Russborough
IN IRELAND LIES a gray stone palace, in a valley by the Wicklow Mountains. The mountains themselves are dry and desolate, and an unfriendly wind picks its way across the heath. Little roads wind here and there in the hills, and criminals drive out from Dublin to make the place their haunt. It is a wonder that the house lay unmolested for so long in its park below the hills, tethered against the drenched green sward of Ireland. The palace of Russborough House comes into view quite suddenly.
At a bend in the N81 from Blessington, a high wall crumbles away, and there, a quarter mile up the pasture, spreads Russborough's long facade. From end to end it runs for seven hundred feet.
Sometimes the sun strikes the house, and the stone glows with a silvery light, and a kind of trumpet music seems to float in the air, proclaiming a world impossibly rapturous and remote. The Leesons built Russborough. Their ancestor came from England as a sergeant in the army of the prince of Orange, who laid waste the Catholic armies of James Stuart in 1690 at a battle on the River Boyne. This defeat completed the destruction of Catholic power in Ireland. After the Battle of the Boyne a long period of minority rule ensued, known as the Protestant Ascendancy. The Leesons were part of this empowered group. They became brewers and Dublin property speculators, and prospered rapidly. They married well, applied for a patent of nobility, and after that passed promptly upward from the baronetage into the peerage, becoming earls of Milltown. All they needed was a decent house, and in 1741 they commissioned the foremost architect in Ireland, Richard Castle, to build it.
An army of laborers poured out of Dublin into County Wicklow and attacked the site. From the quarry at Golden Hill came ton upon ton of granite blocks, in carts that crept down the steep tracks and into the valley and along the muddy, rutted road. The stone was rich in mica, and it sparkled in the light. To the north of the rising house a horde of men slaved with shovels, carving the hillside into terraces. Even at a wage of a penny an hour, the years of spadework behind the mansion cost the Leesons thirty thousand pounds.
Russborough took eight years to build. One day, near its completion, the earl rode up and cast his eye around and ordered forty thousand trees. "About two miles from Ballymore Eustace," wrote a visitor, "we came to a beautiful situation, where we found a noble mansion forming into perfection." At last the Leesons moved in, and their aristocratic friends paraded out in droves. "I told you I was to see Russborough," the Countess of Kildare scribbled to a friend. "The house is really fine, and the furniture magnificent; but a frightful place."
Lady Kildare meant the view, the saturnine hills that scowled at Russborough from across the valley. It struck the Leesons' contemporaries as a bleak and empty setting for so princely a house.
The mansion was a masterpiece of the Palladian style and established the Leesons among the highest families of the land. The architect Castle had also built Carton, the Kildares' country seat, and Leinster House, the Dublin residence of the dukes of Leinster, where the Irish parliament now sits.
Russborough became a great house of the Protestant Ascendancy.
The estates of the Leesons' friends spread across that county as across the whole of Ireland. The earl paved his floors with marble and had his ceilings stuccoed by the Italian masters the Lafrancini brothers. The River Liffey was drawn from its course and made to browse in fountains in view of the house before being released to resume its journey down to Dublin. Beyond the fountains rose the gloomy, swollen masses of the Wicklow hills, with dark clouds pouring over.
In a few generations the Leesons declined, until in 1902 the last of them to live at Russborough, the dowager Countess Geraldine, crated up most of the furnishings and silver, the pictures and the books, and sent them down to Dublin to the National Gallery of Ireland. When the countess died, Russborough passed to the family's heirs in England, who offered it to the Irish state, which declined the offer. The house sat empty until 1929, when Captain Denis Daly, a squire from Galway, bought it. Daly was a Catholic, and this affiliation soon brought the old, Protestant mansion to the attention of the world from which it had stood apart.
