The Wife of Thomas Addis Emmet
JANE EMMET, NÉE PATTEN (1771-1846)[70]
“And the track of my true love’s feet is the track that my heart
would follow.”—Old Irish Love Song.
SO exquisitely has the story of “the Broken Heart” been told, to such haunting strains of melodious sorrow has it been sung, that the whole world has wept over the tragic loves of Robert Emmet and Sarah Curran, But even in Ireland, it is rare to find anyone familiar with the romance of Thomas Addis Emmet; and—to our shame be it told!—the heroic devotion and self-sacrifice of his wife, Jane Emmet, which ought to be a household tale, a constant inspiration to our womanhood, is less known than the tale of some alien queen—Philippa or another. What’s Philippa to us, or we to Philippa? Or why should the heroism of our own women be forgotten, while our voices swell the chorus that praises the heroism of the stranger?
We have already learned in our memoir of Elizabeth Emmet, that her son, Thomas Addis, shortly after having been called to the Bar, married, in 1791, Miss Jane Patten, the twenty-year-old daughter of Rev. John Patten, of Annerville (near Clonmel), and his wife Margaret Colville. After Rev. Mr. Patten’s death in 1787, his widow, with her children, Jane and John, came to live in Dublin where her brother, Mr. Colville was a wealthy merchant, and in this city Thomas Addis Emmet met Miss Patten. It is probable enough that the intimacy between the families—which was very affectionate—was of longer standing; for both the Colvilles and the Emmets were Tipperary folk.
In a letter to his daughter Elizabeth, written on the eve of the latter’s marriage to Mr. Le Roy, Thomas Addis Emmet recalls the happiness it gave him when, as a young husband, he witnessed the tenderness with which his father and mother took to their hearts, as a veritable new daughter, the bride he had brought home to them: “To this day,” he writes (and “this day” was forty years after the event to which his memory goes back) “I remember I never loved your Mother so much, or looked at her with so much delight, as when I saw from my father’s and mother’s actions that they cherished her as their own daughter.”
The tender little phrase throws a pleasing light on the relations that existed between the two ménages, which shared between them Dr. Emmet’s fine mansion on Stephen’s Green. Shortly after his son’s marriage the doctor divided his house (No. 109 Stephen’s Green, West) into two separate dwellings, keeping the corner house for himself, and assigning the other to the young couple. In this inner house Jane Emmet’s elder children, Robert (September 8th, 1792), Margaret (September 21st, 1793), Elizabeth (December 4th, 1794), John Patten (April 8th, 1796), Thomas Addis (May 29th, 1797) were born.
During the years when her nursery was thus rapidly filling, Jane Emmet’s husband was making his mark at the Bar. He was engaged as counsel (with Hon. Simon Butler and Leonard MacNally) in the celebrated case of Napper Tandy against the Lord Lieutenant, the Lord Chancellor and some members of the privy council, who had signed a proclamation offering a reward for the apprehension of Tandy. The object of the whole proceedings on the part of Tandy’s advisers was “to contest the validity of the Lord Lieutenant’s patent, as having been granted under the great seal of England, instead of that of the Chancellor of Ireland.” In the course of Emmet’s address he caused a sensation by boldly asserting that there had been “no legal viceroy in Ireland for the last ten years, and not only the counsel for Lord Westmoreland will not deny that fact, but they will not dare to let his patent come under a train of legal investigation.”
Other notable cases in which Emmet was engaged included the trial at Tralee in 1793 of Lieutenant Carr who had shot a Mr. O’Connell in a duel, and the trial of a Mr. O’Driscoll, at Cork assizes in the same year, on a charge of seditious libel. In this case Emmet was associated with the Sheareses and Leonard MacNally. So successful was he, according to his cousin, St. John Mason’s statement to Dr. Madden, that the first year of his practice he realised £700.
In 1795 he took the oath of the United Irishmen under very sensational circumstances, thus detailed by Madden: “A case occurred before Prime Serjeant Fitzgerald, in which a conviction was obtained on a charge of administering the United Irishmen’s oath, then a capital offence. Emmet appeared for the prisoners on a motion in arrest of judgment. He took up the pleadings in which the words of the oath were recited, and he read them in a very deliberate manner, and with all the gravity of a man who felt that he was binding his soul by the obligations of a solemn oath. ‘I, Thomas Addis Emmet, in the presence of God, do pledge myself to my country that I will use all my abilities and influence in the attainment of an impartial and adequate representation of the Irish nation in parliament; and as a means and absolute and immediate necessity in the establishment of this chief good of Ireland, I will endeavour, as much as lies in my ability, to forward a brotherhood of affection, an identity of interests, a communion of rights and an union of power, among Irishmen of all religious persuasions, without which, every reform in parliament must be partial, not national, inadequate to the wants, delusive to the wishes, and insufficient to the freedom and happiness of this country.’
“Having read the text, and defended its obligations with a power of reasoning and a display of legal knowledge, in reference to the subject of the distinction between legal and illegal oaths, which the counsel for the prosecution described as producing an extraordinary impression, he said:
“‘My lords, here in the presence of this legal court, this crowded auditory, in the presence of the Being that sees, and witnesses, and directs this judicial tribunal—here, my lords, I, myself, in the presence of God, declare I take the oath.’ He then took the book, kissed it, and sat down. No steps were taken by the court against the newly-sworn United Irishman; the amazement of its functionaries left them in no fit state of mind either for remonstrance or reproval. The prisoners received a very lenient sentence.”
Though Emmet took the oath thus publicly, he was not publicly identified with the United Irishmen until a period considerably later. He was rarely engaged as their counsel in the trials of 1797 and 1798—acting rather as chamber lawyer to their committees. He became a member of the directory in 1797 after the arrest of Arthur O’Connor.
But long before that date he had worked for the objects for which the United Irishmen were founded, Reform and Emancipation; and he had been associated, in the closest manner with their founder. He was a member of the political club which Tone formed in the winter of 1790, and Tone found him a man completely after his own heart: “of a great and comprehensive mind, of the warmest and sincerest affection for his friends, and of a steady adherence to his principles, to which he has sacrificed much, as I know, and would, I am sure, if necessary, sacrifice his life. His opinions and mine square exactly.”
In the autumn of 1792 when Tone was working strenuously for the Catholic cause, Emmet gave him invaluable help. His pen was ever ready to assist Tone’s in preparing replies on the Catholic side to the bigotry of the Grand Juries, or drawing up addresses in which the Catholic position was admirably stated. But he did all this work in the shade, so to speak, neither seeking nor desiring any reward for it.
We have already learned from Tone how fully Emmet entered into the scheme for enlisting French aid towards Irish independence, which Tone carried with him on his departure for America in the early summer of 1795. The “charming villa” which Emmet occupied then at Rathfarnham and “the little study of an elliptical form” which he was building at the bottom of his lawn, and the “little triangular field” on the way between Rathfarnham and Dublin became, from the meeting of the three friends, Emmet and Russell and Tone, and the solemn pledge wherewith they bound themselves to each other, among the “holy places” of Irish history.
On March 12th, 1798, Government which had already been long in complete possession of the plans of the United Irishmen, through the treachery of Thomas Reynolds and others, and had allowed them to develop as suited its own purposes, suddenly swooped down on the leaders. The arrest of the country deputies at the house of Oliver Bond was followed the same day by the apprehension of Emmet, Dr. MacNevin, Jackson (Bond’s father-in-law) and John Sweetman at their several abodes.
Jane Emmet had just tucked her little ones into their cots and given them their good-night kiss, when Alderman Carletown and his escort of soldiers invaded the quiet house in Stephen’s Green to carry off her children’s father. The loud knocking at the door, the peremptory demand for admission “in the king’s name” which heralded the entrance of those unbidden guests heralded also the closing of the peaceful happy years of Jane Emmet’s young wifehood and maternity. A new life was opening up before her, full of sorrows, and hardships and privations, and the gently nurtured lady was to discover in the reserves of her character the unsuspected materials of a heroine.
The call which roused the heroine in her was brutal enough. In the search which the soldiers immediately instituted all through the house in quest of documents the nursery was not spared. The children were roughly roused from their sleep, and we may judge of the impression produced in them by the fact that as long as they lived they never forgot it. Thomas Addis Emmet, jun., was only a year-old baby when his father was arrested; he was an old man when Dr. Madden knew him, but he remembered, as if it had been but yesterday, how, waking suddenly, he saw a number of soldiers standing at the window with fixed bayonets presented at him and the little brother who was his bed fellow. Nor was this the only occasion on which the nursery was invaded by the gallant yeomanry. John Patten Emmet told his son, the present Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet, that after his father’s arrest, the house was frequently searched by the military for the seal of the United Irishmen. During one of these searches he and his little brothers were wakened by a bright light in the nursery, and became greatly frightened on seeing a soldier stand guard within the door. “As soon as the man saw the child was awake, with the instinct of a brute he pointed his musket at him as if about to shoot. The children naturally got under the bed-clothing as quickly as possible, and in their terror did not dare to move, being more dead than alive, until the soldiers had left the house and their grandmother could come to them.”[71]
The poor grandmother had to take for the frightened children the place of both father and mother. The father after being brought to the Castle, was committed to Newgate where about twenty of the other leaders were confined. Here his wife managed to gain admission to him—“by stealth,” and “against the most positive orders,” as Lord Castlereagh told Lady Louisa Connolly when, a couple of months later, she sought permission for Pamela to see Lord Edward. “The cell in which Thomas Addis Emmet was confined,” we learn from Dr. Madden, was about twelve feet square. Jane Emmet managed to secrete herself in this wretched abode for some days, one of the turnkeys who had charge of Emmet’s cell being privy to her concealment. Her husband shared his scanty allowance with her; and there a lady, bred in the lap of luxury, accustomed to all the accommodations that are possessed by one in her sphere in life, used to all the comforts of a happy home, familiarised to the affectionate care and kind attentions of an amiable family, daily blessed with the smiling faces of her dear children—“one who had slept with full content about her bed, and never waked but to a joyful morning”—shared the dungeon of her husband: its gloom, its dreary walls, its narrow limits, its dismal aspect—things and subjects for contemplation which her imagination a few weeks before would have sickened at the thought of—were now endured as if they affected her not; her husband was there, and everything else in this world, except her fears for his safety and for separation from him, were forgotten; her acts said to him:
“Thou to me
Art all things under heaven, all places thou.”
“The gaoler at length discovered that Mrs. Emmet was an inmate of her husband’s cell. She was immediately ordered to quit the place; but to the astonishment of the officers of the prison who were not accustomed to have their orders disobeyed, she told them ‘her mind was made up’ to remain with her husband, and she would not leave the prison. The gaoler, whom Emmet speaks of as a man of unfeeling and ruffianly deportment, stood awestricken before a feeble, helpless creature whom he had only to order one of his myrmidons to tear from the arms of her husband, and his bidding would have been obeyed. The power of a brave-spirited woman is seldom put forth that it does not triumph.... The gaoler retired; and Emmet was given to understand that the man had orders from his superiors not to employ force, but the first time that Mrs. Emmet left the prison she was not to be permitted to return. No such opportunity for her exclusion was afforded by that lady. She continued to share her husband’s captivity for many months. But once in that time she left the prison and then only to visit her sick child, when she appealed to the wife of the gaoler ‘as the mother of a family’ to take pity on her wretchedness, struggling as she was between her duty to her husband and the yearnings of nature towards her sick child.... It cheers one to find that this appeal was not made in vain. At midnight this woman conducted Mrs. Emmet through the apartments of the gaoler to the street. The following night, after remaining with her child at the house of Dr. Emmet during the day, she returned to the gaol, gained admittance by the same means, and “was on the point of entering her husband’s cell when one of the keepers discovered her; but too late to exclude her from prison. From that time she availed herself no more of the same facility for leaving or entering prison. During her absence her room had been visited by one of the keepers, a not infrequent occurrence; the curtains had been drawn round the bed, some bundles of clothing placed under the coverlid, and the keeper was requested to tread lightly, as Mrs. Emmet was suffering from headache. Shortly after this occurrence Emmet and MacNevin were removed to Kilmainham, and Mrs. Emmet found means to gain access to her husband, and the authorities connived at her sojourn in his dungeon.”[72]
In October, 1798, Jane Emmet’s sixth child, Christopher, was born, and it seems probable that having returned to her home for the occasion, it was not considered prudent for her to go back to the hardships of Kilmainham. Moreover, ever since the State Prisoners had, in order to save effusion of blood, entered into terms with Government in July, 1798, it was expected that Emmet and his fellow-prisoners would soon be allowed to go to America. Rufus King, however, the resident minister of the United States in London, interfered to prevent the execution of these designs—and one more “scrap of paper” was torn into fragments. Instead of being set at liberty and allowed to emigrate to the United States, in accordance with Government’s formal pledge, the Irish State Prisoners were kept in gaol for no less than four years longer.
On March 18th, 1799, the prisoners were notified to prepare for embarkation to an unknown destination the following morning. When the news reached the Emmet household Mary Anne Emmet, acting with that spirit which showed her the true sister of Thomas Addis and Robert, hastened to the Castle and obtained an interview with Lord Cornwallis. The viceroy was touched by her pleading, and assured her that no harm should come to her brother, but he would give her no information as to “the place of security” whither Government’s apprehension of a foreign invasion impelled them to send the State Prisoners. With the scanty comfort conveyed in Cornwallis’s promise that her brother’s treatment, as well as that of his companions, should be all his friends and theirs could desire, Mary Anne Emmet returned to her parents. She was allowed to visit her brother for a short time in Kilmainham that evening to take the farewell of him which was destined to be her last.
In another place we shall learn something of the adventures of the twenty State prisoners who sailed from Dublin Bay on March the 19th and reached their destination, Fort George, in the extreme north of Scotland, on April 9th, 1799, and of their life in that fortress during the years of their confinement in it.
As may be expected, Jane Emmet made every effort to obtain permission to join her husband in Fort George, and her hopes of success were stimulated by the fact that others of the State prisoners, especially Roger O’Connor, were allowed to have their families with them. The Irish Government, however—in other words, Lord Castlereagh—put every obstacle in her way, and it was only when she made personal application to the Duke of Portland that she obtained the consent she sought. In August, 1800, escorted by her brother, John Patten, and accompanied by her three elder children, Robert, Margaret and Elizabeth, she arrived in Fort George. She left her three younger children, John Patten, Thomas Addis and baby Christopher, in the charge of their grandfather and grandmother, Dr. and Mrs. Emmet, at Casino, Milltown.
The son of one of the little boys thus left behind has culled for us from the family correspondence the letters written by old Mrs. Emmet to her son and daughter-in-law in Fort George, and though the regrettable loss of the letters of Thomas Addis to his parents and those of Jane Emmet to her mother, Mrs. Patten, leaves the correspondence incomplete, nevertheless sufficient remains to help us to make a connected story.
It was not her husband only whom the arrival at Fort George of Mrs. Emmet and her charming children made happy. All the prisoners were delightfully excited by the event, and every man of them became their devoted slave from the beginning. Each one was anxious to lend a hand in the education of the children. Dr. MacNevin, whose Continental education had rendered him an accomplished linguist, taught them French; Hudson and Cormick gave them music lessons. When little William Neilson joined the children some months later, Fort George became a regular academy. Thomas Addis Emmet, himself, was the head-master, and his mother jokingly refers to Jane as his usher—but all the prisoners were eager to secure a post in the school—Dr. Dixon, M. Dowdall, Tennant. There were charming theatrical entertainments, too, wherein the children acted, and concerts at which Robert Emmet and William Neilson displayed their skill on the flute. Samuel Neilson’s letters to his wife never omit a reference to Mrs. Emmet and her “delightful children.” It was probably Mrs. Emmet who suggested to him to send for his little son, and when the boy arrived she mothered him exactly like one of her own children. Once the lad fell ill, and Mrs. Emmet’s attentions to him won the fervent gratitude of the poor father: “her kindness went beyond what could possibly be expected. Fruits, sweetmeats, jellies—everything she could think of were sent, and her own personal attendance and advice were superadded.”
The Governor of the Fort, the chivalrous old Scottish nobleman and soldier, Colonel Stuart, was won over by the sweet womanliness, and the maternal and conjugal devotion of Mrs. Emmet. Very shortly after her arrival he signified to her husband that, for the sake of her health, to which proper exercise was necessary, he would take it upon himself to allow her husband to accompany her on walks outside the enclosure of the fortress. When Roger O’Connor and his wife and family left Fort George, the Governor turned over their suite of rooms to Mrs. Emmet. Once a fire broke out at night. The Governor was called up, and on ascertaining that no danger was to be apprehended, he instantly ran to Emmet’s apartment to remove his apprehension for himself and his family; and the next day the following note was addressed to Emmet:
“The lieutenant-governor’s compliments to Mr. Emmet. He hopes Mrs. Emmet suffered no inconvenience from the alarm of fire which was given last night. As the idea of being locked in may occasion a disagreeable sensation to a lady’s mind, in case of any sudden occurrence (though the lieutenant-governor flatters himself that none in future will arise), he will give directions that the passage door leading to Mr. Emmet’s apartments shall not in future be locked, being convinced Mr. Emmet would make no improper use of all the doors being left open.”
The letters which came from Casino were eagerly welcomed by Jane Emmet and her husband, telling, as they did, so much that they longed to know of the little ones left behind. John is Grandmother Patten’s favourite, and when he goes to visit her he comes back the proud possessor of “new clothes and a great number of Buttons.” “He felt very visibly the importance he had acquired by his visit to town, for as soon as he returned he desired John Delany should be brought in to play with him, as his grandmamma had always a boy on purpose to play with him.” John’s slowness, to which there are frequent allusions in the letters, seems to have caused a little anxiety to his father, so his grandmother is eager to do him justice. “He does not, I assure you, want either observation or intellect, he has great natural justice and a very open good-natured temper.” We learn from his grandfather that he is at “a crown and a quarter school, where he tells me he makes great proficiency, four or five lessons a day in his A, B, C, but as yet he does not couple them very accurately. John, however, is a very well-disposed, well-tempered child, and if he does not mount into the Empyrean galaxy, he will always keep the Milky Way of life, and never tread on thorns.” On another occasion John is at his grandmother’s elbow while she is writing to father and mother and he expressly desires her to tell them that “he is a very good boy; that he has gotten a new spelling book from his grandmamma Patten, and that he will take care and get his lessons well.” All this Grandmamma Emmet is sure “he has sincere intentions of performing, tho’ I must confess that in his old spelling-book he is not very brilliant. He, however, I am told, performs the part of an usher in the school, and acquits himself with great propriety.... John, I think, is much better at school, it helps to enliven him and in some measure open his ideas; he does not learn any bad habits, and he is very fond of it; at home he would be apt to grow sluggish.” As John had not completed his fifth year at the time these letters were written, we need not share too acutely his absent father’s anxiety about him—especially as we from our point of vantage, some six score years later, discern in John one of the most brilliant men of his time. When he died—in the prime of his manhood, at the age of forty-six, his colleagues of the University of Virginia, where he was Professor of Chemistry and Materia Medica, paid tribute to him as “the inventive and learned, the ingenuous and high-souled John Patten Emmet, one of the earliest supports and one of the brightest ornaments of this University.”
If it is curious to find the future distinguished scientist causing anxiety to his father for the slow opening of his intellect, it is still more curious to find his little brother Tom causing him anxiety because some incident related by his grandparents seemed to indicate in the tiny boy a selfish disposition. So concerned was the father at some trait of childish prudence related by the grandparents for his amusement that he had thoughts of taking little Tom to Fort George to educate him under his own eyes. Grandmother Emmet has to assure him that what Mary Anne and she said “imported nothing more than to convey to you an idea of the strength of his intellect, for surely you did not suppose that the disposition of a child, not four years old, would do more than to divert you instead of giving you sincere alarm. The share of understanding which he promises to have will be fully sufficient to overcome his little childish dispositions, and without severity he will do what is right by only pointing it out to him.” How groundless were his father’s fears—and how well justified his grandmother’s confidence, the life of Thomas Addis Emmet, junior, sufficiently proves. His nephew and namesake, recalling the happy days he and the other young people of his generation spent in Mr. Emmet’s lovely home, Mount Vernon, New York, tells us that it would not be possible to find a more genial, kindly and charitable couple than Mr. and Mrs. Emmet. “The term charitable could be applied to him in every sense, as it was difficult for him even to suspect a bad motive, and he frequently suffered for his faith in others. Later in life Mr. Emmet became embarrassed on account of the frequent assistance he had rendered supposed friends and from placing too much reliance on their promises.”
It is plain that of the three children confided to their care the favourite of Grandfather and Grandmother Emmet is the youngest, little Christopher Temple. In this delightful little boy whom everybody in kitchen and parlour idolises, is there given back to them the brilliant son they had lost by a premature death? The grandfather clearly thinks so: “Little Temple, should he live for the germs to open, blossom and ripen into fruit, will equal, I think, his namesake uncle.” His grandmother is afraid her partiality for him will be reckoned as due to his name: “I assure you he is as great a favourite with everyone in the family as with me.” “This little Brat is, to be sure, the chief favourite through the house; we, however, do not spoil him, and I assure you that I fondle him less than the others. Mary Anne caresses him more than I do, but at the same time treats him with steadiness; in the kitchen he would be commander-in-chief if we did not prevent it. He is quite a miniature of our dear little Robert, especially when he holds up his hands and says he won’t be bold any more.” Pictures like that of the dear little grandson occur in the grandmother’s letters again and again: now we see him at table, “fighting in dumb show for his share in his grandfather’s claret,” now sturdily claiming his place in his elder brother’s games, now climbing on chairs and prating enough for two, now riding on Mr. Holmes’s back, and asking to be taken on grandmother’s. “I told him that my back was old, but in a little time I offered to take him, he would not, he replied in a tone of great tenderness, ‘because you have a pain.’ The next night I again asked him if he would come on my back, and he at once said he would if I had not a pain.”
Poor little Temple! Like his namesake uncle he was destined to live but a short life. He died of yellow fever, at sea, at the age of twenty-four, being a Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy.
It was at Fort George that Jane Emmet’s seventh child, a little girl called Jane Erin, was born. Some months after her birth the State prisoners were released,[73] and dispatched on the Government frigate the Ariadne, to Cuxhaven, the port for Hamburg. At Hamburg the prisoners separated, some to go to America, others to Paris, others to Holland, and Dr. MacNevin to Dresden. The Emmets first settled at Brussels where Thomas Addis devoted himself to the education of his children. At Brussels he heard of his father’s death, and was visited by his brother Robert.
We know that it was not brotherly affection alone, deep and true as this was, that brought Robert Emmet to Brussels at this juncture. The fact was that all men saw that the peace between England and France was a very “sick” peace indeed, and liable to expire at any moment. The United Irishmen, whose organisation had survived the disasters of ’98, were waiting their chance of a rupture between the two countries to shake off the yoke of England, which the Union had made more intolerable. They had encouragement from some of the most influential men in Ireland. Though not enamoured of France, which they rightly considered had treated them most scandalously,[74] they were ready to bargain for French aid “on conditions.” France, on the other hand, was willing to make these terms, her only interest in Ireland being to get in a blow at England through her.
It is not the place to tell here how once more France failed Ireland; how Robert Emmet was suffered to go to his death without a finger being raised to save him; how the Irishmen, who had enlisted in an Irish legion in the service of France, on the distinct promise that Augereau was to command a great expedition to Ireland, were wantonly deceived.
In the autumn of 1804, Thomas Addis Emmet, whose clear eyes even Bonaparte could not long deceive, shook the dust of France from his feet and set sail with his wife and the children who had shared their imprisonment and exile, for New York.
On November the 11th, 1804, Jane Emmet first set foot on American soil on which forty-two years of her life were yet to be spent, and in which she was to find a grave. Her health, which had suffered much during her sojourn in Fort George, and through the agitations and anxieties which attended her life in Brussels and Paris, improved. Her husband whose reputation and talents had secured for him the most distinguished reception at the hands of the noblest men in America, made his way rapidly at the American Bar. The little children from whom she had been separated so long: John, and Tom, and Temple, were restored to her. The little band of seven was subsequently reinforced by two new arrivals: Mary Anne, born in New York in March, 1805, and William Colville, born in the same city in April, 1807.
The family correspondence, published by her grandson, Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet, gives us a delightful picture of the home-life of Jane Emmet during these years. She saw her husband honoured among the noblest of the land. She saw her children grow up about her, her girls beautiful and accomplished and altogether charming: her sons clever and successful, heirs to their father’s unstained integrity, as to his commanding abilities. The family had a summer residence on the old Middle Road, New York, and a winter abode in town—but the “Middle Road” was so attractive that the whole year was not infrequently passed there. All sorts of frolics enlivened their stay there, fancy dress balls and musical entertainments not to speak of practical jokes, in which the humour of the family took intense delight. As the sons and daughters got married, the new daughters, and sons thus added served but to widen the charming family circle, not to break it up.
In November, 1827, Jane Emmet had the supreme grief of losing her husband—a grief which was shared by all America—which “paid his love by reverencing his genius.”
Jane Emmet survived her husband nineteen years, dying at the house of her son-in-law on November 10th, 1846.
The noble words of Dr. Madden are the fittest tribute to her memory:
“The widow of Thomas Addis Emmet survived her husband nineteen years. She had shared in his sorrows and his sufferings—had been his companion in prisonment in Kilmainham gaol, and in captivity in Fort George—not for days, or weeks, or months, but for years. She had accompanied him in exile to the Continent and to the land of his adoption, and there she shared in his honours and the felicity of his later years.
“The woman who encountered so many privations and trials as she had done—who had been accustomed to all the enjoyments of a happy home, and
‘Had slept with full content about her bed,
And never waked but to a joyful morning.’
When deprived of all ordinary comforts, of the commonest appliances of these to the humblest state of life, during the imprisonment of her husband in Dublin; and was subjected necessarily to many restraints during the dreary imprisonments at Fort George—seemed ever to those who were the companions of her husband’s captivity as ‘one who, in suffering all things, suffered nothing.’ She fulfilled with heroic fortitude the duties of a devoted wife towards her husband in all his trials in his own country; was the joy and comfort of his life in a foreign land, where the exiled patriot, honoured and revered, in course of time rose to the first distinction in his profession; she died far away from her native land—but her memory should not be forgotten in Ireland.
“This excellent woman, full of years, rich in virtue, surrounded by affectionate children—prosperous, happily circumstanced, dutiful and loving children to her, worthy of their inheritance of a great name, and of the honour that descended to them from the revered memory of her truly noble husband—thus terminated in a foreign land a long career, chequered by many trials, over which a virtuous woman’s self-sacrificing devotion, the courage and constancy of a faithful wife, the force of a mother’s love eventually prevailed. The portrait of this lady is in the possession of Mr. John Patten.[75] The time may come when this intimation may be of some avail. Ireland has its Cornelias, its Portias—matrons worthy of association in our thoughts with Cato’s daughter, the mother of the children who were the jewels of her heart—with the wife of Russell, of Lavalette—but Ireland has no national gallery for the pictures and busts of her illustrious children—no literature for a record of the ‘noble deeds of women’ of her own land.”