"Let my Epitaph be written"
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CACHE INFORMATION: This cache is a magnetic nano. You will need
your own pen.
Edited 7th April 2010 due to many DNFs:
I have removed my so called "spoiler" picture as it obviously was
causing confusion. It was originally meant as a guide to the area
and not as the exact cache location. I have also improved the
hint!
The cache is placed very close to the place where Robert Emmet was
executed for his part in trying to free Ireland from centuries of
oppression.
Irish Historical Mysteries: The Grave of Robert Emmet
Robert Emmet (1778-1803)
Robert Emmet was born on 4 March 1778 in Dublin, and was executed
for high treason in that city on 20 September 1803. Emmet's corpse
subsequently to all intents and purposes disappeared, and the
whereabouts of his final resting place is one of the abiding
mysteries of Irish history. The romantic and tragic features of
Emmet's short life ensure that his story will live on in the
popular imagination. Who can forget, for example, Emmet's
grief-stricken fiancée, Sarah Curran, harshly treated by her father
who opposed the match, and the subject of Moore's song, 'She Is Far
From the Land'? Or Emmet's loyal servant Anne Devlin, who endured
torture in Kilmainham Gaol without giving information to the
authorities? Interest in Emmet has of course quickened during 2003,
the bicentenary of his Rising.
Very few would be prepared to deny that Emmet's 1803 Rising was an
ill-organised and chaotic affair, a tragic postscript to the more
formidable Rebellion of 1798. When Emmet sallied forth on the
evening of 23 July 1803 in military uniform, his followers proved
to be little more than a disorganised rabble, notwithstanding his
grand military plans. (2) Emmet quickly realised that he had
inadequate support for a rising and attempted to disperse the
rebels. Some ignored him and set off on what was in effect a Dublin
mob riot, although one which was more serious than usual because of
its scale, the use of arms and its political intent. The Chief
Justice, Lord Kilwarden, was brutally murdered in his coach, and
after some hours the military managed to scatter the rebels still
in arms, with a number of fatalities.
Emmet was now the authorities' chief target, and having moved his
hiding place from Rathfarnham to Harold's Cross, he was captured at
a house there on 25 August. In Kilmainham Gaol Emmet endeavoured to
plan an escape, but Dr Edward Trevor, nominally the prison
physician but effectively the governor, was aware of the plan and
effectively strung the unfortunate prisoner along. To add to
Emmet's misfortunes, he chose as one of his lawyers Leonard
McNally, a spy in the government service. It is facts such as these
which are used to support the hypothesis that the whole of Emmet's
Rising was a carefully orchestrated government plot to flush out
and neutralise the remnants of the United Irishmen, but it has to
be said that this case is not proven.
Emmet was tried at Green Street Courthouse in Dublin (still in use
as the Special Criminal Court) on 19 September, the trial being
presided over by Lord Norbury, the Chief Justice. The jury brought
in a verdict of guilty of high treason, and before sentence of
death was pronounced, Emmet was allowed deliver his justly
celebrated speech from the dock, although not without some
interruptions from Norbury. Emmet closed his remarkable speech with
resounding words which have a direct bearing on the mystery of his
burial place:
“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 now vindicate
them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them and me
rest in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed, and my
memory in oblivion, until other times and other men can do 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”.
No time was lost in carrying out the sentence of the court, and on
the day following the trial, 20 September, Emmet was taken from
Kilmainham Gaol to the place of his execution, opposite St
Catherine's Church in Thomas Street. Placed on the scaffold and a
rope put around his neck, Emmet was twice asked by the executioner
if he was ready and answered in the negative, and before he had a
chance to answer a third time, was launched into eternity. The
terrors of the law were not yet complete, for after death Emmet's
body was taken down and the head cut off and displayed to the crowd
by the hangman Thomas Galvin with the words, 'This is the head of a
traitor, Robert Emmet'.
Emmet's remains were conveyed first to Newgate Prison and then back
to Kilmainham Gaol, where the jailer George Dunn was under
instructions that if no-one claimed them they were to be buried in
Bully's Acre, a nearby unofficial popular burial place in the
grounds of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham. (5) Some of Emmet's
relatives and friends had also been arrested, including those not
involved in the Rising, such as his brother-in-law Robert Holmes,
and others were too afraid to come forward. Accordingly, Emmet's
body was buried after some hours in Bully's Acre, according to Dunn
beside the grave of one of his executed followers, Felix Rourke,
'near the right-hand corner of the burying ground, next the avenue
of the Royal Hospital, close to the wall, and at no great distance
from the former entrance, which is now built up'. (6) Given that it
is established that Emmet's body was at least temporarily interred
in Bully's Acre, it might be appropriate to erect some sort of
memorial there to record this fact, without of course representing
it as an epitaphed tombstone.
These are the facts concerning the burial of Robert Emmet as we
know them, and it is here that the mystery begins. It would appear
that Emmet's remains were soon after taken secretly from Bully's
Acre and reinterred in St Michan's, a church with strong United
Irish associations, in whose vaults lie the remains of the Sheares
brothers. St Michan's is a fascinating church, as the antiseptic
condition of its vaults causes bodies to remain in mummified
condition, and to this day visitors are shown an uninscribed marker
in the churchyard which they are informed marks Emmet's grave.
However, in the decades after the traumatic events of 1803, and as
legend began to supplement hazy memories, it was claimed that other
cemeteries in fact had the honour of providing Emmet's last resting
place, including St Anne's in Dawson Street, and Glasnevin
Churchyard (not to be confused with the subsequently established
Glasnevin Cemetery).
Strangely, there was one place which did not figure largely in the
increasingly speculative and imaginative theorising about the
location of Emmet's grave, namely, his family's parochial church.
The Emmet family resided in St Stephen's Green (the neglected
historic house collapsed some years ago), and attended services in
the Church of Ireland St Peter's Church in Aungier Street. It was
in fact the tradition of the Emmet family in America that Robert
had been finally laid to rest in the family vault in this church,
as recorded for example by his grand nephew Dr Thomas Addis Emmet.
An understanding that Emmet had been ultimately reburied in St
Peter's appears also to have been an independent family tradition
of the Hammonds, who were friends of the Emmets. It was believed
that following the death of Mary Anne Holmes in 1804 (recte 1805?),
an opportunity was presented for the discrete transfer of the body
of her brother Robert from St Michan's to St Peter's under cover of
her interment, which arrangement was overseen by the sympathetic
Rev Thomas Gamble, who ministered in St Michan's.
The now demolished St Peter's Church, Aungier Street,
Dublin, the most probable location of Robert Emmet's grave
As the centenary of Emmet's Rising approached, a Dublin solicitor,
David A Quaid, published a booklet which made a coherent case that
Robert had been buried in St Peter's. (8) Quaid again hypothesised
that following the death of Mary Anne Holmes, the opportunity was
taken secretly to rebury the executed rebel in the family vault in
St Peter's. Mary Anne's husband, Robert Holmes, remained in prison
for some time after the 1803 Rising, and clearly scarred by his
experiences, for the remainder of his life he was tight-lipped
about Emmet. However, Quaid noted that Holmes had never had a
memorial erected to his beloved wife, suggesting that this was done
to keep Emmet's burial place as secret as possible, and indeed to
comply with the patriot's wishes as expressed in his speech from
the dock. Unfortunately, in the late nineteenth century rebuilding
work in St Peter's had already obliterated the site of the Emmet
vault, but nonetheless there were excavations there and in St
Michan's in 1903, the results of which were inconclusive.
The next to come forward with a new theory was J J Reynolds, who
having published a book in which he came to no firm conclusions,
(9) later drew attention to an unusual discovery in St Paul's
Church, North King Street, which he claimed indicated Emmet may
have been buried there. (10) Following the publicity over
excavations in 1903, it had been brought to Reynolds's attention
that a coffin with a headless body had been found in an
accidentally opened vault in St Paul's. On investigation, it was
found that the vault belonged, significantly, to Dr Edward Trevor,
that five of the six burials therein were registered, and that the
last recorded interment was in 1797. Reynolds claimed that Trevor
possessed a sufficiently evil nature to serve government by
perpetually concealing Emmet's body and thus preventing his grave
becoming a shrine.
As is clear from newspaper correspondence in the wake of the St
Paul's discovery, there was no love lost between Quaid and
Reynolds. Although it was a cause of regret to Dr Thomas Addis
Emmet that the location of his relative's grave should be the
subject of public controversy, both Quaid and Reynolds used the
Dublin press to promote their respective theories, namely, that the
patriot had been buried secretly in St Peter's or St Paul's vaults.
Unfortunately, St Peter's has now been totally demolished, being
replaced by a YMCA premises in Aungier Street. While St Paul's
Church has been converted into an enterprise centre and its
interior gutted, it is possible that the Trevor vault is intact and
could be re-examined using modern scientific methods. Interest in
the question of where Emmet is buried has been manifested over the
years, and of course is again a talking point during the
bicentenary year of 2003. The reputed location of the grave has
been extended outside the Dublin area, with a recent notice that
remains in a County Kerry graveyard are being subject to DNA
analysis!
Given that there is really no serious evidence to support the
theories that Emmet was permanently buried in St Michan's,
Glasnevin, St Anne's or the several other graveyards suggested,
which are we to believe, Peter or Paul? The evidence in support of
St Paul, namely the connection with Kilmainham Gaol through Trevor,
cannot be dismissed, but in the writer's opinion is not strong. On
balance, I am inclined to accept that the evidence in support of St
Peter's is more compelling, namely, the tradition that Robert had
been secretly reinterred there, and the likelihood that a proud
family like the Emmets, and indeed the patriot's friends, would not
allow the patriot's body to lie in an ignominious grave. While the
evidence on the ground has been destroyed by rebuilding work and
ultimately the demolition of St Peter's, the examination of
documentary evidence should continue, and indeed Emmet's most
recent biographer appears to indicate that St Peter's was the most
likely location of his final resting place. (11) However, we must
conclude by stating that the mystery of Emmet's grave has not and
may never be conclusively resolved.
Sean Murphy September 2003
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Vafvqr, ybj, haqre pbapergr onfr. Gb gur yrsg nf lbh ybbx va guebhtu gur tngr.