The murder of Chief Justice Kilwarden typified the blunders that led to thefailure of Robert Emmet's Rising of 1803, which took place 200 years agotomorrow, writes Eileen Battersby

For all its chaos, misguided secrecy, lack of support and apparent failure Robert Emmet's ill-fated Rising of 1803, which disrupted the Dublin streets 200 years ago tomorrow night, was the first major attack on the Act of Union.

Admittedly, in terms of national apathy and near comic disorganisation, it proved a far greater fiasco than the Easter Rebellion some 113 years later.

But the 1803 event, so often overshadowed - indeed overlooked, sandwiched as it is between the respective dramas of the United Irishmen in 1798 and Easter Week 1916 - presented Irish history with precisely the element it has always valued: an attractively multi-dimensional, contradictory and tragic hero.

Robert Emmet not only impressed Yeats, ever susceptible to a romantic gesture, but he also motivated Patrick Pearse. If a single individual could be credited, or blamed, with inspiring 1916, it was Emmet who spoke beyond the grave. While the boy leader, as he was known by some - Emmet was 25 at the time of his execution - has often been seen as yet another idealist on the rampage, historian Ruán O'Donnell credits the youthful patriot with far more substance.

In his book, Robert Emmet and the Rising of 1803, which is published tomorrow, O'Donnell continues the contextual biography so well begun by him in Robert Emmet and the Rebellion of 1798. Instead of mythologising the romantic hero - and it is true that only Parnell's weighty heroic grandeur outrivals that of Emmet - O'Donnell concentrates on the leader who attempted to stage a rebellion, although hampered by poor resources and paranoid secrecy.

In hindsight, no one could envy Emmet his soldiers. By all accounts his troops were at best merely erratic, and at worst, a half-hearted drunken rabble. There was more than rhetoric behind his plans. Although a trip to France had secured nothing in practical terms, he had at least gone and, by doing so, made clear that he saw the rising internationally rather than locally. Emmet also believed from the outset, as he later maintained at his trial, that French rule would not simply replace the British regime in Ireland. The French assistance he hoped for, however, never materialised.

On return from France in October 1802 with nothing forthcoming, Emmet set about recruiting men and sourcing weapons. He obviously succeeded in securing some weaponry, as after the rising, some 7,000 pikes were seized, according to O'Donnell. Central to Emmet's strategy was the seizure of Dublin Castle - the symbolism was obvious. But he also intended to orchestrate a popular national rising.

However, "a striking feature of the Rising of 1803," writes O'Donnell, "was the low level of unrest it excited around the country. Meath, Carlow, Wexford and Wicklow did not stir, and only minor disturbances were reported in Mayo, Clare, Galway, Limerick, Westmeath, Kildare, Queen's County [O'Donnell uses the archaic name for Laois-Offaly\], Antrim and Down. It was alleged that a rocket had been fired in Limerick city, although the subsequent lack of conflict signified that no major grouping awaited its appearance." He adds, "information that Cork rebels intended to revolt on 25 July if the attempt on Dublin succeeded may also have applied further afield."

It is astonishing to note that lack of activity in counties such as Wicklow, Wexford and Kildare, all prominent during 1798. O'Donnell attributes the fact that no military base was attacked outside Dublin to Emmet having "utterly failed to convince rural networks to act without French assistance".

While it has always been said, and written, of the 1803 Rising that it was poorly documented, this book offers a graphic account of a day, July 23rd 1803, in which everything went wrong and the only redeeming fact appears to be that the subsequent looting was limited.

If a single incident can be looked to as having typified the chain of mistakes, it must be the vicious murder of Lord Kilwarden, the Chief Justice of the King's Bench. Although no saint, he had earned credibility. He was the attorney general who helped Wolfe Tone avoid prosecution in 1794.

Kilwarden, born in Kildare in 1739, had been created Baron Kilwarden and supported the Act of Union. On the night of Emmet's Rising, Kilwarden had travelled by carriage into the city from his home at Newlands Cross. With him were his nephew Richard Wolfe and his daughter Elizabeth.

Patrick M. Geoghegan, in Robert Emmet: A Life (Dublin, 2002), describes how "the mob descended on the carriage, rattling their pikes against the door. The 64-year-old Kilwarden refused to open the door, but he was dragged from his seat, and a rebel plunged his pike into his stomach. Mortally wounded, he fell to the ground as other men joined in the attack." The nephew was also killed, the daughter spared.

The killing may well have been due to mistaken identity: the insurgents may, as O'Donnell suggests, have thought Kilwarden was Judge Carleton, "who was hated in Dublin for sentencing the Sheares brothers to death". This confusion fits the chaos of a night that would, in Emmet, create an icon.

• Robert Emmet and the Rising of 1803 by Ruán O'Donnell, is published by Irish Academic Press, €28.40 (paperback)