Edgeworth, HENRY ESSEX

Edgeworth, HENRY ESSEX, the 'Abbé Edgeworth,' was born in 1745. His father then was the Protestant rector of Edgeworthstown, but three years later turned Catholic, and, quitting Ireland, settled at Toulouse. There and at the Sorbonne young Edgeworth was trained for the priesthood; at his ordination he assumed the surname De Firmont from Firmount, the family property. Having declined an Irish bishopric that he might continue to minister to his countrymen in Paris, in 1791 he became confessor to the Princess Elizabeth, in 1793 to her brother, Louis XVI., just sentenced to death. He bravely attended him to the very foot of the scaffold; but the 'Son of St Louis, ascend to heaven,' was an invention, it seems, of the journalist Lacretelle. After many escapes he got safely to England (1796), and presently became chaplain to Louis XVIII. at Mittau, where he died of a fever, caught attending French prisoners, 22d May 1807. See his Memoirs by C. Sneyd Edgeworth (1815), and his Letters (1818).