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.

Anne, however, remained in contact with her cousin, Michael Dywer who led a guerilla 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.

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.

In return for arms (which, in the event, Emmet proved unable to deliver), Dwyer promised to lead his men down from the mountains in support of the rebels in the capital.

[4] 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.

She is likely the Anne Devlin who in 1835 is recorded as being employed by St Patrick's Hospital Dublin as a laundress but, exceptionally, with the status and pay of an "officer" of the institution.

[7] When the historian R. R. Madden (who had corresponded with Cullen) found Devlin in 1842 she was taking washing into her home (off Thomas Street) and was in chronically poor health.

Her husband, with whom she had two children, died in 1845, and her death in a tenement in the Liberties area of Dublin—it is suspected, of starvation—is recorded six years later[7] Devlin is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery to which her remains were removed from a pauper's grave, by Madden and friends in 1852[5] (in Belfast he had performed a similar service for James Hope).

[4] Stepping away from the nationalist hagiography that has surrounded the memory of Robert Emmet, the Irish feminist filmmaker Pat Murphy employs the figure of Anne Devlin in an implicit criticism of a patriotic politics that operates "largely at the level of signs and representations".