official aristocracy created by Henry I. and Henry II. He served John in the Norman wars, and was taken prisoner by Philip of France, and forced to pay a heavy ransom. He was implicated in the baronial conspiracy of 1212. According to his own statement the king had attempted to seduce his eldest daughter; but Robert’s account of his grievances varied from time to time. The truth seems to be that he was irritated by the suspicion with which John regarded the new baronage. Fitzwalter escaped a trial by flying to France. He was outlawed, but returned under a special amnesty after John’s reconciliation with the pope. He continued, however, to take the lead in the baronial agitation against the king, and upon the outbreak of hostilities was elected “marshal of the army of God and Holy Church” (1215). To his influence in London it was due that his party obtained the support of the city and used it as their base of operations. The famous clause of Magna Carta (§ 39) prohibiting sentences of exile, except as the result of a lawful trial, refers more particularly to his case. He was one of the twenty-five appointed to enforce the promises of Magna Carta; and his aggressive attitude was one of the causes which contributed to the recrudescence of civil war (1215). His incompetent leadership made it necessary for the rebels to invoke the help of France. He was one of the envoys who invited Louis to England, and was the first of the barons to do homage when the prince entered London. Though slighted by the French as a traitor to his natural lord, he served Louis with fidelity until captured at the battle of Lincoln (May 1217). Released on the conclusion of peace he joined the Damietta crusade of 1219, but returned at an early date to make his peace with the regency. The remainder of his career was uneventful; he died peacefully in 1235.
See the list of chronicles for the reign of John. The Histoire des ducs de Normandie et des rois d’Angleterre (ed. F. Michel, Paris, 1840) gives the fullest account of his quarrel with the king. Miss K. Norgate’s John Lackland (1902), W. McKechnie’s Magna Carta (1905), and Stubbs’s Constitutional History, vol. i. ch. xii. (1897), should also be consulted.
FITZWILLIAM, SIR WILLIAM (1526–1599), lord deputy of Ireland, was the eldest son of Sir William Fitzwilliam (d. 1576) of Milton, Northamptonshire, where he was born, and grandson of another Sir William Fitzwilliam (d. 1534), alderman and sheriff of London, who was also treasurer and chamberlain to Cardinal Wolsey, and who purchased Milton in 1506. On his mother’s side Fitzwilliam was related to John Russell, 1st earl of Bedford, a circumstance to which he owed his introduction to Edward VI. In 1559 he became vice-treasurer of Ireland and a member of the Irish House of Commons; and between this date and 1571 he was (during the absences of Thomas Radclyffe, earl of Sussex, and of his successor, Sir Henry Sidney) five times lord justice of Ireland. In 1571 Fitzwilliam himself was appointed lord deputy, but like Elizabeth’s other servants he received little or no money, and his period of government was marked by continuous penury and its attendant evils, inefficiency, mutiny and general lawlessness. Moreover, the deputy quarrelled with the lord president of Connaught, Sir Edward Fitton (1527–1579), but he compelled the earl of Desmond to submit in 1574. He disliked the expedition of Walter Devereux, earl of Essex; he had a further quarrel with Fitton, and after a serious illness he was allowed to resign his office. Returning to England in 1575 he was governor of Fotheringhay Castle at the time of Mary Stuart’s execution. In 1588 Fitzwilliam was again in Ireland as lord deputy, and although old and ill he displayed great activity in leading expeditions, and found time to quarrel with Sir Richard Bingham (1528–1599), the new president of Connaught. In 1594 he finally left Ireland, and five years later he died at Milton. From Fitzwilliam, whose wife was Anne, daughter of Sir William Sidney, were descended the barons and earls Fitzwilliam.
See R. Bagwell, Ireland under the Tudors, vol. ii. (1885).
FITZWILLIAM, WILLIAM WENTWORTH FITZWILLIAM,
2nd Earl (1748–1833), English statesman, was the son of the 1st earl (peerage of the United Kingdom), who died in 1756. The English family of Fitzwilliam claimed descent from a natural son of William the Conqueror, and among its earlier members were a Sir William Fitzwilliam (1460–1534), sheriff of London, who in 1506 acquired the family seat of Milton Manor in Northamptonshire,
and his grandson Sir William Fitzwilliam (see above). The latter’s grandson was made an Irish baron in 1620;
and in later generations the Irish titles of Viscount Milton and Earl Fitzwilliam (1716) and the English titles of Baron Milton (1742) and Viscount Milton and Earl Fitzwilliam (1746), were added. These were all in the English house of the Fitzwilliams of Milton Manor. They were distinct from the Irish Fitzwilliams
of Meryon, who descended from a member of the English family who went to Ireland with Prince John at the end of the 12th century, and whose titles of Baron and Viscount Fitzwilliam died out with the 8th viscount in 1833; the best known of these was Richard, 7th viscount (1745–1816), who left the Fitzwilliam library and a fund for creating the Fitzwilliam Museum to Cambridge University.
The 2nd earl inherited not only the Fitzwilliam estates in Northamptonshire, but also, on the death of his uncle the marquess of Rockingham in 1782, the valuable Wentworth estates in Yorkshire, and thus became one of the wealthiest noblemen of the day. He had been at Eton with C. J. Fox, and became an active supporter of the Whig party; and in 1794, with the duke of Portland, Windham and other “old Whigs” he joined Pitt’s cabinet, becoming president of the council. At the end of the year, however, he was sent to Ireland as viceroy. Fitzwilliam, however, had set his face against the jobbery of the Protestant leaders, and threw himself warmly into Grattan’s scheme for admitting the Catholics to political power; and in March 1795 he was recalled, his action being disavowed by Pitt, the result of a series of misunderstandings which appeared to Fitzwilliam to give him just cause of complaint. The quarrel was, however, made up, and in 1798 Fitzwilliam was appointed lord-lieutenant of the West Riding of Yorkshire. He continued to take an active part in politics, and in 1806 was president of the council, but his Whig opinions kept him mainly in opposition. He died in February 1833, his son, Charles William Wentworth, the 3rd earl (1786–1857), and later earls, being notable figures in the politics and social life of the north of England.
FIUME (Slav. Rjeka, Rieka or Reka, Ger. St Veit am Flaum),
a royal free town and port of Hungary; situated at the northern
extremity of the Gulf of Quarnero, an inlet of the Adriatic, and
on a small stream called the Rjeka, Recina or Fiumara, 70 m.
by rail S.E. of Trieste. Pop. (1900) 38,955; including 17,354
Italians, 14,885 Slavs (Croats, Serbs and Slovenes), 2482 Hungarians
and 1945 Germans. Geographically, Fiume belongs to
Croatia; politically the town, with its territory of some 7 sq. m.,
became a part of Hungary in August 1870. The picturesque
old town occupies an outlying ridge of the Croatian Karst;
while the modern town, with its wharves, warehouses, electric
light and electric trams, is crowded into the amphitheatre left
between the hills and the shore. On the north-west there is a
fine public garden. The most interesting buildings are the
cathedral church of the Assumption, founded in 1377, and completed
with a modern façade copied from that of the Pantheon
in Rome; the church of St Veit, on the model of Santa Maria
della Salute in Venice; and the Pilgrimage church, hung with
offerings from shipwrecked sailors, and approached by a stairway
of 400 steps. In the old town is a Roman triumphal arch, said
to have been erected during the 3rd century A.D. in honour
of the emperor Claudius II. Fiume also possesses a theatre and
a music-hall; palaces for the governor and the Austrian emperor;
a high court of justice for commerce and marine; a chamber of
commerce; an asylum for lunatics and the aged poor; an
industrial home for boys; and several large schools, including
the marine academy (1856) and the school of seamanship (1903).
Municipal affairs are principally managed by the Italians, who
sympathize with the Hungarians against the Slavs.
Fiume is the only seaport of Hungary, with which country it was connected, in 1809, by the Maria Louisa road, through Karlstadt. It has two railways, opened in 1873; one a branch of the southern railway from Vienna to Trieste, the other of the
