Fun and games

Hervey organised elaborate games and competitions between local clergymen, inviting his most overweight vicars to splendid dinners without portion control and then ordering after-dinner races over bogland, or calling for […]

Building projects

The remnants and ruins of Hervey’s vast building projects still punctuate the landscape of Ulster—he ordered the building of stately glebe houses and added elegant spires to plain Protestant churches, […]

Names mentioned in the text

English/Scottish Sir Henry Sidney, lord deputy during Shane O’Neill’s time and during the attempted plantations in the 1570s. Sir Thomas Smith, English civil servant and polymath who organised the failed […]

Basis for Dürer’s drawing?

‘These men deck themselves out in big hairy coats, over their heads in the same way as the women wear their cloaks in Brabant. This coat only goes a half-quarter […]

In the line of fire

The minutes of the annual meeting of the trustees of Marsh’s Library in October 1916 noted the ‘damage caused to the Library and its contents by the Sinn Féin Rebellion’. […]