Robert Emmet

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In April 1798 Emmet was exposed as the secretary of a secret college committee in support of the Society of United Irishmen (of which his brother and Tone were leading executive members). Rather than submit to questioning under oath that might inculpate others, he withdrew from Trinity.

Emmet did not participate in the disordered United Irish uprising when it broke out in counties to the south and north of a heavily-garrisoned Dublin in May 1798. But after the suppression of the rebellion in the summer, and in communication with state prisoners held at Fort George in Scotland (including his brother), Emmet joined William Putnam McCabe in re-establishing a United Irish organisation. They sought to reconstruct the Society on a strict military basis, with its members chosen personally by its officers' meeting as the executive directorate. Following the example not only of Tone but also of James Coigly, their aim was to again solicit a French invasion on the prospective strength both of a rising in Ireland and of a radical conspiracy in Britain. To this end McCabe set out for France in December 1798, stopping first in London to renew contact with the network of English Jacobins, the United Britons.

On the new United Irish executive in Dublin, Emmet assisted veterans Thomas Wright (from April 1799, an informer) and Malachy Delaney (a former officer in the Austrian army), with a manual on insurgent tactics. In the summer of 1800, as secretary to Delaney, he set out on a secret mission to support McCabe's efforts in Paris. Through his foreign minister Talleyrand, Emmet and Delaney presented Napoleon with a memorial which argued that the parliamentary Union with Great Britain, imposed in the wake of the rebellion, had "in no way eased the discontent of Ireland", and with lessons drawn from the failure of '98, the United Irish were again prepared to act on the first news of a French landing.

Their request for an invasion force almost double that commanded by Hoche in the aborted 1796 Bantry expedition possibly told against them. The First Consul had other priorities: securing a temporary respite from war (the treaties of Lunéville in 1801 and of Amiens, March 1802) and re-enslaving Haiti.

In January 1802 the arrival in Dublin of William Dowdall, following his release from Fort George, injected new life into the United Irishmen, and by March, contact was re-established with the United Britons network in England. In July, McCabe, returning to Paris from a visit to Dublin, brought news to Manchester that the United Irishmen were ready to rise again as soon as the continental war was renewed. In this expectation, preparations in England were intensified, including in London where Edward Despard sought to enlist in the republican conspiracy soldiers of the guards' regiment stationed at Windsor and the Tower of London. In October, Emmet was dispatched from Paris to assist Dowdall with the Dublin preparations.

In November 1802 the government moved on the conspirators in London. It did not discover the full extent of the plot, but the arrest of Despard and his execution in February 1803 may have weakened English support. Emmet's emissaries from Dublin found a cooler reception in the mill towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and in London than they had expected.

In May 1803 the war with France was renewed. McCabe appeared to enjoy Napoleon's favour, and had had assurances of his intention to help Ireland secure her independence. From his own interviews with Napoleon, and with Talleyrand, in the autumn of 1802 Emmet emerged unconvinced. He was persuaded that the First Consul was considering a Channel crossing for August 1803, but that in the contest with England there would be scant consideration for Ireland's interests. (Sympathetic to the cause, Denis Taaffe proposed that if ever France took possession of Ireland she would trade it for a West Indian sugar island).

Disputing with Arthur O'Connor, who in Paris insisted on a guarantee of a French landing, when war was resumed Emmett sent his own emissary, Patrick Gallagher, to Paris, to ask for "money, arms, ammunition and officers" but not for large numbers of troops. After the rising in Dublin misfired, and with no further prospects at home, in August Emmet did send Myles Byrne to Paris to do all he could to encourage an invasion. But at his trial, while he conceded that a "connection with France was, indeed, intended" it was to be "only as far as mutual interest would sanction require": no man should "calumniate" his memory by believing that he had "hoped for freedom from the government of France".

Michael Fayne, a Kildare conspirator, later testified that Emmet used talk of French assistance only to "encourage the lower orders of people", as he often heard him say that as bad as an English government was, it was better than a French one", and that his object was "an independent state brought about by Irishmen only".

After his return to Ireland in October 1802, assisted by Anne Devlin (ostensibly his housekeeper), and with a legacy of £2,000 left to him by his father, Emmet laid preparations for a rising. According to the later recollection of Myles Byrne, on St Patrick's Day, 17 March 1803, Emmet gave a stirring speech to his confederates justifying the renewed resort to arms. If Ireland had cause in 1798, he argued it had only been compounded by the legislative union with Britain. As long as Ireland retained in its own parliament a "vestige of self-government", its people might entertain the hope of representation and reform. But now "in consequence of the accursed union":

In April 1803, James (Jemmy) Hope and Myles Byrne arranged conferences, at which Emmet promised arms, with Michael Dwyer (Devlin’s cousin), who still maintained a guerrilla resistance in the Wicklow Mountains, and with Thomas Cloney, a veteran of the Wexford rebellion in '98. Hope and Russell headed north to rouse the United veterans of Down and Antrim.

In Dublin, Emmet believed his hand was forced on the 16th of July when gunpowder in the rebel arms depot in Patrick Street accidentally detonated, arousing the suspicion of the authorities. He persuaded the majority of the leadership, to bring forward the date for the rising to the evening of Saturday, July 23, a festival day, which would provide cover for the gathering of their forces. The plan, without any further consideration of French aid, was to storm Dublin Castle, make hostage of Privy Council, and signal the country to rise.

As preparations were made early in July, according to one of his many biographers, Helen Landreth, Emmet believed that "he had been tricked into the conspiracy", that he had been "a pawn moved by some sinister hand". Such may have been the suggestion of Hope's later remarks to the historian R. R. Madden. Emmet, according to Hope, realised that "the men of rank and fortune" who had urged him to head a new rising had had ulterior motives, but that, with Russell, he nonetheless placed his confidence in the great mass of the people to rise. This would have been despite Emmet's recognition that: "No leading Catholic is committed. We are all Protestants".

Parts of his plan were known, through spies and informers, to an undersecretary at Dublin Castle, Alexander Marsden and in turn by the Chief Secretary for Ireland, William Wickham. Yet they kept reports from the Lord Lieutenant and stayed the hand of the Town Major, Henry Sirr, who had wished move against the rebels following the St. Patrick Street explosion.

Drawing on research in the 1880s by Dr Thomas Addis Emmet of New York City, a grandson of Emmet's elder brother, Landreth believes that Marsden and Wickham conspired with William Pitt, then out of office but anticipating his return as Prime Minister, to encourage the most dangerously disaffected in Ireland to fatally compromise the prospects for an effective revolt by acting in advance of a French invasion. Landreth believes that Emmet was their unwitting instrument, drawn home from Paris for the purpose of organising a premature rising by the calculated misrepresentations of William Putnam McCabe and Arthur O'Connor. Her evidence, however, is circumstantial, relying not least on Pitt's reputed cynicism in accepting the prospect of a rebellion in 1798 in order to frighten the Irish Parliament into dissolving itself.

Emmet biographer, Patrick Geoghegan, finds it entirely "implausible" that Pitt, in or out of office, would risk the credibility of the union he had accomplished, and perhaps much else, for "some negligible security gains". He argues that Wickham was genuinely complacent and that notes that, while he may have too long delayed moving against the rebels in the hope of discovering the full scope of their conspiracy, on the 23rd Marsden did sound the alarm in advance of the day's action.

Emmet issued a proclamation in the name of the "Provisional Government". Calling upon the Irish people "to show the world that you are competent to take your place among the nations . . . as an independent country", Emmet made clear in the proclamation that they would have to do so "without foreign assistance": "That confidence which was once lost by trusting to external support . . . has been again restored. We have been mutually pledged to each other to look only to our own strength".

The Proclamation also contained "allusions to the widening of the political agenda of Emmet and the United Irishmen following the failure of 1798". In addition to democratic parliamentary reform, the Proclamation announced that tithes were to be abolished and the land of the established Church of Ireland nationalised. This, it has been suggested, marked the influence upon Emmet of Thomas Russell, although as a radical campaigner for economic and social reform Russell might have wished to go further. Emmet remained intent on giving the rising a universal appeal across both class and sectarian divisions: "We are not against property – we war against no religious sect – we war not against past opinions or prejudices – we war against English dominion."

The Government sought to suppress all 10,000 printed copies of the Proclamation. Only two are known to survive.

At 11 on the morning of 23 July 1803, Emmet showed men from Kildare an arsenal of pikes, grenades, rockets, and gunpowder-packed hollowed beams (these were to be dragged out onto the streets to prevent cavalry charges). They noted only the absence of recognisable firearms and were unimpressed by Emmet, a "youngster" whose inexperience would place "the rope around the neck of decent men". They left to turn back other Kildare insurgents on the road to Dublin. The plan to surprise Dublin Castle, and seize the viceroy, was botched when the assailants prematurely revealed themselves.

By evening Emmet, Malachy Delaney and Myles Byrne (turned out for the occasion in gold-trimmed green uniforms) were outside their Thomas Street arsenal – with just 80 men. R.R. Madden describes "a motley assemblage of armed men, a great number of whom were, if not intoxicated, under the evident excitement of drink". Unaware that John Allen was approaching with a band, according to one witness, of 300, and shaken by the sight of a lone dragoon being pulled from his horse and piked to death, Emmet told the men to disperse. He had already stood down sizeable insurgent groups straddling the main suburban roads by pre-arranged signal, a solitary rocket.

Sporadic clashes continued into the night. In one incident, the Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, Lord Kilwarden, was dragged from his carriage and stabbed by pikes. Found still alive, he was taken to a watch-house where he died shortly thereafter. Kilwarden had used his position to help his cousin, Wolfe Tone, to avoid prosecution in 1794. He was nonetheless reviled for the prosecution and hanging of William Orr in 1797 and, in the wake of 1798, of several Catholic Defenders. Kilwarden's nephew, the Rev. Mr Wolfe, was also killed, although his daughter was not harmed.

Emmet fled the city arriving in Rathfarnham with party of 16 men. When he heard that Wicklowmen were still planning to rise, he issued a countermanding order to prevent needless violence. Instead he ordered Byrne to Paris to again solicit the French.

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