The Purcells came to England at the Conquest and were settled in Ireland by 1172. John Purcell (?1740-1806), the father of this Member, studied medicine at Leyden and Edinburgh and had a successful practice as a physician in Dublin. In 1774 he married Eleanor Fitzgerald, whose family were descended from the 4th earl of Kildare and whose grandfather Edward (d. 1736) was the half-brother of Nicholas Fitzgerald, a prominent supporter of James II killed at the Boyne. They had five sons, John, Charles, Edward, Peter and Edward Carlton. Eleanor Purcell’s brother, John Fitzgerald (1760-1818) not only inherited the family’s Irish property from his father in 1784, but came into estates at Pendleton, near Manchester, and Gayton, near Stafford, through the will of his kinsman Richard Fitzgerald. With his wife Mary, daughter of Keane Fitzgerald of Totteridge, Hertfordshire, he had a son, John Charles, born in 1781, and a daughter, Mary Frances, born in 1779. Her first cousin John Purcell was called to the Irish bar in 1796, but never practised. He married Mary Frances Fitzgerald in 1801 and they made their home at the White House, Bredfield, near Woodbridge, Suffolk. (Mary’s father had bought the neighbouring property of Boulge for them, but the widow of the previous owner continued to occupy the hall on a life interest and did not die until 1835.) The death without issue of Mary’s brother in 1807 left her sole heiress to her father’s great wealth in money and land; and she added to her assets in 1810 when she inherited the best part of her great-aunt Jane Joyce’s estate of £700,000, plus the 3,000-acre manor of Naseby Wooleys, Northamptonshire.
The couple had eight children in nine years, but they were ill-matched and came to lead largely separate lives. Purcell, an absent-minded, genial and gullible man, was fond of country life and pursuits. He was overshadowed and cowed by his domineering wife, whose trustees were careful to restrict his access to her money. Mary, a ‘fine broad woman’, who was reputed to have turned down an offer of marriage from Arthur Wellesley*, was bored by children and Suffolk society. She eventually spent much of her time in London, playing the grande dame, giving opulent dinners at the family house at 39 Portland Place, mixing with painters, poets and actors and making ostentatious appearances at the opera. These developments lay mostly in the future when the Purcells went en famille to France in 1816 and took a house at St. Germain. Yet even then, while Purcell and the children returned to Bredfield for the summer Mary went on a European tour. They reassembled in Paris in 1817 and lived in the Rue d’Angoulême until the death of old John Fitzgerald, 6 Sept. 1818, brought them back to England. Mary, already worth an estimated £750,000, inherited a large fortune.
In 1823 the Fitzgeralds erected an obelisk at Naseby to mark the site of the Civil War battlefield. (It was in fact a mile away from the actual location and subsequently misled and infuriated Carlyle.)
Fitzgerald presented a petition from Welford, Suffolk against any alteration of the corn laws, 20 Feb. 1827.
At the general election that summer he and Augustus Ellis, who had resumed his seat on Canning’s death, were challenged at Seaford by two wealthy strangers. While their watchword was ‘independence’ from Lord Seaford’s electoral domination, their intrusion was seen as part of the Wellington ministry’s assault on the Canningite remnant. Attacked for failing to support the sale of beer bill, which ‘brings relief to the poor man’, Fitzgerald insisted that he had ‘voted with ministers on the three readings’ (even though the first and third were in fact uncontested); and claimed that ‘unconnected with ministers, or with any party, I have generally supported the king’s government, and feel myself as independent in Parliament as I do now in soliciting your suffrages’. One of his leading supporters made much of his ‘liberality and benevolence’ to the borough, where he had founded and endowed a free school and provided relief during recent outbreaks of fever. After topping the poll Fitzgerald slightly modified his explanation of his conduct on the beer bill, now claiming to have voted for the first and second readings, but to have taken a pair for the third: ‘he always voted for the people, and wished ever to do so’.
Ministers listed him as one of ‘the Huskisson party’, and he was absent from the division on the civil list, 15 Nov. 1830. Of his attitude to the reform bill, his youngest son Edward Fitzgerald wrote, 15 Mar. 1831:
My father set out against it at first, but is coming over, I think. The question with him, is not whether the bill is a good one, for he thinks it is; but whether he ought to vote for the disfranchisement of his own borough: wherein he certainly would not be its representative, because no borough would ever wish to be disfranchised.
Fitzgerald Letters, i. 93.
Fitzgerald paired against the second reading, 22 Mar., and voted for Gascoyne’s wrecking amendment, 19 Apr. 1831. At the ensuing general election he was returned unopposed, having ‘stated his belief that some reform, and an extensive reform too, was necessary, but [that] he did not approve of the disfranchisement of any borough, unless some corruption was proved to have taken place’.
I am not opposed to reform and ... I shall not oppose the reform bill further than it may go to affect the interests of my constituents ... While I admit that this bill will be considered a great boon to the nation at large, I must ... say that it will be a bill of pains and penalties to my constituents and others.
Accordingly, he absented himself from all the major divisions on the reform bills. He was granted a fortnight’s leave to attend to ‘urgent business’, 15 Sept., and was a defaulter, 10 Oct., the day of the motion of confidence in the Grey ministry. His only known vote in the 1831 Parliament was for the second reading of the Irish reform bill, 25 May 1832. In January that year he asked Seaford to use his influence with Lord Ripon, a member of the cabinet, to have him recommended to the premier for a baronetcy, of which he had had hopes as a supporter of the Canning and Goderich ministries in 1827: ‘You will ... vouch for my principles being friendly to the present government, and that whatever interest I can command in either country is at its disposal’.
In June 1832 Fitzgerald, who had been a prominent supporter of the reformer Sir Henry Bunbury* at the 1831 Suffolk election,
My politics are and ever have been those of an independent Whig. Unconnected with any government since the death of ... Canning, I have uniformly ... forwarded ... every measure the object of which was to remove civil or religious disabilities, to lighten the burthens or to better the conditions of my fellow subjects, especially by steadily upholding the agricultural interest, the basis of our national prosperity.
Bury and Norwich Post, 13, 27 June 1832.
Among the local reformers his credentials were highly suspect, and he was regarded as the creature of Sir Thomas Gooch* and the county Tories.
In the late 1820s he had begun to mine coal on the Pendleton estate, perhaps in a bid to assert and prove himself. The superintendent of operations was Robert Stephenson, the brother of George, whom Fitzgerald congratulated, 25 Sept. 1832, on receiving ‘the joyful intelligence of you having reached the four foot seam’. The following year the colliery manager absconded with a quantity of money, as had the Naseby estate agent ‘with something above £5,000’ in 1830. Undeterred, Fitzgerald extended the enterprise in 1835 (the year he moved into Boulge Hall) by forming the Pendleton Colliery Company, which had the right to mine on adjacent land leased from the duchy of Lancaster. The undertaking, of which George Stephenson was a director, was expected to produce profits of £14,000 a year; but underground water was a persistent problem, and in August 1843 a flood wrecked the new mine. Edward Fitzgerald told Carlyle:
My father, after spending £100,000 on a colliery, besides losses by everlasting rogues, runaway agents, etc., has just been drowned out of it ... So end the hopes of eighteen years; and he is near seventy, left without his only hobby! He may perhaps be able to let it out to a company at a low rent, that they may pump out the water. But he is come to the end of his purse. Naseby might have had many a draining tile but for that d----d colliery.
Add. 38781, ff. 45, 59, 70, 109, 116; Terhune, 178-80; Martin, 93, 133-4; Fitzgerald Letters, i. 92, 93, 398, 402; W. Axon, Annals of Manchester, 222.
Fitzgerald, whose son-in-law John Kerrich and friend Squire Jenney, investors in the company, were ruined by the flood, struggled on until 1848, when he filed for a petition of bankruptcy. His debts were put at over £130,000, and he proposed to pay £6,000 a year to his creditors, who included his wife and all seven of his surviving children, to the tune of £10,000 each. He was given protection under the Act.