Books: Unlucky Rebel

THE PURSUIT OF ROBERT EMMET (407 pp.) — Helen Landrefh — Whittlesey House ($3.75).

By the time Dublin’s Robert Emmet was twelve years old, in 1790, he had already decided “that it would be a glorious thing to give his life for his country.”

Helen Landreth’s book tells how Emmet, warmly assisted by the English secret service, realized this dream of glory. The Pursuit of Robert Emmet is an exhaustive account of the events leading to the Irish insurrection of 1803, which Emmet led and in which he died.

Many of the accounts of Emmet’s life have been lost; others have only recently turned up. What the records show seems chiefly pathetic to readers schooled in the calculating and brilliant revolutionary techniques of Marx and Lenin. Unlike those men, Robert Emmet lived, from boyhood to scaffold, in a world of chivalrous, humanitarian dreams—a lovable but fatal hallucination which Author Landreth indignantly blames on Emmet’s father, a conventional Protestant doctor of English extraction who didn’t let little Robert air his views when grownups were conversing. After several years at Dublin’s Trinity College, from which he was expelled for his subversive opinions, young Emmet entered a world for which he was no better equipped than Don Quixote.

“My Eyes Are Still Raised.” He joined the Executive Committee of the United Irishmen when their ablest leaders were in prison or exile. Like the American revolutionaries, Emmet and his fellows pinned bright hopes on French military assistance. The British government, fully alert to this threat, had spies planted even in the top drawers of the French War Department.

As Emmet canvassed in Ireland, and Paris for support of a new insurrection, his every move was reported to Whitehall, and many a suave Irish host scurried from the dinner table, after entertaining Emmet, to report the latest items of treasonable talk. On the rare occasions when Emmet suspected that he was being double-crossed, he was not very worried. He wrote: “If a precipice is opening under my feet from which duty will not suffer me to run back, I am thankful for that sanguine disposition which leads me to the brink and throws me down, while my eyes are still raised to the visions of happiness that my fancy formed in the air.”

Agents & Bottle-Bombs. The authorities, eager to make a big catch, were happy to let Emmet’s hopes and fancies grow into a substantial capital offense. As his plans went forward and his workmen turned out an arsenal of pikes, bottle-bombs, grenades and scaling ladders, informers peeped in at the windows of the “secret” depots, or eavesdropped on the excited workmen when they retired to the pubs. Soon the authorities knew that Emmet’s hopes were not confined to Dublin alone, that he had been promised support from all parts of Ireland—undependable promises which his “sanguine disposition” easily built into towers of strength.

“Turn Out, Turn Out!” On the night of July 23, 1803, Emmet decided to act. With characteristic naiveté he dispatched a follower to hire his army transports—plain hackney cabs, which never arrived. To his men he read a gentle but impassioned appeal (written by himself) from “The Provisional Government to the People of Ireland” (“Our object is to establish a free and independent Republic”). He then donned a magnificent, made-to-order, green-&-gold uniform, breeches of “creamy-white cashmere,” a green-plumed hat, and advanced, sword in hand, on Dublin Castle. He was followed by two or three hundred men, a few of them equipped with blunderbusses. After only a few blocks’ march, Emmet’s army had dwindled to 15 man. “Turn out, my boys. . . . Liberty, my boys. Turn out, turn out!” he cried on Patrick Street. But no one turned out. At this point, police and redcoats stepped in. Other groups of Emmet sympathizers were by now stirring all over Dublin. The police had no trouble isolating them.

Emmet fled to his home in Butterfield Lane. “Bad welcome to you!” screamed his disillusioned housekeeper. “Have you destroyed the whole kingdom? . . . And what’s become of your preparations?” “Don’t blame me, Anne,”said poor Emmet.

“If He Had Brain.” Emmet ran on into the hills, where he accepted sanctuary from an informer. A month later he was captured and locked up in Dublin Castle. To the amiable jailer, Emmet disclosed plans for a secret escape, and entrusted to the good fellow (who took it straight to the secret service) his most precious document—a letter identifying the woman he loved.* Paid witnesses, including Emmet’s friends, supplied the prosecutor with extra evidence; and the verdict was cinched when Emmet hired two secret agents as his counsel and carefully told them the whole story of the Rising. “If he had brain to his education he’d be a fine man,” groaned sharp-witted Rebel Michael Dwyer.

A British officer painted Emmet from memory (see cut), as, looking much like the young Napoleon, he rose in the dock to make his last, famed speech. The next day, Ireland’s best-beloved martyr was publicly hanged, after announcing in his “lovely silvery voice: ‘My friends, I die in peace, and with sentiments of universal love and kindness toward all men.’ ” He was 25.

* Sarah Curran, heroine of such ballads as My Emmet’s No More and Emmet’s Farewell to His Love. After Emmet’s death, she married an English officer.