BOOK OF THE DAY: ROBERT O'BYRNEreviews An Architect Earl: Edward Augustus Stratford (1736-1801) 2nd Earl of AldboroughBy Ronald W Lightbown OLL Editions. 471pp, €39
A SHORT remove from Amiens Street in central north Dublin stands a gaunt, granite-faced mansion looking ill-at-ease in its present surroundings. This is Aldborough House, a fitting monument to the Ozymandias of 18th century Irish grandees, Edward Stratford, 2nd Earl of Aldborough. Throughout his life he was preoccupied with status and engaged in a great deal of self-mythologising, not least the creation of a family pedigree that presented his forebears as having been far grander than was actually the case. In addition he was much given to feuding and litigation, even with his own siblings. Sir Jonah Barrington, whose memoirs reveal their author would rather an anecdote be amusing than truthful, described Aldborough as “an arrogant and ostentatious man” and claimed that after his death he was known as “the Peer of a Hundred Wills”. Certainly the last of these documents is replete with reproaches against those members of his family he believed had shown him insufficient respect or gratitude. No wonder Lord Lansdowne’s son called him, “that strange Madman Ld Aldborough”.
On one occasion, when he was already past the age of 60, he overplayed his hand and became engaged in a bitter dispute with a man even more arrogant and certainly more intelligent: John FitzGibbon, first Earl of Clare. The outcome of this imbroglio was that Aldborough was sued for libel, lost the case and wound up being imprisoned in Dublin’s Newgate Gaol. Touchingly his wife chose to join him there but, adding an element of farce to the tale, not long after their arrival Lady Alborough’s personal maid abandoned her mistress to share a cell with a convicted rapist.
Clearly the indignity of being confined to prison, even if the year-long sentence was shortened to only six weeks, was not what the Earl of Aldborough – then plain Mr Edward Stratford – had anticipated when he began his career of self-promotion with the construction of a new street in London called Stratford Place. Although much altered, it survives and still terminates in the house built by its developer with the intention of being his own residence. But ambition exceeded income and the house soon had to be let, after which Lord Aldborough – who inherited his father’s title a mere year after it had been created – preferred to focus his attention on Ireland, which was the least he might do since this country provided the money for all his schemes.
On land in his ownership in Co Wicklow he created a model village designed to perpetuate his name and munificence, Stratford-on-Slaney. Most of its houses have long since disappeared, leaving scarcely a trace of the streets, crescents and circuses proposed by Aldborough. Likewise his princely estate of Belan in Co Kildare has all-but vanished, the house entirely gone, the stable block a shell and just a few obelisks indicating this was once the seat of a great aristocrat. Aldborough House in Dublin was the last of his building projects and the last of the great town residences erected in the capital before the 1800 Act of Union changed the whole tenor of the city and rendered such palaces largely redundant. Within two years of his death it too became the subject of litigation and soon ceased to be a private residence even while the surrounding land was covered in houses of considerably less splendour.
If perhaps insufficiently alive to the inherent absurdities of his subject’s story, Ronald Lightbown has done a thorough job in bringing this distinctive character to our attention and demonstrating that every age has its own Ozymandias. It should be prescribed reading for our present generation of property developers.
Robert O'Byrne is a journalist and author. His most recent book is The Irish Georgian Society: A Celebration.