St Patrick's Cathedral

John Comyn, the first Anglo-Norman archbishop of Dublin, took one of the four Celtic parish churches of the city, the one dedicated to Saint Patrick, and in 1192 raised it to the status of a collegiate church, meaning a church with a body of clergy devoted to both worship and learning. It stood beside a holy well of the same name, on an island between two branches of the River Poddle, and fell outside the city boundaries; the move created two new civic territories, one of them under the archbishop's own temporal jurisdiction. The church had been dedicated to "God, our Blessed Lady Mary and St Patrick" on 17 March 1191.

Comyn's charter, of 1191 or 1192, allowed for a chapter of thirteen canons, three of whom held the special dignities of chancellor, precentor and treasurer; a papal bull of Pope Celestine III confirmed it within a year, and the thirteen prebendaries attached to the church were provided with archiepiscopal lands. The chapter's foundation and its members' rights derive from that charter of 1191 as approved by Celestine in 1192; it was originally 13 in number, has been as many as 30, and now numbers up to 28. Over time a whole complex of buildings rose in the vicinity, among them the Palace of St Sepulchre, the seat of the archbishop, and legal jurisdiction was divided between a Liberty controlled by the dean, around the cathedral itself, and a larger one belonging to the archbishop next to it.

Exactly when the collegiate church was raised again, to the rank of cathedral, is not clear; it was probably after 1192, and it was a unique move in a city that already had one. In 1212 Comyn's successor as archbishop, Henry de Loundres, was elected by the chapters of both Christ Church and St Patrick's, an election recognised by Pope Innocent III. Henry granted the cathedral and chapter a series of further charters between 1218 and 1220, and one of 1220 created the office of dean to head the cathedral, the right of election allocated solely to the canons of the chapter; the deanery is dated a year earlier, to 1219, by other accounts. The building whose basis survives, the largest church in Ireland, went up between 1191 and 1270, though little of the earliest work now remains beyond the baptistry. Much of it was overseen by the same Henry of London, a friend of the King of England and a signatory of Magna Carta who was also involved in the construction of Dublin's city walls and of Dublin Castle. An order from King Henry III in 1225 allowed donations to be collected from across the island towards the reconstruction for a period of four years, and the work, in the Early English Gothic style, lasted at least until the rededication in 1254. The Lady Chapel was added around 1270.

Some believe that St Patrick's, a secular cathedral served by diocesan clergy who were not members of a religious order, was intended to replace Christ Church, which was managed by an order. Whatever was meant by it, a confrontational situation persisted, with considerable tension, over the decades after St Patrick's was established, and it was settled, more or less, by a six-point agreement of 1300 arranged by Archbishop Ferings of Dublin: the Pacis Compositio, which acknowledged both churches as cathedrals. Its terms gave Christ Church formal precedence as the mother and senior cathedral of the diocese, the consecration and enthronement of the Archbishop of Dublin, the cross, mitre and ring of each deceased archbishop, and the annual consecration of chrism oil for the diocese; deceased archbishops were to be buried alternately in the two cathedrals unless they personally willed otherwise, and the two churches were to act as one and share equally in their freedoms. The enthronement provision was not always followed, the records show: many archbishops were enthroned in both, and at least two in St Patrick's only. Unusually, St Patrick's is not the seat of a bishop: the Archbishop of Dublin sits at Christ Church, about 400 metres away.

In 1311 the Medieval University of Dublin was founded at St Patrick's, with William de Rodyard, the dean, as its first chancellor and the canons as its members; it never flourished, and was suppressed at the Reformation. From the middle of the fourteenth century the north transept served as the parish church of St Nicholas Without, the part of the parish of St Nicholas lying outside the city proper, an arrangement that lasted over 500 years.

Following a fire, the tower and the west nave were rebuilt between 1362 and 1370 under Thomas Minot, Archbishop of Dublin from 1363 to 1375, whose name the tower carries. The choir school was founded in 1432. Legend has it that the cathedral is where the expression "chancing your arm" was born, when the 8th Earl of Kildare cut a hole in a door there, still to be seen, and thrust his arm through it to shake hands in friendship with James, Earl of Ormond, in an effort to call a truce in the dispute between the Butlers and the FitzGeralds in 1492.

The English Reformation was an uneven process between 1536 and 1564, but at St Patrick's it was effective from about 1537, and the cathedral became an Anglican church of what is now the Church of Ireland. In the 1530s some of the images within it were defaced by soldiers under Thomas Cromwell, and neglect led to the collapse of the nave in 1544. The conventionally flexible style of Hugh Curwen, Archbishop of Dublin, is instructive: a follower first of Henry's non-reformed church in the 1530s, then of Edward VI's full-blown Protestantism around 1550, he accepted his appointment as archbishop during Queen Mary's reversion of the church to Roman Catholicism in 1555, and continued to serve as archbishop under Queen Elizabeth, using the Anglican rite from 1559, until 1567.

Under Edward VI the cathedral was formally suppressed and the building demoted back to the status of a parish church. On 25 April 1547 a pension of 200 marks sterling was assigned to the dean, "Sir Edward Basnet", followed some months later by pensions of £60 each to the chancellor and the precentor and £40 to the archdeacon. The silver, jewels and ornaments were transferred to the dean and chapter of Christ Church. The King designated part of the building for use as a courthouse, the cathedral grammar school was established in the vicar's hall, and the deanery was given to the archbishop, following the transfer of the Archbishop's Palace to the Lord Deputy of Ireland. In 1549 it was further ordered that the walls be repainted and inscribed with passages from the scriptures.

A charter of the joint monarchs Philip and Mary I restored the cathedral's privileges in 1555 and initiated a restoration. A deed of 27 April 1558, late in Mary's reign, records the release by Thomas Leverous, the new dean, and the chapter of St Patrick's of goods, chattels and musical instruments of the cathedral that had been in the possession of the dean and chapter of Christ Church. It was during that reign that the patronal festival of the Blessed Virgin Mary was last celebrated, in 1558. The Catholic chapter of canons was ejected in 1559, and one of Dublin's first public clocks was erected in "St Patrick's Steeple" in 1560; the Catholic community, for its part, went on nominating canons and the principal dignitaries to St Patrick's through the 1560s and 1570s at least.

By the early seventeenth century the Lady Chapel was said to have been in ruins and the arch at the east end of the choir was closed off by a lath and plaster partition wall, and a series of galleries was added to accommodate large congregations. Flooding was routine and always had been: seepage and floods came from the surrounding branches of the River Poddle from the very earliest years, and the water table was reported to be within 2.3 metres of the floor even in the twentieth century, a situation that ensured the cathedral would never have a crypt or basement. In 1620 the English-born judge Luke Gernon referred to its poor state of repair. During his stay in Dublin in the course of his conquest of Ireland, Oliver Cromwell, the Commonwealth's Lord Protector, stabled his horses in the nave, a gesture intended to demonstrate his disrespect for the Anglican religion, which he associated with Roman Catholicism and political Royalism.

Repairs were begun after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, and in 1666 the chapter offered the Lady Chapel for the use of French-speaking Huguenots who had fled to Ireland; after repair and preparation work it became known as L'Eglise Française de St Patrick, and the lease was renewed from time to time until the special services ceased in 1816, by which time the Huguenots had been fully assimilated into the city's population. The roof, in danger of collapsing, was taken down in 1668 and a new one completed by 1671; buttresses were erected, the west window was replaced with a perpendicular window, and in the 1680s the choir was reformed. In 1688 to 1690, during the Williamite War in Ireland, James II and his fellow Catholics briefly repossessed St Patrick's; the victory of the Protestant Williamites in that war meant the cathedral was restored to Anglican ownership in 1690, when James abandoned Dublin after his defeat at the Battle of the Boyne.

Jonathan Swift, the writer and satirist who was the author of Gulliver's Travels, was dean from 1713 to 1745, and many of his famous sermons and Irish tracts, among them the Drapier's Letters, were given during his time in the office. He took a great interest in the building, its services and its music, and in what would now be called social welfare, funding an almshouse for poor women and Saint Patrick's Hospital. His grave and epitaph are in the cathedral, along with those of his friend Esther Johnson, "Stella", his companion of many years; they lie among more than 500 people buried under the floor and in the graveyard outside, a company that includes Adam Loftus, the first provost of Trinity College Dublin, Frederick Schomberg, 1st Duke of Schomberg, who died in 1690, and several Catholic Archbishops of Dublin. The choir school supplied many of its members to take part in the very first performance of Handel's Messiah in 1742.

George Semple added the cathedral spire in 1749. In 1792 divine service was suspended for a time because of the poor condition of parts of the roof and of the south wall, then 60 centimetres out of perpendicular, and by 1805 the north transept was in ruins, the south transept was in poor condition, and urgent work was under way on the nave roof, which was being held up by scaffolding. An attempt at major restoration was made under Dean Pakenham, dean from 1843 to 1864, limited by poor economic circumstances: the Lady Chapel was restored, the floor, by then raised several metres, was reduced to its original level, and other urgent matters were at least partly addressed. In 1846 the post of Dean of Saint Patrick's was united with that of Dean of Christ Church, a situation that lasted in law until 1872, and around the middle of the century a Celtic cross was found buried near the cathedral, preserved since, which it is thought may have marked the site of the former holy well.

The major reconstruction came in 1860 to 1865, paid for by Benjamin Guinness and inspired by the fear that the cathedral was in imminent danger of collapse. Medieval chantries were removed among other actions, and few records of the work survive. Much of the present building and decoration dates from the Victorian era. The rebuilding ensured the cathedral's survival, but the failure to preserve records of the scale of it means that little is known of how much of the current fabric is genuinely medieval and how much is Victorian pastiche. Sir Benjamin's statue by J. H. Foley is outside the south door, and he presented a new peal of bells during the restoration; his son Edward Guinness gave another peal, cast by John Taylor and Co in 1897, and in 1901 created the adjacent St Patrick's Park out of an area of decrepit housing. Two trebles presented in 1909 by Richard Cherry, the Attorney-General for Ireland and himself a prolific bellringer, produced Ireland's first ring of twelve, and the first peal rung on them, in 1911, was the first tower bell peal ever rung outside England. The other great change came with disestablishment. The Pacis Compositio, still extant, remained in force until 1870, the year from which the Church of Ireland has designated St Patrick's as the national cathedral for the whole of Ireland, drawing chapter members from each of its 12 dioceses. The two-cathedral question itself was settled in 1871, when the newly independent church, at its general synod, made Christ Church the sole and undisputed cathedral of the diocese of Dublin and St Patrick's the national cathedral. From 1783 the cathedral had served as the chapel of the Most Illustrious Order of Saint Patrick, whose members were the Knights of St Patrick; with disestablishment in 1871 the installation ceremony moved to St Patrick's Hall in Dublin Castle, though the heraldic banners of the knights in place at the time of the change still hang over the choir stalls.

It was outside St Patrick's that the troops of the Jacob's Garrison assembled after the Easter Rising to march to Richmond Barracks, where their leader Thomas MacDonagh and his sub-officers John MacBride and Michael O'Hanrahan were condemned to death and moved to Kilmainham Gaol to be shot. The funerals of two Irish presidents have been held in the cathedral: that of Douglas Hyde in 1949, at which the whole of the Irish government and opposition contingent, but for Erskine Childers and Noel Browne, stayed in the foyer because the Holy See at the time forbade Roman Catholics from entering the churches of other Christian traditions, and that of Childers himself in 1974, a major state occasion because he had died in office, attended by King Baudouin of Belgium, the Vice-President of the United States Spiro T. Agnew for President Richard Nixon, Earl Mountbatten of Burma for Queen Elizabeth II, the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and the former prime minister Edward Heath. In 2006 a group of 18 Afghan migrants seeking asylum used the cathedral's national prominence by occupying it for several days, before being persuaded to leave without trouble. In 2007 two places in the chapter were created as ecumenical canonries, one Presbyterian and one Roman Catholic. The cathedral also holds the Dunsany Chapel, the spiritual home in Ireland of the Paris-Malta obedience of the Order of Saint Lazarus, whose decoration was provided for by Randall Plunkett, 19th Lord Dunsany, the man who established the order in Ireland in 1962; its investitures are held there and the dean is an Ecclesiastical Commander of the order. Ireland's Remembrance Day ceremonies, hosted by the Royal British Legion and attended by the President of Ireland, take place there every November, and as at July 2020 the dean was the Very Revd William Morton, one time Dean of St Columb's Cathedral, Derry. The cathedral generally receives no State funding; it welcomes all, with a chapel for those who come simply to pray and a small fee for those who wish to sight-see, and its website mentioned in 2006 that visitor numbers had reached around 300,000 a year.