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Background to the Family
The romantically-titled Knights of Glin, a branch
of the great Norman family, the FitzGeralds or Geraldines,
Earls of Desmond, were granted extensive lands in County
Limerick in the early 14th century by their Desmond
overlords.
The Desmond family were all descended from the Norman
Maurice FitzGerald, a companion-in-arms to Strongbow.
Maurice was the son of Gerald of Windsor and his wife
the Welsh Princess Nesta, Gerald having settled in Wales.
She was famous for her many children including, among
others, a son by King Henry I of England. As a result
she became known as 'the brood mare of the Normans'.
The FitzGeralds came to Ireland from Wales in the 1170s
as mercenaries, at the request of King Dermot MacMurrough,
to help him with his wars to subdue his subjects.
Three of the cadet branches of the Desmond lordship
were known as the White Knight, the Knight of Glin and
the Knight of Kerry. These strange titles are anomalies
and are more akin to Gaelic Chieftainships, demonstrating
the Gaelicisation of this Norman sept.
The last White Knight, Maurice Og Fitzgibbon, died in
1611 and the title is now, sadly, extinct or dormant,
although there have been several claimants to it.
The Earls of Kingston descend in the female line from
Maurice Og - his niece married Sir John King, 1st Lord
Kingston. A full-length portrait of the 1st Lord Kingston
in armour hangs on the left hand wall of the hall. Just
beyond it hangs a portrait of Lord FitzGerald and \'esey,
another claimant to the title.
The Knight of Kerry now lives in England.
Maurice's son, Thomas FitzMaurice FitzGerald, was granted
Shanid in West Limerick in 1197 where he built a polygonal
keep, on a motte, in about 1200. 'Shanid Abu' translated
means 'Shanid for ever' and was always the Desmond Geraldine's'
war-cry.
Their war-cry can be seen on the back of the hall chairs
on the coat-of-arms on the ceiling and on the many pieces
of silver in the house.
The Knights of Glin were granted the barony of Kenry
bordering the banks of the Shannon, near the great Desmond
castle of Askeaton. In the Middle Ages the holder of
the title was often known as 'the Knight of the Glen'
or 'the Knight of the Valley', indicating their extensive
lands along the valley of the river Shannon between
Limerick and the sea.
They owned a number of tower houses in this area including
Beagh, Shanpallas, Castletown, Ballygleaghane (Holly
Park) and Cappagh near
Rathkeale. The lands around Glin on the Kerry border
made up another defensive area marching with those of
the Gaelic Chieftain the O'Connor Kerry to the west
with their great castle of Carrigafoyle.
The Glin Fitzgerald's survived the Elizabethan, Cromwellian
and Jacobite wars where they were invariably on the
losing side, fighting against the English with their
kinsmen The Earls of Desmond. 'Desmond' means 'South
Munster', where Glin is situated.
During the Desmond Wars Thomas FitzGerald, heir of the
then Knight, was hanged, drawn and quartered by the
English forces in Limerick,
in 1567. His mother, legend has it, seized his severed
head, drank his blood, and walked, surrounded by a vast
keening concourse, carrying his dismembered body to
be buried at Lislaughtin Abbey.
One of the Knights of Glin's castles in Co. Limerick,
the old Glin Castle (now a shattered ruin in the village
of Glin), was dramatically besieged by Queen Elizabeth's
forces in July 1600, during the later uprising of the
'Sugar' or 'Straw' Earl of Dcsmond.
Before the siege Sir George Carew, the Lord President
of Munster, captured the Knight's six-year-old son and,
tying the child to the mouth of
a cannon, threatened to blow him to bits if the Knight
did not surrender. The reply, in Irish, was blunt:
'the Knight was virile and his wife was strong and
it would be easy to produce another son".
The Knight managed to hold on to the last portion
of his estates which consisted of some 15,000 acres,
the castle and manorial court of Glin, despite the
highly complicated confiscations, regrants and legal
machinations which took place during the turbulent
17th century. Indeed, the Desmond Rebellion against
Queen Elizabeth, alone saw the confiscation of over
30,000 acres of the Knight's land in Kerry
The History of Glin Castle
The present castle of Glin is really a plain Georgian
House with later castellations and many windows - locally
they used to say there was a window for every day of
the year!
It was originally built in the late 17th century as
a long thatch house when the knights moved in from the
old castle a half mile to the west. This is incorporated
into the long west wing of the present house.
It is probable that this long house was turned into
a T, with an extension facing east, in the first half
of the 18th century as the present secondary staircase,
the dining room and
smoking rooms have a basement beneath them.
However, some large rooms must have been built during
this period as the full length portrait of the Duellist
Knight, Richard FitzGerald, which dates from before
1736, must have hung somewhere. Richard Fitzgerald's
nephew, Colonel John FitzGerald, who eventually succeeded
in 1781, made a larger block of the house in the 1780s
by adding a hall, a grand staircase and two more reception
rooms - the drawing room and library.
The 1780s was a stirring optimistic time in Ireland
and this prompted the building of Glin. In a letter
to Edmund Sexton Pery, the Speaker of the Irish House
of Commons, in May 1779,
Thomas FitzGerald warned that a French naval invasion
was expected off the coast, amid rumours that the American
privateer, Paul Jones, had sailed up the Shannon to
Tarbert after he had defeated an English ship in Belfast
Lough, in the summer of 1779.
By that date, France and Spain had declared war on England
and were supporting the American colonists in the war
of Independence. Panic spread among the gentry and nobility
of Ireland in case the country should be left unprotected
in the face of an invasion. And so, the Irish Volunteer
Regiments were raised between 1778 and 1783: 40,000
men were enrolled by 1779 and 100,000 by 1782.
Inspired by, the success of the Americans, and buoyed
up by their own success in having the trade restrictions
abolished in 1778, and with the strength of the Volunteers
behind them, Henry Grattan and his Patriot Party demanded
legislative independence for Ireland from Britain.
Thomas FitzGerald died in 1781 and was succeeded by
his son Colonel John. A portrait of Thomas FitzGerald
wearing a red coat, is on the right of the drawing room
door.
Colonel John FitzGerald was about 20 when he formed
the Glin Cavalry in 1776. This Militia Regiment became
known later as the Royal Glin Huzzars whose colours
hang on the staircase.
The Royal Glin Artillery was his main regiment and even
boasted a musical band of 10.
The portrait of Colonel John, which hangs over the Portland
stone chimney piece in the hall, shows him wearing the
uniform of this regiment and proudly pointing at his
cannon.
His Volunteer enthusiasm took him to all the reviews
and parades until November 1783 when he attended the
national Volunteer Convention at Rotunda in Dublin.
Many of the reforms presented there were rejected and
the movement lost some of its impetus but carried on
until it was suppressed eventually in 1793. After that,
Col. John's regiments became corps of yeomanry.
The ivory handled sword, with its elaborately chased
blue-gilt blade by Read of Dublin, which hangs under
his portrait in the hall, was presented to him by his
regiment, the Glin Cavalry, in 1800 for keeping the
peace during the 1798 rebellion. A volunteer cream ware
jug with the Irish harp 'tun'd to Freedom for our Country'
commemorates these stirring times and stands on the
hall chimney piece.
The new prosperity of the country was reflected in a
great upsurge of public and private building together
with extensive landscaping and tree planting - all deemed
to express the pride of Ireland's ruling classes in
their newly won national independence - a short-lived
independence which was shaken by the French Revolution
and, finally, shattered by the Rebellion of 1798 and
the ensuing Union with England in 1800.
Colonel John supported this Union, though his faith
in King and Country had faltered temporarily under the
joint influence of his brother, Gerald, and his kinsman
Lord Edward FitzGerald who were both United Irishmen.
[Lord Edward is said to have stayed at Glin during the
1798 Rebellion.]
Colonel John did much to keep the peace in the area
during the Rebellion. Indeed, after his death in 1803,
General Payne, the English
military commander in Limerick, in a letter to Samuel
Marsden, the under secretary in Dublin Castle, commenting
on the death of the Knight, wrote that "he [the
Knight] had kept all that wild country in his neighbourhood
in very good order, enforced obedience to the laws from
all classes and by his humanity and enforced obedience
to the laws of the classes - and by his humanity and
benevolence attached his tenantry to him".
Colonel John had no political influence as all the local
boroughs were in the hands of the new English settler
families. This meant that, unlike so many of them, he
did not spend money on a large Dublin house and thereby
concentrated on
cutting a greater dash at home.
In 1789 Colonel John had married his beautiful English
wife Margaretta Maria Fraunceis of Forde Abbey, Dorset,
the daughter of a rich West Country squire. Her coat
of arms is impaled with his on the hall ceiling, which
suggests that the house was still being decorated at
the time of their marriage. A house, in those days,
could take 7 or 8 years to build, decorate and furnish.
Unfortunately we have no direct information about who
designed the house or the identity of the craftsmen
who styled the superb woodwork such as the mahogany
library bookcase with its
concealed secret door, the inlaid stair-rail, the flying
staircase, or the intricate plaster ceilings.
This is because many of the family papers were burned
by the so-called 'Cracked Knight' in the 1860s.
Tradition tells us that the stone for the house was
brought across the hills from a quarry in nearby Athea,
on horse drawn sleds, by a 'strongman' contractor called
Sheehy. This is the only name connected with the building
of the house that has come down to us.
It seems likely that Colonel John started his
house sometime in the 1780s as he obviously used the
same masons and carpenters as were used for two houses
adjoining each other in Henry Street, Limerick. One
was built for the Bishop of Limerick, later Lord Glentworth,
and the other for the Bishop's elder brother, the Speaker
of the Irish House of Commons, Viscount Pery. These
Limerick houses were finished by 1784 and it is not
unlikely that they are the work of a good local carpenter/builder.
Colonel John may well have been his own architect working
with the excellent craftsmen that Limerick could obviously
produce. It is possible that this Limerick builder may
have been trained or at least influenced by two men
-
the Italian architect Davis Ducart (fl. 1765-1780s)
who built the cut-stone Limerick Custom House between
1765-69 and who specialised in elaborate 'imperial'
or double staircases, and Christopher Colles (c. 1730-1816),
an engineer and architect, who supervised Ducart's work
there.
The double flying staircase may well be a Ducart inspired
flight of fantasy, although Robert Adam's earlier bifurcating
example at Mellerstain, in Berwickshire, of the late
1770s might have been a prototype. The flying-staircase
led up to what was originally a large drawing room on
the first floor. Colles remained as an architect in
Limerick until 1771 as he is
known to have supplied designs for a Bishop's Palace
in that year. The Palace was not built until mid 1780s.
In 1771 Collis emigrated to America where he made a
name for himself as an inventor and engineer. An early
visionary, he designed plans for a navigable waterway
linking the Great Lakes to the Hudson river.
Colles's family had a famous water-powered marble works
in Kilkenny which supplied door cases, chimneypieces
and architectural detailing for many Irish buildings
of this period. The Doric front door case at Glin and
at least one chimneypiece are made of this fossilised
shell-
encrusted limestone.
The neo-classical Plasterwork of the hall is close to
the work of two Dublin stuccadors, Charles Thorpe or
Michael Stapleton and retains much of its original colouring.
The symbols on the frieze underline the Volunteer enthusiasm
and Patriotism of Colonel John with military trophies,
shields sprouting shamrocks and the full bosomed Irish
harp all incorporated into the hall ceiling.
The French horn and music book are evidence that the
hall doubled as a ballroom, the music in Colonel John's
time undoubtedly, being played by
the musicians from the Volunteer artillery band. Colonel
John loved music and had been taught the flute by a
Gaelic music and dancing master, Sean Ban Aerach 0 Flanagan.
All the other reception rooms open off the main hall
and off the staircase hall beyond, making the circulation
around the house ideal for entertaining.
A curious feature of the hall is the placing of columns
near the entrance; in the evolution of the Irish country
house plans, columns commonly formed a screen at the
far end.
The drawing room, library and staircase also have neo-classical
plaster ceilings and friezes.
By the 1790s the money must have started to run out,
even while working on the ground floor, as there is
no decorative plaster work in the dining room. Work
certainly stopped short on the third floor: walls remained
unplastered despite being scored for its application;
pine doors were left unpainted; oak rafters and beams
were left exposed, as there were no ceilings. Cornices
were only partially in place and a marble fireplace
was set up in an otherwise totally unfinished room.
Work on that (third) floor, with the addition of new
bedrooms, was finally completed in the winter of 1999!
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