolan: Charles T. Waters, Esq., B.L., and Charles H.
Teeling, Esq., K.C. I wish I could acknowledge adequately, the
obligations under which I have been put by their kindness in lending me
the precious Teeling letters in their possession, and allowing me to use
them as I desired. I have been privileged also to consult Mr. Waters
constantly in many doubts and difficulties, to draw on his knowledge of
the period, to use his library, and to call on his help in a thousand
ways which it would be impossible to enumerate.

I am also under an obligation to F. J. Bigger, Esq., Belfast, and Denis
Carolan Rushe, Monaghan (another kinsman of Catherine Carolan) for their
patient answering of my many questions concerning a period on which they
are among the greatest of living authorities.

To Mrs. Patrick Semple, LL.D., and her sister, Mrs. MacCarthy, I owe
most warm thanks for their help in making extracts from books otherwise
inaccessible to me, and to Professor Mrs. Macken for the trouble she
took to procure certain books for me. I am also indebted to George
Taaffe, Esq., of Smarmore Castle, Ardee, for information furnished me
from the Taaffe family papers.

                                                       HELENA CONCANNON.

Lios na Mara,

      Salthill, Galway,

            _September, 1918_.

                      THE MOTHERS OF ’NINETY-EIGHT

                                  THE
                        MOTHERS OF ’NINETY-EIGHT

        “Hush, O Mother, and be not sorrowful,
         The women of My keening are yet unborn, little Mother.”
                                         —_The Keening of Mary._

TRULY it was of the Mothers of Ireland that Mary’s Son was thinking,
when from the Tree of His Passion He comforted His own Mother with
prophecy of the “keeners” yet unborn who, through the centuries, were to
bear her company in her anguish, and weep with her for her sorrow and
His most bitter death.

That knowledge—with so much else—we owe to the teaching of Padraic Mac
Piarais. He gave us the first part of the lesson when he gathered us
with him into the cottage of Mary Clancy, in Iar Chonnacht,[1] and bade
us listen to her “keening” with Mary for her dying, crucified Son, and
shuddering at the instruments of His Passion, and shedding floods of
tears at the thought of His gaping wounds. He made us realise what “a
precious thing it is for the world that in the homes of Ireland there
are still men and women who can shed tears for the sorrows of Mary and
her Son.” But did the teacher, himself, know then at what a price had
been won for the mothers of the Gael their “terrible and splendid
trust”? Or was it only revealed to him in the blinding flash of the
illumination which showed him that his own mother’s soul must be pierced
by the same sword which transfixed Mary’s? Certain it is that we had to
wait for the completion of the lesson, begun in Mary Clancy’s cottage,
till that most holy and solemn night when, as he waited, like King
Cellach in his prison cell, for “his love, the morning fair”—and the
flame-like gift it was to bring him—he wrote for his mother the
exquisite prayer, with which he would have her, on the morrow, lay his
own broken body in Mary’s outstretched arms. Then was it made plain to
us that the mothers of Ireland have won the right to stand thus close to
Mary, beneath the Cross, and to claim as their hereditary office, the
task to minister to her in her desolation, because they, above all the
other women of the world, have so often “seen their first-born sons go
forth,” even like Mary’s, “to die amid the scorn of men—For whom they
died.”

Footnote 1:

  “Caoineadh Mhuire” (The Keening of Mary) was taken down by P. H.
  Pearse from the singing of Mary Clancy in Moycullen, and first
  published by him in the _Claidheamh Soluis_, October 24th, 1904.

Thus the Desolate Mother, even in a world which has so largely forgotten
the sorrows of her and of her Son, has always found, and will find, in
the homes of Ireland, her faithful company of keeners. And who shall say
that their ministering is less grateful to her, because while they weep
for her Son, they are weeping for their own, and the voice they raise in
woe is that of Rachel, who will not be comforted?

These poor mothers of our Irish martyrs! These poor Rachels! There is
something in their grief which makes it a thing apart. Wives, and
sisters, and sweethearts, who have given their dear ones to Ireland have
felt, even in their most anguished hour, something of that exaltation
which makes “the hard service _they_ take, who help the Poor Old Woman,”
a yoke more sweet and precious than any liberty. Like the men, of whose
sufferings it was their splendid privilege to partake, the women who
have shared their husband’s prison cell, like Jane Emmet, or who have
walked with their brothers, even to the foot of the scaffold, like Mary
Anne McCracken, or who have found death by their lover’s side on the
battlefield, like Betsy Gray, “think themselves well paid.” But not even
Ireland could pay the mother of the Emmets, or the mother of the
Shearses, or heal the hidden wound that bled until her death-night in
the heart of Bartholomew Teeling’s mother, or comfort Lord Edward’s poor
mother when the roses of each recurring June were redly tragic with the
memory of his blood-stained prison deathbed, and its sunshine was
darkened by the memory of her boy’s agony. For the greatness of their
sorrow, then, shall we not place them first, these broken-hearted
mothers, in our tale of the “Women of ’Ninety-Eight”?

                        The Mother of the Emmets

                  ELIZABETH MASON EMMET—(1740-1803)[2]

                   “My life was he,
                    My death his taking.”
                   —_Lament of Mothers of Bethlehem._

Footnote 2:

  Authorities: Madden’s “United Irishmen,” Third Series, Second Ed.
  (London and Dublin, 1860); Dr. Thos. Addis Emmet’s “The Emmet Family”
  (New York, 1898); J. J. Reynolds’s “Footprints of Emmet” (Dublin,
  1903); Smith’s “County and City of Cork,” edited by Day and Copinger
  (Cork, 1893).

“ON Tuesday, September 20th (1803), the day of the execution of Robert
Emmet, he was visited at ten o’clock in the morning, by Mr. Leonard
McNally, the barrister, who, on entering the room where Emmet had the
indulgence of remaining all that morning in the company of the Rev. Dr.
Gamble, the ordinary of Newgate, found him reading the litany of the
service of the Church of England. Permission was given to him to retire
with McNally into an adjoining room, and on entering it, his first
enquiry was after his mother, whose health had been in a declining
state, and had wholly broken down under the recent afflictions which had
fallen on her. McNally, hesitating to answer the enquiry, Robert Emmet
repeated the question, ‘How is my mother?’ McNally, without replying
directly, said, ‘I know, Robert, you would like to see your mother.’ The
answer was, ‘Oh! what would I not give to see her?’ McNally, pointing
upwards, said, ‘Then, Robert, you will see her this day!’ and then gave
him an account of his mother’s death, which had taken place some days
previously. Emmet made no reply; he stood motionless and silent for some
moments, and said, ‘It is better so.’ He was evidently struggling hard
with his feelings, and endeavouring to suppress them. He made no further
allusion to the subject but by expressing ‘a confident hope that he and
his mother would meet in heaven.’”[3]

Footnote 3:

  Madden, _op. cit._ p. 461. Madden’s account of this touching incident
  was furnished him by John Patten, brother of Mrs. Thos. Addis Emmet,
  and the devoted friend of the whole Emmet family, who was a prisoner
  in Kilmainham at the time of Robert Emmet’s trial and execution.

I have known one woman who, having been able to read, with dry eyes, the
melting tale of Sarah Curran’s “Broken Heart,” and to listen, without a
sob, to the voice of Sarah’s young lover, so soon to be stilled for
ever, pleading from the brink of “the cold and silent grave,” for the
last charity of the world’s silence, broke into a passion of weeping as
the tragedy, which was Robert Emmet’s life-story, swept through every
stage of gathering pathos to the almost intolerable poignancy of its
climax—the picture, conjured up by Madden, of the mother who lay dead,
of a broken heart, in her widowed home in Donnybrook, while her
last-born son, her Benjamin, stood in the dock in Green Street on trial
for his life.

And yet is there not comfort to be found in the thought that the
mother’s loving spirit was liberated in time from the prison of the
suffering flesh, to be made free of all the places out of which her
boy’s anguish called to her? If, as was Robert Emmet’s fond hope, “the
dear shade of his venerated father” looked down upon him, where he stood
in the dock, ready to die for the principles which that father had first
taught him, surely the soul of the mother was not far away. Surely it
bore him company during the long nerve-wrecking, exhausting hours of the
trial,[4] giving him the refreshment which the brutality of his captors
and judges denied; surely it was close at hand when his poor body, on
which the fetters of death were so soon to be laid, had to submit for
the last time to the more galling fetters of the abominable gaoler of
Newgate. Could we bear to think of what Robert Emmet was made to suffer
during his last night on earth, if the conviction that his mother’s
spirit hovered near him, did not bring us comfort? Brought to Newgate
from Green Street about eleven o’clock at night, he was heavily ironed
by Gregg, the gaoler, and placed in one of the condemned cells. About an
hour after midnight an order came from the Secretary at the Castle that
the prisoner must be at once conveyed to Kilmainham. What a journey was
that through the darkness of the autumn night! What a journey back from
Kilmainham to Thomas Street the next day, when through the seething
crowds, the carriage which bore the young martyr to the place of his
execution moved in the midst of its strong guard of horse and foot! Even
his enemies, looking upon him, were fain to confess that never had they
seen a man go forth “to die like this”—with such “unostentatious
fortitude,” such marvellous absence of all signs of fear, such a
conviction of the glory of dying “for Ireland.” Did the dear Lord make
it easy for him “to die like this,” by permitting his mother to leave
her place in heaven for a time to be with her boy in the supreme hours?

Footnote 4:

  The trial of Robert Emmet lasted from 9.30 _a.m._ until 10.30 _p.m._
  During “these thirteen hours of mortal anxiety, of exertion, of
  attention, constantly engaged, he had no interval of repose, no
  refreshment.”

Set side by side two pictures. One is that drawn, in such tragic
intensity of black and white, by Madden, of a woman of sixty-three, who
having drained to the dregs the cup of life’s sorrows, lay down in the
home of her widowhood, from which all her children save one were absent,
to die of the malady, for which science has found no cure: a broken
heart. Nine months earlier her husband had been taken from her and now
she, “like the mother of the Shearses, was hurried to her grave by the
calamity which had fallen on her youngest son; who, it was vainly hoped,
was to have occupied one of the vacant places in the house, and in the
heart of his afflicted parents. Vainly had they looked up to Thomas
Addis Emmet to supply that place which had been left a void by the death
of their eldest and most gifted son, Christopher Temple Emmet. And when
Thomas Addis was taken away from them and banished, to whom had they to
look but to the younger son; and of that last life-hope of theirs they
might have spoken with the feelings which animated the Lacedemonian
mother, when one of her sons had fallen fighting for his country, and
looking on the last of them then living she said ‘_Ejus locum expleat
frater_.’ And that son was taken from them, incarcerated for four years,
and doomed to civil death. Thomas Addis Emmet was then a proscribed man
in exile. The father had sunk under the trial, although he was a man of
courage and equanimity of mind; but the mother’s last hope in her
youngest son sustained in some degree her broken strength and spirit;
and that one hope was dashed down never to rise again, when her
favourite child, the prop of her old age, was taken from her, and the
terrible idea of his frightful fate became her one fixed thought—from
the instant the dreadful tidings of his apprehension reached her till
the approaching term of the crowning catastrophe, when, in mercy to her,
she was taken away from her great misery.”

“Orangemen of Ireland ... these are your triumphs; the desolation of the
home of an aged, virtuous couple—the ruin in which all belonging to them
were involved, the ignominious death of their youngest and gifted
child.”[5]

Footnote 5:

  Madden, _op. cit._ pp. 463-464.

The other picture is one we paint for ourselves of a fair young girl,
very slim and graceful in her riding habit, with a charming face,
usually a little too serious for its twenty summers, showing now a
dainty flush of excitement under the piquant riding hood, and clear
eyes, usually somewhat too grave for their youth, shining now with an
unwonted light. For background a stately eighteenth-century country
seat, set in a landscape of exquisite beauty—(What need to describe the
entrancing loveliness of woodland, lake and mountain, when it is
sufficiently summed up by the magic word, Killarney?) Over it all a sky
aflush with the colours of the summer dawn! The haze of summer over the
bird-filled, fragrant woods, that sway lightly to the breezes of the
virginal new day!

So we picture for ourselves Elizabeth Mason on that summer morning of
the year 1760 when she set forth, a charming and accomplished girl of
twenty, from the home of her father, James Mason, Esq., of Ballydowney,
Killarney, for the memorable visit to Cork, which was to prove an event
of such transcendent importance in her life.

We guess something of the hopes and dreams, which lay in James and
Catherine Mason’s mind when they yielded to the desires of their son,
James (who was a successful business man in Cork), and allowed their
only daughter, Elizabeth, to accompany him, on his return to Cork from
one of his visits home, for “a season” in the gay, little Southern
Capital. Among the country gentlemen of the neighbourhood there was
small likelihood of finding a suitable _parti_ for their beautiful girl.
Arthur O’Neill’s description of Lord Kenmare’s “Milesian Assembly,”
which took place in this identical year,[6] seems to point to a society
around Killarney of hard-riding, hard-drinking, jolly squires with few
of whom Elizabeth’s cultured and thoughtful mind would have enough in
common for the prospects of a very happy marriage. Amid the young
professional and business men in Cork, with their more intellectual
interests, the wider knowledge of life which their close and frequent
intercourse with the Continent fostered, their greater accessibility to
new ideas, she was, as her prudent, loving parents probably realised,
much more likely to find a husband calculated to make her happy.
Extraordinarily gifted by nature, her education had been such as to
foster her birthgifts. Her great-grandson, Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet, of
New York, who in his book, “The Emmet Family,” has done us the great
service of making us acquainted with the _choses intimes_ of his
illustrious stock, has published many of her letters, and they bear out
Dr. Madden’s verdict on her “as an amiable, exemplary, high-minded lady,
whose understanding was as vigorous as her maternal feelings were strong
and ardent.” In another place Madden speaks of her “noble disposition
and vigorous understanding,” and in conversation with Dr. Thos. Addis
Emmet in 1880 he stated that he considered that she, her husband, her
three sons, Christopher Temple, Thomas Addis, Robert, and her daughter,
Mary Anne (wife of Robert Holmes) “were the most talented family in
every respect he had ever known of.” It was felt, indeed, and not alone
by those who hold that “all distinguished men inherit their
characteristics rather from the mother than from the father,” that the
extraordinary brilliancy of the three sons of Dr. and Mrs. Emmet was
largely an inheritance from their mother. And it is impossible to read
her letters, with their exquisite precision and felicity of phrase,
their ease, and candour and absence of all straining after effect, their
expression of a philosophy of life, the noblest, and soundest (because
founded on the truest Christian principles) without feeling that they
have been penned by a woman rarely gifted in heart and mind.

Footnote 6:

  Mrs. Milligan Fox’s “Annals of the Irish Harpers,” p. 147. It was on
  this occasion that Arthur O’Neill, in reply to an apologetic remark of
  Lord Kenmare’s concerning the place that the blind harper had found
  near the foot of the table, made the famous assertion: “Where an
  O’Neill sits, _there_ is the head of the table.”

With these rare gifts of heart and mind, and in all the freshness, and
charm, and beauty of her twenty summers, Miss Elizabeth Mason made
something of a sensation when she appeared in Cork society. She had
numerous relatives in the pleasant little city by the Lee, and each and
every one of them was determined that their beautiful visitor should
have “a good time.” So once or twice a week some kindly matron would
call at James Mason’s house, and carry off his sister to the concerts
and “assemblies” which were regular bi-weekly events in the Assembly
House near Hamond’s Marsh. Or a party of young people would beg her to
join them for a boating excursion on the river, or “a promenade” on the
Mall where the _beau monde_ loved to display its gay silk and satins,
its feathers and furbelows; or on the Bowling Green, where it took the
air under the quaintly cut trees, and listened to the band discoursing
sweet music for its delectation; or in Mr. Edward Webber’s gardens near
the Mardyke where it ate strawberries and cream, and all the other
delectable fruits of the earth, each in its proper season. In the
evenings there were theatre-parties, or “drums” at the Assembly House,
or in the hospitable and elegant homes of some of Cork’s merchant
princes, whose culture was not surpassed by their wealth. Here while the
young folk danced their minuets and country-dances, their elders played
cards; but both young and old were ready to leave dancing floor, and
card table, to take part in the delightful concerts of “Italic airs,”
which made one visitor to Cork imagine “the god of music had taken a
large stride from the Continent, over England to this island,” and
attribute “the humane and gentle disposition of the inhabitants, in some
measure, to the refinement of this divine art.” At supper one heard
supremely good conversation, for the men of Cork were, according to the
same witness, “well versed in public affairs,” fond of news and
politics, and diligent readers of the newest French and English books,
and the periodicals of the day—and their pretty partners made a
charmingly appreciative audience while the men talked over the foreign
and domestic news they had found in the Dublin and London newspapers,
which the two coffee-houses near the Exchange supplied for their
customers.[7]

Footnote 7:

  Smith’s “County and City of Cork,” I., 388.

It began to be noticed by the observant matrons, who chaperoned these
delightful gatherings, that one brilliant talker seemed particularly
anxious to observe the effect his conversation made on clever Elizabeth
Mason, and how persistently he sought her out as a partner in ball and
supper rooms, or at pic-nic or promenade, whenever his professional
occupations allowed him to take part in these functions. They noticed,
with approval, that Elizabeth was not indifferent to the attentions of
the rising young physician, Dr. Robert Emmet,[8] who having studied
medicine and taken his degree with great _éclat_ at one of the most
famous medical schools in Europe, that of the University of
Montpelier,[9] had taken up practice in Cork some years previously.

Footnote 8:

  Born in Tipperary in 1729, he was just thirty-one years old at the
  date of his marriage.

Footnote 9:

  His great-grandson, Dr. Thos. Addis Emmet of New York, himself a
  distinguished specialist, records the publication of a book by Dr.
  Robert Emmet, in 1753, on some of the diseases of women. It was
  originally published in Latin and was afterwards translated into
  French, with two editions printed in Paris (_op. cit._ p. 47).

In due course the good-natured gossips of Cork learned that Dr. Emmet
had sent proposals, through James Mason, jun., to Mr. and Mrs. James
Mason of Ballydowney, for the hand of their daughter, Elizabeth, and
that the parents, having satisfied themselves, after due enquiry, that
the connection was a suitable one, had given their consent to the
marriage. Dr. Emmet was the son of a physician, Dr. Christopher Emmet,
in Tipperary, and in addition to his professional earnings had inherited
a considerable fortune from his father. Through his mother, Rebecca
Temple, he was connected with one of the most aristocratic families in
England. Satisfactory marriage settlements were speedily arranged, and
preparations were pushed on for the wedding, which took place in Cork on
November 16th, 1760.

Dr. Madden informs us, on the authority of Elizabeth Mason’s nephew, Mr.
J. St. John Mason, that the doctor built a large house for his bride in
George’s Street. It seems probable that the _ménage_ included from the
beginning the doctor’s widowed mother, Mrs. Rebecca Temple Emmet, and
his widowed and childless sister-in-law, Mrs. Grace Russell Emmet,
relict of his brother Thomas, who died in 1754. At all events these two
ladies died under the doctor’s roof, after the family had moved to
Dublin; the elder in 1774, the younger in 1788. A bequest of the latter
to her “dear sister-in-law” of a gold watch, and ample legacies to the
children seem to betoken that Elizabeth Emmet had the secret of gaining
the hearts of her husband’s kin, and that as mistress of a large and
wealthy household she knew how to make all who sat by her hearth, or
gathered round her table, happy.

She was soon busy in her nursery. In 1761, her first-born son,
Christopher Temple Emmet, made his entry into it. The boy was destined,
like Cuchullin, to “a great name and a short life.” He was only
twenty-eight when he died, but he had already impressed his
contemporaries as one of the most brilliant men of his time. Grattan,
who disliked the Emmets intensely (because they had the courage of their
convictions, and he, in spite of his fiery rhetoric, was all for
compromise and security), has left on record his opinion of Temple
Emmet, and it is worth quoting at length:—

“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 any bishop in the land. He had a
wonderful memory—he recollected everything—it stuck to him with singular
tenacity. He showed this in his early youth, and on one occasion he gave
a strong instance of it. There existed at that time in Dublin College,
an institution called the Historical Society; there were subjects
selected for discussion, and prior to the debate there was an
examination in history. On one occasion the books happened to be
mislaid, and it was thought no examination could have taken place; but
Emmet, whose turn it was to be in the chair, and who had read the
course, recollected the entire, and examined in every part of it, and
with surprising ability.”[10]

Footnote 10:

  Grattan’s “Life and Times.” By Henry Grattan, the younger. IV. 356.

In reading the records of eighteenth-century families, we are equally
astonished at the size of them, and the small proportion of their
members to survive infancy. Dr. and Mrs. Emmet had seventeen children in
seventeen years, and of these there only grew to manhood and womanhood
three sons, Christopher Temple, Thomas Addis (born 1764), Robert (born
1778), and one daughter, Mary Anne (born 1773). Of the other thirteen,
there remained only their names in Aunt Grace’s family bible, followed
by the pitiable record, “died young.”

One circumstance moves us strangely: four little Robert Emmets (the
first born in 1771, the others in 1774, 1776, 1777) came, and finding
the burden of life too heavy, laid it quickly down, until _he_ came, the
fifth, the destined one, who was to take it up and carry it, until his
hero-fate bade him lay it down—for Ireland.

Perhaps the little graves that multiplied so fast in the Cork cemetery
made that city a depressing place for Elizabeth Emmet; or perhaps her
husband was attracted to Dublin, by the promises of professional
advancement offered by the appointment to the Viceroyalty of his
kinsman, the Marquis of Buckingham. At all events it is a matter of
history that Dr. and Mrs. Emmet came to Dublin in 1771 and took up their
residence in Molesworth Street.[11] Here a number of their children were
born, including Mary Anne (1773) and Robert (1778).

Footnote 11:

  The identification of the house is of much interest, as it was that in
  which Robert Emmet was born. A writer in _Georgian Society Record_
  (IV. 94) states that it is now numbered 22, and forms portion of
  Kilworth House.

In this same year, 1771, Dr. Emmet was appointed State Physician, and
owing to his character and capacity, was soon in possession also, of a
large private practice. He was a charming, genial man, and a great
favourite with his patients. His wife’s nephew, St. John Mason,
described him to Dr. Madden as “a man of easy and gentlemanly manners,
remarkable for vivacity and pleasantry, but free from coarseness or that
exaggeration of expression in moments of hilarity called grimace. He
possessed humour but not of a caustic nature. In discourse he was fluent
and happy in the choice of words, and in the use of classical
quotations. He was remarkably punctual and precise in business and
professional affairs.” By his professional skill and business prudence
Dr. Emmet amassed a considerable fortune, and lived in a manner
commensurate with it, entertaining much good company, and taking a
leading part in the brilliant society of the day.

After the birth of their youngest child, Robert, in 1778, the Emmets
moved from their house in Molesworth Street, to a splendid new mansion
in Stephen’s Green. Those were the days of the Volunteers, and Ireland,
stirred to the depths by the example of America’s struggle for freedom,
was gathering her forces to make the same demand, which America had
already secured—and to back it by the same arguments. Less fortunate
than America—or less wisely and nobly led—Ireland did not force the
question to the decision of the field of battle, but accepted in full
settlement of her claim a something which only Grattan and his friends,
blinded by their own verbal fire-works, could have mistaken for liberty.
Dr. Robert Emmet was one of those who saw, from the beginning, the
inadequacy of the Settlement of 1782; and there is no doubt but that it
was from him that his sons learned that political creed—the doctrine of
“Absolute Independence”—for which one of them was to suffer the “white
martyrdom” of exile, and the other the “red martyrdom” of blood. Grattan
and Curran and others of their ilk who could never forgive those who had
the pluck and honesty to draw their logical conclusion from the premises
which they themselves had instituted, have tried to discredit Dr. Emmet
by throwing ridicule on him. Grattan’s son quotes his father as saying
that “Dr. Emmet had his pill and his plan, and he mixed so much politics
with his prescription, that he would kill the patient who took the one,
and ruin the country that listened to the other.” And Curran loved to
raise a laugh among his friends—Sir Jonah Barrington and other
high-minded gentlemen—by “taking off” the Doctor administering “their
morning draught” to his sons. “Well, Temple, what would you do for your
country? Addis, would you kill your brother for your country? Would you
kill your sister for your country? Would you kill me?” We can listen
with equanimity to the bitter epigrams of Grattan, or the monkey-like
buffoonery of Curran when we remember what his own sons thought of Dr.
Emmet: “Dear shade of my venerated father,” cried Robert as he stood in
the dock facing his iniquitous judges and accusers, “look down on your
suffering son, and see has he for one moment deviated from those moral
and patriotic principles which you so early instilled into his youthful
mind, and for which he has now to offer up his life.” And Thomas Addis
Emmet, writing to his mother from Brussels, on the receipt of the news
of his father’s death (December, 1802), has drawn for his own, and his
mother’s consolation, a noble portrait of him whom they had lost: “The
first comfort you can know must spring up from within yourself, from
your reflection and religion, from your recalling to memory that my
father’s active and vigorous mind was always occupied in doing good to
others. That his seventy-five years were unostentatiously but
inestimably filled with perpetual services to his fellow-creatures. That
although he was tried, and that severely, with some of those calamities
from which we cannot be exempt, yet he enjoyed an uncommon portion of
tranquillity and happiness, for, by his firmness and understanding, he
was enabled to bear like a man the visitations of external misfortunes,
and from within no troubled conscience or compunction of self-reproach
ever disturbed his peace.”

The years from 1778 to 1789 were, doubtless, the happiest years in
Elizabeth Emmet’s life. The elder boys, Christopher Temple and
Thomas Addis, were at the University, and a mother even less tender
than she, could not but be filled with pride and happiness at the
brilliant records they were making for themselves. In one of these
years there arrived from America kinsfolk of her husband’s, Sir John
and Robert Temple, and the latter’s family, and in the hospitable
eighteenth-century manner which its big houses and generous style of
living fostered, they became inmates of Dr. and Mrs. Emmet’s house.
The tie which bound the Emmets to the Temples was strengthened, when
in 1784 Christopher Temple Emmet married his cousin, Miss Anne
Western Temple, daughter of Robert. He had been called to the Bar a
short time previously and was in extensive practice. I have already
quoted Grattan’s opinion of his gifts. Even more significant was the
testimony—spoken of all places in the world—in the very Court
wherein Christopher’s youngest brother was awaiting the
death-sentence—and by the lips that were so soon to pronounce it,
the cruel lips of “Hanging Judge” Norbury. “You had an eldest
brother whom death snatched away, and who when living was one of the
greatest ornaments of the Bar. The laws of his country were the
study of his youth, and the study of his maturer years was to
cultivate and support them.” With Christopher marked out, by the
judgment of all the competent men of his time for high advancement;
with a charming and amiable new daughter added to her household in
the shape of Christopher’s wife; with her second son, Thomas Addis,
winning all sorts of distinctions for himself in the University of
Edinburgh, whither he had gone to study medicine; with Mary Anne,
growing into lovely womanhood, and showing a strength of character
and a breadth of intellect, which stamped her as a true Emmet; with
young Robert, earning praise from his masters and regard from his
comrades; with the spectacle of her husband’s delight in all this to
double her own—Elizabeth Emmet might well count herself, for one
golden moment at least, that rare thing: a perfectly happy woman.

Alas! Alas! how short the moment to which we may cry with Faust, “tarry
awhile, thou art so fair.” Very speedily, Elizabeth Emmet’s “fair
moment” passed. In February, 1789, her son, Christopher Temple, went
“circuit” in Munster—and one day to those who waited his return in the
pleasant home in Stephen’s Green there came the tragic news of his death
from smallpox. The blow was too severe for Christopher’s young wife. She
died a few months after her husband, leaving their little daughter,
Kitty, to the care of her grandparents. Elizabeth Emmet had to live
on—to face the sorrows that yet awaited her.

At the desire of Dr. Emmet, the second son, Thomas Addis, anxious “to
fill” as far as in him lay, “the place of his brother,” turned aside
from the profession of medicine, in which he had already graduated, and
took up that of law. He was called to the Bar in 1790. In 1791, he
married Miss Jane Patten, daughter of Rev. John Patten of Clonmel, his
choice of a bride giving the greatest satisfaction to his father and
mother.

At first the young couple lived with the old Doctor and his wife, as
part of the one household; but as the little grandchildren began to fill
the nursery, it was found desirable to provide separate establishments.
The Doctor, with this end in view, divided his house in Stephen’s Green,
West, into two portions. It stood (and still stands, divided as the
Doctor left it into two residences) at the corner of Lamb’s Lane and
Stephen’s Green, West,[12] and the Doctor kept the corner portion for
himself and assigned the inner to his son’s family. Thomas Addis Emmet
had, also, as we know from Tone’s “Autobiography,” “a charming villa” at
Rathfarnham, and doubtless the whole family were made welcome in it,
whenever the call of the countryside overbid the attractions of the
town, in the years previous to Dr. Emmet’s purchase of Casino—the
country residence where he spent his last years.

Footnote 12:

  Mr. Reynolds identifies them as 124 and 125 Stephen’s Green, West. In
  Dr. Emmet’s time the house was numbered 109.

The mention of Tone fitly introduces the years of Thomas Addis Emmet’s
public life—his efforts for Catholic Emancipation, his connection with
the United Irishmen. But, as we shall speak more fully of these years
when we come to tell the story of Thomas Addis Emmet’s wife, we shall
content ourselves here with a thought of the anxieties, which must have
been the constant companions of a woman so clever and far-sighted as his
mother. Where was all this leading to? Her son, himself with his clear
grave eyes and resolute heart, knew perfectly well—like the majority of
the leaders of the United Irishmen—that the course in which he was
embarked was one which would, most probably, call for the sacrifice of
all that men hold dear. Brilliant professional prospects; the elegance
and comfort of a home adorned by a charming wife and a band of lovely
children; property and position and the interest in a settled order of
things which they bring with them; life itself—all these Thomas Addis
Emmet saw himself called upon at any moment to renounce for the loyal
service of Ireland. “It is a hard service they take,” indeed, “who serve
the _Poor Old Woman_”! “But, for all that, they think themselves well
paid.”

On March the 12th, 1798, when the Government, acting on the information
of Thomas Reynolds, swooped down on the Leinster Directory of United
Irishmen, assembled in Oliver Bond’s house, Emmet was arrested in his
home in Stephen’s Green and committed to Newgate, from whence he was
afterwards conveyed to Kilmainham. Of his wife’s heroic conduct on that
occasion we shall have an inspiring tale to tell. While her
daughter-in-law shared her husband’s imprisonment, Elizabeth Emmet found
merciful occupation in the care of the five little grandchildren whom
they had confided to her: Robert, Margaret, Elizabeth, John Patten,
Thomas Addis.

In April, the authorities, alarmed by the spirit of patriotism which was
manifesting itself among the students of Trinity College, ordered the
“Visitation,” of which Moore gives an account in his “Memoirs.”

In anticipation of the verdict of Lord Chancellor Fitzgibbon, Robert
Emmet, who was looked on as the leader of the patriot youths, requested
the Board of Fellows to take his name off the books of the college.
During the wild excitement of the next few months: the bloody weeks of
“the Rising” in May and June; the executions and court-martials of July;
the French landing in August; the new executions which followed it, in
September; the capture of Tone in October; his court-martial and death
in November, all through the tragic calendar of the year 1798, Dr. Emmet
and his wife Elizabeth had, at least, the comfort of their younger son’s
constant presence with them.

In this year Dr. Emmet set the houses in Stephen’s Green, and took up
his residence with his family (which now included his grandchildren) in
a country house he had recently purchased for himself, Casino, Milltown.
This historic house still stands, and Mr. Reynolds’s indications make it
easy to locate: “at the corner of Bird Avenue on the eastern side of the
Dundrum Road, midway between Milltown and Windy Arbour.”

Two events of much importance mark the following year (1799) in
Elizabeth Emmet’s maternal calendar. The first was the removal of Thomas
Addis and the other State prisoners to Fort George in the North of
Scotland; the second was the marriage of her daughter, Mary Anne, to the
distinguished barrister, Robert Holmes.

Early in 1800, Robert Emmet visited his brother in Fort George, passing
from thence to the Continent where he remained until after the signing
of the Peace of Amiens in 1802.

Later in the year, Jane Emmet made good the design which her conjugal
affection had long inspired, and which no governmental rebuff could
weaken—that of joining her husband in Fort George. She went there in
July, escorted by her brother, John Patten, and accompanied by her three
elder children, Robert, Margaret, and Elizabeth. With the grandparents
at Casino were left John Patten, Thomas Addis, and a sturdy little chap
called Christopher Emmet, who had joined the goodly company since we
last made the enumeration of them.

During the years Thomas Addis and his wife spent in Fort George there
was a constant interchange of letters between Casino and the grim
northern keep in which the Irish State prisoners were so long interned.
Sometimes the Casino news is conveyed by Dr. Emmet—whose letters remind
us of St. John Mason’s description of his conversation; sometimes it is
Mary Anne Holmes who holds the pen; sometimes it is Kitty, the orphan
daughter of Christopher Temple and Anne Western Temple. But most
frequently it is the mother and in these letters we get our best picture
of the sort of woman Elizabeth Emmet was.[13] There are pleasant
glimpses, too, of the home-life in Casino. We see the father, seeking
solace for his anxieties in his labours in beautifying the house he
fondly hoped was to be the home of his children, and his children’s
children. The thirteen acres around Casino serve the purpose of
Penelope’s web, and the loving wife finds comfort in watching the
amusement he gets from his tree-planting and landscape gardening, his
industry in gravelling the walks and raking them when they have been
gravelled. Convinced that “the promises of hope are better than the
gifts of fortune,” he has built a fine nursery ’gainst the happy day
when all his grandchildren (and their parents) shall be gathered
together under his patriarchal roof; and a certain cherry tree in full
blossom makes him and his wife long to see Jane and her charming
children gathered under it. The Doctor’s craze for transplanting trees
which, to the rest of the family, seem to be perfectly well placed where
they are, has grown into a family joke; but his wife is too well pleased
to see the good effect the interest and occupation have on his health to
protest now, as she was wont to do, even “tho’ from the earliness of the
season and the age of the trees she despairs of ever seeing a leaf upon
any of them.” “As we have a great demand for pea-rods,” she remarks
jestingly, “they will not be useless.” She gathers up all the news she
can about their friends, knowing how welcome such items are to exiles.
Dr. Drennan, who has attended Mary Anne at the birth of her first-born
baby, is happily “married to a very amiable, pretty young woman”; “he
has waited to some good purpose.” We have a pretty etching of the author
of the “Wake of William Orr,” and the famous “Orellana Letters,”
“leaning over the cradle of his little heir, so anxious about it lest it
should die.” Other friends, like Lady Anne Fitzgerald, Ally Spring, the
Temples—and, above all, the Pattens and the Colvilles—find frequent
mention. She does not hesitate to inculcate certain “musty precepts” as
to health, which her knowledge of her son’s and her daughter-in-law’s
dispositions seems to her to call for. Jane must refrain from “the great
efforts of which she is so fond,” for “system is better than swiftness,”
and though “we may admire the speed and power of a racehorse, a steady
draft horse will in general be found as useful and much more durable.”
Both Thomas Addis and Jane are fond, she knows, of heated rooms and late
hours, and their prudent mother reminds them of the necessity of fresh
air in their bed-chamber and living room, and preaches the doctrine of
“early to bed and early to rise.”

Footnote 13:

  They are published at length by Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet in his “Emmet
  Family” (pp. 71-101). They are models of grace and style, and one
  wishes they were in the hands of our women who have so largely lost
  the old-world accomplishment of letter-writing.

But what most people will think the most delightful thing in the letters
are the pictures they give of the children. As has been already
mentioned, the three elder were with their parents in Fort George, and
almost all the State prisoners were lending a hand, each in his own
speciality, to their education. The accounts of their progress interests
their grandmother keenly, and she helps with comments on their
dispositions as she had studied them. She is proud of Elizabeth’s beauty
and goodness of disposition, of Margaret’s shrewdness of observation,
and liberality and directness in dealing; but “the tenderness of
Robert’s tones and the brightness of his countenance give him the
advantage over all the other children whatever.” It is easy to see that
Robert is his grandmother’s favourite, dear as all the children are to
her. A letter from him gives her “great pleasure, for it is a true
picture of his heart, overflowing with innocence, honesty, and good
nature.” She begs for “minute accounts of the three children ...,” she
and her husband “being glad to feed upon crumbs that fall from her son’s
table.” In return she is almost as minute as her son and daughter-in-law
could wish about the three from whom they are separated. She draws a
funny little sketch of the “little fellow,” two-year-old Christopher
Temple, “fighting hard in dumb show for his share in his grandfather’s
claret,” and a little later on “engaging in his elder brother’s plays,
and forcing himself into notice more than the others.” John is the other
grandmother’s favourite, and Tom is pronounced by Ally Spring “the
finest child you have,” but “the little fellow,” as Elizabeth always
calls the baby namesake of her dead first-born, is of all the three
confided to her care the nearest to her heart. We must, however, reserve
further quotations from the letters, as far as they regard her
grandchildren, until we come to discuss their education, at some length,
in our memoir of their mother.

The letters paint the writer as a grave and somewhat reserved nature.
She feels that she has not her husband’s “gracious manner,” which
perhaps prevents her daughter-in-law judging of the strength of her love
for her. She is inclined by nature to melancholy. “Solitude has through
life stuck to me like an inner garment, and I find that it exceeds even
those of the children of Israel; it is a habit that instead of wearing
by time, grows stronger by constant use.” But she has the great anchors
of Faith and Charity. She feels her blessings with a grateful heart, and
wishes to discern and adore the healing hand which has been held out to
her in the midst of trials and distresses, and without which her natural
infirmities must have sunk under the scenes she has gone through. The
most persistent note in this correspondence is that of deep and true
religious feeling and, as we catch it, we seem to understand how it came
about that in the midst of the corrupt society which was that of
eighteenth century Dublin, this woman’s sons were kept chaste and
undefiled—Moore’s tribute to the unspotted youth of Robert comes back to
us, bringing with it unconscious tribute to the pure and exalting
influence of Robert’s mother.

The letters end in 1802, when Thomas Addis Emmet was released from Fort
George and awaited in Brussels certain developments which were to
determine his future movements. Here the news of his father’s death
reached him, and his own letter on that occasion to his mother, which I
have already quoted, brought forth one from her which, apart from its
intrinsic interest, must have ever borne in the eyes of her son a
priceless value, for when he received it, the hand that had penned it
was long mouldering into dust. It was addressed to the _Poste Restante_,
New York, and only reached its addressee on his arrival in that city in
November 11th, 1804.

In the interval the race of Emmet had been practically exterminated in
the land for which they had given so much. The death of Elizabeth Emmet
on September 9th, 1803, was followed by her youngest son’s execution a
few weeks later. In 1804 Mary Anne Holmes died most tragically in the
arms of her husband, newly liberated from prison. One guesses that the
little children, John, and Tom, and Temple, were then taken care of by
their Grandmother Patten, until an opportunity could be found of sending
them across the Atlantic to their parents. They had gone with
Grandmother Emmet, when she left Casino, after her husband’s death, to
take up her residence in Blomfield, Donnybrook. And, no doubt, Mary Anne
Holmes and poor cousin Kitty did what they could to care for them and
comfort them. But if the pathos of the scene drawn by Madden of the
death chamber of Elizabeth Emmet could have borne any heightening,
doubtless he would have introduced in it the tiny figures of three
little frightened, sable-clad boys, standing hand in hand for comfort,
and weeping—though they knew it not—for the tragedy of the passing of
their house from Irish soil.

                  The Mother of Lord Edward Fitzgerald

            EMILIA MARY, DUCHESS OF LEINSTER (1731-1814)[14]

 “And the flower I held brightest of all that grew in soil or shall ever
    grow
 Is rotting in the ground, and will spring no more to lift up my heart.”
                                —_A Father’s Keen_, by Patrick O’Hegarty.

Footnote 14:

  _Authorities_: Moore’s “Life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald”; Campbell’s
  “Edward and Pamela Fitzgerald,” “Letters of Horace Walpole,” works of
  Mrs. Delaney, etc.

“GREATER love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for
his friends.”—(_John_ xv. 13). Ever since that June dawn, when its first
sweet rays, stealing through the bars of the prison window in Newgate,
fell on the form that lay rigid and still on the prison bed, we know
what was “the greatest love” in Lord Edward’s life. For on that sad bed,
still disordered from the tossings of his fever-racked limbs, still
stained with his life-blood, there lay one _who had died for Ireland_.

By the supreme test, therefore, vouched for by the Supreme Lover, we
know that the love of Ireland was Lord Edward’s “greatest love,” and
that all other loves of his had to yield to its supremacy. But we can
only measure the magnitude of his love for Ireland, if we have the
measure of his other loves to set beside it. And so it falls out, that
we have a particular need, if we would estimate Lord Edward aright, and
would understand what he had to offer to Ireland, to know something of
his other loves, and of those who inspired them. Above all we must know
something of his extraordinary love for his mother.

His letters are full of it: “I am never so happy as when with you,
dearest mother, you seem to make every distress lighter, and I bear
everything better, and enjoy everything more when with you.” And again:
“You cannot think how I feel to want you here. I dined and slept at
Frescati the other day, Ogilvie and I, _tête-à-tête_. We talked a great
deal of you. Though the place makes me melancholy, yet it gives one
pleasant feelings. To be sure, the going to bed without wishing you a
good night; the coming down in a morning, and not seeing you; the
sauntering about in the fine sunshine, looking at your flowers and
shrubs without you to lean upon one, was all very bad indeed. In
settling my journey that evening, I determined to see you in my way,
supposing you were even a thousand miles out of it.”

There is one letter to the “dearest of mothers,” in which he places his
love for her above all else: “I assure you I miss you very, very much. I
am not half so merry as I should be if you were here. I get tired of
everything, and want to have you to go and talk to. _You are, after all,
what I love best in the world._ I love you more than I think I do; but I
will not give way to such thoughts, for it always makes me grave. I
really made myself miserable for two days since I left you, by this sort
of reflections; and in thinking over with myself what misfortunes I
_could_ bear, I found there was one I _could not_; but God bless you.”

Was it Lord Edward’s surpassing love for his mother, that made her, on
her side, single him out among all her children to lavish her tenderness
on; or did she recognise in his great capacity for love a heritage from
her own nature which drew this son closer to her than any other child
she had ever borne? It is certain that of her numerous children—they
counted twenty-one in all—Lord Edward was his mother’s favourite, and
was accepted as such by the rest of the family. Mr. Gerald Campbell
thinks her very frankness in avowing her preference for him prevented
any jealousy among the others. Among the seventy or eighty letters of
the Duchess to her daughters and others which Mr. Campbell examined
before writing his charming book, “Edward and Pamela Fitzgerald,” there
is hardly one, he tells us, “in which she does not express her exceeding
love for him above all the rest.” He quotes: “Dear, dear Eddy! How
constantly he is in my thoughts!” “In Edward nothing surprises me, dear
angel; he has always loved me in an uncommon degree from childhood.” “I
do not pretend to say that Dearest Angel Edward is not the first object:
you have all been used to allow me that indulgence of partiality to him,
and none of you, I believe, blame me for it, or see my excessive
attachment to that Dear Angel with a jealous eye.” The truth is that
Lord Edward had to an extraordinary degree, the gift, so often accorded
as a birthright to persons with a great work to do in the world, of
winning hearts. And probably his own brothers and sisters were as ready
to succumb to his magnetism as the rest of the world.

It would not be surprising if Lord Edward inherited his power of winning
hearts, as well as his capacity for love, from his fascinating mother,
and she, in her turn, wielded it in virtue of her Stuart blood. For she
was the great-granddaughter of Charles II and the beautiful Louise de
Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth. Of the numerous daughters of her
father and mother, the Duke and Duchess of Richmond, four grew to
womanhood, and of these Lady Emilia Mary was the second. All four were
famous for their great beauty and charm; and all four have played a
notable part in history. Lady Caroline, who married Stephen Fox,
afterwards Lord Holland, was the mother of the brilliant statesman,
Charles James Fox. Lady Louisa married Mr. Connolly, of Castletown. Lady
Sarah, some years after the unfortunate termination of her first
marriage with Sir Charles Bunbury, married Colonel Napier and became the
mother of many distinguished soldier sons, including Sir William Napier,
the historian of the Peninsular Wars, and Sir Charles Napier, the
conqueror of Scinde.

I do not know why the novelists who have found in the life romance of
the four beautiful Lennox girls such a wealth of material should have
passed over the love-story of their parents. It is, if possible, more
romantic than any of them. The story is told by their grandson, Mr.
Henry Napier, and published in the introduction to the “Life and Letters
of Lady Sarah Lennox” (pp. 85-87), his mother:

“My grandfather, the second Duke of Richmond, was one of the Lords of
the Bedchamber to King George the Second, who then resided at Kensington
Palace. He had been, as was the custom in those days, married while yet
a boy to Lady Sarah Cadogan.... This marriage was made to cancel a
gambling debt, the young people’s consent having been the last thing
thought of; the Earl of March[15] was sent for from school, and the
young lady from her nursery, a clergyman was in attendance, and they
were told they were immediately to become man and wife! The young lady
is not reported to have uttered a word; the gentleman exclaimed, ‘They
surely are not going to marry me to that dowdy!’ The ceremony, however,
took place; a postchaise was ready at the door, and Lord March was
instantly packed off with his tutor to make the ‘_grand tour_,’ while
his young wife was returned to the care of her mother, a Dutch woman,
daughter of William Munster, Counsellor of Holland. After some years
spent abroad Lord March returned, a well-educated handsome young man,
but with no very agreeable recollections of his wife. Wherefore, instead
of at once seeking his own home, he went directly to the Opera or
Theatre, where he amused himself between the acts in examining the
company. He had not long been occupied in this manner when a very young
and beautiful woman more especially struck his fancy, and turning to a
gentleman beside him he asked who she was. ‘You must be a stranger in
London,’ replied the gentleman, ‘not to know the toast of the town, the
beautiful Lady March.’ Agreeably surprised at this intelligence, Lord
March proceeded to the box, announced himself, and claimed his bride—the
very dowdy whom he had so scornfully rejected some years before, but
with whom he afterwards lived so happily that she died of a broken heart
within the year of his decease, which took place in Godalming, in
Surrey, in August, 1750, when my mother was only five years and a few
months old.”

Footnote 15:

  The title borne by the hero of the story while his father, the first
  Duke of Richmond, was still alive.

  EMILY, COUNTESS OF KILDARE
  The Mother of Lord Edward Fitzgerald
]

The conjugal affection which ever afterwards united the hero and heroine
of this pretty romance receives emphatic testimony from Horace Walpole.
In the gossip he gathers up for his correspondents their names figure
frequently; and while he jests maliciously about the Duke’s “pride and
Stuartism,” and the Duchess’s “grandeur,” he is an enthusiastic admirer
of her Grace’s beauty, and his cynicism is not proof against the
spectacle of her love for her husband, and her devotion to her children.
Like her daughter, the Duchess of Leinster, she had an extraordinarily
large family—twenty-six, as we learn from Horace Walpole[16]—but as was
so often the case in these enormous eighteenth-century families—but a
small proportion of them survived their infancy. We have a pretty
picture of the Duchess and her husband (“who sat by his wife all night
kissing her hand”) at the ball given by “long Sir Thomas Robinson” for
“the Duke’s little girl,” Lady Caroline Lennox, in October, 1741. “The
beauties,” he informs his Florentine correspondent, Sir Horace Mann,
“were the Duke of Richmond’s two daughters,[17] and their mother, still
handsomer than they.” At the Duchess of Norfolk’s great “masquerade” of
February 17th, 1742, to which Royalty went, ablaze with diamonds, and
where “quantities of pretty Vandykes, and all kinds of old pictures
walked out of their frames,” the “two finest and most charming masks,”
in Mr. Walpole’s opinion, “were their Graces of Richmond, like Henry the
Eighth and Jane Seymour, excessively rich, and both so handsome!”[18]

Footnote 16:

  “Letters,” II., 221.

Footnote 17:

  “Letters,” I., 85. The editor of the Walpole “Letters,” identifies the
  second of these girls as Lady Emily, our heroine, but it seems very
  unlikely, as she was only ten years old at the date of this ball.

Footnote 18:

  _Ibid._, p. 146.

Owing to their father’s position at Court, the little Lennox girls were
well known to the old king, George II, and prime favourites with him. He
was Lady Emily’s godfather, and the christening cup he gave her is still
preserved at Carton. He was delighted, beyond measure, when one day,
taking his constitutional on the broad walk at Kensington, he saw a
charming little maid rush from her French _bonne_ and come bounding up
to him with a saucy “_Comment vous portez vous Monsieur le Roi, vous
avez une grande et belle maison ici, n’est ce pas?_” It was little Lady
Sarah Lennox, and the king, having discovered her identity, invited her
_bonne_ to carry her often to see his “_grande et belle maison_.” The
children learned to speak French before they spoke English, and Lady
Emily, in particular, showed herself all through life an enthusiastic
admirer of French literature, and very accessible to the new ideas of
which that literature made itself the vehicle. Horace Walpole tells us
of the delight he experienced, on one occasion when he had invited her
and her sister, Lady Caroline, with their husbands, Lord Kildare and Mr.
Fox, to Strawberry Hill, and the weather turned out too wet to show his
company the wonders of his castle and grounds, to find that Lady Kildare
was “_a true Sévignist_.” “You know,” he remarks to his correspondent,
Richard Bentley, “what pleasure I have in any increase in our sect”
(_i.e._ the cult of Madame de Sévigné). “I thought she looked handsomer
than ever, as she talked of _Notre Dame des Rochers_.”[19] Later on, we
hear from Mrs. Delany of her admiration for Rousseau, and his theories
of education; and we know from one of her daughters that her great
interest in education made her a diligent reader of Madame de Genlis.
She seems to have spent much time in her girlhood with her mother’s
relations in Holland, and this fact, together with the French influences
which presided over her education, gave her a European point of view,
which was in striking contrast with the insularity of the majority of
English-women of her class and generation. Doubtless, this
cosmopolitanism of his mother’s was, also, not without its effect on
Lord Edward.

Footnote 19:

  A name given by Horace Walpole to Madame de Sévigné, of whose
  “Letters” he was a devoted enthusiast. He sometimes calls her “_Notre
  Dame de Livry_”—_Les Rochers_ and _Livry_ were the names of her
  country seats.

In 1744, her elder sister, Lady Caroline, eloped with Mr. Henry Fox, to
the great displeasure of the Richmonds. “The town,” writes Horace
Walpole to his namesake in Florence (May 27th, 1744) “has been in a
great bustle about a private match; but which by the ingenuity of the
ministry, has been made politics. Mr. Fox fell in love with Lady
Caroline Lennox, asked her, was refused, and stole her. His father was a
footman;[20] her great grandfather, a king: _hinc illae lacrymae_.”

Footnote 20:

  Sir Stephen Fox was said originally to have been a choir-boy in
  Salisbury Cathedral. He died, after a romantic career, and having held
  office under four sovereigns—Charles II, James II, King William, and
  Queen Anne—one of the wealthiest men in England.

It was only after some years, and when the birth of Lady Caroline’s
eldest little boy made the struggle between tenderness and pride in her
parents’ hearts incline overwhelmingly towards the former, that they
consented to a reconciliation. The touching letter which the Duke
addresses to his daughter on this occasion has been published by the
Princess Liechtenstein in her book on “Holland House” (pp. 68-72), and
will be read with interest by all who have learned to like Lord Edward’s
maternal grandfather and grandmother, from Horace Walpole’s account of
them.

One consequence of Lady Caroline’s runaway marriage was to make the Duke
and Duchess of Richmond extra careful about the chaperonage of their
second daughter, Lady Emily. Horace Walpole has an amusing story to tell
in this connection of a little “set-to” between the Duchess of Richmond
and the witty but eccentric Duchess of Queensberry. “There is a very
good quarrel on foot between two duchesses: she of Queensberry sent to
invite Lady Emily Lennox to a ball: her Grace of Richmond, who is
wonderfully cautious since Lady Caroline’s elopement, sent word ‘she
could not determine.’ The other sent again the same night: the same
answer. The Queensberry then sent word, that she had made up her
company, and desired to be excused from having Lady Emily’s; but at the
bottom of the card wrote, ‘Too great a trust.’”[21]

Footnote 21:

  Letter to Sir Horace Mann, March 29, 1745.

Carefully guarded as Lady Emily might be, the town was soon busy with
her name. When Prince Lobkowitz arrived in England in the beginning of
1745 and was observed to pay great attention to the Duke of Richmond’s
charming daughter, it was immediately reported that they would make a
match of it. The gossip even reached Mrs. Dewes, deep in the provinces,
and in reply to a question she puts her sister, Mrs. Delany, about it,
the latter gives the accepted version of the story:[22] “You were not
quite misinformed about Lady Emily Lennox and Prince Lobkowitz; he _was_
in love with her and made proposals of marriage, but the Emperor would
not consent on some foolish reason of State. I never heard that Lady
Emily was in any way engaged to him, and everything is agreed on between
her and Lord Kildare, and my Lady Kildare is come over for the wedding.
Prince Lob. was in England last year.”

Footnote 22:

  Letter to Mrs. Dewes, November 7, 1746.

Well informed as Mrs. Delany prided herself on being, it is not to be
expected that she would know as much about the matter as Lady Emily
herself; and fortunately we have in a letter of the latter’s addressed
to her friend, Hon. Anne Hamilton,[23] her version of the incident. As
the letter gives a vivid idea of our heroine as a lively girl, of
fourteen or fifteen, and of the sort of society in which she moved, it
is worth reproducing.

Footnote 23:

  Afterwards Countess of Roden. The letters of Lady Emily to Miss
  Hamilton are in the possession of the Earl of Roden and have been
  published by the Marquis of Kildare in his “Earls of Kildare,” Second
  Addenda, 1866, p. 76 _et seq._

“Prince Lobkowitz, who I believe you remember a giddy, good-natured wild
young man, as any in the world, was coming to Goodwood, and has had a
fall off his horse, so that I fancy he won’t be here this good while; _a
propos_ to him I must make you laugh and tell you what the Town says,
_he is in love with me_, I very much so with him, but his relatives
don’t care he should marry a Protestant, though as he is his own master
that would be no objection, but that Papa and Mamma, great as he is,
won’t part with me, and besides have other views for me; is not this a
pretty story. I assure you ’tis told for certain all over the Town, and
several of my friends have told me of it. The truth of the matter is, he
is vastly fashionable, and as I happen to speak French and to know most
of his acquaintances in Holland, he takes it into his head to talk a
good deal to me, and you know in London two people can never talk
together a quarter of an hour but they must immediately either be in
love or to be married. They say also that the Venetian ambassadrice is
in love with him and with rather more truth, for she really behaves very
ridiculously about him.[24] As you love these sort of things I must tell
you a ridiculous thing enough. Prince Lobkowitz was one night at supper
at the Venetian ambassadrice’s and the Prince of Wales sent for him,
upon which he went and she was excessively angry with him for leaving
her to go; in joking she said since he would go she would keep his hat.
Accordingly the next morning she cut the hat into a million of little
pieces and sent it to him with her compliments. About a week after he
told her a pye which he had promised her had come from Germany, upon
which she invited a vast deal of company to dinner, and when she came to
open the pye, behold it was the bits of hat which she had sent him. I
think it gives one a very good notion of them both.”

Footnote 24:

  Some of the pranks of this lady, which created a sensation, even in
  the irresponsible society of the period, are related with great
  _verve_ by Horace Walpole.

Very soon after, “the Town” had given her a new suitor—and this time
with more reason. As early as April 15th, 1746, Mr. Horace Walpole was
able to report to Sir Horace Mann that the Duke of Richmond “has refused
his beautiful Lady Emily to Lord Kildare, the richest and first peer of
Ireland, on a ridiculous notion of the King’s evil being in the family.”
The Earl persisted in his suit, and the Duke’s objections were finally
overcome so that by the end of the year we find Lady Emily writing to
her friend “Nancy” Hamilton to announce her betrothal. “In short, in
order that the whole town of London should not tell a lye, Lord Kildare
desires to make them speak truth, and as Papa and Mamma have no
objection to it. I am willing to save them from this and heartily wish
they would tell no more.” A little after the announcement of the
engagement, Mrs. Delany met the beautiful bride-elect at the Prince of
Wales’s “Birthday” in Leicester House, and waxes enthusiastic in a
letter to her sister, Mrs. Dewes (January 21, 1747), over her
loveliness. Even the hideous dress of the moment (“hoops of enormous
size and most people wear vast winkers to their heads”), which make
other women look like “blown bladders,” could not destroy Lady Emily’s
exquisite beauty. “The reigning beauty I think among the young things is
Miss Carpenter, Lord Carpenter’s daughter, and since Lady Dysart was
fifteen I have never seen anything so handsome; but the prize of beauty
is disputed with her by Lady Emily Lennox. She is indeed ‘like some tall
stately tower’; the other is ‘some Virgin Queen’s delicious bower!’”

The marriage took place on February 7th, 1747, when the bride was a
little over sixteen. Horace Walpole has the record of the event in the
chronicle he sends his friend in Florence on February 23rd, 1747. “Lord
Kildare is married to the charming Lady Emily Lennox, who went the very
next day to see her sister, Lady Caroline Fox, to the great
mortification of the haughty Duchess-mother. They have not given her a
shilling, but the King endows her by making Lord Kildare a
Viscount-Sterling[25] and they talk of giving him a pinchbeck dukedom,
too, to keep him always first peer of Ireland.”

Footnote 25:

  That is an _English_ viscount, in contrast to the “pinchbeck” of an
  Irish title.

It was quite true that Lady Kildare (who, in common with the rest of the
family, had been forbidden all intercourse with Lady Caroline since the
latter had married Mr. Fox in opposition to their parents’ wishes) made
immediate use of the liberty conferred by her new position to visit her
sister. Lord Kildare and she urged a reconciliation, with more zeal
perhaps than discretion. In the letter of the Duke to Lady Caroline to
which I have already referred, he complains very bitterly of the tone
adopted by the Kildares, “who instead of makeing entreatys, were pleas’d
to tell your mother that wee _ought_ to forgive you, and were blamed by
the world, and by themselves for not doing it, which is a language I
would hear from nobody, and indeed when they saw how it was received,
they did not think fit to repeat it. And I assure you my reconcilement
to you has been defer’d upon this account, for I will have both them and
yourselves know that it proceeds from the tenderness arising in our own
breasts for you, and not from their misjudg’d aplication.”

The first few months after the marriage were spent by Lord and Lady
Kildare in England and the young wife’s letters to her girl friend are
full of bridal happiness. But her “dearest Nanny” is not to think that
when she says she is happy, “it is from being her own mistress, doing
just what she please, and all the fuss and racket.” “No, believe me,
that my happiness, thank God, is upon a better foundation. It is from
being marry’d to the person I love best in the world, and who is the
best and kindest of husbands.”

James, twentieth Earl of Kildare, was just twenty-five at the time of
his marriage, and had succeeded his father, Robert, nineteenth Earl,
three years previously. His young Countess might well find him “the best
and kindest of husbands,” for he was one of the best and kindest of men,
much concerned for the welfare of his people and his country, and taking
a serious view of the duties and responsibilities of his great position.
He was the leader of the popular party in the Irish House of Lords, and
when the corrupt administration under the Duke of Dorset and Primate
Stone had become intolerable to the people he took the bold step of
presenting a memorial against them to King George II. His brave fight
with tyranny and corruption made him the idol of the populace, and on
one occasion “he was an entire hour passing through the crowd from
Parliament House to Kildare House, and a medal was struck to commemorate
the memorial, representing the Earl, sword in hand, guarding a heap of
money on a table from a hand which attempted to take it, with the motto,
‘Touch not, says Kildare.’”

By July, 1747, the young Earl and Countess were back in Ireland settled
for the moment at Dollardstown. The Dowager Countess and Lady Margot,
the Earl’s sister, came on a visit to them, and these with Miss
Brudenell, the young Countess’s companion, and a couple of men friends
of the Earl’s, make up a party very much to the bride’s taste. “We read,
work, write and walk,” she informs her confidante Miss “Nanny.” They are
presently to take up residence in Carton, which the Dowager Lady Kildare
has given over to her son and his bride, having completed it after her
husband’s death and furnished it for the young people from top to
bottom—even to “the table linen.” It would be ungrateful of the new
Countess—after this generosity on the part of her mother-in-law—to seem
indifferent about Carton, but in truth she leaves the simplicity of
Dollardstown for the grandeur of Carton with much regret.

A few weeks later we find our young people in residence at Carton, with
the elder Lady Kildare and her daughter, Lady Margot, as their guests.
The young wife, one gathers, stands a little in awe of her grave,
reserved mother-in-law, whose manner “until ye are well acquainted with
it, is not very taking.” But she is quite in love with Lady Margot,
“whom she [_i.e._ the Dowager] is very strict with.” She is “really
charming, and I find I shall grow vastly fond of her. She is vastly
lively, very sensible and a very open heart, for she always speaks her
mind, and has a very open heart.” In a later letter she makes merry over
the compassion she received from those friends who thought it “a very
dismal thing for her” to have to leave London—the new London house the
Earl had bought for her in Whitehall—“to come with the person in the
world I love best, who studies how to please me and make me happy more
and more every day, to a very pretty country where I meet with nothing
but civilities from everybody, to a whole family who are agreeable and
cheerful and vastly fond of me, and to a country where I have a charming
house building [Leinster House], a sweet place [Leinster Lodge] which
you know I always delight in, and another pretty place [Carton].
Certainly I deserve great compassion for all this.”

While “her charming great house” was a-building, the Earl took a town
house for his bride’s first winter in Dublin in Stephen’s Green, and she
did the honours of her great position by giving some large parties in
it. She enters with great zest into her Lord’s building and improvement
schemes. Beautiful Leinster House, perhaps the most perfect creation of
Richard Castle’s architectural genius, was nearing its completion, and
although her health does not permit her to share her Lord’s weekly visit
to Carton, she keeps _au courant_ with all that is being done there.
“Lord Kildare has cut down the avenue, which I am sure makes it
charming, and has made a very fine lawn before the House, which I think
is the greatest beauty a place can have.”

A few weeks after the date of this letter, her first child George, Lord
Offaly, was born (January 15th, 1748) and the young mother’s cup of
happiness seemed full to overflowing. She was one of those women who
have the genius and the passion of maternity, and much of her sweetness
was due to this characteristic. During the following years her letters
to her friend are full of the pretty children who have followed George
into her nursery at quick intervals. William, her second son, afterwards
Duke of Leinster, was born in March, 1749, and the Countess’s first
little girl arrived in August of the following year. Her friend receives
an entertaining account of the small bundle of femininity: “in the first
place her name is Caroline Elizabeth Mabel. Caroline after my sister,
Elizabeth after the old Lady Kildare in London, and Mabel to please Mr.
Fox, who had entertained himself while he was here in reading over old
manuscripts and letters belonging to the Kildare family, in which he
found there had been a great many Mabels, and therefore begged we would
tack it on to the other two, which was done accordingly. And now ye have
the history of her name. I will tell you she is in the first place fat
and plump, has very fine dark long eyes which I think a great beauty,
don’t you? and her nose and mouth like my mother’s, with a peaked chin
like me. As for her complexion she is so full of red gum that there is
no judging of it, but what is best of all is that she is in perfect
health and has been so ever since she was born. But it’s not fair to her
brothers to entertain you only about her without mentioning them.” And
so we get a charming picture of the two little boys, and incidentally a
glimpse of their pretty young nineteen year-old mother in the midst of
them: “To begin with George. He is in the first place much improved as
to his beauty, but the most entertaining, comical arch little rogue that
ever was, chatters incessantly, is immensely fond of me, and coaxes me
not a little, for he is cunning enough, very sweet tempered and easily
governed by gentle means, in short if I was to sit down and wish for a
child it would be just such a sort of boy as he is now. William is a
sweet child, too, in a different way, he is not so lively or active as
George is by a good deal, but is forward enough both as to his walking
and talking, for he says several words and walks quite alone. As for his
little person it is fat, round and white as he was when you saw him, and
does not improve as to that; he is the best-natured creature that can
be, and excessively passionate already, but puts up his mouth to kiss
and be friends the very next moment. He is vastly fond of his nurse and
does not care twopence for me, so you may imagine I cannot for my life
be as fond of him (though in reality I love him as well) as of George,
who is always coaxing and kissing me, and does not care for anybody
else.”

The poor young mother was to have the great grief of seeing two of these
pretty children die young. Lord Offaly died in 1765 at the age of
seventeen, and was succeeded as heir, by William. Little Caroline died
in 1754 at the age of four. The fatality which, as has been already
observed, pursued the large eighteenth-century families, did not spare
our beautiful Countess’s. Of the nineteen children (nine sons and ten
daughters) she bore her lord during the twenty-six years of their
married life there only survived the years of childhood six sons:
William, Charles, Henry, Edward, Robert, Gerald; and four daughters:
Emily (afterwards Countess of Bellamont), Charlotte (afterwards Baroness
Rayleigh), Sophia, and Lucy.

In the meantime, knowing nothing of what the future has in store for
her, the Countess is a very happy woman. The improvements at Carton, in
which she is so interested, have been a great success, and no wonder she
longs to go there and see how “her spotted cows” look on the new lawn
from which the Earl has cleared some hedges since she was there last.
Did she ever tell her friend of her passion for spotted cows? She
believes not: “You have no notion what a delightful beautiful collection
of them I have got in a very short time, which indeed is owing to my
dear Lord Kildare, who ever since I took this fancy into my head has
bought me every pretty cow he saw. It’s really charming to see them
grazing on the lawn.”

So, with her children, the part she took in her husband’s plans for the
improvement of his estate, and his tenantry, her social duties, her
frequent visits to England, the years of the Countess’s married life
passed swiftly and happily. Mrs. Delany meets her occasionally in Dublin
society, but one gets the impression that Lady Kildare keeps the Dean of
Down’s lady at some little distance, and that may account for the rather
bitter tone in which the latter speaks of the Countess. The Dowager
Countess was a great friend of Mrs. Delany’s, by whom she was frequently
visited in London, and whom she visited at Delville. But it is
significant enough that the mistress of Delville, having invited to
breakfast Mrs. Vesey and Lady Kildare, “Lord Kildare would not let his
lady venture so far.” On another occasion Mrs. Delany went with Mrs.
Vesey and their friend Letitia Basle to visit Carton, and call on Lady
Kildare and Lady Caroline Fox. But they found nobody but the Dowager “at
home,” and were not even invited to dinner. These experiences are
probably at the bottom of Mrs. Delany’s evident acrimony against the
Countess. Writing to her sister, Mrs. Dewes about Rousseau, who, during
a sojourn of his in England, was the guest of their brother, Bernard
Grenville, Mrs. Delany warns her of the danger he may be “to young and
unstable minds ... as under the guise of pomp and virtue he does advance
very erroneous and unorthodox sentiments. It is not the _bon ton_ who
say this, but I am too near _the day of trial_ to disturb my mind with
fashionable whims. Lady Kildare said she would ‘offer Rousseau an
elegant retreat, if he would educate her children.’ I own I differ
widely with her ladyship, and would rather commit that charge to a
downright honest person. I mean as far as religious principles; but
perhaps that was a part that did not enter into her schemes at all.”
When the Duchess, as she then was, startled her friends by her second
marriage to Mr. Ogilvie, Mrs. Delany’s observations on the event were in
the worst possible taste. After a little tilt at her as “one of the
proudest and most expensive women in the world,” this typical Mrs. John
Bull, with all the unctuous priggishness and fondness for innuendo of
her class, quotes a horrid jest of Lady Brown’s, and proceeds to bestow
her quite uncalled-for pity on the Duchess’s “poor children.” It is easy
to suppose that our charming and clever Lady Kildare found herself bored
to death with Mrs. Delany, and her hideous shell-work, and the other
atrocities on which she lavished her time (with the profound conviction
that she was setting an example for all womanhood), and that she
committed the unforgivable offence of avoiding her as much as she could.

At the Coronation of King George III, in September, 1761, our Countess,
then the mother of ten children, walked in the procession of the
peeresses and, according to Horace Walpole’s account of the proceedings
to Hon. H. S. Conway, was with her sister-in-law, the Duchess of
Richmond, and Lady Pembroke, “the chief beauties.” To the Countess of
Ailesbury he compares this trio to “the Graces.” To George Montagu he
speaks of “Lady Kildare, still beauty itself, if not a little too
large.” It is clear that her Ladyship’s beauty was not the transient
thing which passed with the passing of youth. She was forty-eight when
Sir Joshua Reynolds painted the portrait of her, which is still in
Kilkee Castle. “What a beautiful head!” cried Edmund Burke in a rapture
of admiration, when he saw the portrait in his friend’s studio. “Sir
Joshua with much feeling replied: ‘It does not please me yet; there is a
sweetness of expression in the original which I have not been able to
give to the portrait, and therefore cannot think it finished.’”

In 1766 the Earl, who had been made to suffer as much as the
administration dared for the bold stand he had taken in Irish politics,
received at last the “_pinchbeck dukedom_” which had been promised him
nearly twenty years ago. Government was as kind to him now, as it had
been averse to him before; and lucrative offices were offered him in
quick succession. But death took him from the midst of his splendour,
and one November day in the year 1773 he was carried from the beautiful
home he had built for himself in Leinster House to the family vault in
Christ Church, where his ashes await the resurrection.

The Duchess, after a short widowhood, married, to the consternation of
most of her friends, and the scandal of the Mrs. Delanys, her sons’
Scotch tutor, Mr. Ogilvie. The marriage, contrary to expectation, turned
out extremely well. Under a rather dry and unattractive exterior Mr.
Ogilvie had a kind heart, and was most devoted to his step-children,
who, on their side (and this is true of Lord Edward in a special
degree), were very fond of him. Lady Sarah Bunbury,[26] writing from her
brother-in-law, Mr. Connolly’s place at Castletown, to her friend, Lady
Susan O’Brien, shortly after the marriage took place, hints that the
Duchess had been forced to the step she had taken, by “the impertinence”
of her daughter, Lady Emily, who had recently married the dissipated
Earl of Bellamont, to her mother’s intense displeasure. It further
appears, she told her son (William, Duke of Leinster), her
mother-in-law, and her sister (Lady Louise Connolly) that she thought it
very possible she should marry Mr. Ogilvie. They all agreed in the same
thing for answer, that they could not _wish it_, but if she was happy it
was all they wished; and that she could not choose a person she had a
better opinion of and had more regard for. With such a sanction, you
would perhaps think there was nothing for her to do, but to inform her
brother (the Duke of Richmond) of her marriage _tout simplement_, but I
wish you had seen the affectionate, the reasonable manner in which she
wrote to my brother, and indeed to all her friends. One of her
expressions to him is, ‘I am content that you should call me a fool, and
an _old fool_, that you should blame me, and say you did not think me
capable of such a folly; talk me over, say what you please, but remember
that all I ask of you is your affection and tenderness.’ My brother says
there is no resisting her owning herself in the wrong, and begging so
hard to be loved, so you see the good effect of meekness; I assure you
my sister _gains_ friends instead of losing any by her manner.

Footnote 26:

  Letter of July 29th, 1775, “Letters,” I., pp. 240-241.

After her second marriage the Duchess and her husband, Mr. Ogilvie,
taking the younger children with them, went to live in France, where her
grace’s brother, the Duke of Richmond, had put his house at Aubigny at
their service. Here the two little Ogilvie girls were born, Cecilia and
Emily, and were made heartily welcome to the family circle by their
kind-hearted half-brothers and sisters, the Fitzgeralds. In the meantime
these boys and girls were going on with their studies under Mr.
Ogilvie’s direction, and the successful careers of Lord Charles and Lord
Gerald in the navy, Lord Edward in the army, Lord Henry in politics, and
Lord Robert in diplomacy were largely due to the skill and prudence with
which Mr. Ogilvie directed their preparatory studies.

In 1780 the family returned to Ireland, and the Duchess saw her brood of
boys scatter for their first flight. For the next six or seven years
she, with her girls, divided her time between Ireland and England. But
from 1785 to 1787 she was settled in Dublin with Lord Edward, back for a
portion of the time, under her wing, and her girls going out a good deal
under the chaperonage of the young Duchess of Leinster, and their aunt,
Lady Louisa Connolly. In the summer of 1787 we learn from Lady Sarah
Napier that the Duchess was in Barège for the sake of Lady Lucy’s
health, and she was looking forward to the pleasure of being joined by
three of her sons, when news of Lord Gerald’s death at sea reached her.
From 1788 the Duchess took up her permanent abode in London, probably
with the idea of getting her daughters suitably settled. As regards Lady
Charlotte these expectations were fulfilled the following year when she
married Mr. Strutt.

In 1788 and 1789 Lord Edward was in Canada and his letters to his mother
describing his adventures, “deep in Canadian woods” and on the banks of
Canadian lakes and rivers, were looked forward to with great eagerness
by the Duchess, and passed from hand to hand among the family circle,
even finding their way from London to Castletown, for Lady Louisa
Connolly’s and Lady Sarah Napier’s delectation. “He writes,” the latter
informs her friend, “the most natural and pretty account of his journey
you ever read, comments on the spirit of the chase, the melancholy end
of it, the inferior passions of hunger driving away pity, his low
spirits when he thinks of all his friends, and ends: ‘My dear mother, I
fear we are all beasts and love ourselves best.’” Lord Edward was a
special favourite of his aunt, Lady Sarah, and nothing that befel “this
dear spirited boy” left her cold. One of the most delightful spectacles
in the world was to see how he brought his love-troubles to her and to
“his dearest mother” with the full certainty of their sympathy and help,
and understanding.

He had been for some time deeply in love with his cousin, Georgina,
daughter of Lord George Lennox, but the young lady’s father would not
consent to the match and married the girl to Henry Bathurst, Lord
Apsley. By an unfortunate chance Lord Edward, arriving in England,
unexpectedly from Canada, drove up to his mother’s house in Harley
Street at the very moment she was giving a dinner-party in honour of the
bridal pair.

Disappointed in love, Lord Edward threw himself eagerly into politics,
and devoted his time to his duties in the Irish Parliament. On the
outbreak of the French Revolution he hurried to Paris, and in the
enthusiasm with which he adopted revolutionary principles, he took the
extreme step of “renouncing” his title, and in consequence of this he
was dismissed from the English army.

In December, 1792, Lord Edward married Pamela, who was generally
believed to be the daughter of the Duke of Orleans and Madame de Genlis.
The marriage cannot have been much to the liking of the Duchess. But,
like the wise woman she was, she offered no opposition to her son’s
choice, once she saw his heart was set on it, and when he came to her a
few weeks later to present his bride to her, she opened wide her heart
and arms to “the dear, little, pale, pretty wife.”

During the five years that followed, Lord Edward and Pamela kept in the
closest possible touch with the Duchess through a constant
correspondence and frequent visits. But it was only one portion of his
existence which her son revealed to his loving mother. There is no hint
of politics, of the stern business which was to be wound up in the
bloody liquidation of “’Ninety-Eight,” in the letters which “Eddy”
writes in the open bay window of the little book-room in Frescati, with
the birds pouring out their song and the perfumed garden its fragrance
all around him. It is of her flowers and shrubs he tells the Duchess, “I
believe there never was a person who understood planting and making a
place as you do. The more one sees of Carton and this place [Frescati]
the more one admires them; the mixture of plants and the succession of
them are so well arranged.” He gladdens her heart with a description of
Frescati and the shrubs she had planted, in all their June loveliness.
“All the shrubs are out, lilac, laburnum, syringa, spring roses, and
lily of the valley”—in short the whole is heavenly. He seeks her
approval for his own gardening plans and labours: he has had the little
green full mowed and rolled, the little mound of earth that is round the
bays and myrtle before the house planted with tufts of gentianellas and
primroses, and lily of the valley, and they look beautiful, peeping out
of the dark evergreen; close to the root of the great elm he has put a
patch of lily of the valley. A fine February morning finds him “digging
round roots of trees, raking ground and planting laurels,” and planning
to have hyacinths, jonquils, pinks, cloves, narcissi in little beds
before the house and in the rosery. If his mother will trust him to
prune the trees, in the long round, he thinks he can do it prudently.

Later on he tries very hard to make his mother see the home he has made
for his wife in Kildare—the little white house with bay windows, all
covered with climbing roses and honeysuckle—the “dear wife” herself in
her little American jacket planting sweet peas and mignonette—her
work-box with the little one’s caps on the table in the open window.

The expected “little one,” “the little young plant that was coming,”
filling its young father with proud joy, arrived in October, 1794, in
the shape of another little Eddy, and the Duchess was very glad to
accede to her big Eddy’s request, and to be its godmother. The little
Eddy was subsequently left with his grandmother for good, after his
parents’ visit to Hamburg in 1796, which was to have such momentous
political consequences. Little did the poor Duchess know for what his
father was preparing when “the precious Babe” was left with her! She is
full of gratitude for the gift, and full of appreciation of the
sacrifice the “dear Edwards” have made in parting with it—they “who
adore it and delight in its pretty ways.” We get charming glimpses of
the Duchess and the pretty boy in some letters to Lady Lucy. Now he is
at play among the sheep on the green hill beneath her window; now at her
elbow while she is writing, and full of messages for her to give to Papa
and Mamma. “Eddy, dood boy, Eddy, happy boy. Papa ride horseback, Mama
dance.” which shows, the Duchess remarks, “that he remembers them.”
Again, the Duchess is showing him a lock of Papa’s hair which Lady Lucy
has sent her mother, and Eddy is kissing it a thousand times: “Papa’s
hair, Eddy’s own Papa’s hair!” She loves to gather up his comical
remarks. “I told him something he was eating was _enough_ and that more
was _too much_. ‘But Eddy don’t like _enough_, Eddy like _too much_.’”

In October, 1797, Lord Edward saw his mother for the last time. After
that, events moved with tragical swiftness to the catastrophe of May
19th, 1798.

It was ten days after Lord Edward had got his fatal wound in the
altercation with Major Ryan that his mother was told of his condition.
As soon as the news was broken to her, she declared that she must go to
her boy at once. They kept her in London, persuading her that it was
there she might serve his cause, seeing great people, using all the
influence she could command to have his trial put off. Only poor Lucy,
more closely in sympathy with Lord Edward than any of the others, feels
how useless all this is. “All that human foresight could point out they
are doing, but alas! Edward is dying and alone!”

It was only on June 6—when Lord Edward had been two days dead—that the
Duchess, Mr. Ogilvie, Lady Sophia, Lady Lucy, and “Mimi” Ogilvie set out
at length for Ireland. They were met on the road by the messenger
bearing the fatal news.

Lord Edward’s daughter, Pamela, shall tell us the end of the story: “The
Fourth of June, when the guns fired for the King’s birthday, was always
a dark day in the house; poor Grandmamma appeared in deeper mourning,
and somehow there was a sort of stillness; we spoke with bated breath,
and went softly ... it was the anniversary of my father’s death.
Grandmamma wore his coloured handkerchief next her heart, and it was put
into the coffin with her.”

                      The Mother of the Sheareses

            JANE ANNE SHEARES, _née_ BETTESWORTH (-1803)[27]

                   “Come to me, O Christ,
                   Take swiftly my soul
                   Alike with my sons.”
                   —_Lament of Mothers of Bethlehem._

Footnote 27:

  _Authorities_: Madden’s “United Irishmen,” Fourth Series, Second
  Edition.

ON Saturday, May 19th, 1798, Lord Edward, desperately wounded in the
gallant fight he had put up—one man against the multitude of his
assailants—was taken prisoner and lodged in Newgate. Wounded and alone
he lay in his gloomy cell, and on his hard prison bed through the long
hours of the hot May Sunday that followed, and none of those who loved
him was near at hand to bring healing to his fevered body, or comfort to
his tortured heart.

On that same May Sabbath, when, from every open space that the
retreating country had left behind her, in her flight before the city’s
advance, there came the smell of the lilac and hawthorn, the honeyed
fragrance of lime trees and chestnut blossoms—“all the sweetness of the
May”—a different scene was taking place in another part of the city. In
a handsome house at the corner of Baggot Street and Pembroke Street, a
dinner-party was in progress. The _cuisine_ was irreproachable, the wine
excellent, the conversation of a high order. The master of the house, a
tall finely-built man of about forty-five, with something of the soldier
in his bearing, sat at one end of the table. His countenance, usually
somewhat stern and forbidding, owing to the haughty glance of his dark
eyes, and the curious blood-red birth-mark which stained the lower part
of his face, was softened now into geniality as his eyes swept the
little circle of relatives and guests gathered around his hospitable
board. His brother, a man of about thirty-two, of a singularly open and
pleasing countenance, blue-eyed, clear-complexioned, with well-formed
features and a clever mobile mouth, that showed, as the frequent smile
parted it, a row of perfect teeth—sat opposite. An old lady—their
mother—very stately and handsome in her rich dark dress and priceless
lace, sat near her eldest son. Beside her was that son’s beautiful wife.
On the opposite side of the table was the host’s sister, and beside her
his daughter by an earlier marriage. By the side of the younger brother
sat a tall man in the uniform of a Captain in the King’s County Militia.

Presently, dinner being ended, the ladies left the men of the party to
their wine, and retired to the drawing-room. A knock at the front door,
followed by the _frou-frou_ of silks and the murmur of feminine voices
in the hall, announced the advent of after-dinner visitors. At the
proposal of the younger brother of the host, the political discussion
which the three men had inaugurated over their port was postponed, and a
dish of tea with the ladies in the drawing-room was suggested. The dark
eyes of the master of the house were full of merriment, while he
explained to the guest what the magnet was that drew John from his
politics. As the voices floated past them in the hall there had been
clearly discernible the silvery tones of their beautiful neighbour, Miss
Maria Steele. “You should hear some of the poetry he addresses to his
Stella, Captain Armstrong!” said the host in laughing tones.

Captain Armstrong! Captain Warneford Armstrong! We know now, with that
name ringing in our ears, that darker than the tragedy of Lord Edward,
lying wounded to death in his prison cell at Newgate, is the tragedy
that is being enacted before our eyes in this pleasant hospitable house.
In this handsome dining-room, around the gleaming mahogany with its
genial burden of fruit and wine, there sit—the informer, Captain John
Warneford Armstrong, and his victims, Henry and John Sheares! And
presently, if we have the courage to face it, and will follow the three
men in their passage to the ladies in the drawing-room, we shall see an
even more harrowing spectacle. For in that charming eighteenth-century
room, all full of May sweetness from the tall open windows, all full of
lovely ladies and beautiful children in their picturesque
eighteenth-century costume, we shall presently see the traitor gather
the two little children of Henry Sheares upon his knee, while their
mother tunes her harp, and sings in her glorious voice, some exquisite,
moving strain for his delectation.[28] It is the picture which the
genius of Curran has made immortal: “I am disposed to believe, shocking
as it is,” he cried, while he turned to the Jury, in the dim light of
the ghastly midnight court where the Sheareses stood, two months later,
on trial for their lives, “that this witness had the heart, when he was
surrounded by the little progeny of my client—when he was sitting in the
mansion in which he was hospitably entertained—when he saw the old
mother, supported by the piety of her son, and the children basking in
the parental fondness of the father—that he saw the scene, and smiled at
it—contemplated the havoc he was to make, consigning them to the storms
of a miserable world, without having an anchorage in the kindness of a
father. Can such horror exist, and not waken the rooted vengeance of an
eternal God?”

Footnote 28:

  The incident of Mrs. Henry Sheares singing to her harp for the
  entertainment of Armstrong was related to Madden by Miss Maria Steele,
  the friend of John Sheares. In Curran’s “Life,” written by his son, it
  is stated on the authority of a gentleman who had dined with the
  Sheareses, on the day in question that “he observed Armstrong, who was
  one of the guests, taking his entertainer’s little children upon his
  knee, and as it was then thought, affectionately caressing them.”
  Armstrong denied to Madden the truth of these statements, but his
  denials were not considered convincing.

The poor old lady, on whom the diabolical treachery of the guest of that
Sunday dinner-party was to bring such suffering that the whole annals of
“’Ninety-Eight” have nothing to surpass it, had already tasted in a
fuller measure, than is the lot of common women, the joys and the
sorrows of life. The near kinswoman of the distinguished lawyer,
Sergeant Bettesworth, and a relation of the Earl of Shannon, she had
been married, while still very young, to a wealthy Cork banker, Mr.
Henry Sheares, son of Henry Sheares, Esq., M.P., of Goldenbush. At
Goldenbush, by the pleasant Bandon river, the young couple resided for
some time, and here a number of their children were born. But at a later
date the family lived at Glasheen, about a mile and a half from Cork,
and their abundant means allowed them to keep up another establishment
in the city—a house which has been identified by Dr. Madden as situated
at the corner of Moore Street and Nile Street.

The young wife was highly accomplished, and it is rare to find a couple
so perfectly matched, as were she and her husband, in every noble
quality of heart and mind. She entered into his philanthropic schemes
with the greatest zeal. Out of the abundance with which God had blessed
them it was their joy to help all those in need. One of the spectacles
which moved their compassion most keenly was that of decent poor people
who, having fallen into debt, were by the barbarous law of the time,
liable to be hauled off to prison for it, and to be herded with
criminals, by whom they were too frequently contaminated. To help these
unfortunates, whose only crime was poverty, Mr. Sheares instituted “the
Society for the Relief of Persons Confined for Small Debts,” and in
about nine months the secretary, Rev. Dr. Pigott, was able to report
that “more than seventy poor wretches have been relieved by this
institution from the depths of misery, and all the horrors of loathsome
confinement—by which, at the same time, above 240 children (besides
wives and other poor dependent relations) have had those restored to
them from whose labour they derive their bread, and the community has
been enriched by the replacing of many useful and industrious members.”

We have already spoken of the culture which marked the merchant princes
of Cork in the eighteenth century. Even in their cultured ranks Mr.
Henry Sheares stood prominently forth. He was a clever writer, and his
contributions over the pen-name “Agricola,” to the Cork periodicals of
his day were keenly appreciated by their readers. It was held by some of
them that “no moralist—not even Mr. Addison—excelled him in the
composition” of the little moral essay, which was his favourite vehicle
of instruction. Two of his essays, one “On Forgiveness,” the other “On
Man in Society, and at His Final Separation from it,” are reproduced by
Madden; and they show, beneath the somewhat stilted and formal style
which was so much to the taste of their day—and so little to that of
ours—a depth of religion, feeling, a noble philosophy of life which can
never be out of date. He was the founder of a Club, somewhat in “the
Spectator” style, “where popular and literary subjects were debated, and
his speeches at this Club were long remembered by his friends as
pleasing memorials of great historical knowledge, a fine taste and
graceful elocution.” He sat as member of Parliament for the borough of
Clonakilty—which was in the patronage of his wife’s kinsman, the Earl of
Shannon—in the Irish House of Commons from 1761 to 1767; and the
_Parliamentary Debates_ for these years show that he took an active part
in the proceedings of the House.

Mr. Sheares died in 1776, leaving his widow and family in very
comfortable circumstances. Nine children are mentioned in his will:
Henry, Robert Bettesworth, Richard, John, and Christopher Humphrey;
Letitia, Mary, Jane Anne Bettesworth, and Julia. Of these it was their
mother’s tragic fate to survive all but the youngest, Julia.

The greatest pains had been taken with their education, and for their
settlement. Of the four daughters, all were married except Julia: one to
Mr. Gubbins, of Limerick, another to Mr. Henry Westropp, another to Dr.
Payne of Upton. “The sons,” writes one who knew the family, “had the
best masters to attend them in their father’s house, under their
father’s eye; he narrowly inspected what company they kept, and at a
proper age they were sent to the University, where, being young men of
good natural parts, they acquired a considerable degree of reputation.”

The high hopes that had been built on these boys were overturned, in the
case of three of them, by very early deaths. One day Robert and John
were out bathing together, when John got into difficulties, in saving
him poor Robert was drowned. A little later, Christopher, who had chosen
the army for his profession, went out to the West Indies, on John’s
advice. A few months later there came to his loving mother in Ireland
the news of his death by yellow fever. Richard, who had entered the
navy, perished on the _Thunderer_, which went down, with all hands, off
the West Indies, in the great hurricane of October, 1779.

The eldest son, Henry, who inherited his father’s real and personal
property, estimated at about £1,200 a year, was educated at Trinity
College, Dublin, and first chose the army for his profession. In 1782,
when he was scarcely twenty years of age, he eloped with Miss Swete, of
Cork, whose father, Alderman Swete, was considered one of the wealthiest
men in the City. Young Councillor Fitzgibbon (afterwards Lord Clare) had
been among Miss Swete’s suitors, and it is said that he never forgave
the man whom she preferred to him—and that thoughts of this early
rivalry in love were at the bottom of the implacable hostility which
drove Henry Sheares to his doom. Shortly after the marriage, Alderman
Swete became bankrupt, and his daughter’s fortune having vanished with
the rest of his assets, Henry Sheares was obliged to give up the army
and take up the study of law. He was called to the Bar in 1790, his
brother John, thirteen years younger than he (born 1766) having been
called the preceding year. The brothers began practice together, taking
up their residence in Dublin—at first in a house on Ormond Quay, and
from 1796 in Baggot Street (now 128).

A little after the move to Dublin the young wife of Henry Sheares died
(December 11th, 1791) leaving her husband four little children. Three of
the children were taken by the grandparents, the Swetes, and educated by
them in France. The youngest child, Jane, appears to have been put in
charge of Grandmother Sheares and Aunt Julia.

In 1792 Henry Sheares, accompanied by his brother, John, went to France
to visit his children. The stirring events which were taking place in
Paris drew the brothers to the capital, and here they made the
acquaintance of some of the most prominent men of the Revolution;
notably Roland and Brissot. The influences under which they found
themselves in this atmosphere were to give the most decisive direction
to their political philosophy, and ultimately to seal their fate. The
ardent spirit of John was irresistibly attracted to the new doctrines,
and where John led, Henry, who loved him with a love surpassing the love
of ordinary brothers, was fain to follow. Left to himself, poor Henry
would have felt little call to republicanism; he liked dignified
splendour; a fine house, a good table, a choice library. He loved
society in which from his conversational powers, and his charming
deferential way with women, he was a great favourite. He was a devoted
family man—a loving son, and husband and father—and his happiest hours
were spent in his own beautiful home in Baggot Street in the years which
followed his second marriage with Miss Sarah Neville, a lady of good
family in the County Kilkenny. In this home, with its rich furniture and
fine library, he was soon joined by his mother and Julia and little
Jane; and Sarah Sheares, who was a woman of character, as well as of
accomplishments and charm, lived on the happiest footing with her
people-in-law. John was also a permanent member of the household.

Shortly after their return from France the brothers became members of
the newly instituted Society of United Irishmen, which at that time, had
perfectly “constitutional” objects: Catholic Emancipation and
Parliamentary Reform. But in the eyes of the Lord Clares and others of
the Ascendancy the advocating of the most moderate measures of reform
was “treason.” During all the brothers’ professional career, the enmity
of Lord Clare, which was first that of an unsuccessful rival in love of
Henry’s, pursued them, and as they, in their turn, put no restraint on
the language they used with regard to the Lord Chancellor, every day
that passed fanned the flame.

It was only after the arrest of the chief leaders of the United Irishmen
on March 12th, 1798, that the Sheareses became prominent in the
organisation. John Sheares was appointed to the Directory, and given
special charge of operations in Cork. In April the brothers went circuit
in the South-West, and were present at a memorable dinner-party in the
house of Bagnal Harvey, Bargey Castle. Another guest was (unfortunately
for the majority of those present) Sir Jonah Barrington. By some curious
presentiment—which he took good care should be verified by immediately
communicating with Mr. Secretary Cooke—he _knew_ that a tragic fate was
reserved for most of the guests. An excellent prophet was Sir Jonah—of
the same “authentic class” as Major Sirr[29]—every member of that jovial
dinner-party (with the exception of himself, a certain barrister and Mr.
Hatton) was executed within three months!

Footnote 29:

  “There are two sorts of prophets—one that derives its source from real
  or fancied inspiration, yet are sometimes mistaken; the other class
  composed of persons who prophesy what they are determined to bring
  about themselves; of this second, and by far the most authentic class
  was Major Sirr.”—Curran’s “Speech in Hevey’s Trial.”

With Sir Jonah Barrington and other “honourable” gentlemen of his class
drawing up “for their own amusement,” lists of those among their fellow
guests at friendly dinner parties “whom they considered likely to fall
victims” to the coming disaster, and these lists finding themselves
wafted by some marvellous agency from Wexford Bridge to the office of
Mr. Secretary Cooke in Dublin Castle—it is not to be supposed that
Government was in ignorance of the movements and designs of the
Sheareses. They were carefully watched and “set,” but they were left at
large for some time, according to Madden, “to allow the premature
explosion of the rebellion to take place, for the same reason that Lord
Edward was left at large after the arrests at Bond’s for several weeks,
during which time Messrs. Hughes and Reynolds (the informers) visited
him in his places of concealment, at Cormick’s in Thomas Street, and at
Dr. Kennedy’s in Aungier Street.”

At length the time was ripe for their destruction. Government had found
the proper tool.

On Thursday, May 10th, Captain John Warneford Armstrong took a little
jaunt to town from his camp at Lehaunstown and called—as he was in the
habit of doing—at Byrne’s, the bookseller’s, in Grafton Street. Though
Captain Armstrong wore the king’s uniform, he was, if his conversation
was any indication, by no means a fanatical adherent of a militarist and
royalist government. He talked republicanism; and was a diligent reader
of republican and deistical books, like Paine’s “Age of Reason” and
“Common Sense.”

During one of his many conversations with Byrne the names of the
Sheareses cropped up, and Byrne, completely deceived by the Captain’s
specious professions, proposed to make them known to each other. In the
afternoon of May the 10th, Captain Armstrong was seated in Byrne’s shop
when Henry Sheares came in, and Byrne immediately made the introduction.
Henry, however, was unwilling to enter into any conversation with the
Captain and shortly afterwards made an excuse to leave him.

Presently entered John, with his head full of plans for the Rising,
which was fixed for the 23rd of the month. One of his greatest objects
was to gain over the soldiers, and when Captain Armstrong was made known
to him by the unsuspecting Byrne “as a true brother on whom he might
depend,” it is not to be wondered at, if John looked on this meeting as
the direct answer to his ardent prayers. The Captain professed to be as
eager as John to secure the soldiers for the good cause, and after some
preliminary discussion it was arranged to meet at the brother’s house in
Baggot Street the following Sunday.

At eleven o’clock on Sunday, May 13th, Captain Armstrong saw the
brothers as arranged; at this interview he got from them the names of
some soldiers in his regiment who were known to be United Irishmen.

On Wednesday, May 16th, Captain Armstrong called once more at the house
of his victims but found neither of them at home. A second call about
six o’clock in the evening was more fruitful. He was shown in to John in
the library, and learned from him that he was on the eve of his
departure for Cork to organise the Rising there, and that his friend,
Surgeon Lawless, would take his place in Dublin and consult and advise
with Armstrong as to the matters they had in hand. It would appear that
poor Henry Sheares was on his guard against Armstrong for at this
interview he did not appear.

On the morning of the following day Armstrong was again in Baggot
Street, and made the acquaintance of Surgeon Lawless, who according to
the Captain, “informed him that he had lately attended a meeting of