Both underwent a transformation from disaffected socialite to committed revolutionary leader.
The parallels between the young Irish aristocrat and the English poet peer and (some would argue) peerless poet are greater than Byron himself could have foreseen. Lord Byron, for example, was enchanted by “anecdotes of those times when I, alas! was an infant.” He added, “If I had been a man, I would have made an English Lord Edward Fitzgerald.”įitzgerald, fifth son of Ireland’s premier peer, died in the attempt to free his country from the rule of the British monarchy, and he is the subject of Stella Tillyard’s masterly and moving new biography. Insurrectionary spirits looked back with some nostalgia to the fiery clarities of the French Revolution and to the Irish rebellion of 1798 with which it was so tragically intertwined.
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