Edward Fitzgerald was a brother of the Duke of Leinster and the Earl of Kildare, an amiable, high-minded, warm-hearted, gallant fellow of learning and culture and fine manners. He served as a major in the British forces during the American Revolution, and for a time was an aid-de-camp on the staff of Lord Howe. He was dismissed from the British army, however, for active sympathy with the French Revolution, went to France, and took refuge among the friends he had made there. There he met and married Anne Syms, better known as "Pamela," a woman of great personal and mental attractions, whose origin was involved in a mystery that was never revealed, and concerning whom many romantic stories have been written and told. It is generally believed that she was an illegitimate daughter of Philippe Égalité, Duke of Orleans, sometimes called "Philip the Handsome," by an Irish woman named Syms, and was, therefore, a half-sister of King Louis Philippe of France. By Edward Fitzgerald she had three children: Edward Fitzgerald, who was an officer in the British army; Pamela, who became the wife of Sir Guy Campbell; and Lucy, who became the wife of Captain Lyon of the Royal Navy. Several years after Fitzgerald's tragic end she married John Pitcairn, an American, with whom she came to the United States, and lived in Philadelphia until her death in 1831. While he was in Paris Lord Edward met Wolfe Tone, the leader of the Revolution of 1798, Arthur O'Connor, Thomas Addis Emmet, an elder brother of Robert Emmet, and other fellow countrymen, who were conspiring with the French directoire for an attack upon Ireland. He joined the movement with great earnestness and enthusiasm, and finally arranged with the French government to send a fleet of forty-three vessels with fifteen thousand troops under General Hoche, Wolfe Tone being attached to the commander's staff, to attack the Irish coast simultaneously with an uprising of the people. Ireland was taken by surprise and thrown into a panic, but Providence intervened. A violent gale arose, the landing was postponed, the French fleet became separated, and each vessel found its way back to the Continent.