The 1701 grant for Marsh’s Library suggests that intellectual openness and social restriction could coexist. Its European-language collections and Huguenot keeper, Élie Bouhéreau, connected Dublin to refugee scholarship, yet access was intended chiefly for graduates and gentlemen within a Protestant establishment. This tension becomes more striking beside the year’s recruitment policies, surveillance of Catholic clergy and limits on dissenters. Rather than treating the library solely as a cultural landmark, the article invites us to consider its place in a post-war system of power, security and learning. How far should Marsh’s Library be interpreted as scholarship, Protestant consolidation, or both simultaneously?