“I should therefore, sir, wish for the suppression of this extract, if no particular, motive should have arisen for forwarding it to its destination. I shall avail myself of your kind permission to wait upon you in the course of the day, to pay my respects once more personally to you, if I shall be so fortunate as to find you at leisure. I have the honour to be, with very great respect, your obliged servant, JOHN P. CURRAN.”
But it is time to return to our death-doomed “miscreant.” At half-past one, on the afternoon of September 30, the order was given to start. The scaffold had been built in Thomas Street, nearly opposite S. Catherine’s Church. He was dressed all in black, and maintained the serene and undemonstrative demeanour which was thought scandalously unbefitting by some spectators and some scribes. On the principle that the game was up, that “no hope can have no fear,” Robert Emmet became, not indifferent, but beautifully gay towards the end, as gay in irons as Raleigh or Sir Thomas More. He was quite sure that he had nothing to repent of, now that the account was cast and cancelled. Of course his care-free conduct was misconstrued: it passed officially for “effrontery and nonchalance,” and the single-minded Christian, never quite out of touch with the Church in which his holy mother had brought him up, was darkly given forth as an impenitent atheist. The ordinary attitude of the revolutionary late eighteenth-century mind was irreligious enough, but it was not Robert Emmet’s. One of his colleagues in the dream and the disaster, Thomas Russell, an elder figure in Emmet’s never-marshalled “army,” and a nobly interesting one, was extraordinarily pious: as pious as General Gordon. On the scaffold at Downpatrick (brought to that by his thwarted outbreak in the North), he recalled, for a memory well suited to encourage him, “my young hero, my great and dear friend, a martyr to the cause of his country and to liberty.” Russell’s hospitality of mind was not such that he could have made an exemplar of an infidel. But there is so much proof on this point, that the old charge may be laid aside in that limbo of all inaccuracies for which the invention of printing is responsible. The Englishman at the helm of affairs in Dublin, by no means (as we have seen) a wholly unsympathetic annalist, bequeaths us an account of Emmet’s final interview with the chaplains. It cannot escape the reader that two distinct issues were, in the minds of those worthy gentlemen, vaguely blended. No person in Mr. Robert Emmet’s situation, unless he repented of his politics, had any chance of being considered otherwise than unsound in his religion. Individualism, looked upon as the exact science it undoubtedly is, was not quite at its best in the self-righteous era of George the Third, and under the Establishment which was regulated by a now almost obsolete basilolatry.