This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Elizabeth Malcolm. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 1781, Ireland
Died: 18 September 1851
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Anne Campbell
Devlin, Anne (1781–1851), nationalist and heroine, was born at Cronebeg, near Aughrim, Co. Wicklow, the second of four daughters and three sons of Bryan Devlin and his wife Winifred (née Byrne), who were farmers. When Anne was a child the family moved to a substantial dairy farm at Corballis, south of Rathdrum, Co. Wicklow. Her father, a brother, and various cousins were members of the Society of United Irishmen. Although her immediate family did not take an active role in the 1798 rebellion, they sheltered wounded rebels. After the suppression of the rising, Anne carried messages and supplies to fugitives who had taken refuge in the Wicklow mountains, including her cousins Michael Dwyer, Arthur Devlin, and Hugh O’Byrne. As a result of their known sympathies, the family’s house was destroyed by the yeomanry in June 1798, and Bryan Devlin was arrested in October and held in Wicklow jail until early in 1801. After his release the family moved to a farm at Rathfarnham, on the southern outskirts of Dublin.
In April 1803 Anne Devlin began work nearby in Butterfield Lane, as unpaid housekeeper to Robert Emmet. In Emmet’s house she was privy to the meetings he held in preparation for another rising in Dublin in July 1803, and she acted as a courier for him. When the rising failed and Emmet returned to Rathfarnham, Anne Devlin berated him for abandoning his followers. Yet several days later, when the yeomanry descended on the house and tortured her, she refused to divulge information on his whereabouts. During the following month, while Emmet was hiding in the Wicklow mountains and later at Harold’s Cross in Dublin, she frequently carried messages for him.
Shortly after Emmet’s arrest in late August, Anne Devlin and most of her family were taken into custody and lodged in Kilmainham jail, where one of her young brothers died, probably of typhus. Devlin was subjected to solitary confinement, offers of bribes, and repeated threats in order to force her to reveal information. This she consistently refused to do. Many years later she recalled that, at Christmas 1803, some twenty-one members of her extended family were housed in various Dublin prisons. Most were released before her. The harsh conditions that she endured, including incarceration in damp, cold cells without adequate food or exercise, inevitably took a toll on her health. She developed erysipelas, a painful skin disease, which plagued her for the rest of her life. Early in 1806 she was moved to Dublin castle. The wives of her jailers, both at Kilmainham and the castle, did what they could to alleviate her sufferings. Her release in late 1806, after three years’ imprisonment, was partly due to lobbying on her behalf by Mrs Hanlon, the wife of the chief jailer at Dublin castle.
In her memoirs, recorded in the 1840s, Devlin characterised herself in 1806 as ‘tossed on the world without money, without health, and friendless’. This is clearly an exaggeration. She returned to her family for a time, but they had lost their farm and were struggling to make a living in Dublin. However, she received money from Emmet’s supporters and appears to have been employed as a maid and companion for several years by Elizabeth Hammond, who had been a close friend of the Emmet family. Her life from about 1810 until 1840 is more difficult to trace. In the late 1840s she said simply that her health improved after her release and she found work, adding that she was employed as a laundress by ‘respectable families’ and married ‘an industrious and upright man named Campbell’. By ‘attention to business’, they had ‘earned for many years a competence equal to our wants’. She married Campbell in April 1811 and had three children: Catherine (b. 1812) and William (b. 1816), and Mary Anne (b.1822), who appears to have emigrated to New York during the late 1840s.
In 1836 an official report, listing employees of Dublin hospitals, noted that St Patrick’s Hospital for the insane had, since 1825, employed a laundress, named ‘Ann Devlin’. The master and matron during this period were Patrick and Sarah Campbell, and Robert Emmet’s father had served as the hospital’s surgeon for thirty years until his death in 1803. It seems probable therefore that Devlin spent at least ten years of her career as a laundress working for St Patrick’s, and that she lost her job when the Campbells retired in the late 1830s. By 1842, when she was visited by Dr R. R. Madden, who was collecting information on the United Irishmen, she was living in John’s Lane, off Thomas Street, and was taking washing into her home. Her husband died in 1845. When visited in 1847 by another researcher, Brother Luke Cullen, she was in failing health. Suffering from severe rheumatism, a common complaint of laundresses, and deteriorating eyesight, she became dependent upon her children Catherine and William. Neither of them, however, appears to have enjoyed good health or to have been regularly employed, and Devlin sank into extreme poverty. Both Madden and Cullen made efforts to raise money to support her, but the public response was far from generous.
Anne Devlin died 18 September 1851 of ‘want’ in a room at 2 Little Elbow Lane, the Coombe, Dublin, and was buried beside her husband at Glasnevin cemetery. Shortly afterwards Madden arranged to have her remains transferred to a more prominent part of the cemetery and added a gravestone, which summed up her life, describing her as Robert Emmet’s ‘faithful servant’, who had otherwise lived ‘in obscurity and poverty’. This stone was replaced with a large Celtic cross around 1900, though the inscription was preserved. In her memoirs Devlin had rejected the label ‘servant’, and she seems to have become impoverished only in her final years. The inscription, however, marked the beginning of the mythologising of Anne Devlin as the devoted peasant woman, refusing, despite torture, to betray her young master and his cause.
In 2003, a statue of Anne Devlin by artist Clodagh Emoe was unveiled in Rathfarnham village, to commemorate her contribution to the revolutionary period of 1791–1803.