Lord Edward Fitzgerald at Thomas Street

A rising is not lost on the field. More often it is lost in a back-bedroom, by the kicking-in of a single door, an hour before supper, while the password on the landing goes unanswered and the man who alone could have welded a country into an army is still in his shirt-sleeves with a bandaged shoulder.

THE FIFTH SON OF LEINSTER

Edward FitzGerald was born at Carton House in Kildare on the fifteenth of October 1763, fifth son of James, first Duke of Leinster, and Emily Lennox, granddaughter of Charles II. He was schooled in Dublin and in France, took a commission in the British army, and was shot through at Eutaw Springs in the Carolinas in 1781, carried off the ground by a freed slave named Tony Small whom he kept beside him afterwards as a free man and friend. He sat for Athy in the Irish Parliament. In Paris in 1792 he dined with Tom Paine, renounced his title at a republican supper, and married Pamela, the natural daughter of Philippe of Orléans. He came home to a country governed by a Castle and a Parliament that between them held three quarters of the people outside the law of property and the law of worship. By the spring of 1797 the Society of United Irishmen had chosen him as the field commander of the rising. He was thirty-four, slight, dark, with a soldier's carriage and a child's directness; the only man in the Directory who could speak to a Wexford pikeman and a Belfast Presbyterian and a Kildare gentleman in the one breath. He was, by the calculation of the Castle, the single indispensable man. They had been hunting him through Dublin since the twelfth of March.

THE LIBERTIES, MAY 1798

The country that May was tilted forward like a cart with the brake off. Habeas corpus was suspended. The yeomanry were free-quartered through Wicklow and Kildare and Wexford, pitchcapping and half-hanging for the names of pike captains. The United army on paper stood at near three hundred thousand men; the order of battle for Leinster was to rise on the night of the twenty-third, take the mail-coaches on the roads out of Dublin as the signal, and have the country up before the second of June. The French fleet, by Tone's last letter from Paris, was promised for the summer. FitzGerald had moved three times in a fortnight: from Cormick's in Thomas Street to Murphy's, from Murphy's to Magan's, back to Murphy's at number one hundred and fifty-three. Murphy was a feather merchant. The back-bedroom on the upper floor looked over the slated roofs of the Liberties towards the spire of St Catherine's. On the Friday before, Samuel Neilson had brought him in from Bridge Street through a yard with a ball-wound dressed in the shoulder. The papers were in the trunk under the window: the order of battle, the names of the field commanders for the twelve counties, the signal protocol for the mail-coach attacks. If he was taken with the trunk, the rising went with the trunk.

A QUARTER PAST SEVEN

It is a quarter past seven on the evening of Saturday the nineteenth of May, in fading May light. He is in the bed in his shirt-sleeves, the bandage still on the right shoulder. John Murphy, his Kildare gillie, is on the door of the upper landing; Murphy's brother is on the door of the house; two United Irish picket men are on the corner of Thomas Street and Marshalsea Lane. Under his pillow is a poniard, a French dagger with a chased grip, the blade six inches. He hears the wheels of a heavy carriage draw up in the street, which is not the hour for a brewer's dray. He hears boots in the front entry, more than two pair. He hears, from the landing, Murphy's voice raised in the United protocol, Where are the soldiers? and the silence where the countersign should be. In the space of that silence he understands three things, in the order in which a soldier understands them: that the picket on the corner has been lifted without firing, which means treachery and not surprise; that the man who has informed is one of the eight men who knew this house, which closes the list to a name he can almost speak; and that the trunk under the window cannot be burned in the four seconds remaining. He reaches under the pillow for the poniard. There is no calculation in the reach. Twenty years of campaigning in two armies have arranged the hand before the head. He thinks, with the clear small thought a man has at the head of a stair he is about to fall down, that Pamela is at Denzille Street and the child not yet a year old, and he thinks of the cold green water of the Carolina rivers, and he thinks, because a FitzGerald in extremity thinks in the Norman tongue of his house, noblesse oblige, which is to say, the name is older than the man and will outlast the bedroom.

THE DOOR

Major Henry Charles Sirr of the Castle police kicks the bedroom door at twenty past seven, with Captain Daniel Ryan and Captain Swan of the yeomanry behind him and eight yeomanry men in the hall below. FitzGerald springs from the bed in his shirt with the dagger in his hand. Ryan goes for him with a small-sword. FitzGerald takes the small-sword on his left forearm and drives the poniard twice into Ryan's belly, low, under the ribs, the soldier's stroke. Sirr fires a pistol at four feet and hits him in the right shoulder above the old bandage. Swan and four yeomanry men come in with the butts of their muskets and their boots. Two further balls are put into him, in the right side and the right thigh, while he is on the floor. The whole business takes under two minutes. The trunk under the window is taken up unopened and carried down to the carriage in the street.

NEWGATE

Ryan was carried to the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham and died of his stomach wounds on the morning of the twenty-second. FitzGerald was taken in a sedan-chair through the dusk of the Liberties, up Bridgefoot Street and across the river, to Newgate Gaol on the upper quays, and laid in the room kept for political prisoners since the United arrests began. His own physician, Dr Garnett, was permitted to attend on the morning of the twentieth. The wound in the side suppurated within the week. He was lucid in patches, feverish in others; he asked once, by his cousin Lord Henry's account, for news of the country, and was told there was none. Pamela was kept from him by order of the Privy Council until the morning of the third of June, when she was let in for one hour and put back on a packet for England the same night. He died in the cell on the evening of the fourth of June 1798, of fever and the suppurating ball-wound, fifteen days after the door at Thomas Street.

THE COUNCIL CHAMBER

In the Council Chamber at Dublin Castle, on the Monday morning after the arrest, Lord Camden the Lord Lieutenant and Lord Castlereagh the Chief Secretary read the papers out of the trunk. The order of battle for Leinster was on the table by ten o'clock. The names of the field commanders were on the table by noon. Within the fortnight the Castle had lifted, by preemption and by warrant, the working leadership of the United Irishmen in Dublin, Kildare, Meath, and Wicklow. Francis Higgins, proprietor of the Freeman's Journal, called the Sham Squire in the prints, was paid one thousand pounds out of the secret service account on the seventeenth of June for the information that brought Sirr to Thomas Street; the warrant was countersigned by Edward Cooke, under-secretary at the Castle, and the figure stands in the secret service ledger in the State Paper Office to this day. The information had been laid by a Catholic barrister named Francis Magan, in whose house FitzGerald had slept three nights earlier, and whose name was not made public for sixty years.

VINEGAR HILL

The rising went forward without him. The Dublin rising of the twenty-third of May was put down inside twelve hours, the mail-coaches stopped on the roads and the assembly points cleared by the yeomanry before the United companies could form. Kildare rose and was broken at the Curragh. Wexford rose on the twenty-sixth under Father John Murphy of Boolavogue and Bagenal Harvey, took Wexford town, was thrown back from New Ross, and made its last camp on the round hill above Enniscorthy. The Battle of Vinegar Hill on the twenty-first of June was fought by countrymen with pikes against artillery in line, and lasted the morning. About thirty thousand people, most of them Catholic small farmers of County Wexford, were killed in the four weeks of the rising. Wolfe Tone landed at Lough Swilly in October with a French frigate and three hundred men, was taken, was sentenced, cut his own throat in the condemned cell on the nineteenth of November and was three days dying. The Act of Union followed in 1800. The Irish Parliament voted itself out of existence in the building on College Green, and the country was governed thereafter from Westminster for one hundred and twenty years.

THE PLAQUE AT ST WERBURGH'S

The funeral was in private at St Werburgh's Church on Werburgh Street, at four in the morning of the seventh of June, by order of the Privy Council, to forestall riot. He was laid in the vault beneath the south aisle. The plaque on the wall, in marble, in Latin, reads Edwardus FitzGerald, jacet hic, ætatis suæ XXXIV, Edward FitzGerald lies here, of his age the thirty-fourth. Major Sirr, who lived to be eighty and is buried thirty paces away in the same churchyard, used to walk past the plaque on his way to the family pew. The Castle had the houses of Thomas Street renumbered in the nineteenth century; the feather merchant's house at one hundred and fifty-three is now one hundred and fifty-one, in a terrace of shopfronts opposite the eastern gable of St Catherine's where Robert Emmet was hanged five years later. There is no plaque on the front of it. The trunk and the papers are in the National Archives of Ireland at Bishop Street, in nine numbered folders.

The hinge of a rising is a narrower thing than the rising itself. A door, a landing, a password not answered. The country that was meant to rise on the second of June rose without its commander and was broken in a field above Enniscorthy three weeks later. What survives is not the order of battle in the trunk, nor the warrant in the secret service ledger, nor even the marble in the south aisle, but the six-inch French poniard that came out from under the pillow in the second between the silence on the landing and the boot at the door, and which is kept now in a glass case in the National Museum at Collins Barracks, in the city he meant to take.