The Wife of Lord Edward Fitzgerald
Pamela (1776?-1831)[[79]]
“Would God thou wert among the Gael!
Thou wouldst not then from day to day
Weep thus alone.”—Mangan.
[79]. Authorities: Madden’s “United Irishmen” (Second Series, Second Edition;) Moore’s “Life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald”; Gerald Campbell’s “Edward and Pamela Fitzgerald”; Harmand’s “Madame de Genlis”; various works of Madame de Genlis, including “Mèmoires,” “Adèle et Théodore,” “Leçons d’une Gouvernante à ses Élèves,” etc.
IT is not Romney, ravishing as his portrait of her is, nor Giroust, who in his Leçon de Harpe has painted her for us in all the virginal charm, and sweet, and fresh, and innocent loveliness of her early girlhood, nor Mieris, whose miniature of her shows an exquisite Diana, with little white buskined feet, as light and swift as the wind on which they seem to be borne—it is none of these that has given us the picture of Pamela we Irish people love best. It is as Lord Edward, himself, pictured her in a letter to his mother that we think of her most willingly—with her baby in her arms, the little son, the first-born, of whom the young husband and father was so proud: “I wish I could show the baby to you all—dear mother, how you would love it! Nothing is so delightful as to see it in its dear mother’s arms, with her sweet, pale, delicate face, and the pretty looks she gives it.” For the sake of the five years of perfect happiness she gave Lord Edward we, the Irish nation, to whom he has given so much, have taken “the dear little, pale, pretty wife” into our hearts for all time.
Poor Pamela! We have need to keep her place in our hearts very safe and warm; for the rest of the world has dealt pitilessly with her fame during life, and her memory after death—and fate has spared her no unkindness, no humiliation, from the shadows that surrounded her cradle to the sordid and macabres details of her incoffining.
As we read the sad story of Pamela, and contrast “what might have been” (“if the dear little, pale, pretty wife” had been suffered by destiny to ripen, in the sweet, and simple and wholesome atmosphere of Irish family life, to her gracious maturity, and lovely old age) with the sordid actuality, our love for Pamela becomes doubled with a great pity, and an infinite regret. We feel how right Madden was in ascribing what was unlovely in her to the education she received at the hands of Madame de Genlis, and the blame which some of her critics have lavished on her levity, her errors and her frailties we join with him in apportioning to those who failed in their duty towards her in the most critical and trying moment of her life.