Barons, Rebels & Romantics

The Fitzgeralds first thousand years spawned barons, earls and dukes, rakes, rebels and rascals, lovers, eccentrics, poets, priests, soldiers of fortune and politicians.  Many met their deaths at the hands of their enemies in skirmishes and battles; others were murdered, hung, drawn and quartered or executed as traitors. They had wit, and a certain style, both on the way up and down.  Take, for example, the Earl of Kildare summoned to London by Henry VII to account for himself. When asked why he had burned the church at Cashel, he said he only did it because he thought the archbishop was inside. The king was so amused by his response that he rewarded him with the governance of Ireland. Later, the ‘Great’ Earl of Kildare, about to go into battle against the Rebel Irish who, incidentally, were led by his son-in-law, when asked where the Loyal Irish should take part in the battle, replied: “Marry, let them stand there and give us the gaze”. He won the battle and was made a Knight of the Garter. Yet another Kildare fought the last pitched battle in the British Isles between private armies, leading his retainers against the family’s old enemy, the Ormond Butlers.  Defeated and his hip shattered by a musket ball, he was carried off the field of battle by the triumphant Butlers, who taunted him by saying “Where’s the mighty Earl of Kildare now?” “Where he has always been, on the backs of the Butlers”, was his reply.

In the modern world no less than the medieval, the Fitzgeralds sought to play a role, albeit a diminished one as soldiers, administrators and politicians. They died gallantly in skirmishes in the wastes of Afghanistan and India for the Honourable East India Company, fought in the Continental Army for US Independence and in the British Army against it, died for the Confederacy and for the Union Army in the Civil War. Hundreds gave their lives in the First and Second World Wars, Korea and Vietnam but on these occasions, perhaps for only the second time in a thousand years, since the invasion of Ireland, they all chose to fight and die on the same side.

Nicholas Fitzgerald, a conservative Member of Parliament, attended the 1891 Constitutional Convention to draft a constitution for Australia, as one of the State of Victoria’s delegates. He argued against the election of State Governors, fearing it would increase the trend towards democracy in Australia. His noble Cambro-Norman Irish ancestors would have agreed with his sentiments; they didn’t confuse good government with popular participation.

War, politics and administration seemed to attract generation after generation of Fitzgeralds but several succumbed to the arts. An Earl of Desmond was regarded as a fine poet in Irish but William Thomas Fitzgerald (1759-1829) was an execrable poet, often subject of parody because of his patriotic verse. Lord Byron referred to him in the first couplet of ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’ – “Still must I hear? – shall Fitzgerald bawl His creaking couplets in a tavern hall”.  The Annual Register remarked in 1829 that ‘On all public occasions his pen was ever ready’. His more notable productions are either prologues for plays or appeals to England