“The rose left her cheek, the brave eyes grew dim,
She drained the bitter cup of sorrow to the brim—
When that sad September noon saw your young heart low,
And the dawn of Ireland shrouded in a bleak cloud of woe.
“I had died for you gladly, my courage never quailed,
When their swords pierced my bosom, their wild threats assailed;
Nor did their prison torture win from me a single tear—
That memory of grief and pain would die if you were here.”
—Ethna Carbery: Anne Devlin’s Lament for Emmet.
SHALL we not join together the two women, whom love for Robert Emmet has dowered with a common immortality, and whom a common agony of loss has bound, one to the other, in the eternal sisterhood of sorrow? So best shall our love and pity reach them both—the fragile girl who died of a broken heart for his sake, and the strong girl whose brave heart faced—for his sake likewise—tortures that were worse than death. And let it not weaken our sympathy with Sarah Curran to remember that the sentimental generation which wept for her (in the rose-tinted shades of its Whig drawing-rooms, the while Tommy Moore set her sorrows to the sweetest and saddest of music) allowed Anne Devlin to die of starvation.
In thinking of Sarah Curran we paraphrase unconsciously the pitiful lines of one of our Irish poets and say of her:
“There was a maid whom Sorrow named his friend,
And she of her high comrade Sorrow dreaming,
Went walking with slow steps.”
From her earliest years sorrow had walked with her as friend with friend; and the sadness of her death was but in keeping with the sadness of her birth, of her disposition, of her home-life, of her love story.
We know from the confidences of John Philpot Curran’s most intimate friends that the brilliant gaiety of his convivial hours alternated with fits of the blackest depression. His friend, Charles Phillips, writes of him: “It was with him as it is with every person whose spirits are apt to be occasionally excited—the depression is at intervals in exact proportion.... He was naturally sensitive—domestic misfortunes rendered his home unhappy—he flew for a kind of refuge into public life; and the political ruin of his country, leaving him without an object of private enjoyment or of patriotic hope, flung him upon his own heart-devouring reflections.... It was a deplorable thing to see him, in the decline of life, when visited by this constitutional melancholy. I have not unfrequently accompanied him in his walks upon such occasions, almost at the hour of midnight. He had gardens attached to the Priory, of which he was particularly fond; and into these gardens, when so affected, no matter at what hour, he used to ramble. It was then almost impossible to divert his mind from themes of sadness. The gloom of his own thoughts discoloured everything, and from calamity to calamity he would wander on—seeing in the future nothing for hope, and in the past nothing but disappointment.”
The home of such a man cannot have been a very happy one for his children; and the sufferings imposed on his family by Curran’s attacks of melancholia must have been aggravated in the case of his youngest daughter Sarah, who inherited, with her father’s genius and her father’s artistic and musical sensibility, more than her share of her father’s disposition to sadness. In the large dark mournful eyes of her, which had also come to her from her father, was mirrored the hereditary sadness of her soul.
This hereditary sadness, fostered by an unhappy home-life, was further strengthened by two events which darkened her childhood. The one was the death of her favourite sister, Gertrude, who died at the age of twelve, when Sarah herself was a girl of eleven. Gertrude was a musical prodigy, and the whole family, and especially Sarah and her father, who were passionately fond of music, worshipped her. Curran insisted on the dead girl being buried in the Priory grounds, and she was laid to rest under a large tree on the lawn, directly opposite the window of the children’s nursery. “Under its shade they [i.e. Gertrude and Sarah] had often sat together, pulled the first primroses at its roots, and watched in its leaves the earliest verdure of the spring. Many an hour, for many a year, did the sorrowful survivor take her silent stand at the melancholy window, gazing on the well-known spot, which constituted all her little world of joys and sorrows. To this circumstance she attributed the tendency to melancholy which formed so marked a feature of her character through life.”[97]
Two years after Gertrude’s death, a grief even more intolerable befel our poor Sarah. She lost her mother, whose favourite daughter she was—and it was worse than death which caused the separation. Sarah was fourteen at the time—old enough to feel the shame, and to suffer the agony of it in every fibre of her pure and noble nature. So overwhelmed was she with grief that it was thought advisable for her to leave the Priory for some time. She therefore accepted the offer of hospitality made her by an early college friend of her father, Rev. Thomas Crawford, of Lismore, and remained with his family “until better thoughts at home led to her return to it.”
At what time she learned to know Robert Emmet we are not definitely informed. The Emmets and the Currans were old acquaintances—if not friends—and for a time at least Thomas Addis Emmet and John Philpot Curran were neighbours in Rathfarnham. They must have often met, likewise, in the law-courts. Richard Curran, Sarah’s eldest brother, was a fellow-student of Robert Emmet’s at Trinity, and it was ostensibly to see him, and to enjoy the witty conversation of his father that Robert Emmet, after his return from Paris in 1802, paid his frequent visits to the Priory. Curran loved to see youth around him, and made the young men heartily welcome.
And all the time it was Sarah that drew the young patriot to the house her presence glorified for him—Sarah with her pale and delicate loveliness, the soft cloud of her black hair, the haunting sadness of her great dark eyes, the exquisite voice of her that moved him to the very depths of his soul, singing some of the tender old Irish airs he loved so well! Sarah with her fatal dower of loveliness, and genius, and music, and passion—and sorrow.
It is quite certain that after the failure of the Insurrection of July 23rd, 1803, Emmet could have escaped to America, had not he risked his all for the sake of one last meeting with his love. He came back to an old lodging of his at the house of Mrs. Palmer at Harold’s Cross, and from this place he sent a letter through Anne Devlin to Sarah Curran.
A few days later, Government received information that Emmet was at Mrs. Palmer’s. On August 25, Major Sirr rode out there and captured him, bringing him back handcuffed, to Dublin Castle, whence he was committed to Kilmainham Gaol on the charge of High Treason.
When he was arrested, two letters[98] in a lady’s hand-writing were found in his possession. As these letters clearly showed that their writer was fully acquainted with Emmet’s plans, the authorities were most anxious to discover from whom they came. They half suspected that they had been written by his sister, Mrs. Holmes, and that the language of a love affair was adopted as a means of averting suspicion. Emmet, in an agony of mind, lest the writer should be discovered, offered at his Examination before the Privy Council to accept any consequences for himself if the lady’s name should not appear.
Alas! it was his own mistaken trust in the turnkey of Kilmainham, George Dunn, which put Government in possession of the knowledge they had hitherto vainly sought. Dunn had been bribed by St. John Mason, Emmet’s cousin, to facilitate his escape, but while pretending to fall in with Mason’s plans he had in reality betrayed them to the Castle. Knowing nothing of this, Emmet entrusted to George Dunn, a letter openly addressed to “Miss Sarah Curran”—and this letter (which clearly indicated her as the writer of the others) was, within an hour, in the hands of the Chief Secretary.
Amid the other grim documents of the Home Office Secret Papers this love letter of Emmet’s keeps strange company. It has been published, for the first time, in “The Viceroy’s Post-Bag” (p. 358):—
“My dearest Love,
“I don’t know how to write to you. I never felt so oppressed in my life as at the cruel injury I have done to you. I was seized and searched with a pistol over me before I could destroy your letters. They have been compared with those found before. I was threatened with having them brought forward against me in Court. I offered to plead guilty if they would suppress them. This was refused. Information (without mentioning names) was required. I refused, but offered since if I would be permitted to consult others, and that they would consent to enter into any accommodation of that nature to save the lives of those condemned, that I would only require for my part of it to have those letters suppressed, and that I would stand my trial. It has been refused. My love, can you forgive me?
“I wanted to know whether anything had been done respecting the person who wrote the letters, for I feared you might have been arrested. They refused to tell me for a long time. At length, when I said that it was but fair if they expected I should enter into any accommodation that I should know for what I was to do it, they then asked me whether bringing you into the room to me would answer my purpose, upon which I got up and told them that it might answer theirs better. I was sure you were arrested, and I could not stand the idea of seeing you in that situation. When I found, however, that this was not the case, I began to think that they only meant to alarm me; but their refusal has only come this moment and my fears are renewed. Not that they can do anything to you even if they would be base enough to attempt it, for they can have no proof who wrote them, nor did I let your name escape me once, nor even acknowledge that they were written directly to myself. But I fear they may suspect from the stile, and from the hair, for they took the stock[99] from me, and I have not been able to get it back from them, and that they may think of bringing you forward.
“I have written to your father to come to me to-morrow. Had you not better speak to himself to-night. Destroy my letters that there may be nothing against yourself, and deny having any knowledge of me further than seeing me once or twice. For God’s sake, write to me by the bearer one line to tell me how you are in spirits. I have no anxiety, no care, about myself; but I am terribly oppressed about you. My dearest love, I would with joy lay down my life, but ought I to do more? Do not be alarmed; they may try to frighten you, but they cannot do more. God bless you, my dearest love.
“I must send this off at once; I have written it in the dark. My dearest Sarah, forgive me.”
The next morning Major Sirr and a party of yeomanry presented themselves at the Priory with warrants to search the house for papers, and arrest Sarah Curran. The events of that morning are graphically described by the Chief Secretary, Mr. Wickham, to the Home Secretary.
“Secret
“Dublin Castle, Sept. 9, 1803.
“My dear Sir,
“The writer of the letter found in Mr. Emmet’s pocket is discovered. She proves to be Mr. Curran’s youngest daughter. This discovery has given rise to some very unpleasant and distressing scenes. It became indispensably necessary to search the apartment of the lady for papers. She resided at her father’s house in the country near Rathfarnham, within a short distance of Butterfield Lane. Major Sirr was sent there this morning with a letter addressed to Mr. Curran, of which I send a copy inclosed. Unfortunately, Mr. Curran was not at home, and still more unfortunately the young lady was not up, tho’ the rest of the family (two other daughters and a son) were assembled at breakfast, so that the Major entered the room where she was still in bed. This circumstance occasioned a scene of great confusion and distress, and was also productive of some inconvenience, for whilst the Major and the other daughter were giving assistance to Mr. Emmet’s correspondent—who was thrown into violent convulsions—the eldest Miss Curran continued to destroy some papers, the few scraps of which that were saved were in Mr. Emmet’s hand-writing.
“I have the satisfaction to add that Mr. Curran is satisfied that Government has acted throughout with great personal delicacy towards him, and that on his part he has acted fairly towards Government, and that he was unquestionably ignorant of the connection between his daughter and Mr. Emmet.
“The Lord Lieutenant particularly requests that Miss Curran’s name may not be mentioned. It is difficult that it should be long concealed, but it is desirable that it should not be first mentioned by any member of Government in either country.
“The Attorney-General, who has had the kindness to go himself to Mr. Curran’s house at Rathfarnham, gives the most melancholy and affecting account of the state in which he left the whole family.”
Curran had been engaged by Emmet as his Counsel, but he immediately threw up his brief. He had never liked the Emmets; but now when Robert’s action had brought danger to his own family, and obstacles to his own advancement, his feeling towards him—and towards his own daughter—became a hatred, with elements of madness in it. Of his treatment of the latter we shall speak later.
To the curt letter in which Curran announced to the prisoner his refusal to act as his Counsel, Robert replied as follows:—
“I did not expect you to be my counsel: I nominated you because not to have done so might have appeared remarkable. Had Mr. ——[100] been in town I did not even wish to have seen you, but as he was not I wrote to you to come to me at once. I know that I have done you very severe injury, much greater than I can atone for with my life. That atonement I did offer to make before the Privy Council, by pleading guilty if those documents were suppressed. I offered more. I offered if I was permitted to consult some persons, and if they would consent to an accommodation for saving the lives of others, that I would only require for my part of it the suppression of those documents, and that I would abide the event of my own trial. This was also rejected, and nothing but individual information (with the exception of names) would be taken. My intention was not to leave the suppression of these documents to possibility, but to render it unnecessary for anyone to plead for me, by pleading guilty to the charge myself.
“The circumstances that I am now going to mention I do not state in my own justification. When I first addressed your daughter I expected that in another week my own fate would be decided. I knew that in case of success many others might look on me differently from what they did at that moment, but I speak with sincerity when I say that I never was anxious for situation or distinction myself, and I did not wish to be united to one who was. I spoke to your daughter neither expecting, nor, in fact, under those circumstances, wishing, that there should be a return of attachment, but wishing to judge of her dispositions—to know how far they might not be unfavourable or disengaged, and to know what foundation I might afterwards have to count on. I received no encouragement whatever. She told me she had no attachment for any person, nor did she seem likely to have any that could make her wish to quit you.
“I staid away till the time had elapsed when I found that the event to which I have alluded was to be postponed indefinitely. I returned by a kind of infatuation, thinking that to myself only was I giving pleasure or pain. I perceived no progress of attachment on her part, nor anything in her conduct to distinguish me from a common acquaintance.
“Afterwards I had reason to suppose that discoveries were made, and that I should be obliged to quit the Kingdom immediately; and I came to make a renunciation of any approach to friendship that might have been formed. On that very day she herself spoke to me to discontinue my visits. I told her that it was my intention, and I mentioned the reason. I then for the first time found, when I was unfortunate, by the manner in which she was affected, that there was a return of affection, and that it was too late to retreat. My own apprehensions, also I found afterwards were without cause, and I remained.
“There has been much culpability on my part in all this; but there has also been a great deal of that misfortune which seems uniformly to have accompanied me.
“That I have written to your daughter since an unfortunate event has taken place was an additional breach of propriety, for which I have suffered well. But I will candidly confess that I not only do not feel it to have been of the same extent, but that I consider it to have been unavoidable after what has passed; for though I will not attempt to justify in the smallest degree my former conduct, yet, when an attachment was once formed between us—and a sincerer one never did exist—I feel that, peculiarly circumstanced as I then was, to have left her uncertain of my situation would neither have weaned her affections nor lessened her anxiety; and looking upon her as one, whom, if I had lived, I hoped to have had my partner for life, I did hold the removing of her anxiety above every other consideration. I would rather have had the affections of your daughter in the back settlements of America, than the first situation this country could afford without them.
“I know not whether this will be any extenuation of my offence. I know not whether it will be any extenuation of it to know that if I had that situation in my power at this moment I would relinquish it to devote my life to her happiness. I know not whether success would have blotted out the recollection of what I have done. But I know that a man with the coldness of death on him need not be made to feel any other coldness, and that he may be spared any addition to the misery he feels, not for himself, but for those to whom he has left nothing but sorrow.”
There were all the elements of the cad in John Philpot Curran’s character, and these came to the surface after his return to his house on September 9th, when he presented himself in the darkened chamber where his daughter lay in her agony. After one terrible interview, he refused to see her, or to speak to her, ever again.
He had perforce to shelter her for a little time longer under his roof—for brain fever, followed by a temporary loss of reason, brought her to death’s door. She was thus mercifully spared, as her friend said, “the misery of travelling step by step, through the wilderness of woe which Emmet’s trial and execution would have proved to her.”
On the night before his execution (while his love tossed in the delirium of fever, and the sister who watched by her bed had her heart torn by the way she called his name) Robert Emmet wrote two letters which are eloquent of the thoughts of her which filled his heart until it ceased to beat. One is addressed to her brother, Richard, who had found means to send his friend a message of kindness, which might almost atone for his father’s caddish cruelty:
“My dearest Richard,
“I find I have but a few hours to live; but if it was the last moment, and that the power of utterance was leaving me, I would thank you from the bottom of my heart for your generous expressions of affection and forgiveness to me. If there was anyone in the world in whose breast my death might be supposed not to stifle every spark of resentment, it might be you. I have deeply injured you—I have injured the happiness of a sister that you love, and who was formed to give happiness to everyone about her, instead of having her mind a prey to affliction. Oh! Richard, I have no excuse to offer, but that I meant the reverse. I intended as much happiness for Sarah as the most ardent love could have given her. I never did tell you how much I idolised her. It was not with a wild or unfounded passion, but it was an attachment increasing every hour, from an admiration of the purity of her mind and respect for her talents. I did dwell in secret upon the prospect of our union. I did hope that success, while it afforded the opportunity of our union, might be a means of confirming an attachment which misfortune had called forth. I did not look to honours for myself—praise I would have asked from the lips of no man; but I would have wished to read in the glow of Sarah’s countenance that her husband was respected.
“My love, Sarah! it was not thus that I thought to have requited your affection. I did hope to be a prop round which your affections might have clung, and which would never have been shaken; but a rude blast has snapped it, and they have fallen over a grave.
“This is no time for affliction. I have had public motives to sustain my mind, and I have not suffered it to sink; but there have been moments in my imprisonment when my mind was so sunk by grief on her account that death would have been a refuge. God bless you, my dearest Richard. I am obliged to leave off immediately.”
The second was addressed to Thomas Addis Emmet and his wife. It was suppressed by the Lord Lieutenant’s orders, and found its final destination in the Home Office Secret Papers, whence Mr. MacDonagh first exhumed it:
“My dearest Tom and Jane,
“I am just going to do my last duty to my country. It can be done as well on the scaffold as on the field. Do not give way to any weak feeling on my account, but rather encourage proud ones that I have possessed fortitude and tranquillity of mind to the last.
“God bless you and the young hopes that are growing up about you. May they be more fortunate than their uncle; but may they preserve as pure and ardent an attachment to their country as he has done. Give the watch to little Robert. He will not prize it the less for having been in the possession of two Roberts before him. I have one dying request to make to you. I was attached to Sarah Curran, the youngest daughter of your friend. I did hope to have had her my companion for life. I did hope that she would not only have constituted my happiness, but that her heart and understanding would have made her one of Jane’s dearest friends. I know that Jane would have loved her on my account and I feel also that had they been acquainted she must have loved her on her own. No one knew of the attachment until now, nor is it now generally known, therefore do not speak of it to others. She is living with her father and brother, but if these protectors should fall off and that no other should replace them, treat her as my wife and love her as a sister. God Almighty bless you all. Give my love to all my friends.”
As soon as his daughter was able to travel, Curran drove her from his house. She first found shelter with her kind friends the Crawfords, of Lismore, and subsequently with a Quaker family called Penrose at Woodhill, Cork, whose kindness to the broken-hearted, homeless girl helped to restore her to some degree of strength. On one occasion, during her stay with them, they persuaded her to go to a masked ball in Cork. The “mask” selected for her was that of a wandering ballad-singer, and in this character she sang, in the exquisite voice, which had so often charmed her dead young lover, some of the beautiful, plaintive Irish airs of Owenson.
A romantic young officer, Captain Sturgeon, lost his heart to the singer—and when he heard her story his affections were but the more deeply engaged. Himself, the offspring of a most romantic marriage,[101] he found in the halo of poetry, with which Sarah’s sad love-story invested her, but an added attraction. He, therefore, proposed for her hand; and the Penroses who saw in this marriage, the one hope of their friend’s future settlement, urged his suit with much ardour. At this time consumption had declared itself in her fragile form, and the doctors stated that residence in a warm climate was necessary to save her life. Captain Sturgeon was ordered to Sicily in the winter of 1805, and this fact seemed to Miss Curran’s friends, the Penroses, an additional reason for urging her to accept his proposal.
At last she yielded to the united entreaties of her friends and gave her hand to Captain Sturgeon, with his full knowledge that her heart was buried in Emmet’s unknown grave.
In the spring of 1808 the English had to abandon Sicily, when Captain Sturgeon and his wife returned to England in a crowded transport, in very tempestuous weather. An unfinished letter of Sarah’s to one of her friends, will tell in all the pathos of its simplicity the end of her sorrowful story:
“Hythe, April 17, 1808.
“My dear M——, I suppose you do not know of my arrival from Sicily, or I should have heard from you. I must be very brief in the details of events which have been so fatal to me, and which followed our departure from that country. A most dreadful and perilous passage occasioned me many frights. I was, on our entrance into the channel, prematurely delivered of a boy, without any assistance, save that of one of the soldier’s wives, the only woman on board but myself. The storm being so high that no boat could stand out to sea, I was in imminent danger till twelve the next day, when, at the risk of his life, a physician came on board from one of the ships and relieved me. The storm continued, and I got brain fever, which, however, passed off. To be short, on landing at Portsmouth, the precious creature for whom I suffered so much, God took to Himself. The inexpressible anguish I felt at this event, preying on me, has occasioned the delay of my health. For the last month the contest between life and death has seemed doubtful; but this day having called in a very clever man, he seems not to think me in danger. My disorder is a total derangement of the nervous system, and its most dreadful effects I find in an attack on my mind and spirits. I suffer misery you cannot conceive. I am often seized with heavy perspirations, trembling and that indescribable horror which you must know if ever you had fever. Write instantly to me. Alas! I want everything to soothe my mind, O my friend, would to heaven you were with me! nothing so much as the presence of a dear female friend would tend to my recovery. But in England you know how I am situated—not one I know intimately. To make up for this my beloved husband is everything to me; his conduct throughout all my troubles surpasses all praise. Write to me, dear M., and tell me how to bear all these things. I have, truly speaking, cast all my care on the Lord; but oh! how our weak natures fail every day, every hour I may say. On board the ship, when all seemed adverse to hope, it is strange how an overstrained trust in certain words of our Saviour gave me such perfect faith in His help, that, though my baby was visibly pining away, I never doubted his life for a moment. ‘He who gathers the lambs in His arms,’ I thought, would look on mine if I had faith in Him. This has often troubled me since.”
Extract from Gentleman’s Magazine for 1808: “May 5th, 1808, at Hythe, in Kent, of a rapid decline, aged 26, Sarah, wife of Captain Henry Sturgeon, youngest daughter of the Right Hon. J. P. Curran, Master of the Rolls in Ireland.”
In 1842 when Dr. Madden was engaged in his researches for his memoir of Robert Emmet, he was directed to a certain old washerwoman, called Campbell, then living in great poverty and obscurity in a stable-yard off John’s Lane. This old woman, he was told, was the only one then living, in all probability, who could give an authentic account of what happened on the night of July the 23rd, 1803, after the flight of the leaders and the rout of their followers.
How did she come to have this information? For the reason that she had helped Rosie Hope to cook and keep house for Robert Emmet and his companions in the establishment he had leased (in the name of Robert Ellis) in Butterfield Lane, Rathfarnham, during the months of active preparation for the Rising. Her father was a well-to-do dairyman, of the neighbourhood, and both he and his sons, as well as their kinsmen, Michael Dwyer, the Wicklow “outlaw,” and Arthur Devlin, were deep in Robert Emmet’s plans. His daughter’s housewifely skill had been devoted to the Cause in the same spirit as her male relatives’ soldier-service. Her maiden name, which Dr. Madden’s informant had previously omitted to mention, was—Anne Devlin.
Anne Devlin! Can anyone living to-day, with a drop of Irish blood in his or her veins, hear that name without a great stirring of the heart? It stands for a heroism, a fortitude, a devotion, a fidelity, a loyalty, which even to have conceived, honours all human nature—and which to have produced, ennobles Irish womanhood for all time. Anne Devlin! Amid the great names of our race which thrill each Irish heart as with a trumpet note, what name has power to move us as does that?
We owe it to Dr. Madden that the name means so much to us. Had he not sought her out, and drawn her story from her lips, and raised her body from its pauper burial place to lay it, in its rightful place amid the noblest in Glasnevin, that name might have meant as little to us as it did to the generation, which Dr. Madden’s appeal for her (in the first edition of his “United Irishmen”) left unmoved, and which, during his absence, from Ireland, left her to die of cold and hunger in a tenement house, and be buried in a pauper’s grave.
“In the summer of 1843,” writes Dr. Madden, “accompanied by Anne Devlin, I proceeded to Butterfield Lane, to ascertain the fact of the existence or non-existence of the house in which Robert Emmet had resided in 1803. For a length of time our search was fruitless. The recollection of a locality at the expiration of forty years is a very dim sort of reminiscence. There was no house in the lane the exterior of which reminded my conductress of her old scene of suffering. At length her eye caught an old range of buildings at some distance, like the offices of a farmhouse. This she at once recognised as part of the premises of her father, and she was soon able to point out the well-known fields around it, which had once been in her father’s possession. The house, alongside of which we were standing, on the right-hand side of the lane going from Rathfarnham road, she said must be the house of Mr. Emmet, though the entrance was entirely altered; however, the position of an adjoining house left little doubt in her mind. We knocked at the door, and I found the house was inhabited by a lady of my acquaintance, the daughter of a Protestant clergyman, who had been, strange to say, the college friend and most intimate acquaintance of Robert Emmet, the late Dr. Hayden, of Rathcoole.
“The lady of the house, in whom I discovered an acquaintance, left us in no doubt on the subject of the locality—we were in the house that had been tenanted by Robert Emmet. The scene that ensued is one more easily conceived than described. We were conducted over the house—my aged companion at first in silence, and then as if slowly awakening from a dream, rubbing her dim eyes, and here and there pausing for some moments when she came to some recognised spot. On the ground floor she pointed out a small room, on the left-hand of the entrance—‘That’s the room where Mr. Dowdall and Mr. Hamilton used to sleep.’ The entrance has been changed from about the centre to the right-hand end; the window of a small room there has been converted into the door-way, and the room itself into the hall. ‘This,’ said Anne Devlin, ‘was my room; I know it well—my mattress used to be in that corner.’ There was one place, every corner and cranny of which she seemed to have a familiar acquaintance with, and that was the kitchen. On the upper floor, the principal bed-room at the present time attracted her particular attention; she stood for some time gazing into the room from the door-way; I asked her whose room it had been. It was a good while before I got an answer in words, but her trembling hands, and the few tears which came from a deep source, and spoke of sorrow of an old date, left no necessity to repeat that question—it was the room of Robert Emmet.
“Another on the same floor was that of Russell. They slept on mattresses on the floor—there was scarcely any furniture in the house; they often went out after dark, seldom or never in the day-time. They were always in good spirits, and Mr. Hamilton used often to sing—he was a very good singer; Mr. Robert sometimes hummed a tune, but he was no great singer, but he was the best and kindest-hearted of all the persons she had ever known; he was too good for many of those who were about him. Of Russell she spoke in terms hardly less favourable than those in which she expressed her opinions of Emmet.... At the rear of the house, in the courtyard, she pointed out the spot where she had undergone the punishment of half-hanging, and while she did so there was no appearance of emotions, such at least as one might expect recalled terror might produce, but there were very evident manifestations of another kind, of as lively a remembrance of the wrongs and outrages that had been inflicted on her, as if they had been endured but the day before, and of as keen a sense of those indignities and cruelties, as if her cowardly assailants had been before her, and those withered hands of hers had power to grapple with them.”
And then, amidst the very scenes which had been hallowed by Robert Emmet’s presence and Anne Devlin’s sufferings Dr. Madden heard from her lips the high, heroic tale once more.
“On July the 23rd at about eleven o’clock at night,” Anne Devlin told Dr. Madden, “Robert Emmet, Nicholas Stafford, Michael Quigley, Thomas Wylde, John Mahon, John Hevey, and the two Perrotts from Naas came to the house at Butterfield Lane. She first saw them outside of the house, in the yard; she was at that moment sending off a man on horseback with ammunition in a sack, and bottles filled with powder. She called out, ‘Who’s there?’ Robert answered, ‘It’s me, Anne.’ She said, ‘Oh, bad welcome to you, is the world lost by you, you cowards that you are, to lead the people to destruction, and then to leave them.’ Robert Emmet said, ‘Don’t blame me, the fault is not mine.’ They then came in; Quigley was present, but they did not upbraid him. Emmet and the others told her afterwards that Quigley was the cause of the failure....
“They stopped at Butterfield lane that night and next day, and at night about ten o’clock, fled to the mountains, when they got information that the house was to be searched. Her father, who kept a dairy close by, got horses for three of them, and went with them.
“Rose Hope, the wife of James Hope, had been there keeping the house also. The reason of their stopping there that night was, that Emmet expected Dwyer and the mountaineers down in the morning by break of day, but Dwyer had not got Emmet’s previous letter, and had heard of Emmet’s defeat only the next day, and therefore did not come. Mr. Emmet and his companions first went to Doyle’s in the mountains, and thence to the widow Bagenell’s. Anne Devlin and Miss Wylde, the sister of Mrs. Mahon, two or three days after, went up to the mountains in a jingle with letters for them. They found Robert Emmet and his associates at the Widow Bagenell’s, sitting on the side of the hill; some of them were in their uniform, for they had no other clothes.
“Robert Emmet insisted on coming back with her and her companion, he parted with them before they came to Rathfarnham, but she knows not where he went that night, but in a day or two after he sent her to take a letter to Miss Curran; he was then staying at Mrs. Palmer’s, at Harold’s Cross.
“The day after ... a troop of yeomen came with a magistrate, and searched the house. Every place was ransacked from top to bottom. As for herself she was seized on when they first rushed in, as if they were going to tear down the house. She was kept below by three or four of the yeomen with their fixed bayonets pointed at her, and so close to her body that she could feel their points. When the others came down she was examined. She said she knew nothing in the world about the gentlemen, except that she was the servant maid; where they came from, where they went to, she knew nothing about; and so long as her wages were paid she cared to know nothing else about them.
“The magistrate pressed her to tell the truth—he threatened her with death if she did not tell; she persisted in asserting her total ignorance of Mr. Ellis’s acts and movements, and of those of the other gentlemen. At length the magistrate gave the word to hang her, and she was dragged into the courtyard to be executed. There was a common car there—they tilted up the shafts and fixed a rope from the backband that goes across the shafts, and while these preparations were making for her execution, the yeomen kept her standing against the wall of the house, prodding her with their bayonets in the arms and shoulders till she was all covered with blood, and saying to her at every thrust of the bayonet, ‘Will you confess now; will you tell now where is Mr. Ellis?’ Her constant answer was, ‘I have nothing to tell, I will tell nothing.’
“The rope was at length put about her neck; she was dragged to the place where the car was converted into a gallows; she was placed under it, and the end of the rope was passed over the backband. The question was put to her for the last time, ‘Will you confess where Mr. Ellis is?’ Her answer was, ‘You may murder me, you villains, but not one word about him will you ever get from me.’ She had just time to say, ‘The Lord Jesus have mercy on my soul,’ when a tremendous shout was raised by the yeomen; the rope was pulled by all of them except those who held down the back part of the car, and in an instant she was suspended by the neck. After she had been thus suspended for two or three minutes her feet touched the ground, and a savage yell of laughter recalled her to her senses. The rope round her neck was loosened, and her life was spared—she was let off with half-hanging. She was then sent to town, and brought before Major Sirr.
“No sooner was she brought before Major Sirr, than he, in the most civil and coaxing manner, endeavoured to prevail on her to give information respecting Robert Emmet’s place of concealment. The question continually put to her was, ‘Well, Anne, all we want to know is, where did he go to from Butterfield lane?’ He said he would undertake to obtain for her the sum (he did not call it reward) of £500, which he added, ‘was a fine fortune for a young woman,’ only to tell against persons who were not her relations; that all the others had confessed the truth—which was not true—and that they were sent home liberated, which was also a lie.”
Dr. Madden said to her with pretended seriousness, “You took the money, of course.” Her indignant answer, accompanied by a look to which Dr. Madden felt only a painter could do justice—was “Me take the money—the price of Mr. Robert’s blood! No; I spurned the rascal’s offer.”
“The major went on coaxing, trying to persuade her to confess. He said everything had been told him by one of her associates. Nay, what’s more, he repeated word for word, what she had said to Mr. Robert the night of the 23rd, when he came back to Butterfield lane—‘Bad welcome to you, etc.’ One of the persons present with him then must have undoubtedly been an informer. After she had been some time in Kilmainham, Mr. Emmet was arrested and sent to that prison. Dr. Trevor had frequently talked to her about him, but she never ‘let on’ that she had any acquaintance with him. At this time she was kept in solitary confinement for refusing to give information. One day the doctor came and spoke to her in a very good-natured way, and said she must have some indulgence, she must be permitted to take exercise in the yard. The turnkey was ordered to take her to the yard, and he accordingly did so; but when the yard-door was open, who should she see walking very fast up and down the yard, but Mr. Robert. She thought she would have dropped. She saw the faces of people watching her at a grated window that looked into the yard, and her only dread was that Mr. Robert on recognising her would speak to her; but she kept her face away, and walked up and down on the other side; and when they had crossed one another several times, at last they met at the end. She took care, when his eyes met hers, to have a frown on her face, and her finger raised to her lips. He passed on as if he had never seen her—but he knew her well; and the half smile that came over his face, and passed off in a moment, could hardly have been observed except by one who knew every turn of his countenance. The doctor’s plot failed, she was taken back to her cell, and there was no more taking of air or exercise then for her.
“She was in Kilmainham, a close prisoner, when Robert Emmet was executed. She was kept locked up in a solitary cell, and indeed always, with a few exceptions, was kept so during her confinement the first year. The day after his execution she was taken from gaol to the Castle, to be examined, through Thomas Street. The gaoler had given orders to stop the coach at the scaffold where Robert Emmet was executed. It was stopped there, and she was forced to look at his blood, which was still plain enough to be seen sprinkled over the deal boards.
“At the latter end of her confinement, some gentlemen belonging to the Castle had come to the gaol and seen her in her cell. She told them her sad story, and it was told by them to the lord lieutenant. From that time her treatment was altogether different; she was not only allowed the range of the woman’s ward, but was permitted to go outside the prison, and three or four times, accompanied by her sister and Mrs. Dwyer and one of the turnkeys, was taken to the Spa at Lucan for the benefit of her health; for she was then crippled in her limbs, more dead than alive, hardly able to move hand or foot.
“At length Mr. Pitt died; it was a joyful day for Ireland. The prisons were thrown open where many an honest person had lain since the month of July, 1803.”
Anne Devlin’s narrative to Dr. Madden did not exhaust the full tale of her sufferings. There is no mention in it of the fact that the whole of her family, except one sister and a brother who were mere children, had been thrown into prison, and their property ruined. As there was no place for the little brother to go he found refuge in his father’s cell in gaol. But the consolation of his boy’s company was not left long to old Brian Devlin. Some communication having been discovered between him and his daughter, the latter was removed from the new to the old gaol. Some time after, the boy, then sick of a fever, was taken in the night from his father’s cell and made to walk the mile which separated the new from the old gaol. Here he died in circumstances which were looked on as very suspicious.
So atrocious was the treatment meted out to Anne Devlin by Dr. Trevor that the other prisoners made special mention of it in a Memorial they presented to Lord Hardwicke: “His treatment,” they stated, “of all, but especially of one unfortunate State prisoner, a female, is shocking to humanity, and exceeds credibility. He drives, through exasperation, the mind to madness, of which instances have already occurred.”
Of what befel Anne Devlin when, broken in health and crippled in limb, she was at length liberated from Kilmainham we have no record. We must fill in for ourselves the main features of the forty years that elapsed before Dr. Madden discovered her in the old washerwoman, married to a poor labourer in “a stable yard” off John’s Lane. Poverty, sickness, grinding toil, hunger often, and want of every kind: these were her portion through those long years of misery.
She might have had a different portion. She might have said the one little word her captors wanted her to say. She might have stretched out her hands for their five hundred golden guineas, and walked forth that moment a free woman. She might have seen her father’s fields restored to him and his business flourishing; and she, herself, the well-dowered daughter of the prosperous dairyman, would surely have found a husband—not too squeamish about the origin of his wife’s fortune—to keep her in comfort all the days of her life. She might have had all that most men hold most dear—as the price of a single word.
She chose instead—what seemed certain death, and then torture of every description, both corporal and mental, until in the vile prison cell, the strong mind snapped, and the vigorous body broke. But the will, faithful to the end, never faltered.
The end of her story is told in a letter published by Dr. Madden in the Nation of September 27th, 1851:—
“Four years ago an appeal was made in the Nation on behalf of Anne Devlin, which was in some small degree responded to—very, very inadequately, however. Afterwards we lost sight of her entirely. So it seems did others of her friends until it was too late. But last week, a gentleman who always took the warmest interest in this noble creature, was informed that she was still living in a miserable garret of No. 2 Little Elbow Lane, a squalid alley running from the Coombe to Pimlico. On this day week he sought that wretched abode, but she had died two days previously, and had been buried in Glasnevin on the preceding day. A young woman with an ill-fed infant in her arms, apparently steeped in poverty, but kindly-looking and well-mannered, in whose room Anne Devlin had lodged, said: ‘The poor creature, God help her, it was well for her she was dead. There was a coffin got from the Society for her, and she was buried the day before.’ To the enquiry, what complaint she had died of, the answer was—‘She was old and weak indeed, but she died mostly of want. She had a son, but he was not able to do much for her, except now and then to pay her lodging, which was fivepence a week. He lived away from her, and so did her daughter, who was a poor widow, and was hard enough set to get a living for herself. About ten or twelve days ago a gentleman (she believed of the name of Meehan) called there, and gave the old woman something. Only for this she would not have lived as long as she did. She was very badly off, not only for food, but for bed-clothes. Nearly all the rags she had went at one time or another, to get her a morsel of bread.’”[102]
“It is a hard service they take, who help the Poor Old Woman.... But for all that they think themselves well paid.”