On this date in 1778, Robert Emmet, the Irish patriot and infidel, was born in Dublin to a prosperous Protestant family. His father was a physician. Emmet attended Trinity College in Dublin until he joined the United Irishmen. He fled to France in 1800 after the Irish Rebellion of 1798 was crushed. There, Emmet embraced Deism and met Napoleon and Talleyrand.
For organizing an aborted uprising against the British upon his return to Ireland in 1803, Emmet was condemned to death. Refusing the offer of a cleric’s ministrations on the way to his execution, Emmet told him, “I appreciate your motives, and I thank you for your kindness, but you merely disturb the last moments of a dying man unnecessarily.”
He had been sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, as was customary for conviction of treason. The next day he was hanged and then beheaded in front of St. Catherine’s Church in Dublin at age 25. (D. 1803)
