The Least of These E-Book

Mark B. Roe

• Herausgeber: THP Ireland
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 509

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Lying at the very edge of the eighteenth-century city, behind high walls and forbidding gates, the Dublin Foundling Hospital was long viewed with horror and suspicion. Yet, following its closure, it seemed to have slipped from the city's memory. The Least of These uncovers the story of the Hospital, from its origins as a workhouse in 1703 during the Penal Laws to its demise in 1830. Its mission: to take in the children of poor Catholics and raise them as Protestants, loyal to king and empire. This was an institution where every infant was tattooed with an identification number, where thousands of children were fed opium and where, as with many foundling hospitals, the death toll was vast. But why did it endure for so long? And why did quite so many die? Based on original research, Mark B. Roe brings together eyewitness accounts, letters from desperate parents and individual life stories to finally bring the tragic story of Dublin's Foundling Hospital to light.

Leseprobe

First published 2022

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Mark B. Roe, 2022

The right of Mark B. Roe to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 8039 9085 9

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

‘Inasmuch as ye have done itUnto the least of these little ones,Ye have done it unto me.’

Matthew 25:40

Inscription over the western fireplace, Foundling Hospital Chapel1

To Moira, Niamh and Lia

Contents

       Acknowledgements

       Prologue

  1   Foundations

  2   ‘Such Useless Ancient Poor’

  3   ‘A Murdering-House’

  4   Children of the Parish

  5   A Suicide and an Explosion

  6   Out-Matron Quayle

  7   The Death of Emy French

  8   Mr Adderley’s Complaint

  9   ‘Up Many Stairs to the Garrets’

10   Pursell Under Fire

11   A New Broom

12   A Christmas Visit

13   A Letter from the Matron

14   A Dangerous Journey

15   The Nurses Speak

16   The Visitors’ Report

17   Cross-Examination

18   Syphilis Considered

19   A Fallow Field

20   A Severe Malady

21   The Foundlings Speak

22   Life in the Hospital

23   The Arrival of the Magees

24   Foundling W 149

25   Counting the Cost

       Appendix I – Admissions and Mortality

       Appendix II – Letters

       Bibliography

       Endnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the following for assistance in preparing this work: The National Library of Ireland, Trinity College Dublin, the National Archives, Marsh’s Library (Dublin), Dublin City Library and Archive, the Irish Architectural Archive, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Queen’s University Belfast, University College Dublin, the Heritage Centre at the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, Westmeath County Library, the National Archives, UK, the Bureau of Military History, and the Irish Georgian Society. Thanks also to my editors Nicola Guy and Ele Craker, and particular thanks to Moira, Niamh and Lia for their endless patience.

Prologue

The walls stretched for some 400ft along James’s Street. At their base ran a muddy footpath, separated from the street by a patch of waste ground.1 To the left of the gates a narrow doorway was set into the wall. It was through this doorway that the five visitors were admitted by the porter, William Kellet.2 The date was Tuesday, 11 April 1797.3

Inside the walls, dozens of windows looked down on the visitors, from ranges of plain, barrack-like buildings stretching to left and right. At the centre stood a vast hall, whose towering arched windows dwarfed the visitors. Built in the old-fashioned style of the previous century, the hall had a steeply pitched roof on which were perched six tiny dormer windows, high above the level of the street. Its entrance was a grand and imposing doorway, itself as tall as a two-storey building.

Within, the cavernous bare hall, lit by its soaring arched windows, had the look of some utilitarian cathedral. On each windowless end wall was a great fireplace – bleakly empty of any warming flame. Over the left-hand, eastern wall hung the huge painting of a plump and satisfied-looking cleric. This was Archbishop Hugh Boulter, who had been central to the creation of the Foundling Hospital generations before. Now his portrait looked down on rows and rows of long wooden tables that filled the hall and could accommodate a thousand children.4

On the far side of the hall a doorway led outside, where more ranges of prison-like two- and three-storey buildings enclosed a vast courtyard.5 Away in the distance, the long building that formed the rear boundary of the yard had once been called ‘Bedlam’. There the insane had been sequestered, far from the street, where their cries could not be heard. Because of its scale, the whole complex had been likened by one observer to a walled town lying on the edge of the city – a world unto itself.6

Although vast, the buildings had barely space enough to contain the dormitories and schoolrooms needed. Many of the dormitories, particularly those on the upper floors, were felt to be cramped and overcrowded with beds. These were bunk beds, crammed together without space between them. Such was the crowding at some periods that two or three children slept in each bed.7

However, it was to the infant infirmary that the visitors proceeded with some urgency, for they had been dispatched specifically to investigate conditions there. The infirmary they found to be a ‘black and gloomy’ chamber.8 (Either there were few windows, or their light had been deliberately obscured.) In the gloom they made out five ‘filthy cradles’. It’s likely in fact that these were simply modified bedsteads of the heavy wooden type.9 On each bedstead were laid three or four infants side by side – eighteen in total. The infants were noticeably underdressed to cope with the cold, given the ‘inclement season’ and the lack of adequate heating from any fire. What’s more, the clothing they did have was ‘filthy and dirty’. It later emerged that sick infants, on being transferred from the nursery to the infirmary, had their clothes removed and replaced with old clothes taken from babies on their arrival at the Hospital. The newer clothes were then returned for use elsewhere in the Hospital. What’s more, the ‘cradles’ were lined with straw – which was difficult to keep free of infestations – and the infants were covered with cast-off blankets, no longer good enough even for use elsewhere in the Foundling Hospital. These too were dirty and the cradles ‘swarming with bugs’.10

To look after these eighteen babies, or whatever number might be in the infirmary, throughout the day and night, day in and day out, there were but two women – Catherine Maquean and Esther Wiggan.11 Given the intense demands of their duties, and in keeping with the practice of the times, it is likely that these women slept in the same room as the infants, on mattresses on the floor, or on settle beds, which could be rolled or folded away during the day.12 They may have taken their meals in the same room, or left for short periods to eat nearby, since the infirmary had its own small kitchen, far removed from the main kitchens or the great hall. Perhaps the two women alternated shifts, with one sleeping during the day, the other at night – this might be one explanation for the darkness of the chamber. Each of the women was paid £4 per year (plus board and ‘lodging’) – little more than the lowest rank of maidservant. As was the norm for the time, they were completely untrained.13

By now the visitors were sufficiently alarmed to send for Mrs Hunt, the matron. Confronted by what was later described as ‘inhuman neglect’ and perhaps spurred into defensiveness, Mrs Hunt spoke with a candour that she would later appear to regret. ‘Those children,’ she said, were ‘just laid there to die.’ Having spoken to her, the visitors concluded (in their report to the governors, which was later submitted to parliament), that ‘no human efforts are ever made use of to save the lives of the children, except administering to them the common food, bread and milk or bread and water’. And ‘when weakly, infants are sent into this place of death … all are indiscriminately treated: bread and milk or bread and water must sustain them or they perish’.14

Surprisingly, in a visit to a room containing eighteen poorly fed infants, the visitors failed to mention any crying from the infants. However, Catherine Maquean later gave the most likely explanation for why noise makes no appearance in the report of the visitors. For despite the lack of medical attendance, there was one medicine that was in plentiful supply – ‘the Bottle’, which Maquean ‘supposed it a composing draught, for the Children were easy after taking it for an hour or two’.15 By this she meant a sleeping draught and in the eighteenth century these invariably contained opium.16

In their report the visitors pulled no punches in describing the ‘miserable situation’ of the children and in lamenting that the matter had ‘a complexion of more than savage cruelty’. It was later to emerge that here in this one room, in the quiet and semi-darkness of the infant infirmary, away from the great hall and the other buildings, 5,215 infants had died during the course of the previous six years.

This book examines how this came about, and what happened subsequently. In doing so it will look at the origins of the Foundling Hospital as a workhouse and the radical decision to change it to a repository for infants in 1730. It will follow the progress of the institution as it struggled with its new role, and, above all, it will attempt to uncover the fate of the roughly 127,000 infants who entered its doors, 100,000 of whom died or disappeared from the records.

1

Foundations

During the Williamite War, which swept Ireland from 1688 to 1691, an observer described seeing a ‘crowd of forlorn and famishing outcasts’ who had been displaced by the fighting. ‘So dreadful was their destitution,’ he wrote, ‘that a morsel of garbage was a feast, and they flocked as ravens round the putrefying and blackened carcasses of dead horses which lay rotting in the summer sun.’1 Recurrent episodes of warfare and famine in the 17th century set multitudes on the move in a desperate attempt to survive. Many of them gravitated to the capital.

In 1695, Dublin city governors complained of a ‘great number of sturdy beggars, both men and women … with their children, which they send in the night to beg at the doors … [of] particularly the most considerable persons, crying at their doors at unseasonable hours in the night’.2 One concern of the burgesses was that these ‘idlers and vagabonds’ would take advantage of the distraction caused by their ‘troublesome children’ to ‘rob and plunder houses’ (a ruse that, if it had been used, had been well and truly rumbled by the time it was denounced in the council chamber).

Stables, barns, haylofts, outhouses, communal latrines in courtyards, ruins, abandoned houses and those under construction – these were the places the poor could find shelter in a city. Warmth could be obtained from cow sheds and dunghills, which were common throughout the city, and even in ‘annealing yards associated with the glass manufactory’.3 But these spaces may have been already occupied by the luckier urban poor, in which case the ‘foreign’ beggars may have slept in the fields near the city and tramped in at night to beg, when there was less chance of being accosted by local paupers.

The city of Dublin had long struggled to cope with its poor. To the indigenous paupers of its crowded streets and lanes were added the vagabonds and beggars who flocked to the city in times of crisis. Formal legal provision for the indigent was limited. A 1542 Act allowed alms to be raised for the ‘deserving’ poor and the punishment of the ‘undeserving’ poor, who could be whipped and returned to their place of origin.4 This law was, in fact, a transcription of English legislation and took little account of actual conditions in Ireland. For example, it referred to administrative units such as ‘hundreds’ and ‘wapentakes’ that had never existed in Ireland. What’s more, the brutal warfare, dispossession and plantation that characterised this era made these provisions purely theoretical when they were introduced.

It was to be nearly a century before the next legal development – a 1635 Act under which each county was to have its own house of correction with ‘mills, working cards and other necessary implements’ to set the poor to work.5 This act was another hasty transcription of English legislation – so carelessly drafted that it wrongly assumed that the Elizabethan poor law of 1601 applied in Ireland and that effective local poor relief was in operation.6 However, the implementation of this act was delayed, and its measures were never fully to take effect.

In 1640 a new bill included provision for poor orphans, including binding them as apprentices, and setting the poor to work.7 However, this legislation too was stymied in its later stages, before ever coming into operation. Thereafter, government relied on proclamations to address temporary and local crises. These were reactive and lacked the authority and longevity of legislation.8

Throughout this period, a fundamental distinction between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor was made. The ‘undeserving’ poor – also called ‘vagabonds’ and ‘sturdy beggars’ – were considered able to earn their living but simply too idle or too feckless to do so. However, the definition of this class was conveniently wide and could, for example, include unregistered priests and defeated Irish soldiers. Imprisonment in houses of correction or ordinary gaols, deportation to the American or Caribbean colonies, or even summary execution was their possible fate.9

The ‘deserving’ poor, including invalids, the ‘superannuated’, and women with dependent children, were considered more worthy of charity. However, as we have seen, there was little or no legal or formal provision for this. What’s more, as one historian notes, as time went on, ‘the dichotomy between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor became more closely aligned with the fundamental ethnic and sectarian division of Irish society’.10

The Anglican Church of Ireland parishes formed the main organ of local government.11 The Church acted as an arm of the state, with the appointments of senior clerics determined by government and the parishes collecting alms for the relief of the poor. In theory, responsibility for the deserving poor lay with them. However, their narrow population base and limited acceptance left the parishes unable, and probably unwilling, to engage in relief on the scale that was required. What’s more, unlike England, on which practices were loosely based, no legislation had been put in place to underpin this role.

However, in 1665, the St Andrew’s Act was introduced, allowing ‘for the relief of the poor and putting out child apprentices’.12 It enabled the parish to raise money specifically for the poor. Although it applied to the Dublin parish of St Andrews only, it nevertheless established a precedent that other parishes followed.13

Other sources of relief for the deserving poor were charitable individuals and town corporations. Both sometimes ran small-scale poorhouses, often continuations of institutions run by Catholic monasteries before their suppression in the 1500s. Given the small scale of these poorhouses, entry was highly selective and often reserved for relations or dependents of influential citizens.14 Examples in Dublin included St John’s Poorhouse, on Thomas Street, and St Stephen’s Poorhouse, near St Stephen’s Green.15

From time to time the city governors made attempts to address the problem. The King’s Hospital, or Blue Coat Hospital, which opened in 1670, was originally meant for the relief of aged and infirm poor but was subsequently used as a school for the sons and grandsons of ‘decayed’ freemen. Then, in the 1680s, the city acquired some land on its outskirts, and in 1688, enclosed the site with a wall and began ‘the foundation of [a] workhouse and infirmary’.16 However, little progress was made, due to lack of funds. According to the city records, from time to time the site was used ‘to gather the poor people together to clear the city of mendicants’ – it is not clear whether they were gathered and held by force.17 The location of the site was significant since it lay just outside St James’s gate, the main access point to the city from the west, from which it was presumed many of the wandering poor came. Thus the site on James’s Street had an early association with the poor. But no further advances were made in establishing a workhouse before the country was engulfed in the Williamite War – yet another in a long series of conflicts that devastated the country.

When it came to the ‘deserving’ poor, as we have seen, in the absence of comprehensive legislation or formal measures, individuals could undertake their own charitable efforts. One such individual was John Collis, creator of a workhouse in Dublin that was subsequently ‘lost’ to history. In 1690, Collis, a Dublin merchant, printed his Proposals for the Taking in Boys into the King and Queens Work-House in Strand-street near Capel-street, Dublin, agreed on by the Master, Officers, and Senior Workmen of the said House. The parishes had, at least in theory, an obligation to orphans and impoverished children. As we have seen, the 1640 bill included provision for ‘binding’ these children as apprentices. The problem was that potential masters were often reluctant to accept such apprentices, believing they inherited habits of idleness. And parents, even though impoverished, also could object to potential masters, fearing ill-treatment, exploitation, or worse.18 In addition, in this era before industrialisation, employment opportunities for unskilled children were rare.19

Collis set out to address this problem by establishing a workhouse specifically for this type of apprentice (although it would also take in non-pauper apprentices, depending on capacity and the demand for places from the parishes). Collis’s Workhouse was intermediate between the old system under which parishes struggled to find places for poor children in the general apprenticeship market, and the later development of large-scale workhouses – which would become fashionable a few years later.

Collis’s document, Proposals, sets out arrangements for entering boys into the Workhouse for an apprenticeship of seven years. They must abide by the rules of the house or otherwise be ‘dealt with as sturdy Beggars and Vagrants’.20 The service did not come cheap. Firstly, each place had to be secured by an auction process, where the ‘Disposers’ would bid for each place, starting at a minimum of £5. Furthermore, each boy who obtained a place had to be provided with ‘three new suits of apparel’ as well as three hats, six pairs of stockings, six pairs of shoes, six cravats, six handkerchiefs and six shirts. Also required were a Bible, a knife, a comb, a thimble, ‘a porringer or like dish, and a penner’. In addition, each boy was required to bring ‘a piece of plate to the value of twelve shillings, at least’.21

Collis was an independent-minded original thinker with a clear financial acumen. His hard-nosed, up-front demands probably indicate pragmatism and a desire for his undertaking to succeed, rather than any greed. He believed strongly in the importance of workhouses in addressing poverty in Ireland. In April 1697 he made a proposal to the Board of Trade in London to establish one in every county. His proposal was considered over the course of four months, and he made numerous visits to the Board’s meetings, before his suggestion was finally rejected.22

Nevertheless, he did succeed in establishing a workhouse in Dublin. In his work A National Credit for a National Use, printed in Dublin and submitted to parliament in February 1706, Collis relates how:

I have spent near 30 years, with great expense and labour, to endeavour the settling a public Work-house for the poor: and because the City did not endeavour any such thing, I undertook the enterprise at my own charge; and in order thereto, I built a house to hold 60 poor, to diet, lodge, and work in, and I furnished the said House with working-tools and took in some poor, and they are now at work there.23

But while Collis had been pursuing his goal of a resolutely solvent workhouse, Dublin Corporation had resumed its efforts at establishing an institution on a much larger scale. In 1697 it passed a resolution to lobby the government for funding to build a ‘house’ to ‘put idlers to work in’ and if necessary to approach parliament.24 Within a few weeks the Recorder, William Handcock, who was also an MP for the city of Dublin and acted as something of an intermediary between Dublin Corporation and parliament, placed a bill before parliament ‘For the erecting of a public workhouse in Dublin’. However, the bill failed to progress.25

What’s more, the land intended as the site for the new workhouse, and on which the city had spent so much money, enclosing it with a wall in the 1680s, had become entangled in a complex legal situation. This was due to forfeitures – the confiscation of land from the Catholic supporters of the defeated James II. However, the Corporation finally managed to reacquire the land in 1703 and set about the project in earnest. A committee was formed, to meet regularly to consider how to proceed, and to lobby parliament. The meetings were to be at the Tholsel, the seat of the Dublin city assembly. The result was the presentation to parliament, again by the Recorder (now John Forster) in October 1703 of a new bill, which this time was approved by parliament.

John Collis’s smaller workhouse was now to be overshadowed, and ultimately thwarted, by a development on a much larger scale. This time, in addition to Dublin Corporation, the movement was supported by senior figures such as the Duke of Ormonde (the head of English government in Ireland) and his wife, Mary. This new workhouse, Collis wrote ruefully, would achieve all his aims and ‘be in all future ages to [their] immortal praise and memory, though it accidentally has eclipsed and frustrated mine, to my great loss, and almost ruin, as is well known to most of the inhabitants in Dublin’.26 Collis was right about being ‘eclipsed’, for his workhouse was to disappear from memory, and no mention of it is to be found in any of the annals of Dublin’s history.

The legislation underlying the new Dublin Workhouse had its origins in the London Corporation of the Poor of 1647.27 Incorporation involved bestowing certain functions of the numerous city parishes onto one body corporate and granting legal status to that body. This facilitated central management of some civic functions – where before each parish had operated as an individual entity. Another advantage was that its legal status allowed the new organisation to receive and manage charitable bequests in perpetuity.28 Although the London Corporation of the Poor became defunct, the idea of incorporation was revived in the 1690s by a Bristol merchant, John Cary,29 and became the legal basis for the Bristol Workhouse.30 In turn, this legislation with minor changes was subsequently applied to fourteen English cities, establishing workhouses, in fourteen separate Acts of the English parliament, between 1696 and 1712.31 It’s clear that this legislation was adapted by the Irish parliament for Dublin in 1703. Comparing, for example, the Exeter Corporation Act passed in 1698, and the Dublin Workhouse Act of 1703, there are clear similarities, including almost identical wording in the preamble.32 In addition, a carefully transcribed extract from Cary’s book on the subject, published in 1700,33 is found in the papers of Lord Lanesborough.34 Lanesborough, along with his wife, was one of the largest individual donors to the Dublin Workhouse building fund, further supporting the influence of the Bristol example.35 Nevertheless, the Dublin Act did contain indigenous features, such as the use of revenue from the carriage trade to finance the Workhouse, as we shall see.

Those supporting the new workhouse included, in addition to the Duke and Duchess of Ormonde, the Anglican Archbishop of Dublin, William King, senior aristocrats Lord and Lady Lanesborough, and others.36 In a religious era it was important for regimes to bolster their legitimacy through acts of ‘godliness’ and ‘righteousness’.

Another factor that contributed to the opening of a workhouse in Dublin was the existence of reform societies in the city in the 1690s. Reform societies were religiously motivated associations targeting immorality, such as ‘profane language’ (although these often ended up directed against the poor and marginalised).37 In England, Corporation Acts were enacted in cities with a strong reform society presence.38 There may have been a similar connection in Ireland. There was considerable movement between Dublin and London at the time, many Protestant Dublin merchants having fled to London between 1688 and 1690, returning when hostilities had ceased. Further indirect evidence linking the Dublin reform societies to the Workhouse comes in the person of Sir Richard Bulkeley, who was prominent in the reform society movement in Dublin39 and an early advocate of workhouses.40 He was one of only four people individually named in the Dublin Workhouse Act as a governor (among a large number of unnamed ‘ex-officio’ governors).41

This combined activity culminated in 1703 in ‘An Act for erecting a workhouse in the city of Dublin for imploying and maintaining the poor thereof’.42 The legislation decreed that from 1 May 1704 ‘there be and shall be a corporation to continue forever within the county of the city of Dublin’ to be known as ‘the Governors and guardians of the poor of the city of Dublin’. This Corporation was to consist of senior government officials and senior clergymen as well as the Lord Mayor and aldermen of the city of Dublin and a number of other named individuals – to a total of approximately one hundred. The largest groups were the twenty-four aldermen and forty-eight sheriff’s peers of Dublin city council. In addition, any person donating £50 could be made a governor, subject to election by the existing governors.

The governors were to vote annually, to elect from among themselves a ‘Court of Assistants’ of seven governors, and a treasurer, who would look after the operations of the Workhouse for the following year. This Court of Assistants was required ‘upon the first Thursday in every month to keep a court or assembly’, which could make bye-laws and regulations. The governors were to set to work ‘all vagabonds and beggars, which shall come within the city or liberties’ and were given the power to detain ‘all idle or poor people begging or seeking relief’ within the city, or poor people in receipt of parish alms.43 Vagabonds might come from anywhere in Ireland, but the Workhouse was also to cater for the ‘parish poor’ – people dwelling within the parishes of Dublin who were destitute and dependent on parish alms. In addition, any children above the age of 5 who had no means of support could be taken up. These children could be placed in bonded servitude to ‘any honest person, or persons, being protestants’ until the age of 21 in the case of females, and 24 in the case of males.44

Surprisingly, given that it led to the building of such an iconic structure, the legislation did not specify the nature of the building to be provided, merely referring to ‘such hospital or workhouses as be hereafter erected’.45

The Act stated that the governors ‘shall have the care of the maintenance of the poor of the said city and liberties’ – a sweeping responsibility. But in effect the only provision the Act made to discharge that responsibility was the erection of a ‘hospital or workhouses’. The governors were given ‘full power to examine, search and see what poor persons’ were in the city and to apprehend any ‘idle vagrants and beggars’. These were then to be incarcerated in the workhouse(s) for up to seven years. Any existing almshouses were excluded from the governors’ remit.

There were to be two main sources of income for the Workhouse (and in addition it was hoped the work of the inmates would generate profits). The first was a tax on ‘any hackney coach or coaches, carts or cars (crude carts with solid wooden wheels) … chairs or sedans’ plying for hire within the city. This tax consisted of a licence fee called a ‘fine’ as well as an annual tax. These were costly – £5 to licence a coach (equivalent to the cost of twenty full days of hire) and 40s for the annual tax – equivalent to eight full days’ hire. Notably, coaches and chairs not for hire in private ownership (mostly of the wealthy) were not to be touched. The Act also specified the rates coach- and chair-men could charge their customers.

One reason for using this source for funds was that taxing the carriage trade was already within the purview of Dublin Corporation, and had been ring-fenced to finance a workhouse as early as 1681.46 However, some may have felt it was a form of poetic justice. Jonathan Swift, later Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, complained that pedestrians like himself and his ‘brother walkers’ bore the brunt of demands from beggars, while ‘as to persons in coaches and chairs, they bear but little of the persecution we suffer, and are willing to leave it entirely on us’.47

The second source of income was a tax on houses, at 3 per cent of their (rateable) value per annum. This was to be collected by churchwardens, in keeping with the practices of the time whereby, as we have seen, the Anglican Church had a significant role in the administration of the state. The churchwardens were then to turn the proceeds over to the governors.48 A twenty-one-year term was set on the operation of the Act – a not uncommon measure to ensure that legislation with revenue implications was reviewed.

*          *          *

At the same time as it passed the legislation founding the Workhouse, the Irish parliament, controlled by the Anglo-Irish victors of the Williamite War, passed further anti-Catholic laws, refining what were already unjust and repressive legal instruments. The latest addition was ‘An Act to prevent the further growth of popery’. This was premised on the assertion that ‘papists’, because of their ‘hatred and aversion to the … true religion’, were daily endeavouring ‘to persuade and pervert [others] from the Protestant religion’ ‘by cunning devices and contrivances’ ‘to the destruction of the Protestant interest in this kingdom’.49 Any ‘papist’ found guilty of such an offence was to suffer the penalty of ‘premunire’ – the loss of all civil rights, forfeiture of lands, goods and ‘chattels’, and indefinite imprisonment ‘during the royal pleasure’. Furthermore, previous laws having forbidden Catholic children from obtaining an education in Ireland, the new Act now included detailed restrictions to prevent ‘popish families’ from sending their children abroad to be educated. In addition, if the eldest son of a Catholic was to convert to Protestantism ‘such popish parent shall become, and shall be, only tenant for life’ on what would now become the son’s property. ‘No person of the popish religion’ could be the guardian of a child ‘or have the tuition or custody of, any orphan, child or children, under the age of twenty one years’.

Furthermore, ‘every papist’ was ‘hereby made incapable to buy and purchase … any manors, lands, tenements or hereditaments’. No Catholic could take out a lease of more than thirty-one years. A Catholic who had land was not entitled to make a will. Rather, if all his children remained Catholic, on his death he was obliged to divide his land in equal shares among all his sons, and the land shall ‘in like manner from such respective sons, being papists, descend to and be inherited by all and every the sons of such sons, share and share alike’. Within a few generations the land of any Catholics would be reduced to small uneconomic allotments that could then be easily purchased by non-Catholics (Catholics being forbidden to buy land).

It was in this context that, in the wake of the new workhouse Act, the first meeting of the governors of which we have record was held on 9 May 1704, just eight days after the legal establishment of the Corporation of Governors.50 The new governors set about raising fresh funds for the project in earnest.

2

‘Such Useless Ancient Poor’

On 12 October 1704, a mere five months after the first meeting of the governors, a party of dignitaries gathered at the chosen site for the new Workhouse. This was at the very edge of the city, just within the legal city boundary, at the end of James’s Street, where the city petered out to be replaced by fields. The site was bounded to the west by Cut-Throat Lane, perhaps called after a family named Cothroit, said to have had land in the area in medieval times.1 It included, to the south, an area known as ‘the pipes’, through which ran a watercourse that was the city’s principal, though rudimentary, water supply. Across the river the Royal Barracks was taking shape – eventually to become the largest military barracks in Europe.

Although lying at the edge of the city, the site was far from undesirable. In fact it was elevated and airy – at a time when fresh air was considered essential to good health. Nearby, fields sloped steeply down to the River Camac, then rose to another elevation on which stood the Royal Hospital, the beautiful and prestigious building created by Charles II for retired soldiers. Indeed, when the Workhouse was finished, the two buildings, which shared a similarity of design, must have formed a harmonious pair.

Afterwards the group was lavishly entertained, probably in the Tholsel, the city hall. Sir Francis Stoyte, a silk merchant,2 as Lord Mayor for that year, was effectively chairman of the governors and would play a leading role in the building programme. The Recorder, John Forster, who had helped initiate the legislation in the Commons, was also present. The presence of the Duchess of Ormonde, wife to the Viceroy (who was abroad), indicated approval at the highest level of government. In her own right, she would go on to play a significant role in fundraising for the project and in offering to solicit support at the English court.3

The heavy workload, or enthusiasm, of the new governors can be glimpsed from a petition by Mary Semour, a servant who was paid for the upkeep of the Tholsel. In 1705 she requested an increase in her fee, because ‘she is obliged to keep two servants to clean the stairs and rooms of the Tholsell, by reason of the continual number of people that attend the Governors of the Poore House’.4

The next detailed account we have of the activities of the governors comes in a report printed in June 1705 by Francis Stoyte.5 And it indicates progress at an astonishing speed. By then there were ‘erected two large buildings, of three hundred foot long, and twenty foot broad in the clear; two stories high, besides garrets, (with one large vault) proper for stores, and setting the poor to work in, and the same are finished except the glazing. The buildings for lodging of about six hundred poor, are raised to one story high. Two kitchens [are] ready for roofing. The Great Hall is going forwards, and the vaults under the same almost finished.’ The buildings were likely to be completed by Christmas, the report said – as long as the money held out.

The project had by then received, or been pledged, around £5,000 from various sources – mostly voluntary contributions.6 The Duchess of Ormonde raised £900, the Lord Mayor £341. Lady Lanesborough personally contributed £200, and her husband £100. Not everyone contributed in monetary form – Thomas Burgh, the Surveyor General, who probably designed the building and supervised the building work, donated ‘a pile of stone-work at his own cost at the entrance into the Workhouse’.7 This probably refers to stone gate piers. (By reason of his office, Burgh was also a governor, and took some part in the financial management of the Workhouse, being a member of the Court of Assistants, at least in 1706.)8

As to the city’s bequest, in an ominous portent of things to come, only £10 of the expected £408 due from the tax on houses – on which the Workhouse would have to rely for part of its income – had been paid. And, from the tax on carriages, £183 out of £778 was also outstanding. It was projected that a total of £10,500 would be needed to finish the building, including £2,500 for furniture and manufacturing equipment, and £2,000 for ‘an apartment for lunatics’.9

It’s likely that the reasons Stoyte went to the trouble of having this report printed were threefold. Firstly, to reassure contributors about the use of their money; secondly, to encourage those who had pledged money, but not yet paid, to do so; and thirdly, to encourage more pledges. He promptly sent two copies to Archbishop King, who was visiting London, with the specific request to pass them on to the Duchess of Ormonde, also in England, so that she could use her influence at court to secure further support.10

However, there was trouble with the building works from the start. A handwritten document lodged in Marsh’s library outlines a petition to the governors by a Mrs Dorcas Peters.11 She claimed to be part-owner of a quarry at nearby Dolphin’s Barn. According to the petition, workmen on the new building had ‘by strong hand and with great force and violence’ taken ‘all or most part of the stones that were [used] in the building of the said Workhouse’, from her quarry, and in addition had sold ‘a great many loads of stones to several persons for ready money’ and had ‘refused to make any satisfaction for same’. To add insult to injury they had ‘almost destroyed … the herbage and grass … of about 20 acres of land’ next to the quarry ‘by the many horses and carrs that went daily to the said quarry for stones for the said Workhouse’ amounting to ‘commonly 4 or 500 loads on a day’. Peters, ‘finding herself likely to be ruined by this oppression made application to Sir Francis Stoyte … and the [governors] who at their several meetings instead of ordering satisfaction to the said [Peters] gave her only fair promises to no purpose’. Peters was forced to take the matter to ‘the High Court of chancery’, which proved ‘very expensive almost to the ruin of her and her family’. The unfortunate Mrs Peters never received any satisfaction – eventually the matter was referred to arbitrators ‘who never made any end of the said matter’.

However, the building must have proceeded at breakneck speed for, according to a later document ‘the House was finished by 1 February 1706’.12 This was at a time when comparable buildings often took much longer. Nevertheless, the Workhouse was finally open for business.

Another document outlines what happened next: ‘... all vagrants found in several streets were apprehended & sent to the Workhouse.’13 There were 124 of these, the document relates. The Act allowed them to be incarcerated and ‘set to work’ for up to seven years.

Then in October 1707, ‘the several Churchwardens pursuant to a proclamation of the [Act] brought to the Workhouse their parish poor in number 180’.14 These were the settled residents of the various Dublin parishes who had fallen on hard times and were being supported at the expense of the parish. In addition there were ‘twenty boys’, who from the very start were on the books of the Workhouse. Their origins are not explained. Quite possibly these were boys from John Collis’s now superseded Workhouse, and they may have helped in the construction of the new building.

This brought the total number of inmates to 324, ‘which number of 324 continued in the Workhouse two years notwithstanding that sixty boys and girls were in that time [apprenticed] to trades by indentures, and some died, all whose places [were] constantly filled up by fresh objects of charity which daily fell charge on the several parishes’.15

Another category catered for in the early years of the Workhouse was the mentally ill. William Fownes was a prominent merchant of the time, who was active in the early years of the institution. He was one of the seven members of the Court of Assistants in 1705 and became Lord Mayor in 1708. In a letter to Jonathan Swift he later recalled that ‘when I was Lord Mayor I saw some miserable lunatics exposed to the hazard of others as well as themselves. I had six strong cells made at the Workhouse for the most outrageous, which were soon filled; and by degrees, in a short time, those few drew upon [us] the solicitations of many, till by [1727] we had in that house forty and upwards. The door being opened, interest soon made way to let in the foolish, and such like, as mad folks.’16

However, in the first sign of trouble in the Workhouse’s long history, a handwritten note from 1710 refers to debts incurred by the governors, both through the building of the Workhouse and providing for the poor in it – debts that the governors simply could not repay.17

The governors ‘having no way to pay the said debts but by reducing the … poor in the Workhouse, and so lessening their charge, for a year no poor have been admitted into the Workhouse except 3 or 4 [lunatics] … so that the number at present [is], by old persons dying and some being taken out for servants, reduced to 280’.18 In other words, after a mere three years in operation, a freeze had to be placed on admissions.

This is where the plans of the Workhouse supporters began to unravel. The philosophy underlying the Workhouse was that the idle – those sturdy vagrants and idle poor – would be taught the virtue of labour, and even earn some material reward, so that by the time they left they would be converted to the merits of honest toil and become useful members of society. This presupposed that ‘idleness’ was a lifestyle choice, rather than being forced upon the individual through economic conditions. In addition to the beneficial effects on their souls, it was assumed that through the labour of the inmates the Workhouse would become economically productive and thus become wholly or partly self-financing.

But the poor, it seems, had different ideas. For when the parishes were directed to send in their poor, it appears that many ‘pretending to find means to maintain themselves … did not go into the House’.19 It’s likely only the very incapable – the helpless, the sick, the old and the very young – who had not the resources to fend off admission, ended up inside.

One clue as to why this might be so is contained in one of the governors’ own reports: ‘Beating of hemp has been a constant work, the terror of which drove out great numbers of beggars and vagrants from the city,’ the governors reported.20 The beating of hemp was a laborious repetitive task, often used as a punishment in jails and bridewells.

Another clue is provided by W.D. Wodsworth, who had access to the minute books of the governors and describes the accommodation for the poor in these early years. This consisted of ‘the vaults and other convenient places’ under the hall of the Workhouse.21 According to Wodsworth, ‘These vaults, or cellars, are specified as having been 240 feet long by 17 wide, with an “airy’” sunk at the outside of the building for the purpose of affording light and to carry off the rain water, and they were to have a double row of beds two [tiers] high to admit of sleeping 100 men and 60 women, and also to be used for their working and day accommodation.’ ‘Anyone fond of calculation,’ he goes on, ‘can form a good idea of what the sanitary aspect of these low pitched, dark, damp, and dreary lodgings must have been.’22

As we have seen, 124 vagrants had been rounded up in the first sweep. But it seems that when the Workhouse rapidly ran into financial difficulties these were the first to be let go, probably as being the most troublesome and the most able to fend for themselves. Preference was shown to keeping on those less able to support themselves – the old and the sick. The only problem with this was that the financial model on which the Workhouse rested required the young and fit to labour to support the others. Was it to be a self-supporting and profitable prison factory, or a bloated almshouse that would always need a large subsidy?

The harsh economic reality of the time is touched upon by the governors when they reported that in the city at large outside the Workhouse ‘the most able [spinners] who work above 16 hours in 24, cannot earn 2d per diem’.23 This reality went to the heart of the concept of the Workhouse. The governors were running up against a truth they had not foreseen, and perhaps still did not see – that the causes of poverty did not lie within the poor themselves. It was not idleness nor fecklessness, nor even ‘popery’, that caused them to be destitute and no amount of reform would cure them.

Even though the governors reported that they spared no effort to find suitable work for the inmates, they felt they were either too old or too young for productive labour, and so could only earn just enough to ‘defray the charges of the instructors, and pay for the tools for working’.24 And therefore, they complained, ‘by the charge of such useless ancient poor, the house must become … for the most part an alms-house, instead of a workhouse’.25 In fact, the governors argued that separate almshouses should be established to relieve them of this burden.

The governors even claimed that they offered to hire out the inmates at a rate of a half-penny a day – one quarter of the reported going rate – for the first three months (thereafter to increase by a half-penny each quarter until it reached 2d per day), and to provide clothing, food and lodging. All the employer would have to provide was the materials. But even this was not enough, and the governors found any employers reluctant to take on the inmates ‘when they had examined their incapacities’.26

Despite all this the governors still maintained that the Workhouse was ‘of no small benefit to the public’ since it would raise its child inmates in the Protestant religion, ‘considering most of these children are … of popish parents’.27 The governors emphasised the Protestant instruction all inmates received: ‘They have prayers twice a day, the children instructed in the catechism, reading and writing at certain hours, by turns, as they are capable.’ Therefore, they argued, even if the Workhouse was costing more to run than anticipated, it was worth it.

3

‘A Murdering-House’

Sadly, few shared enterprises are undertaken with complete unanimity of purpose, and so it proved with the Workhouse. Early in its history John Vernon, after briefly serving as ‘secretary’ to the board, became embroiled in a bitter dispute with the governors. And it is thanks to this that we have valuable insight into its early years.

Vernon first came to prominence in 1695, when he initiated a notorious legal case. A few years earlier a Colonel Edward Vernon, owner of Clontarf Castle, on the outskirts of Dublin, and considerable lands in the area, had died, leaving two daughters, Eliza and Maria. Vernon, who was a first cousin of the colonel, sued for possession of the estate, alleging that it had been kept in trust for him by the colonel. Through an Act of Parliament in 1698, Vernon won the case and Maria was dispossessed of her inheritance. Not content with this, a number of years later, the litigious Vernon sued the Corporation of Dublin, claiming exclusive rights over 195 acres of strand between the shore of Clontarf and the North Bull.1 Around the same time that he initiated the dispute with the Corporation, Vernon was also in yet another clash – this time with a fellow Dublin merchant, John Rogerson, who when building his eponymous quay, ordered stones from a John Vernon of Clontarf. When these were delivered they were seemingly of the wrong size, but Vernon refused to take them back, presumably because of the cost of moving them. Instead he dumped them in the River Liffey, and they subsequently had to be removed at the city’s expense.2

In 1716 Vernon published a detailed and scathing attack on the Workhouse, Remarks on a paper, entituled, An Abstract of the State of the Work-House, for maintaining of the poor of the city of Dublin, which commented on a governors’ report, castigating both the way in which it had been set up and its day-to-day running ever since. Firstly, he alleged that the original charitable donors had been ‘induced’ to subscribe on the false premise that 500 poor would be ‘immediately’ housed and that eventually that number would rise to 1,600.3 In addition, Vernon poured scorn on the claimed annual contribution of £100 from the rent of lands donated by the city. He claimed, firstly, that the lands only achieved an annual rent of £94; secondly, that out of this was payable an annual charge of £33 ‘to the Lady Susana Belasis’; and thirdly, that part of the land had been conveyed to Sir Mark Ransford, alderman and one of the governors closely involved with the Workhouse – leaving less than £50 per annum for the poor.4

He also argued that beating hemp was grossly unsuitable work for the old and for children, being too arduous. He pointed out that ‘the aged and feeble have been over-pressed with unreasonable labour exacted from them, and undue correction inflicted on them’ in the Workhouse ‘so that some have not spared to call it a Murdering-House’.5 The severity of their treatment, Vernon maintained, only served to scare away the healthy beggars and vagabonds, who would ‘find all means they could to excuse themselves from coming under their lash’ – thereby defeating one of the primary aims of the Workhouse.

One of the main ideological aims of some supporters of the Workhouse was the reform of ‘dissolute persons’ by Christian teaching, and by rewarding work with financial gain. No doubt the majority of supporters were happy if the number of beggars on the streets was reduced, regardless of whether it was due to their reform, or due to simply scaring them away through fear of incarceration in a prison factory. But since it was largely the latter, this resulted in ‘filling the house with superannuated beggars and young children able to do little work’.6 As we have seen, one disadvantage of the lack of healthy inmates of working age was that the whole financial model of the Workhouse was undermined.

However, although beggars may have fled from the clutches of the Workhouse, they did not disappear from the streets of Dublin. The city ‘is so far from being eased or freed from beggars, that their number is rather increased’, claimed Vernon. Indeed conditions in the country ‘have been such as have compelled the poor to come a-begging for relief to this the metropolis of the kingdom, to which as a fountain the distressed continually resort’.

Vernon contradicted the argument of the governors that viable paying work could not be obtained for the inmates. While, as we have seen, the governors had maintained that the hardest working and most capable spinners in the city could not earn as much as 2d per day, even if working sixteen out of every twenty-four hours, Vernon argued instead that ‘an able spinner will spin two balls per week, and earn 10d per ball’ – in other words just over 3d per day; and that ‘other spinners in finer work’ will make 5 or 6d per day, while spinning linen yarn could make up to 8d per day. And even children, ‘after 14 days or a month’s instruction’, could earn from 2 to 4d per day ‘for quill-winding’ (that is, winding the yarn around the bobbin, leaving it ready to feed into the loom) ‘and tending the twisting mill’.7 However, like the governors, he provides no evidence to support his claims. In fact, in an earlier document Vernon had made the staggering claim that, if properly set up, the linen manufactory could bring in nearly £4,000 a year.8

Another error the governors made, he claimed, was to employ ‘smart boys’ in the spinning of wool, which he describes as ‘work proper for old women and girls’. The boys became so discouraged by this, he claimed, that they ‘made all the shifts they could among their friends’ to get out of the Workhouse.

The governors were proud of their record in having ‘one hundred youth of both sexes … put out apprentices’ between 1706 and 1710, but Vernon pointed out some problems with the process. He maintained that a 20s clothing allowance, which was given up front to the master who was to take on the apprentice, attracted unscrupulous employers. Then, having received the allowance, they would simply abandon the would-be apprentice as soon as convenient.

Vernon, predictably, railed against the quality of the religious education in the Workhouse. He demanded to know, as proof of its quality, whether any of those so instructed were competent to officiate at the ‘several necessary services’, or to take over any clerical posts, thus reducing the need to pay the salaries of chaplains. This was setting an impossibly high standard – expecting the Workhouse to be able to turn vagrants and beggars into clerics. Vernon also slated the Workhouse officers for allowing ‘infamous persons [fit] for Newgate or Bridewell’ (both notorious prisons) to be admitted, and to fraternise with the other inmates, and become ‘tutoresses to the children which brought an ill name on the House and might well [he’s being unusually equivocal] discourage any sober persons from taking up their lodging among them’.9 According to Vernon, the governors had even had the idea of recommending that the Bridewell be moved to the Workhouse from its then location – something that did eventually happen, but not until 1729.10

Vernon perhaps gives some insight into the elusive lives of the children who would come to be products of the corrupt and abusive system he describes. He paints them as ‘turned prodigals, rambling on the mountains, or vagrants in the streets, for want of … due care’ by the Workhouse in their upbringing.11

Incidentally, the document casts an interesting light on the origins of some of the inmates. The movements of the British Army were believed to contribute significantly to the number of impoverished women and children in the Workhouse. The governors reported in An Abstract of the State of the Work-House that ‘the many recruits and new regiments which have come into this city of late years, also the rolling of the regiments to do duty in Dublin [have] brought and left here great numbers of women and children, who have no places of abode to go to, their husbands being abroad in the Service’.12 The presence of a standing army in Britain was considered an unacceptable threat to civil liberties. A solution was found whereby the army was largely quartered in Ireland – at the expense of the Irish exchequer.13 The military recruited heavily in England during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–15) and many of these regiments were stationed in Ireland and would have passed through Dublin on their way to the Continent or in rotation to country barracks.14 The men were paid directly, even when abroad, with little or no provision for their wives or children, who were often left destitute.15

Vernon goes on to make a direct accusation of corruption when it comes to the issue of raising taxes to support the Workhouse. There are, he notes, ‘not less than 400 brick, stone, lime, and sand carts that ply for hire in the city of Dublin’, which he says were liable for tax under the Act. This tax was not being levied, he claimed. The matter had been ‘considered, debated, consulted, counsels’ opinion [obtained], resolutions [made] thereon, and directions given for the taking them up … but the power of their purse hath prevailed … to stifle it … to the prejudice of the Workhouse’ – a loss that he put at £200 per annum.16 (Presumably he had some knowledge of the cost of transporting building material, given his dispute with Sir John Rogerson and the city authorities already mentioned.)

It is perhaps not surprising, given his character, that after a short time as secretary – probably less than a year – and before even a single inmate had been admitted to the Workhouse, Vernon had fallen out with the governors. The cause isn’t clear, but an aggrieved Vernon alleged that ‘their inferior court’ (that is, the Court of Assistants) ‘hath disgracefully thrust me out, and by violence, taken away the books and papers committed to my charge’ – a claim that conjures up the ludicrous image of a physical tug-of-war with the Workhouse ledgers.

Pugnacious as ever, it seems that Vernon made a formal complaint to a general meeting of the governors in July 1710, and even complained to the ‘chief Governors of this kingdom and chief magistrates of this city’.17 He had the last word though, publishing his Remarks in 1716, still maintaining that he had never been ‘legally discharged’ from his post as secretary. He is also careful to direct his criticisms to the Court of Assistants, rather than the governors as a whole, since to do otherwise would be to antagonise the entire upper echelon of Irish society.

*          *          *

In 1716, in a sign that oversight of the Workhouse was not functioning as it should, legislation was passed under which the Court of Assistants of seven and quorum of five were increased to nine and reduced to three respectively – because of the difficulty in getting a quorum of five together on the first Thursday in every month ‘whereby the necessary business of the said Workhouse is very much delayed’.18

Little documentary evidence survives regarding the operations of the Workhouse between 1716 and 1725. We have to wait until the latter year for a parliamentary enquiry to shed some light.19 It’s likely that the governors submitted petitions to parliament on a regular basis and these sometimes prompted parliament to enquire more deeply into the Workhouse’s affairs. At this time, parliament sat for a session of a few months only every two years.

There was considerable political turmoil in Dublin during this period. The Rage of Party – that intense conflict between Whigs and Tories in England, which centred on the legitimacy of the succession to the throne – spilled over into Ireland. There was ‘a complete breakdown in city government in 1713–14’, with violent scuffles at the Tholsel leading to one fatality.20

Another fault line within the ruling class existed between supporters of the ‘English interest’ – who, loosely, believed that local interests should be firmly subordinate to those of England – and supporters of the ‘Irish interest’, who favoured the interests of native-born colonialists (in so far as the interests of the two could be disentangled).