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Rh French court. His father, Robert Edgeworth, great-grandson of Francis, who went over from England about 1582, and gave his name to Edgeworthstown, county Longford, resigned the rectory of that parish in 1749, on his conversion to Catholicism. The son, Henry Essex Edgeworth—Edgeworth de Firmont, as the family now styled itself, from an estate called Firmount, near Edgeworthstown—never saw Ireland again after thus leaving it at four years of age. Educated at Toulouse and Paris for the priesthood, he joined the seminary of foreign missions, but was dissuaded from his plan of becoming a missionary, and devoted himself to the poor, especially the poor Irish in Paris. He declined, when the Revolution assumed a threatening air, a pressing invitation to return to Ireland, his reasons being the long cessation of correspondence with his family (his elder brother Ussher had gone back to Ireland), his imperfect knowledge of English, and the spiritual needs of his flock. Princess Elizabeth, on her confessor accompanying the King's aunts to Italy in February 1791, appointed Edgeworth as his successor, and he frequently visited her at the Tuileries till August 1792, but was not introduced to the rest of the royal family.

When the King's trial was impending, Elizabeth recommended Edgeworth to her brother for the last spiritual ministrations, in the hope that his obscurity would save such a confessor from