While the Duke of Northumberland occupies the splendid ancestral home of the descendants of Agnes Percy, his own family is commemorated not in England, but in the name of a scientific institution in Washington, D.C.
references
1. Fonblanque, The House of Percy, Vol. II, p. 370.
2. Boswell, Life of Johnson, p. 447.
3. Walpole, XXXIV, 23.
4. Walpole, XXXII, 211.
5. Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of George III, Vol. I. p. 333.
6. ibid., II, 260.
7. Boswell, Life of Johnson, p. 931.
8. Lady Bessborough and Her Family Circle, p. 19.
9. Diaries of a Duchess, ed. Grieg (1926) p. x.
1 o. Augustus Hare, In My Solitary Life, p. 222.
11. Old and New London, Vol. Ill, p. 3211.
12. House of Lords Journal, 2 1st January 1779.
13. Lady Holland to Her Son, pp. 88,94.
14. Greville, I, 240, 312,305.
15. Literary Gazette, 1827, p. 154, from Earl of Bridgwater's
Family Anecdotes.
16. Cecil Woodham-Smith, Queen Victoria, Vol. I pp. 97-9.
17. The Times, 25th August 1930.
18. Conspiracy against the British Empire, pamphlet, 1st March
1921.
8. The Geraldine Ape
Duke of Leinster
Sometime between 1260 and 1270 there was a disastrous fire at the castle of Woodstock, near Athy in County Kildare, Ireland. It happened so quickly that there was no time to organise a sensible evacuation of the building. In their panic, people ran in all directions to find a way out. They viewed the conflagration from safety, and when it had died down, they took stock. To their horror, they realised that in the confusion they had left behind the infant heir of the family, little John FitzThomas FitzGerald. The servants rushed back to the house, and found his room in ruins; there was no sign of him. Then someone heard a strange sound from the roof of one of the towers. Looking up, they saw a monkey, normally kept chained up as a bizarre pet, carefully holding the baby in its arms. It had taken him out of his swaddling clothes, licked and cleaned him, and wrapped him up again carefully. The baby grew up to become the 1st Earl of Kildare, and to found the illustrious family of the Kildare Geraldines (or FitzGeralds). In recognition of the extraordinary debt which the family.and all its descendants owe to that monkey, the Earl fashioned his family crest with two monkeys as supporters, and a third posing triumphant at the top. The Earls of Kildare continue in unbroken male succession to the present day, the 26th Earl of Kildare being Edward FitzGerald, Duke of Leinster, Premier Duke, Marquess and Earl of Ireland. All have acknowledged that their branch of the family would never have existed were it not for the quick thinking of the Geraldine Ape.The ape has remained with the Geraldines in spirit throughout their history, and to him they are wont to ascribe their knack for survival. At least three more times they were on the brink of extinction. In 1537 Henry VIII tried systematically to wipe them all out by murdering the 10th Earl of Kildare and his five uncles. But he forgot the Earl's half-brother, who succeeded to the title and continued the line. When the 15th Earl died at the age of nine in 1620 and was succeeded by his seventeen-year-old cousin, this young man was the last surviving FitzGerald. "On his life alone depended the continuance of this race, once so widely spread."1 And again in 11743, the 20th Earl of Kildare, later 1st Duke of Leinster, was the only male representative of the Kildare branch of the Geraldines.
By their title of Kildare, the family recall the county which was their home for seven centuries, and by their name of FitzGerald ("sons of Gerald") they recall their descent from Gerald of Windsor, a Norman baron who married Nesta, daughter of the King of South Wales - Rhys the Great - and whose son Maurice fitz Gerald conquered Ireland. The "Great Conquistador", as he is known, subdued the Irish and made Kildare his home, dying in 1176. Soon afterwards his son Thomas built Maynooth Castle and continued the family's service to the English king by defending it vigorously against the natives. He was Justiciar of Ireland, a position of great power held by many of his descendants. It is his grandson, John FitzThomas FitzGerald, who was rescued by the monkey.
The Geraldines eventually became Irish by adoption, rising to a pinnacle of popularity as the "good" family of Ireland,2 by which time their conquering ancestor had long since been forgiven. They waited 500 years before reaching the status of a dukedom, and during this period their history was closely interwoven with the history of Ireland itself. John FitzThomas FitzGerald, "one of the most unruly even of the Irish barons",3 controlled a large part of the country, and was created 1st Earl of Kildare in 1316 for having defended Ireland against Robert the Bruce. His descendants were warriors, famous for their war-cry "Grom a-boo" (or "Croom to victory", Croom being one of the castles belonging to the Earls of Kildare)4 which became so associated with power and valour that an Act of Parliament under Henry VII was passed forbidding its use.5 The cry of a rival family, the Butlers, was abolished at the same time. Crom a Boo is still the motto of the Dukes of Leinster.
There was another branch of the FitzGeralds, also descended from Maurice fitzGerald the Conqueror, and raised to the peerage as Earls of Desmond. (They too claimed to have been rescued by an ape, but bore no evidence in their crest.) When the 7th Earl of Kildare married a daughter of the Earl of Desmond, the two lines were united, and their son, 8th Earl of Kildare (1456-1513) had two FitzGerald grandfathers. He was known as the "Great Earl" of Kildare, and was the first of the family to be honoured with the Garter. The Earls of Desmond are now extinct, though there does survive another descent from the Conqueror of Ireland, represented by the present Marquess of Lansdowne, whose surname is Fitz- maurice.
In the Tudor period two members of the family made their mark in different ways. Lady Elizabeth FitzGerald (1528-11589), a daughter of the 9th Earl of Kildare, was the "Fair Geraldine" to whom Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and son of the Duke of Norfolk, addressed his love poems. She was twelve years old at the time of this Petrarchan romance, and at fifteen she married Sir Anthony Browne, a sixty-year-old widower. Surrey deplored this marriage in his later poems. A later marriage was to Edward Fiennes Clinton, Earl of Lincoln and ancestor of the present Duke of Newcastle.
Lady Elizabeth's brother was "Silken Thomas", the 10th Earl (1513-1537), so called because his horsemen wore silken fringes on their helmets. For having permitted the murder of the Archbishop of Dublin, the Pope excommunicated Silken Thomas, along with his associates, in terms of the most un-Christian curses. "O good Lord! send to them, and every of them, hunger and thirst", says the document (I have modernised the spelling), "and strike them and every of them, with pestilence, till they, and every of them be consumed, and their generation clean eradicated and delivered of this world, that there be no memory of them, strike them, and every of them, also with such leprosy, that from the highest part of the head to the sole of their foot, there be no whole place. Strike them also with madness, blindness, and woodenness of mind, etc."8 Thomas's father, the 9th Earl, died of a broken heart on hearing of this curse in 1534.
Meanwhile, the English government set about trying to put the curse into practice. The Geraldine Rebellion, of which Silken Thomas was the head, had seriously threatened the English authority in Ireland. Thomas had formally declared war on England, a far more dangerous act than the killing of a trembling Archbishop. It was determined that these Fitz Geralds should never more prove troublesome. Thomas was captured and imprisoned for sixteen months in the Tower (his name, scratched on the wall of Beauchamp Tower, can still be seen), while all other males of the family were rounded up. On 3rd February 1537 the 10th Earl of Kildare, aged twenty-four, and his five uncles were executed at Tyburn in the barbarous manner reserved for the most contemptible traitors. They were hanged, drawn and quartered, that is their bowels were removed before death, and their bodies chopped up. Two of the uncles were known to have had nothing whatever to do with the rebellion, but they were mur
dered because they were FitzGeralds. As we have seen, they missed one twelve-year-old boy, suffering from small-pox, who was rescued by the Bishop of Kildare and kept in hiding. Wrapped in a blanket, he was taken first to his sister, then to his aunt Lady Eleanor FitzGerald, and finally fled to Liege, pursued at every step by the King's agents. Henry VIII wanted desperately to get the fugitive child into his hands. The boy finally made his way to Rome, where he was protected by Pope Paul III, and lived to return to England after Henry's death. Mary Tudor annulled the attainder against his family and restored him to the earldom of Kildare. Strangely, we find that this 11 th Earl had signed the letters patent for the succession of Lady Jane Grey to the throne in 1553; Mary was perhaps more expedient than forgiving.
The mighty race of little earls proceeded once more on its path towards the dukedom, continually rising in importance if not in size. Frequent references to the earls' diminutive stature put one in mind of a family of leprechauns. Maurice fitz Gerald's son, and founder of the Kildare line, was said to be "a man of small stature, but of no mean valour and integrity".7 The 16th Earl (1603-1660) was actually known as "The Fairy Earl" because of his size. Lord Edward FitzGerald (1763—1798), rebel son of the 1st Duke, was stated to be five feet and five inches tall.
They developed also in political sensibility. Their battle-cry silenced, they gradually substituted for a doctrine of victory to the strong, one that all power was a trust for the people, and that personal liberty as well as personal property was sacrosanct. It was a doctrine which evolved in England and was exported to France and to America, where it changed the destinies of both those countries. In England it founded the Whig party, and when its principles were applied to Ireland, it fomented rebellion. In England the Dukes of Bedford, Devonshire, and Rutland among others led the Whig movement, while in Ireland it was the future Duke of Leinster who fought to apply Whig policies. If the English non-landowner suffered from a discriminatory system, the Irishman was a virtual slave, with no voice in his own future, no freedom to live as he wanted, no existence outside his belonging to his landlord. The FitzGeralds "strove to make Irish parliament in Irish affairs what the English parliament was in English ones".8 From this date, the middle of the eighteenth century, the FitzGeralds are invincibly popular in Ireland, and one of them, Lord Edward, was to be a national martyr.
The 20th Earl of Kildare came to the title in 1744, once more the solitary male representative of the Geraldines of Kildare. He remedied that by marrying a lady from a family noted for its fertility, and who gave him seventeen children (nine sons and eight daughters). The lady was Emily Lennox, daughter of those romantic lovers, the 2nd Duke and Duchess of Richmond, who fell wildly in love long after they married. The Duchess of Richmond had been pregnant twenty- seven times in twenty-nine years of marriage. At first, the Duke would not consent to his lovely daughter marrying Kildare, in spite of his wealth, because there was said to be scrofula (known as "king's evil") in the family.9 But Richmond relented a few months later, and the marriage took place in February 1747, to celebrate which Kildare was given an English viscountcy. He was already an M.P., a Privy Councillor, a Lieutenant-General, and the Governor of County Kildare, as well as the most popular peer in Ireland. His support for the popular party did nothing to diminish his own ambition for peerage titles. The viscountcy did not satisfy him; he wanted to be a duke. "Did he mention the Irish dukedom to you?" wrote Richmond to the Duke of Newcastle, one week before the wedding. "I know it is what he has set his heart upon."10
He waited another twenty years. In 1761 he was created Earl of Offaly (he already had the barony of that name) and Marquess of Kildare, with the promise that whenever the King saw fit to create a new duke in the peerage of England, he would receive a dukedom in the peerage of Ireland. The promise was kept in 1766, four weeks after Hugh Smithson (Percy) became 1st Duke of Northumberland; Kildare chose the title of Leinster.
The new Duke's fifth son, Edward, was just three years old. He was to grow up in an atmosphere of quasi-revolution, his father and his father's friends espousing the new concept of the sovereignty of Parliament above the Crown, and equality under the law, and his cousin, the 3rd Duke of Richmond, hovering on the brink of socialism. Edward was the idol of his family, the most intelligent, the most thoughtful, and the most fervent. His enthusiasms proved fatal. When advised that he should keep cool and quiet on the subject of Irish politics for the time being, he said, "I keep my breath to cool my porridge."11
He early joined the Sussex militia and in 1781 was savagely wounded in the thigh, and left to die on the field. His survival was assured only by a negro called Tony, who took him to his hut and nursed him. From that day to the end of his life, FitzGerald kept Tony as his devoted servant. He travelled widely on the North American continent and was made an honorary member of the Bear tribe. In 1791, in the wake of the French Revolution (of which the Whigs approved), a "Society of United Irishmen" was established, with the avowed aim of abolishing religious discrimination in Ireland, expelling the English influence, and eventually declaring a Republic, Lord Edward did not join until 1796, but in 1792 he was in Paris, staying at the same hotel as Paine and eating meals with him; he joined in a famous toast for the abolition of all hereditary titles.12
By 1797 the United Irishmen numbered 280,000 conscripts, armed and eager to invade England. Edward FitzGerald was now one of the military leaders and a rabid reformist. He planned to invade at the side of French forces, and there was even a project to begin the rising by murdering eighty leading noblemen (though it is not certain that FitzGerald was privy to this intention). The government could not afford to tolerate this incipient insurrection for long. One Thomas Reynolds informed that a meeting of the conspirators would be held on a certain day, as a result of which many were arrested. Lord Edward, warned in advance, escaped into hiding, with an arrest warrant on his head. He remained in Dublin throughout his supposed exile, sometimes disguised as a woman, and actively planned a rising for 23rd May 1798. When, however, a reward was offered for his capture, Lord Edward was in real danger. The story of his end is the stuff of which martyrs are made.
The reward naturally induced Lord Edward's betrayal, as it was intended to do. An informer disclosed that he was hiding with one Murphy, a feather dealer, and on 19th May Swan and Ryan went there to arrest him. He had just had dinner, and was lying on his bed upstairs. Swan and Ryan burst into the room. There followed a scuffle, and accounts differ as to the details of what happened next. His friends claim that Ryan shot at him through the door, and wounded him, refusing to allow medical attention to the wounds for twenty-four hours. Less partial versions agree that FitzGerald fired the first shot, which killed Ryan, and that FitzGerald was subsequently shot in the right arm after a desperate struggle. He was given medical attention, and pronounced free from danger. But the wound festered, and he died on 4th June in Newgate prison.13 Ireland had another of her beloved martyrs.
Lord Edward's loss was the most acutely felt because he was not merely a political fanatic, but a splendid man. As so often happens, his virtues endeared him even to those who detested his views. Lady Holland, admittedly a friend of the family, says, "Such was the winning character of poor Lord Edward that without patronage, wealth, no very superior abilities, he had the faculty of attaching men of all ranks to his person."14 The modern vernacular has a less elegant shorthand for saying the same thing : he had the common touch.
His mother, the Dowager Duchess, had long since been widowed, and remarried, to an uncouth Scot called Ogilvie, whom she had engaged to tutor her younger children and fallen in love with. She had even produced a second family, of three daughters, making a total of twenty children. She shared her son Edward's passion for democratic ideals, and was a fervent admirer of Rousseau. So, too, was the 2rid Duke of Leinster (1749-1804), her second son, and thereby a great-great-grandson of Charles II through the Richmond offspring. Leinster was a voluble Whig, perpetually getting to his feet in the House of Lords to make
one protest after another against the government. He supported the United Irishmen unswervingly, for which he was virtually deified in Ireland. One historian describes him as "an honest, undeviating friend of the Irish nation".15 The same author says that Leinster was generally respected as a public man and universally beloved as a private one. Other views are not so complimentary. He does not appear to have been very intelligent, his talents were seriously limited. He was the first Knight of the Order of St Patrick (founded to parallel the Order of the Thistle in Scotland). His wife, than whom "there was never more loveable creature breathing",18 died of grief in 1798, a few weeks after the death of her beloved brother-in-law Lord Edward. The Duke himself died of strangury. Town and Country had revealed, twenty years earlier, that he kept a secret mistress.17
His son, the 3rd Duke of Leinster (1791-1874) was again a Whig, again Lord Lieutenant of County Kildare, and again a Grand Master of Freemasons, like his father. He was Lord High Constable at the coronations of both William IV and Queen Victoria. He did not make much of a mark, and references to him are mostly inconsequential. Creevey talks of his kindness and good humour, "he would not have minded brushing my coat if I had wanted it",18 and others agree that he was a good sort. Our prime source is the doubtful one of Harriette Wilson, who thought him charming, but a stupid fool and a bore. She introduces him to us with characteristic verve: "Now the said Duke of Leinster being a very stingy, stupid blockhead, whom nobody knows, I will describe him. His person was pretty good; straight, stout, and middle-sized, with a good, fair Irish allowance of leg ... I never saw anything more decided in the shape of curls than those which adorned and distinguished Leinster's crop ... I do not see how a man could be well handsomer, without a mind. His Grace was at that time in the constant habit of assenting to whatever anybody said, good or bad. He was all smiles and sweet good-humour." She allows him to be a man of honour, and he comes through the pages, in spite of her bitchiness and almost without her awareness, as a man worth knowing. She is impatient with him; "I am not going to sit down all my life to love this fool", she writes. "I must have something for the mind to feed on", and one can quite believe that Harriette was cleverer than he. She pays tribute once more to his easy-going nature, noticed by others, in her usual back-hand way: "he never had anything on earth to recommend him to my notice, save that excellent temper".19 Leinster's behaviour when Harriette betrays him does more than anything to reveal the man's qualities as well as his weakness. It seems clear that she was never his mistress, if only because he could easily be kept an obedient suitor without ever being granted the prize for which he was suiting. It was he who introduced her to Lord Worcester, the future Duke of Beaufort, whereupon her attentions turned away from Leinster to plunge into a real love affair. Leinster was chagrined. His friend had stolen his lady-love. It was too much. He asked Harriette, with dignity and decorum, kindly to refrain from making her affair with Worcester obvious until such time as he could decently leave the country, but he wished her well.
The Dukes Page 35
