Finally managed to finish the Interlude.
Here's another part. Sorry for the loooonnng wait, btw.
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Taken from: “Erin Go Bragh: The History of Early Modern Ireland, 1796-1946”, by Deidra O'Kennedy, Sean Rowland, and others. (c) 2000 Emerald Publishing, Dublin, Ireland.
Ireland today is many things; a beacon of stability, a land of acclaimed poets, thinkers, film-makers, and writers, a shining example of civility, a land of ever-growing prosperity, and a nation that quite gladly plays the cordial acquaintance with all others. But to understand how today's Ireland came to be, we must first take a look back through history, all the way to the turn of the 19th century, when Britain was king of the world and Ireland was just another poor colony of a seemingly uncaring empire.....
Perhaps the first event of significance after the Revolution of 1798 may have been “Emmet's Rebellion” during the summer and early autumn of 1802. Robert Emmet, the son of Robert Emmet, Sr., a court physician and his wife Elizabeth, nee Mason, had had a fairly comfortable upbringing in the Milltown area of Dublin, and his elder brother, Thomas, was a friend of Wolfe Tone, the Irish nationalist. A learned man, Emmet was accepted to Dublin's prestigious Trinity College in 1793, at just 15, and in early 1797 joined the College Historical Society.
It was in that year that Robert & Thomas Emmet began to become involved in political activism, and Robert, unfortunately, was expelled in late December of 1797 for having joined a United Irish club in the college. Later, the brothers parted ways, with Robert Emmet going to France and Thomas to Boston in the United States.
While in Boston, the elder Emmet met a local woman there and married her in the spring of 1799, and had twin sons, Douglas and William, in September of that year[1].
Robert, meanwhile, stayed in France, plotting against the English government of his homeland, while also helping reorganize the resistance in Ireland, coming into contact with figures such as Joseph Holt and Michael Dwyer.
In November of 1801 these three men came together in County Cork to discuss their plans for what they saw as, and hoped would be, the beginning liberation of Ireland from English rule....
On March 17, 1802, their plans began to be put into place. Emmet, Dwyer, and Holt purchased a couple of safehouses near Wicklow, about 50 miles south of Dublin, and began to amass huge quantities of weapons. Later that day, they also met with Thomas Russell and James Hope, a pair of fellow revolutionaries, who began to set up ad hoc networks of willing compatriots from across the island.....
On July 9th, 1802, Emmet and about 1,000 of his fellows stormed, and briefly took, Dublin Castle, which was only lightly guarded, touching off a series of additional incidents across Ireland....[2a]
Ultimately, Emmet's Rebellion came to naught; by October, there just were too few people left willing to fight and many of it's leaders, including Michael Dwyer, Thomas Russell, Arthur Devlin, and James Hope, as well as Robert Emmet himself, had all been captured, held in prison, and to be tried in March of the following year....
….Hope and Devlin were dead by March 15th, and Russell and Emmet were to be executed on the 30th.....[2b]
Emmet, however, had managed to escape, on the early morning hours of of the 29th, along with Russell, with the help of Anne Devlin, the late Arthur Devlin's sister, and Joseph Holt, the only leader of the rebellion who hadn't been captured as of then. After picking up his lover Sarah Curran, in Harold's Cross, they then fled to Emmet's old home in Milltown, where they met up with his brother Thomas, who had returned to Ireland only a few weeks earlier to visit their ill mother. Thomas helped Anne, Sarah, and Robert board a boat headed for the United States, and by noon that day, they were free and out of the reach of British authorities.[3]
On April 20th, Robert Emmet, Sarah Curran, and Anne Devlin arrived in New York and were released after a brief questioning by the Port Authority. Emmet and Curran rented a tenement room in Manhattan, while Anne moved into a building just across the street from theirs. It seemed like they had made the perfect getaway, but it did come at a terrible cost; on May 13th, Emmet received word from his friend, Joseph Holt, that his brother Thomas had died in their home in Milltown just two days after they left, after a confrontation with a pair of particularly belligerent guards went horribly wrong, leaving his nephews William and Douglas fatherless[4]. Emmet went into a week-long period of mourning, then began a regular correspondence with Thomas's wife, who was to move back in with her parents temporarily until she could remarry, or find another caregiver.
Robert Emmet and Sarah Curran married in New York City on February 21st, 1804, and several children, as well as adopting Thomas Emmet's twin sons, one of whom was himself to become an important figure in Irish history in subsequent decades.....[5]
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[1]One of them later became a distinguished poet.
[2a]Which caused a lot of headaches, as did Wolfe Tone's 1798 rebellion, but nothing much worse than that, either.
[2b]Russell went his own way, fleeing to Canada via Galway, and under an assumed name.
[3]Which is similar to what Tom Emmet did IOTL.
[4]Thomas Emmet eventually provided us with a pretty substantial number of famous descendants IOTL, and that Robert's legacy never passed on. But here, Bobby gets a chance, too.
[5]Which son ends up going back to Ireland is something that'll be revealed in a later post. Stay tuned. =)
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