his loyalty, and he was summoned to Dublin to answer before the council, where he successfully acquitted himself (Ham. Cal. ii. 23, 24, 31, 33; Carew, i. 472). In 1576 he succeeded his father, who had long been impotent, as Baron of Upper Ossory, and two years afterwards had the satisfaction of killing the great rebel Rory Oge O'More (Collins, Sydney Letters, i. 264; Somers Tracts, i. 603). Owing to a series of charges preferred against him by Ormonde, who declared that there was ‘not a naughtier or more dangerous man in Ireland than the baron of Upper Ossory’ (Ham. Cal. ii. 237; cf. ib. pp. 224, 246, 250), he and Lady Fitzpatrick were on 14 Jan. 1581 committed to Dublin Castle (ib. p. 280). There was, however, ‘nothing to touch him,’ he being in Sir H. Wallop's opinion ‘as sound a man to her majesty as any of his nation’ (ib. p. 300). He, however, seems to have been suddenly taken ill, and on 11 Sept. 1581 he died in the house of William Kelly, surgeon, Dublin, at two o'clock in the afternoon (Lodge (Archdall), vol. ii.; A. F. M. v. 1753). He was, said Sir H. Sidney, ‘the most sufficient man in counsel and action for the war that ever I found of that country birth; great pity it was of his death’ (Carew, ii. 344). He married in 1560 Joan, daughter of Sir Rowland Eustace, viscount Baltinglas, by whom he had an only daughter, Margaret, first wife of James, lord Dunboyne. His estates passed to his brother Florence Fitzpatrick (Lodge, Archdall).
[Authorities as in the text.]
FITZPATRICK, RICHARD, Lord Gowran (d. 1727), second son of John Fitzpatrick of Castletown, Queen's County, by Elizabeth, fourth daughter of Thomas, viscount Thurles, and relict of James Purcell, baron of Loughmore, entered the royal navy and was appointed on 14 May 1687 commander of the Richmond. On 24 May 1688 he was made captain of the Assurance, from which in 1689 he was transferred to the Lark, in which he cruised against the French in the German Ocean. Having distinguished himself on that station, he was advanced on 11 Jan. 1690 to the command of the St. Alban's, a fourth-rate, with which on 18 July he captured off Rame Head a French frigate of 36 guns, after a fight of four hours, in which the enemy lost forty men killed and wounded, the casualties on board the St. Alban's being only four; and the French ship was so shattered that she had to be towed into Plymouth. In February 1690–1 he drove on shore two French frigates and helped to cut out fourteen merchantmen from a convoy of twenty-two. In command of the Burford (70 guns) he served under Lord Berkeley in 1696, and in July was detached to make a descent on the Groix, an island near Belle Isle, off the west coast of Brittany, from which he brought off thirteen hundred head of cattle, with horses, boats, and small vessels. He was promoted to the command of the Ranelagh (80 guns) on the outbreak of the war of the Spanish succession, and took part in Ormonde's mismanaged expedition against Cadiz (1702), and in the successful attack on Vigo which followed; but soon after retired from the service. In 1696 he had received a grant of the town and lands of Grantstown and other lands in Queen's County, and on 27 April 1715 he was raised to the Irish peerage as Baron Gowran of Gowran, Kilkenny. He took his seat on 12 Nov., and on 14 Nov. helped to prepare an address to the king congratulating him upon his accession. He died on 9 June 1727. Fitzpatrick married in 1718 Anne, younger daughter of Sir John Robinson of Farmingwood, Northamptonshire, by whom he had two sons, John and Richard. The former, promoted to the Irish earldom of Upper Ossory on 5 Oct. 1751, was father of Richard Fitzpatrick (noticed below).
[Charnock's Biog. Navalis, ii. 134–8; Burchell's Naval History, pp. 545, 547; Luttrell's Relation of State Affairs, ii. 80, 435; Hist. Reg. Chron. Diary (1727), p. 23; Lodge's Peerage of Ireland (Archdall), ii. 347.]
FITZPATRICK, RICHARD (1747–1813), general, politician, and wit, was second son of John, first earl of Upper Ossory in the peerage of Ireland and M.P. for Bedfordshire, by Lady Evelyn Leveson Gower, daughter of the second Earl Gower, and was grandson of Richard Fitzpatrick, lord Gowran [q. v.] He was born in January 1747, and was educated at Westminster School, where he formed an intimacy with Charles James Fox. They were afterwards connected by the marriage of Stephen Fox, the elder brother of Charles James, to Lady Mary Fitzpatrick, the sister of his friend. The schoolboy friendship lasted until the death of Fox in 1806, and Fitzpatrick is chiefly remembered as Fox's companion. On 10 July 1765 Fitzpatrick entered the army as an ensign in the 1st, afterwards the Grenadier, guards, and on 13 Sept. 1772 he was gazetted lieutenant and captain, but he had no opportunity of going on service, and devoted himself to the pleasures of London life. He lived in the same lodgings with Fox in Piccadilly, and shared his love for gambling and betting, classical scholarship and brilliant conversation. The two friends were recognised as the leaders of the young men of fashion about
