WHEN Lord Edward Fitzgerald wrote to his mother, the Duchess of Leinster, from Paris, dating his letter Tuesday, October 30th, 1st year of the Republic, 1792", it was a typically dramatic announcement of his political position. The fifth son of the Duke of Leinster, former general in the British army, and member of the Irish Parliament for Kildare, had become an ardent and undiscriminating admirer of the French Revolution - which he later wanted to see re enacted on the streets of Dublin.
His mother could hardly have been too surprised; after all, it was she who had brought him up on the principles of Rousseau, as outlined in Emile, with the emphasis on emotional freedom and the expression of natural reason". While Fitzgerald's egalitarianism and alienation from his Ascendancy background found in Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man the necessary articulation, these feelings had been gestating during his youthful period in the British army and his travels in North America. There he had admiringly observed the culture of the Iroquois Indians, who made him an honorary chieftain.
With Wolfe Tone and Father John Murphy, Lord Edward Fitzgerald is one of the most famous figures of the 1798 rebellion, and perhaps the most romanticised. Stella Tillyard's biography sets out to extricate him from the historiographical tradition that has cast him as an innocent romantic, or idealistic dilettante flirting with radical politics and used by others more astute and ruthless than he. As in her last book, Aristocrats, she has rendered the 18th century as close as the day before yesterday, quoting amply from private correspondence, enabling us to hear the voices of her protagonists.
With skill and clarity she teases out the political intrigues in London and Dublin in the 1780s and 90s, making nice distinctions between the Paineite and Foxite groups of radicals in their relationship to property and power. There are deftly sketched portraits, too, of Elisabeth Linley Sheridan, wife of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, of Edward's profligate parliamentarian cousin, Charles Fox, of Madame de Genlis, Parisian educationalist and mistress of Philippe, Duc d'Orleans. She vividly evokes Fitzgerald's formative period in Paris, where he joined the group of English and Irish aspiring revolutionaries who clustered around Tom Paine in Whites Hotel.
Tillyard's most significant achievement is to maintain the narrative drive and sympathetic characterisation that make this kind of historical writing so popular without sacrificing the complexity of the background to the upheavals of 1798 and of the many, often contradictory, strains of political and religious opinion that were channelled into the United Irishmen.
While she emphasises the importance of the impact of Enlightenment ideas and the American and French revolutions on the Belfast and Dublin intelligentsia exemplified by Lord Edward with his links with radical Whiggery in London and his mascot of the Revolution: his French wife Pamela - she also traces the sectarian identifications within the movement, pointing out that for many United Irishmen, Francophilia meant not the espousal of secularism and democracy, but of Catholicism and monarchy. While not setting out to provide a complete history of the rebellion, she manages to convey the violence chaos, and confusion of the summer of 1798, which left an estimated 30,000 dead.
While Tillyard argues for Fitzgerald's militancy, military acumen and total commitment to the cause of an Irish republic brought about by force, she acknowledges that written evidence documenting the man of action, rather than the young idealistic dreamer, is scarce: the need for secrecy from the mid-1790s onwards means that the stream of marvellously candid letters to his mother evaporates.
Yet even when the layers of romanticism, added by, among others, his first biographer, Tom Moore, are stripped away an aura of glamour stubbornly clings to Fitzgerald. Tillyard herself, although she refrains (with difficulty, she tells us) from quoting from the many 19th century ballads and verses about Lord Edward, succumbs to the legend, at times writing about him with an indulgence reminiscent of Baroness Orczy on the Scarlet Pimpernel. His gardening habits, in particular, prompt her to flights of lyricism and abstraction.
Perhaps there is no other way to do justice to the temperament of a man who, as he scrambled around the back streets of Dublin under threat of execution, commissioned a new outfit that would be appropriate for a commander of the rebellion: a green jacket with scarlet braiding, a long green cape and a tasseled cap of liberty. Le citoyen Edouard could not resist the flamboyant gesture.
He died on June 4th, 1798, as the result of a gunshot wound received when he was captured after the failure of the rebellion.