... threatened to cut her throat with his sabre if she did not tell instantly the place in which I was hiding. The cowardly villain, no doubt, would have put his threat in execution had not some of his comrades interfered to prevent him". Rising of 1803 In the winter of 1802-03 Byrne entered into the plans of Robert Emmet and Anne Devlin for a renewed uprising. In his Memoirs Byrne describes a meeting he arranged between Robert Emmet and the Wexford rebel leader Thomas Cloney at Harold's Cross Green, Dublin, just prior to Emmet's Rebellion: "I can never forget the impression this meeting made on me at the time - to see two heroic patriots, equally devoted to poor Ireland, discussing the best means of obtaining her freedom." In July 1803, the plans unravelled when Michael Dwyer (Devlin's cousin), still holding out in Wicklow, recognised that there were neither the promised arms nor convincing proof of an intended French landing. In the north Thomas Russell and James Hope found no enthusiasm for a renewal of the struggle in what in '98 had been the strongest United Irish and Catholic Defender districts. In Dublin, with their preparations revealed by an accidental explosion of a rebel arms depot, Emmet proceeded with a plan to seize the centres of government. The rising, for which for Byrne turned out with Emmet and Malachy Delaney in gold-trimmed green uniforms, was broken up after a brief confrontation in Thomas Street. Unaware that John Allen was approaching with a band, according to one witness, of 300, Emmet ordered what R.R. Madden recorded as "a motley assemblage of [80] armed men ... under the evident excitement of drink" to disperse. In the service of France Two days after the fight in Thomas Street, Byrne met with the fugitive Emmet and agreed to go to Paris to procure French assistance. But in Paris he found Napoleon's attentions (as in 1798) focussed elsewhere. The First Consul used a cessation of hostilities with Britain to pursue a very different venture, the re-enslavement of Haiti. Byrne was commissioned as a captain in Napoleon's Irish Legion. But at a time when Byrne was convinced that "all Catholic Ireland" was "ready to rise the moment a rallying point was offered", the Irish exiles (Thomas Addis Emmet and Arthur O'Connor chief among them) could not deflect the First Consul from other priorities. Rather than