A Visit to St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin

By Richard Denning

This summer my family and I visited Ireland and stayed for a week near the capital, Dublin. One of the days we went on a visit to St Patrick's Cathedral. St Patrick's is the national Cathedral of the Anglican Church of Ireland. It is also the largest as well as the tallest church in Ireland. Dublin actually has a second Anglican cathedral Christ Church which is the cathedral of Dublin, Glendalough and Cashel in the Church of Ireland. Dublin is unusual in having two Anglican cathedrals as well as a Catholic one (St Mary's).

The Cathedral seen from the north.

The Cathedral is named after Saint Patrick who is said to have visited Dublin in the 5th Century. According to tradition it was on this site that he chose a well in which to baptise new converts to Christianity which he introduced to the land.

Interestingly back in 1901 six grave slabs were discovered during building works about 100 yards from the Cathedral which dated to the 10th century. One of these stones was a cap to what appeared to be a very old well. Whilst there is no definitive proof that the well is the one that St Patrick used, it is thought quite probable that this is indeed the same well. Furthermore the stones at least show the site has been used as a Christian site for over one thousand years.

There is documentary evidence of a church on the site dating back to the year 890 when King Gregory of Scotland, visited it. In 1190 Archbishop John Comyn raised the church to Cathedral status. The present Cathedral building, in terms of shape and size, dates from 1220-1259 and was built during the tenure of an Archbishop Luke. Sadly Luke himself became blind. So when the building work was finished he never saw it.

The well stones that sat on the head of  the well.

As is the case with many cathedrals, the building was constantly developed in the following centuries. One of the early additions is now the oldest part that survives. Dating back to 1270 the Lady Chapel was added. In those centuries it had become the trend to add a chapel dedicated to Mary behind the altar. From mid-17th century the Chapel was called the ‘French Chapel’ as it was used by Huguenots who had fled France and came to Ireland following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

In the 14th century a series of disasters forced a rebuild of the original tower and nave: a violent storm in 1316 (which blew down the spire), a fire in 1362 and a further collapse of the tower in 1394. The current structure is essentially the one that survived after that last disaster and reconstruction although the clock, one of the first in Dublin, was added in 1560 and the modern spire in 1700. In the 18th and 19th centuries the cathedral went into decline and was in desperate need of repair. It was the Guinness Foundation that during the 1860s raised £150,000 that was the main benefactor that allowed restoration. During that time screens which separated the choir and priests from the congregation were removed, opening the entire structure up.

In the 15th century a curious incident occurred that created a famous saying still used today.

As we were walking around the Cathedral I came across a door standing in the middle of the floor. It is a very old wooden door with a curious hole in the middle. Drawing closer we realized it was not only a door of significance but in fact is the door behind the phrase “to chance your arm.”

My wife, Jane at the door

It seems that in the year 1492 the Butlers of Ormonde and the FitzGeralds of Kildare were rival families locked in a longstanding dispute over who should be the Lord Deputy. No resolution was reached and in that year the dispute became violent and a small battle occurred outside Dublin city walls.

The fight did not go well for the Butlers and so, realizing fortune had turned against them, they fled to St Patrick’s Cathedral where they took refuge. Their enemies pursued them to the cathedral and asked them to open the door and come out and agree to a peace.

The Butlers did not believe that they could trust the Fitzgeralds and so refused to open the door as they feared they would be killed.

So it was that Gerald FitzGerald asked for an axeman to chop a hole in the door. When this was done he pushed his hand through the door as a gesture of peace. The head of the Butler family took this as a sign of good faith and shook hands with Gerald. The fighting was over and peace restored.

I recreate the event. Fortunately Jane did not have an axe

The door is known today as the “Door of Reconciliation”. It is believed then that this story was the origin of a commonly used Irish phrase “To chance your arm” or to take a risk.

Jonathan Swift, most famously the author of “Gulliver’s Travels”, was Dean of Saint Patrick’s from 1713 until his death in 1745. He was politically very active and fought hard against social injustice against the Irish people. One success he had was preventing a debased currency being imposed on Ireland and for which he was presented with the freedom of the City of Dublin.

The pulpit used by Swift is still present in the cathedral.

At the time his love of exercise and obsession with cleanliness was considered most odd but seemed to have been good for him because Swift lived to be 77. He did not suffer from false modesty, however. Swift wrote his own epitaph himself before he died and which is still present in the cathedral. It read:

"Here lies the body of Jonathan Swift, Doctor of Divinity and Dean of this Cathedral,
Where savage indignation can no longer lacerate his heart;
Go traveller and imitate if you can, this dedicated and earnest champion of liberty"

A Copy of Handel; Messiah in the cathedral.

The cathedral was the location of a world premier when the combined choirs of Christ Church and Saint Patrick’s Cathedrals sang the first performance of Handel’s oratorio Messiah on the 13th of April 1742.

The Cathedral is actually situated slightly outside the "old city" which is clustered around the original viking settlement and Christ Church but all the important sites in Dublin are within walking distance and well worth the visit. You can find out more here...

~~~~~~~~~~

Richard Denning is an historical fiction author whose main period of interest is the Early Anglo-Saxon Era. His Northern Crown series explores the late 6th and early 7th centuries through the eyes of a young Saxon lord. Explore the darkest years of the dark ages with Cerdic.

An Irish Neo-Classical Architectural Gem – The Casino at Merino

by Arthur Russell

The Casino at Merino (Dublin)

In 1759, James Caulfield, 1st Earl of Charlemont began building a pleasure house called ‘The Casino’ near his ancestral house on his estate overlooking Dublin Bay (Italian names such as Merino, Rialto, Portobello were given to areas of Dublin by their aristocratic owners to commemorate their "Grand Tours" of Europe).

What was constructed on the estate at Merino House is described as a Neo-classical Garden Temple and is a true architectural gem that attracts thousands of visitors to view the excellence of design and superb examples of 18th century workmanship.

The Earl was a member of the 18th century Dublin Parliament, and engaged and collaborated with the most notable architect of his day; Sir William Chambers; to design the building. The Scottish architect never actually viewed the finished result of his work for Charlemont, due to many commitments and building projects he was involved in all over the three kingdoms. Sir William later wrote in his book “The Treatise on Civil Architecture” (1791), that the ideas for the Casino on Earl Charlemont’s estate in Dublin were derived from an un-executed design for ‘one of the end pavilions of a considerable disposition made soon after my return from Italy for Harewood House.’

 The driving inspiration for the building of the Casino (which means small house); came from Caulfield’s nine year long “Grand Tour” of Europe where he immersed himself in classical art and the architecture of Rome, Florence, Greece, Egypt and other locations. He determined, on his return to Ireland, to recreate and adapt as necessary, some of the challenging concepts he had seen into a single building on his own estate. As the second city of the Empire, mid eighteenth century Dublin was in the middle of a remarkable building boom that saw whole streets of elegant houses transform the city into a remarkable showpiece of wealth and privilege for the ruling Ascendancy class. Much of what is called Georgian Dublin still survives to give the city its distinctive character.

James Caulfield
1st Earl of Charlemont

As an aristocrat and a senior legislator in the Irish Parliament, the Earl had the time and money to indulge in what it is certain, many of his contemporaries considered a seemingly frivolous and impractical pursuit as he set about building the Casino on his estate. Regardless of what they thought; what he achieved in the structure is truly impressive from an architectural perspective.

His objective for the Casino was to create a retreat where he could get away from the cares of both his constituents and his estate, and where he could meet and entertain his closest friends and colleagues. The structure was built at some distance from the main Marino House and was accessed by means of a tunnel which ran between them. This tunnel could be used by servants from the main house carrying food and drink to guests in the retreat.

While the big estate house, Merino House; is long gone; and most of the surrounding lands have been taken over by subsequent urban development arising from the spread of the city of Dublin into the surrounding countryside; ‘The Casino at Merino’ still stands at the centre of a beautiful public park which is still enjoyed and appreciated by local residents and visitors alike.

 From the outside, the Casino appears to consist of just one single apartment. At the base of the four corners are statues of recumbent lions facing outwards. The impression of a single apartment arises from the large windows that fill the centre walls on 3 sides, along with the large entrance paneled door, that on closer examination, camouflages an inset smaller door; on the 4th side. The intention is clearly to make the building appear to be very simple and small from the outside. From inside it is anything but. The structure, which took a decade and a half to complete, actually contains a total of 16 rooms, which seems unbelievable until one enters and explores the interior, which is arranged on 3 levels including a basement. The design makes clever use of available space and light. The overall footprint of the building covers fifty square feet to its outer columns, and is in the shape of a Grecian cross.

The panes of the large windows are subtly curved so that it is impossible to see from outside that there is more than one level inside the structure. Each large window actually lights two or more rooms in the interior of the building, and on two levels. The floors are covered with intricate designs of polished wooden parquet blocks; mostly derived from exotic places then being exploited by the British Navy as it spread its Imperial power throughout the world. Some of the hardwood timbers used in the Casino are no longer available as the related tree species have sadly since become extinct. The floor designs are based completely on the variety of natural woods available, and are both colourful and intricate. Some designs indicate the Earl’s attachment to Freemasonry.

Above - The big door with
inset smaller door
View from interior through
one of the big windows

One of the wooden parquet floors

Four of the columns on the corners of the building are hollow and have a length of chain running down their centres, which causes rainwater to run down and away from the building without causing any wetting or dampening to the interior. Almost two and a half centuries later, this simple mechanism still works perfectly.

Two Roman ornamental urns on top of external walls camouflage flue pipes coming from fireplaces in the building. These features were designed by James Gandon, the architect of many public buildings in Georgian Dublin including the Customs House and the former 18th century Irish Parliament building (now Bank of Ireland).

The interior décor features interesting designs with excellent examples of decorative plasterworks on walls and ceilings. The rooms include a library, rooms to display collected art objects, niches for Roman and Grecian statuary, a kitchen; upstairs, a State Bedroom as well as servants quarters. The Casino remains as Earl Charlemont’s determination to encapsulate in a single building all that he found perfect on his Grand Tour

 Subsequent history of Casino at Merino

Within a hundred years after completion, the building had fallen into neglect. In 1876 the Charlemont Estate itself was sold, and the nearby Merino House was demolished during the 1920's. The Casino building remained in a state of disrepair until 1930 when an Act of the newly independent Irish Parliament was passed to allow it to be taken into state ownership care. It has since been painstakingly restored by the Irish Office of Public Works (OPW) who continue to be responsible for its upkeep. It stands as a perfect example of architect William Chambers’ work and the cultural aspirations of the Irish ruling classes.

Today the building is a must see target for visitors to Dublin city, and is a favourite place for the performance of civil wedding ceremonies.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Arthur Russell is the Author of Morgallion, a novel set in medieval Ireland during the Invasion of Ireland in 1314 by the Scottish army led by Edward deBruce, the last crowned King of Ireland. It tells the story of Cormac MacLochlainn, a young man from the Gaelic crannóg community of Moynagh and how he and his family endured and survived that turbulent period of history. Morgallion has been recently awarded the indieBRAG Medallion and is available in paperback and e-book form. More information available on website - www.morgallion.com

Wild Irish Women

by Tim Vicary

Who was the first woman elected to the British House of Commons? Nancy Astor, you say – every schoolgirl knows that.

But sorry, schoolgirls, that’s wrong. Read the question again, more carefully, as your teacher told you to do. It’s true that Nancy Astor was the first woman to TAKE HER SEAT in the Commons, in December 1919. But a quite different woman was ELECTED to the House of Commons, a whole year earlier, in December 1918.

Constance

A feisty lady from Dublin, with the traditional Irish surname of, er, Markiewicz.

Markiewicz? Irish? Come on. If she was really elected, why didn’t she take her seat? Explain, please. This doesn’t make much sense.

Lissadell

Ok, let’s start at the beginning. Once upon a time, in 1868, a little girl called Constance was born. She was born in London, so she wasn’t really Irish, but her father, Sir Henry Gore-Booth, was an Anglo-Irish landlord. So Constance Gore-Booth and her younger sister Eva spent much of their childhood at the beautifully named family home of Lissadell, which is in the county Sligo, a large portion of which their father owned.

W.B. Yeats, 1900

Like all Anglo-Irish girls they learned to ride and shoot from an early age, but they also developed a commendable concern for the poor Irish peasants they saw around them, as well as an interest in art and poetry. One of the many artistic guests at Lissadell was the poet W.B.Yeats; much later he wrote a poem about the sisters: “Two girls in silk kimonos, both beautiful, one a gazelle.”

Maud Gonne

Constance trained to be a painter, and in Paris in 1900 she married a Polish widower, Count Casimir Markiewicz – thus becoming the Countess Marciewicz. They settled in Dublin and she became a landscape painter. But Constance was also passionately interested in women’s rights, and the idea of Irish independence.  In 1908 she joined Inghinidhe na hEireann (Daughters of Ireland) the women’s branch of Sinn Fein, whose first president was Maud Gonne, about whom W.B. Yeats wrote many more poems. Although many members of the society were working class women, the Countess arrived at her first meeting after attending a ball at Dublin Castle, still wearing a diamond tiara.

These Anglo-Irish aristocratic women had immense self confidence and energy: they had been brought up to believe the world belonged to them and if they didn’t like the way it was, they were about to change it. Constance, like Maud Gonne, acted in Yeats’s plays at the Abbey Theatre; and with her sister Eva she campaigned for women’s suffrage. At a political rally in Manchester, where Winston Churchill – an opponent of women’s votes - was standing in a by-election, Constance appeared driving a carriage with four white horses. ‘Can you cook a dinner, woman?’ a male heckler challenged. ‘Of course I can,’ Constance replied scornfully. ‘Can you drive a coach and four?’

As you see, she was no shrinking violet. In 1909 she founded Fianna Eireann, an Irish nationalist scouts association which trained teenagers to use guns. In 1911 she was jailed for protesting against the visit of King George V to Ireland. She had thrown stones at the King and Queen’s portraits and burned Union flags. In 1913 there was a major strike in Dublin, and she joined James Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army to protect the strikers. She set up soup kitchens and sold her jewellery to feed their families. Landscape painting seemed far behind!

Lieutenant Markiewicz

Her true moment of glory came during the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, when Connolly’s Citizen Army joined Padraig Pearse in occupying the Dublin’s General Post Office and reading out a stirring declaration of Irish independence. The Countess, as Lieutenant Markiewicz, ordered her Citizen Army Volunteers to occupy St Stephen’s Green and - absurdly  - to defend it by digging trenches in the park, like those on the Western Front.  Enthusiasm, however, is one thing, military tactics another: it had apparently not occurred to her how easy it would be for British soldiers to climb onto the rooftops around the park and shoot directly down into the trenches below! Her soldiers withdrew hurriedly to the more defensible College of Surgeons, where she surrendered six days later.

And that might well have been the end of the story. As one of the leaders of a rebellion which had tried to get guns from Germany in the middle of a war, she was convicted of treason and sentenced to death. But she was a woman! And so, unlike Pearse and Connolly and 13 others, she was spared.

Her bust in St Stephen's Green

And so we come, at last to her election to Parliament. All those Irish rebels who had not been shot were imprisoned for 6 months and then released, and at the 1918 General Election, inspired by the martyrs of the Easter Rising, they joined Sinn Fein and stood for Parliament. Constance herself was back in prison, for campaigning against conscription, but she was a Sinn Fein candidate too. And she won! She was elected for the constituency of Dublin St Patrick’s with 66% of the vote, thus making her the first woman ever elected to the House of Commons and beating Nancy Astor by 12 whole months!

But, er … she didn’t take her seat? Ah, no. You see, none of them did. Her party, Sinn Fein, won 73 out of 105 Irish seats, but no Sinn Fein MPs went to Westminster. Why not? Well, because as far as they were concerned, they were standing for independence, in support of the declaration which Pearse and Connolly had read out on the steps of the General Post office in 1916. That’s what the Irish people had voted for, they said. They hadn’t elected their Sinn Fein MPs to attend Parliament in some foreign city like London or Vladivostok or Timbuctoo, had they? No, they’d elected them to form an Irish government, in Dublin. And that’s what they did.

So Constance never took her seat in the House of Commons after all. Which is a pity, really, because it might have been quite dramatic.  Rather like a female Guy Fawkes sitting on the back benches and wondering: ok - what next?

There’s a lot more to tell about Constance (and Eva) but no space for it here. But if you’ve enjoyed this post you may understand why I felt inspired to write two novels about Anglo-Irish women in this period. They had a lot of courage and energy, a lot to protest about, and they surely lived their lives to the full!

Something to read about, while great-granny nods off beside the fire.

****

Tim Vicary’s Anglo-Irish historical novels Cat and Mouse and The Blood Upon the Rose are available as ebooks on Amazon US and Amazon UK. You can read more about them on his website and his blog.

All pictures from Wikimedia Commons