On the 23rd of July 1803, the carriage of Lord Kilwarden entered Thomas Street, Dublin. His daughter, Miss Wolf, sat between the Lord Chief Justice and his nephew, the Reverend Richard Wolf. Armed men sprang forth, halted the horses, dragged the postilion from his seat, and tore open the doors. The two men were pulled violently from the vehicle. Miss Wolf leaped out in her turn; one of the insurgents carried her to safety in a neighbouring house, where she remained concealed until the Sunday morning.
Lord Kilwarden was borne to the watch-house in Vicar Street. Major Swan found him stretched upon a guard-bed, severely lacerated, yet retaining his senses. Before all else, the dying magistrate inquired after his daughter. When the Major assured him that she was unhurt, he replied: “God be praised.” An officer present remarked that every man taken with a pike ought to be hanged forthwith. Kilwarden overheard these words, and turning toward Swan, murmured: let no man be hanged without a trial.
The account collected by George Borrow preserves this response of the dying judge amidst the fury of reprisals. In the tumult of Thomas Street and the adjoining lanes, the judge’s nephew was slain. In Francis Street, the military and the volunteers engaged other insurgents; Colonel Brown and two members of the Liberty Rangers fell in the affray. The Castle suspended Habeas Corpus and caused men suspected of participating in the rebellion to be apprehended. By the close of July, the city had entered another phase: that of special commissions and State trials.
On the 31st of August, at Green Street, Edward Kearney, alias Carney, was the first to appear before the Special Commission. Patrick M’Cabe, who had turned Crown evidence, admitted having taken part in an earlier insurrection and stated that he had received notice of the plot on the preceding eve. He corroborated the general circumstances, yet failed to identify Kearney. Soldiers of the 21st Regiment, among them Brady, swore they had found the prisoner in arms on the night of the 23rd of July. Their depositions disclosed certain discrepancies which the record does not elucidate.
Counsel for Kearney offered a different explanation for his presence. He described a hawker of skins, indigent but industrious, whom the insurgents had compelled to follow their train. Witnesses were called to sustain an alibi and to speak to his character. Their testimony failed to persuade the jury. Lord Norbury expounded the law of high treason and rehearsed the evidence with meticulous care. After a few minutes’ consultation, the jurors returned a verdict of guilty. The sentence was death. Two days after the conviction, Kearney was executed in Thomas Street, hard by the spot where, according to the narrative, he had been taken.
The subsequent proceedings presented different faces, yet no change of temper. Thomas Maxwell Roche, an old slater of some sixty years, was likewise convicted, having been found in arms in Thomas Street. Owen Kirwan, an old-clothes dealer, was connected with a sequence of more overt actions by the testimony of a neighbour. Benjamin Adams, a silk weaver, stated that he had seen him pass repeatedly from his house toward Thomas Street with a green bag. Between eight and nine o’clock, he observed Kirwan return home. A rocket traversed the sky above the dwelling. Kirwan cried out: “There is the rocket, my boys!” He then stepped into his shop, donned a green coat, and presently returned in a cotton jacket after his wife had followed him out.
Adams continued: Kirwan bore a pike and exhorted the men to come forth, declaring that whoever remained behind would be put to death on the morrow. The company marched up Plunket Street toward Thomas Street. Later, other men halted before the house; Kirwan’s wife had prepared some victuals for them, and they partook of beer. Adams ultimately heard discharges of musketry in the direction of the Coombe. Kirwan called witnesses who depicted him as a sober, industrious tradesman, hitherto unmarked by any seditious engagement. The jury convicted him notwithstanding these testimonies. The neighbour had described a bag, a change of raiment, a pike, and men fed before a threshold; against these acts, the defence could set only years of unblemished labour without known rebel ties. Kirwan received his sentence on the 2nd of September; he was executed on the 8th, in Thomas Street.
Robert Emmett was brought to the bar on the 19th of September. He was presented to his judges as the prime mover of the insurrection. His brother had already endured imprisonment for an earlier rebellion, followed by exile. At the hearing, the Crown produced a proclamation of the provisional government, an address to the citizens of Dublin, and sundry manuscripts seized in his lodgings, upon his person, and in a desk in Thomas Street. One set forth the project of independence; another treated of the insurrection and of expected foreign succour; a third gave expression to the hopes and misgivings of its author. The paper found upon him inquired in particular whether foreign intervention might not plunge the country into a condition yet more wretched. That found in the desk opposed an ardent expectation of success to the pressing obstacles.
Emmett demanded that an additional clause of the proclamation be read: that which prohibited the execution of any man by court-martial, save for mutiny, until the pleasure of the provisional government should be known. The document was read. Then came the formal allocution following upon a conviction for high treason: what had he to say why judgment of death should not be pronounced?
The speech which Borrow attributes to Emmett opens with what he sought to rescue from the proceedings. The law, he observed, delivered not only his body to the executioner; it surrendered his memory to obloquy. He challenged one accusation above all others: that of having been an emissary of France. He maintained that he had preferred an independent Irish effort to the entrance of a French host into the realm. He refused to suffer the cause of independence to be confounded with submission to a foreign power. In the version of the address transmitted by Borrow, he went so far as to imagine a French army landing upon the coast: he would oppose them, he declared, with the torch in one hand and the sword in the other.
Emmett reverted repeatedly to his reputation after death. Standing before the judge who was about to condemn him, he claimed the right to speak as man to man. He demanded at the last that no man should write his epitaph, and that his name should remain sheltered from the censures of those who knew neither his motives nor his deeds. Lord Norbury pronounced sentence.
Following the trial, in Newgate, Emmett requested an interview with one of the counsel who had defended him. He delivered to him, according to Borrow, a full account of his resources and his share in the preparation of the rising, empowering him to lay the matter before the Government. He avowed himself the chief contriver, denied having had any respectable or opulent associates within the country, and attributed to the funds received upon his father’s death the purchase of the arms deposited in Marshalsea Lane. He likewise denied having solicited or received any aid from the French Government. This disclosure, reported after the bar had risen, does not obliterate the public scene: it specifies that which Emmett wished to leave behind, and that which he acknowledged having undertaken.
On the 20th of September, he was executed in Thomas Street. The trials did not all establish the same facts, nor through the same species of proof: Kearney was identified by soldiers, Kirwan by a neighbour recounting a night of agitation, while Emmett was confronted with proclamations and seized papers. A single charge of high treason brought before the bench men whose individual measures of responsibility must be distinguished. In the watch-house, Kilwarden had pleaded for a trial before the gallows; in the courtroom, Emmett pleaded that the sentence alone should not be left to write his memory.