Unable to reconcile with Ireland's Protestant Ascendancy or with the Kingdom's English-appointed administration, he sought inspiration in the American Revolution and revolutionary France where, in 1792, he met and befriended Thomas Paine.

[1] He spent most of his childhood in Frescati House at Blackrock in Dublin where he was tutored by Ogilvie in a manner chiefly directed to the acquisition of knowledge that would fit him for a military career.

[3] Webb surmises that the success of the American colonists in fighting against regular troops led him in later years to the conviction that his countrymen in Ireland could cope with them with a similar result.

[2] In 1783, he visited the West Indies, before returning to Ireland where, in the autumn of that year, his brother William, the 2nd Duke of Leinster, had procured Edward's election to the Irish Parliament as a Member for Athy.

Dejected, in England, by unrequited love for his cousin Georgina Lennox (who later married the 3rd Earl Bathurst),[7] accompanied by Small in 1788 he joined the 54th Regiment in Halifax, Nova Scotia, then a resettlement site for thousands of free ‘loyalist’ blacks.

[2] Instead, replaced by his brother Henry as MP for Athy, he was returned to the Irish House of Commons from County Kildare, and entered into intimate terms with his first cousin Charles Fox, with Richard Sheridan and other leading Whigs.

[10] His Whig connections, together with his transatlantic experiences, predisposed Fitzgerald to sympathise with the doctrines of the French Revolution, which he embraced enthusiastically when he visited Paris in October 1792.

[9] According to Thomas Moore, Lord Edward FitzGerald was the only one of the numerous suitors of Sheridan's first wife, Elizabeth, whose attentions were received with favour; and it is certain that, whatever may have been its limits, a warm mutual affection subsisted between the two.

[9] Ireland was by then seething with dissent which was finding a focus in the increasingly popular and revolutionary Society of the United Irishmen, which had been forced underground by the outbreak of war between France and Britain in 1793.

[10] However, it was not until 1796 that he joined the United Irishmen, who by now had given up as hopeless the path of constitutional reform and whose aim, after the recall of Lord FitzWilliam in 1795, was nothing less than the establishment of an independent Irish republic.

In the same month, FitzGerald and his friend Arthur O'Connor proceeded to Hamburg, where they opened negotiations with the Directory through Reinhard, French minister to the Hanseatic towns.

They possessed some arms, but the supply was insufficient, and the leaders were hoping for a French invasion to make good the deficiency and to give support to a popular uprising.

But French help proving dilatory and uncertain, the rebel leaders in Ireland were divided in opinion as to the expediency of taking the field without waiting for foreign aid.

[9] It was probably abhorrence of such measures that converted Thomas Reynolds from a conspirator to an informer; at all events, by him and several others, the authorities were kept posted on what was going on, though lack of evidence produced in court delayed the arrest of the ringleaders.

[9] As a fellow member of the Ascendancy class, the Government were anxious to make an exception for FitzGerald, avoiding the embarrassing and dangerous consequences of his subversive activities.

On 30 March the government proclamation of martial law authorising the military to act as they saw fit to crush the United Irishmen led to a campaign of vicious brutality in several parts of the country.

Meanwhile, the date for the rising was finally fixed for 23 May and FitzGerald awaited the day hidden[9] by Mary Moore above her family's inn in Thomas Street Dublin.

His wife, whom the government probably had enough evidence to convict of treason,[18] had fled the country, never to see her husband again, but Lord Edward's brother Henry and his aunt Lady Louisa Conolly were allowed to see him in his last moments.

[18] The same writer claims: He had, indeed, a winning personality, and a warm, affectionate and generous nature, which made him greatly beloved by his family and friends; he was humorous, light-hearted, sympathetic, adventurous.

Even after the lead coffin was laid in the vault at dead of night, the mourners were obliged to stay in the church until passes could be procuredApart from the daughter born to him by Elizabeth Sheridan in 1792, Lord Edward FitzGerald had the following children with his wife Pamela: There are Lord Edward Streets named in his honour in many places in Ireland, such as Dublin, Limerick, Sligo, Kilkenny, Ballina, Ballymote, and Ballycullenbeg in County Laois.