Blessington House


Blessington House, Blessington Manor, the Manor House of Blessington, or Downshire House was a large estate house in Blessington, County Wicklow, Ireland built in 1673, and destroyed during the 1798 Rebellion. It was never rebuilt.

History

Background

In 1667, Michael Boyle, then serving as the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, bought the old Norman Lordship of the Three Castles in west Wicklow for £1,000. Both estates had previously belonged to the Cheevers, a County Meath Anglo-Norman family.
Boyle chose to live in his newly acquired Wicklow estate and was granted a royal charter to establish a new town there on a greenfield site, which he named Blessington - or Blesinton as it was more commonly referred to during the 1600-1800s. Planned to occupy the ancient townland of Munfine, the town was granted borough status and was to "extend into the said county of Wicklow every way from the middle of the said town two hundred or more acres in the whole".
Boyle encouraged farmers of the Protestant faith to settle on the estate, as was the case in most large landed estates of the period.

Construction

In 1673, construction began on the brick mansion of Blessington House, to designs by Dublin architect and carpenter Thomas Lucas. Lucas had previously worked on St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin and on the original west front of Trinity College Dublin, which was eventually demolished in the 1750s. Lucas is known to have remained in Boyle's employment during 1673 and 1674.
According to Phibbs, the method of payment to the builder was agreed thus: "£100 in hand, £100 when the first storey was set, £100 when the walls were ready for the roof and the last payment made when the work was completely finished". The work was to be carried out "exactly according to the draught of the same house made by said Lucas" and the agreements made between Boyle and his contractors specified that the two-storied house, built of lime, stone, brick and sand, was to be 106 feet long, 61 feet wide, with walls at least 10 feet high and a cellar 60 feet long and 28 feet wide.
The building had a recessed centre at the back, eight dormers on the roof, and typical of many houses of the period was designed to have its principal rooms on the first floor, according to the piano nobile architectural principle. In front of the house was a large circular pond.
Lucas was also tasked with designing the interior of the house, while a Dublin mason named Thomas Browne was assigned with carrying out all masonry work. Lucas's contract was for £1,300 and Browne was to be paid £600, but additional expenses and furnishings ended up adding considerably to the cost. Construction of such a large building was a huge financial undertaking and consequently Boyle, as Chancellor, sought from Thomas Osborne, the Lord High Treasurer, an increase in his salary from £2,000 to £3,000 per annum. According to Trant, it is unclear what the result of this request was.

Landscaping

The demesne and deer park, luxuriously planted with a variety of trees, extended to over 440 Irish acres, with the deer park covering 340 acres of this. Boyle had to be personally granted a license by King George II for the enclosed deer park. By 1684, the lands were described in an Abstracts of Grants of Lands as "now inclosed with a wall about the deer park".
The landscaping on the estate was typical of the seventeenth century, with ponds, canals and a formal garden, which all converged on the house at the apex of a crow's foot pattern. There were lawns between the various avenues and a double line of lime trees planted either side of the major avenue between the front of the house and St Mary's Church. A pair of gate piers from the avenue, as well as one of the original lime trees, remain standing as of.
The principal avenue from the front of the house linked it directly with St Mary's Church in the centre of Blessington, and was an avenue still extant by 2004, before roadworks largely changed the area with the construction of the Blessington ring road. Traces of the other avenues could also still be seen in the landscape as of 2004.

Appraisal

In 1709, the house was described thus by Samuel Molyneux, a visitor to Blessington:
The modern historian Maurice Craig agreed that Boyle's mansion "must have been among the very finest" of the wide-eaved houses typical of the period.
Trant notes that Blessington House would have been similar to in style to another mansion built by Archbishop William Bulkeley about forty years earlier, at Old Bawn, Tallaght, not far from Blessington. These types of dwelling, according to Trant, "with extensive windows and spacious interior, had replaced the earlier tower houses of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which had been built mainly with defence in mind". This new style of house, however, was a sign of the growing security felt by settlers as the seventeenth century progressed.

Usage

When Boyle had completed Blessington House, he turned his attention to the construction of a church for the town; St Mary's, which was eventually dedicated on 17 September 1683 with Boyle in attendance. The church still stands, and was still in use as of June 2024.
It is unclear how often Boyle used his Blessington mansion. It is known that he was residing there in 1678, the same year he was promoted to the See of Armagh, and was "taking a little air, as physic to prepare more against the next term" whilst also taking care of business matters.

Boyle's final years

In 1689, James II landed at Kinsale with a force of 2,500 men which led to the country being "in ferment". Shortly afterwards, Blessington was attacked by "a horde of wandering rapparees" and Blessington House plundered. According to Trant, the word 'rapparee' in interchangeable with 'tory', and the rapparees in question were most likely the Wicklow clanns of the O'Byrnes and O'Tooles. A detachment of dragoons was positioned in the town for security, and Boyle himself sought refuge across the Irish Sea in Chester. Boyle's first wife Margaret Synge, along with their child Martha were drowned at sea as they fled the 1641 Rebellion some decades earlier.
In July 1690, William of Orange won a decisive victory over James II at the Battle of the Boyne. One of William's Dutch generals, Ginkle, continued in Ireland afterwards and had a detachment of French troops quartered in Blessington House. This complement consisted of fourteen or fifteen troopers with their horses in the stables, and a commanding officer in the house. Boyle reported that they were more "formidable" than the dragoons who had been there before them, and "hath put the place and people" into a "quiet". The officer in charge assured Boyle that 'a tickett' would be given for any hay or oats used by his men, and that the troopers would be "banned from going into the park or doing any disturbances to the deer or any my stock upon the place, that no young trees or hedges in the demesne would be cut down and that Boyle's labourers would not be interfered with".
Boyle's largest sitting tenant was one John Finnemore of Ballyward near the village of Manor Kilbride, whose presence in Blessington was first recorded in the year 1683 in entries from the 'vestry books' of St. Mary's Church. On 20 May 1700, Murrough Boyle, son of Michael, granted Sarah Finnemore of the town of Blessington, a lease of the townland of Ballyward, demonstrating that Murrough was at least partly in control of affairs on the estate at that point, and not his father.
Michael Boyle died at his home in Oxmanstown, Dublin in December 1702, and was buried in St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.

Boyle descendants

Upon his death, Boyle's eldest son Morough inherited his fathers various estates. Morough's interest in the Blessington estate is unclear, but the fact that Monsieur Gilmud, Morough's chaplain, died in the town in 1710 would suggest that Morough lived at Blessington House, at least for a time.
With Morough's death in 1718, and no male heir, the titles Baron Boyle and Viscount Blessington became extinct, and the estates in Blessington and Monkstown devolved to his sister Anne. When Anne's son William Stewart died in 1769, also without a male heir, the Blessington title became extinct once more, and all the Boyle estates went to Charles Dunbar, a grandson of Morough's daughter Mary.
During this time, other large country estates began to appear in the immediate surroundings of Blessington, including Russborough House, built four kilometres away from Blessington between 1741 and 1755. The houses of the minor gentry, such as the Smiths at Baltyboys House, the Hornidges at Tulfarris and Russelstown and the Finnemores at Ballyward, were on a more modest scale than Russborough, but still not insignificant.
A lease from 1732, for 1,050 acres in the townland of Ballylow, a semi-mountainous area within the Blessington estate, demonstrates the conditions which tenants were expected to satisfy. As was the system at the time, the Finnemores, upon being granted their lease, would divide the land into smaller parcels, which they would then sub-lease on to smaller tenants. It is worth noting that the Blessington estate included much underdeveloped heath land and the Finnemores and their tenants were expected to improve their holdings during the course of the lease. The conditions of the 1732 lease were listed as the following:

  • Rent was £30 per annum to be paid at Blessington House.
  • Finnemore was to erect good ditches and 2 rows of quicksets between himself and his neighbours.
  • Pay a duty hogg and 2 capons at Christmas.
  • Do suite and service at the Manor Courts of Blessington.
  • Grind their corn and mault, to be used for bread and drink, at the Manor Mill of Blessington.
  • Sow hemp and flax according to the law.
  • Permission for John Pearson to enter the lands to deliver livery and seizen – a legal requirement.
  • Keep ditches and buildings in good repair.
  • Rear one couple of young hounds or beagles yearly for his Lordship.

In 1760, Blessington House was "burned and almost levelled" in an attack which was described: "the Downshire mansion at Blessington was broken into about two in the morning while the men who should have been guarding it were absent drinking in the town".
In 1778, Dunbar also died heirless. In his will, he had reiterated the wishes of his great-grandfather, Morough Boyle, that the estate should continue "in the family and blood of the late Primate Boyle". The estates were thus divided amongst Boyle's descendants, with the Blessington estate coming into the possession of Wills Hill, 1st Marquess of Downshire.