Sketch of the History of Dublin

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Sketch of the History of Dublin**

By C. Litton Falkiner, M.A., M.R.I.A.

(From the Handbook to the Dublin District, British Association, 1908)

It is a curious circumstance which has often been noted that the story of the Irish capital does not become the story of the capital of the Irish people until a period long subsequent to the first foundation of Dublin.

Although the Irish annalists make occasional mention of the site of the future city of Dublin by its earliest name of Ath Cliath, or Ath Cliath i Cualu, from the district of Cualain, a territory corresponding to the diocese of Glendalough; it is not until the end of the eighth century that vague tradition and unauthenticated legend begin to crystallize into history with the coming of the Norse invader.

Owing its origin to Danish auspices, Dublin was neither first built by Irish hands, nor originally peopled by men of Irish race. To the Ireland of the ages before the advent of the Vikings, the spot round which the city was to rjse had no doubt always been a place of some importance. For its maritime situation must from the earliest times have necessitated some sort of assemblage of dwellings near the junction of the River Liffey with the Irish Sea.

But there is nothing to indicate that either in pre-Christian or early Christian times the ancient Ath Cliath had reached a position of consequence. Until the Danes had fixed their seat in the immediate neighbourhood, no Leinster chieftain or Irish king appears to have chosen the place for stronghold or for residence.

Even during the first hundred years of its Norse ownership, it is improbable that any considerable town can have grown up. Indeed, both the name originally given to the place by the native Irish and the later one, likewise of Gaelic origin, which the Scandinavian invaders adopted, indicate that the early importance of the spot was geographical rather than political; and arose less from any settlement of which it had become the site than from the different uses, appropriate to the physical features of the locality, to which the Celt and the Norseman respectively put it.

To the former it was Ath Cliath, the ford bridged by hurdles, which formed the most direct means of communication between the ancient kingdoms of Meath and Leinster; and as such it is said, but without any sufficient authority, to have been ulitized by St. Patrick when making his way from Wicklow to Armagh.

To the latter it was Dubhlinn, the dark pool or haven lying eastward of the ford, a little further down the river, in which the warships of the Viking might find safe harbourage in the course of his marauding visits to the Irish coast.

The earliest ravages of the Danes in Ireland commenced towards the close of the eighth century; but it was not until the year 837 that the Vikings paid their first recorded visit to Dublin. In that year there came “three score and five ships and landed at Dubhlinn of Ath Cliath” to plunder the adjacent territory. This was the prelude to the incursions of the Finn Gaill or Fair Strangers, the memory of whose settlement in the district north-west of Dublin is embalmed in its name of Fingal.

Their advent seems to have been followed within a year or two by the erection of the first recorded building in Dublin, a fortress or fixed encampment which, ten years later, was destroyed by a fresh horde of Northmen. The new-comers represented a different branch of the Scandinavian stock, and are called by the annalists Dubh Gaill, or the Dark Strangers.

For some time after their arrival the story of Ireland is a succession of struggles between the two opposite elements in the Scandinavian immigration; but about the middle of the ninth century this antagonism terminated in the general recognition of Aulaf or Olaf the White by all sections of the invaders. It was by this coalition that the Scandinavian power in Ireland was permanently consolidated; and it is in King Aulaf that we are to recognize the true founder of Dublin. In 851, according to the chronicles of the Four Masters, “Aulaiv, son of the king of Loch-lann, came into Ireland, and all the foreigners submitted to him, and had rent from the Irish.”

For above a century and a half from the establishment of Aulaf’s authority, Dublin was the centre of that important Viking confederacy, stretching from Carlingford to Waterford, to which the name of Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin has been applied.

But it is not to be supposed that the Danish supremacy was left unchallenged throughout this long period. The story of the early wars of Ireland after the coming of the Norsemen contains the record of more than one struggle between the native and the alien race for the possession of that fortress by means of which the Danish kings of Dublin sought to buttress their power, and which was to form the nucleus of the future capital.

In these contests there were many vicissitudes, and fortune was fickle with her favours. But, though the Irish had their triumphs, they were, for a long period, temporary and barren; whereas from the date of the great battle, fought on October 17th, 917, on the banks of the Liffey, within a mile or so of the very site of the original Ath Cliath, until that of the still greater Battle of Clontarf, fought close on a century later, the Danish supremacy in Dublin was complete and unbroken. And although the famous victory of Brian Borumha in 1014 effected the expulsion of the foreigner from Meath and Leinster, it did not effectually achieve the deliverance of Dublin from foreign rule.

For above half a century after Clontarf the city remained in Danish hands. Down to the time of the coming of the Normans, Dublin continued to be, predominantly at least, the city of the Ostmen, as the Norse inhabitants had come to be known.

It was by a garrison of Ostmen that in 1170 it was stoutly, though ineffectually, held against Strongbow and his followers. Thus it is that the oldest memorials which Dublin has to boast are those of its early Norse owners, and that its pre-Norman remains are of Scandinavian rather than of Gaelic origin. Its oldest cathedral

• Christchurch - was founded almost a quarter of a century after the Battle of Clontarf by Sitric, its Danish king. Its oldest church, St. Michan’s, recalls a Danish saint. And an important quarter of the modern city, on the north bank of the Liffey, has but lately lost its long-preserved name of. Oxmantown or Ostmanstown.

But if the earliest traditions of Dublin are undoubtedly those which connect the city with its Norse founders, its earliest authenticated records are as unquestionably Norman. Beyond the associations just mentioned, there is little, if anything, to identify the Dublin of to-day with the capital of the Scandinavian kingdom; or to indicate what. manner of city it was that on St. Matthew’s Day, September 21st, 1170, after its abandonment by the Danish king, Hasculf McTorkil, surrendered to Strongbow and his valiant lieutenant Miles de Cogan; and which, after the abortive attempt at recapture by a Danish squadron under the dispossessed sovereign, was to become the central stronghold of Norman authority in Ireland.

It is impossible to affirm decisively that the fortress of king Aulaf once stood on or near the site of the “royal palace roofed with wattles after the fashion of the country,” which Henry II, on his first arrival in Dublin in 1174, erected for the accommodation of his Court at Christmastide. But it is at least extremely probable that it was so. For the physical configuration of the rising ground to the south-east of the city-walls must at all times have suggested the eminence on which Dublin Castle now stands as the most appropriate site for a fortress.

Thus it may well have been that the battlements of the watch-tower from which king Sitric had followed the varying fortunes of the fight at Clontarf rose from the self-same spot on which for seven centuries His Majesty’s castle of Dublin has been the citadel of the governing authority in Ireland.

But however that may be, no trace of the Danish fortress survived the final overthrow of Scandinavian power; and it is really with king John’s order for the construction of “a strong fortress in Dublin, suitable both for the administration of justice and, if need be, for the defence of the city,” that the history of Dublin, considered as a metropolis, must be said to begin.

The Norman captors of the Danish town had received from Henry II the charter under which Dublin was to remain, during the long Plantagenet era, the one secure stronghold of English power in an island only half subdued.

After the expulsion of the Norsemen, the sovereign “granted to his men of Bristol his City of Dublin to inhabit and to hold of him, and of his heirs for ever, with all the liberties and free customs which his men of Bristol then enjoyed at Bristol, and through all England.” This charter, subsequently confirmed by king John and others of Henry’s successors, gave to the city and its inhabitants an impress which lasted down to Stuart times. “It is resembled to Bristol, but falleth short,” was the verdict of an English visitor in the time of James I.

The people of Dublin long retained the mercantile characteristics of the great capital of the west of England; and the parish church of St. Werburgh’s, dedicated to the patron saint of one of the earliest of Bristol churches, still bears witness to the connexion between the two cities.

The essentially alien character of Dublin, as thus colonized, is well illustrated by the fact that its citizens were long a prey to the depredations of the Irish septs who dwelt within its neighbourhood. Easter Monday of the year 1209 was marked by a memorable raid by the O’Byrnes and O’Tooles, who, descending unexpectedly on the holiday-making citizens, drove them within the city walls, after a slaughter which caused the day long to be remembered in the capital as Black Monday.

And Stanihurst, the sixteenth-century chronicler, has recorded how, at a somewhat later date, the Irish enemy carried their raids on one occasion even into the precincts of the Court of Exchequer, “where, surprising the unweaponed multitude, they committed terrible slaughter by sparing none that came under their dint, and withal, as far as their Scarborough leisure would serve them, they ransacked the prince’s treasure. ”

It was doubtless upon some such provocation as this that the work of building the castle and raising the walls of Dublin was ordered and enforced by King John. To that monarch, who as Lord of Ireland had a peculiar interest in his father’s conquest long before he succeeded to the English Crown, Dublin was perfectly familiar, and he thoroughly understood its needs.

The first instructions for the building of the castle were issued to the Justiciary, Meiller FitzHenry; but it is to a Norman Archbishop of Dublin, Henri de Londres, that the honour of its erection is really due. The fortress appears to have been completed about the year 1220, and the city walls a few years later. But both castle and city underwent considerable expansion at the hands of the Viceroys of the early Plantagenet sovereigns.

Henry III gave orders for the erection of a great hall, 120 feet in length and 80 in breadth, “with glazed windows after the manner of the Hall of Canterbury,” a building which in later days appears to have served as the place of meeting for the earlier Irish Parliaments; and it was at the behest of the same monarch that a splendid chapel was raised within the castle precincts to the honour of Edward the Confessor.

There is not much of external splendour about Dublin Castle as it exists to-day; but there can be little doubt that, as conceived by its Plantagenet founders, it was intended to be a pile worthy to be the principal edifice of a stately capital.

The limits of the medieval city, as encompassed by the walls and turrets designed to defend it, were far from extensive. From the date of its first origin, as the seat of a settled political system, Dublin has a history of over seven centuries, in the course of which the metropolis has from time to time been extended, until at the present day its limits have come to embrace an area of close on eight thousand acres, and to contain a population of nearly three hundred thousand.

But these imposing figures have only recently been attained by the inclusion within the city boundaries of several of what until recently were deemed its northern and western suburbs; and down to the year 1900 the city of Dublin had long keen understood to mean the area within the North and South Circular Roads, a circumference of about nine miles.

But the walls of the medieval city were much less extensive, and can hardly have measured more than an Irish mile, or encompassed an area much larger than that now enclosed in St. Stephen’s Green. Its dimensions can be gauged with fair accuracy from the accompanying map (here, 240k file  to preserve detail), by which it will be seen that the city lay along the south bank of the Liffey, whose waters at high tide ran right up to the walls from a point just below the castle, at which Grattan Bridge now spans the river, to the Old Bridge; the whole forming an irregular quadrangle, near the middle of which stood Christchurch Cathedral.

Although portions of the ancient walls are still discernible, their traces are of the faintest, only St. Audoen’s Arch surviving to show the precise situation of one of the eight city gates. But no substantial change in the boundaries of the capital having taken place between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, a late Elizabethan description of “the whole circuit of the city walls” enables us to gain a fair notion of the character of the medieval town.

The walls were about 17 feet high, with a breadth of 4 or 5 feet, and the numerous towers by which they were defended varied from 16 to 40 feet in height. Within was a rampart, 15 feet thick, and the walls were stoutly buttressed at various points without. The gates, of which the chief was Newgate, were of imposing dimensions.

Few studies in historical topography can have more real interest than the analysis of the process by which so many of the great cities of modern Europe have been gradually developed from the walled enclosures, which were indispensable conditions of a medieval town, into the spacious and unrestricted amplitude of a twentieth-century metropolis.

In the case of Dublin the process is peculiarly well marked and easy to trace, and is the work in the main of three great periods of expansive growth. As late as the era of the Commonwealth, Dublin still remained a walled town. within the ambit of whose fortifications few changes affecting its general aspect had taken place for a couple of centuries.

From the days of the later Plantagenets to those of the later Stuarts, it may be said with little exaggeration that no changes on a scale large enough to affect its general configuration were wrought in the appearance of the capital or in its geographical outline.

Some extensions of the residential quarter had indeed taken place in the closing years of the sixteenth century, the erection of Trinity College on the site of the old monastery of All Hallows naturally leading to the occupation of the intervening area between College Green and Dublin Castle, now traversed by the spacious thoroughfare of Dame Street.

Thus, almost contemporaneously with the foundation of the University, the site on which the Parliament Buildings in College Green-now the Bank of Ireland-were subsequently raised was utilized for the first time by the well-known statesman and soldier, Sir George Carew, for the building at first called Cary’s Hospital, but afterwards known as Chichester House, from the name of its owner under James I, the celebrated Lord Deputy, Sir Arthur Chichester.

But no attempt had as yet been made to enlarge the metropolis, either to the north, where the ancient Oxmantown still sufficed for all the inhabitants of Dublin on that side of the river, or to the south-east, where the modern enclosure of St. Stephen’s Green was still a common. And along the line of the southern quays, already antiquated to our twentieth-century, eyes, fresh meadows ran from the river banks to the old Priory of Kilmainham.

But the Restoration was to change all that. Under the auspices of an illustrious Irishman, the first Duke of Ormond, who held office as Lord Lieutenant for fifteen of the last twenty-five years of the de facto of Charles II, a remarkable transformation was effected. Ormond, and those who with him constituted the viceregal court, had, like so many of the followers of his sovereign, passed more than ten years in an enforced exile in the cities of the continent.

The experience was not without a marked educational influence on the exiled cavaliers, who returned from abroad with new and liberal ideas of what a capital ought to be. The walled medieval city, which, as late as 1649, had endured a siege in much the same form in which an attack might have been conducted two centuries earlier, speedily vanished before the more advanced notions of the returned royalists.

Houses everywhere sprang up without the walls of Dublin. The space from Cork Hill to College Green, previously but sparsely occupied, was speedily filled up; and the quays began to be formed. On the north bank of the river, Oxmantown Green was so largely encroached upon that St. Stephen’s Green, which was first walled in about this time, had to be requisitioned as an exercise-ground for the garrison.

The capital grew so quickly that it was noted in 1673 by Lord Essex, one of the Restoration Viceroys, that “the city of Dublin is now very near, if not altogether, twice as big as it was at His Majesty’s Restoration, and did till the Dutch war began every day increase in building.”

So rapid was the extension that some of the old-fashioned citizens, accustomed to rely for security on the protection of the city walls, were filled with alarm, and felt obliged to warn the Lord Lieutenant of the dangers likely to be occasioned in time of war by the large number of dwellings which had sprung up outside the defences of the city.

But, apart from the actual extension of streets and buildings throughout this period, the era of the Restoration was marked in Dublin by two great and abiding memorials of the public spirit and enterprise of its seventeenth-century rulers and citizens. The formation of the splendid recreation-grounds of the Phoenix Park, and the enclosure of the spacious area of St. Stephen’s Green, at opposite sides of the city, produced a marked effect on the conditions of the further development of Dublin. The Phoenix Park, from the moment it was provided, enormously enhanced the amenities of residence in Dublin.

And, although a full century was to elapse before residential Dublin transgressed beyond the eastern limits of St. Stephen’s Green, the permanent dedication of so large an area as an open-air space has had an abiding effect on the aspect and atmosphere of the modern city.

Of these two improvements, the first was the work of the Viceroy, the second of the municipality. The germ of the Phoenix Park was found in certain Crown lands, which, having originally formed portion of the possessions granted to the Priory of the Knights Hospitallers at Kilmainham, had been resumed by the Crown on the suppression of the monasteries.

To this nucleus Ormond added extensively by the purchase of adjacent property to the north and west; so that, as first designed, the Park comprised above 2,000 acres, including the area south of the river now forming the grounds of the Royal Hospital

• another monument of post-Restoration magnificence.

The Park was not designed by Ormond as the seat of the Viceregal residence; and the present Viceregal Lodge became so only by purchase from a private owner, who, towards the close of the eighteenth century, had been permitted to build a residence in connexion with his office of Ranger of the Phoenix Park.

But in its present state the Park, as a whole, owes much to the care and interest of a succession of Viceroys, notably of the celebrated Lord Chesterfield, who took a lively interest in its plantations, and by whom the Phoenix Column in the centre of its principal drive was erected.

St. Stephen’s Green, on the other hand, owes its origin to municipal auspices, stimulated in part by the pressure of financial exigency, and in part by the spirit of emulation and zeal for improvement which was abroad under the Duke of Ormond’s regime.

The confusion of the Civil War had worked havoc alike with the material prosperity of the general body of the citizens of Dublin and with the municipal finances. The State Papers of the time depict in mournful colours the ruin and indigence wrought in the course of the long struggle, which in Dublin had been marked by all the horrors of a sustained siege and the desolation inevitably produced by the constant apprehensions of military assault.

Accordingly the city fathers could find no better means of replenishing an exhausted exchequer than by letting out the lands round the common called St. Stephen’s Green as building lots, at the same time providing for the enclosure of the central space. Although the allotments were taken up by persons of wealth and position, it was not until the succeeding century that the building ground was fully utilized.

But in the early half of the eighteenth century the Green became the centre of fashionable Dublin, and the Beaux’ Walk, along its northern side, was long the chief resort of the leaders of Dublin society. Down to a late period in the nineteenth century St. Stephen’s Green was maintained at the expense of the residents.

It owes its present splendour as a public park solely to the munificence of Lord Ardilaun, who, in 1880, carried out, at a cost of £20,000, the scenic transformation which has converted it from an ordinary city square into one of the handsomest of city parks.

Besides those two great alterations in the geographical aspect of the city and its environs, two striking memorials of the reign of Charles II survive in Dublin. The first is the stately building near its western boundaries known as the Royal Hospital, an institution similar to Chelsea Hospital, which was built towards the close of the reign from the design of Sir Christopher Wren on the site of the ancient Hospital of the Knights of St. John. The second is the Hospital or Free School of Charles II, better known as the Blue Coat School founded and endowed by the liberality of the citizens of’ Dublin, acting under a Royal Charter. But in the latter case the original Caroline building has given place to an eighteenth-century successor.

With the close of Charles the Second’s reign and the ensuing political disturbances, a period was put to the development of Dublin under the Stuarts; and it was not until the reign of George II that those extensive additions began to be made which render the latter half of the eighteenth century the grand period in the architectural adornment of the Irish capital.

But the interval between the accession of James II and the demise of George I, though unmarked by any striking memorials, was, nevertheless, characterized by a gradual development of certain districts theretofore but sparsely inhabited, or even wholly waste, whose occupation was an essential preliminary to the more imposing additions of the succeeding age.

Thus the considerable territory between the enclosure of the College Park and the river had become so thickly populated as to necessitate the erection of a new parish, now known as St. Mark’s; and some progress was made towards the inhabiting of the low-lying lands immediately adjacent to the north-eastern bank of the Liffey.

These extensions were in part the effect of the pronounced development of the city along the banks of the river in an easterly direction, which its growing wealth and prosperity rendered necessary. But they were in part also due to the important enlargement of the port of Dublin by the clearing of the river channel for the better accommodation of shipping. This was an improvement which ultimately transformed the neighbourhood from a wilderness of slough and slob into the busy hive of railway and river-side enterprise of which it has more recently become the scene; but its most immediate and most conspicuous effect was the laying out of Sackville Street and its adjacent northerly extensions-thoroughfares which the subsequent construction of Carlisle, now O’Connell, Bridge first brought into direct contact and communication with the centre of the modern capital.

The age of Queen Anne, which in England has left so clear an architectural imprint, has but few memorials in Dublin. No great building of the first rank survives to recall that era, unless it be the fine Library of Trinity College, which, however, though begun in Queen Anne’s reign, was not completed till 1732; and, though the period was marked by a good deal of rebuilding on old sites, the houses then erected have given place for the most part to the more spacious residences of a later time.

The main importance of this period in the history of Dublin lies not so much in its visible enlargement as in the extension of its local and municipal institutions, more than one of which, such as the Port and Docks Board, date from the beginning of the eighteenth century. The development of the linen trade, and the diffusion throughout the country of a spirit of mercantile enterprise, which, though it has unfortunately not been maintained, was a very marked feature of the early part of the eighteenth century, exercised a direct effect upon the progress of the Irish capital; and to this increased commercial prosperity must be attributed in a great degree that marvellous outburst of architectural enterprise which marked the reign of George II and his successors, and which has left such indelible marks on the face of the city.

For, in its essential features, in almost all that attracts the attention of the passing traveller, the Dublin of to-day is still the Dublin of the closing years of the eighteenth century. With the exception of the cathedrals of Christ-church and St. Patrick’s, the only buildings of real antiquity which it contains, almost every structure of interest, and every characteristic feature of the capital, apart from its natural environs, are memorials of that period.

Of those public buildings upon which Dublin now prides itself, the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham is almost the only one which existed in the seventeenth century, and curiously few were added in the nineteenth. Of the great distinctive features in the centre of the modern city, the Parliament House, now the Bank of Ireland, was built in the reign of George II; and the great facade of Trinity College, erected at the cost of the Irish Parliament, dates from that of his successor.

Modern municipalities have often indulged in lavish expenditure for the housing of their civic councils; but the handsome meeting-place of the Corporation of Dublin has only been adapted from the Royal Exchange of the eighteenth century, whilst the Four Courts and the Custom House, the two chief adornments of the River Liffey as it flows through the city, are monuments of architects of the same period.

Nor are the memories of the most vivid period of Irish history in the Dublin of to-day confined to its public buildings. For the residential quarters of Dublin within the old city boundaries still belong as exclusively as its public edifices to the same period. The great squares commemorate in their names the Viceroys and nobility of the Georgian era, and few of the more important streets were unbuilt a hundred years ago.

Save the handsome Post Office in Sackville Street, which dates from very early in the last century; the fine group of buildings round Leinster House, forming the National Gallery, Museum, and Library; and a few of the public statues; there is little in the configuration of the modern streets of Dublin which would be unfamiliar to an eighteenth-century citizen.

In the last-named adornment, indeed, Dublin has never been opulent, and it was notably deficient in statues before the erection of those of Burke, Goldsmith, and Grattan, in College Green; of those of Nelson and O’Connell, in Sackville Street; and of the recently erected monument to Queen Victoria at Leinster House.

The best-known of books about Dublin, Sir John Gilbert’s “History of Dublin,” originated in its author’s rambles as a young man through the streets of his native city, and in the memories which his well-stored mind enabled him to recognize as enshrined in the street-names affixed to the principal thoroughfares.

And as there is no better stimulus to the faculty of historical imagination than the traditions which are preserved in the street-nomenclature of a modern city, so there is perhaps no better key by which a stranger interested in such associations can attempt to unlock the past than that which is afforded by the simple process of noting the names attached to its more important streets.

In the case of Dublin this method of investigation is more than ordinarily simple, requiring for the most part no more elaborate equipment of historical lore than a list of the names of the statesmen who have represented the Sovereign in Ireland for the last two hundred and fifty years.

The succession of the Viceroys of Ireland is embalmed in the names of the principal streets of the Irish capital ; and whoever would trace the gradual development of Dublin has only to make himself acquainted with Viceregal chronology from the Restoration to the Union.

For the order of its municipal development corresponds with curious precision with the order of the Viceregal succession, the name of each succeeding Viceroy being stamped on each fresh extension of the streets of the metropolis. Thus, the earliest development of Dublin after the Restoration consisted, as already noted, in the extension of the quays on the north bank of the Liffey.

Accordingly, we find in this extensive thoroughfare memorials of the chief governors of the period- Ormond Quay perpetuating the name of the great Duke of Ormond; Arran Quay that of his son Richard, Earl of Arran, who twice held office as deputy in his father’s absence; and Essex - now Grattan-Bridge, preserving until quite recently the memory of another Restoration Viceroy.

In the more modern additions to the city the same rule holds good. Grafton Street, Harcourt Street, and Westmoreland Street on the south side of the city; Bolton Street, Dorset Street, and Rutland Square on the north side, exhibit the order of the street extensions of the eighteenth century. The process might be minutely followed in the names of many of the lesser streets. It can be traced in a less noticeable but still remarkable degree in the case of nineteenth-century extensions in Dublin, and in the street-nomenclature of the various townships outside the borough boundary.

It has not been possible in such a sketch as this to attempt to exhibit the many remarkable events in the history of Ireland with which Dublin has direct associations. To do so would be to tell both too much and too little of the larger story of Ireland.

For, though in one sense the story of the capital is the story of the country, the chronicle of Dublin can scarcely be said to abound in striking episodes. Since its capture by Strongbow’s followers the incidents of its history have not often been exciting. In Plantagenet times its most thrilling experience was the imminence, in the reign of Edward II, of a siege at the hands of Edward Bruce, as the result of an invasion from Scotland which had very serious effects on the course of Irish history; but the Scottish commander stopped short of assaulting the city, and turned his arms in a different direction.

Under the first of the Tudors the city was the scene of Lambert Simnel’s brief masquerade in the character of the rightful King of England; the pretender being crowned with all the pomp and circumstance of royalty in the cathedral of Christchurch.

And, in the reign of Henry VIII, the capital witnessed the most serious revolt against English authority of which it has ever been the scene, when, in 1534, Lord Thomas FitzGerald, while governing the country in the absence of his father, the Earl of Kildare, who had been summoned to England on a charge of treason, laid siege to Dublin, and sought to carry Dublin Castle by storm. But the young Geraldine, who is known in history as Silken Thomas, was unable to cover his treason with the justification of success, and perished with his five uncles at Tyburn.

In spite of the general unsettlement of the country, and the prolonged Irish wars which filled the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the close of the Tudor era was unmarked by any very notable event in Dublin history; and the close of Strafford’s administration on the eve of the great Civil War was the occasion of the next outbreak by which the peace of the city was menaced. On October 23rd, 1641, the Irish Rebellion was heralded by the abortive attempt of Sir Phelim O’Neill to surprise Dublin Castle, as the preliminary to the capture of the capital. But the Government of the day was served on this occasion by the treachery, or indiscretion, of one of the conspirators, and Dublin was spared the bloodshed which elsewhere characterized the outbreak of the insurrection.

But, though the authority of the English Government was maintained throughout the struggles of the succeeding decade, Dublin was a witness of many vicissitudes of fortune, in the course of which the city and its citizens were severe sufferers.

In the earlier part of the conflict between Cavalier and Roundhead, the Duke of Ormond, as Charles the First’s vicegerent, had to meet the attack of the generals of the Catholic Confederation; but, though successful in repelling their assault, he was obliged a year or two later to surrender the capital of his sovereign into the hands of foes more formidable than the King’s Irish enemies, and to abandon it to the Commissioners of the English Parliament. Two years later, in 1649, the death of the King having produced a temporary union among all factions in Ireland, the same Viceroy, who had formerly defended the city, was called upon to besiege it. But Ormond’s attack was foiled and his army completely dispersed by Michael Jones, the Parliamentary Governor of Dublin, at the Battle of Rathmines; and thenceforward the capital remained in Cromwellian hands until the Restora tion. That event, however, was greeted with enthusiasm by the citizens; and Charles II was proclaimed in the Irish capital in a perfect delirium of loyalty.

Next, and most exciting of all perhaps among the incidents of Dublin history, comes the brief episode of ,James the Second’s visit, when that monarch, exiled from two of his kingdoms, found a temporary refuge in the third, establishing himself in the Irish capital till the decisive defeat at the Boyne obliged him to abandon it.

James was followed by another royal visitor in the person of William III, whose stay in Dublin is commemorated in Grinling Gibbons’ famous equestrian statue of that monarch in College Green. The war of the Revolution was the last occasion on which Dublin experienced the excitement of actual hostilities; and for more than a hundred years the peace of the city remained undisturbed by any formidable civil outbreak.

The military disturbances of the seventeenth century gave place to the more peaceful, though scarcely less exciting, political agitations of the succeeding age, in which Swift, in the character of the author of the “Drapier’s Letters,” and Charles Lucas, a noisy but capable politician, whose statue by Edward Smyth still stands in the the Hall, were the central figures.

In 1778 the celebrated meeting of the Ulster Volunteers in College Green was the prelude to the triumph of the patriot party in the Irish Parliament, and the restoration of those parliamentary liberties of Ireland which are inseparably associated with the splendid names of Flood and Grattan, but which in less than twenty years were to be extinguished as a consequence of the agitation of the United Irishmen and the rising of 1798.

That insurrection, which was planned to commence on May 23rd of that year, was precipitated by the arrest in Dublin, two months earlier, of several of the chiefs of the movement, followed after a short interval by the capture and death in melancholy and dramatic circumstances of its principal leader, the ill-fated and picturesque patriot Lord Edward FitzGerald.

For some months after this event Dublin was under martial law, and its citizens were enrolled in yeomanry corps for the protection of the capital.

An echo of the United Irish movement was heard five years later, when another brilliant apostle of popular principles headed the short-lived insurrection known as Robert Emmet’s rising - an outbreak which proved a hopeless fiasco as a menace to the authority of the Government, but which was attended with melancholy results in the murder of Lord Kilwarden, the Irish Lord Chief Justice, and in the death on the scaffold of the romantic but misguided youth whose enthusiasm had hurried him into a foolhardy enterprise.

The history of Dublin during the nineteenth century is upon the whole a history of municipal prosperity and expansion. None of the great movements of the period can be said to have originated in Dublin. Nor are the chief triumphs of such great leaders of public opinion as O’Connell and Parnell associated in any particularly striking manner with the capital.

The great agitations of the nineteenth century-the movement for Catholic Emancipation, the Young Ireland movement, the Fenian rising in 1867, the Land League agitation of more recent years-though all of them enjoyed in a greater or less degree the sympathy of the Dublin populace, were movements which left the surface of Dublin life practicaly untouched and untroubled.

A melancholy exception is to be noted in the tragic crime known as the Phoenix Park murders in 1882, when Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke were the victims of the Invincible conspiracy.

In recent years Dublin has been happy in having no history, and its chronicles for the last quarter of a century have been fortunately filled with no more notable items than those which testify to the improvement in the appearance of its thoroughfares.

The last generation has witnessed the adornment of some of the leading quarters of the city with such architectural successes as the Museum and Library in Kildare Street, and such triumphs of sculpture as the statue of O’Connell in Sackville Street; and last, but not least, the public-spirited munificence of Lord Iveagh in clearing away the dilapidated houses in the neighbourhood of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and the creation of St. Patrick’s Park, has effected a striking improvement in the amenities of the poorer quarters of the city.

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