FITZGERALD, Thomas (?c.1780-1834), of

A wealthy Catholic merchant and West India proprietor, Fitzgerald had settled early in life in Demerara (later British Guiana), where he acquired considerable property.1O’Connell Correspondence, ed. M.R. O’Connell, ii. 54. A Fitzgerald plantation, once valued at £50,000, was sold under execution in 1849 for just £1,000: Ballina Chronicle, 1 Aug. 1849: www.irelandoldnews.com. He returned to Ireland harbouring political ambitions and purchased a residence near Dundalk, county Louth in 1823. Recognised as a man of influence and fortune, he established a reputation as a ‘patriotic and public-spirited’ member of the Louth Independent Club and ‘a powerful accession to the popular interests’.2Freeman’s Journal, 22 Jan. 1830. In May 1830 he chaired a county meeting to protest against the ‘new imposts’ placed on Ireland by the assimilation scheme of the chancellor of the exchequer, Henry Goulburn, and at that year’s general election was solicited to start for the county as an ‘independent’ liberal. He declined and instead appeared on the platform with Richard Lalor Sheil, making ‘every exertion in his power’ to secure the return of two reformers.3HP Commons 1820-1832, iii. 836; Freeman’s Journal, 20 Apr., 25 May, 21 Sept. 1830; 21 Dec. 1832.

Fitzgerald attended the great reform meeting at the Royal Exchange in Dublin in September 1831, and that month organised freeholder opposition to the return of Lord Clermont’s nephew at a by-election for Louth. A year later he was solicited by a large body of electors to come forward for the county as a second repealer after Sheil opted to stand for County Tipperary.4Freeman’s Journal, 17 Sept. 1831, 1 Sept. 1832. Although Daniel O’Connell’s agent in Louth confessed to having ‘no great opinion’ of him, the Freeman’s Journal declared that no man had ‘contributed more towards the independence of Louth’, and Fitzgerald therefore offered himself to the independent club, 5 Sept. 1832, being unanimously adopted at a public meeting at Dundalk on 11 December.5N. Markey to D. O’Connell, 21 Oct. 1832, O’Connell Correspondence, iv. 457; Freeman’s Journal, 11 Sept., 14 Dec. 1832; HP Commons 1820-1832, iii. 837. He advocated ‘the principles of peace, retrenchment, and reform’ and, the independent club having insisted on a pledge, expressed his conviction that ‘the peace and prosperity of Ireland’ would be ‘most effectually promoted by a Repeal of the Union’. In an appeal to Protestant voters, he expressed hope that ‘Irish men of all parties and persuasions’ might be ‘cemented in one great community, studying only what will advance their common country’. The Freeman’s Journal concluded that there was ‘not an honester man in the list of candidates’ and he was returned unopposed.6Freeman’s Journal, 1 Sept., 21 Oct., 15, 28 Dec. 1832.

In supporting O’Connell’s amendment to the address, 8 Feb. 1833, Fitzgerald argued for the Irish to be put ‘on an equal footing with their fellow subjects’ with regard to the law.7Hansard, 8 Feb. 1833, vol. 15, cc. 399-402. While he welcomed the introduction of Stanley’s Irish grand jury bill, 19 Feb.,8Freeman’s Journal, 19 Oct. 1833; Hansard, 19 Feb. 1833, vol. 15, cc. 972-3. he was quick to cross swords with the ministry over the Irish coercion bill, which he believed would set a precedent ‘for the despotic innovations of future times’. Before a noisy House, and like ‘one talking in a tempest’, he argued that such a ‘tyrannical and oppressive measure’ was unnecessary in his own county, and declared that ‘nothing short of open rebellion’ would reconcile him to the bill’s ‘arbitrary features’.9It was reported that ‘the noise that prevailed throughout the house, rendered him totally inaudible’ so that ‘not one word in twenty that he uttered could be heard, even by those who sat near him’: Parliamentary Reviewer (1833), i. 274-5. He believed that Irish grievances lay in unemployment, destitution, the maladministration of justice, and absenteeism, but regarded tithes as ‘the master grievance’. In place of this ‘odious impost’ he recommended ‘a certain fixed rate substituted on the land, to be applied as a provision for the infirm and destitute poor’, whom he regarded as the intended beneficiaries of the original system.10Hansard, 4 Mar. 1833, vol. 16, cc. 168-72; 13 Mar. 1833, vol. 16, c. 575. He voted against all three readings of the Irish coercion bill, and failed in his attempt to have the change of trial venue clause modified, his amendment being defeated by 19 to 84.11Hansard, 18 Apr. 1833, vol. 17, cc. 315-6.

An opponent of ‘an extravagant expenditure of public money’, Fitzgerald voted for Joseph Hume’s motion on military and naval sinecures, 14 Feb. 1833, and subsequently supported a reduction of the standing army and the disbandment of the yeomanry. Wishing to curtail the Irish church establishment ‘to the standard of national want’, he voted for the first reading of the Irish Church temporalities bill, 11 Mar. 1833.12Freeman’s Journal, 19 Oct. 1833. He also divided in favour of Thomas Attwood’s motion for a committee on distress, 21 Mar., Hume’s motion to abolish military flogging, 2 Apr., and Matthias Attwood’s motion for currency reform, 24 Apr. A supporter of shorter parliaments, he voted in favour of George Grote’s ballot motion, 25 Apr., and sat on the election committee for New Sarum, 30 Apr. 1833.13CJ, lxxxviii. 328. Having supported the Jewish disabilities bill, 22 May, he was one of 18 members who voted for William Gillon’s motion to appropriate the revenues of the Irish Church for purposes of education upon the demise of present incumbents.14Morning Post, 22 May 1833. In June he introduced a bill for the better transmission of property not exceeding £200 in Ireland, which was designed to bring modest landholders within ‘the protective influence of the laws’ by giving them ‘cheap and expeditious justice’ in resolving disputes ‘about their little properties’.15PP 1833 (335) i. 601; CJ, lxxxviii. 439, 453; Parliamentary Review (1833), i. 80; ii. 220; Freeman’s Journal, 19 Oct. 1833. The amended bill did not get beyond its second reading, and despite securing the support of the Irish chief secretary, Edward Littleton, and the Irish law officers, a second bill was unsuccessful when re-introduced in March 1834.16PP 1833 (481) i. 615; PP 1833 (595) i. 635; Freeman’s Journal, 19 Oct. 1833; Standard, 12 Dec. 1833. However, much of Fitzgerald’s bill was contained in the Civil Bill Courts (Ireland) Act (6 & 7 Wm. IV, c. 75) of 1836: See HP Commons, 1832-68: ‘Lynch, Andrew Henry’.

On 27 May 1833, Fitzgerald addressed a meeting of upwards of 1,500 planters, merchants, and others connected with the West Indies at the City of London Tavern, where he railed against the ‘injustice’ of the ministry’s proposals for the abolition of slavery, arguing that it represented an attack ‘on every person owning property’.17Morning Chronicle, 28 May 1833; N. Draper. The Price of Emancipation. Slave-Ownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of Slavery (2010), 82. The latter account conflates the meeting at which Fitzgerald’s speech was delivered with that held on 5 April 1832. He claimed that hundreds of abolitionist petitions had been ‘manufactured’ in the city of London, and endorsed the resolutions on emancipation made by George Canning in 1823. He argued that unless emancipated slaves were compelled to work the government’s measure would bring ‘an end to the productiveness of the West India Colonies’ and merely ‘tend to the increase of slavery elsewhere’.18The Times, 28 May 1833; Morning Chronicle, 28 May 1833. The basis of his contention was that ‘every one who knows the character of the negro, knows that indolence of disposition, and a desire to escape from labour, are predominating features’: Ibid. In the subsequent Commons debate he ‘took the part of the colonial interest’, arguing that it was ‘clear to him from the Statute-law, from the time of Elizabeth downwards, that the slave-trade and the right of property in slaves, were recognized by various Acts of Parliament’, and that it was therefore ‘imperative upon the legislature to give compensation’ for the interests that had been sacrificed.19Hansard, 3 June 1833, vol. 18, c. 324; Freeman’s Journal, 7 June 1833. His name does not appear in the minorities that supported Fowell Buxton’s motions for shortening slave apprenticeships, 24, 25 July 1833, and compensating slave owners, 31 July, and Howick’s motion that no apprenticed slave be flogged unless guilty of mutiny or conspiracy, 29 July. Returning to Irish affairs, in June he joined the committee on the bill to consolidate the laws relating to the sale of wine, beer and spirits and in July was added to the select committee on the Dublin and Kingstown ship canal.20CJ, lxxxviii. 498, 548. As the representative of an agricultural county, he felt that he owed it to his constituents to oppose O’Connell and vote for the third reading of the Irish Church temporalities bill, 8 July, and he paid ‘particular attention’ to the progress of the Irish grand jury bill.21Hansard, 8 July 1833, vol. 19, c. 301; 11 July 1833, vol. 19, c. 569. He divided in favour of Charles Tennyson’s motion for shorter parliaments, 23 July, and was in the minority that supported O’Connell’s motion against the press, 29 July.22Morning Post, 31 July 1833. Denying that he was in parliament ‘to represent his own opinion’, he contended ‘that a communion between the electors and the elected’ was of ‘the greatest use’, and used the public dinner given in his honour at Dundalk in October to provide a detailed account of his first session in parliament.23Freeman’s Journal, 19 Oct. 1833. He claimed that from ‘the 4th of February to the 20th of August there was never a day that the house was open for public business that I was absent from my post’, and it appears that his final division of the session came on 15 August, in opposition to the continuation of naval impressment. Placing his confidence in the Whig government, he paid tribute to Littleton and Louis Perrin for their efforts to reform Irish municipal corporations and was in turn lauded for the service he had rendered to his constituency.24Freeman’s Journal, 19 Oct. 1833. However, despite having claimed to have made his close interest in the slavery question manifest to the electors of Louth at the time of his election, he does not appear to have alluded to the issue in this speech.25Morning Chronicle, 28 May 1833; Freeman’s Journal, 19 Oct. 1833.

On Fitzgerald’s return to Ireland from the continent after the recess, the Freeman’s Journal remarked that ‘no popular member of Parliament discharged his duties with more undeviating fidelity or more practical efficiency, throughout a tedious and fatiguing session, to the labours of which he applied himself with unrelaxing zeal’.26Freeman’s Journal, 28 Sept. 1833. He was sedulous in ensuring that his speeches and votes were accurately recorded by the press: Freeman’s Journal, 26 June 1833; The Times, 23 Apr. 1834. When parliament reconvened, Fitzgerald supported Daniel Harvey’s motion for closer scrutiny of the pensions list, 18 Feb. 1834, and criticised the ‘considerable severity’ that had been resorted to by the Irish police in the collection of tithes. Expressing his disappointment at Littleton’s postponement of the appropriation issue, he argued against Irish landlords ‘being converted into tithe-proctors for the Irish parsons’.27Hansard, 12 June 1833, vol. 18, c. 657; 20 Feb. 1834, vol. 21, cc. 624-5. He backed James Silk Buckingham’s motion for a committee to consider an alternative to naval press gangs, 4 Mar., and, having supported Henry Ingilby’s motion for a reduction of the malt tax in 1833, backed its repeal, 27 Feb. 1834. He divided against Hume’s motion to reconsider the corn laws, 7 Mar., but supported his motion for the withdrawal of the vote for the payment of the yeomanry and volunteer corps, 10 Mar.28He had not been in the minority that supported Whitmore’s motion for a low fixed duty on corn, 17 May 1833, and did not support Lord Chandos’s motion for a select committee on agricultural distress, 21 Feb. 1834. Having been appointed to the committee on toll payments on the Drogheda and Kells road, for which he was to have brought in a bill, he was granted one month’s leave of absence on urgent business.29CJ, lxxxix. 110, 112. On his return to the House he opposed Althorp’s motion that church rates be replaced by a land tax, 21 Apr. 1834, and supported O’Connell’s repeal motion, 29 Apr. He joined the opposition to the second reading of the Irish tithes bill, 2 May, and in his last recorded speech, condemned the measure as ‘deficient and objectionable’, 6 May 1834.30Hansard, 6 May 1834, vol. 23, cc. 640-2.

Fitzgerald died in harness in October 1834 and was succeeded by his eldest son, Thomas Christopher (1820-71), who died unmarried.31The Drogheda Journal recorded the date of his death as 29 October, whereas The Times stated it as 30 October. His second son, Percy Hetherington Fitzgerald (1830-1925), practised as a barrister and crown prosecutor, before making his reputation in London as a sculptor, prolific writer, and personal friend of Charles Dickens.32F. Clarke, ‘Fitzgerald, Percy Hetherington’, Dictionary of Irish Biography, iii. 907.