After hiding for some days in the Wicklow mountains Emmet repaired to the house of a Mrs Palmer at Harold's Cross, in order to be near the residence of John Philpot Curran, to whose daughter Sarah he had for some time been secretly attached, and with whom he had carried on a voluminous correspondence, afterwards seized by the authorities at her father's house.
The grammar school was founded in 1696, and here among its students were John Philpot Curran and Isaac Butt.
In the sixth examination of John Philpot (1516-1555) in 1555 we are told that Lord Riche said to him, "All heretics do boast of the Spirit of God, and every one would have a church by himself, as Joan of Kent and the Anabaptists."
Philpot was imprisoned soon after Mary's accession in 1553; and it is very pleasing to find, amidst the records of intense bitterness and rancour which characterized these times, and with which Romanist and Protestant alike assailed the persecuted Anabaptists, a letter of Philpot's, to a friend of his, "prisoner the same time in Newgate," who held the condemned opinions.
Philpot in a long reply, whilst maintaining the obligation of infant baptism, yet addresses his correspondent as, "dear brother, saint, and fellow-prisoner for the truth of Christ's gospel"; and at the close of his argument he says, "I beseech thee, dear brother in the gospel, follow the steps of the faith of the glorious martyrs in the primitive church, and of such as at this day follow the same."
