How the hazardous Dukes of Leinster squandered their vast family fortune
Even after it has been renamed, Carton House will always be associated with the FitzGerald family, writes Liam Collins
THEY have long departed their magnificent ancestral home, but the decision to re-name Carton House as part of an international hotel re-brand is surely the final ignominy to befall the once all-powerful FitzGerald family, Norman conquerors, rebellious Gaelic chieftains and Dukes of Leinster.
Carton, their one-time Palladian playground with an entrance to the main street of Maynooth, was just one of the magnificent homes of the FitzGeralds in Co Kildare, others included Kilkea Castle and Leinster House and Frescati House in Dublin.
The feudal aristocratic system, which made the FitzGeralds among the most powerful families in these islands, was also its downfall when a set of unfortunate circumstances saw the dissolute gambler and womaniser Lord Edward FitzGerald get his hands on the title and lay waste to the family fortunes.
When he sold the family townhouse, Leinster House in Dublin to the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) in 1815, the 3rd
Duke of Leinster set about remodelling Carton, which had been in the family for generations.
The result was one of the most opulent family homes in Ireland and the building as it stands today.
The family wealth seemed secure for generations when some 45,000 acres of their estates were sold to tenants under the Land Acts of the late 1890s, leaving Carton with its rolling parkland and magnificent stone walls stretching for miles around the perimeter of the house. The FitzGeralds were paid £766,000 by the British government for this inconvenience, a sum reckoned to be about €100m in today’s money.
At the turn of the century, the 5 th Duke and his wife had four children, a girl who died within a year of birth and three sons, Maurice, Desmond and Edward. Lord Desmond was killed by a Mills Bomb during ordnance practice on a beach in Calais, France in May 1916 while serving in the Irish Guards. His death meant that when his elder brother Maurice, the 6th Duke died in a psychiatric hospital in Edinburgh where he had spent much of his life in 1922, the family fortunes fell into the hands of a spectacular spendthrift and gambler, the illustriously titled Lord Edward FitzGerald.
Although he had served with distinction in Gallipoli and was invalided out of the British army in 1915 because of war wounds, he was best known in London and Dublin for all the wrong reasons. A ‘Bertie Wooster on steroids’ type figure, he had scant regard for money, heritage or propriety.
He had run up such fantastic debts that he had already sold a “reversionary” interest in Carton to a Tory millionaire and speculator Sir Henry Mallaby-Deeley, known as the ‘50 shilling tailor’ for £67,000 (and estimated £16m in today’s money) and £1,000-a-year tax free for the rest of his life.
He had also scandalised the family by marrying May Juanita Etheridge, one of the ‘Pink Pyjama Girls’ who performed at the Shaftesbury Theatre in 1913. Lord Edward, who is described in Burke’s Peerage as: “His grace, the Premier Duke, Marquess, and Earl” in the Peerage of Ireland, divorced May, the first of his four wives, in the Scottish Courts in 1930, although they had been separated for years.
In his book The Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know which chronicled the wayward lives and excesses of the peerage — the most notorious of them Irish — Karl Shaw says: “She struggled with the practical difficulties of sharing a small London home with 15 monkeys” and quotes her as saying, “the smell was simply horrible”. Edward also kept snakes and insisted on his wife carrying his pet fox cub in her arms when they went shopping in Regent Street, while he led his Irish wolfhound on a leash. She took her own life in 1935.
The 7th Duke’s exploits as a gambler and impecunious man-about-town endeared him to the aristocracy, who loved a colourful ‘Irish’ rascal, even if they were far more careful of their own inheritance. He was a friend of King Edward VIII before and after he abdicated, and according to gossip and hearsay, this did not prevent him from having an affair with Wallis Simpson.
He wasn’t exaggerating when he sold his story to a London tabloid with the title ‘My Forty Years of Folly’. When he died in 1976, the Duke was living in poverty with his last wife, the caretaker of the block of flats where he kept a bedsit.
His only son (with May Ethridge), Gerald, who married into the MacMurrough Kavanagh family of Borris, Co Carlow, became the 8th Duke and was father to the present and 9th Duke, a garden designer, now 71, who lives in Oxfordshire, England.
In the meantime, Carton endured varying fortunes. The speculator Mallaby-Deeley sold it in 1939 to Lord Brocket, and after that, it became the home of his younger son Hon David Nall-Cain. He sold it in 1977 to the Mallaghan family, who restored the house and opened it as a hotel and later developed it into a golf and residential resort. They sold it for €57m in 2017 to American businessman John Mullen and it became part of his Belmullet Hospitality Group.
It is now to undergo a multi-million refit and will re-open as Fairmont Carton House, part of an upmarket hotel group that includes the Savoy Hotel in London and the Plaza Hotel in New York.
The house, with its stunning baroque ceilings, including ‘The courtship of the Gods’ by the Francini Brothers in the salon and its Chinese Room with original wall paper from 1759, had seen a procession of grand visitors, including Queen Victoria who stayed there on two of her visits to Ireland.
In more recent times, Princess Grace of Monaco came to visit and the actor Ryan O’Neal stayed there while filming Barry Lyndon. The film director Blake Edwards and his wife Julie Andrews lived in the grounds during 1969 while filming nearby, and the singer Marianne Faithfull lived for a time in the Shell Cottage on the estate.
The present Duke had the tragic misfortune to lose his only son and heir, Thomas FitzGerald, the Earl of Offaly in a car crash at the age of 23. He came to Ireland for the first time in September 1996 to enrol in the Ballymaloe School of Cookery and stayed on, working in a number of restaurants in Cork. On May 9, 1997 he was killed and his girlfriend injured in a car accident near Cashel, Co Tipperary.
His mother, Fiona, said that her son had coped with dyslexia and “had many other talents, he was a kind, sensitive, loving and loyal and a very good cook”.
Then in 2007, a builder from San Francisco, California, Paul FitzGerald, attempted to usurp the title of Duke of Leinster, claiming rather audaciously that Desmond FitzGerald, the middle son of the 5th Earl had not died in France but rather improbably was a member of the secretive Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and had been spirited away to the United States.
Mr FitzGerald’s claim was supported by his aunt, 81-year-old Theresa Caudhill, who allegedly spent £1.3m researching the claim and included DNA samples from her father’s exhumed body. The Lord Chancellor of England reiterated that the current Duke of Leinster, Maurice FitzGerald, is the rightful Duke.
Despite its changing fortunes this century, the current Duke has been a regular visitor to Ireland and when he visited Leinster House in 2011, the then Ceann Comhairle of the Dail, Sean Barrett said “There is a real sense of history being alive today”.
‘When he died in 1976, the Duke was living in poverty with his last wife, in a modest bedsit...’