Lady Edward Fitzgerald (whose husband had served under Lord Moira in America) was at Moira House on the evening of her husband's arrest. Writing from Castletown, county Kildare, two days after that event, Lady Louisa Connolly, Lord Edward's aunt, says: "As soon as Edward's wound was dressed he desired the private secretary at the Castle to write for him to Lady Edward and tell her what had happened. The secretary carried the note himself. Lady E. was at Moira House, and a servant of Lady Mountcashel's came soon after to forbid Lady Edward's servants saying anything to her that night." She continued, after Lord E.'s death, to reside at Moira House till obliged by an order of the privy council to retire to England, where she became the guest of her husband's uncle, the duke of Richmond. [2]
Lady Moira, who so kindly befriended Lady Edward, was unquestionably a very remarkable woman, and had considerable influence, politically and socially, in the Dublin of her day. Although an Englishwoman, she became in some respects ipsis Hibernis Hibernior, and for a very long period prior to her death never quitted the soil of Ireland. Had the Irish aristocracy generally been of the complexion of those who assembled in the more intimate reunions at Moira House, the history of that country during the past century would have been a widely different one. The members of that brilliant circle were thorough anti-Unionists, and Lord Moira and his sons-in-law, the earls of Granard and Mountcashel, proved that they were not to be conciliated by bribes, either in money or honors, by entering their formal protest against that measure on the books of the Irish House of Lords.
When the delegates on behalf of Catholic claims came to London in 1792, it was this enlightened Irish nobleman who received them, and who, in the event of the minister declining to admit them, intended as a peer to have claimed an audience of the king. Lord Moira both in the English and Irish Houses of Peers denounced the oppressive measures of the government, and his opposition gave so much offence that the English general Lake was reported to hayer declared that if a town in the North was to be burnt, they had best begin with Lord Moira's, causing him so much apprehension that he removed his collection, which was of extraordinary value, from his seat, Moira Hall, in the county Down, to England.
The celebrated John Wesley visited Lady Moira at Moira House in 1775, "and was surprised to observe, though not a more grand, a far more elegant room than he had ever seen in England. It was an octagon, about twenty feet square, and fifteen or sixteen high, having one window (the sides of it inlaid throughout with mother-of-pearl) reaching from the top of the room to the bottom: the ceiling, sides and furniture of the room were equally elegant." It was here that two of the greatest members of their respective legislatures—Charles Fox and Henry Grattan—first met in 1777, and Moira House continued to be the scene of splendid entertainments up to the death of the first Lord Moira, in 1793. Wesley concludes his letter about Moira House by asking, "Must this too pass away like a dream?" Whether like a dream or no, it certainly has been signally the fate of this whilom proud mansion to pass from the highest to the very humblest almost at a bound. For some years after Lady Moira's death (in 1808) the house was kept up by the family, but in 1826 it was let to an anti-mendicity society. The upper story was removed, the mansion was stripped throughout of its splendid decorations—some of the furniture is now at Castle Forbes, the seat of the earl of Granard, Lady Moira's great-grandson, a worthy descendant—and the saloons which were wont to be thronged with the most brilliant and splendid society of the Irish metropolis in its heyday are now the abode of perhaps the very poorest outcasts who are to be found in the whole wide world.
The district in which Moira House stands has long ceased to be fashionable. The mansion stands close to the Liffey, a few yards back from the road. An elderly man who has charge of the mendicity institution for whose purposes the house is at present used, told me that he remembered it when kept up by the family, although its members were not actually residing there. What is now a fearfully dreary courtyard, where the outcasts of Dublin disport themselves, was then, he said, a fine garden with splendid mulberry trees, which he, being a favorite with the gardener, was permitted to climb—a circumstance which had naturally impressed itself on his childish memory. I told him that I had heard that long after the difficulties of the first marquis—who lent one hundred thousand pounds to George the Magnificent when that glorious prince was at the last gasp for £ s. d.—had compelled him to part with his large estates; in the county Down, he had retained possession of this mansion, and that it had even descended to the last marquis, whose wild career concluded when he was only six-and-twenty; but the old man thought it had passed from them long before. He remembered, he said, the last peer (with whom the title became extinct) coming to Dublin, because he had an interview with him about some furniture for his yacht, my informant being at that time in business, and he thought he should have heard if the property had been still retained. I asked if the marquis had exhibited any interest as to the old historical mansion of his family. "Not the slightest," he replied.
Hardy, in his well-known life of Lord Charlemont, says: "His (Lord Moira's) house will be long, very long, remembered: it was for many years the seat of refined hospitality, of good nature and of good conversation. In doing the honors of it, Lord Moira had certainly one advantage above most men, for he had every assistance that true magnificence, the nobleness of manners peculiar to exalted birth, and talents for society the most cultivated, could give him in his illustrious countess."
Powerscourt House, a really noble mansion in St. Andrew street, is now used by a great wholesale firm, but is so little altered that it could be fitted for a private residence again in a very brief time. The staircase is grand in proportion, and the steps and balustrades are of polished mahogany, the last being richly carved.
Tyrone House is now the Education Office, and Mornington House, where Wellington's father resided, and where or at Dangan—for it is a doubtful point—the duke was born, is also used for government purposes.
The great squares of Dublin are St. Stephen's Green, Rutland, Mountjoy, Merrion and Fitzwilliam Squares. The first of these dates from the latter half of the seventeenth century, and is probably in a far more prosperous condition now than it ever was before. If we are to judge by Whitelaw's history, it presented in 1819 an aspect such as no public square out of Dublin—the enclosure of Leicester Square, London, excepted—could present. "Of that kind of architectural beauty," he says, "which arises from symmetry and regularity, here are no traces." Some houses were on a level with the streets, others were approached by a grand perron. The proprietors were of all degrees: here was the great house of a lord, there a miserable dramshop. The enclosure consisted of no less than thirteen acres, making Stephen's Green the largest public square in Europe. It was simply a great treeless field, with an equestrian statue of George II. stuck in the middle of it. The principal entrance to the ground is described as "decorated with four piers of black stone crowned with globes of mountain granite, once respectable, but exhibiting shameful symptoms of neglect and decay." There had been a gravel walk called the "Beaux' Walk," from its having been a fashionable resort, "but," says Whitelaw, "the ditch which bounds it is now usually filled with stagnant water, which seems to be the appropriate receptacle of animal bodies in a disgusting state of putrefaction." At night this charming recreation-ground was illumined by twenty-six lamps, at a distance of one hundred and seventy feet from each other, stuck on wooden poles. Such an account of the grand square of Dublin does not make one surprised to learn that the main approach to it from the heart of the city was of a very miserable description.
In reading Whitelaw's history of Dublin it is impossible not to be struck with the fact that it records a degree of neglect and indifference on the part of the people and the local authorities to beauty, decency and order such as could scarcely be found in another country. In the centre of Merrion Square was a fountain of very ambitious expense and design, erected to the honor of the duke and duchess of Rutland, a lord and lady lieutenant. The fountain was only finished in 1791, but "from a fault in the foundation, or some shameful negligence in the construction, is already cracked and bulged in several places; and though intended as a monument to perpetuate the memory of an illustrious nobleman and his heroic father (the famous Lord Granby), is, after an existence of only sixteen years, tottering to its fall." Mr. Whitelaw continues: "Unhappily, a savage barbarism that seems hostile to every idea of order or decency, of beauty and elegance, prevails among but too many of the lower orders; and hence the decorations of almost every public fountain have been destroyed or disfigured: the figure, shamefully mutilated, of the water-nymph in this fountain has been reduced to a disgusting trunk, and the alto relievo over it shows equal symptoms of decay, arising partly from violence, and partly, perhaps, from the perishable nature of the materials." Truly a forcible picture of art and the appreciation thereof in Ireland!