This is a book review written by Trudy Cochrane. It is published on this site with her kind permission. The book is Citizen Lord; Edward Fitzgerald, 1763 - 1798 by Stella Tillyard.
Lord Edward Fitzgerald was the military tactician behind the 1798 Irish insurrection. The rebellion is often dismissed as a peasant’s revolt that was easily squashed by the British army but was a well-planned military operation that even resulted in a Republic operating in the southeastern town of Wexford for three weeks. The organized effort of the rebellion shocked the powers in London and was the key event that steamrolled the Act of Union. How a young man from wealth and privilege ended up plotting rebellion, enlisting French help to do so, and then dying a traitor to the crown in a Dublin jail, is the subject of Stella Tillyard’s thrilling book Citizen Lord.
Lord Edward Fitzgerald was the fifth son of [21] children of the Duke and Duchess of Leinster; the premier peer family in Ireland of the 18th century. He grew up steeped in Enlightenment values and was schooled under the methodology of Rousseau. His father was a remote authority figure at best and died when Edward was nine. Edward was very close to his mother, an over-emotional, passionate woman, and his childhood is revealed mainly through his letters to and from the Duchess. After Edward’s father died it became apparent that the Duchess had been having an affair with the children’s beloved tutor, Mr. Ogilvie. They married quickly and the Duchess moved the family to France where they all spent nine happy years.
Being the fifth son, Lord Edward’s career prospects were limited; the military or managing one of his father’s estates, marrying and pursuing a political career. Edward was a confidant, outgoing young man with a thirst for excitement; he gladly embraced the prospects of adventure offered by the British Army. At fifteen he was purchased a Lieutenant’s commission, but his mother would not allow him to join his regiment. Instead, he was sent to learn the life of soldiering on the south coast of England and within the safety of his uncles militia. When he was nineteen, he finally saw action, landing at Charleston, NC. He was wounded at the battle of Eutaw Springs and was rescued by a slave named Tony, who became Edward’s lifelong friend.
When Edward returned to London (his family was now living there) he began a political apprenticeship under his cousin, the famous British prime minister, Charles James Fox. Young and full of idealism, he set his mind on reforming the Irish parliament using the knowledge he gained. Not everyone in Dublin felt as enlightened as he did though, and he made few friends or allies during his first session.
When two successive love affairs failed, Edward despaired to his mother in a letter of ever marrying within in his circle. He was too poor by aristocratic standards to attract the right sort of woman and his heart was easily bruised. His abrupt proposal to his cousin Georgina, daughter of Lord George Lennox, led to him being dismissed from their house in disgrace. Edward hoped Georgina would defy her father and run away with him. When it became obvious she wouldn’t, Edward himself ran away; back to the army and a chance to distinguish himself and win her back.
It was peacetime and therefore little opportunity for Lord Edward to advance in the army. His main job while in North America was to lead a mapping expedition into the wilderness. Hunting for himself, sleeping under the stars, and navigating a canoe, Edward was back in his element. The army still held much more allure for him than the treacherous waters of romance or the stuffy halls of Irish Ascendancy politics. During this time, Edward met with Iroquois Indian chief Joseph Brant. Brant was a man who had traveled to London to meet the King and promote Indian interests. Impressed with Lord Edward’s bonhomie and down-to-earth nature as much as his station in life, he made Lord Edward an honorary Iroquois chief.
By the time Edward returned home to his family and the news that Georgina had married (and exceptionally well), it was two years later and he was a changed man. Europe had also changed. The French Revolution had annihilated the order and cold-blooded fear of anything French or reforming gripped the aristocracy in Britain and the rest of Europe. In Ireland, where agrarian violence was constantly bubbling and threatening to erupt into full revolt, the Ascendancy class was particularly nervous. Lord Edward returned to this climate having seen revolution succeed in America and the prosperous settlers on their farms. He was a self-sufficient young man, able to survive on his own in the wilderness. While in London he met, as if by divine providence, Thomas Paine and became one of his disciples. He also began his most intense and tragic love affair, with playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s wife, Elizabeth. The affair lasted until Elizabeth died of consumption. After h! er death Edward threw himself into all the news of the new French order and even accompanied Paine to France. There, Edward lived amongst the post-revolutionary horrors and successes and met his wife Pamela, an illegitimate daughter of King Louis’ brother.
He was now ready to return to Ireland. Having fully given up on reform, Edward set about (not yet joining, but closely associated with the United Irishmen) to instigate Ireland's break with Monarchy. His life’s work was to set Ireland on the course to becoming a Republic. The plan was to create this with a full-out insurrection assisted by a second French landing in Ireland (the first in 1797 led by General Hoche and Wolfetone having ended with the fleet scattered after a freak Atlantic storm). With Lord Edward’s military expertise, he trained his adjutant generals from the counties in the arts of war, and they in turn trained those under them, preparing for the day the French arrived.
On March 12th, 1798 the whole of the Leinster executive, the top brass of the United Irishmen was arrested in Bond St. after being sold out by an associate. It was a disaster for the United Irishmen and Lord Edward, and the event signaled the end of Ireland’s best chance of becoming a Republic for the next 125 years.
After the Bond St arrests Lord Edward, now effectively the last leader of the proposed revolution went underground. For weeks the authorities frantically searched the island for him. They offered rewards for his capture and alternately, an open port to him. “Won’t anyone urge Lord Edward to fly?” despaired Lord Clare the chancellor, “I pledge myself that every port in the country shall be left open to him!”
Edward was invisible right under their noses; he remained a phantom on the back streets of Dublin in elaborate disguises and in a series of safe houses. But the price was right and the opportunity arose for a Mr. Magan, and Lord Edward was betrayed. As he lay upstairs in a safe house, several officers broke in the door and seized Edward. He fought like a tiger, stabbing and fatally wounding Captain Ryan. Meanwhile, outside the house, 200 of Dublin Castle’s finest soldiers waited to drag the last of the revolutionaries to Newgate Prison.
“Edward Fitzgerald died raving and wounded in a Dublin gaol as the Rebellion of 1798 raged around him,” says a quote on the back of the book. He was 35 years old. The mail coaches leaving Dublin on May 23rd were stopped; it was the signal to the counties to rise. Even though Lord Edward never led the way to Dublin Castle, and the Dublin rising sputtered out despairing of a leader, the rebellion started in the outlying areas.
Tillyards telling of this remarkable young man’s life and times is nothing short of stunning. Aside from meticulous and colorful background on all the historical figures Lord Edward comes into contact with, she weaves a pure human tale around the letters shared by him, family and friends.
During the dangerous last weeks of his life, we are given a vivid description of his whereabouts, and the people who protected him. This is due to her using the research from current Irish historians, and Tillyard thanks them in her book. You can smell the muck of the city as Edward lurks in the dockside slums of Dublin. You can feel the danger he’s under as he steps out onto the streets in disguise, and you are tuned in to the events and frantic searching that is going on around him. The book is impossible to put down at this point.
Citizen Lord is a highly recommendable book for anyone interested in Irish and eighteenth-century European characters. The trips she takes us on to post-revolutionary France, Foxite, and Pittite London, as well as meeting the fascinating Iroquois chief Joseph Brant are certainly worth the price of the book. It is also a brilliant read for anyone just looking to be swept away in a grand and dramatic story.