Robert Emmet: A Survey of His Rebellion and of His Romance

A Survey of His Rebellion and of His Romance

THE four who lived to grow up of the seventeen children born to Robert Emmet, M.D., of Cork, later of Dublin, and Elizabeth Mason, his wife, were all, in their way, persons of genius. The Emmets were of Anglo-Norman stock, Protestants, settled for centuries in Ireland. The Masons, of like English origin, had merged it in repeated alliances with women of Kerry, where the Dane, the Norman, and later invaders from nearer quarters had never settled down to perturb the ancient Celtic social stream. Dr. Emmet was a man of clear brain and incorruptible honour. The mother of his children, to judge by her letters, many of which have been privately printed, must have been an exquisite being, high-minded, religious, loving, humorous, wise. Her eldest surviving son, Christopher Temple Emmet, was named for his two paternal grandparents, Christopher Emmet of Tipperary and Rebecca Temple, great-great-granddaughter of the first Baronet Temple of Stowe, in Buckinghamshire. The mention of that prolific, wide-branching, and extraordinary family of Temple as forebears of the younger Emmets is like a sharply accented note in a musical measure. It has never been played for what it is worth; no annalist has tracked certain Emmet qualities to this perfectly obvious ancestral source. The Temples had not only, in this case, the bygone responsibility to bear, for in a marked manner they kept on influencing their Emmet contemporaries, as in one continuous mood thought engenders thought. Says Mr. James Hannay: “The distinctive ηθος of the Temples has been a union of more than usual of the kind of talent which makes men of letters, with more than usual of the kind of talent which makes men of affairs.” The Emmets, too, shared the “distinctive ηθος” in the highest degree. Added to the restless two-winged intelligence, they had the heightened soberness, the moral elevation, which formed no separate inheritance. The Temples were, and are, a race of subtle but somewhat austere imagination, strongly inclined to republicanism, and to that individualism which is the norm of it. The Temple influence in eighteenth-century Ireland was, obliquely, the American influence: a new and heady draught at that time, a “draught of intellectual day.” If we seek for those unseen agencies which are so much more operative than mere descent, we cover a good deal of ground in remembering that Robert Emmet the patriot came of the same blood as Sidney’s friend, Cromwell’s chaplain, and Dorothy Osborne’s leal and philosophic husband. And he shared not only the Temple idiosyncrasy, but, unlike his remarkable brothers, the thin, dark, aquiline Temple face.