FITZGER'ALD, Lord EDWARD ( 1703-0S). An Irish politician and revolutionist. The fifth son of the seventeen children of the first Duke of Leinster, he was born October 15, 1763, at Car tun Castle, near Dublin. and educated in France. Fitzgerald joined the English Army, and in 1781 went to the United States. He was wounded at the battle of Eutaw Springs. In 1783 he re turned to Ireland to represent Athy in the Irish Parliament. A taste for exploration afterwards led him to journey by compass through the woods from Frederieton to Detroit, where he was formally admitted into the Bear tribe. lle also went down the Mississippi to New Orleans. In 1790 he returned and sat in the Irish Parliament as member for Kildare. Attracted by the French Revolution, he visited Paris in 1792. and was cashiered from the' English Army for attending a revolutionary banquet at winch he expressed republican sympathies and renounced his title of nobility. During this visit he married the puta tive daughter of Philippe 'Egalite.' Duke of
Orleans, and Madame Geniis, the celebrated Pamela, who was afterwards discovered to be the child of Mary Sims, of Newfoundland. by De Brixey, a French captain. They returned to Ireland .and lived at Kildare, the union proving particularly happy. His sympathies with the struggles of his countrymen led him to join the United Irishmen in 1796. and he went to France to arrange, with the Directory, an invasion to support an Irish revolution. Soon after his return the plot became known to the English Govern ment. and Fitzgerald. after a desperate resist ance, during which he was severely wounded, was captured and died in prison on June 4, 1798. His widow married Air. Piteairn, American Consul at Hamburg, but soon separated from him, and after a checkered existence, died in poverty in Paris in 1831. Consult Moore, Life and Death of Edward Fitzgerald (12(1 ed., London, 1875).