Stories of the Four Courts

The murder, during the 1803 Rebellion, of a Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, may have contributed to the bias shown against its leader, Irish barrister Robert Emmet, during his subsequent trial for treason.

The Lord Chief Justice so killed was Arthur Wolfe, Lord Kilwarden, and the circumstances of his shocking death are detailed in the following extract from the Cornhill Magazine’s ‘Tragedy of Robert Emmet,’ carried in the Croydon Observer of 16 October 1903:

“A private carriage came along Thomas Street, driving in the direction of the Castle. In it were two gentlemen and a young lady.  It was stopped by the mob.  ‘What do you want?’ demanded the elder of the gentlemen. ‘I am Kilwarden, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench.’ The judge – one of the most humane dispensers of the law in a rather brutal age – was immediately pulled out of the carriage and piked.  He resided a few miles outside the city, and, hearing the rumours of an insurrection, decided that as a member of the Privy Council, his post was at the Castle.  The other gentleman, the Rev Richard Wolfe (Kilwarden’s nephew) was also cruelly murdered.  The young lady was the judge’s daughter.  With the departure of Emmet, the rebellion had fallen into the hands of the offscourings of the lowest quarters of Dublin.  But the Irish instinct of respect for women was alive even in the breasts of this rabble.  In all the horrors of ’98 in Wexford, the peasants laid not a hand immodestly upon any women of their opponents, while their own wives and daughters and sisters were being outraged by the military. ‘Run away with you, miss, and God save you!’ cried the insurgents to Miss Wolfe – after they had foully murdered her aged father before her eyes – and the unhappy young lady, distraught and hysterical, hastened unmolested to the Castle!”

Why did the mob kill a man described by Jonah Barrington as “one of the best men I ever knew… the more intimately known the more apparent were his good qualities,” an unfailingly soft-hearted judge, who, as the below shows, was even ahead of his time in attributing criminal behaviour to poor parenting?

Introducing himself to the rebels as ‘Kilwarden, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench,’ may have been the unlucky act that sealed the victim’s doom.

There was at that time another judge of a similar name and title sitting in the Four Courts; hypochondriac Corkman Hugh Carleton, Chief Justice of the Irish Common Pleas, who had sentenced to death some of the leading rebels of 1798. It has been suggested that the mob simply got confused between the two men, and ended up mistakenly executing one Chief Justice for the perceived fault of another.

If so, the Kilwarden tragedy brings to mind that perennial problem for barristers prior to the publication of member photographs on the Law Library website – confusion with another of a similar name, something which, depending on the reputation of that other, had the potential to destroy, or indeed make, a career.

It is likely that Kilwarden himself would have deplored any unfairness shown to Emmet at his trial.   A letter published in the Westminster Gazette of 23 April 1921 states that, soon after he had received his fatal injury, a party of military reached the spot.  The officer in command exclaimed indignantly that every rebel taken with arms in his hands ought to be instantly hanged. Kilwarden, who still lived, turned round and impressively exhorted him ‘to let no man suffer but by the laws of his country’ – almost his last words, as he expired a few minutes later. 

Although few would choose it, it is hard to imagine a nobler exit for a senior member of the Irish judiciary.

There is no suggestion that Emmet sanctioned the attack on Kilwarden, and indeed some accounts have him assisting Miss Wolfe’s escape.  But he was still seen as responsible for it; the site chosen for his execution being the very spot where the Lord Chief Justice had been pulled from his carriage.

The ghost of that carriage is reputed to haunt the site of Kilwarden’s old home at Newlands, Clondalkin, albeit unaccompanied by its owner. 

Still in Thomas Street, perhaps, communing with the shade of Robert Emmet?