the proposal and joined Richilde in Flanders. He was killed, fighting against Robert, at Cassel in 1071.
See Freeman, Norman Conquest, vols. iii. and iv.; Sir James Ramsay, Foundations of England, vol. ii.
FITZ OSBERT, WILLIAM (d. 1196), was a Londoner of good
position who had served in the Third Crusade, and on his return
took up the cause of the poorer citizens against the magnates
who monopolized the government of London and assessed the
taxes, as he alleged, with gross partiality. It is affirmed that
he entered on this course of action through a quarrel with his
elder brother who had refused him money. But this appears
to be mere scandal; the chronicler Roger of Hoveden gives
Fitz Osbert a high character, and he was implicitly trusted by
the poorer citizens. He attempted to procure redress for them
from the king; but the city magistrates persuaded the justiciar
Hubert Walter that Fitz Osbert and his followers meditated
plundering the houses of the rich. Troops were sent to seize
the demagogue. He was smoked out of the sanctuary of St
Mary le Bow, in which he had taken refuge, and summarily
dragged to execution at Tyburn.
FITZ PETER, GEOFFREY (d. 1213), earl of Essex and chief
justiciar of England, began his official career in the later years
of Henry II., whom he served as a sheriff, a justice itinerant and
a justice of the forest. During Richard’s absence on Crusade
he was one of the five justices of the king’s court who stood next
in authority to the regent, Longchamp. It was at this time
(1190) that Fitz Peter succeeded to the earldom of Essex, in the
right of his wife, who was descended from the famous Geoffrey
de Mandeville. In attempting to assert his hereditary rights
over Walden priory Fitz Peter came into conflict with Longchamp,
and revenged himself by taking an active part in the
baronial agitation through which the regent was expelled from
his office. The king, however, forgave Fitz Peter for his share
in these proceedings; and, though refusing to give him formal
investiture of the Essex earldom, appointed him justiciar in
succession to Hubert Walter (1198). In this capacity Fitz
Peter continued his predecessor’s policy of encouraging foreign
trade and the development of the towns; many of the latter
received, during his administration, charters of self-government.
He was continued in his office by John, who found him a useful
instrument and described him in an official letter as “indispensable
to the king and kingdom.” He proved himself an able
instrument of extortion, and profited to no small extent by the
spoliation of church lands in the period of the interdict. But
he was too closely connected with the baronage to be altogether
trusted by the king. The contemporary Histoire des ducs
describes Fitz Peter as living in constant dread of disgrace and
confiscation. In the last years of his life he endeavoured to act
as a mediator between the king and the opposition. It was by his
mouth that the king promised to the nation the laws of Henry I.
(at the council of St Albans, August 4th, 1213). But Fitz
Peter died a few weeks later (Oct. 2), and his great office passed
to Peter des Roches, one of the unpopular foreign favourites.
Fitz Peter was neither a far-sighted nor a disinterested statesman;
but he was the ablest pupil of Hubert Walter, and maintained
the traditions of the great bureaucracy which the first and
second Henries had founded.
See the original authorities specified for the reigns of Richard I. and John. Also Miss K. Norgate’s Angevin England, vol. ii. (1887), and John Lackland (1902); A. Ballard in English Historical Review, xiv. p. 93; H. W. C. Davis’ England under the Normans and Angevins (1905). (H. W. C. D.)
FITZROY, ROBERT (1805–1865), English vice-admiral,
distinguished as a hydrographer and meteorologist, was born
at Ampton Hall, Suffolk, on the 5th of July 1805, being a grandson,
on the father’s side, of the third duke of Grafton, and on the
mother’s, of the first marquis of Londonderry. He entered the
navy from the Royal Naval College, then a school for cadets,
on the 19th of October 1819, and on the 7th of September 1824
was promoted to the rank of lieutenant. After serving in the
“Thetis” frigate in the Mediterranean and on the coast of South
America, under the command of Sir John Phillimore and Captain
Bingham, he was in August 1828 appointed to the “Ganges,”
as flag-lieutenant to Rear-Admiral Sir Robert Otway, the
commander-in-chief on the South American station; and on the
death of Commander Stokes of the “Beagle,” on the 13th of
November 1828, was promoted to the vacant command. The
“Beagle,” a small brig of about 240 tons, was then, and had
been for the two previous years, employed on the survey of the
coasts of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, under the orders of
Commander King in the “Adventure,” and, together with the
“Adventure,” returned to England in the autumn of 1830.
Fitzroy had brought home with him four Fuegians, one of whom
died of smallpox a few weeks after arriving in England; to the
others he endeavoured, with but slight success, to impart a
rudimentary knowledge of religion and of some useful handicrafts;
and, as he had pledged himself to restore them to their
native country, he was making preparations in the summer of the
following year to carry them back in a merchant ship bound to
Valparaiso, when he received his reappointment to the “Beagle,”
to continue the survey of the same wild coasts. The “Beagle”
sailed from Plymouth on the 27th of December 1831, carrying
as a supernumerary Charles Darwin, the afterwards famous
naturalist. After an absence of nearly five years, and having,
in addition to the survey of the Straits of Magellan and a great
part of the coast of South America, run a chronometric line round
the world, thus fixing the longitude of many secondary meridians
with sufficient exactness for all the purposes of ordinary navigation,
the “Beagle” anchored at Falmouth on the 2nd of October
1836. In 1835 Fitzroy had been advanced to the rank of captain
and was now for the next few years principally employed in
reducing and discussing his numerous observations. In 1837 he
was awarded the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society;
and in 1839 he published, in two thick 8vo volumes, the narrative
of the voyage of the “Adventure” and “Beagle,” 1826–1830,
and of the “Beagle,” 1831–1836, with a third volume by Darwin—a
book familiarly known as a record of scientific travel. Of
Fitzroy’s work as a surveyor, carried on under circumstances
of great difficulty, with scanty means, and with an outfit that
was semi-officially denounced as “shabby,” Sir Francis Beaufort,
the Hydrographer to the Admiralty, wrote, in a report to the
House of Commons, 10th of February 1848, that “from the
equator to Cape Horn, and from thence round to the river
Plata on the eastern side of America, all that is immediately
wanted has been already achieved by the splendid survey of
Captain Robert Fitzroy.” This was written before steamships
made the Straits of Magellan a high-road to the Pacific. The
survey that was sufficient then became afterwards very far
from sufficient.
In 1841 Fitzroy unsuccessfully contested the borough of Ipswich, and in the following year was returned to parliament as member for Durham. About the same time he accepted the post of conservator of the Mersey, and in his double capacity obtained leave to bring in a bill for improving the condition and efficiency of officers in the mercantile marine. This was not proceeded with at the time, but gave rise to the “voluntary certificate” instituted by the Board of Trade in 1845, and furnished some important clauses to the Mercantile Marine Act of 1850.
Early in 1843 Fitzroy was appointed governor and commander-in-chief of New Zealand, then recently established as a colony. He arrived in his government in December, whilst the excitement about the Wairau massacre was still fresh, and the questions relating to the purchase of land from the natives were in a very unsatisfactory state. The early settlers were greedy and unscrupulous; Fitzroy, on the other hand, had made no secret of his partiality for the aborigines. Between such discordant elements agreement was impossible: the settlers insulted the governor; the governor did not conciliate the settlers, who denounced his policy as adverse to their interests, as unjust and illegal; colonial feeling against him ran very high; petition after petition for his recall was sent home, and the government was compelled to yield to the pressure brought to bear on it. Fitzroy was relieved by Sir George Grey in November 1845.
In September 1848 he was appointed acting superintendent
