John Fitzgerald

Who was John Fitzgerald?

John Fitzgerald was a British Member of Parliament.

He was born John Purcell, the son of John Purcell, a Dublin physician and his wife Eleanor, the daughter of John Fitzgerald of Waterford. The Purcells were an Anglo-Irish family who had arrived in England at the time of the Norman conquest and settled in Ireland by 1172. John Purcell, junior was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and trained in the law at the Middle Temple and King's Inns. He was called to the Irish bar in 1796, but never practiced.

He married in 1801 his cousin Mary Frances, the daughter and heiress of his uncle John Fitzgerald of Little Island, Waterford, who also had estates at Pendleton in Lancashire and Gayton, Staffordshire. The couple lived at the Bredfield House, also known as the White House, Bredfield, near Woodbridge, Suffolk and had 3 sons and 5 daughters. In 1810 Mary Frances, whose elder brother had died in 1807, inherited her great-aunt's estate, including the 3,000-acre manor of Naseby Wooleys, Northamptonshire. In 1823 he erected an obelisk to mark the site of the battle of Naseby. When she then inherited her father's estates in 1818, Purcell took the name of Fitzgerald.