A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process

by Jonathan Bardon

  ladies and gentlemen who are well-wishers to this noble and grand charity ... request as a favour, that the ladies who honour this performance with their presence would be pleased to come without hoops, as it will greatly increase the charity by making room for more company.

  At eleven in the morning the doors were opened, and the New Room, richly decorated in white and gold and with large mirrors for the ladies, was soon filled by over seven hundred people of fashion. At noon the full choirs of the two cathedrals were ready, Mr Maclaine was at the organ, Mr Handel turned to direct His Majesty’s Band, and the performance began.

  So moved was Dr Patrick Delany, the Dean of Down, by Susanna Cibber’s singing of ‘He was despised’ that he rose from his seat and cried out with passion: ‘Woman, for this, be all thy sins forgiven!’ Faulkner’s Dublin Journal gave this verdict on the performance:

  Words are wanting to express the exquisite Delight it afforded to the admiring crowded Audience. The Sublime, the Grand, and the Tender, adapted to most elevated, Majestick and moving Words, conspired to transport and charm the ravished Heart and Ear.

  Handel and all the performers had given their services without payment, and the £400 collected in ticket money was divided evenly between the three charities. In response to entreaties, Handel put on another performance on 3 June, a pane of glass being removed from the top of each of the windows to ventilate the Musick Hall. After being lavishly entertained everywhere and enjoying a well-earned rest, Handel returned to England in August.

  While he waited patiently to be appreciated in London, Handel was showered with fan mail from Ireland. Mary Delany preferred to pass on her admiration through her brother, who was a friend of the composer:

  3rd December 1750. I hope you will find Mr Handel well.... His wonderful Messiah will never be out of my head; and I may say my heart was raised almost to heaven by it.... If anything can give us an idea of the last day it must be that part ‘The trumpet shall sound, the dead shall be raised’.

  Only a city with a large leisured class could have given Handel the patronage he received. Dublin was fast becoming the second city of the British Empire.

  Episode 125

  THE SECOND CITY OF THE EMPIRE

  During the eighteenth century Britain became a world power. Possessing a powerful navy, it conquered territory from its rivals France, Spain, Portugal and Holland, extended its control in the Indian subcontinent, developed colonies in North America, and began its settlement of Australia. Strict laws prevented Ireland trading directly with the colonies, but English vessels brought into Irish ports: tea from the Far East; sugar from the West Indies; tobacco from Virginia; fine muslin from India; and other exotic luxuries. To pay for these overseas goods and also for English coal, Ireland exported linen, corn, butter, salt pork and other farm produce.

  No city in Ireland benefited more from the expansion of the British Empire than Dublin. Captain William Bligh—yes, the same captain of ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ fame—supervised the impressive deepening of the Liffey estuary to allow vessels to come up at all tides to the new stone-lined quays. The population, which had been 58,000 in 1683, was close to 129,000 by 1772, and 182,000 (including the garrison) by 1798, making Dublin the second largest city in the British Empire.

  It was in this city that the viceroy held court at Dublin Castle. In the 1750s the handsome Bedford Tower was erected there and the castle was extended and given an elegant square built of red brick and cream stone. Edward Lovett Pearce, descended from the seventeenth-century rebel leader Rory O’More, designed a magnificent new Parliament House in College Green with a line of stone columns in the new classical style. Across the island, expanding trade, a rising population and—above all—the long period of peace increased the income of the Protestant landowners. Much of the money they collected from their tenants they spent in Dublin. Here they needed to be present to attend the sessions of parliament and the law courts. And, of course, they wanted to show off by entertaining lavishly and find suitable husbands for their daughters.

  As well as erecting great mansions on their estates, these gentlemen built magnificent town houses in Dublin constructed of cut stone. The first to be put up in the new Georgian style was Tyrone House, built for Marcus Beresford, Earl of Tyrone, in 1740. Then followed many others, including: Powerscourt House in William Street, built for Richard Wingfield, Viscount Powerscourt; Leinster House in Kildare Street, completed for James Fitzgerald, first Duke of Leinster, in 1745, and now the home of Dáil Éireann; Northland House, built for the Knox family of Dungannon in 1770, and now the Royal Irish Academy; and Charlemont House, designed by and built for James Caulfield, first Earl of Charlemont of Co. Armagh, and later the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art.

  Other Protestant gentlemen became urban developers. The included: Luke Gardiner, first Viscount Mountjoy, who planned and laid out Gardiner Street and Mountjoy Square; the sixth Lord Fitzwilliam of Meryon, who developed Merrion Square and Fitzwilliam Street (the longest Georgian street in the world); and Dr Bartholomew Mosse, who developed Rutland Square, now Parnell Square. On the same site Dr Mosse erected the Rotunda Lying-in Hospital—the first maternity hospital in either Britain or Ireland. The Assembly Rooms attached to the Rotunda rapidly became Dublin’s social hub where concerts and other events were put on to raise funds for the hospital.

  Most of these Protestant gentlemen and their families had become newly rich in only one or two generations. Visitors from England often found them to be noisy, wild, brash, extravagant and hard-living—in particular, hard-drinking. Lord Chesterfield, when he was Lord Lieutenant, was horrified by the ‘beastly vice’ of excessive drinking of French wine which destroyed ‘the constitutions, the faculties, and too often the fortunes of those of superior rank’. Heavy drinking naturally took place on festive occasions when endless toasts were given, the most popular being to

  the glorious, pious and immortal enemy of the good and great King William, who delivered us from popery, slavery, arbitrary power, brass money, and wooden shoes.

  This caused that perceptive observer of Irish society, Sir Jonah Barrington, to remark:

  Could His Majesty King William learn in the other world that he had been the cause of more broken heads and drunken men, since his departure, than all his predecessors, he must be the proudest ghost, and most conceited skeleton that ever entered the gardens of Elysium.

  According to John Bush, an Englishman who visited Dublin in 1764, a ‘middling drinker’ would drink four bottles of claret—that is, red wine from Bordeaux—without showing any effects. No man was considered a serious drinker in Dublin who could not, he wrote, ‘take off his gallon coolly’—that is, the equivalent of six modern bottles drunk at a single sitting.

  Dublin, indeed, was a city of excess and extremes.

  Episode 126

  DUBLIN: POVERTY, CRIME AND DUELS

  Visitors to Dublin in the eighteenth century were struck by the over-indulgence and lavish lifestyle of those at the apex of society. But just a short distance from Dublin Castle the poor crowded the narrow streets and lanes. The Rev. James Whitelaw, the Church of Ireland rector ministering from St Catherine’s Church in Thomas Street, described the condition of these slums:

  This crowded population is almost universally accompanied by a very serious evil—a degree of filth and stench inconceivable.... Into the backyard of each house, frequently not ten feet deep, is flung from the windows of each apartment, the ordure and filth of its numerous inhabitants; from which it is so seldom removed, that I have seen it nearly on a level with the windows of the first floor; and the moisture that, after heavy rains, oozes from this heap ... runs into the street, by the entry leading to the staircase.... In Joseph’s Lane near Castle market, I was interrupted in my progress by an inundation of putrid blood, alive with maggots, which had from an adjacent slaughter yard burst the back door, and filled the hall to the depth of several inches.…

  The sallow looks and filth of the wretches who crowded r
ound me indicated their situation, though they seemed insensible to the stench.... In the garret I found the entire family of a poor working shoemaker, seven in number, lying in a fever, without a human being to administer to their wants.

  He counted thirty-seven persons in one house:

  Its humane proprietor received out of an absolute ruin which should be taken down by the magistrate, a profit rent of above £30 per annum, which he extracted every Saturday night with unfeeling severity. I will not disgust the reader with any further detail.

  The poor tended to cluster round two fetid streams, the Poddle and the Coombe. Their homes were frequently inundated by floods, as the young Edmund Burke observed from his family residence on Arran Quay in January 1746:

  Our cellars are drowned ... the water comes up to the first floor of the house threatening us every minute.... From our doors and windows we watch the rise and fall of the waters as carefully as the Egyptians do the Nile, but for different reasons.... [It is] melancholy to see the poor people of other parts of the town emptying their cellars ... for as fast as they teem out the water, so fast does it, through some subterraneous channels, return again.

  The poor were also the most frequent victims of crime. On 10 September 1778 the Hibernian Magazine reported:

  Last Sunday morning about 3 o’clock five soldiers supposed belonging to the main guard forced an unhappy woman into an entry in Fishamble Street, and two of them guarded the pass alternately with drawn bayonets in their hands until each had gratified his brutal desires. This piece of barbarity was transacted in the presence of above twenty spectators one of whom dared not venture to the poor creature’s assistance; the military heroes threatened with horrid imprecations to stab the first person to the heart who should offer to molest them.

  Dublin’s criminals could also be drawn from the educated classes. These included the ‘pinking dindies’, skilled in slashing their victims with the points of their swords which stuck out below the open end of their scabbards. They used this technique to force passers-by to hand over their purses, usually for the purpose of recouping the losses they had incurred at the gaming tables. By the same means they also snatched ladies from their protectors, and, as one observer noted, ‘many females were destroyed by that lawless banditti’.

  The students of Trinity College, given a splendid façade facing the Parliament House in College Green in 1759, acquired a reputation for wild and debauched behaviour. Sons of nobles and gentlemen for the most part, they strode about wearing gowns trimmed with gold or silver according to rank. Some could afford to dine at the Eagle Tavern, home of the notorious Hell-Fire Club, or risk a duel at Lucas’s Coffee-House on Cork Hill. Others would eat beefsteaks in The Old Sot’s Hole at Essex Bridge or mingle with the humbler classes in the ale-houses of Winetavern Street. Generally known as ‘bucks’, they were often eager to join in fights in the narrow streets, wielding the heavy keys to their rooms as weapons.

  Duelling was so popular amongst the Dublin gentry that duelling clubs were established. Newspapers frequently carried complaints that passers-by in the Phoenix Park were in considerable danger from stray bullets. Richard Daly, manager of the Theatre Royal, fought nineteen duels in two years—three with swords and sixteen with pistols.

  When the winter season was over, the gentry deserted the capital for the countryside, where the nobility were erecting splendid mansions.

  Episode 127

  ‘THE IRISH GENTRY ARE AN EXPENSIVE PEOPLE’

  The population of Ireland rose from around two million in 1700, to about two and a quarter million by 1740 and reached over five million by 1800. In consequence, the demand for land increased sharply, and this allowed landowners to raise their rents. Now the nobility and gentry could afford to knock down or abandon the uncomfortable castles and fortified houses that had been erected in more turbulent times and replace these outmoded dwellings with new luxurious mansions.

  Without exception, all looked east across the Irish Sea for inspiration. The classical style became the vogue when Sir Gustavus Hume, High Sheriff of Co. Fermanagh, commissioned the German architect Richard Cassels to build his country seat on the western peninsula of Lower Lough Erne in 1728. At about the same time William Conolly, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons and the richest man in Ireland, erected what is still regarded as the most magnificent Georgian great house in Ireland, Castletown, fifteen miles west of Dublin. Almost as splendid was Carton nearby, designed by Cassels for Robert Fitzgerald, nineteenth Earl of Kildare.

  It cost Armar Lowry-Corry, first Earl of Belmore, some £90,000 to build Castle Coole in Co. Fermanagh. He chartered a brig to bring Portland stone from the Isle of Wight to a specially constructed quay at Ballyshannon; from there the blocks were carted ten miles to Lough Erne to be taken by barge to Enniskillen, and more bullock carts were used for the last two miles to complete the delivery. Visiting in 1796, the French émigré, the Chevalier de Latocnaye, found the interior ‘full of rare marbles, and the walls of several rooms are covered with rare stucco work produced at great cost, and by workers brought from Italy.... Temples should be left to the gods.’ When the earl died in 1802, his estate had debts of £70,000. Lord Belmore’s extravagance was exceeded by that of Frederick Hervey, simultaneously Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry. After visiting the Earl-Bishop’s huge palace at Downhill on the rugged Londonderry coast, de Latocnaye wrote:

  Oh, what a lovely thing it is to be an Anglican bishop or minister! These are the spoiled children of fortune, rich as bankers, enjoying good wine, good cheer, and pretty women, and all for their benediction. God bless them!

  During a tour of Ireland in 1732 the English historian John Loveday remarked:

  The Irish gentry are an expensive people, they live in the most open hospitable manner continually feasting with one another.

  Certainly there are numerous accounts of gargantuan meals and extended drinking bouts. John Boyle, fifth Earl of Orrery, wrote in 1736:

  Drunkenness is the touchstone by which they try every man.... A right jolly glorious-memory Hibernian never rolls into bed without having taken a sober gallon of claret to his own share.... It is a Yahoo that toasts the glorious and immortal memory of King William in a bumper without any other joy in the Revolution than that it gives him a pretence to drink so many more daily quarts of wine. The person who refuses a goblet to this prevailing toast is deemed a Jacobite, a papist and a knave.

  Beauchamp Bagenal of Dunleckney House in Co. Carlow was so fond of duelling that he kept a brace of pistols loaded upon his dinner-table. When the meal was over, the claret being produced in a cask, he would tap the cask with a bullet from one of his pistols, while he kept the other for any of his guests who failed to do justice to his wine. John Eyre, a baron living in Co. Galway, served his meals at Eyrecourt with such little ceremony that guests were expected to cut off hunks from the whole roasted ox he had hung up by its heels.

  Feasts at Shane’s Castle by Lough Neagh in Co. Antrim were altogether more refined. Sarah Siddons, the celebrated English actress, visited her friend Lady O’Neill there in 1783:

  It is scarce possible to conceive the splendour of this almost Royal Establishment, except by recollecting the circumstances of an Arabian Night’s entertainment. Six or eight carriages with a numerous throung of Lords and Ladies and gentlemen on Horseback began the day by making excursions about this terrestrial paradise, returning home but just in time to dress for dinner. The table was served with a profusion and elegance to which I have never seen anything comparable.... A fine band of musicians played during the repast. They were stationed on the Corridor, which led from the dining room into a fine Conservatory, where we plucked our dessert from numerous trees of the most exquisite fruits, and where the waves of the superb Lake wash’d its feet while its delicious murmurs were accompanied with strains of celestial harmony from the Corridor.

  It would be impossible to imagine a greater contrast between such scenes of opulence and refinement and the squalor and destit
ution in which the peasantry lived.

  Episode 128

  ‘A SORT OF DESPOT’

  Arthur Young, the English agricultural improver who toured Ireland and briefly worked as a land agent there in the 1770s, formed a poor opinion of Irish landlords. He denounced them as ‘lazy, trifling, inattentive, negligent, slobbering, profligate’. He was appalled by their brutality towards their tenants:

  The landlord of an Irish estate, inhabited by Roman Catholics, is a sort of despot, who yields in obedience in whatever concerns the poor, but to no law but that of his will.... Speaking a language that is despised, professing a religion that is abhorred, and being disarmed, the poor find themselves in many cases slaves even in the bosom of written liberty.... A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a servant, labourer or cottar dares to refuse to execute. Nothing satisfies him but an unlimited submission. Disrespect, or anything tending towards sauciness he may punish with his cane or his horsewhip with the most perfect security; a poor man would have his bones broke if he offered to lift his hand in his own defence. Knocking down is spoken of in the country in a manner that makes an Englishman stare. Landlords of consequence have assured me that many of their cottars would think themselves honoured by having their wives and daughters sent for to the bed of their masters.…