Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 19.djvu/158

Fitzgerald and migrated to Oriel, where he was Newdigate prizeman in 1835, and graduated B. A., being placed second class in classics in 1837, and M.A. in 1844. He was called to the bar by the Honourable Society of Lincoln's Inn at Hilary term 1839, and went the northern circuit. In 1848 he was returned for Horsham, Sussex, in the conservative interest, but was unseated on petition. He was returned again for the same borough in 1852, and retained his seat until 1865. He was under-secretary of state for foreign affairs under the Derby administration, in which Lord Malmesbury was foreign secretary, from February 1858 to June 1859. He was appointed governor of Bombay in January 1867, and was sworn in a member of the privy council, and made knight commander of the order of the Star of India the same year, and honorary grand cross of the same order in 1868; he was relieved in March 1872. In February 1874 Fitzgerald was returned to parliament for the third time for the borough of Horsham, and sat until November 1875, when he was appointed chief commissioner of charities in England. Fitzgerald, who was an honorary D.C.L. Oxon. (1863), and a magistrate and deputy-lieutenant of Sussex, died at his residence in Warwick Square, London, 28 June 1885. He married in 1846 Maria Triphena, eldest daughter of the late Edward Seymour, M.D., and by her, who died in 1865, left issue.

[Foster's Knightage, 1882; Law Times, 4 July 1885; Times, 30 June 1885.]  FITZGERALD, WILLIAM THOMAS (1759?–1829), versifier, was born in England of an Irish father (see preface to his 'Tears of Hibernia dispelled by the Union'), and claimed connection with the Duke of Leinster's family. He was educated partly at a school in Greenwich and partly in Paris, and entered the navy pay office as a clerk in 1782. 'On all public occasions,' as the 'Annual Register' for 1829 remarks, his 'pen was ever ready.' His more notable productions are either prologues for plays or appeals to England's loyalty and valour. These latter he was in the habit of reciting, year after year, at the public dinners of the Literary Fund, of which he was one of the vice-presidents. It is to this that Byron refers in the first couplet of 'English Bards and Scotch Reviewers' :- Still must I hear? shall hoarse Fitzgerald bawl His creaking couplets in a tavern hall ? The 'Annual Register' for 1803 speaks of the company at the dinner for that year as being 'roused almost to rapture' by Fitzgerald's 'Tyrtæan compositions,' and says that 'words cannot convey an idea of the force and animation' with which he recited, 'or of the enthusiasm with which he was encored.' A collection of Fitzgerald's poems appeared in 1801 as 'Miscellaneous Poems, dedicated to the Right Honourable the Earl of Moira, by William Thomas Fitzgerald, esq.,' and they are very bad. Perhaps the one which most nearly approaches the famous parody in the 'Rejected Addresses' is the 'Address to every Loyal Briton on the Threatened Invasion of his Country;' but the 'Britons to Arms!' of a later date is almost of equal merit. Fitzgerald's 'Nelson's Triumph' appeared in 1798, his 'Tears of Hibernia dispelled by the Union' in 1802, and his 'Nelson's Tomb' in 1806. In 1814 Fitzgerald issued a collected edition of his verses in denunciation of Napoleon Bonaparte. It is, however, unquestionably in the 'Loyal Effusion' of the 'Rejected Addresses,' and the opening couplet of 'English Bards and Scotch Reviewers' that Fitzgerald will live. It is only just to record that this 'small beer poet,' as Cobbett called him, bore no malice against James and Horace Smith for their parody. Meeting one of them, probably the latter, at a Literary Fund dinner, he came to him with great good humour, and said, 'I mean to recite. . . . You'll have some more of "Gods bless the regent and the Duke of York."' Fitzgerald died at Paddington on 9 July 1829. A portrait appears in the 'European Magazine' for 1804. [Gent. Mag. 1829, ii. 471-3; Annual Register, 1829; notes to the later editions of Rejected Addresses.]  FITZGERALD, WILLIAM VESEY, (1783-1843), statesman, was the elder son of the Right Hon. James Fitzgerald [q. v.], by his wife Catherine Vesey, who was in 1826 created Baroness Fitzgerald and Vesey in the peerage of Ireland. He was born in 1783, and spent three years at Christ Church, Oxford, where he made some reputation as a young man of ability, and he entered the united House of Commons as member for Ennis, in his father's room, in 1808. He was greatly involved in the famous scandal resulting from the connection of the Duke of York with Mrs. Mary Ann Clarke [q. v.], but rendered services to the government and the court in bringing facts to light, and secured his appointment as a lord of the Irish treasury and a privy councillor in Ireland in February 1810. His motives at this time were impugned by Mrs. Clarke in a 'Letter ' which she published in 1813, but though there probably was a grain of truth in her assertions, there was not enough to damage Fitzgerald's