What English mercy looked like in 1535
The Maynooth Pardon
In the spring of 1535, Henry VIII's lord deputy William Skeffington arrived at Maynooth Castle with artillery — proper modern siege guns, the kind Ireland had never seen pointed at an Irish castle before. The siege lasted ten days. When the garrison of Silken Thomas FitzGerald's stronghold finally surrendered, they expected the standard treatment for captured soldiers: ransom, exchange, mercy. Instead, the English commander had them executed in front of the gate. The killing of men who surrendered in good faith became known with grim Irish irony as the 'Maynooth Pardon.' Silken Thomas himself — Thomas FitzGerald, 10th Earl of Kildare, who had renounced his allegiance to Henry VIII in a public ceremony at St Mary's Abbey in Dublin the year before — was captured later in 1535. He was executed at Tyburn in February 1537, along with his five uncles. It was the end of FitzGerald dominance in Irish politics, orchestrated by a king who understood that you did not defeat a ruling family: you eliminated it.
1795 and the deal that built a seminary
The College on the Plain
In 1795, the British Government was at war with revolutionary France and badly needed to keep Irish Catholics calm. The solution arrived at was peculiar but logical: fund a seminary in Ireland so that priests would no longer need to train on the continent, where they might absorb inconvenient revolutionary ideas. The Maynooth College Act passed that year, and St Patrick's College opened with fifty students. The British were paying for a Catholic institution in a country with a Protestant establishment, which required a certain amount of looking the other way on all sides. By the 1820s, Maynooth-trained priests were the backbone of Daniel O'Connell's Catholic Emancipation campaign. The seminary Henry Grattan had supported as a pragmatic political concession had become the nerve centre of Irish Catholic nationalism. By 1850 it was the largest Catholic seminary in the world. Pugin's Gothic buildings followed in the 1840s and 50s — the same architect who designed the interior of the Palace of Westminster — and they are the campus that visitors see today.
Ireland's premier family, from castle to hotel
The FitzGeralds and Carton
After the slighting of Maynooth Castle the FitzGeralds retreated first to Kilkea and eventually to Carton, where they built the Palladian house around 1740. James FitzGerald became Ireland's first and only Duke of Leinster in 1766 — the premier peer of Ireland, which meant the premier peer of the whole country, not just the ascendancy — and married Lady Emily Lennox, great-granddaughter of Charles II. They had 23 children. One of them was Lord Edward FitzGerald, born at Carton in 1763, who renounced his title, went to France to meet Thomas Paine and absorb revolutionary ideas, and became a leader of the United Irishmen. He was fatally wounded during his arrest in Dublin in May 1798, the night before the intended uprising. He died on June 4th, aged 34, as the rebellion he had organised collapsed outside. The 7th Duke of Leinster sold Carton in 1949 to pay gambling debts. The house passed through several owners before Fairmont took it on. The golf courses are very good. The Shell Cottage that Lady Emily decorated with shells from around the world is still in the grounds.
When the State moved in alongside the priests
The university that grew from the seminary
For almost 200 years, Maynooth meant one thing: the seminary. In 1997, the secular campus of St Patrick's College became a constituent college of the National University of Ireland — later gaining independent university status as Maynooth University in 1997. The institution now has 14,000 students and a research output that has nothing to do with theology. The seminary continues on the south campus, training priests in the same buildings where Pugin's Gothic Revival architecture meets the everyday business of a modern university. The two institutions share a boundary and a heritage. The tone of the seminary side — quiet, purposeful, self-contained — sits about 200 metres from the main student-facing side, which on any given Thursday evening is doing something entirely different. Maynooth is the only place in Ireland where you can go from a Pugin refectory to a student union bar in the time it takes to cross a courtyard.