Lord Edward Fitzgerald

Irish rebel leader

• Born: October 15, 1763
• Birthplace: Carton House, near Maynooth, County Kildare, Ireland
• Died: June 4, 1798
• Place of death: Newgate Prison, in Dublin, Ireland

Fitzgerald, born into an aristocratic family, became a leader of the movement for Irish independence from England and repudiated his title of nobility in an act of defiance. He was part of the attempt to pursuade France to invade England and thus incite rebellion in Ireland.

Early Life

Lord Edward Fitzgerald was the scion of the upper echelons of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. His father, James Fitzgerald, was earl of Kildare and later, as first duke of Leinster (1766), became the highest-ranking Irish peer. His mother was Emilia Mary, daughter of the second duke of Richmond. As the fifth son, Edward led a life of opulence and ease without the undue pressures of responsibility, moving back and forth between the many Fitzgerald estates at places including Carton House in Kildare, Leinster House in Dublin City, and Frascati House near Blackrock, County Dublin.

Fitzgerald apparently developed egalitarian ideas at an early age and, perhaps encouraged by his mother, became deeply absorbed in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He never abandoned his attachment to the idea of the pure, unsullied “noble savage” struggling for freedom against an artificial class system. In 1779 he embarked on a military career, journeying to America with the Sussex Volunteer Militia. In one of the last battles of the American Revolutionary War, a brutally contested fight at Eutaw Springs, South Carolina, on September 8, 1781, Fitzgerald was seriously injured and left for dead on the field. He was providentially rescued and nursed back to recovery by an escaped slave named Tony Small, who later accompanied the young man back to Ireland and became a lifelong friend.

Life’s Work

Returning to Ireland after the ending of the American Revolution by the Treaty of Paris in 1783, Edward Fitzgerald took up a seat in the Irish parliament, representing Athy. Soon bored, however, he went on a Grand Tour of Europe, falling in love with a cousin, Georgina Lennox. After a brief affair, their relationship fizzled. Out of disappointment, Fitzgerald returned to military service, and he was stationed in Canada as a major in the infantry. While on this tour of duty, he persuaded the colonial authorities to allow him to undertake an expedition of discovery into unmapped territory. He journeyed from Quebec, down the Mississippi River to Louisiana, and became an “adopted” member of the Huron nation in the process.

His ardor for military glory and adventure seemed to leave him for a while, and he refused a commission from the prime minister to command a British expedition against Cádiz in Spain. Instead, he returned to parliamentary politics and also took a romantic interest in Elizabeth Linley, the wife of a noted author and fellow Irishman. A daughter was born out of this affair but, strangely, no violent rift seems to have been created between Sheridan and Fitzgerald.

Neglecting his parliamentary and military duties, the young noble again traveled abroad, this time taking a deep interest in the unfolding drama of revolutionary France and frequenting radical circles and debating clubs in Paris. He then began advocating a break of Ireland from England, by violent revolution if necessary, and marked himself as a subversive in 1792 by denouncing the British administration and renouncing his title of nobility. That same year saw the overthrow of King Louis XVI, the replacement of the monarchy by the First Republic, and a general war in Europe, which pitted England against France. Edward Fitzgerald was deprived of military rank and henceforth kept under surveillance. In France he had become enamored to Pamela Seymour, who is said to have been the daughter of Philippe Égalité, duke of Orleans, through a liaison with the courtesan, Madame de Genlis. Fitzgerald and Seymour were married in 1792, and upon his return to his native land shortly thereafter, he was suspected of engaging in subversion.

Certainly he made no secret about his political sympathies. However, he made no definitive move until 1796, when he joined the the Society of United Irishmen, a predominantly Protestant revolutionary nationalist organization founded by Wolfe Tone, James Napper Tandy, and others. He is known to have been present at a secret meeting in Hamburg, Germany, between United Irish leaders and French agents to set down plans for French assistance in fomenting an Irish rebellion. (However, how significant his role in the meeting was remains subject to debate.) It is believed that the abortive landing of General Louis Lazare Hoche and Tone in Bantry Bay, County Cork, in December of 1796 might have been one of the main items on the agenda.

Though a latecomer to politics, Fitzgerald’s exalted station in society assured him of a place within the movement’s leadership. From that time on he concentrated on pulling together an underground military apparatus that could be set to rise in revolt throughout Ireland and would coordinate with landings of French troops. Plans for such a rising, set for late spring of 1798, were far from complete when an informer, Thomas Reynolds, revealed that the main governing revolutionary unit, the Leinster Directory, was to meet in Dublin on March 12, 1798. Assembled at the home of Oliver Bond, the unit’s directors were arrested. However, Fitzgerald, the unit president, was warned by Reynolds himself and evaded the net; Fitzgerald was given the opportunity to leave the country before martial law was declared. Reynolds may have been acting at the behest of government officials, who undoubtedly hoped to avoid the embarrassment of prosecuting a member of such a prominent family. Fitzgerald chose to not compromise and thus remained in hiding for more than two months, despite the imposition of martial law on March 30. He made plans as best he could on the run and spirited himself from house to house within the city, under the very noses of his adversaries.

Finding Fitzgerald to be less than obliging and being forced to hunt him down, officials allowed a bounty to be put upon his head; a lawyer named Francis Magan revealed his whereabouts at Thomas Street. On May 19, a group of men led by the constable, Major Henry Charles Sirr, went to his hideaway and burst into his bedroom to apprehend him. Fitzgerald put up a determined struggle to escape, slashed at his opponents with his knife, and mortally wounded one of them. Major Sirr drew a pistol, shot Fitzgerald in the shoulder, and incapacitated him. Fitzgerald was taken to Newgate Gaol, where it was initially assumed that his injury was not life-threatening. However, the wound became infected, and the rebel leader died in his cell on June 4, 1798, even as the revolt he was planning had broken out and was raging through counties Kildare and Wexford.

Significance

Lord Edward Fitzgerald was considered neither a dynamic nor an effective a leader nor an imaginative thinker in comparison to contemporary revolutionaries Wolfe Tone, Arthur O’Connor, or Thomas Addis Emmett, among others. He acted as a blue blood turned amateur revolutionary, who in the end proved too reckless to coordinate an effective underground movement.

His untimely capture and death, however, constitute one of history’s major “what ifs.” Like his equally ill-fated colleague-in-arms, Tone, Fitzgerald is the most revered and the best known of the 1798 rebels, and he has served as a role model for Irish Republican nationalists of all stripes for the last two centuries.

Bibliography

Curtain, Nancy J. The United Irishmen: Popular Politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791-1798. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1994. The most definitive study of the United Irish as a grassroots movement.

Knox, Oliver. Rebels and Informers: Stirrings of Irish Independence. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. An excellent time line and useful information on the diversity of opinions, the degree of commitment, and the quality within the leadership of the Irish nationalist movement of the late eighteenth century.

Newsinger, John, ed. United Irishman: The Autobiography of James Hope. London: Merlin Press, 2001. A contemporary account by one of the participants in the rebel organization that also sheds light on the leadership and personalities involved in the nationalist struggle.

Smyth, Jim, ed. Revolution, Counterrevolution, and Union: Ireland in the 1790’s. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. A collection that brings together different slants on aspects of what was, even for early modern Ireland, a tumultuous decade.

Tillyard, Stella. Citizen Lord: The Life of Edward Fitzgerald, Irish Revolutionary. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. A biography that seeks to resolve or at least explain some of the contradictions in the psychological makeup of an aristocrat turned radical revolutionary.