ROMANTIC HOUSES:Stradbally Hall was designed for entertaining on a massive scale – though perhaps not for a rock festival. A new book by Robert O'Byrneon historic Irish houses includes a chapter on the Cosby family home in Co Laois, which plays host to Electric Picnic this weekend
IRELAND’S PRESENT division into counties only really got underway in the 16th century, when successive Tudor monarchs encouraged English settlers to take over large tracts of land until then in the hands of what were deemed to be unruly and unreliable natives. In 1556, for example, Mary I created two new shires in the midlands, named Queen’s and King’s County after herself and her husband Philip II of Spain.
Queen’s County, now better known as Co Laois, exceptionally has neither has any coast nor borders onto any county that does; it is effectively the most landlocked part of Ireland.
However, Laois’s rich pastures, woodlands and mineral resources, as well as its geographical importance, have always given it a special significance. For centuries the area was largely controlled by the O’Moores, the leading family of the region’s Seven Septs. Rory O’More (as it was then spelled), who died in 1557, and his son, Rory Óg O’More, were both notable leaders in Ireland’s wars against the Tudors, while another member of the same family, also called Rory O’More, would become head of the 1641 Rising against the English.
The opponents of the O’Mores included successive generations of Cosbys, beginning with the arrival in Ireland of Sir Francis Cosby, an English soldier who was granted land in Queen’s County after being appointed General of the Kern (an armed Irish foot soldier) by Mary I in 1558. Since this land traditionally belonged to the O’Mores, it is not surprising Sir Francis remained in perpetual conflict with Rory Óg until the latter was slain in a battle against English forces in 1577; Sir Francis would himself be killed three years later in the Battle of Glenmalure, where the Irish were led by the celebrated warrior Fiach MacHugh O’Byrne.
Sir Francis was succeeded by his oldest son, Alexander, whose home became a former Franciscan friary in Stradbally, Queen’s County. The name Stradbally derives from the Irish term sráidbhaile, meaning a village or town of one street. And so it remains to this day; Stradbally is effectively a long linear street, with two openings on the western side forming Market Square and Courthouse Square. The remnants of the old friary survive, but in the closing years of the 17th century the Cosbys built themselves an alternative residence, which was then added to and embellished by successive generations, before it, in turn, was deemed no longer suitable (the house’s appearance is known from an extant topographical painting of Stradbally, dating from circa 1740).
In 1772 Dudley Cosby, who for his services as British Minister to the Court of Denmark had been created Lord Sydney of Leix and Baron Stradbally, embarked on the construction of a new house on a site about half a mile southwest of the old one, which by then had already been demolished. Within two years Lord Sydney was dead, and the incomplete property passed to a cousin, Admiral Philips Cosby, who had been born in America, where his father was Lieut Governor of Annapolis and his uncle Gen William Cosby Governor of New York. Though Admiral Cosby retired from the Royal Navy in 1782, he was repeatedly recalled to serve during wars against the French.
The house begun by Lord Sydney and completed by his heir forms the core of the present Stradbally Hall. Of two storeys over a raised basement and nine bays long, its chaste late 18th-century classical decoration survives in the three linked reception rooms on the garden front. But the building’s external appearance was radically altered during the 1860s, when Col Robert Cosby employed the architect Sir Charles Lanyon to enlarge and remodel Stradbally Hall. A new entrance front was added to the property, featuring two-bay projections on either side of a single-storey Doric portico. Meanwhile, on the garden front, the house’s existing recessed centre section was filled with a stupendous three-arch loggia, and a two-storey “nursery wing” added to the immediate west. Lanyon also made many changes to the building’s interior, not least the creation of a vast, top-lit central hall. This features a Victorian oak staircase climbing up to a picture gallery some 60ft long and 20ft wide, above which is suspended a coffered and barrel-vaulted ceiling with glass occupying a considerable part of the space; at either end of the gallery small lobbies were created by the insertion of a pair of pink marble Corinthian columns, and each side of the gallery is flanked by a line of bedrooms.
Nothing else can match the scale and grandeur of the hall, but some of the ground-floor rooms come close, not least the ballroom, which also serves as a library. The most notable feature here is the ceiling, decorated with a series of 24 early 19th-century French paper panels telling the story of Cupid and Psyche. And while the basic form of the three interconnecting reception rooms on the garden side remains much as they were when first built in the late 18th century, their decoration is now distinctly Victorian, not least thanks to the gilt wallpaper in the drawing room.
Stradbally Hall’s size makes it plain that this was a house designed for entertaining on a massive scale. The early 19th-century Irish memoirist Sir Jonah Barrington, who was born not far away at Abbeyleix, writes of a dinner at Stradbally Hall during which a half-blind guest sitting next to Admiral Philips Cosby mistook the latter’s knobby fist for a bread roll and thrust his fork into it with easily imagined consequences. Still home to the Cosby family, Stradbally remains an attractive destination, albeit in somewhat different circumstances than during the admiral’s time; the estate is now the venue for an annual music festival, Electric Picnic, which is taking place there this weekend.
This extract is taken from Romantic Irish Homes by Robert O’Byrne, published this month by Cico Books, £25