Historians of 1798 have long been tantalised by the knowledge that a large collection of letters relating to Lord Edward Fitzgerald and his family had disappeared and perhaps destroyed because of their political content. The mystery has been solved through the recent acquisition by the National Library of these apparently vanished papers, amounting to 800 letters, with 150 from 1798 alone. Best of all, there are 77 letters by Lord Edward himself, which shed new light on this famously charismatic figure.
Thomas Moore's breathless prose records the electric effect he had on his contemporaries, describing him striding down Grafton Street in 1797: "Though I saw him but this once, his peculiar dress, the elastic lightness of his step, his fresh, healthful complexion and the soft expression given to his face by their long dark eyelashes are as present and familiar to my memory as if I had intimately known him."
His extended family simply adored him and the word "angel" is used again and again to describe him. His heart-broken sister, Sophia, observed at his death: "You know how truly he was loved by everyone of his family. He was the acknowledged favourite of our hearts. Whenever he came among us, it was universal delight."
If this suggests a cardboard saint, Edward was far from it. He had a terrific sense of humour - "that comedy, that buffoon, that dear ridiculous Eddy" as his sister, Lucy, described him delightedly in 1793. He was chatty, witty, charming - a chess player, a fine dancer, handsome, sensual, endlessly fond of women and relaxed in their company at balls and operas. The trendy ladies of Dublin always sought out his presence. But he was also a man's man, active and energetic, fond of the outdoor and military life. He took to winter-skating, snow-shoeing, tobogganing, canoeing.
He was also an accomplished linguist, adding Spanish in the 1780s to his fluent French from family holidays at Aubigny, their French chateau, as well as picking up Irish in the 1790s. Lord Edward was also easily bored, restive, prone to homesickness and ennui. He missed his family when abroad - notably his adored mother, Emily, always his closest friend and confidante.
In Canada, he wryly observed: "She has a rope around my heart that gives hard tugs." Emily deployed her formidable array of manipulative skills on her fractured family, ruling as a loving doyenne long after the scattering of her children.
A serial lover, Edward oscillated constantly between profoundly felt attachments and bitter separations: Catherine Meade in 1786, his English cousin Georgiana Lennox in 1788; Elizabeth Linley, wife of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, in 1791, with whom he had a love-child; and eventually his future wife Pamela in 1792. The disappointed recoil from these entanglements often sent him on distant adventures - to Canada after Georgiana, to Paris after Elizabeth.
He also maintained a long-running and affectionate relationship with his French mistress, Madame de Levis, an adventuresome grass widow - this terminated only after his marriage to the exotic and glamorous Pamela after a whirlwind three-week romance. Despite his track record, Edward was to prove a faithful and loving husband.
The Dublin social set closed ranks against this intruder - she was too young, too vivacious, too French, too much in love and loved. She upset the provincial Dublin trendies even more by being so glaringly ahead of them in the fashion stakes. They responded with a smear campaign - her stylish pink ribbons were reported as red, dipped in the blood of her relative, the guillotined French king, sent to her by her Paris friends.
Lord Edward was equally quick to form intense male friendships. The African-American Tony Small rescued him from death on a muddy American battle site in 1782; Edward never subsequently parted from "the faithful Tony". He was his constant companion as well as his symbolic touchstone for the universal brotherhood of man.
By 1786, the bond between the two men was tight indeed: "I was going to send Tony to London to learn to dress hair but when he was to go, I found that I could not do without his friendly face to look at and one that I felt to love me a little". In 1788, a lonely Edward in Canada observes that "his black face is the thing that I feel attached to". After 1798, Tony drops out of view but these new letters pick him up again. He had moved to London, and set up in trade in Piccadilly. Falling ill in 1803, he appealed to the Fitzgerald family for assistance which was quickly forthcoming.
Lord Edward struck up intense friendships with celebrated Indian leader Joseph Brant when he met him in Canada in 1789, the equally famous revolutionary Thomas Paine in Paris in 1792, and his "twin-soul", the United Irishman Arthur O'Connor in Dublin in 1796.
Edward's life was lived on a truly vast canvas. He travelled in North America, the West Indies, England, Germany, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain and France. His travels and his warm friendships with African and Native Americans convinced him of that most 18th-century of concepts, the brotherhood of man. "I have seen human nature under all its forms," he wrote. "Everywhere it is the same." As an Indian fellow traveller told him in 1789, "all are brother, all are Indian". He was inducted into the Bear Tribe in 1796 near Detroit.
The world was his oyster. After his epic trek from Canada to the head waters of the Mississippi and down to New Orleans, he boasted: "Ireland and England will be too little for me when I go home". His travels deepened his evolving radicalism and, in 1792 in Paris, he became a fully fledged republican - Le Citoyen Edouard Fitzgerald - who ostentatiously renounced his aristocratic title: "I do not like to be Lord Edward". He subsequently enthusiastically embraced "the democratic turf and milk" of his rural Kildare retreat.
Self-consciously, he shed elaborate aristocratic dress and wigs for the plain clothes and cropped hair of the democrat. He took up the uileann pipes, learned Irish, played handball and danced his way through the pubs and country kitchens of Kildare. All the time, his radicalism deepened and soon he was the most charismatic of United Irish leaders, heir to the glamorous mantle of the patriot Geraldines.
The letters shed new light on the single most tragic episode in Lord Edward's life. By 1796, he knew that his politics would lead to death on the scaffold or the battlefield and he took a shocking decision to secure the future of his much-loved children. He relinquished them into the care of trusted relatives living safely in England, having persuaded Pamela (who hero-worshipped as well as loved him) that this was the proper course of action.
His little daughter was given to his maiden aunt Sophia: "As for the dear child's sake, the thing must not be done by halves, so that I consider the little thing as dead for me and shall act as if there was no such being in the world and I can not be too strict in this conduct and hope I shall act up to it with all the firmness that is necessary - it is painful".
His little daughters, Louisa and Pamela, were to be lovingly reared by Sophia. His adored son, Edward, was left with his mother, Emily, in London in October 1796. Emily immediately realised the sacrifice that Edward and Pamela were making: "They adore it and delight in all its pretty ways and yet to leave it behind out of downright good nature and affection to me was a sacrifice indeed".
She also had a haunting awareness that it was "cruel' of her to accept the child: "The only drawback to my pleasure is the feel of having been selfish which I hate but have moments of weakness and self indulgence and, having suffered a great deal of disappointment and anxiety before, I gave way to this temptation which was thrown in my way with so good a grace that I could not resist it for they persuaded me that it gives them pleasure".
The emotionally astute Edward anticipated that the young boy - another Eddy - would provide solace to his grieving mother when the inevitable would befall him. The little child completely absorbed Emily's insatiable mothering instincts - she was one of the great mothers of the 18th century, who had already given birth to 21 much-caressed children. She soon loved the new infant - "my little heart's delight" - to distraction.
After Lord Edward's traumatic death, young Eddy was an effective therapeutic - "he chases away misery, occupies and delights me." Her daughter, Sophia, believed that the child was "a sweet little emblem of the dear beloved departed father. He is the balm of her afflicted heart".
Emily was worried that the remarrying Pamela might take her children back into her own care but reasoned; "No woman marrying again would wish to burthen a husband with children unprovided for' and she correctly predicted to Sophia that "your fortune will secure you the possession of the little angel.' Thomas Moore Some of Lord Edward's letters are reproduced in Thomas Moore's 1831 biography where he elevates Edward into a saintly martyr. In the process, he diminishes his humanity, his sense of humour and his good-natured interaction with his family.
Moore's Lord Edward is a more formal, colder and less engaging character than these new letters show. The unpublished indicate a different Edward. Here he is in 1788, bantering his sisters, Charlotte and Lucy, in the humorous style which so amused them: "I am sure Charlotte got Mr Strutt by the swing of her bum but don't abandon your favourites, never spare them, work them well - the Lennox handkerchief and a Castletown nosegay and the little cockers (breasts) must get something".
This is the gay, ebullient Edward who was always the life and soul of the party. He was also very much a man of the world, writing to his teacher and step-father, William Ogilvie, about his visits to Canadian brothels and comparing them to famous Parisian ones: "There is a certain commodity here very cheap indeed which helps me on - not quite so good as chez la Comtesse de Milford but very tolerable. What a set of hungry dogs there will be at this shop this winter. I certainly do envy some of them". Again, there is a characteristic coda - "pray don't let my mother hear this, she would be quite shocked'.
In 1791, he records this view of Dublin women after he had accused one of them of being cold: "I find it is the worst thing one can say of a Dublin woman. You cannot conceive what an affront it is reckoned. To be counted a damned cold bitch without passions is the worst of characters."
The National Library is to be congratulated on acquired such a large, rich and coherent collection, especially as it adds to its already considerable Fitzgerald collection. This family is now certainly one of the best documented in the entire 18th-century world, as well as one of the most dramatic. These remarkable letters confirm Byron's assertion that Lord Edward would make "the finest subject in the world for an historical novel". He is surely equally suitable for a major feature film.
Professor Kevin Whelan is Michael Smurfit director of the Keough-Notre Dame Centre in Dublin. A longer version of this article appears in the winter 1999 edition of History Ireland