FitzGerald
also Fitzgerald, Mac Gearailt, Geraldine
Hibernis ipsis Hiberniores, the Geraldines of Kildare and Desmond.
- Origin
- Leinster, Ireland
- Motto
- Crom Abú
- Famous bearer
- Garret Mór FitzGerald, 8th Earl of Kildare (c.1456–1513), the 'Great Earl', Lord Deputy
- Register
- Irish family
Ranked of all time
The 10 Most Powerful Irish Clans of All Time
CoreHistoric reach
The seat of FitzGerald
Seat vacantChief
No one leads the FitzGerald community yet. When the movement opens, you can stand for its leadership, or help elect whoever does.
Current mission
No shared goal set yet. Once FitzGerald has leadership, it sets the public focus: a restoration, a gathering, a real-world project that helps its own.
The FitzGerald clan is being rebuilt. Join the waiting list for the movement today, and you help decide who leads it and what it does.
Help rebuild the FitzGerald clan →Motto
Crom Abú
“Crom for ever (the Geraldine war-cry, after Croom Castle)”
What does the FitzGerald name mean?
Norman patronymic, son of Gerald. Old French fils (later fils, contracted to Fitz in Norman record-keeping) attached to the Christian name. The eponymous Gerald was Gerald FitzWalter of Windsor (c.1075–1135), constable of Pembroke Castle and the man who married Nest, daughter of Rhys ap Tewdwr of Deheubarth, the union from which the Geraldines and Tudors and most of the great Welsh-Marcher houses descend. The Gaelic form Mac Gearailt translated the Norman patronymic when the family Gaelicised; the common collective name 'the Geraldines' is the English form of the same.
The history of FitzGerald
The FitzGeralds came to Ireland with Strongbow's invasion in 1169, Maurice FitzGerald, son of Gerald of Windsor and Nest of Deheubarth, was one of the principal Norman commanders at the Wexford and Waterford landings. Within two generations the family had branched into the two great Geraldine houses: the FitzGeralds of Kildare in Leinster, and the FitzGeralds of Desmond in south-western Munster. Both rose to earldoms, Kildare in 1316, Desmond in 1329, and both became, by the 14th century, more powerful in fact than the English royal authority they nominally served.
The Earls of Kildare ruled Ireland in all but name through the 15th century. Garret Mór FitzGerald, 8th Earl of Kildare (c.1456–1513), the 'Great Earl', was Lord Deputy of Ireland for almost the whole of his adult life, a Yorkist who survived Bosworth, governed Ireland for the Tudors, and could put the largest private army in the kingdom in the field. The line ended in disaster: his grandson Silken Thomas FitzGerald (1513–1537) renounced his allegiance in 1534, was suppressed by force, and was hanged at Tyburn in 1537 with five of his uncles. The Kildare estates were forfeited.
The Munster Geraldines, the Desmond line, ran a longer arc. The 15th and 16th Earls of Desmond, James Fitzmaurice FitzGerald and his cousin Gerald, led the great Desmond rebellions of 1569–1573 and 1579–1583 against Elizabeth's policies in Munster. Gerald, the 16th Earl, was hunted down in the Slieve Mish mountains in November 1583 and beheaded; his head was sent to Elizabeth, his body buried in an unmarked grave at Kilnamannagh. The Munster Plantation followed within five years. Edward FitzGerald (1763–1798), Lord Edward, was the United Irish leader killed in Dublin Castle in 1798. Garret FitzGerald (1926–2011) was Taoiseach of Ireland 1981–1987.
Champions of the FitzGerald name
The bearers whose lives are inseparable from this surname. Each has its own page — biography, achievements, geography, connection to the family.
Step Into History
Walk the streets and seats the FitzGerald name knew — a photoreal walk through time, on foot.
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Georgian Dublin in the year of Rocque's great map — College Green, the Liberties' weavers, the Liffey quays and Christ Church.
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The MacCarthy lords' great tower-house in its prime — the battlements and the famous stone, high over wooded Muskerry.
Notable bearers of the FitzGerald name
- Garret Mór FitzGerald, 8th Earl of Kildare (c.1456–1513), the 'Great Earl', Lord Deputy
- Silken Thomas FitzGerald (1513–1537), leader of the 1534 Kildare rebellion
- Lord Edward FitzGerald (1763–1798), United Irish leader
- Garret FitzGerald (1926–2011), Taoiseach of Ireland
- Penelope Fitzgerald (1916–2000), English novelist of Geraldine descent
Stories of FitzGerald
Silken Thomas
1534On the eleventh of June 1534, Thomas FitzGerald, twenty-one years old and deputy-governor of Ireland in his father's absence in London, rode into the council chamber at St Mary's Abbey in Dublin with a hundred and forty horsemen of his Kildare retainers, threw the Sword of State on the table, and renounced his allegiance to Henry VIII. He had heard a false rumour that his father had been executed in the Tower. The Geraldines of Kildare had been the effective government of Ireland for almost a century. The renunciation was, by the lights of any participant in the room, a more serious thing than a Continental noble's defiance: it was the largest private army in Ireland declaring against the king. The campaign that followed cost him his life and the dynasty its earldom.
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Lord Edward Fitzgerald at Thomas Street
1798On the evening of the nineteenth of May 1798, in the upper bedroom of a house at 153 (since renumbered 151) Thomas Street in the Liberties of Dublin, Lord Edward FitzGerald, fifth son of the first Duke of Leinster, in his thirty-fifth year, the principal field commander of the Society of United Irishmen and the aristocratic figure of the planned republican rising, was arrested in his bed by Major Henry Charles Sirr of the Dublin Castle police on a tip-off from Francis Higgins (the Sham Squire) the Freeman's Journal proprietor. He was wounded twice in the struggle, killing the police officer Captain Daniel Ryan with the dagger he kept under his pillow. He was carried to Newgate Gaol on the upper Liffey quays, was attended in the gaol by his physician Dr Garnett, but the wounds turned septic; he died of fever and infection in his cell on the fourth of June 1798, six weeks before the failure of the United Irish rising at Vinegar Hill on the twenty-first of June. The arrest at 153 Thomas Street is, by every careful Irish republican history, the moment at which the United Irish rising lost its only commander capable of welding the geographically scattered risings into a coherent national insurrection.
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