Fitzgerald, Thomas, Earl of Desmond

(c. 1426–1468)

   An adherent of the house of YORK, Thomas Fitzgerald, the eighth earl of Desmond, served as EDWARD IV’s lord deputy of IRELAND in the mid-1460s.

   With the execution of James BUTLER, the staunchly Lancastrian earl of Ormond, in May 1461, political dominance in Ireland passed to the Fitzgerald family, whose leaders had attached themselves in the 1450s to the cause of Richard PLANTAGENET, duke of York. Succeeding his father as earl of Desmond in 1462, the eighth earl maintained his family’s Yorkist allegiance by crushing a Lancastrian invasion of Ireland led by Ormond’s brothers, John and FITZGERALD, THOMAS, EARL OF DESMOND 93 Thomas Butler, both of whom had been attainted by Edward IV’s first PARLIAMENT. In 1463, the king rewarded Desmond by appointing him lord deputy. Governing in close association with his kinsman, Thomas FITZGERALD, earl of Kildare, Desmond, like earlier Anglo-Irish deputies, used the authority and financial resources attached to his official position to advance his own and his family’s interests.

   Desmond’s quarrels with other Anglo-Irish nobles, his friendliness with native Irish leaders, and his attempts to impose new exactions on the landowners in the Pale (i.e., the most Anglicized region of Ireland around Dublin) led to uprisings and complaints that cost him the favor of the king. By 1468, Edward had replaced him as lord deputy with John TIPTOFT, the English earl of Worcester. In the Irish Parliament of that year, Worcester secured a bill of ATTAINDER against both Desmond and Kildare, although only the former suffered execution. His effectiveness destroyed by his actions against his predecessors, Worcester was recalled in 1470. The attainders of Desmond and Kildare were reversed, and the latter assumed the deputyship. Although Desmond’s heir was allowed to succeed to his father’s lands and title, relations between the English Crown and the Desmond Fitzgeralds were strained for decades.

   See also Fitzgerald, Gerald, Earl of Kildare

   Further Reading: Cosgrove, Art, Late Medieval Ireland, 1370-1541 (Dublin: Helicon, 1981); Lydon, James, Ireland in the Later Middle Ages (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1973); OtwayRuthven, A. J., A History of Medieval Ireland (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1980).