Robert Emmet was tried for high treason 200 years ago today. We print his speech from the dock, right, introduced by Prof Kevin Whelan, below
My lords, as to why judgment of death and execution should not be passed upon me I have nothing to say; why the sentence which in the public mind is usually attached to that of the law ought to be reversed I have much to say.
I stand here a conspirator, as one engaged in a conspiracy for the overthrow of the British government in Ireland, for the fact of which I am to suffer by the law, for the motives of which I am to answer before God. I am ready to do both.
Was it only the fact of treason, was it that naked fact alone with which I stood charged, was I to suffer no other punishment than the death of the body, I would not obstrude on your attention but, having received the sentence, I would bow my neck in silence to the stroke.
But, my lords, I well know that when a man enters into a conspiracy he not only has to combat against the difficulties of fortune but to contend against the still more insurmountable obstacles of prejudice. And that if, in the end, fortune abandons him and delivers him over, bound, into the hands of the law his character is previously loaded with calumny and misrepresentation.
For what purpose I know not except that the prisoner, thus weighted down in mind and body, may be delivered over a more unresisting victim to condemnation. It is well. But the victim being once obtained and firmly in your power, let him now unmanacle his reputation. Not, my lords, that I have much to demand from you. It is a claim on your memory rather than on your candour that I am making.
I do not ask you to believe implicitly what I say. I do not hope that you will let my vindication ride at anchor in your breasts. I only ask you to let it float upon the surface of your recollection, till it comes to some more friendly port to receive it, and give it shelter against the heavy storms with which it is buffeted.
I am charged with being an emissary of France, for the purpose of inciting insurrection in the country and then delivering it over to a foreign enemy. It is false. I did not wish to join this country with France. I did join - I did not create - the rebellion; not for France but for its liberty.
If the French come as a foreign enemy, oh, my countrymen, meet them on the shore with a torch in one hand, a sword in the other, receive them with all the destruction of war. Immolate them in their boats before our native soil shall be polluted by a foreign foe.
If they succeed in landing, fight them on the strand, burn every blade of grass before them as they advance, raze every house. And if you are driven to the centre of your country, collect your provisions, your property, your wives and your daughters, form a circle around them, fight while two men are left, and when but one remains let that man set fire to the pile and release himself and the families of his fallen countrymen from the tyranny of France. Our object was to effect a separation from England.
When my spirit shall have joined those bands of martyred heroes who have shed their blood on the scaffold and in the field in defence of their country, this is my hope: that my memory and name may serve to animate those who survive me.
While the destruction of that government which upholds its dominion by impiety against the most high, which displays its power over man as over the beasts of the field, which sets man upon his brother and lifts his hands in religion's name against the throat of his fellow who believes a little more or less than the government standard, which reigns amidst the cries of the orphans and of the widows it has made . . . .
What I have spoken was not intended for your lordships, whose situation I commiserate rather than envy; my expressions were for my countrymen. If there be a true Irishman present let my last words cheer him in the hour of his affliction.
My lords, it may be a part of the system of angry justice to bow a man's mind by humiliation to the purposed ignominy of the scaffold. But worse to me than the purposed shame of the scaffold's terrors would be the tame endurance of such foul and unfounded imputations as have been laid against me in this court.
You, my lord, are a judge. I am the supposed culprit. I am a man; you are a man also. By a revolution of power we might change places, though we could never change characters. If I stand at the bar of this court and dare not vindicate my character, what a farce is your justice. If I stand at this bar and dare not vindicate my character, how dare you calumniate it?
Does the sentence of death which your unhallowed policy inflicts on my body condemn my tongue to silence and my reputation to reproach?
Your executioner may abridge the period of my existence, but while I exist I shall not forbear to vindicate my character and motives from your aspersions; and as a man to whom fame is dearer than life I will make the last use of that life in doing justice to that reputation which is to live after me, and which is the only legacy I can leave to those I honour and love, and for whom I am proud to perish.
As men, my lords, we must appear on the great day at one common tribunal, and it will then remain for the searcher of all hearts to show a collective universe who was engaged in the most virtuous actions or actuated by the purest motives.
My lords, will a dying man be denied the legal privilege of exculpating himself in the eyes of the community from a reproach thrown upon him during his trial, by charging him with ambition and attempting to cast away for a paltry consideration the liberties of his country? Why then insult me, or rather why insult justice, in demanding why sentence of death should not be pronounced against me?
I know, my lords, that the form prescribes that you should put the question; the form also confers a right of answering. This, no doubt, may be dispensed with, and so might the whole ceremony of the trial, since sentence was already pronounced at the castle before your jury was empanelled. Your lordships are but the priests of the oracle, and I submit, but I insist on the whole of the forms.
I have been charged with that importance in the efforts to emancipate my country as to be considered the keystone of the combination of Irishmen or, as it has been expressed, "the life and blood of the conspiracy". You do me honour overmuch. You have given to the subaltern all the credit of the superior.
There are men concerned in this conspiracy who are not only superior to me but even to your own conceptions of yourself, my lord. Men before the splendour of whose genius and virtues I should bow with respectful deference and who would not deign to call you friend, who would not disgrace themselves by shaking your bloodstained hand.
What, my lord, shall you tell me on my passage to the scaffold which that tyranny of which you are only the intermediate minister has erected for my death: that I am accountable for all the blood that has and will be shed in this struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor? Shall you tell me this, and must I be so very a slave as not to repel it?
I do not fear to approach the omnipotent judge to answer for the conduct of my short life, and am I to stand appalled here before a mere remnant of mortality? Let no man dare, when I am dead, to charge me with dishonour; let no man attaint my memory by believing that I could have engaged in any cause but of my country's liberty and independence. The proclamation of the provisional government speaks my views: no inference can be tortured from it to countenance barbarity or debasement. I would not have submitted to a foreign oppression for the same reason that I would have resisted tyranny at home.
If the spirits of the illustrious dead participate in the concerns of those who were dear to them in this transitory scene, dear shade of my venerated father look down on your suffering son and see has he for one moment deviated from those moral and patriotic principles which you so early instilled into his youthful mind and for which he now has to offer up his life.
My lords, you are impatient for the sacrifice. The blood which you seek is not congealed by the artificial terrors which surround your victim. It circulates warmly and unruffled through its channels, and in a short time it will cry to heaven.
Be yet patient. I have but a few words to say: my ministry is now ended. I am going to my cold and silent grave; my lamp of life is nearly extinguished. I have parted with everything that was dear to me in this life for my country's cause and abandoned another idol I adored in my heart, the object of my affections.
My race is run. The grave opens to receive me, and I sink into its bosom. I am ready to die. I have not been allowed to vindicate my character. I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world: it is the charity of its silence. Let no man write my epitaph, for as no man who knows my motives dare not vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them rest in obscurity and peace, my memory be left in oblivion and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times and other men can do justice to my character. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written.
I have done.
Prof Kevin Whelan is joining actor Stephen Rea and cellist Neil Martin for an Emmet evening at Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin, at 7 p.m. tomorrow. Free tickets from 01- 4535984 or kilmainham
gaol@
duchas.ie
On the surprisingly hot day of September 19th, 1803, Robert Emmet was tried for high treason at Green Street courthouse in Dublin. The jury convicted him without leaving its box. Emmet maintained an impressive demeanour; even his enemies described him as cool, tranquil and determined. One said: "When the verdict was pronounced, he seemed to consider himself as rising into a martyr."
Emmet then made an amazingly clear and fluent extempore speech from the dock, despite constant badgering by the choleric Judge Norbury. His counsel, Peter Burrowes, was impressed by the "wonderful strength and resolution of Emmet in standing so long, through all the fatigue and anxiety of the trial, and then delivering that noble speech with such energy before the pronouncing of the sentence".
Emmet had mentally prepared the speech, which he saw as a chance to put his case. He understood there are two types of death: physical death and death by forgetting. The philosopher Paul Ricoeur observes that for the victims of political injustice to be forgotten is to die again. For Emmet it was crucial that he, his colleagues and their project not be thrown into the rubbish bin of history; his speech was his defence against oblivion.
It was also key to making Emmet heroic. His death was steeped in classic republican tradition - the Senecan tradition of the death that puts a political system on trial. In his last letter he observed: "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 [of battle\]". His speech aimed "to unmanacle his reputation", and he positioned it as "a claim on your memory".
A crucial feature was its use of the future perfect, the open- ended tense of nationalism. This is the tense of Emmet's peroration, directed not to the present but to that day when the nation would finally have come into being. Its appeal is to those who would complete his vision (what James Joyce in Finnegans Wake called the past prophetical).
Emmet's speech remained a constant calling to conscience about the Republic and where it stood. Its power derived from the fact that it was not directed at its immediate audience: the speech soars over the dock and out to the general populace. It says: my ethics, my political principles, are superior to those by which I am being judged.
The speech - and with it the meaning of Emmet's life, of the United Irishmen and of republicanism - awaited the verdict of history for vindication, to give it meaning and closure. Because of that pitch the speech is always contemporary.
