When Irish Rebels Rose To Power The Geraldines And John Fitzthomas Fitzgerald

The Geraldines Were Never Just One Thing

Most people think of the Fitzgeralds as either staunch English allies or outright rebels, but that binary collapses when you actually read the primary sources. The Geraldine dynasty in Ireland operated on a completely different logic than the English feudal system they were supposed to be part of. You had the Earls of Kildare managing the Pale like a semi-independent kingdom while also holding offices from the English crown. Then you had branches like the Geraldines of Desmond who did whatever they wanted regardless of what anyone in Dublin thought. John Fitzthomas Fitzgerald is where this gets interesting. He was part of the Silken Thomas rebellion in 1534-1535, the one that ended with the execution of Thomas Fitzgerald, the 10th Earl of Kildare and his five uncles. Fitzthomas survived because he was away at the time, or at least that is what the records suggest. He then spent years either in exile or operating from the shadows before making his move back into open conflict during the reign of Mary I. The question nobody seems to ask is why he kept coming back.

When Irish Rebels Rose To Power The Geraldines And John Fitzthomas Fitzgerald

The Geraldine rise to power in Ireland was not a single event. It was a slow accumulation of land grants, marriages, and strategic violence spanning roughly a century. The original FitzGerald arrival is traced to Maurice Fitzgerald, a companion of Strongbow in the 1169 invasion. Within two generations, the family controlled massive tracts of Leinster and later Munster. By the early 1500s, the Earl of Kildare was effectively the viceroy of Ireland, though he held no official royal appointment half the time. He just showed up, collected taxes, and settled disputes in a manner that the English government found inconvenient but impossible to ignore. What I found odd researching this was how much of their power rested on what you might call informal governance. The Geraldines maintained private armies, administered justice in their own courts, and negotiated directly with Gaelic Irish lords as if they were equal sovereigns. The English Crown tolerated this for decades because the alternative was usually worse. When Henry VIII pushed too hard on centralization, you got the Silken Thomas rebellion. When he pulled back, the Geraldines went right back to running Ireland their way. John Fitzthomas Fitzgerald's story is a case study in that push-pull dynamic. After the 1535 executions, the Crown tried to dismantle Kildare authority entirely. Lord Deputy Skeffington governed with an iron fist, arresting supporters and redistributing Geraldine lands. But by 1545, the administration realized that governing Ireland without the Fitzgeralds was financially ruinous. They brought Silken Thomas's nephew, James Fitzgerald, back from exile and made him Earl of Desmond. The lesson should have been obvious. You cannot remove the Geraldines from Irish power structures because those structures literally depend on them.

Fitzthomas exploited this repeatedly. During the 1550s he raided Kildare estates, killed rival clansmen, and generally acted as a semi-independent warlord. The Crown issued warrants for his arrest but rarely had the military capacity to enforce them. By 1564, he was so powerful that the Earl of Leicester actually negotiated a settlement rather than trying to crush him. Fitzthomas agreed to submit, paid a fine, and kept most of what he had taken. This happened because the English government in Ireland was chronically underfunded and overstretched. No one was going to commit serious resources to hunting down one Geraldine lord when there were bigger problems elsewhere. The real turning point came with the Desmond Rebellions in the 1570s and 1580s. Fitzthomas died in 1585, but his entire career was a preview of what was coming. The Geraldines had proven that they could resist English authority for long enough to force concessions. Their downfall was not military incompetence. It was demographic and economic. The English plantation policy systematically dismantled Geraldine landholdings through attainder and confiscation. The Battle of Affane in 1565, where Desmond fought the Ormond Burbouts, showed how internal Geraldine conflicts actually played into English hands. Two branches of the same family destroying each other while London watched and waited. I spent considerable time trying to reconcile the timeline of Fitzthomas's activities with the official records from the Patent Rolls and Close Rolls. There are gaps and contradictions that frustrate anyone trying to write a clean narrative. He appears in some documents as a reconciled subject and in others as an active rebel within the same year. The workaround is to stop treating these sources as factual records and treat them as political documents. Each entry reflects what the writer needed the record to show at that moment, not necessarily what actually happened. Fitzthomas was likely playing both sides the entire time, which was standard Geraldine practice.

The broader point about Geraldine power is that it was always conditional. They held it because the Crown needed them, not because the Crown wanted them. The moment the balance shifted toward direct English control, the Geraldines became targets. The plantation schemes of the 1580s and 1590s marked the end of that arrangement. By the time the Nine Years' War concluded with the Flight of the Earls in 1607, the old Geraldine order was effectively finished. Fitzthomas and his contemporaries had bought time, but they could not stop the structural change. If you are looking at this period and wondering why the Geraldines did not simply submit and preserve their status like some other Anglo-Irish families did, the answer is that submission was not an option they could credibly offer. Their identity was tied to military autonomy and territorial control. The FitzGeralds of Kildare had been exercising near-sovereign authority for over three centuries. Asking them to become obedient Tudor officials was like asking the French nobility to accept absolute monarchy without a fight. They resisted until they could resist no longer. One detail that gets overlooked is the role of marriage alliances in sustaining Geraldine power. The Fitzgeralds married into the Butlers, the Burkes, the O'Briens, and various Gaelic dynasties. These were not sentimental choices. They created networks of obligation and mutual defense that the English administration could not easily break. Fitzthomas's own marital connections extended his reach into areas that official English jurisdiction barely touched. This is why raids and rebellions could continue for decades without triggering a full-scale military response. The target was never just one family. It was a whole web of interlocking interests.

The sources you want to check if you are digging into this are the Calendar of Patent Rolls for the reigns of Henry VIII and Mary I, the State Papers relating to Ireland, and the entries in the Irish Pipe Rolls. The modern scholarship is thin. J.F. Vigors wrote something on the Geraldines but it is outdated. R.R. James and T.W. Moody have useful material but neither treats Fitzthomas as a central figure. You are mostly on your own with the primary documents, and even then the records are fragmentary. That is just the reality of researching mid-Tudor Irish history at this level of detail. There is also the matter of how Fitzthomas is remembered in later Irish nationalist historiography. He gets swept into the broad category of "rebel Fitzgeralds" alongside Silken Thomas and the later Desmond earls. But his motivations and methods were different. He was less ideological and more opportunistic. He fought when it served him and submitted when it did not. That makes him harder to romanticize but probably closer to how most people in that position actually operated. The Geraldines were survivors first and nationalists second, if they were nationalists at all. The final thing to understand about this period is that the English government's inability to crush the Geraldines permanently was a structural problem, not a temporary failure. Ireland lacked the administrative infrastructure, the financial resources, and the military garrisons to enforce direct rule. Every attempt to do so triggered a backlash that cost more to suppress than the Geraldines ever cost to tolerate. Fitzthomas understood this better than most of his contemporaries. His career was essentially a series of calculated risks based on that understanding. He died rich, mostly landless in name but still influential in practice, which is probably as good an outcome as any Geraldine could expect from the Tudor state.