The town crowds too closely upon it, but the position is superb. The castle windows look clown upon the Nore, spanned by a narrow ancient bridge, and command, not only all that is worth seeing in the town, but a wide and glorious prospect over a region which is even now beautiful, and in summer must be charming.
Over the ancient bridge the enterprise of a modern brewer last week brought a huge iron vat, so menacingly ponderous that the authorities made him insure the bridge for a day.
Within the castle, near the main entrance, are displayed some tapestries, which are hardly shown to due advantage in that position. They were made here at Kilkenny in a factory established by Piers Butler, Earl of Ormonde, in the sixteenth century, and they ought to be sent to the Irish Exhibition of this year in London, as proving what Irish art and industry well directed could then achieve. They are equally bold in design and rich in colour. The blues are especially fine.
The grand gallery of the castle, the finest in the kingdom, though a trifle narrow for its length, is hung with pictures and family portraits. One of the most interesting of these is a portrait of the black Earl of Ormon’de, a handsome swarthy man, evidently careful of his person, who was led by that political flirt, Queen Elizabeth, to believe that she meant to make him a visit in Ireland, and, perhaps, to honour him with her hand. He went to great expenses thereupon. At a parley with his kinsman, the Irish chieftain O’Moore of Abbeyleix, this black earl was traitorously captured, and an ancient drawing representing this event hangs beneath his portrait.
The muniment room, where, thanks to Lord Ormonde’s courtesy, we found everything prepared to receive us, is a large, airy, and fire-proof chamber, with well-arranged shelves and tables for consult ing the records. These go back to the early Norrnan days, long before Edward III. made James Butler Earl of Ormonde, upon his marriage with Alianore of England, granddaughter of Edward I. The Butlers came into Ireland with Henry II., and John gave them estates, the charters of some of which, with the seals annexed, are here preserved. There are fine specimens of the great seals also of Henry III., and of his sons Edward I. and Edmund Crouchback, and of the Tudor sovereigns, as well as many private seals of great interest. The wax of the early seals was obviously stronger and better than the wax since used. Of Elizabeth, who came of the Butler blood through her mother, one large seal in yellow wax, attached to a charter dated Oct. 24, 1565, is remarkable for the beauty of the die. The Queen sits on the obverse under a canopy; on the reverse she rides in state on a pacing steed as in her effigy at the Tower of London. The seals of James I. follow the design of this die. Two of these are particularly fine. At the Restoration something disappears of the old stateliness. A seal of Charles II., of 1660, very large and florid in style, shows the monarch sitting very much at his ease, with one knee thrown negligently over the other. Many of the private letters and papers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, during which Kilkenny, as it had been often before, was a great centre of Irish politics and intrigues, have been bound up in volumes, and the collection has been freely drawn upon by historians. But it would obviously bear and reward a more thorough co-ordination and examination than it has ever yet received.
There is a curious Table Book here preserved of Charles I. while at Oxford in 1644, from which it appears that while the colleges were melting up their plate for the King, his Majesty fared better than might have been expected. His table was served with sixty pounds of mutton a day; and he wound up his dinner regularly with “sparaguss” so long as it lasted, and after it went out with artichokes.
An Expense Book, too, of the great Marquis, after he became the first Duke of Ormonde, Colonel Blood’s Duke, kept at Kilkenny in 1668 throws some interesting light on the cost of living and the customs of great houses at that time. The Duke, who was in some respects the greatest personage in the realm, kept up his state here at a weekly cost of about £50, a good deal less—allowing for the fall in the power of the pound sterling—than it would now cost him to live at a fashionable London hotel. He paid £9, 10s. a week for the keep of nineteen horses, 18 shillings board wages for three laundry-maids, and £1, 17s. 4d. for seven dozen of tallow-candles. The wines served at the ducal table were Burgundy, Bordeaux, “Shampane,” Canary, “Renish,” and Portaport, the last named at a shilling a bottle, while he paid no more than £3, 18s. for six dozen bottles of Bordeaux, and £1, 1s. for a dozen and a half of “Shampane.” This of course was not the sparkling beverage which in our times is the only contribution of Champagne to the wine markets of the world, for the Ay Mousseux first appears in history at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It was the red wine of Champagne, which so long contested the palm with the vintages of Burgundy. St. Evremond, who with the Comte d’Olonne and the great gourmets of the seventeenth century thought Champagne the best, as the Faculty of Paris also pronounced it the most wholesome of wines, doubtless introduced his own religion on the subject into England—but the entry in the Duke’s Expense Book of 1668 is an interesting proof that the duel of the vintages was even then going as it finally went in favour of Burgundy. While the Duke got his Champagne for 1s. 2d. a bottle, he had to pay twenty shillings a dozen, or 1s. 8d. a bottle, for five dozen of Burgundy. He got his wines from Dublin, which then, as long before, was the most noteD wine mart of Britain. The English princes drew their best supplies thence in the time of Richard II.
From the castle we drove through the snow to the Cathedral of St. Canice, a grand and simple Norman edifice of the twelfth century, now the Church of the Protestant bishop. An ancient Round Tower of much earlier date stands beside it like a campanile, nearly a hundred feet in height.
There is a legend that Rinuccini wanted to buy and carry away one of the great windows of this Cathedral, in which mass was celebrated while he was here. The Cathedral contains some interesting monuments of the Butlers, and there are many curiously channelled burial slabs in the floor, like some still preserved in the ruins of Abbeyleix. Lord de Vesci pointed out to me several tombs of families of English origin once powerful here, but now sunk into the farmer class. On one of these I think it was that we saw a remarkably well-preserved effigy of a lady, wearing a plaited cap under a “Waterford cloak”—one of the neatest varieties of the Irish women’s cloak—garment so picturesque at once, and so well adapted to the climate, that I am not surprised to learn from Lady de Vesci that it is very fast going out of fashion. This morning before we left Abbeyleix she showed us two such cloaks, types from two different provinces, each in its way admirable. Put on and worn about the room by two singularly stately and graceful ladies, they fell into lines and folds which recalled the most exquisitely beautiful statuettes of Tanagra; and all allowance made for the glamour lent them by these two “daughters of the gods, divinely tall,” it was impossible not to see that no woman could possibly look commonplace and insignificant in such a garment. Yet Lady de Vesci says that more than once she has known peasant women, to whom such cloaks had been presented, cut off the characteristic and useful hood, and trim the mangled robe with tawdry lace. So it is all over the world! Women who are models for an artist when they wear some garment indigenous to their country and appropriate to its conditions, prefer to make guys of themselves in grotesque travesties of the latest “styles” from London and Paris and Dublin!
Kilkenny boasts that its streets are paved with marble. It is in fact limestone, but none the worse for that. The snow did not improve them. So without going on a pilgrimage to the Kilkenny College, at which Swift, Congreve, and Farquhar,—an odd concatenation of celebrities—were more or less educated, we made our way to the Imperial Hotel for luncheon. The waiter was a delightful Celt. Upon my asking him whether the house could furnish anything distantly resembling good Irish whisky, he produced a bottle of alleged Scotch whisky, which he put upon the table with a decisive air, exclaiming, “And this, yer honour, is the most excellent whisky in the whole world, or I’m not an Irishman!”