Lord Edward FitzGerald
Lord Edward FitzGerald was an Irish aristocrat and revolutionary proponent of Irish independence from Britain. He abandoned his prospects as a distinguished veteran of British service in the American War of Independence, and as an Irish Parliamentarian, to embrace the cause in Ireland of Catholic-Protestant reconciliation and of a sovereign republic. Unable to reconcile with Ireland's Protestant Ascendancy or with the Kingdom's English-appointed administration, he sought inspiration in the American Revolution and in revolutionary France where, in 1792, he met and befriended Thomas Paine. From 1796 he became a leading proponent within the Society of United Irishmen of a French-assisted insurrection. On the eve of the intended uprising in May 1798, he was fatally wounded in the course of arrest.
Early years
FitzGerald, the fifth son of the 1st Duke of Leinster and the Lady Emily Lennox, was born at Carton House, near Dublin, and was a member of the Fitzgerald dynasty. In 1773 his father died and his mother soon afterwards married William Ogilvie, who had been the tutor for him and his siblings. He spent most of his childhood in Frescati House at Blackrock in Dublin where he was tutored by Ogilvie in a manner chiefly directed to the acquisition of knowledge that would fit him for a military career.American War of Independence
FitzGerald joined the British Army in 1779 and then became aide-de-camp on the staff of Lord Rawdon in the southern theatre of the American Revolutionary War. He was wounded in the leg at the Battle of Eutaw Springs on 8 September 1781, and was carried off the field by an escaped slave named Tony Small. Small was a free man at the end of the war, and Lord Edward employed him from then on, and the two travelled together back to Europe. FitzGerald was evacuated from Charleston, South Carolina in 1782 when the British forces abandoned the city. Webb surmises that the success of the American colonists in fighting against regular troops led him in later years to the conviction that his countrymen in Ireland could cope with them with a similar result.In 1783, he visited the West Indies, before returning to Ireland where, in the autumn of that year, his brother William, the 2nd Duke of Leinster, had procured Edward's election to the Irish Parliament as a Member for Athy. He held the seat, as a supporter of Henry Grattan's Patriot opposition, until 1790.
Explorer in the New World
In the spring of 1786, Fitzgerald took the then unusual step for a young nobleman of entering the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, after which he made a tour through Spain in 1787. Dejected, in England, by unrequited love for his cousin Georgina Lennox, accompanied by Small in 1788 he joined the 54th Regiment in Halifax, Nova Scotia, then a resettlement site for thousands of free ‘loyalist’ blacks, before proceeding to the garrison in New Brunswick.During their eighteen months in North America, Fitzgerald and Small, guided by a compass, traversed the country from Fredericton, New Brunswick to Quebec, crossed Upper Canada to Detroit, where Fitzgerald was honoured with some kind of honorary affiliation given the name "Eghnidal", by the chief of the Bear clan of the Kanien'kehá:ka, Karonghyontye, and made his way down the Mississippi to New Orleans, whence they returned to England. Of the frontier society he encountered, Fitzgerald commented: "The equality of everybody and their manner of life I like very much. There are no gentlemen, everybody is on a footing".
Re-enters politics
In 1790, Fitzgerald turned down the command of an expedition against Cádiz offered him by Pitt, observing that the promotion would require him to vote in Parliament with the government and against his convictions. Instead, replaced by his brother Henry as MP for Athy, he was returned to the Irish House of Commons from County Kildare, frequently returning to visit family in England where he entered into intimate terms with his first cousin Charles Fox, with Richard Sheridan and other leading Whigs.His Whig connections, together with his transatlantic experiences, predisposed Fitzgerald to sympathise with the doctrines of the French Revolution, which he embraced enthusiastically when he visited Paris in October 1792. He lodged with Thomas Paine and listened to the debates in the Convention. At a convivial gathering on 18 November, he supported a toast to "the speedy abolition of all hereditary titles and feudal distinctions", and gave proof of his zeal by expressly repudiating his own title, a performance for which he was dismissed from the army.
Marries on the Continent
According to Thomas Moore, Lord Edward FitzGerald was the only one of the numerous suitors of Sheridan's first wife, Elizabeth, whose attentions were received with favour; and it is certain that, whatever may have been its limits, a warm mutual affection subsisted between the two. She conceived a child by him, a baby girl who was born on 30 March 1792 but who died in October of the following year.While in Paris, FitzGerald became enamoured of a young girl whom he chanced to see at the theatre, and who is said to have had a striking likeness to Elizabeth Sheridan. He discovered her to be a protégée of Stéphanie Félicité, comtesse de Genlis who had achieved fame as a writer and had been responsible for the education of the children of Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans. The girl, whose name was Ann Sims but was commonly known as Pamela, was commonly believed to be the daughter from a relationship between the duke and Mme de Genlis, but there is some evidence to support the story of Madame de Genlis that Pamela was born in Newfoundland. On 27 December 1792, FitzGerald and Pamela were married at Tournai, one of the witnesses being Louis Philippe, afterwards King of the French; and in January 1793 the couple reached Dublin.
Return to Ireland
In 1793, on his return from Paris, Lord Edward fresh from the gallery of the Convention in Paris, returned to his seat in the Irish Parliament and immediately began his attack on government. He was required to apologise at the bar of the House of Commons for denouncing a Government proclamation which Grattan had approved for the suppression of the United-Irish attempt to revive the Irish Volunteer movement as a French-model "National Guard". However, it was not until 1796 that he joined the United Irishmen, who by now had given up as hopeless the path of constitutional reform and whose aim, after the recall of Lord FitzWilliam in 1795, was nothing less than the establishment of an independent Irish republic.Revolutionary activities
In May 1796, while Theobald Wolfe Tone was in Paris endeavouring to obtain French assistance for an insurrection in Ireland, FitzGerald and his friend Arthur O'Connor proceeded to Hamburg, where they opened negotiations with the French Directory through Reinhard, French minister to the Hanseatic towns, and through Finnish nobleman Johan Anders Jägerhorn. The Duke of York, meeting Pamela at Devonshire House on her way through London with her husband, had told her that "all was known" about his plans, and advised her to persuade him not to go abroad. The government in London was kept apprised of Fitzgerald's contacts in Hamburg, which contributed to Hoche's abortive expedition to Ireland in December 1796, by his host, the informer, Samuel Turner.In September 1797, the Government learnt that, back in Dublin, that Lord Edward was among those on the Leinster directory of the United Irishmen urging an insurrection. He was the colonel, or county chief, in the republicans' Kildare "regiment" and as head of the directory's military committee, in February 1798, had computed the number United Irishmen prepared to rise nationwide, at 269,896. While acknowledging their deficiency in arms, he was among the advocates of action in advance of a further French attempt on Ireland, with some evidence that he favoured a plan for the massacre of the Irish peers while in procession to the House of Lords for the trial of Lord Kingston in May 1798.
Lead-up to arrest
It was probably abhorrence of such measures that converted Fitzgerald's confidante, Thomas Reynolds, from a co-conspirator to an informer; at all events, Reynolds and several others, kept the authorities posted on what was going on, though lack of evidence produced in court delayed the arrest of the ringleaders. But on 12 March 1798 Reynolds' information led to the seizure of a number of conspirators at the house of Oliver Bond. Lord Edward FitzGerald, warned by Reynolds, was not among them.As a fellow member of the Ascendancy class, the Government were anxious to make an exception for FitzGerald, avoiding the embarrassing and dangerous consequences of his subversive activities. They communicated their willingness to spare him from the normal fate meted out to traitors. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Clare, said to a member of his family, "For God's sake get this young man out of the country; the ports shall be thrown open, and no hindrance whatever offered".
FitzGerald, however, refused to desert others who could not escape, and whom he had himself led into danger. On 30 March the government proclamation of martial law authorising the military to act as they saw fit to crush the United Irishmen led to a campaign of vicious brutality in several parts of the country. This forced the United Irish executive to bring forward plans for the rising, with or without French aid.
Lord Edward FitzGerald's social position made him the most important United Irish leader still at liberty. On 9 May a reward of £1,000 was offered by Dublin Castle for his apprehension. Since the arrests at Bond's, FitzGerald had been in hiding, but had twice visited his wife in disguise and was himself visited by his stepfather Ogilvie and his friend William Lawless; he generally observed less caution than his situation required. Meanwhile, the date for the rising was finally fixed for 23 May and FitzGerald awaited the day hidden by Mary Moore above her family's inn in Thomas Street Dublin.
Tipped off that the house was going to be raided, Moore turned to Francis Magan, a Catholic barrister and trusted sympathiser, who agreed to hide Fitzgerald. Making their way to Magan's on 18 May, Fitzgerald's party was challenged by Major Henry Sirr and a company of Dumbarton Fencibles. Moore escaped with Fitzgerald and took him back to Thomas Street to the house of Nicholas Murphy.
Moore explained to Magan what had happened and, unbeknownst to her, Magan informed Dublin Castle. The Moores were raided that day. Mary, running to warn the Leinster Directory meeting nearby in James's Gate, received a bayonet cut across the shoulders.