A clever and ambitious Irishman like his father, who seems to have made an abortive bid to buy an English borough for him as soon as he came of age, Fitzgerald was returned in succession to his parent for the close borough of Ennis. Although his ‘oldest political friends’ had been the Foster family, he adopted his father’s attachment to the Prince of Wales as ‘in some sort my inheritance’ and on 9 May 1808 appealed to the Prince for directions as to his political conduct. Hitherto, he had abstained even from giving a vote, except on the Maynooth College question, 29 Apr., on which he had joined some friends of the Prince’s in the minority in favour of the increased grant. On 19 May he spoke against the restriction of the import of Irish spirits into Great Britain and on 25 May voted for the Catholic claims, as his father had done.
The Countess of Erroll, one of London’s elegant widows, claimed privately that she had the control of Fitzgerald’s vote during 1809 and he was also in some danger of being ensnared by Mrs Mary Anne Clarke.
Fitzgerald, who had ‘a bold, forward, lively flow of words’ spoke ‘very sensibly and well’, so Perceval thought, on behalf of ministers in the debate on the Scheldt expedition, 29 Mar. 1810. When he supported inquiry into Irish tithes, 13 Apr., he was careful to explain that his grounds were not those of the mover, Parnell.
Whatever fears Fitzgerald had of losing his independence were certainly soothed by the willingness of the Irish executive to accommodate both his support of a measure of Catholic relief and his opposition to the Regency bill, which caused them no surprise and on which they did not require the resignation he proffered out of loyalty to the Prince.
By July 1813, after a busy session introducing Irish financial measures, Fitzgerald had decided that he no longer wished to hold the Irish exchequer on the terms that were generally understood by both Westminster and Dublin to have prevailed on his appointment. The crux of the issue between him and the government was that he felt that, in the interest of the Irish revenue boards, there should be a clear line of demarcation between his duties and those of the chief secretary which, he believed, were slowly usurping them. The prime minister took the view that Fitzgerald, whom he regarded as too ambitious for the health of his Irish policies and too reminiscent of his mentor John Foster, wished to increase his department’s importance to the detriment of the authority of Westminster as represented by the chief secretary, and therefore preferred that he should resign and his duties be absorbed by Peel. Unfortunately for Liverpool, Peel had no wish to take on such additional work and was somewhat isolated from Westminster feelings on the subject by his personal friendship with Fitzgerald. The upshot was that Fitzgerald withdrew his threat of resignation and continued in his post until the solution suggested by Liverpool on Peel’s demur was at length adopted and the English and Irish treasuries united in 1817.
Fitzgerald, apart from defending Irish financial measures against Sir John Newport, also stood by Peel in defence of the Irish executive generally. A select committeeman on and partisan of the Corn Laws, he rescued John Wilson Croker from the mob outside the House in March 1815. On 20 May 1816 he introduced the measure for the consolidation of the exchequers which made himself redundant. A year before there had been some talk of an appointment which would remove him from the House, and on 4 Mar. 1816 he wrote of ‘an arrangement in contemplation which would give me income without putting me to the tremendous expense which I have had in my present station’: that is, clerk of the pleas, on the death of Lord Buckinghamshire. In June he mentioned that he would prefer a foreign mission, or permission from his father to live economically in France or Switzerland. He refused the vice-treasurership of Ireland (a nominal substitute for the Irish chancellorship), 29 Nov. 1816, against Peel’s advice, on the grounds that ‘I ought not to accept now of an office so little equivalent in any respect which can make public employment desirable to a public man, or an object of honourable ambition’. It was a decision which stung Liverpool into writing to Peel that he thought Fitzgerald ‘possessed of many excellent qualities. He has certainly considerable abilities, but he is unfortunately deficient in two qualities, more important in the concerns of life than any talents, judgement and temper’.
As a result of his being out of office and having personal financial problems which he had disdained to relieve by recourse to the sinecure of the hanaper office, or to the civil services compensation bill, Fitzgerald’s career was in the doldrums. In July 1817 he failed to secure employment abroad from Castlereagh. In January 1818 Peel pressed his claims to the vacant treasurership of the navy or for the post of envoy to Berlin, but Fitzgerald was passed over; as also in an application, in June 1818, to succeed Peel as chief secretary, a circumstance that left him not merely disappointed, but ‘mortified’. It was no consolation to him that he walked over county Clare at the election of 1818, of which he commented ‘it only seems to make me dependent’.
Not surprisingly, Fitzgerald ‘was loud in his condemnation of the conduct of government during the last session’ in August 1818 and his behaviour of a piece with that of other disgruntled young politicians out of place at that time. His contributions to debate continued to be largely on Irish affairs, particularly the grand jury presentment bill, though it was he who presented the report of the committee on the royal establishments, 17 Feb. 1819, and he rallied to government on critical divisions. His appointment in 1820 to a minor diplomatic post appeared little more than a snub to his political ambitions. His subsequent career was similarly chequered, though his close friendship with Peel ensured him more official recognition and he was one of the few Irishmen of his day to achieve cabinet rank. He died 11 May 1843.