with them on the catholic question. The partial fusion of parties in the Canning ministry called him to office as lord of the English treasury (July 1827). The passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act, which had always been warmly supported by Fitzgerald, removed the only barrier between him and the tories. Feeling himself bound, as an emancipationist, to support the Duke of Wellington, he again took office in 1830 as vice-treasurer of Ireland. Shortly afterwards his active political career terminated, for although he once more held office as a lord of the admiralty in Sir Robert Peel's short-lived administration of December 1834, he never again recovered his seat in parliament, which he lost in the struggle attendant on the Reform Bill. He was defeated at the Kerry election of 1831, and again in 1835. He was frequently invited to seek the suffrages of an English constituency, but declined. In 1845 Fitzgerald addressed a 'Letter to Sir Robert Peel on the Endowment of the Roman Catholic Church of Ireland.' The Duke of Wellington and the writer were the only survivors of those who professed Pitt's politics in the Irish parliament, and Fitzgerald's letter, while partly explanatory of Pitt's views and pledges, also established the fact that this great statesman was the originator of the 'treasonable and sacrilegious scheme' of Peel. When Pitt left office he drew up a paper explaining the causes of his resignation, which was delivered by Lord Cornwallis to the Knight of Kerry for circulation among the leading Roman catholics. Pitt's views were subsequently more fully revealed in the 'Castlereagh Correspondence.' Fitzgerald approved the means by which the union was carried, declaring it to be a very popular measure among the Munster and Connaught population; and with respect to the parliament on College Green, with whose inner workings he was intimately acquainted, he stated that he was 'thoroughly disgusted with its political corruption, its narrow bigotry, and the exclusive spirit of monopoly with which it misgoverned Ireland.' On the passing of the Act of Union, Lord Castlereagh addressed a confidential letter to Fitzgerald, acknowledging the pledges given to the Irish catholics, and announcing his intention to support the endowment of their church.
In private Fitzgerald was an excellent friend and landlord. He died at Glanleam, Valentia, 7 March 1849, having married (1), 5 Nov. 1801, Maria (d. 1827), daughter of the Right Hon. David Digges la Touche of Marlay, Dublin; and (2) Cecilia Maria Knight, a widow, who died 15 Oct. 1859. By his first wife he had six sons and four daughters. His four eldest sons predeceased him, and he was succeeded in his 'feudal' honours by his fifth son, Peter George Fitzgerald [q. v.]
[Gent. Mag. 1849; Cork Southern Reporter and Kerry Post, March 1849.]
FITZGERALD, PAMELA (1776?–1831), wife of Lord Edward Fitzgerald [q. v.], was described in her marriage contract of 1792 as Anne Stephanie Caroline Sims, daughter of Guillaume de Brixey and Mary Sims, as a native of Fogo Island, Newfoundland, and as about nineteen years of age. Though she has generally been regarded as the daughter of Madame de Genlis by the Duke of Orleans (Égalité), this statement of her Newfoundland birth is confirmed by information now obtained from Fogo. Henry Sims, a respectable planter who died there in 1886, at the age of eighty-two, believed Pamela to have been his cousin. Mr. James Fitzgerald, the present magistrate of Fogo, on arriving in the island in 1834, made the acquaintance of Sims, who informed him that his grandfather, an Englishman living at Fogo in the latter part of last century, had a daughter Mary, that she was delivered of a child at Gander Bay, and in the following summer sailed with her infant for Bristol, in a vessel commanded by a Frenchman named Brixey, and that the Simses heard nothing more of mother or child until they learned from Moore's book that Lord E. Fitzgerald married a Nancy Sims from Fogo. Newfoundland had no parish registers at that date, but Henry Sims's story may be true, though there is the bare possibility of the death of the child in infancy, and of the transfer of her pedigree to a second child placed under Mary's charge. It may be conjectured that when in 1782 she was sent over by Forth, ex-secretary to the British embassy at Paris, to be brought up with the Orleans children, and familiarise them with English, the object was to divert attention from the arrival a little later of a child known as Fortunée Elizabeth Hermine de Compton (afterwards Madame Collard), who died in 1822 at Villers Hélon. Hermine, who, unlike Pamela, was recognised by the Orleans family in after life as a quasi-relative, was in all probability Madame de Genlis's daughter by Égalité, and was perhaps born at Spa in 1776. In a scene between Madame de Genlis and Pamela, witnessed by the latter's daughter, there was moreover a positive disclaimer of maternity (Journal of Mary Frampton, letter of Lady Louisa Howard to Mrs. Mundy,1876). Unveracious, therefore, though the lady was, her story may be credited that Forth casually saw the child at Christchurch, that he sent
