Maurice FitzGerald, 6th Duke of Leinster

Maurice FitzGerald, 6th Duke of Leinster, etc. (1 March 1887 – 4 February 1922), was the eldest son of the 5th Duke of Leinster and his wife, the former Lady Hermione Wilhelmina Duncombe, a daughter of The 1st Earl of Feversham.

Biography

Born at Kilkea Castle and never married, he acceded to the dukedom and its related titles upon his father's death from typhoid fever in 1893, at age 42;[1] his mother died of tuberculosis in 1895, at age 30.

The Duke had three siblings:

During his minority, his family's large estates in County Kildare were sold in November 1903 by his trustees to 506 tenant farmers via the Land Commission. Some of the lands had a title dating back to the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1171. The 45,000 acres sold for £766,000, a huge amount at the time, but this had to cover costs, some mortgages and £272,000 that was earmarked to family trusts for the surviving younger children of the 4th duke.[3]

Mental illness and death

The 6th Duke was reported to be in delicate health from childhood onwards and, the day before he turned 21, in 1908, a newspaper observed that he was "little known in London", due to the "careful way in which he has been obliged to live".[4] Actually, the young Duke was, at the time, a patient at Craig House Hospital, a psychiatric institution, in Edinburgh, Midlothian, Scotland; there he lived in his own villa, attended by a butler, from 1907 until his death in 1922.[5][6][7]

From 1908 until death John Donald Pollock served as his personal physician and confidant.[8]

Ancestry
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References
  1. Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower, Old Diaries: 1881-1901 (G. Scribner's, 1902), page 205
  2. Angela Lambert, Unquiet Souls (Harper & Row, 1984), page 64
  3. Cosgrove PJ The sale of the Leinster Estate under the Wyndham Act, 1903; Journal of the County Kildare Archaeological Society 2008-09, vol. XX, part 1, pp.9-26.
  4. "Setting Traps For A Duke", The New York Times, 1 March 1908
  5. Daily Telegraph obituary
  6. Dani Garavelli, "State of Mind: How the Royal Edinburgh Hospital Helped Change Attitudes to Mental Illness",The Scotsman, 3 October 2012
  7. "Title Fight", The Glasgow Herald, 21 October 1976, page 6
  8. Biographical Index of Former Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1783–2002 (PDF). The Royal Society of Edinburgh. July 2006. ISBN 0 902 198 84 X. Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 13 January 2018.
  9. Fox-Davies, Arthur Charles (1904) [1986]. The Art of Heraldry: An Encyclopædia of Armory. London: Bloomsbury Books. p. 485. ISBN 0-906223-34-2.
Peerage of Ireland
Preceded by
Gerald FitzGerald		 Duke of Leinster
1893–1922		 Succeeded by
Edward FitzGerald
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