FitzGerald · 1798
Lord Edward Fitzgerald at Thomas Street
On 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.
It is a quarter past seven on the evening of the nineteenth of May 1798, in the upper back-bedroom of a feather-merchant's house at 153 Thomas Street, in the Liberties on the south side of central Dublin, in fading May light. He is thirty-four years old. He is Lord Edward FitzGerald, fifth son of James the first Duke of Leinster and Emily Lennox of Carton (granddaughter of Charles II), born at Carton House in Kildare on the fifteenth of October 1763, schooled in Dublin and France, an officer of the British army in the American war (wounded at Eutaw Springs in 1781), Member of Parliament for Athy in the Irish Parliament, and (since the spring of 1797) the principal field commander of the Society of United Irishmen.
He is in the bed in his shirt-sleeves, with a surgical bandage on his right shoulder where his fellow United Irish officer Samuel Neilson had let him in on the previous Friday after the Bridge Street raid. He has a poniard under his pillow. The watch on the door of the upper landing is John Murphy, his Kildare gillie. The watch on the door of the house is Murphy's brother. The watch on the corner of Thomas Street and Marshalsea Lane is the United Irish picket, two men.
He thinks: the United army is in the field at Naas in seven days. The Dublin rising is at the Royal Exchange in nine. The country is going up by the second of June.
He thinks: I have, in this room, the order of battle for the Leinster rising and the names of the field commanders. The papers are in the trunk under the window. If I am taken with the papers, the rising is taken with the papers.
He hears, by his own deposition before he died, the wheels of a heavy carriage drawing up in the street. He hears boots in the front entry. He hears Murphy on the upper landing call out, in United Irish protocol, the password (Where are the soldiers?) and not receive the answer. He reaches under the pillow for the poniard.
Major Henry Charles Sirr of the Dublin Castle police, with Captain Daniel Ryan and Captain Swan of the Yeomanry and eight Yeomanry men in the entrance hall, has come up the stairs. Sirr kicks open the bedroom door at twenty past seven. Lord Edward, by Sirr's deposition the next morning, springs out of the bed in his shirt with the dagger in his hand. Captain Ryan goes for him with a small-sword. Lord Edward stabs Ryan twice in the abdomen with the dagger. Sirr fires a pistol at four feet, hits Lord Edward in the right shoulder. Captain Swan and four Yeomanry men go in with their boots and the butts of their muskets. Lord Edward is overpowered in two minutes, with two further ball-wounds in the right side and the right thigh.
Captain Daniel Ryan, by Sirr's deposition, dies of his stomach wounds on the morning of the twenty-second of May at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham. Lord Edward is taken in a sedan-chair to Newgate Gaol on the upper Liffey quays the same evening. He is laid in the upper-floor room of the gaol that has been kept for political prisoners since the 1790s. His own physician, Dr Garnett, is permitted to attend him on the morning of the twentieth of May. The wounds, particularly the bullet-wound in the side, turn septic within the week. Lord Edward dies of fever and the suppurating infection on the fourth of June 1798, fifteen days after the arrest.
His wife Pamela (the natural daughter of the Duke of Orléans, Philippe Égalité) is permitted to attend him on the morning of the third of June. The funeral is in private at St Werburgh's Church on Werburgh Street, on the seventh of June, at four in the morning, by order of the Privy Council to avoid public riot. He is buried in the crypt of the church. The plaque on the wall of St Werburgh's, in marble, in Latin, reads: Edwardus FitzGerald, jacet hic, ætatis suæ XXXIV, Edward FitzGerald lies here, of his age the thirty-fourth.
The United Irish rising went forward without him through the late May and June of 1798. The Dublin rising of the twenty-third of May was suppressed within twelve hours by the Castle administration's preemptive arrests; the United Irish military leadership, mostly arrested with Lord Edward in the previous fortnight, was unable to coordinate the field action. The Wexford rising of the twenty-sixth of May, under Father John Murphy of Boolavogue and Bagenal Harvey, ran for four weeks (Wexford town was taken; New Ross was attacked and not taken; Vinegar Hill was the camp), and was broken at the Battle of Vinegar Hill on the twenty-first of June. About thirty thousand people, mostly Catholic countrymen of County Wexford, were killed in the four weeks of the Wexford rising, the worst civilian loss of life in any month of Irish history before the famine. Lord Edward's papers, found in the trunk at 153 Thomas Street on the evening of his arrest, are in the National Archives of Ireland today. The republican judgment, since Wolfe Tone's death five months later, is that the morning at Thomas Street was the morning the country lost the rising before it began.