Vesey Fitzgerald, an ambitious, talented, likeable but unsteady Irishman, with a relaxed moral code, was undermined in politics by unreliable health and lack of nerve. He owed such eminence as he achieved in his chequered political career after 1820 almost entirely to his personal friendship with Robert Peel*, which was cemented during the latter’s period as Irish secretary, 1812-18. He had ceased to be chancellor of the Irish exchequer and a lord of the treasury when the two establishments were amalgamated in 1817, having refused the Irish vice-treasurership as beneath him, thereby confirming the premier Lord Liverpool’s low estimate of his judgement and temper. Beset by financial problems and keen to obtain an Irish peerage for his aged father (which had been refused him in 1815), he was bitterly disappointed at being passed over as Peel’s successor, and remained disgruntled and dissatisfied during the 1818 Parliament, though he continued his general support for the ministry.
What may be my feelings as to the treatment I have met with from the government is I am quite aware of little moment to them. I have not deserved it, but I shall never condescend to remonstrate or to complain of it and they probably in the plenitude of their power would be very careless if I did. But I have satisfaction in knowing the interest which my friends have felt and their solicitude for me.
NLI mss 7858, p. 42.
At the general election two months later he was returned again unopposed for county Clare, where his family had a leading interest.
for a short time, it is not my intention to relinquish Parliament, but on the contrary to give up the mission ... if I find it expected that I should continue there ... I certainly do not contemplate being absent longer than for one session.
Ibid. p. 120, Vesey Fitzgerald to Massey, 24 May 1820.
He attended the first session of the new Parliament. As an Irish Member, he supported Holme Sumner’s motion for inquiry into agricultural distress, 30 May 1820, and he was placed on the resultant select committee next day. He claimed to be ‘averse to protecting duties’, 2 June, but sought reassurance from the chancellor, Vansittart, that the Irish linen duties were not under threat. He said that precipitate repeal of the Union duties would cause ‘serious inconvenience and injury’ in Ireland, 8 June, and on the 14th he spoke and was a teller for the majority against Parnell’s attack on them. That day he regretted government’s initial refusal to relieve the distress produced by Irish bank failures (he applauded their decision to advance £500,000 on the 16th); paid a personal tribute to the dead Henry Grattan I*, though the Whig Member Sir Mackintosh thought he did it ‘ill’,
The principal object of the mission, which brought him £4,900 a year, was to persuade Bernadotte to repay the large sums lent by Britain during the French wars. In this Vesey Fitzgerald was unsuccessful. Still smarting over his treatment by ministers (he observed to one correspondent, 14 Sept. 1821, that ‘the long services and claims of my father, my family and myself’ were ‘so much waste paper’), he told Peel, when congratulating him on his appointment as home secretary, 24 Dec. 1821, that he had been ‘long in low spirits from many causes’, but in terms of health was ‘much better than I was a month ago’.
Vesey Fitzgerald supported the principle of the Irish constables bill, 7 June 1822. On 17 June he pressed Goulburn, the Irish secretary, to relieve distress, for ‘the awful situation’ in Ireland ‘no longer admitted of delay’. He made a few minor contributions to debates on Irish matters in the following three weeks.
I am on the whole glad to find, from his own conversation, that his views are still directed to diplomacy ... [and] that he does not appear to look for something at home, because I am sure he will never, in Lord Liverpool’s time at least, get anything that he would think it right to take ... Vesey looks high as to foreign employment.
Add. 40319, f. 57.
When Huskisson was moved to the board of trade in December 1822 Peel pressed Liverpool at least to offer woods and forests to Vesey Fitzgerald, but the premier would not hear of it.
In the Commons, 10 Feb. 1823, Vesey Fitzgerald joined in calls for a revision of Irish tithes. He welcomed the government’s composition bill as ‘calculated to redeem all the promises which had been made’, 6 Mar. Yet he wanted it to go to a committee upstairs, 21 Apr., when he deplored Hume’s inflammatory encouragement of Irish Catholics to take up arms; and on 16 May he denounced the measure, which he now felt ‘would not relieve the distresses of the people, but would ... augment the revenues of the clergy’. He repeated this criticism, 30 May, 6 June, and voted in the hostile minority, 16 June. He defended the Irish yeomanry against Hume’s ‘most unfair and illiberal’ attack and supported the ministerial proposal to place them under military control, 11 Feb. He divided with government against inquiries into the parliamentary franchise, 20 Feb., and the prosecution of the Dublin Orange rioters, 22 Apr., and repeal of the house tax, 10 Mar. He supported renewal of the Irish Insurrection Act, 12 May, contending that ‘the misfortunes of Ireland were to be attributed, not to the conduct of those by whom she had been governed, but to moral causes, which no government could effectively control’. Despite his pro-Catholic sympathies, he deprecated the ‘calumnies ... against the magistracy and the people’ contained in their petition for a more equitable administration of justice in Ireland, 26 June. He was named to the select committee on employment of the Irish poor, 20 June 1823. Soon afterwards he broached his wish for a senior diplomatic posting to Liverpool, ruling out the ‘odious’ embassy to the United States, which he claimed to have turned down in 1819. He made little impression, and when Peel, whom he had asked to put in a good word for him, reported that Liverpool had mentioned Portugal as spoken for but had ‘pointed at America’, he became indignant:
I see that from Lord Liverpool I am to expect nothing and I must make up my mind to my future. I must not blame Mr. Canning, on whom I have neither political or personal claim, if Lord Liverpool does not think that I am entitled even to his intervention ... I do not think my conduct towards the present government ought to have led to ... an offer which was to produce my retiring from Parliament for such a mission ... I have spoken with Lord Liverpool and Mr. Canning for the last time on these points ... They shall not again insult me ... I ought not perhaps to express what I feel towards your colleagues ... But it is hard to suppress one’s feelings for ever. When I look back on the two past years and call to mind what I have experienced, I cannot think that even you will blame me.
Add. 40322, ff. 35, 37.
At Cheltenham in August 1823 he sang the praises of the duke of Wellington’s political acumen, which he had recently discovered, to Mrs. Arbuthnot, but damned his brother Lord Wellesley’s ‘absurd pomp and assumption of all the attributes of royalty’ as Irish viceroy.
In February 1824, through Peel, he renewed his application for an Irish peerage, this time for himself, letting it be known that it might reconcile him to the American embassy and would give him ‘an honourable exit from my representation of Clare’, which he was finding increasingly tiresome. Peel put his ‘strong claim on the justice of the government’ for acquiescing in the abolition of his office in 1817, adding that ‘considering the prominent part which Ireland is likely to bear in our discussions, it would be politic to connect with the government one who, from ability and local information, has the power of rendering so much service’. Liverpool would not have it, pointing out that a peerage would not advance his diplomatic pretensions, which were in an case inflated, and suggesting that he would ‘be as anxious for office and employment after he gets the peerage as he was before. It will not satisfy him, but rather in his opinion give additional weight to his claims’. Vesey Fitzgerald whined to Peel that ‘my prospects are as bad as possible, and hopeless as I thought them, I never looked at them with more painful feelings’.
In the House, 10 Feb. 1824, he opposed Hume’s motion for information on non-resident Irish clergy as ‘casting a most undeserved stigma on the bishops of Ireland’. He defended the Kildare Place Association’s educational work and stated that in parts of south-west Ireland there had been ‘no partiality’ towards Protestants in the establishment of schools 9 Mar. He was named to the select committees on Irish land valuations, 10 Mar., and Irish disturbances, 11 May (and again, 17 Feb. 1825). He argued strongly against the government’s proposal to get rid of the Irish linen bounties, 18, 19, 22 Mar., and was one of a deputation of Irish Members who urged their temporary continuance on the chancellor, 8 Apr.
come home at the end of three years, a general election having taken place in my absence, after a wretched abode in Washington, perhaps with ruined health, to look again to the honourable feeling of a ministry who have shown me that they think no more of me than a sucked orange, to lay a claim to promotion or employment after I have in fact abandoned political life at home and in retiring from Parliament sealed that abandonment.
Having secured an assurance that his peerage claim would be favourably considered in due course, he still hesitated, fearing that going to America would not, given his past shabby treatment by Liverpool, open the door to more congenial senior European postings. On the advice of Peel, to whom he unburdened himself at great length in tortured letters, he more or less committed himself at the end of September to accepting the appointment. Yet he continued to play for time and confessed to Peel that he would ‘prefer the peerage, if I can obtain it through you, to any other object’:
I should feel that I had not been passed by in every line and for everybody. I should while in the full enjoyment of an ascendancy in my county and while every motive of retirement must be suspected get rid possibly of a representation that tires me and which ... obliges me to an hundred acquiescences, to civilities which are burdensome, applications which are odious and the approaches of Popish lawyers and others whom in the end I am sure I shall offend ... If you can accomplish it for me I would rather finish now with this object than remain perhaps seven years more, with embittered and resentful feelings ... With this object I should not object to go to America or anywhere else or to remain at home without looking for anything. In a couple of years I might go abroad to occupy myself better than I can do here in my present mortifying position.
Buckingham, ii. 113; Add. 40322, ff. 46, 56, 64, 80, 86.
After a visit to Paris, where he bought paintings on Peel’s behalf, in November, he found Liverpool, who had been approached on the matter by Peel, very receptive to his wish to have the Irish peerage conferred on his mother, with remainder to himself. To get himself out of the American mission he had seized on the alarming state of Ireland, where the Catholic Association was threatening to create chaos. Liverpool did not attach much ‘importance’ to this, but Canning, to whom Vesey Fitzgerald appealed in December 1824, was more indulgent and released him from his engagement and agreed to let it be known that far from prevaricating, he had ‘relinquished a most important mission from a sense of duty’ and had not prejudiced his future claims. Feeling ‘quite light hearted’, Vesey Fitzgerald acknowledged the handsomeness of Canning’s conduct, and Peel congratulated him on such an ‘advantageous’ outcome.
On the eve of leaving Ireland for the 1825 session Vesey Fitzgerald concluded a long report to Peel on the state of that country with the observation that ‘everything which I have seen ... confirms me in the impression ... that there is no immediate danger of insurrection or movement among the people’.
In mid-September Wellesley wrote to Liverpool enthusiastically endorsing Vesey Fitzgerald’s wish to have the Irish peerage conferred on his mother. Nothing was done in December, as Wellesey recommended, and in January 1826 Vesey Fitzgerald, who felt that the viceroy had perhaps overdone things, fretted that Liverpool, ‘the last [man] that ought to forget my family or me’, might cast him aside again. Peel persuaded him to be patient.
Vesey Fitzgerald justified the size of the estimates, 19 Feb. 1827. He was a teller for the ministerial majority on the Clarences’ annuity bill, 8 Mar. He voted for Catholic relief, 6 Mar., and presented favourable Clare parish petitions, 16 Mar.
God knows in these times neither office or power are much the objects of ambition. In the difficulties of the country, it would be ... to be wished perhaps that the Whigs had been tried for a couple of months. The task of their successors would be more easy.
Add. 40322, ff. 173, 188, 194, 197, 215, 227.
He stayed in under Wellington, pleased to be reunited in office with Peel, on whom he unsuccessfully urged his brother Henry the dean of Kilmore’s claims to preferment.
On the address, 31 Jan. 1828, Vesey Fitzgerald praised Admiral Codrington for his victory at Navarino and, on Ireland, defended the new ministry’s leaving the Catholic question as an open one within the cabinet. ‘As a Protestant and proprietor of landed property’, he presented and endorsed several Irish pro-Catholic petitions, 4, 5, 7, 25 Feb., 7 May, and voted silently for relief, 12 May. He divided against repeal of the Test Acts, 26 Feb., and two days later came to Peel’s defence over his premature exit from the debate. He was appointed to the finance committee, 15 Feb., and to the select committee on Irish education, 11 Mar. He acquiesced in the granting of leave for Grattan’s Irish assessment of lessors bill, 20 Mar., though he thought it would need alteration. On the East Retford issue next day he favoured sluicing the borough with the freeholders of Bassetlaw. He supported the life annuities repeal bill, 25 Mar. He spoke in favour of the Hibernian Company bill, 22, 24 Apr., when he was in the government majority against inquiry into chancery delays. On 28 Apr. he denied a radical allegation that he and other Irish Members had persuaded ministers to have the corn averages calculated at Irish ports. He deplored the ‘warmth of feeling’ which entered the debate on provision for Canning’s family, 14 May, when he praised Canning’s ‘talents ... zeal and ... earnestness’; he spoke in the same sense, 22 May. On the 16th he vindicated the finance committee in reply to Hume’s strictures. He presented and supported a petition from resident Irish aristocrats and gentry for a grant of money to employ the starving poor. He defended details of the Irish estimates, 10 June 1828.
In mid-May Lord Ellenborough, anticipating the resignation of Huskisson and his associates from the ministry, noted a view that of their possible replacements Vesey Fitzgerald was ‘the cleverest and is useful, but he is unpopular, and would rather discredit a government’.
He was apparently offered a seat for Aldeburgh by his friend Lord Hertford; but in mid-August he found that Wellington had arranged his return for Tralee, whose sitting Member had recently died.
The subjects [of trade] are so new to me, the details so difficult and complicated, the responsibility so great and my own sense of inferiority so painful when I have to communicate with the persons who represent different interests, and my consciousness, my conviction that I shall not acquit myself to my own satisfaction, to yours, or the duke’s when I come to treat these points in public, are so intense that if ... I might be transferred ... I should feel not only gratified and obliged but I should be relieved from what is at times almost an agony of mind.
After consulting Wellington, who thought it essential that the head of the board of trade should be in the Commons, Peel told him that ‘he ought to remain where he is [and] that having held the office of chancellor of the exchequer in Ireland he must be conversant with the business generally of the board of trade’.
Vesey Fitzgerald, who considered Dawson’s pro-Catholic speech at Londonderry, 12 Aug. 1828, ‘very bold and imprudent’, but likely to have a good ‘moral effect’, was closely involved in the cabinet’s deliberations on how to deal with the crisis in Ireland and corresponded at length with Peel on the problem. Yet according to Von Neumann, he complained in November that it was ‘particularly embarrassing for the government in view of the divergence of opinion which it had produced in the cabinet’, who had already ‘allowed matters to go too far’.
can’t bear Mr. Fitzgerald who, he says, is an ill tempered, ill conditioned blackguard with whom it is quite disagreeable to him to be in society with. I think, if the consideration of the Catholic question is put off, it will be a great consolation to the duke if it frees him of Mr. Fitzgerald, who is always dissatisfied, always wanting to change his office and always talking of going. He says now he must go if the Catholics are not satisfied this session; but, when the time comes, he won’t go, I’ll answer for it.
Ellenborough Diary, i. 283; Arbuthnot Jnl. ii. 229-30.
After Lord Anglesey’s recall as viceroy, which he blamed on his own ‘vanity’, Vesey Fitzgerald entreated Peel to urge caution on Wellington, whom he considered to be surrounded by incompetent advisers. Ellenborough found him ‘rather Irish’ in cabinet, 21 Jan. 1829, when, because he ‘hates the 40s. freeholders who ousted him’, he argued for ‘giving a pecuniary provision for the clergy’. He was one of the committee of four charged with the task of drafting a measure to control the freeholders to complement the concession of Catholic emancipation, and he did not shy away from their ‘open disfranchisement’.
At the close of the session Greville, noting that the ‘great want’ of the administration was ‘that of men of sufficient information and capacity to direct the complicated machinery of our trade and finances and adjust our colonial differences’, observed that Vesey Fitzgerald ‘knows nothing of the business of his office, still less of the principles of trade; he is idle but quick’.
I feel my health seriously impaired, my sight is very much affected, and ... my spirits are depressed to a degree that I am unwilling to confess ... I fall almost daily into a state of nervousness which not only incapacitates me for doing my daily duties, but which is made more distressing by the anxiety which my office imposes, and the tremendous responsibility which hangs upon me ... I am ... deeply sensible of what will be my situation when Parliament meets, and when the pressure on my brain will break me down.
Add. 40323, ff. 50, 56, 58, 81, 84; Greville Mems. i. 345-6.
In January 1830, when he apparently suffered an ‘apoplectic seizure’, he resigned his office, despite Wellington’s attempt to make him reconsider, and, on doctor’s orders, decided to stay away from Parliament for the whole of the approaching session.
The Irish secretary Lord Francis Leveson Gower reported from London, 5 Feb. 1830, that Vesey Fitzgerald’s ‘unfortunate dejection at this moment is irreparable’.
If an election takes place I suppose I ought to go over instantly, for I shall have an arrangement to make of some kind if I am not willing perhaps to be excluded from the House of Commons. At all events perhaps I ought to be over, and to pay my duty to the king. I have no ambition but I do not like being altogether on the shelf.
Add. 40322, f. 157.
Soon afterwards Ellenborough, who wished ‘he was well and could come into office again’, heard from Sir Henry Hardinge* that he ‘seems eager about politics’. He went to London in late July, when Greville found him ‘aware of the difficulties’ of the ministry ‘and the necessity of [their] acquiring more strength’.
The following year, still in ‘miserable health’, Vesey Fitzgerald sought Wellington’s support for his pretensions to an Irish representative peerage, ‘now the only door which is likely to be opened for my entering either House’. The duke, who rebuked him for his almost indecipherable handwriting, eventually persuaded the leading Irish Conservatives to support him on the second vacancy, after Lord Bandon.
a very able public man ... if not the most able they have; but [I am] told by others, who know ... [him] better, that ... [I overrate] him. He is a very good speaker, he has not naturally much industry, and his health is bad, which will probably disable him from a very close and assiduous attention to business.
Parker, Peel, ii. 578; Victoria Letters (ser. 1), i. 435.
He was poorly in the spring of 1842, recovered briefly, but fell mortally ill with ‘a liver complaint’ on 5 May 1843. He lingered in severe distress until his death at his house in Belgrave Square in the early hours of the 11th.
He is a great loss in all ways, and few men could be more generally regretted. He was clever, well-informed, and agreeable, fond of society, living on good terms with people of all parties, and universally popular. He was liberal in his opinions, honourable, fair, and conciliatory ... His death is a public misfortune.
Greville Mems. v. 91-92.
An anonymous writer took a more sober view:
[He was] considered a good man of business and was greatly esteemed in private life, but it never could be said that his talents or qualifications as a statesmen were of the highest order; still ... they were of that efficient and useful character which makes his loss as a minister, though not irreparable, much to be regretted.
The Times, 12 May 1843.
Another described him as ‘a man of accomplished understanding, graceful in manners, and intelligent in office’, and ‘a very interesting speaker upon occasions, less forcible than finished, and less declamatory than pointed’.