The Emmet Conspiracy

Submitted by Anon on 1 October, 2003 - 5:43

By Jack Cleary

The romantic 19th century song lamenting "old Robert Emmet, the darling of Erin", is still widely known and sung today - two hundred years after the public executioner hanged the 25-year old Emmet, cut him down alive, disembowelled him, and then chopped him up before a gawping crowd in Thomas Street, Dublin.

It was the last terrible act in the drama of the first Irish republicans, the United Irishmen.
Robert Emmet was the younger brother of a famous United Irishman, Thomas Addis Emmet. The United Irishmen, founded by Wolfe Tone in Belfast, was an underground, oath-bound republican movement, looking to the French Revolution for their inspiration.

They took as their objective to win "the rights of man in Ireland" by an uprising against English overlordship and the Protestant Irish oligarchy which ruled through an elite Parliament in Dublin.

They proclaimed it as their objective to unite all the warring religious creeds, "Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter", in a common Irish nation independent of Britain and allied to revolutionary France.

The "united men" was a heavily middle-class organisation - lawyers, doctors, merchants and such. It did embrace people of all religions, and was itself an example of the union of creeds which it preached.

It was strongest in the Protestant north-east of Ireland and in the towns.

In 1796 a strong force of French soldiers came close to landing in the south west, but was defeated by bad weather, which forced the ships to return to France. There followed a savage reign of terror in Ireland.

Soldiers went round the country flogging, burning and "half-hanging" indiscriminately in a drive to find and confiscate all arms. The United Irish organisation was badly damaged in the terror. British spies got into its highest committees.

In 1798, the "Year of Liberty" and the "Year of the French", Ireland exploded in a succession of regional uprisings.

A strong rising of republicans, mainly Protestant, broke out in the North, under the United Irishmen Henry Joy McCracken and Henry Monroe, but it was brutally crushed.

A rising in Wexford - one of the most Anglicised parts of Ireland, where the people spoke English and not, as in most of rural Ireland then, Gaelic - turned into an elemental peasant war, with strong sectarian elements in it, including the slaughter of Protestants as Protestants.

Then - in the words of another popular song, "when Ireland was broken and bleeding, and looked for revenge to the West" - one thousand French soldiers under General Humbert landed in Killalla Bay, in County Mayo. They rallied local United Irish and peasant insurgents to them, and inflicted a famous defeat on the British Army at Castlebar.

Eventually they were defeated by a vastly more numerous British Army. The Irish allies of the French, refused the right to surrender, were butchered on the battlefield or hanged.

Savage state terror continued until it crushed all opposition.

In 1800 British prime minister Pitt forced through a decision to abolish the Irish Parliament of the Protestant oligarchy and unite Britain and Ireland. Protestants tended to oppose, Catholics to favour, the union. What was left of the United Irishmen continued to favour an independent Irish Republic.

They were in contact with underground British republicans, who were also heavily persecuted.

Robert Emmet planned an uprising. In September 1803, an accidental explosion in his group's arsenal led to their discovery. Emmet led a hundred or so men into the streets, where they were easily overwhelmed by state forces.

Emmet got away, but was later captured. At his trial he defied his judges, making a famous speech from the dock that would continue to inspire Irish nationalists throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and was duly sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered.

Some of Emmet's associates, led by Michael Dwyer, fled to the Wicklow hills, not far from Dublin, and conducted a guerrilla war for a while. But the people of the countryside were too crushed under the army's heel to rise again.

The great Irish socialist James Connolly wrote an account (here abridged) of "the Emmet conspiracy":

The Emmet Conspiracy was distinctly democratic, international and popular in its sympathies and affiliations. The treacherous betrayal of the United Irish chiefs into the hands of the Government, had removed from the scene of action practically all the middle-class supporters of the revolutionary movement; and left the rank and file to their own resources and to consult their own inclinations. It was, accordingly, with these humble workers in town and country Emmet had to deal, when he essayed to reorganise the scattered forces of freedom for a fresh grapple with the despotic power of the class government then ruling Ireland and England. Emmet's conspiracy was more of a working-class character than its predecessors. Indeed it is a remarkable fact that this conspiracy, widespread throughout Ireland, England, and France, should have progressed so rapidly, and with such elaborate preparations for armed revolt, amongst the poorer section of the populace, right up to within a short time of the date for the projected rising, without the alert English Government or its Irish Executive being able to inform themselves of the matter.

Probably the proletarian character of the movement - the fact that it was recruited principally amongst the working class of Dublin and other large centres, as well as amongst the labouring element of the country districts, was the real reason why it was not so prolific of traitors as its forerunner. After the conspiracy had fallen through, the Government, of course, pretended that it had known of it all along - indeed the British Government in Ireland always pretends to be omniscient - but nothing developed during the trial of Emmet to justify such a claim. Nor has anything developed since to dim the glory or sully the name of the men and women of the working class, who carried the dangerous secret of Emmet's conspiracy and guarded it so well and faithfully to the end.

It must be remembered in this connection, that at that period the open organisation of labourers for any purpose was against the law, that consequently the trade unions which then flourished amongst the working class were all illegal organisations, whose members were in constant danger of arrest and transportation for the crime of organising, and that, therefore, a proposal to subvert the oppressive governing class and establish a republic founded upon the votes of all citizens, as Emmet planned, was one likely to appeal alike to the material requirements and imagination of the Irish toilers. And, as they were already trained to secrecy in organisation, they naturally made splendid material for the revolutionary movement.

It is significant that the only serious fight on the night of the ill-fated insurrection took place in the Coombe district of the Liberties of Dublin, a quarter inhabited exclusively by weavers, tanners, and shoemakers, the best organised trades in the city, and that a force of Wicklow men brought into Dublin by Michael Dwyer, the insurgent chieftain, were sheltered on the quays amongst the dock-labourers; and eventually managed to return home without any traitor betraying their whereabouts to the numerous Government spies over-running the city.

The ripeness of the labouring element in the country at large for any movement that held out hopes of social emancipation may be gauged by the fact that a partial rebellion had already taken place in 1802 in Limerick, Waterford, and Tipperary, where, "the alleged grounds for rebellion were the dearness of the potatoes", and "the right of the old tenants to retain possession of their farms".

Such were the domestic materials upon which the conspiracy of Emmet rested - working-class elements fired with the hope of political and social emancipation.

Abroad he sought alliance with the French Republic - the incarnation of the political, social, and religious unrest and revolution of the age, and in Great Britain he formed alliance with the 'Sassenach' reformers who were conspiring to overthrow the English monarchy.

On November 13, 1802, one Colonel Despard, with nineteen others, was arrested in London charged with the crime of high treason; they were tried on the charge of conspiracy to murder the King; although no evidence in support of such a charge was forthcoming, Despard and seven others were hanged. According to the Castlereagh papers Emmet and Despard were preparing for a simultaneous uprising, a certain William Dowdall, of Dublin, described as one of the most determined of the society of United Irishmen, being the confidential agent who acted for both.

Every recurring Emmet anniversary continues to bring us its crop of orators who know all about Emmet's martyrdom, and nothing about his principles. Even some of the more sympathetic of his panegyrists do not seem to realise that they dim his glory when they represent him as the victim of a protest against an injustice local to Ireland, instead of as an Irish apostle of a world-wide movement for liberty, equality and fraternity.

Yet this latter was indeed the character and position of Emmet, and as such the democracy of the future will revere him. He fully shared in the international sympathies of that Dublin Society of United Irishmen who had elected a Scottish reformer to be a United Irishman upon hearing that the Government had sentenced him to transportation for attending a reform convention in Edinburgh. He believed in the brotherhood of the oppressed, and in the community of free nations, and died for his ideal.

Emmet is the most idolised, the most universally praised of all Irish martyrs; it is, therefore, worthy of note that in the proclamation he drew up to be issued in the name of the "Provisional Government of Ireland" the first article decrees the wholesale confiscation of church property and the nationalising of the same, and the second and third decrees forbid and declare void the transfer of all landed property, bonds, debentures, and public securities, until the national government is established and the national will upon them is declared.

Two things are thus established - viz., that Emmet believed the 'national will' was superior to property rights, and could abolish them at will; and also that he realised that the producing classes could not be expected to rally to the revolution unless given to understand that it meant their freedom from social as well as from political bondage.

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