Parish of Rathfarnham

**

Parish of Rathfarnham.

**(i.e., Rath-Fearannain or Farnan’s Rath

The Parish of Rathfarnham in the seventeenth century appears as containing the Townlands of Rathfarnham, Terenure, Kimmage, Rathgar, Little Newtown, Butterfield, Scholarstown, and St. John’s Leas.

It now contains the Townlands of Ballyroan (i.e., Baile Ruadhain, or Rowan’s Townland), Butterfield, Kimmage, Newtown Little, Old Orchard, Rathfarnham, Rathgar (i.e., Rath-gearr, or Short Rath), Scholarstown, Terenure (i.e., Tir-an-iubhair, or the Land of the Yew), Whiteball, and Willbrook.

The objects of archaeological interest in the Parish are the Castle of Rathfarnham and a fragment of the Old Church.

Rathfarnham and its Castle

Rathcastle2.jpg (6500 bytes)Rathcastle3.jpg (6757 bytes)The Castle of Rathfarnham, formerly the seat of the Right Hon. Francis Blackburne, sometime Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and still in the occupation of his descendants, is one of the few fine residences of any antiquity in the metropolitan county. It was originally a fortified and embattled structure built in the reign of Queen Elizabeth by that great legal ecclesiastic, Archbishop Loftus, but owing to alterations in the eighteenth century carried out in a Grecian style of architecture, it now presents the appearance of a modern house.

This castle is not the first dwelling which has occupied its site. Soon after the Anglo-Norman Conquest the lands of Rathfarnham, then joining on the north those within the manor of St. Sepulchre and on the east those within the parish of Taney, had been given to a family called le Bret, and during their ownership, which lasted for many generations, a manorial residence stood upon their property.

They were people of importance amongst the early settlers, and, in addition to Rathfarnham, became possessed of estates in Tipperary and Cork. The first of the family connected with Rathfarnham was Milo le Bret, to whom in 1199 a grant of the lands was made. His. name appears amongst the magnates of Ireland, and he was personally known to King John, at whose court in England he was, on at least one occasion, a visitor.

Towards the close of the thirteenth century, after the lands had been held by Walter le Bret who in 1269 made a perpetual assignmrnt of a portion of them now known as. Kimmage, Geoffrey le Bret appears as the proprietor of the manor of Rathfarnham, for which he rendered military service valued at 68s. to the Crown.

He saw much service as a soldier. During a period of twenty years he was one of those responsible for the protection of the marches of Dublin, and large sums were from time to time paid to him for expenses incurred in resisting the enemies of the Crown at Saggard, Newcastle, and other places.

In these operations he gained so high a reputation for bravery that it reached the English Court. In 1297 he was included by Edward I. amongst the liegemen in Ireland whom that monarch summoned to assist him in his war against France, - promising as an incentive to prompt compliance that he would keep them close to his side. Again in 1302 le Bret was honoured with a similar command to join in the war against Scotland.

The lands of Rathfarnham were occupied, under their owners, by the great Danish clan of Harold, who; with the Walshes and the Archbolds, then held so much of the lands bordering on the territory of the hillsmen.

Their occup4ion was sometimes only rendered possible by illegal compacts with their neighbours, and in 1305 Richard, son of Reginald Harold, paid a fine because Rathfarnham had afforded shelter to some of the foes of the Crown.

The owners of Rathfarnham were then resident in Cork. Milo, son of Geoffrey le Bret who in 1320 granted to his legal adviser, John Graunteste, a yearly rent charge of 20s. and a robe of proportionate value out of the lands of Rathfarnham, was Sheriff of Cork, and his grandson, John le Bret filled the same position.

On account of an apprehended invasion of the O’Byrnes; the latter was ordered in 1356 to proceed with his followers fully armed in martial array to his manor of Rathfarnham, and in 1375 he was given license to remove corn from his house at Rathfarnham for his own use.

The existence towards the close of the fourteenth century of a bridge across the Dodder at Rathfarnham is indicated by a bequest in the will, executed in 1381, of a certain Joan Douce, of St. Audoen’s Parish, in Dublin, of one mark towards its construction.

At the beginning of the fifteenth century the Harolds still appear as tenants, and the lands were in the hands of the Crown owing to the death of John, son of Geoffrey le Bret.

In 1415 they were committed to the custody of James Fitzwilliam, the first owner of Merrion of his name. Subsequently, owing to the death of one John Galvey, two parts of the lands were committed in 1423 to Thomas Hall, and in 1424 to James Cornwalsh, the Chief Baron of the Exchequer, who met his death in the Castle of Baggotrath.

At the time they came into the possession of Archbishop Loftus the lands of Rathfarnharn, which had passed from the Brets to the Eustace family, were, like Monkstown, in the hands of the Crown, owing to the rebellion of James Eustace, third Viscount Baltinglass, and before obtaining the custody of the Castle of Monkstown, Sir Henry Wallop, the Earl of Portsmouth’s ancestor, had applied for a lease of them.

A few months later, in the autumn of 1582, Archbishop Loftus was soliciting a lease of some of the lands forfeited during the Desmond Rebellion, and though for a time his petition was withdrawn, this application was probably the origin of the grant of Rathfarnham to him.

Owing to the Incursions of the hillsmen it was then described as a waste village, and the original castle, if it remained at all, can have been only a ruin. But within two years of his acquiring the property Arch-bishop Loftus had built the castle which has come down to the present day-an edifice of such magnificence in the opinion of a contemporary writer as would for all time be a monument to the greatness and grandeur of its builder.

According to the patent of a peerage conferred on one of his descendants the object of its erection was to protect the English subjects of the Crown, but as the Archbishop, owing to the disturbed state of the neighbourhood, had shortly before been obliged to vacate his episcopal seat at Tallagh, it is probable that it was part of his design to provide a country residence for himself.

Archbishop Loftus, who was a native of Yorkshire, had come to Ireland in the train of the Earl of Sussex; who was appointed Lord Lieutenant soon after the accession of Queen Elizabeth, and had subsequently become Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Archbishop of Armagh.

That diocese was then in a distracted state, and in 1567 he was translated to Dublin - in those days the most important and valuable of the Irish archbishoprics. For more than thirty-seven years he held the latter See, and with it for twenty-four years the office of Lord Chancellor, to which he was appointed after having been on several occasions the temporary custodian of the Great Seal.

Loftus stands out amongst his fellows as a man of singular ability, with a reputation as an eloquent preacher, and in his successful opposition to the diversion of the revenues of St. Patrick’s Cathedral to the establishment of a university, as well as in the assistance which he gave towards the foundation of Trinity College, of which he was the first provost he exhibited both high principle and independence of character.

In his time such offices as he held gave power and influence beyond anything possible in the present day. These advantages he used, undoubtedly, for his own advancement and that of his family, although, probably not to a greater degree than others in a similar position would have done.

Loftus took up his residence at Rathfarnham in the year 1585, when he had incurred much enmity by his opposition to the diversion of the endowment of St. Patrick’s Cathedral for educational purposes, and his establishment there, and the nominal rent of 30s., for which he was granted the fee farm of the lands, gave rise to many malicious allegations.

In that year he found it necessary to write to Lord Burghley to explain how he had means to build a house, and some years later it was said that, while causes were pending before him, “angels, beasts of the field, and birds of the air did fly and run to Rathfarnham.”

As has been mentioned, the castle was considered a stately residence, and an occasional reference shows that its contents were in keeping with it. Couches such as were made for the Archbishop in Ireland were thought worthy of a place in the home of Lord Burghley’s illustrious son, the first Earl of Salisbury, as was also a deer’s head, “the rare greatness” of which had caused the Archbishop to have it hung in the hall of “his poor house,” and which he wishes might be the most remarkable curiosity in Christendom in order that his love to his friend might be the more evident.

In every room basins and ewers of pure silver were to be seen, in some great standing white bowls and others of a smaller size attracted the eye, and after the death of Queen Elizabeth the buffet was adorned with three handsome cups made out of her Irish Great Seal.

Archbishop Loftus had an enormous family of twenty children. Only four of his sons came, however, to man’s estate, and of these but two survived him. All four served in the army, and it was in the wars in Ireland towards the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign that the two who died before their father met their deaths.

Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam knighted the eldest, and the unfortunate Earl of Essex, on his hurried departure from Ireland, after appointing the Archbishop to act in his absence as a Lord Justice, stayed a moment on the sands before taking ship to confer a similar honour on two of the younger.

Seven of the Archbishop’s daughters were married-some of them more than once - finding husbands in the families of, amongst others, Colley, Blaney, Berkeley, Colclough, Moore, Warren, and Ussher.

In these alliances and in others, which, it was said, were contemplated, the Archbishop’s enemies saw grounds for accusations against him of an attempt to secure an indispensable position in the government of Ireland.

The Archbishop’s eldest son, Sir Dudley Loftus, whose marriage to a daughter of Sir Nicholas Bagenal had also afforded occasion for suspicious whispering on the part of his father’s enemies, succeeded to Rathfarnham in 1605 on his father’s death.

In early life he is said to have been an honest young gentleman, “both loved and we’ll disposed,” and during the military operations in Ulster, as captain of a troop of horse, he displayed conspicuous valour.

It was for the part which he took in an engagement near Beleek, when after his horse had been killed under him he slew with his own hand twelve of the enemy, that he was knighted by Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam, and subsequently he was employed in several expeditions in which he spared himself neither toil nor hardship. He does not appear to have been prominent in public affairs after his father’s death, and resided principally in the suppressed preceptory of Kilcloggan, in the County of Wexford, which had been granted to him, and where in 1616, at the age of fifty-five, he died.

Rathfarnham Castle was: in Sir Dudley Loftus’s time occupied temporarily by the Right Hon. Sir Thomas Ridgeway, then Treasurer for Ireland, and afterwards created Earl of Londonderry, who in September 1611 dates a letter on affairs of State to the Earl of Salisbury from Rathfarnham, but on Sir Dudley’s death, as his Wexford property went to a younger son, the Castle became the constant residence of Sir Adam Loftus, who succeeded Sir Dudley there as his eldest son.

Although a time-serving politician, Sir Adam Loftus was one of the most able of the Archbishop’s descendants, and has the proud distinction of being the father of Dr. Dudley Loftus, the famous Oriental scholar. He enjoyed the friendship of the leading people in Ireland in his day. Sir Arthur Chichester, the planter of Ulster, conferred the honour of knight hood on him in 1610, when he was barely of age, and appointed him Constable of Maryborough Castle.

The great Earl of Cork, the most striking personality of that time, gave the hand of one of his daughters in marriage to his eldest son. The great Earl’s cousins, Sir William Parsons, the well-known governor of Ireland at the time of the’ Rebellion, and Sir Laurence Parsons, ancestor of the present Earl of Rosse, who was a Baron of the Exchequer and is said to have died in 1628 at Rathfarnham, both held Loftus in esteem, and became related to him by the marriage of their oldest sons to two of his daughters. And the mighty Earl of Strafford conceived a strong affection for him, regarding him as a man of integrity and capacity.

The career of Loftus for many years was bound up with that of the Earl of Cork, and in the great Earl’s quaint business diary and correspondence he is frequently mentioned.

There the tale is told of the unromantic marriage of his son to the Earl’s daughter. The first reference to Sir Adam is an account of a conversation between Sir Adam and Sir Laurence Parsons, who acted as the great Earl’s confidential legal adviser, regarding a widowed daughter of the Earl whom Sir Adam desired to receive at Rathfarnham.

Then a year later the betrothal of Sir Adam’s eldest son, Arthur Loftus, to the Earl’s daughter, Dorothy, born six years before in Sir Walter Raleigh’s house at Youghal, was accomplished, and the first instalment of her marriage portion of £3,000 was paid to her future father-in-law.

Soon afterwards young Loftus went to reside at Lismore, and the little girl with her French attendant came to Rathfarnham. Then the youth went in the Earl’s train to England, where he fell sick of the smallpox, and was provided with money (which the Earl was careful to have refunded), and with the use of the Earl’s medicine chest and became the constant companion of the Earl’s son, whom he accompanied to Oxford.

And finally on Shrove Monday, 1632, the girl bride, then only fourteen years of age, was married, as the Earl records, by the good Primate Ussher in Rathfarnham Castle to the husband of her parent’s choice.

A few months after this marriage had been arranged Sir Adam Loftus became, jointly with a member of the Parsons’ family, Surveyor-General of Ireland and an official of the Court of Wards. He subsequently acted as a keeper of the Great Seal during the absence of his cousin, Viscount Ely, then Chancellor of Ireland, and was made a member of the Privy Council.

While the Earl of Cork was a Lord Justice, before the arrival of the Earl of Strafford, Sir Adam Loftus was at his right hand. We find him riding with the Earl and Sir William Parsons on more than one occasion to give orders for the rebuilding of Maynooth Castle, and being lent by the Earl one of his two precious copies of Stafford’s “Pacata Hibernia.” But no sooner had the Earl of Strafford landed than Sir Adam began to worship the rising sun.

He obtained a seat as member for the borough of Gorey in the Parliaments held under Strafford; and Charles I., in response to a request from Strafford that he would give Sir Adam “a scratch of the pen,” sent him a gracious message of thanks for the help which he had rendered to his Viceroy in the Privy Council.

In spite of his devotion to Strafford, Sir Adam managed to retain the’ Earl of Cork’s goodwill. With the great Earl’s approval he was appointed Vice-Treasuter of Ireland, and the Earl relate’s that when going to take the oaths of office, Sir Adam, who was accompanied by all the judges, many of the Privy Council, and very many of the Lord Deputy’s gentlemen mounted on his great horses, rode between him as Lord Treasurer and Strafford’s son.

When the dispute between Strafford and the Earl arose, Sir Adam was instant in urging the Earl to submit himself to Strafford’s judgment, and probably from that time they drifted more and more apart until at last the Earl recorded that Sir Adam had used him uncivilly, and spoke to him in a harsh and displeasing manner.

Sir Adam Loftus took an active part in the proceedings instituted by Strafford against his cousin, the Lord Chancellor, and from letters written to him by Strafford from the Tower of London he appears to have been one of the few in Ireland on whom Strafford thought he could rely.

But Strafford’s execution was not long a thing of the past when Sir Adam became deep in the councils of the Parliament. In this line he was followed, doubt less to the unspeakable regret of the Earl of Cork, by his eldest son.

Soon after Strafford’s arrival in 1634 Arthur Loftus had received from him knighthood, and in the same year - a year in which the Earl of Cork records his thanks to God for the birth of her first child to his daughter, Lady Dorothy Loftus, at Rathfarnham-he was returned to Parliament as member for the borough of Enniscorthy.

Subsequently Sir Arthur had a very unpleasant passage with his father-in-law touching a domestic squabble, in which he showed himself both “heady and untractable,” to the Earl’s great discontent - and is not again mentioned in the Earl’s correspondence or diary.

On the outbreak of the Rebellion in 1641 every precaution was taken to prevent Rathfarnham Castle falling into the hands of the rebels. All the Loftus family took up arms. Sir Adam Loftus and Sir Arthur Loftus commanded each a troop of horse, and, as they were engaged elsewhere, the care of the Castle was committed to Sir Adam’s second son, the learned Dudley Loftus, then just returned from his studies at Oxford.

As its custodian, Dudley Loftus is said to have done good service in defending Dublin from the rebels, who swarmed down from the mountainous country. Amongst those who resorted to the Castle during that winter of disorder was an extraordinary genius called John Ogilby, who is said to have been nearly killed there by an explosion of gunpowder.

Ogilby, who had been brought to Ireland by Strafford, as tutor to his children, and was then Master of the Revels, and owner of a theatre in Dublin, had gained some military training as a member of Strafford’s guard of honour, but possibly the literary tastes which he displayed afterwards in the publication of various books, including the first guide to the roads of England-a noble folio volume - may have had something to do with his association with the scholarly custodian of Rathfarnham Castle.

The state of siege in which the inhabitants of the Castle lived for several years may be gathered from the outrages committed in the immediate neighbourhood. In the Easter week following the outbreak of the Rebellion, one Henry Jones the tenant of Scholarstown, was murdered, his body being found pierced with fourteen wounds.

Soon afterwards some of the rebels came to the house of Henry Butterfield, from whom, doubtless, the modern townland of Butterfield derives its’ name, and after killing one of his servants and robbing him of his cattle, carried off Butterfield to Powers-court and there hanged him on a gallows.

After the Cessation, when the great sweep of cattle was made at Rathmines, Thomas Wood, a tailor, and Ralph Morris, a wheelwright, both of Rathfarnham, were also carried off to Powerscourt, but made good their escape the next day, not however, before ropes had been placed round their necks and threats to hang them had been uttered.

The owner of a cloth mill at Rathfarnham, John Higginson by name, also suffered severely. He had contracted for the supply of transport for the artillery, and from time to time seventy-seven of the horses employed in that service were carried off from him at Rathfarnham.

During the Cessation, when he was building a mill at Rathfarnham, a notorious rebel, whom he had seen riding one of the horses which had been taken from him, threatened him, and subsequently his cloth mill was broken into. The caretaker and his family were assailed with shots and great stones, and the caretaker only saved his life by escaping through the sluice of the mill and taking refuge in the Castle.

Besides the loss of cloth to the value of £60, Higginson’s business was destroyed, as he tells us, by his customers being frightened away, and he was obliged to obtain soldiers to guard his property at a cost of three shillings weekly.

About the same time the house of one Edward Thorpe, at Rathfarnham Bridge, was robbed, and his servant maid lost her eye sight through shots fired by the burglars, and forty cows and sixteen horses belonging to Sir Adam Loftus were taken from the lands of Newtown by a party of the Confederate troops, who were called upon by the. Marquis of Ormonde to make reparation for this violation of the Treaty of Cessation.

During the two years’ succeeding the outbreak’ of the Rebellion Sir Adam Loftus constantly attended the meetings of the Privy Council, and was one of the chief supporters of Sir William Parsons and his brother Lords Justices; and Sir Arthur Loftus, who had sent his family to England, continued to act as an officer in the King’s Irish Army, serving as Lieutenant-Colonel of Sir Charles Coote’s regiment and as Governor of Naas.

When the Treaty of Cessation with the Irish was proposed both Sir Adam Loftus and his son joined in the opposition to it, and on account of their sympathy with the Parliament were imprisoned in Dublin Castle. Sir Adam Loftus underwent a prolonged confinement, owing to a public attack which he made on Lord Brabazon, the eldest son of the first Earl of Meath, for his loyalty to the King, but Sir Arthur Loftus was only detained for twenty-five weeks.

On reaching England they were received with every mark of favour by the Parliament. Sir Adam Loftus, besides being given a command in its army, was appointed a Counsellor of State and Treasurer for War in Ireland, and Sir Arthur Loftus was given permission to beat his drums in London for men to join in an expedition to relieve Duncannon Fort and afterwards served with Lord Broghill in Munster.

But evil times came then for the house of Loftus, and they were reduced to a state of extreme poverty. Sir Adam Loftus, whom Colonel Michael Jones earnestly desired, “as honest men were scarce,” to have with him in Dublin, was a prisoner for debt in London, and subsequently, while receiving a pension of l0s. a week from the State, was obliged to ask for assistance to take his family to Dublin. Sir Adam Loftus, who was in an equally impecunious state, on his accounts as Treasurer of War failing to give satisfaction, was for a time imprisoned, and was placed on a pension of £4 a week.

Meantime Rathfarnham Castle appears to have been derelict, except so far as it may have been occupied by the military. When in the summer of 1647 the Marquis of Ormonde surrendered Dublin to the Parliament it was suggested by Lord Digby that leave for him to remain in Ireland, with Rathfarnham as a residence, should be one of the conditions of surrender.

Two years later, in July, 1649, as has been mentioned under Rathmines, the Castle was garrisoned by the Parliament, and a few days before the disastrous Battle of Rathmines it was stormed and taken by the Royalist troops. All in it were made prisoners, and Ormonde, in a letter to Charles II., takes credit for the fact that although 500 of his men obtained entrance into the Castle before an officer had done so, not a single member of the garrison was killed - a great contrast, he remarks, to the conduct of the soldiers of the Parliament on similar occasions.

During the Commonwealth, Dr. Dudley Loftus, who held various offices of State, and was returned to the Parliament of 1659 as representative of the grouped Counties of Wicklow and Kildare, appears to have been recognised as the owner of the Castle.

A considerable village then existed round it. A census of that period gives the number of the inhabitants of Rathfarnham as seventy persons, occupying twenty-two houses. Amongst these were three gentlemen, Mr. Darby Burgoyne, Mr. James Bishop, and Mr. William Graham, and the cottiers included a smith, a carman, and a cow herd, besides a gardener and a cooper, who were in Dr. Dudley Loftus’s employment. In addition, seventy-seven inhabitants, occupying twenty houses, are returned as residing in Butterfield. These included Mr. Robert Dixon, who had thirteen servants in his employment, a large farmer called Henry Walsh, two carmen, a brogue-maker, and a weaver.

A strong wooden bridge across the river Dodder made communication with Dublin easy under ordinary circumstances, but on more than one occasion it was carried away by the violence of the mountain torrents. The observant Dr. Gerald Boate, in “Ireland’s Natural History,” dwells on the tendency of the Dodder to rise suddenly, and says that although the bridge at Rathfarnham was so high that a man on horseback could ride under it, and the water was usually so shallow that a child could wade through it, the river rose frequently to such a height that it touched and even flowed over the bridge.

At the time of the Restoration, Sir Adam Loftus had resumed possession of the Castle, which was then rated as containing eighteen hearths. His eldest son, Sir Arthur Loftus, had died shortly before, but Sir Arthur’s sons, Adam and Robert, are mentioned as resident with their grandfather.

Amongst the other inhabitants about that time were Mr. Matthew Penoix, Mr. George Hopkins, Mr. William Denison, Mr. George Casborough, Mr. William Dixon, of the Old Orchard; Mr. Anthony Poulter, of Butterfield; Mr. David Gibson, of Scholarstown; Mr. Daniel Reading, of Stoughton’s Farm; Mr. Laurence Hudson, of Newtown Little; and Mr. Richard Greene, of the White House.

After Sir Adam Loftus’s death his daughter-in-law, Lady Dorothy Loftus, the widow of Sir Arthur Loftus, is returned as the occupier of the Castle, and obtained in 1665, from the Master of the Ordnance six well-fixed firelock muskets for its protection. She died in 1668, having married, as her second husband, a member of the Taibot family, and was succeeded by her eldest son.

Adam Loftus., who appears as owner of Rathfarnham Castle after his mother’s death, and who was raised to the peerage as Baron Loftus of Rathfarnham and Viscount Lisburne, was one of the gallants of the gay court of Charles II.

Soon after the Restoration, when he was returned to the Irish Parliament as member for the borough of Lismore through the influence of his uncle, the second Earl of Cork, he figures as the survivor in a duel with one John Bromley, and only escaped from the sentence of the King’s Bench that he should be burned in the hand by the intervention of the King.

Some years later he appears as owner of an Irish wolf-hound which he brought to fight with an English mastiff before the Merry Monarch an unfortunate passage, writes Viscount Conway to Sir George Rawdon, whom he beseeches for the credit of their country to find a better dog, as when the wolf-hound had almost overcome the mastiff he ran away, and the King laid a wager that there was not a dog of his breed that would not do the same.

Abroad at Saumur we find him dancing attendance on a great lady of his day, and forming one of a colony of English people who brought out from England for their amusement such luxuries as a coach and six, a pack of hounds, and half a dozen riding horses. He appeared in Ireland in 1672 with a commission as Captain in the Army, seeking to raise 500 volunteers for the Duke of Monmouth’s regiment, and two years later, when he was appointed Ranger of the Phoenix Park, he dated a letter (in which he mentions a severe family affliction) from Rathfarnham.

About this time there died a maiden daughter of Sir Adam Loftus, Grizzel by name, from whom portion of the Rathfarnham demesne derives its appellation of Grizzel’s Paddock. She mentions in her will numerous relatives to whom she bequeaths various remembrances, including her gold bodkin, her candle cup and chafing dish, her father’s picture, her porcelain and china, and her essence box with her arms; but, as a person of puritan sympathies, she evidently viewed with disfavour her nephew’s mode of life, and refers to him with great reserve as Adam Loftus, Esq., of Rathfarnham.

Her minister, Mr. Isaac Smith, is far more favoured, and, in addition to being bequeathed two silver powder boxes, is given a reversionary interest in the lease of the farm of Woodtown, which she had been granted by her father.

It was to James II. that Adam Loftus owed his creation, in 1686, as a peer, but at the Revolution he espoused the cause of William III. In the service of that monarch he lost his life. He joined King William’s Irish Army as Colonel of a regiment of foot, and in that capacity displayed heroic conduct at the taking of Carrickfergus Fort, the Battle of Aughrim, and the Siege of Limerick.

His bravery there was the cause of his death. He had directed his tent to be pitched as near the walls of the city as possible in the trenches, and when coming out of it one day in the month of September, 1691, he was killed by a cannon ball - a messenger of death which was afterwards carefully gilded and hung over the tomb of his family in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, where he was interred.

By his wife Lucia, daughter of George, sixth Lord Chandos, Viscount Lisburne had an only surviving child, a daughter, who bore her mother’s name, and by this daughter’s marriage a year after her father’s death, to Thomas, Marquis of Wharton, Rathfarnham Castle became the property of the Wharton family.

Of the Marquis of Wharton, the greatest rake and one of the busiest politicians of his day, and of his wife who, under an affectation of prudery, is said to have been equally unscrupulous, Rathfarnham Castle, which provided him, on an elevation in the peerage, with the title of Earl of Rathfarnham, saw little. He filled for a time the office of Lord Lieutenant, but four months residence in Ireland was all he thought the duties of his office required.

His eldest son, Philip, who was created Duke of Wharton, and who succeeded his father in 1716, when only seventeen years of age, was even more profligate - and within eight years of his coining into possession of the property was obliged to sell a great portion of his estates, including his estate at Rathfarnham.

The latter comprised, beside the castle and demesne, a great extent of lands in the parishes of Rathfarnham, Whitechurch, Cruagh, and Tallaght, and after a report that it had been disposed of for £85,000 to Viscount Chetwynd, it was sold for £62,000 to the Right Hon. William Conolly, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons.

The village of Rathfarnham, which is said to have been in 1665 the birth-place of Robert Wilks, one of the most distinguished actors of his day, whose father was attached to the Viceregal Court, was at the close of the seventeenth, and for part of the eighteenth century, a fashionable health resort.

While Bishop of Derry in the spring of 1697, the good Dr. William King retired there, after a long illness, in order to escape the atmosphere and bustle of Dublin, which he could not endure, and to spend his time free from business and company in the open air; and in the next year that most erratic of men, John Dunton, the travelling bookseller, while carrying on his scuffle with his Dublin brethren, sometimes took a ramble there to recruit himself in country scenes.

The curious signs and place names which appear in old leases indicate the popularity of the place: the Sign of the Sun, the Black Lion, the Flower Pot, the Booly or Cow Walk, Hanover Hall, the Sally Park, the Spa Walk, the Roll of Tobacco, the White House, the Coffee House and the Stake Field, are to be found amongst others.

There is a tradition that some of Dean Swift’s publications issued from a printing press in the village, and a ballad on the neighbouring Spa at Templeoge published in 1730 professes to have been printed at the Cherry Tree in Rathfarnham - a name which is mentioned in a deed of the period.

In the spring of 1728 great rains prevailed, which resulted in the bridge of Rathfarnham being broken down and part of the deer park wall being carried away; in the next year Rathfarnham was troubled by an invasion of monster rats similar to those which appeared in Merrion; in 1730 Ambrose Kimberley was executed for the abduction of the daughter of Mr. Daniel Reading, of London, from the house of her nurse at Rathfarnham; and in the summer of 1740 an extraordinary shower of rain resembling blood in colour fell there.

During the early part of the eighteenth century the handsome mansion, what now forms the centre of the fine pile of buildings at Rathfarnham occupied by the Loretto Convent, was erected, and round it extensive gardens, orchards, and a deer park were laid out. This mansion, which is approached by a high flight of steps and is built of red brick, presents the appearance of a dwelling on which money has been lavishly expended, and the reception rooms, which display ornate ceilings, wide doors of shining mahogany, and curious leather wall paper, are apartments of great magnificence.

Its builder was a gentleman of much wealth, Mr. William Palliser, the only son of the Archbishop of Cashel of that name, whose memory is preserved in the “Bibliotheca Palliseriana,” which he bequeathed to the Library of Trinity College. Mr. William Palliser, who was himself interested in scientific and literary pursuits, and his wife enjoyed wide popularity; his recovery from serious illness in 1747 is announced as giving great joy to all his friends; and by the death of his wife, a gentlewoman of exemplary piety and virtue, and of a most benevolent and humane disposition, in 1762, her acquaintances are said to have lost an agreeable and valued friend, and the poor a kind benefactress.

Not far from Mr. Palliser’s house was the residence of the Worth family. This had been originally occupied by the Honble. William Worth, who had a seat on the Bench as a Baron of the Exchequer in the closing years of the reign of Charles II., and retained it for four years after the accession of James II.

Worth was on terms of intimacy with Lord Clarendon, and having followed that nobleman in his tortuous proceedings during the Revolution, failed to obtain reinstatement in his judicial position from William III. He took to himself no less than four wives, through one of whom he became possessed of the interesting sixteenth century mansion known as Old Bawn, near Tallaght. He was succeeded at Rathfarnham on his death in 1721 by his eldest son, while a younger son, who took the name of Tynte, became the owner of Old Bawn.

His eldest son, Edward Worth, who. died at Rathfarnham in 1741, and was buried with his father in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, with much funeral pomp, was bequeathed, in addition to the property which he inherited, a considerable estate by his cousin, Dr. Worth, whose library is preserved in Dr. Stevens’s Hospital, and was representative in Parliament for the borough of Knocktopher.

Adjoining Mr. Palliser’s demesne was a house sometime occupied by Mr. Robert O’Callaghan, an eminent lawyer, who married in 1735 one of the daughters of Mr. Edward Worth, a young lady of great merit, as we are informed, who brought to her husband a fortune of £10,000.

Mr. Robert O’Callaghan, who represented the borough of Fethard in Parliament until shortly before his death in 1761, was the eldest son of Mr. Cornelius O’Callaghan, one of the most distinguished lawyers of his day, who became, through a younger son, an ancestor of the Viscounts Lismore.

At O’Callaghan’s house in Rathfarnham the Rev. Thomas Sheridan, the friend of Swift, and grandfather of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who had been his schoolmaster, breathed his last, after uttering the oracular words, “Let it blow east, west, north, or south, the im mortal soul will take its flight to the desired point.”

Soon after Dr. Sheridan’s death in 1738 Mr. O’Callaghan’s house became the residence of Mr. Balthazar John Cramer, who died in 1741, and whose son took the name of Coghill, and became a baronet, and subsequently of his widow, who was a daughter of the first Viscount Lanesborough.

Amongst other residents at Rathfarnham about that time we find the Recorder of Dublin, Eaton Stannard, one of the executors of Swift’s will, who represented Midleton in Parliament and became Prime Serjeant; Lieutenant-Colonel James Fountain, of the Hon. Colonel Onslow’s Regiment of Foot, who died in 1739 at his house there; Mr. John Ward, a brewer, whose house, with well-stocked gardens, was to be sold in 1741 by his widow; Mr. Richard Geering; Alderman Thomas How, whose niece, Miss Mary Holmes, “a most agreeable lady with £20,000 fortune,” married in 1747 the Rev. John Palliser, the cousin and heir of Mr. William Palliser; Major Bowleis, and Captain Adams.

About the year 1742 the house known as Whitehall, and the extraordinary cone-shaped tower encircled by a winding staircase adjacent to it which stand at the back of Rathfarnham demesne, near the road to Dundrum, were erected by a Major Hall, who probably modelled the tower long known as “Hall’s Barn” on a similar structure called “the Wonderful Barn,” erected by the Conollys about the same time near Castletown.

The house, which in the eighteenth century was described as beautiful, and in which a curious kitchen and panelled staircase are still to be seen, was afterwards the residence of the Rev. Jeremy Walsh, the curate of Dundrum, who married there in 1778 the widow of Thomas Byre, sometime M.P. for the borough of Fore, and is mentioned as a well-known place in the lists of carriage fares of that time.

Rathfarnham Castle, which, owing to their possession of Castletown, had not been occupied by Speaker Conolly or his successor, was, about the year 1742, purchased by the Right Rev. John Hoadly, who was at that time translated from the Archbishopric of Dublin to that of Armagh. Dr. Hoadly, who was the brother of the famous English Bishop of that name, was one of the great political prelates, but did not find the promotion of the English interest, which was the first object with all of them, inconsistent with exertions for the improvement of agriculture. To this he directed both his skill and his purse, and he was beloved by the tenantry and landowners, amongst whom he excited by his example and judicious rewards a spirit of emulation and a strong desire to become better farmers.

In building, ” as the most useful and rational method of supporting the honest and industrious poor,” he gave much employment. On his promotion to the See of Dublin in 1729 from that of Ferns, which he had previously held, he had built an episcopal mansion at Tallaght in place of the ruined feudal castle which he had found there, and on coming into possession of Rathfarnham he proceeded to lavish money on the restoration of the Castle, which he put into a state of thorough repair and made his home.

Hoadly did not long occupy Rathfarnham, his death taking place there in 1746 from a fever said to have been contracted while super-intending workmen in the demesne. His life had been one of singular activity; in a letter to the Duke of Newcastle written a few months before his death he states that for the eighteen years and more which he had been in Ireland he had constantly, without one failure, attended the King’s service, and that for sixteen years he had borne the burden of the administration in the Privy Council and in the House of Lords, and, much against his will, had taken a leading part in the management of the University. His wife, a lady distinguished for her virtues and endowments, had died two years before, and the Archbishop’s remains were laid with hers in the quiet country church of Tallaght.

Rathfarnham Castle then passed to Mr. Bellingham Boyle, who had married, in November, 1740, Archbishop Hoadly’s only daughter and child a young lady who inherited her father’s taste for country pursuits.

Dean Swift, who subsequently expressed great distress at hearing she had the smallpox, in one of his delightful letters thanks her for a pig and a bowl of butter which she had sent to him, and threatens to tell all the ladies of his acquaintance that the sole daughter and child of his Grace of Dublin is so mean as to descend to understand housewifery, and to show her letter to every female scrawler in order that they may spread about the town that her writing and spelling are ungenteel and unfashionable, and more like a parson’s than a lady’s.

Bellingham Boyle, who was nephew of Henry Boyle, then Speaker of the House of Commons, and afterwards Earl of Shannon, and who represented Bandon in Parliament proceeded, after his marriage, to his LL.D. degree in Dublin University, became a Governor of the Workhouse in room of Mr. Balthazar Cramer, and a trustee of the linen manufacture, and on the recommendation of his father-in-law and uncle was appointed a Commissioner of the Revenue.

Boyle and his wife were prominent in the Dublin society of their day, and William, fourth Duke of Devonshire, while Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, recognised their high position in society by dining with them at Rathfarnham when on his way to spend some days at Powerscourt.

An advertisement of property stolen in 1751 from the Castle of Rathfarnham sets forth at length descriptions of various gorgeous articles of apparel, including a suit of clothes of bloom colour, cross-barred and flowered with silver; another suit of yellow colour, brocaded with silver and colours; a third suit of lute string striped and brocaded on a white ground; a grey duchess night-gown; a velvet mantle of cherry colour lined with white satin and bordered with ermine; and a piece of white satin quilted for a petticoat, embroidered with vine leaves in shades of green and brown stalks.

In the midst of political intrigues, in which he is said to have been allied with the astute Philip Tisdal, Boyle found time to superintend the farming of his demesne, and sent in July, 1762, from Rathfarnham to the Dublin market the earliest oats ever grown in Ireland. Five years later - a few years before his death-he disposed for £17,500 of the castle and demesne.

The purchaser was Nicholas Loftus, second Earl of Ely, and the Castle thus once more became the residence of a descendant of its builder. He was the fourth in direct descent from the second son of Sir Dudley Loftus, the eldest son of Archbishop Loftus, and inherited Sir Dudley’s Wexford estate. Both his grandfather and father had been prominent in public affairs; the former had been created Baron Loftus of Loftus Hall and Viscount Loftus of Ely, and the latter, after succeeding to those titles, had been promoted to an earldom under the title of Earl of Ely.

The question of the mental capacity of the purchaser of Rathfarnham, as has been already mentioned in connection with the history of Killiney Hill, gave rise to a *cause celebre *of the eighteenth century. His father, the first Earl of Ely, had married in 1736 the elder daughter and co-heiress of Sir Gustavus Hume, of the County Fermanagh. She died four years later, leaving as the sole issue of the marriage Nicholas, afterwards second Earl of Ely, and owner of Rathfarnham. The child, who was two years old at the time of his mother’s death, was then sent to live with his maternal grandmother, Lady Hume, and remained under her care until her death, when he was twelve years old. He was then taken by his father to live with him.

His father led a dissipated life, and kept the boy, who was acknowledged to have been of delicate constitution from his birth, in a state of the most complete subjection, treating him with the greatest cruelty and neglect.

Through his mother the boy, on attaining the age of twenty-one, was entitled to her property, but owing to his weak state of health his father was able to withhold knowledge of this fact from him, and to spend the money to which his son was entitled on his own pleasures.

At the same time it was in the father’s interest that the youth should appear capable of managing his own affairs, for, in the event of his incapacity being proved, the children of his mother’s only sister, who had married Mr. George Rochfort, brother of the first Earl of Belvedere, would have succeeded on his death to the property which he inherited from his mother, and with the object of showing that he was of sound mind the father had him returned to Parliament a few years after he came of age for his pocket borough of Bannow, in the County Wexford.

Before his father’s death, which took place in 1766, the Rochforts had instituted proceedings to have the question of the youth’s capacity decided legally, and four months after his father’s death a commission was issued to determine it. The conduct of the defence devolved on his father’s only brother, Colonel the Hon. Henry Loftus, the owner of Killiney Hill, who had represented the borough of Bannow and then represented the County Wexford in Parliament.

The Rochforts alleged that the youth was an idiot or of unsound mind, and his uncle put forward the defence that his condition was entirely the result of the treatment which he had received from his father, and that he was capable of instruction, stating, in proof of the treatment which the youth had received, that on posting down to Claremont, his brother’s seat in the County Wicklow, after his brother’s death, he found the youth miserably clad and almost in rags, so infirm and debilitated as not to be able to walk about, totally illiterate, and in ignorance of the property to which he was entitled.

The Commissioners, who included two Privy Councillors, two Masters in Chancery, a King’s council, an alderman, and three other gentlemen, had the assistance of a jury, and after a trial lasting five days and a personal examination of the young Earl, this jury, on which three Privy Councillors and other gentlemen of high degree served, found that the young Earl was not an idiot or of unsound mind. On appeal to the House of Lords their decision was upheld.

Three months after the trial in April, 1767, the Manor and Castle of Rathfarnham, the estate and mansion of his ancestors, was purchased for the young Earl, and money was raised to modernize and improve the structure. After a personal interview with Lord Bowes, then Lord Chancellor of Ir4and, the young Earl was appointed Governor of Fermanagh, and in December of that year it was announced that he had been pleased to grant a pension to the widow of a workman who had been killed at Rathfarnham by the fall of a wall.

Afterwards the Earl’s health became more unsatisfactory, and in the beginning of 1769 he was taken by his uncle to Bath, and subsequently to Spa, in pursuit of health. From the latter place they returned to Ireland in October, and on the voyage the young Earl contracted an illness from which he died on the 12th of the following month.

Eight days before his death he signed at Rathfarnham Castle a deed before one of the Masters in Chancery, and two days later he executed a will, leaving all he possessed to his uncle, in the presence of the Right Hon. John Ponsonby, the Speaker of the House of Commons; Sir Henry Cavendish, father of the Parliamentary reporter, mentioned in connection with the history of Booterstown; and Sir James May.

Henry Loftus, who appears so prominently in the pages of “Baratariana” as Count Henrico Loftonzo, now succeeded to the Viscounty of Ely and the ownership of Rathfarnham Castle. His possession of his nephew’s estate was not undisputed, and the Rochforts instituted proceedings to upset his nephew’s will, but its validity was upheld by Philip Tisdal in his capacity as Judge of the Prerogative Court.

Count Loftonzo’s success in this and in everything else was imputed by his enemies to political intrigue. There is no doubt that the Viceroy, the Marquis of Townshend, was most anxious to secure his support, and it was announced a year after the young Earl’s death that “the great man” had been sumptuously entertained by a nobleman not far from Rathfarnham, and that since that time he had boasted of his conquests, which had not, however, been attained without the promise of places of profit to eight of the peer’s dependants.

Matchmaking seems to have been an amusement of Count Loftonzo and his wife; in the same year in which Lord Townshend visited Rathfarnham it is recorded that a Wexford gentleman was married at Rathfarnham Castle, the seat of the Right Hon. Viscount Loftus, to a young lady “of great merit and beauty, with every other accomplishment which can render the marriage state happy,” and if rumour spoke truth Count Loftonzo’s wife spared no effort to secure Lord Townshend as husband for her niece, the lovely Dolly Monro.

The year 1771 saw the Earldom of Ely created for the second time in favour of Count Loftonzo, and on Angelica Kauffmann’s visit to Ireland, which then took place, she painted a picture of the newly-made Earl and his Countess. This picture, which now hangs in the Irish National Gallery, is painted on one of the largest canvases ever used by the artist, and represents in a flowery garden, almost in life size, the Earl in his ermine tippet, and his Countess, in the full dress robes of a peeress) while near them are two beautiful girls, said to be the artist and Dolly Monro, and a negro attendant holding a cushion on which two coronets rest.

Three years later the Earl had the misfortune to lose his wife, after a long illness; but, although Provost Andrews thought it would be impossible to find as amiable a successor, he was not long in filling up the vacancy, and subsequently we see him on the eve of St. Patrick’s Day at a masquerade ball figuring as a hermit and his second wife as a washerwoman.

On the institution of the Order of St. Patrick Lord Ely was named as one of the original knights, but was unable to attend the installation, and died a few months later in May, 1783, at Bath. One of the obituary notices which appeared says that his death was nothing short of a national loss, as his fortune was spent in the improvement of his country and in encouraging honest industry amongst the poor, and another refers to his rapid advancement in life from the rank and revenue of a private gentle-man to a very rich earldom and great Parliamentary influence.

Lord Ely’s operations at Rathfarnham Castle were on a scale of regal magnificence. In the decoration of the interior of the house the talented artists and skilled artizans then to be found in Dublin were employed, and in the drawing-room, the small dining-room with its exquisitely painted ceiling, the gilt room with its inlaid chimney-piece, and the stately ball-room, their work is still to be seen.

Amongst those who were engaged in beautifying the house was Angelica Kauffmann, and panels painted by her adorn the elaborate ceiling of the drawing-room.

In the demesne the noble gateway on the river Dodder exhibits the classic taste of the Earl and his extravagant conceptions. On visiting the Castle in 1781 Austin Cooper was lost in admiration, and forty years later James N. Brewer refers to its splendours. After describing the Castle as we see it today, a square building with towers at each corner and a semi-circular extension on the southern side, Austin Cooper tells us that it was originally embattled and had small Gothic windows, but that a coping of stone had been substituted for the battlements and that the windows had been modernized.

He mentions the portico, consisting of a dome, on which the signs of the Zodiac were painted, supported on eight Done columns, and the hall. The latter, he says, was lighted by three windows of stained glass, which have now disappeared, made by Thomas Jervais, who executed the window designed by Sir Joshua Reynolds in New College, Oxford, and was ornamented with statues, busts, and urns on pedestals of variegated marble. Afterwards he inspected a room, then called the gallery, in which he saw a cabinet of tortoisoe shell and brass filled with ivory ornaments of rare; beauty, and concludes by saying that a description of the other rooms, of the family portraits, of the paintings collected by the first Earl of Ely, and of the china, would require a volume.

Henry, Earl of Ely, was succeeded at Rathfarnham by his nephew, Charles Tottenham, the son of one of his sisters) who had married the famous member of the Tottenham family known as “Tottenham in the boots,” from his having appeared in the House of Commons in riding dress, and saved his country by recording his vote at the sacrifice of the sacred conventionalities of the period.

Charles Tottenham, who took the name of Loftus, was made the subject of renewed litigation by the Rochforts, in which they were successful, but this defeat does not appear to have seriously impaired his wealth, and soon after he succeeded to Rathfarnham he was raised to the peerage as Baron Loftus, and subsequently was created Marquis of Ely.

The demesne at Rathfarnham, then remarkable for an aviary in which there were ostriches and many other rare birds, was thrown open by him to the public for which he received high encomiums from the press, and the Lords Lieutenants of his day were entertained by him frequently in the great dining-room of the Castle.

The village of Rathfarnham at the end of the eighteenth century was said by Austin Cooper to be a small village with very few houses of the better class, and the residents in the neighbourhood were not numerous.

Amongst those connected with Rathfarnham in the latter part of that century we find-the Rev. John Palliser, D.D., who succeeded to the residence of his cousin, Mr. William Palliser, and who died in 1795; Mr. Richard Wetherall, who died in 1752, leaving money for the endowment of a grammar school; Mr. Edward Slicer, who died in the same year at a very advanced age; the agreeable widow Slicer, who married in 1757 Sir Timothy Allen, sometime Lord Mayor of Dublin; Mr. Benjamin Sherrard, an eminent linen manufacturer, who died in 1766; Mr. John Lamprey, a young gentleman of unblemished reputation, who died in the same year at Waxfield; Alderman James Horan, and Alderman James Hamilton; Sir George Ribton, the second baronet of the name, who built Landscape; and Mr. Garret English, an upright and active magistrate (for an assault on whom a man was in 1790 whipped from the bridge of Rathfarnham to the upper end of the town), who lies buried in Dundrum graveyard.

Amongst owners of property were the Presbyterian Church, which owned land in Rathfarnham, originally leased in 1679 by Viscount Lisburne to Daniel Reading, and subsequently sold by the Right Hon. Thomas Conolly to the Rev. Richard Choppin, one of the ministers of the meeting house in Wood Street Dublin, and Provost Hely Hutchinson, who owned Butterfield House, and gave the fair green to the village.

The bridge at Rathfarnham was carried away once more in June, 1754, by floods, caused by the greatest rain known for years, and one built in its place suffered the same fate. These disasters, Austin Cooper says, were due to the supports resting in the water on bad foundations, and a bridge of a single arch was, about the year 1765, thrown across the river, which, from the fact that it rested on the solid banks, Cooper predicted would last for years.

A ford near the present bridge at Orwell Road was sometimes used, and after crossing it in his carriage in the year 1773, Counsellor Walsh was robbed of his gold watch valued at 50 guineas.

Samuel Derrick, who succeeded Beau Nash as Master of the Ceremonies at Bath, and for whom the great Samuel Johnson had a kindness, mentions that on a visit to Ireland in 1760, when driving from the County Kildare to Bray, he dined at Rathfarnham, and an inn bearing the Sign of the Ship existed there some years later.

The manufacture of paper was carried on to a very considerable extent by a Mr. Mansergh, who died in 1763, and by Mr. Thomas Slator, whose works were destroyed in 1775 by fire and dye works, which were owned in 1752 by Mrs. Elizabeth Fisher, were established near the bridge.

Nurseries owned by the Bruces, eminent seedsmen of the fairest character, supplied all manner of fruit and forest trees, flowering shrubs, and green-house plants, and the early production of farm produce, already noted in connection with Mr. Bellingham Boyre’s occupation of the Castle, was maintained by a barrel of new wheat being brought in 1768 on August 6th from Rathfarnham to the Dublin Market.

During the Volunteer movement Rathfarnham was often visited by the Dublin companies; in 1783 the Light Company of the Independent Dublin Volunteers made an excursion there on a Sunday in October and after being sumptuously entertained by Alderman iloran, on whose lawn they went through their martial exercises, spent the evening “with the greatest good humour and cheerfulness”.

Rathfarnham Castle was dismantled by the Loftus family in the early part of the nineteenth century, and after having been occupied for a time by a family called Roper, under whom the demesne was used for dairy purposes, it was bought about the year 1852 by Lord Chancellor Blackburne.

The neighbouring residence of the Pallisers, after the death of the Rev. John Palliser, passed into the possession of the King’s’ Printer, Mr. George Grierson, whose model farm was noted for the production of prize crops and cattle, and was sold subsequently to its present occupants, the Convent of the Loretto.

Rathgar

The lands now covered by the populous suburb of Rathgar, which lies between Rathmines and Rathfarnham, were in the centuries immediately succeeding the Anglo-Norman Conquest, the grange or home farm of the Abbey of St Mary de Hogges -a convent for nuns of the rule of St. Augustine, which stood upon College Green, then called the Hogges or the mounds.

At that time there were to be seen on the lands the Abbey’s manor house, granary, and other farm buildings (for robbery from which one David Lugg was at the beginning of the fourteenth century sentenced to be hanged), and a wood of considerable extent.

In the sixteenth century, when the dissolution of the religious houses took place, the premises and lands, which were returned as containing ninety acres arable, and three of wood, were held under the Convent by James Richards, and some years later they were granted by the Crown to Nicholas Segrave.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century the castle or manor house of Rathgar had become the country residence of the Cusacks) one of the oldest and most leading mercantile families in Dublin, and was occupied by Mr. John Cusack, who was in 1608 Mayor of Dublin. His son, Mr. Robert Cusack, succeeded him. The latter had entered in 1617 as a law student at Lincoln’s Inn, but his only appearance in legal proceedings seems to have been as defendant in a suit taken by the Prebendary of St. Audoen’s in Dublin to compel him to restore an entry to that church which some member of his family had obstructed more than sixty years before by building a house across it.

He served as Sheriff of his county, and during the troublous time’s after the Rebellion suffered severely by his loyalty to the throne. At the time the Duke of Ormonde was apprehensive of being besieged in Dublin by the Confederates, Mr. Cusack found it necessary to obtain orders forbidding the Royalist troops from cutting timber in the wood of Rathgar and taking his horses and carts while drawing his corn, and serious injury must have been done to his house during the Battle of Rathmines, when it was taken possession of by some of the Royalist soldiers.

Being a Protestant Mr. Cusack was allowed to remain in possession of his lands under the Commonwealth, and when the Restoration came we find him living there in a house which was rated as containing five hearths, his household including his wife,

Alice, his eldest son, John, his daughter, Katherine, two men servants, and two maid servants, one described as a little short wench and the other as a full fat wench; and the only other residents on the lands being two poor women.

After Robert Cusack’s death Rathgar became the residence of his second son, the Honble. Adam Cusack, one of the Justices of the Common Pleas. During the Commonwealth Adam Cusack, who had attained to the position of a Fellow in Trinity College, Dublin, entered as a law student in his father’s Inn, and when the Restora~tion came, though he had not completed seven years’ residence, the period then required, he was allowed, on undertaking not to practise in England, to be called to the Bar.

In Ireland, as he had much influence, owing to his being by marriage a nephew of Sir Maurice Eustace, the Lord Chancellor, he came quickly to the front and twelve years after his call to the Bar, having filled while a practising barrister the position of a Justice and Chief Justice of the Provincial Court of Connaught he was appointed to the Common Pleas.

He appears to have been a delicate man; during his judicial career he was for two years unable to discharge his duties through ill-health, and he died in 1681 at a comparatively early age. His will indicates his benevolent character. Besides legacies to numerous relatives, he bequeathed sums of money to the poor in Rathfarnham and in St. Audoen’s parishes; to the hospital in Back Lane, and to that at Oxmantown, now known as the Blue Coat School; and to the prisoners in Newgate and “the Black Dog.”

He had married a sister of John Keatinge, who during Adam Cusack’s lifetime, became Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and afterwards became well known on account of the part he played at the time of the Revolution, but had no children. His widow continued to reside at Rathgar, and married, as her second husband, Mr. Nicholas Cusack. The latter was outlawed in 1690 for treason, but the property was subsequently restored to the Cusack family.

During the eighteenth century the castle or manor house fell into ruin, and Austin Cooper in 1782 found at Rathgar only the walls of a large and extensive building, which, he says, had a modern appearance, with the remains of several offices near to them, and an entrance gateway, which, as a staircase indicated, had formerly been arched over, and which looked older than the main structure.

The lands were let to market gardeners and dairymen, including a certain John Mooney, whose son’s disreputable career and death on the scaffold, for highway robbery, form the subject of a religious tract of the period, and it was not until 1753 that they were opened up for building by the construction of an avenue from the gate of Rathmines Castle, then occupied by Chief Justice Yorke, to Terenure.

A sham fight of the Dublin Volunteers took place in 1784 on the lands of Rathgar, and the ruined castle was fortified and occupied by some of the troops, who were only driven out of it with great difficulty.

Terenure and Kimmage

The earliest mention of these lands, which lie between Rathfarnham and Crumlin, is a grant made in 1206 to Audoen le Brun, Chamberlain of the Irish Exchequer, of the tithes of two carucates of demesne lands in Terenure and Kimmage held by Walter, the goldsmith.

Soon afterwards in 1216 Hugh de Barnewall was granted protection for his chattels, lands, and tenements in Terenure and Drimnagh, and from that time until the Commonwealth the Barnewall family was connected as owner with Terenure and Kimmage, as well as with Drimnagh.

In 1221 the property of the Barnewalls was temporarily placed in custody of John de St. John, and in 1228 was restored to Reginald, brother of Hugh de Barnewall, who had succeeded to it through the death of his brother without heirs, and who was then actively engaged in the defence of Ireland for the King.

A portion of the lands of Kimmage were, however, in the thirteenth century included in the lordship of Rathfarnham, and in 1269 Walter de Bret granted half a carucate of land in Kimmage, which touched on the watercourse from Templeogue and on the lands of Terenure, to William do Tathcony, who transferred it for the yearly rent of one penny or a white dove to John de Hache.

The latter, together with Thomas Russell, of Crumlin, was also granted a lease by Geoffrey le Bret on condition that they should supply him annually with wine value for twelve pence and admit him to dinner, failing which hospitality he preserved the right to claim both the wine and its value. In subsequent legal proceedings Felicia, widow of John do Hache, Alice, widow of John Russell, and Ralph, son of John Russell, are mentioned in connection with the lands.

The owners of Terenure were generous benefactors to the church. The Prior of St. Lawrence by Dublin agreed in 1300 with Reginald Barnewall and Johanna, his mother, to recover a rent charge of 20s. on the lands left by Wolfran Barnewall to that establishment and an owner of the same name granted portion of the lands, afterwards known as St. John’s Leas; extending from the manor of St. Sepulchre to the watercourse to the Hospital of St. John without Newgate.

In the seventeenth century a castle and six other dwellings stood upon the lands of Terenure and Kimmage, which were then in the possession of Peter Barnewall. He was residing there when the Rebellion broke out and, according to depositions made by his tenants, escaped plunder himself and showed little real sympathy with those who were not so fortunate.

One of those tenants, Thomas Mason by name, in deposing to the loss of cattle, horses, and household stuff, stated that Mr. Barnewall refused to allow him to put his cattle for safety into his pigeon house park, and that after the cattle had been carried off, Mr. Barnewall advised him to employ for their recovery one of his servants called Toole, who although he was armed with warrants from the Lords Justices and paid a pound by Mason, failed to find the cattle.

From as subsequent deposition it appears that the cattle had been carried off from the Caim or Pass of Killenure, near Rathfarnham, by John Woodfin, a retainer of “the grand rebel,” Toole, of Powerscourt, who acknowledged to Mason that he had taken them, together with sixty sheep belonging to the Archbishop of Dublin, and told him that some of the cattle had been stolen from him, but that he had recovered them and hanged the thief.

Another of the tenants, William Dickinson by name, who stated that the rent of his farm was £90 a year deposed that Mr. Barnewall’s late servant Toole, and John Woodfin, were amongst those concerned in robbing him of a number of cattle and horses, and of a barrel of beer, which he appears to have considered of equal importance with the live stock.

During the Commonwealth, Terenure, which then contained a castle in good repair, and a dwelling-house which had been a mill, and Kimmage, on which there was also a castle, were leased to Major Alexander Elliott.

The lands of St. John’s Leas had before that time come into the possession of Nicholas Loftus, the younger brother of Sir Adam Loftus, and ancestor of the Marquises of Ely. There was stated to be a castle upon them, but it does not appear to have been occupied by the owner, as a return made in 1644 of property left by him in Ireland on going to England mentions his goods as being in Dublin, in charge of Mr. Recorder Bysse and other persons, and in the Castle of Rathfarnham.

In a survey of Terenure made by the Parliament which gives the population as twenty persons, a young farmer called John Sheppey is returned as tIle principal inhabitant but shortly before the Restoration Mr. Erasmus Cooke appears as resident there in a dwelling-house with land, for which he paid a rent of £90 a year. After the Restoration Major Harman occupied a house rated as containing four hearths at Terenure, only one of the other eight inhabitants, Samuel Dixon, having a house with two hearths, and Kimmage was occupied by Abel Carter, and subsequently by Thomas Pegg.

The site of the great house of Terenure in the eighteenth century is now occupied by the Carmelite College, and the demesne, divided about the beginning of the nineteenth century by the road from the village of Terenure or Roundtown to Tallaght, ran down to the river Dodder, joining there the lands of Rathfarnham, and including all the lands comprised in Bushy Park.

It was the seat of the Deane family, whose members, as representatives in Parliament of the metropolitan county and of the borough of Inistiogue, in the County Kilkenny, were prominent in the political life of that period. Their residence at Terenure was due to the purchase in 1671 of its lands, together with those of Kimmage and “the Broads,” for £4,000 from Richard Talbot afterwards Earl of Tyrconnel, in whom the fee was then vested, by Major Joseph Deane, of Crumlin. Major Deane, who was a brother of one of the regicides, had served in the army of the Parliament but was received into favour on the Restoration, and became member for Inistiogue and Sheriff of the County Dublin, as well as owner of large estates.

On his death in 1699 Terenure passed to his second son, Edward, who sat in Parliament for twenty-five years, for five of which he was one of the representatives for the County Dublin, and for the remainder of the time for Inistiogue.

Edward Deane, on his; death in 1717, was succeeded at Terenure by his eldest son, who bore the same Christian name, and who had been returned two years before as the second member for Inistiogue. The latter died in 1748, and Terenure was for a short time in the possession of his eldest son, who also bore the name of Edward, and sat for Inistiogue.

An advertisement appeared from the last-named in 1750 announcing that the house of Terenure was to be set and mentioning, amongst other attractions, that in the gardens, which contained about four acres, there were two large fish ponds stocked with carp and tench, and that the house commanded an agreeable prospect of the harbour of Dublin.

A year later, in 1751, this young man, while at Harwich, was shot in a duel. As he was unmarried, Terenure, on his death, passed to his brother, Joseph Deane, the youngest son of the second Edward Deane of Terenure. This owner of Terenure was the most distinguished member of his family; he sat for many years in Parliament as member for the metropolitan county, and married the daughter and heiress of Matthew Freeman, of Castlecor, in the County Cork, whose name his descendants bear.

Amongst the tenants who occupied houses on the lands of Terenure under the Deanes we find at the beginning of the eighteenth century Mr. John Falkiner, who was Sheriff of the County Dublin in 1721, and whose house afterwards came into the possession of Mr. Travers Hartley, sometime member for the City of Dublin, through his marriage to Mr. Falkiner’s grand-daughter - the rise in the value of property during that century being shown in the fact that the house with thirty acres of land was leased in 1717 at a rent of £69 a year, in 1756 at a rent of £150, and in 1792 at a rent of £422.

The connection with Terenure of the family of Shaw, now represented by Sir Frederick Shaw, Baronet, whose residence, Bushy Park, has been mentioned as forming part of the original demesne of Terenure House, dates from the latter part of the eighteenth century, when Terenure House was taken by Mr. Robert Shaw, Controller of the General Post Office in Ireland and founder of one of the leading Dublin banks of his day, from whom the present baronet is fourth in descent. His appointment to the chief position in the Irish Post Office was due to his merit and abilities, and on his death in 1796 an appreciative notice which appeared in the Hibernian Magazine applauds his dignity, generous temper, unaffected piety, and extensive charity.

He was succeeded by his eldest son, Robert, who, after representing the City of Dublin in Parliament for many years, and serving as Lord Mayor, was created a baronet. Sir Robert Shaw married the only daughter and heiress or Mr. Abraham Wilkinson, and through the purchase of the lands of Terenure by his father-in-law became owner of the Deane property.

On the construction of the road to Tallaght Sir Robert Shaw moved his residence to Bushy Park, and Terenure House became subsequently the residence of Mr. Frederick Bourne, in whose time it was noted for the beauty of its gardens.

Fortfield House, the fine residence of Mr. Louis Perrin-Hatchell, which stands upon the lands of Kimmage, was built about the year 1785 by the illustrious Barry Yelverton, Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer, and first Viscount Avonmore, one of the greatest orators that ever adorned the Bar of Ireland. In its construction no expense was spared, and its walls display the work of the artists and artizans who found employment in Dublin at that period.

After the death of Lord Avonmore in 1805 Fortfield was sold to John, first Lord Clanmorris, and was demised by him in 1811 to Sir William MacMahon, sometime Master of the Rolls, from whom in 1858 it was purchased by the Right Hon. John Hatchell, the grandfather of the present owner.

Ecclesiastical History

The remains of an ecclesiastical building in the old graveyard of Rathfarnham mark the site of a church dedicated to SS. Peter and Paul, which stood there at the time of the Anglo-Norman Conquest.

During the thirteenth century the advowson was the subject of prolonged litigation, first between the lord of the soil, Milo le Bret, and the Archbishop of Dublin, and afterwards between the Archdeacon of Dublin and the Priory of the Holy Trinity, to whom the Archbishop and Milo le Bret seem to have transferred their respective claims.

In 1225 the Pope assigned the determination of the dispute to the Priors of St. John and of St. Thomas, Dublin, and of Conall, in the County Kildare, and as a result the church was assigned to the Priory. The dispute did not, however, end with this decision, and in 1253 the question was referred to the Dean and Precentor of the distant Cathedral of Lismore for hearing.

Ultimately about the year 1267 a settlement was arrived at between William de Northfield, then Archdeacon of Dublin, and the Priory of the Holy Trinity, by which the church was assigned to him and his successors subject to the payment of twelve marks to the Priory; and, in the appointment of one of Northfield’s immediate successors, Rathfarnham (which was assessed at the high ecclesiastical valuation of twenty-seven marks), is called a prebend in the Cathedral of St. Patrick, in right of which the Archdeacon was to be assigned a stall in the choir and a seat in the chapter.

After the death of Northfield and again in 1301 the Priory attempted to raise a claim to the church, but from Northfield’s time until the nineteenth century it remained portion of the corps of the Archdeaconry. When the Cathedral of St. Patrick was for a time dissolved in the early part of the sixteenth century the rectory of Rathfarnham, then leased to Sir John Allen, was the most valuable of those within the Archdeacon’s corps.

The tithes extended over toiwnlands known as Rathfarnham, Newtown, Prestownland, Bowdanstown, Scholarstown, Terenure, Kimmage, St. John’s Leas, and Rathgar, and had been leased by the Archdeacon to one William Wirrall for £40, while the curate, who held the glebe house and eleven acres of arable land, and was assigned the fees and oblations, had to pay the Archdeacon 26s. in addition.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the church was served, as well as Donnybrook and Taney, by the Rev. Robert Pont, the fabric was stated to be in good repair, but some years later, when served in like manner by the Rev. Richard Prescott, although sixty persons* *attended divine service, it was said to be ruinous

Subsequently we find the church served by the same curate as Taney, the Rev. Thomas Naylor, and from 1640 to 1647, when the cure was returned as vacant, the Rev. George Hudson was in charge. During those troublous times the incumbent of Kilmannon, in the diocese of Ferns, the Rev. Davis Archer, took refuge at Northfield, and under the Commonwealth the Rev. James Bishop, already mentioned in connection with Bullock, held for a time the cure of the parish.

After the Restoration Northfield, which, during the rule of James II., was sequestrated with Donnybrook, continued under the care of the same curate as Donnybrook and Taney until the year 1706, when the Rev. Henry Brenn was appointed to the sole charge of the parish. He resigned in 1711, and the Rev. John Owen, afterwards Dean of Clonmacnoise, was nominated as his successor, but does not appear to have discharged the duties, as the curacy is returned as vacant until 1718, when the Rev. Isaac Lake was appointed.

He was succeeded in 1724 by the Rev. John Towers, in 1727 by the Rev. William Candler, in 1728 by the Rev. Richard Wybrants, in 1733 by the Rev. Anyon Challenor, and in 1746 by the Rev. William Grueber.

A cousin of the Pallisers, the Rev. George Thomas, followed Mr. Grueber in 1752, and continued curate of the parish until 1768, when his death took place. He was succeeded by his eldest son, the Rev. Walter Thomas, and subsequently by his son-in-law, the Rev. Philip Homan, a member of the family seated at Surock, in the County Westmeath, who had married in 1763 “the amiable Miss Mary Anne Thomas.” Mr. Homan was presented in 1789 with a piece of plate to mark the great esteem in which he had been held during a connection with the parish of twenty years.

The church, of which some remains are still to be seen in the graveyard of Rathfarnham, became, about the year 1780, too small for the parishioners, who were returned in 1766 as including 347 Protestants, inhabiting 82 houses, besides 797 Roman Catholics, inhabiting 154 houses, and, notwithstanding the fact that it was in 1770 selected by the Bishop of Elphin, Dr. William Gore, for the purposes of an ordination, it was in a very decayed state, as we are told by Austin Cooper, who says it was a plain building with a small chancel and a modern porch.

A grant of £400 was voted in 1783 by Parliament for the construction of a new church, and after an order for a change of site had been obtained the foundation stone of the present edifice was laid in June, 1784, by the Rev. Philip Homan.

Eleven years later, on June 7th, 1795, in response to a petition signed by, amongst others, the Marquis of Ely, Barry Yelverton of Fortfield, and Sir George Ribton of Landscape, it was consecrated for divine worship.

In the eighteenth century the residence of the clergymen was the house known as Ashfield, now the seat of Mr. John Denis Tottenham, and in the early part of the nineteenth century of the eminent Sir William Cusac Smith, Baron of the Exchequer (A mural tablet to the memory of Barry Yelverton was erected by Sir William Cusac Smith in Rathfarnham Church. It bears the following inscription

“In the adjoining cemetery are deposited the mortal remains of Barry Viscount Avonmore, late Lord Chief Baron of the Court of Exchequer in Ireland, who departed this life on the 19th day of August; in the year of our Lord 1805. In consideration of having long been honoured with his lordship’s friendship Sir William Cusack Smith, Baronet, has obtained a kind permission of which he avails himself with gratitude and pride by consecrating to his respected memory this tablet. It is a plain one but it bears the name of Yelverton, and therefore is not unadorned. The abilities and worth which it might with truth record it, however, cannot be necessary to commemmorate here, of merits so recent and so eminent as his, on the minds of the present generation the impression must be strong; while considering the eventful periods which his life embraced7 and the elevated and active sphere in which it was his lot to move, to transmit those merits to posterity seems the task of the historian to whom, accordingly and fearlessly, it is surrendered by the friend.”).

Towards the close of the eighteenth century two public schools for the children of the poor were established in the village.

Under the Roman Catholic Church the parish of Rathfarnham formed originally portion of the Union of Tallaght, and in 1697 we find it served by the Rev. Timothy Kelly, who was then living at Oldcastle.

His successors have been, in 1730, the Rev. Nicholas Gibbons; in 1750, the Rev. Owen Smyth; in 1766 the Rev. Robert Bethel, who is buried in the graveyard at Whitechurch, and in whose time £206, which had been collected for the purpose of building an addition to the chapel at Rathfarnham, was stolen from the vestry; in 1781, the Rev. William Ledwidge; in 1810, the Rev. Nicholas Kearns; in 1832, the Rev. Laurence Roche; in 1851, the Rev. William M’Donnell; in 1864, the Rev. Daniel Byrne; in 1868, the Rev. Nicholas O’Connor, afterwards Bishop of Ballarat; in 1874, the Rev. Robert Meyler; in 1894, the Rev. Thomas Kearney; and in 1900, the Rev. Pierce Gossan.

The succession of clergymen under the Established Church, after the Rev. Philip Homan, has been as follows - in 1789, the Rev. John Lyster; in 1793, the Rev. Henry MacLean (A mural tablet in Rathfarnham Church bears the following inscription; “In a vault adjoining to this House of God lie the mortal remains of the Rev. Henry MacLean, Curate of the parish of Rathfarnham and Magistrate for the Co. Dublin, 44 years. His parishioners unite in this testimonial of love and esteem for their departed friend whose kindly manners, strict integrity, and unostentatious charity endeared him to the rich and poor of an extensive neighbourhood. He died regretted on the 2nd of March, 1838, aged 68 years.”), who served the cure for forty-four years, and in whose time Archbishop Magee was laid to rest in the old graveyard; in 1838, the Rev. George Augustus Shaw and the Rev. Benjamin Bunbury; in 1842, the Rev. John William Finlay; in 1844, the Rev. John James Digges La Touche; in 1851, the Rev. Thomas Neligan Kearney, in whose time the parish was severed from the corps of the Archdeacon of Dublin; in 1854, the Rev. Lancelot Dowdall; and in 1884, the Rev. James Sandys Bird.

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