Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition
Labour in Irish History (Author: James Connolly)
Chapter 9
Chapter IX
The Emmet Conspiracy
The Rich always betray the Poor.Henry Joy M'Cracken's Letter
to his sister, 1798.
The Emmet Conspiracythe aftermath of the United Irish
movement of 1798, was even more 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. All students who have investigated
the matter are as one in conceding that 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 movementthe 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
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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 alongindeed the British
Government in Ireland always pretends to be omniscientbut
nothing developed during the trial of Emmet to justify such a claim.
Nor has anything developed since, although searchers of the Government
documents of the time, the Castlereagh papers, the records of the
secret service and other sources of information, have been able to
reveal in their true colours of infamy many who had posed in the
limelight for more than a generation as whole-souled patriots and
reformers. Thus Leonard McNally, barrister-at-law, and legal defender
of the United Irishmen, who acted for all the chiefs of that body at
their trials, was one of the Catholic Committee and elected as
Catholic delegate to England in 1811, looked up to and revered as a
fearless advocate of Catholic rights, and champion of persecuted
Nationalists, was discovered to have been all the time in the pay of
the Government, acting the loathsome part of an informer, and
systematically betraying to the Government the inmost secrets of the
men whose cause he was pretending to champion in the court-room. But
this secret was kept for half a century. Francis Magan, another
worthy, received a secret pension of £200 per year from the
Government for the betrayal of the hiding-place of Lord Edward
Fitzgerald, and lived and died revered as an honest, unoffending
citizen. A body of the Royal Meath Militia stationed at Mallow, County
Cork, had conspired to seize the artillery stationed there, and with
that valuable arm, join the insurgents in a body. One of their number
mentioned the plot in his confessions to the Rev. Thomas Barry, parish
priest of Mallow, and was by him ordered to reveal it to the military
authorities. The leader of the plotters, Sergeant Beatty, seeing by
the precautions suddenly taken that the plot was discovered, fought
his way out of the barracks with nineteen men, but was
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subsequently captured and hanged in Dublin. Father Barry
(how ironical the title sounds) received £100 per year pension
from the Government, and drew this blood-money in secret for a
lifetime before his crime was discovered. It is recorded that the
great Daniel O'Connell at one time turned pale when shown a receipt
for this blood-money signed by Father Barry, and yet it is known now
that O'Connell himself, as a member of the lawyers' Yeomanry Corps of
Dublin, was turned out on duty to serve against the rebels on the
night of Emmet's insurrection, and in Daunt's Recollections he relates that
O'Connell pointed out to him a house in James's Street which he
(O'Connell) had searched for Croppies (patriots).
The present writer has seen in Derrynane, O'Connell's ancestral
home in County Kerry, a brass-mounted blunderbuss, which we were
assured by a member of the family was procured at a house in James's
Street, Dublin, by O'Connell from the owner, a follower of Emmet, a
remark that recalled to our mind that search for Croppies of
which Daunt speaks, and gave rise to a conjecture that possibly the
blunderbuss in question owed its presence in Derrynane to that
memorable raid.
But although latter-day investigators have brought to light many
such treasons against liberty as those recorded, and have revealed
depths of corruption in quarters long unsuspected, nothing has yet
been demonstrated 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
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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, according to Haverty's
History of Ireland, 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
restedworking-class elements fired with the hope of political
and social emancipation. Abroad he sought alliance with the French
Republicthe 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
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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. Mr. W. J. Fitzpatrick in his books Secret Service Under Pitt, and
The Sham Squire, brings out
many of these facts, as a result of an extensive and scholarly
investigation of Government records and the papers of private
families, yet, although these books were published half a century ago,
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.
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Two things are thus establishedviz., 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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