the Wexford rebels in 1798, celebrated as the Second Battle of Vinegar Hill. Legacy The Dublin Castle authorities had no wish for Westminster to know that a wide-ranging republican conspiracy had been hatched under their noses. Lord Castlereagh, author of the Union that was supposed to address the challenges of Irish governance, advised them that "the best thing would be to go into no detail whatever upon the case [against Emmet] to keep the subject clearly standing on its own narrow base of a contemptible insurrection without means or respectable leaders". In what was widely viewed as an unnecessary attack on a doomed man Emmet's prosecutor, William Plunket, took pains to portray him as the deluded leader of a conspiracy encompassing "the bricklayer, the old clothes man, the hodman and the hostler". At the same time, and notwithstanding that the rebellion was led almost exclusively by Protestants, many in authority were quick to associate it with Catholic disloyalty. That a rebel muster had occurred close the Catholic seminary at Maynooth, was made a point of an official inquiry, and of ill-founded allegations of clerical complicity. (The only association with the college appears to have been the intervention of its French-born professor of natural philosophy, André Darré. He helped negotiate the surrender of the local rebels on July 25). In the north, although Catholic Defenders had been equally loath to commit themselves, the failure of Presbyterians to respond to the entreaties of Hope and Russell was celebrated as evidence of Protestant commitment to the Union. In October 1803, the judge who conducted Russell's trial noted with satisfaction that Ulster Presbyterians had "got into their heads that the present scheme of rebellion has originated with the papists exclusively, and that idea, together with a conviction that should Bonaparte succeed in his designs, there will be no republic, but on the contrary, despotism and pillage, secures their support in the present crisis". Daniel O'Connell who led the struggle for Catholic Emancipation and for repeal of the Union in the decades that followed, denied all connection, roundly condemning the resort to "physical force". He remained content with his dismissal of Emmett in 1803 as an instigator of bloodshed who had forfeited any claim to "compassion". For their rehabilitation, Emmet and the men in 1803 had to await a later generation of Irish republicans. Patrick Pearse, who in 1916 was next to proclaim a provisional