Burton’s Bank and Steevens’ Doors1733 CE

Dateline

In 1733 Ireland’s most revealing developments were not battlefield events or a change of monarch, but a sequence of pressures and institutions concentrated in Dublin: epidemic illness, a banking collapse, the opening of a major hospital, the return of parliament, and the creation of a society intended to reshape poor Catholic children through Protestant schooling. Taken together, they show an Ireland governed by a Protestant political minority, increasingly alert to questions of credit, public order, improvement and welfare, yet divided sharply by religion and social power. The year also left quieter evidence of intellectual energy: agricultural experiment, mineral enquiry, Irish-language poetry and an unusually imaginative work of print.

Illness and a New Hospital

An influenza epidemic reached Ireland towards the end of January. Contemporary and later medical chronologies place the island within a wider outbreak that had already moved through parts of northern Europe and Britain. The surviving evidence does not permit a reliable total for deaths or even a detailed map of its Irish course. It does, however, make the timing clear enough to place widespread respiratory illness among the immediate experiences of the opening weeks of 1733.

Against that background, the opening of Dr Steevens’ Hospital in Dublin was especially significant. A contemporary hospital account states that it opened to receive patients under Mrs Grizel Steevens’s charity on 23 July 1733. Richard Steevens’s will had provided the foundation; his sister Grizel had advanced the project during her lifetime, purchasing land near the city and financing much of the building. The completed institution was designed for far more beds than its permanent income could initially maintain. Its first supported provision was for forty sick people, while the building itself was capable of accommodating several hundred if benefactions could be secured.

This was not a public health service in the modern sense. Entry depended upon rules, governors and charitable recommendation, and donors who endowed beds gained a continuing right to nominate patients to them. Yet the hospital’s stated beneficiaries were recognisably urban working people: impoverished householders, tradesmen and labourers whose sickness or injury stopped them earning bread for their families. Patients suffering sudden accidents, fevers and pleurisies could be admitted when there was room, even without the usual certificates. The hospital therefore brought medical care, philanthropy and social discipline together in one conspicuous new building on Dublin’s western side.

Credit Fails in Dublin

Only weeks before the hospital opened, Dublin’s fragile world of private finance suffered a conspicuous failure. Ben and Samuel Burton’s bank collapsed on 25 June. The exact losses of individual depositors and creditors cannot safely be reconstructed from the brief record of the event, but the failure was serious enough to become the subject of specific parliamentary relief for creditors during the session that began later that year. The statutory record preserves that connection, even though the relevant Act received assent in April 1734 rather than in the calendar year 1733.

The Burton failure illustrates the risks behind the expanding commercial life of the capital. Banking was not yet a regulated public utility: confidence rested on private houses, personal reputation, bills, loans and networks of merchants and landowners. A collapse could travel well beyond a counting-house, unsettling shopkeepers, investors, landlords and those who had entrusted savings to a banker. It is tempting to treat the episode as an isolated Dublin mishap; it was instead a reminder that credit had become essential to the circulation of money and goods in an economy increasingly tied to ports, estate management and long-distance trade.

Parliament Returns

The Irish parliament, repeatedly prorogued, assembled for its fourth session under George II on 4 October 1733. Its sitting demonstrates both the importance and the limits of Dublin’s legislature. The parliament could frame Irish taxation and domestic legislation, but it operated within the constitutional restraints of the Hanoverian state and under a lord lieutenant, Lionel Sackville, duke of Dorset. The session’s early measures included additional duties on beer, ale, spirits, wine, tobacco and other imported goods; revenue rather than broad political reform was at its centre.

A more lasting change in parliamentary management occurred on the opening day. Henry Boyle, a Cork landowner and politician, was elected Speaker of the Irish House of Commons on 4 October. He had become a privy councillor earlier that year and was appointed chancellor of the exchequer in November. Boyle’s election marked the rise of a figure who would dominate Commons politics for decades through electoral influence, patronage and negotiation with Dublin Castle. In 1733, however, this was a beginning rather than a settled achievement: his speakership gave form to an increasingly organised Protestant political elite.

The government’s concerns also extended beyond the chamber. A proclamation of 31 August offered a reward after revenue officers were assaulted during the rescue of smuggled brandy. In December, another proclamation ordered alleged tories, robbers and rapparees named by local authorities in Antrim, Cork, Meath, Clare, Westmeath and Tipperary to surrender. Such notices do not prove a single co-ordinated rising. They do reveal the language through which officials described threats to property, excise collection and local order across widely separated counties.

A Charter for Conversion

On 24 October, George II granted a charter incorporating the Society in Dublin for Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland. This was the institutional beginning of the Irish Charter Schools. Its purpose was not religiously neutral education. The society was established to provide poor Catholic children with instruction in English and Protestant religion, combining conversion with training for labour and service. The charter itself belonged firmly to 1733; the society formally opened and began organising its officers and subscriptions in February 1734, so it would be wrong to claim that its first schools were already functioning in the autumn of 1733.

The initiative must be understood in the setting of the penal-law order. Catholics remained the great majority of Ireland’s people, while political authority and the established church were Protestant. Restrictions upon Catholic education existed in law, though practice was more complicated than statutes suggest: an official count had recorded hundreds of Catholic schools in 1731. The charter-school project was therefore an attempt not simply to provide literacy, but to intervene in family, language, religion and allegiance. Its later history would be deeply controversial. In 1733 its founders presented it as charitable rescue; for many Catholic families, the prospect of institutional education designed to detach children from their faith and homes carried very different implications.

Improvement on Display

The older Dublin Society, founded in 1731 to promote husbandry, manufactures and useful arts, supplied a contrasting model of organised improvement. In February 1733 it opened an agricultural display in vaults beneath Parliament House, an early agricultural museum. Its members were considering Ballycastle collieries, samples of mineral material associated with an apparent burning on the Kerry coast, hop cultivation and the encouragement of tillage. These activities should not be mistaken for a national economic transformation. They were the projects of a small, well-connected body. But they show that some Irish landowners, clergymen and professionals were trying to gather practical knowledge and apply it to production.

The subjects themselves point to the breadth of the ambition: coal for fuel and industry, hops for brewing, crops for estates, and locally available mineral resources. The Society’s minute books preserve the texture of this work—meetings, proposals, payments, petitions and premiums—rather than a grand programme imposed from above. In 1733, Ireland’s economic future was being discussed in rooms and vaults in Dublin, even while the Burton bank failure exposed the weakness of commercial confidence and the countryside remained overwhelmingly agricultural.

Print, Poetry and Architecture

Samuel Madden published Memoirs of the Twentieth Century in January 1733, an extraordinary Irish contribution to early speculative writing. Presented through letters from a future age, it used imagined future politics and morals to comment obliquely on the concerns of its own day. Madden was also associated with the Dublin Society’s interest in practical improvement, making the book a reminder that eighteenth-century Irish intellectual life could join patriotic economics, religious concern and literary experiment.

The year also marked endings and beginnings in learned culture. Séamas Dall Mac Cuarta, an important Irish-language poet of the Oriel region, died in 1733; the survival and later editing of his work testify to the continuing vigour of vernacular literary tradition under changing social conditions. On 1 August, Richard Kirwan was born at Cloughballymore, County Galway. He would become one of Ireland’s leading natural philosophers, but in 1733 his birth is simply a small sign of the Catholic gentry world from which he emerged.

Finally, on 7 December Sir Edward Lovett Pearce died at Stillorgan. Surveyor General and a leading architect of Irish Palladianism, Pearce had helped shape the new Parliament House on College Green and had been a governor of Dr Steevens’ Hospital. His death removed a major designer from Dublin just as the city’s institutional architecture was becoming more ambitious. Thus 1733 closed with a new hospital receiving the sick, a new charter promising to remake children, and the loss of an architect whose public buildings gave the Protestant capital much of its emerging form.