The last ever election of the Dublin University constituency, where counting is now imminent, brings to a close more than 400 years in which Trinity College has returned representatives to various versions of parliament.
The tradition goes back to 1613 when Trinity, still in its early 20s then, won the right to elect two MPs, part of King James I’s plan to pack the Irish House of Commons with Protestants and so end the previously dominant influence of “Old English” Catholics.
An interesting early result was the election of Rev William Beddell in 1628. Despite being English and having had no contact with Ireland until a year previously, Beddell would end up – only 14 years later – buried under a gravestone with old Irish script in Cavan.
This wasn’t an extreme example of the English going native. A Protestant evangelist, Beddell had sought to convert the natives though their own language. So as Bishop of Kilmore, he appointed only Irish speakers to parishes.
Last Poll and Chorus – Frank McNally on the end of 400 years of Trinity College elections
Hit (and miss) parade – Frank McNally on the mixed fortunes of a who’s who list from 40 years ago
Glad rags – Colm Keena on clothes and society
Nato and Irish neutrality – John Mulqueen on a vexed political issue
Hence his bilingual epitaph, which also records that the deceased had been “Optimus Anglorum [“the best of the English”] under whose patronage the Old Testament was translated into Irish”.
Probably the most influential MP for Trinity, however, was also one of the last: Edward Carson, who represented it from 1892 to 1918.
In failing to keep the whole island in the UK, Carson reluctantly helped create Northern Ireland. As a lawyer, he also helped ruin Oscar Wilde, something he hadn’t set out to do either.
But a previous Trinity MP had gone ever further – actual literary homicide – consigning the poet John Keats to an early grave. Or at least that was the opinion of Keats’s friends, who believed that a savage (and anonymous) review of the poem Endymion in 1818 hastened the poet’s demise.
“Poor fellow!” lamented Byron in verse. “’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,/Should let itself by snuff’d out by an article.”
Shelley, meanwhile, offered a more scientific post-mortem: “The savage criticism of his Endymion, which appeared in the Quarterly Review, produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind; causing] the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs; a rapid consumption ensued, and the succeeding [more positive reviews] were ineffectual to heal the wound.”
That wasn’t quite accurate, medically. But in any case, the damning critique had been the work of Galway-born John Wilson Croker, a poet himself, who hated the new Romantic style of which Keats, Shelley, and Byron were all exponents.
This did not stop Croker becoming MP for Dublin University in 1827. Nor did representing Trinity soften his critical cough. An attack on Alfred Tennyson in 1833, equally fierce, helped dissuade the latter from publishing anything for the next nine years.
Speaking of romantics, Dublin University can also claim to have elected Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy, or a bit of him. The link is Limerick-born, Huguenot-descended Tom Lefroy, who finished his days as Lord Chief Justice of Ireland.
Lefroy represented Trinity from 1830-41. But decades before that, in 1796, he had been the “very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man” with whom Austen flirted at a series of balls.
In a letter to her sister, she was “almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved”. Even so, she added these scandalous details: “Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together”.
That was the year she wrote Pride and Prejudice and it is widely supposed that Lefroy made it into the book. It has also been suggested that Austen mingled their personalities, allotting some of his to Elizabeth Bennett and some of hers to Darcy.
Alas, the real-life romance ended in tears, when Lefroy went back to Ireland. It may be a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. But as a young lawyer, Lefroy needed to marry up in the world. Austen didn’t fit the trajectory.
Still, many years later, when he was very old, he would confess to having loved her, if only with a “boyish love”. On a less romantic note, before his election in Dublin University, Lefroy had opposed Catholic emancipation, warning of consequences in terms that even the London Times considered “apocryphal twaddle”.
During a strange interlude between the end of British rule in Ireland and independence, in June 1921, MPs for Trinity (there were four of them) formed the entire attendance at the inaugural meeting of the House of Commons for “Southern Ireland”.
They elected an acting chairman, Gerald Fitzgibbon, and then adjourned. But at the second meeting, held in the offices of the Department of Agriculture in July, only two turned up. So the chairman adjourned again, sine die (“without a day”). The house has stayed adjourned ever since.
In the early years of the Free State, Dublin University was granted three seats in the Dáil, to reassure Ireland’s religious minority. Disliking their tendency not to vote for him, however, Eamon de Valera ended that arrangement in 1936.
Thereafter, Trinity was reduced to electing mere senators, albeit some of the more vociferous and articulate people in Irish politics, including Noël Browne, David Norris, and Mary Robinson.
