in the severest manner". 23 July 1803 The alarm caused by the explosion at the Patrick Street arms depot on July 16 persuaded Emmet and a majority of the leadership to bring forward the date of the rising. Without further consideration of French aid, it was set for the evening of Saturday, July 23, a festival day which could provide cover for the gathering of their forces. Kildare On the morning of 23 July 1803, emissaries from Kildare taken to view the Thomas Street depot in Dublin were impressed, not by the folding pikes, the grenades or rockets, but by the lack of serviceable firearms. Emmet could show them but a dozen blunderbusses and twelve cases of pistols. They left to turn back their men on the road to the city. In Kildare, a county which despite having been "up" in 1798 was spared by a locally negotiated amnesty from the "white terror" that followed, there had been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of men willing to act in support of a Dublin coup d'état. Shortly after his return from exile in March 1803, Michael Quigly, one of the Kildare leaders who had surrendered in July 1798, visited known United Irish veterans in Naas, Sallins, Rathcoffey, Prosperous, Timahoe and elsewhere and, according to the reports of local magistrates, was enthusiastically received. Sir Fenton Aylmer, a prominent local landowner, noted that "the peasantry of the County Kildare, in general, are determined to rise when they hear of a French invasion and join the enemy". Without news either of the French or of developments in Dublin, on the evening of the 23rd about one hundred rebels gathered on the main street in Maynooth under the leadership of Owen Lyons, a shoemaker, Carter Connolly, a schoolteacher, and Thomas Kereghan, a farmer and Grand Canal boatman, all wearing green uniforms. They overpowered the only two soldiers stationed in the town and then set about searching for arms in the possession of local inhabitants. After the small rebel force had marched to Rathcoffey on the morning of the 24th in hope of meeting other insurgents, they learned the rebellion in Dublin had failed. With no possibility of success and few options, they finally surrendered in Maynooth on 25 July. Meanwhile, there had been a similar muster on 23 July in Naas. The men, by some accounts numbering as many as 400, proceeded in small bands toward Dublin.