The foundation of the Hospital and Free school of King Charles II., Oxmantown Dublin : commonly called the Blue coat school : with notices of some of its governors, and of contemporary events in Dublin from the foundation, 1668 to 1840, when its government by the city ceased

Front matter

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Preface

The duty of a governor of King's Hospital to consult its old records from time to time, led the writer naturally to a perusal of them aU, until the task, sufficiently uninviting at first, became the subject of a continually increasing interest. The close connection of the School from its foundation with the City, whose chief magistrate was, for one hundred and seventy years, the standing chairman of the governors, and whose aldermen were always his official colleagues, brought the life of the school into constant communion with the hfe of the city ; whilst the usage, which prevailed during all this period, of co-opting to the Board distinguished persons from outside, brought the governors from time to time into relations with many of the highest personages in church and state, some of them historical and even Ulustrious, some less known, yet, who once were notables or notorious. Under King Charles's charter, the chief officer of the school, its chaplain and headmaster, was always appointed with the direct sanction of the Archbishops of Dublin, who, in the earlier years, were usually associated as Lords Justices with the government of the kingdom, and as the government of the city very often reflected that of the realm, so both wiU be found at times to be clearly reflected in the microcosm of the royal school of the city. Thus the old manuscript of our ancient Minute Books, sere and dead to the casual glance become to the student starthngty revivified, as the names of men long forgotten or half forgotten, rise|up, like the dry vi PREFACE.

bones in the valley of the prophet, luminous and animate, as though a breath had entered into them, and the atmosphere of our school, and its place in our mental vision, are then re-peopled with phantoms of the past, figures who were once chief actors on the stage of their day, makers of Dublin in great transitional epochs of her story. No one can be more conscious than the writer of the want of due proportion and of the undue discursiveness in many of the pages that follow. But if the fact that the governors were, throughout, the men charged with the rule of the city, and the conduct of its growth and development, be an inadequate excuse for the pages which have sought to trace the evolution of our Capital since the days of the Restoration, may the writer be permitted at least to hope that he has been enabled to recall some striking incidents of lasting interest, and to present them in lights, which, if not wholly new, exhibit them in relations in which they have not hitherto been familiar. His ambition will be more than satisfied if he has thus made even a slight contribution to the History of our Nobilissima Civitas, Dublin.

The sources from which these chapters are drawn have been, for the most part, noted in the text, but a special acknowledgment is due of their constant indebtedness to Sir John Gilbert's great Calendar of the City Assembly Rolls, as continued by his talented widow. To the Corporation of Dublin, and their most courteous Town Clerk, Mr. Henry Campbell, and to his friend and brother governor, Mr. F. Elrington Ball, the accomplished author of The History of Dublin, the author's thanks are here gratefully tendered.

Frederick R. Falkiner.

August, 1906.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

I. Thomas, Earl of Ossory . . Frontispiece.

(From engraving by Vandervane — Sir Peter Lely, Pinx.)

II. Edward Wettenhall. Bishop of Cork, 1678, ^p™f

{From original Portrait by Vander Vaert.)

III. Map of St. Stephen's Greex, as allotted,

1664 . . ' . . . . 43 (From Rental Maps in King's Hospital.)

IV. Map of Oxmantown Green, as allotted,

1665 .. .. ..44

(From Rental Maps in King's Hospital.)

V. Original Blue Coat School, as completed,

1675 .. .. ..70

(From Old Engraving in King's Hospital.)

VI. Charles Lucas, M.D. . . . . . . 199

(Photograph of Statue by Edward Smyth in the City Hall, Dublin.)

Vll. Front Facade of present King's Hospital, as

designed by Thomas Ivory . . . . 208

(From Original Plans in British Museum.)

VIII. Very Rev. Walter Blake Kirwan, Dean of

(From Engraving by Dr. Ward from Painting by Hugh Hamilton.)

This was painted in 1 806, after Kirwan's death, and dedicated in his honour to Lord Hardwick. It idealizes a famous scene when Kirwan, after an outburst, broke down, unable to proceed. Turning towards the orphans below the pulpit, he pointed to them, in the rapt sUence, with outstretched hands — ^the effect was electrical.

IX. King Charles II. . . . . . . 293

(From Engraving by Vertue of Original Portrait, by Sir Peter Lely.)

FOUNDATION

OF THE

KING'S Hospital of King Charles II.

I. Dublin At The Time Of The Restoration

The foundation of the King's Hospital was one of the earliest symbols of the new era of hope and energy, which, notwithstanding the prevalent misery, awoke on the restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, and was destined "to transform the mediaeval City on the Hill into the modern capital of Ireland. It is thus a significant page in the history of Dublin. For it is safe to say, that the face of the city changed more in the thirty years which followed, than in the three hundred that preceded. To conceive this, needs to have a mental vision of the city at the time of the Restoration, its physical, social, and political conditions. To aid such a conception is the motive of these preliminary pages.

If a citizen of to-day, standing on the central spot of our main thoroughfare, the middle of Carlisle or O'Connell Bridge, could see in vision the prospect eastward as his ancestor saw it in 1660, he could no longer believe he was in his native city. The ancestor could only have viewed from that point if perched on the rigging of an up-river

B craft, for then the Old Bridge alone crossed the Liffey, joining the Church Street and the Bridge Street on the site of the primaeval Ford of Athcliath. Our visionary might rub his eyes and dream he was looking seaward from a railway carriage crossing the salt lake at Malahide, at dunes and sandbanks, the glory of golfers, and level reaches, brown and gray at the ebb, but regained by ocean at high tide ; through these the river wound her channel deviously to the bar and the bay. No quay or sea rampart bound the jagged coasts of the estuary diverging north and south to Clontarf and to Merrion. The north shore trended obliquely behind where the O'Connell statue stands to the further end of Abbey Street, and thus to the causeway, still known as the North Strand, to mark by its name the old sea-line as it passed to Ballybough and the estuary of the Tolka. The tides twice daily overflowed the sites of Eden Quay and the Custom House, the Amiens Street station and all east of it, and the miles of harbour causeway, now known as the North Wall. Landward of this coast were slob grounds slashed with briny pools, behind which rolled green houseless fields upward into the country at Finglas and Artane. So, too, the south-east coast was an unbanked beach. Close to the right of our view-point was a creek covering the sites of Westmoreland, D'Olier and College Streets, and the Theatre Royal. This was the estuary of the riveret Steyne, the mill stream of the old priors of All Hallows, precursors of Trinity College.

College Green, so late as 1657, is said to adjoin the*seaside. This stream flowed into it opposite the College gates. The space is still traceable underground. ^ More than thirty years ago the writer had part in a bitter battle about the erection of the Provincial Bank in College Street. The contract assumed the foundations would be on ordinary terra firma, but the diggers went down down through nineteen feet of sludge, till the cost of the foundations nearly equalled the superstructure, and the fight of bank and builder raged through many Courts for the benefit of the 1 Gilbert's Calendar of Dublin Corporation Records, iv. 121, law. Charles Haliday tells of a poor servant maid drowned some sixty years ago, when a high tide broke into a basement at foot of Grafton Street. From this creek the coast went eastward under the causeway of Lazars or Lazie Hill in the line of Townsend Street, between which and the University precincts lay cattle-sprinkled pastures. Lazie Hill was so called from a very ancient hospice at the far and isolated end, projected for lepers under vow to embark for the shrine of St. James of ComposteUo. Near the present S. Clark's Church, the coast swerved to the right by the back of where Merrion Square stands, as famous then for snipe as now for ladies, under the upland of Holies and Lower Mount Street, by the site of Sir Patrick Dun's Hospital to the Beggar's Bush and the Dodder ; here it met a ridge of land r unn ing back to the bay in a spit, shaped hke a hockey staff, the twist of which was the Ringsend.

This was corruptly spelled even in 1660, for it means the end, not of the " Ring," but of the " Rinn or point." Thus between S. Marks and Ringsend a great gulf was fixed, flooding all the first mile of the now Wicklow railway, the Lansdowne football ground, the gas works and canal harbour. Here a coUier was wrecked on the site of Dun's hospital two hundred years ago. Into this gulf rushed the rapid Dodder, "the brook of Refarnham,"- without respect of persons in time of floods, for in 1629 it drowned the hope of one of the first families of the city, son of Sir WiUiaih Usher, who was clerk of the Privy Council and kinsman of the great Primate. The lad was crossing the ford, where Ballsbridge crosses now, on his way to town from the port at Ringsend, whence a car fared to Lazie Hill, carrying passeiigers at fourpence each, and passing over the sands at low water. Young Usher's fate forced the building of a stone bridge, on Sidney Smith's principle that the sacrifice of a bishop in a railway smash alone would force directors to take requisite precaution. In the very year our Hospital was completed, 1674, our founders, the Corporation, projected the forming in this Dodder gulf the great harbour of Dublin, and imported a famed engineer from London, Andrew Yarranton, whose plans, comprising a royal fort on the site of Merrion Square, are still extant. Behind the Ringsend spit spread the dunes of the south Bull, stretching in flats to Merrion and Booterstown, sweeping over the low-lands of Sydney Parade and to the confines of Old Dunleary — Fort of Leoghaire Arch-King of Erin, when Patrick our first saint came — to be changed to Kingstown, when George, first gentlemaa in England, came to visit us in 182 1. Through these eastern sands the river channels wound, forming four pools — Clontarf Pool and Salmon Pool, north and south of a floundershaped sandbank, and further east between the roaring North and South Bulls, the Poolbeg or Little Pool, and the Iron Pool, where the estuary merged in the ocean. -

But we are not to think of this eastern Dublin as of a dismal swamp, Dantean Cocytus of slush and sands. Dublin has always had a faculty of being jolly under creditable circumstances, and it is a question whether this scene had not in the Stuart times an animated variety, which for all its increase it lacks to-day. At Ringsend the larger vessels lay stranded at ebb, till lifted by the tide ; they transhipped their cargoes into gabbards and barges which sailed up the Estuary to the Wood and Merchant's Quays, which stood as now, to unload at the old Custom House, which then was at the foot of the present Parliament Street. Even sea-going vessels to a draught of six feet could go up on high, spring tides. Maps 3 of the age show the pools at Ringsend crowded • with three masted ships, and perhaps there were more of these direct from foreign parts than now, when Dublin imports come chiefly in cross-channel steamers. The wide space on Wood Quay still attests where the wine barrels were trundled straight from Bordeaux and the Tagus to the foot of the old Vicus Tabemorum, Wine- Tavern Street. Viceroys in the eighteenth century landed and left in state at Ringsend. In 1649 iron Oliver in

2 Capt. Grenville Collins' Map, 1686; iiaMda.y''s Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin, p. 233.

•' Yarrantlon's Map, 1674; Gill Cal., Vol. V. ; Rocque's Map, 1776. Scan. Dub., 113 person disembarked with his 13,000 Ironsides for the terrible campaign, the echoes of which stUl roll at times through the imperial parhament. In 1657, ^vhen his son, Henry, was Lord Deputy, the good frigate of war, Lambay Castle, was launched so far up river as Lazie Hill. There was a thriving herring fishery at Ringsend, salmon were netted in the Salmon Pool, and in the Clontarf Pool was a famous oyster bed, which survived tiU sanitation and sewer gas poisoned it to death. The Lord Mayor and Recorder had large admiralty jurisdiction luider royal charters, and their chronic conflicts with the royal Admiralty at Ringsend, where the jurisdictions joined, gave a hvely interest even to Coroner's inquests.

^Vnd in 1660 these sands were stUl written with great memories, for they were then nearly as on that Good Friday, 1014, when King Sitric Silkenbeard and his Queen, the daughter of the Great Brian, watched from the city battle" ments the fearful drawn battle, surging from Mary's Abbey to Clbntarf, watching all day in tremulous tension like the chorus from the towers of Thebes, when the Seven Champions were storming the walls, he to see his Ostmen allies driven to their ships or into the sea, she to learn at night of the three generations of her kinsmen in the battle slain, the grand old Boroimhe himself, his hero son, Murrough, his grandson boy Turlough transfixed and drowned in the Tolka weir at Clonhffe. There on the south bank stiU stood in 1660, the PiUar Stone of the Ste5nie by the creek, marked by Sir PhUip Crampton's swan fotmtain now, just as it had been erected eight hundred years before by the invading Vikings, the symbol of their conquest, and the signal for their fleets, where they would land and draw up their war canoes on the beach, like the Argives at Ilium. The Ste5me gave its name to aU the confines between the sea-shore and road to Baggot's rath, now the Baggot Streets ; in the centre lay Trinity CoUege, the old AU Saints Juxta Dublin ; its Nassau Street boundary was then the depressed causeway of S. Patrick's Well Lane. The piUar of the Steyne was the story of three hundred Scandinavian years written in stone, it still lives only in the parchments of some of our old city leases.

Westward of our point of vision, was more to identify the Dublin of 1660 with that of 1906. Both coasts, indeed, were still pebbly and embanked, and behind the northern slobs were green meadows to the line of Capel Street where S. Mary's Abbey rose. This shore is still commemorated by the Strand Street of to-day, though now severed from the water by the houses and embankment of Ormond Quay, but the shores were now converging towards river shape, and beyond the Abbey rose the tower of S. Michan's Church as now, and opposite to it the tower of Christchurch on the hill of the High Street ; and behind these the sunset sky, seen sometimes then as sometimes now, a sky-scape of glory, more pathetic for the luminous city vapours, and which is not to be surpassed in Ireland and therefore in the world. The south shore coursed along Fleet Street, then known as the Strete of the Strand, but close by the old Custom House, where Bollard's paper factory stands now, it turned -into a creek piercing up to the Lower Castle Yard, forming the estuary of the Poddle, which flowed in through the low ground below the Castle Creek, most noteworthy in this, that this was of old, the Blackpool or Dhubv Lynn, from which our beloved city is named. At its land end was an ancient mall-pond and dam, which gave name to the Damas gate, chief portal of the city proper close by, and to Damas, now Dame Street, which ran through Uttle more than a narrow lane to the corner of Trinity Street, where was the extreme portal the Blind Gate, opening to Hoggen Green which adjacent to the new university had alreadj' begun to be called CoUege Green. No relic of this pristine Dhubvlin now lingers visibly, save the sluice gate of the Poddle, under the wall of WelUngton Quay, famiUar only to the seagulls hovering immemorially from the cliffs of Howth and Lambay to dance their airy minuets round the entrance, aiding the tides in their daily task of ablution, and our sanitary authority pending the long promised main drainage.

To the left of our stand point, the sight was pleasant.

where the shore ran along the Fleet or Strand Street, with the bright gardens and villas of a few magnates behind with watergates to the river, their front gates in Hoggen Green and Damas Street, The eastern end, now the site of the Bank of Ireland, had been granted sixty years before to Sir George Carey, to whom Falkland was kin, on the terms of his building a bridewell and Free School. These proved abortive, and Sir Arthur Chichester, first Lord Belfast, was granted the site in fee farm for six and eight pence a year. Sir Arthur telling the city that he might have it as well as any one else ; he too was under terms to complete the abortive bridewell into a school, but instead Chichester - House was built — " just opposite the College " — This was one of our chief mansions at the Restoration, and here sat the Court of Claims and other public functionaries. Near it was the villa of Sir Arthur Annesley, representative of Dublin in Richard Cromwell's Parhanient of 1659. I"^ ^^^ city gift it is said to be adjoining the seaside. Annesley was created Earl of Anglesea, and his gardens are commemorated in Anglesea Street. Further west was the mansion of the Lord Chancellor Eustace, given him by the King on the restoration, and still marked by the street of his name, and beyond this, reaching to the Black Pool and Damas Gate, lay the home of Sir John Temple, Master of the Rolls, father of Swift's Sir William, and ancestor of Lord Palmerston ; this fronted to Damas Street and its memory is preserved in Temple Bar.

On the further side of these villas spread the Hoggen Green, between the city walls and the University, and back to the south as far as old Stephen Street, and the waste common of St. Stephen's Green. It was pierced on the city side by S. George's Lane, now South Great George's Street. Though sprinkled with some homesteads, it was stih the chief pleasance of the town. On the left it merged in the M5niclien Fields that covered the space of Dawson and Kildare Streets to the marshes of Merrion Square, the old lands of the Mynechen's Mantle, or S. Mary del Hoggen. founded for elderly nuns by Dermot MacMurrough, before the Anglo-Norman Invasion. Where St. Andrew's Church now stands was the Bowhng Alley, a primaeval recreation ground, where the archers shot in Plantagenet times, and behind this another place of sport, called Tib and Tom, where merry makings of the city youth were held before the Restoration and after. But right in front of the Bowling AUey facing Chichester House rose the most striking historic Memorial in the city bounds. — The Danish Mount. Under the enlightened regime of Strafford, the City Assembly passed an Ordinance " that no parcel of the Greenes or Commons of the City, Hoggen Green, S. Stephen Green, and Oxmantown Green shall henceforth be lett, but wholly kept for the use of the citizens to walk and take the air, by reason this citie is at this present very populous," and the Mayor was forbidden even to read any petition to the contrary, under the then dread penalty of £40. Such a law was of course doomed to mutability, even Lord Meath could not have preserved such a policy of open spaces, which the march of time was sure to trample down, but it is a sore pity that it could not preserve one of our most ancient landmarks, which any city in the world might be jealous to uphold. This was the Thinmote or Thing-mount, which gave name to the Green, the Ostman Hogge or hill, which still in 1660 rose seventy feet over the river level.

Here the townspeople gathered in the summer evenings, for the prospect was splendid over land and city and sea. The Ordinance was passed when the city was prosperous, but the necessities of the Restoration times compelled sales of the city lands. In 1661 the Corporation therefore leased the Hill site to the Bishop of Meath, Dr. Jones, who was then contemplating the erection of St. Andrew's Church, as the old parish Church at the Damas Gate was ruinous, and who had also bought the Bowling Green for that purpose, but in the lease of the Hill was a reservation to the city of a passage from the top to the bottom of the Mount — " for their common prospect," and a covenant that no building or other thing should be erected for

DUBLIN AT THE TIME F THE RESTORATION. 9

obstructing of said prospect. But in 1685, alas ! the whole was removed by the most flagrant act of Vandalism of that improving age. A fine view might be had elsewhere, but not the Thingmount, thronged with reminiscences that should never have been effaced.

For this was the Hill of Council of our Norse makers of Dublin, their centre of legislature and judicature, of public meeting and moot, their House Things or Hustings, their place of games and of doom. Sanctified, too, by religious awe, for the Vikings, pro more raised these " Things " in correlation to their Landing Steynes, erecting near them stone circle temples to Thor and Freya, and we may well think that the Churches of St. Andrew's and St. Mary, both on Hoggen Green in Plantagenet times, and known as St. Andrew Thingmote, and St. Mary del Hogge, replaced these temples here when the North men turned Christian. For the rule of the missionaries, as coimselled by Gregory the Great, was not to destroy pagan temples, but to transform them, conciliating their converts by following old forms, and replacing stone circles by rounded Campaniles ; and it is scarcely a coincidence that this new St. Andrew's Church was circular in form, and was known as the Round Church, till burned in Queen Victoria's time. The Mount was the scene of a very high comedy in the Strongbow Conquest- His lieutenant Milo de Cogan, about to join battle with Hasculf Mac TorkiU, our Ostman King, just relanded at the Steyne with Scandinavian reinforcements, to expel the invaders, feared an attack in the rere from the O'Bjnrne's clansmen of the Wicldow and Dublin hills. So he made treaty with Gylemeholmoc, then chief, and lord of Glencree and Kilruddery, by which the O'Byme and his clan were to look on at the battle, and " if God grant us (Norman) to defeat these folk (Ostmen), you are to help us to foUow them, but if we prove recreant, you are to join them to slay and torture us."

On this pledge Gylemeholmoc " gaily went out, and now is this King truly seated with his people upon the Hoggen over Stesoie outside the city in the plain to behold the melee." Here he sat on the top of the Thingmote, impartial as a Nationalist leader at a Ministerial crisis, waiting events, whether he will join Tory or Radical in the lobbies. And next year when Henry IT. came in person to win the lordship of Ireland, the wily Plantagenet knowing the Thingmote was the scene of election of the Ostman Kings, and its religious sanctity, chose it rather than the the fortress at the Castle, where to meet the Irish Chiefs, and obtain their homage. Here " he caused a royal palace to be constructed wonderfully by wythes after the manner of the Country, close by the Church of St. Andrew the Apostle outside the city," feasted there the Chieftains, entertained them with military sepctacles and games on the Green, and dismissed them with presents, having held with them the solemn festival of Christmas, 1172.4 At the Thingmote in later Plantagenet years, was erected under statutes of the Pale, 5 butts for Archery, where aU men between sixty and sixteen would muster and shoot up and down three times every feast day in summer, which at the Restoration had become the Dublin Bowling Green. The Thingmote was "the fortified hill near the-CoUege," the scene of a fierce meeting of Cromwell's soldiers in 1647, which the mutineers seized as a place of vantage, and held it until at midnight they were received to mercy.

The removal of the Thingmount and the Pillar of the Steyne was of a landmark, that had connected Dublin with all the misty romance of the Northmen, with the Tingshogen of Sweden, the Pillar Stones of the Shetlands and Orkney, with Staines and Runnymede, and with La Hogue in Normandy, and thus they tied us to the times when the Ivars, Godfreys, Sitrics, Olafs were kings at once both in Dublin and Northumbria, Lords of the Isles whose war cries were heard often —

Breaking the silence of the seas, Amongst the farthest Hebrides :

in the times when King Olaf sailed from Athcliath to contest the crown of England with Athelstane at Brunnanburgh,

DUBLIN AT THE TIME OF THE RESTORATION. ii

when contingents from the Liffey joined Rollo up the Seine, when he went to win the Duchy of Normandy, and to breed the iron race of William the Conqueror. The Ostmen who raised this Thingmount we call Goths, but surely they were Vandals who displaced it, and it is sad to record that a distinguished Recorder was the chief Vandal. Sir WiUiam Davys' house was opposite the College, where the Provost's house is now, in restoration times, then he took up the Bishop of Meath's lease of the Thingmount, and had a grant of the mount free of the conservative covenants ; he became Chief Justice of the King's Bench, and to enlarge his garden carted away our Mons Sacer to make the embankment on S. Patrick's WeU Lane to be named Nassau Street, after King William came.^

But the hfe of the town was in the httle waUed city on the hiU, and the few streets ra5mig out thence in starfish wise ; httle, but packed with varied vitality, quaint mediaeval and signally picturesque, its area occupied forty-five acres only. The ancient wall was just a statute mile in its devious girth, pierced by eight towered gates, loop-holed and portculUsed, between which rose sixteen other pinnacled turrets bristhng along or in front of the curtain. Three of the Gates were in the eastern W^all : the Damas Gate, leading up to the Castle ; the Pole Gate, adjoining S. W^erburgh's Church, giving access from Bride Street by a bridge over the Poddle. It was through this Milo de Cogan made his decisive charge which broke the Ostmen and secured the EngUsh invasion. S. Nicholas Gate, with double towers, one hundred and fifty yards further west, had also a bridge over the Poddle with access to S. Patrick's Street, and S. Nicholas' Church close by within the walls. Between Damas and the Pole gates was the Bermingham Tower, alas, alone and but partially sxirviving, and Stanihurst's Tower, seventy yards beyond the Castle waU. Between the Pole Gate and S. Nicholas, was Genevel's Tower round, three stories high, with timber lofts

^ The exact site of the Thingmount is fixed by a comparison of the

' leases made by the city, which are specified in the 4th and 5th volume

above. The three ports in the south wall were the New Gate, ' at the end of Commarket, from which the great city prison was called, beyond which S. Thomas Street ran out into the country, Gormond's Gate at the west end of Cooke Street, and the Bridge Gate close near, south of the Old Bridge of Dublin. Between S. Nicholas and the New Gate were three towers — Sarsfield's, Segrave's, and Pagan's. Fitzsimon's tower, between New Gate and Gormond's, and Harbard's tower, between Gormond's and the Bridge. On the northern wall behind the Merchant's and Wood Quays, were the Wine Tavern Gate and S. Audeon's Gate, added to the more ancient defences about the time of Bannockburn, when the city, alarmed by the invasion of Edward Bruce, and not content with the river protection, built them out of the stones of the Dominican Abbey, the site of the present Four Courts, burnt to the ground some years before. Along these two quays, and between wall and river, were Prichett's tower, Pyan's Castle at the end of Fishamble Street, then Casey's, Isoult's, and Buttevant's towers in succession, the last where the south end of Essex Bridge is now, with Bysses' tower, completing the circuit, between this and the Damas Gate.