Anne Devlin

Anne Devlin (1780 – 18 September 1851) was an Irish republican who in 1803, while his ostensible housekeeper, conspired with Robert Emmet, and with her cousin, the rebel outlaw Michael Dwyer to renew the United Irish insurrection against the British Crown. When their plans for a rising in Dublin, the Irish capital, misfired, she endured torture and imprisonment. Outrage over her treatment secured her release in 1806, after which she was assisted for a period by the Emmet family. A long working life as a laundress ended in destitution.

Devlin was born in Cronebeg near Aughrim in County Wicklow to Wynnie Byrne and Bryan Devlin. The family later moved onto a 32-acre farm outside Rathdrum where her father was able to take a sub-lease despite the Protestant-only covenant of the land owner, the earls of Strafford.

Winning the confidence of Lord Strafford, in 1796 her parents secured a position for Anne as a maid in the household of his sister-in-law in Dublin. Reacting to the government's violent suppression of United Irish agitation (in which her mistress's brother-in-law, Edward Heppenstall, a militia lieutenant, was to earn the sobriquet the "Walking Gallows"), her father called her home. When the rebellion commenced in May 1798, Anne was working as a kitchenmaid for the Manning family in nearby Corbalis Castle, and neither she nor her family took any part. Anne, however, remained in contact with her cousin, Michael Dywer who led a guerrilla force in the Wicklow Mountains and, defiantly, she helped re-inter and bury the bodies of executed rebels. In 1799, notwithstanding that he continued throughout the rebellion to farm and pay his rent, her father was arrested and held for two and a half years in Wicklow Gaol dependent on his daughter's bi-weekly visits for food and clothing.

After her father's release in May 1801, the Devlins left Wicklow for Rathfarnham, County Dublin. It was there Anne met Robert Emmet, recently returned from France and was now the leader of a new, secret, United Irish directorate. Her father had offered Emmet the shelter of his own home, but Emmet preferred leasing a house in nearby Butterfield Lane. In order to lend the arrangement the appearance of a gentleman's residence, he did accept the offer, first of her sister Julie but then, as she had not the courage, of Anne, to play the role of housekeeper. Emmet paid her nothing. "She is one of ours", Emmet famously said when United men calling at the house refused to discuss their plans in front of her.

Devlin helped Emmet and James Hope arrange meetings at Rathfarnham in April 1803 with her cousin Dwyer. In return for arms (which, in the event, Emmet proved unable to deliver), Dwyer promised to lead his men down from the Wicklow Mountains in support of the rebels in the capital. She also involved herself the preparations for the insurrection in the city, helping to move arms and supplies from the Dublin headquarters on Butterfield Lane to rebel positions in other parts of the city.

Although the rising in Dublin on the evening of 23 July seemed to have taken the authorities by surprise, the lack of support among the unprepared population and confusion in the rebel ranks led to its collapse and disintegration into a night of bloody street clashes. Shortly after the rising was quashed, a detachment of yeomanry arrived at Butterfield Lane, seizing Anne and her eight-year-old sister. Anne was interrogated, including with the use of half-hanging but, finding out little of consequence, the yeomanry eventually departed. Shortly after returning to live in her family home in Rathfarnham the entire family was seized by government forces, having been informed on by a neighbour.

Her importance and central role in the conspiracy was noted and Devlin was interrogated in Dublin Castle by Henry Charles Sirr (the Dublin police chief who in 1798 had fired the fatal shot in the arrest of Lord Edward Fitzgerald). Resisting both threats and inducements to inform on Emmet, she was taken to Kilmainham Gaol, where Emmet, who was offering no defence in his own case, urged her to testify against him in order to save herself. In addition to her own brutal treatment, her entire family was jailed in an effort to break her resulting in the illness and death of her nine-year-old brother. But she consistently refused to cooperate.

In the hope of removing her from a list of state prisoners at Kilmainham being considered for release, in 1806 her jailer Trevor Edward had her removed to the tower of Dublin Castle. There, thanks to a persistence of a friend, she was visited by the new Irish Chief Secretary, Charles Long. Appalled at finding Devlin so poorly she was scarcely able to move, he had her released.