The first half of the sixteenth century witnessed the tentative beginnings of direct political relations between Ireland and France in the form of a French dimension to the intrigues of the Anglo-Irish Geraldine dynasty. During this period, leading members of the Geraldine family of Desmond and Kildare mounted campaigns in opposition to the English crown and in the process sought the assistance of François I (1494–1547). James Fitzgerald, tenth earl of Desmond (d. 1529), was the first Irish magnate to engage in serious intrigue with the French crown in the early 1520s. In 1540 his kinsman, Gerald Fitzgerald, heir to the earldom of Kildare then in abeyance following his half-brother's rebellion (1534–5), sought temporary asylum in France. His status as a leading Anglo-Irish magnate and as a figurehead of Ireland's first nation-wide coalition gained him an hospitable reception at the hands of the French authorities and ensured his safe passage through France into Flanders while exerting a modest strain on Anglo-French relations. In the longer term, it gave rise to his being invested with a pivotal role in French war propaganda during the 1540s. This deliberately contrived scaremongering was effective in playing upon one of the greatest fears of the Whitehall and Dublin administrations in relation to Ireland – a revival of the Geraldine interest, backed by the French and possibly the Scots. Through their intrigues the Fitzgeralds therefore furnished the French with legitimising causes for possible intervention in Ireland during the two Anglo-French wars in the 1520s and in the mid-1540s.