Kilkenny Castle

Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke — Strongbow — raised the first castle here in the 12th century, probably a wooden structure; the Anglo-Normans had one established by 1173, possibly over an earlier residence of the Mac Giolla Phádraig kings of Osraighe. Kilkenny lay inside the lordship of Leinster granted to Strongbow, and passed with his daughter and heiress Isabel, who married William Marshal in 1189. In 1192 Marshal made Geoffrey FitzRobert seneschal of Leinster, and the building that followed began a major phase of development in the town; excavation in 2019 by Cóilín Ó Drisceoil uncovered the foundations of Marshal's great gatehouse of the early 1200s.

The first stone castle was completed in 1260, placed to control a fording-point of the River Nore and the junction of several routeways. It was square, with a large circular tower at each corner and a massive ditch; in its original condition it would have formed an important element of the town's defences, and a symbol of Norman occupation. Three of those four towers survive.

Sir Gilbert de Bohun, seneschal of Kilkenny, inherited the county and the castle from his mother in 1270. Edward I outlawed him in 1300 and reinstated him in 1303, and he held Kilkenny until his death in 1381. It did not pass to his heir Joan: the crown seized it and in 1391 sold it to the Butlers, a family that had come with the Norman invasion and changed its name from FitzWalter in 1185. The buyer was James Butler, 3rd Earl of Ormond, who established himself as ruler of the area; his dynasty held Kilkenny for centuries after. Lady Margaret Butler, daughter of the 7th Earl, was born in the castle; she married Sir William Boleyn and was the paternal grandmother of Anne Boleyn.

In the 17th century the castle came to Elizabeth Preston, wife of James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormond, then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Ormond was a Protestant, unlike most of his family, and through the Irish Confederate Wars of the 1640s he was the representative of Charles I in Ireland — while his own castle served as capital of the Catholic rebel movement, Confederate Ireland, whose parliament or Supreme Council met here from 1642 to 1648. Ormond himself was based in Dublin. During Cromwell's siege of Kilkenny in 1650 the east wall and the north-east tower were damaged; both were later torn down. Returning from exile, Ormond remodelled the castle as a modern château in 1661.

By the 18th century the castle had run down with the family's failing fortunes; money brought in by Anne Wandesford of Castlecomer, who married John Butler, 17th Earl of Ormonde, paid for some restoration, and the 19th-century Butlers tried to return the building to its medieval appearance, rebuilding the north wing and extending the south curtain wall. The income was thinner than the display suggested: the Ormonde settled estates were nominally worth some £44,000 a year in the 1880s and 1890s, but arrears through the agricultural depression brought the real figure closer to £22,000, and Lady Ormonde once startled a guest at a Castle Ball by remarking that “we are very poor”. In 1903 some 27,800 acres in Tipperary and Kilkenny were sold under the Wyndham Land Act for £240,000, cutting the family's Irish land to the castle's 95-acre demesne, a home farm and mountain forest.

James Butler, 3rd Marquess of Ormonde, died in 1919, and death duties and expenses came to £166,000. In 1922, during the Irish Civil War, Republicans holding the castle were besieged by Irish Free State forces. The Ormondes stayed put, with their Pekinese, in their bedroom over the great gate — the main focus of the attack — a machine gun posted outside their door. One man was injured, but the damage took many years to repair. The family lived on there until 1935, when they sold the contents for £6,000, moved to London and left the place empty for thirty years.

After the deaths of the 4th Marquess in 1943 and the 5th in 1949, the estate came to Arthur Butler, 6th Marquess. In 1967 he sold the abandoned and deteriorating castle to the Castle Restoration Committee for a ceremonial £50, saying his family and the people of Kilkenny alike took pride in it and had not liked to see it deteriorate: “There are already too many ruins in Ireland.” He also bought the ground in front so it should never be built on. The handover marked the founding of The Butler Society. Restoration filled the rest of the century, and the castle and grounds are now managed by the Office of Public Works.