Following the suppression of the United Irish uprising in 1798, he sought to organise a renewed attempt to overthrow the British Crown and Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, and to establish a nationally representative government.

[2] So too, as a friend of his father, was Dr William Drennan,[3] the original proposer of the "benevolent conspiracy--a plot for the people"[4] that was to call itself, at Tone's suggestion, the Society of United Irishmen.

His brother Thomas and Wolfe Tone, preceding him in the society, had maintained its lively tradition (stretching back to Edmund Burke) of defying the College's injunction against discussing questions of "modern politics".

[6] Fellow Society member Thomas Moore recalled that men "of advanced standing and reputation for oratory, came to attend our debates, expressly for the purpose of answering [Robert] Emmet".

[2] In April 1798, Emmet was exposed as the secretary of a secret college committee in support of the Society of United Irishmen (of which his brother and Tone were leading executive members).

But after the suppression of the rebellion in the summer, and in communication with state prisoners held at Fort George in Scotland (including his brother), Emmet joined William Putnam McCabe in re-establishing a United Irish organisation.

[10] On the new United Irish executive in Dublin, Emmet assisted veterans Thomas Wright (from April 1799, an informer)[11] and Malachy Delaney (a former officer in the Austrian army),[12] with a manual on insurgent tactics.

Through his foreign minister Talleyrand, Emmet and Delaney presented Napoleon with a memorial which argued that the parliamentary Union with Great Britain, imposed in the wake of the rebellion, had "in no way eased the discontent of Ireland", and with lessons drawn from the failure of '98, the United Irish were again prepared to act on the first news of a French landing.

In July, McCabe, returning to Paris from a visit to Dublin, brought news to Manchester that the United Irishmen were ready to rise again as soon as the continental war was renewed.

According to the later recollection of Myles Byrne, on St Patrick's Day, 17 March 1803, Emmet gave a stirring speech to his confederates justifying the renewed resort to arms.

[23]In April 1803, James (Jemmy) Hope and Myles Byrne arranged conferences, at which Emmet promised arms, with Michael Dwyer (Devlin’s cousin), who still maintained a guerrilla resistance in the Wicklow Mountains,[24] and with Thomas Cloney, a veteran of the Wexford rebellion in '98.

In Dublin, Emmet believed his hand was forced on the 16th of July when gunpowder in the rebel arms depot in Patrick Street accidentally detonated, arousing the suspicion of the authorities.

He persuaded the majority of the leadership to bring forward the date for the rising to the evening of Saturday, July 23, a festival day, which would provide cover for the gathering of their forces.

[29] Parts of his plan were known, through spies and informers, to an undersecretary at Dublin Castle, Alexander Marsden and in turn by the Chief Secretary for Ireland, William Wickham.

Landreth believes that Emmet was their unwitting instrument,[31] drawn home from Paris for the purpose of organising a premature rising by the calculated misrepresentations of William Putnam McCabe and Arthur O'Connor.

[33] He argues that Wickham was genuinely complacent and notes that, while he may have too long delayed moving against the rebels in the hope of discovering the full scope of their conspiracy, on the 23rd Marsden did sound the alarm in advance of the day's action.

[39] At 11 on the morning of 23 July 1803, Emmet showed men from Kildare an arsenal of pikes, grenades, rockets, and gunpowder-packed hollowed beams (these were to be dragged out onto the streets to prevent cavalry charges).

[27] By evening Emmet, Malachy Delaney and Myles Byrne (turned out for the occasion in gold-trimmed green uniforms) were outside their Thomas Street arsenal – with just 80 men.

[41] Unaware that John Allen was approaching with a band, according to one witness, of 300,[42] and shaken by the sight of a lone dragoon being pulled from his horse and piked to death, Emmet told the men to disperse.

Historian Patrick Geoghehan has identified over seventy different versions of the text,[49] but in an early printing (1818) based on notes taken by Burrowes, Emmet concludes:[50] I am here ready to die.

[52][53] In December Wickham resigned his post, confessing to friends that "no consideration upon earth" could induce him "to remain after having maturely reflected" on the contents of the note he had received.

[54][55] Emmet's remains were first delivered to Newgate Prison and then back to Kilmainham Gaol, where the jailer was under instructions that if no one claimed them they were to be buried in a nearby hospital's burial grounds called Bully's Acre.

[58] A search of the family vault at St Peter's Church in 1903 could not find Emmet's remains, and his actual burial place is still unknown, inspiring the phrase, "Do not look for him.

Castlereagh advised that "the best thing would be to go into no detail whatever upon the case, to keep the subject clearly standing on its own narrow base of a contemptible insurrection without means or respectable leaders",[52] an instruction Plunket appears to have followed in Emmet's prosecution.

Daniel O'Connell who was to lead the struggle for Catholic Emancipation and for repeal of the Union in the decades following Emmet's death, roundly condemned the resort to "physical force".

O'Connell's own programme of mobilising public opinion, fuelled by sometimes violent rhetoric and demonstrated in "monster meetings", might have suggested that constitutionalism and physical force were complementary rather than antithetical.

[62] The Young Irelander publisher Charles Gavan Duffy repeatedly reprinted Michael James Whitty's popular chapbook Life, Trial and Conversations of Robert Emmet Esq.

[65] As Pearse parleyed with the British for terms at the end of Easter week, 1916, his Dublin commander James Connolly is recalled lying wounded in a house in Moore Street with a portrait of Emmet hanging over his bed.

In her screen drama Anne Devlin (1984), the Irish feminist filmmaker Pat Murphy offers an implicit criticism of patriotic politics that operates "largely at the level of signs and representations".

[74] Emmet is "bold Robert" in the song Back Home in Derry, written by Bobby Sands in HM Prison Maze before his fatal hunger strike in 1981.