In 1779 Charles Agar, hitherto Bishop of Cloyne, was appointed Archbishop of Cashel, following the death of the previous incumbent, Dr Michael Cox. The latter, although he had occupied the archiepiscopal seat for the previous quarter-century, had spent little time in Cashel, preferring to live in the splendid residence he commissioned in County Kilkenny, Castletown Cox. As a result, when Agar arrived in Cashel, he discovered that the palace there ‘certainly had undergone no alterations, and probably received but few repairs from the time it was built…and as the house is wainscotted throughout the parlour and bedchamber stories, and much of the former had originally been painted of a dark brown colour, it made at this time but a dismal appearance.’ Today an hotel, Cashel Palace was designed by Sir Edward Lovett Pearce around 1727 for the then-archbishop Timothy Godwin but he died two years later and the building was completed by his successor Theophilus Bolton who, as is well-known, constructed a library beside his residence, bequeathing a collection of  more than 8,000 volumes to the archdiocese. The Rev Henry Cotton in his Fasti ecclesiae Hibernicae (1847) estimated that the construction cost £3,730, while more recently Anthony Malcomson, in his magisterial Archbishop Charles Agar: Churchmanship and Politics in Ireland, 1760-1810 (2002) has proposed a figure of £3,611. This was an expensive project but by the time Agar arrived, further expenditure was required to bring the palace up to date. The building seems to have been in such poor condition that Sir Cornwallis Maude, who lived not far away at Dundrum, offered the archbishop his own house while he ordered the repairs ‘which I believe necessary before it can be fit for your accommodation.’ Working with the architect Oliver Grace, Agar embarked on a programme of improvements to the palace, which in total would cost him £1,123. 

Recording his time in Cashel, Archbishop Agar noted that when he arrived ‘The door from the hall into the salon was exactly opposite the hall door, and there was in the salon a door into the garden exactly opposite to the door of the room; which not only cut the room, as it were, in two, but rendered it so cold that, as often as any one of the three doors was opened, the room was not habitable with comfort, for no company could be so situated as not to feel the wind. The Archbishop therefore stopped up the door in the centre of the room, and took away entirely that which opened into the garden. He placed the door in the hall at the end of the south side, let all of the windows of the salon down to the ground, and put double doors to this and every room on the parlour storey, and new-sashed the parlour and bed-chamber stories in front and rear. He…put the best species of register grates in the hall, salon and eating parlour, and in all the other rooms of the house. He also painted the whole house once and in some parts twice since he has inhabited it.’ Today, the salon (ie. the drawing room) retains the alterations made to it by Agar, although French windows once again allow access to the gardens. Of the interiors from the time of the palace’s original construction, the staircase hall still has its splendid staircase and the entrance hall retains its panelling. A room to the immediate right of the latter, now used as an office, is also panelled but this decoration may have been recycled when the house underwent reordering by Agar (or even more recently) because until his arrival it served as the main dining room…

‘Though the house was substantially built,’ Archbishop Agar later wrote, ‘and the plan originally a good one in most respects, in some it stood in great need of amendment. The eating parlour was only 19 feet 6 inches by 17 feet, a room certainly altogether too small for such a purpose in such a house. This room was on the east side of the great hall of entrance and could not be enlarged. On the west side of the hall was a room of the same dimensions, at the north end of which, and between it and the breakfast parlour, was a dark passage from the hall to the gallery, leading to the library, in which there was a staircase which communicated by a trap door with the north end of the corridor in the bedroom story. Dr Agar removed this staircase entirely, took down the wall of partition and threw the passage into the eating room, which made it 30 feet long by 19 feet 6 inches broad, and placed a window over the door leading to the library, in order to render that part of the eating room more light.’ After it became an hotel in the 1960s, Agar’s eating room was further opened into the adjacent breakfast parlour to the south to create one large dining room; a divider marks the former division between the two spaces. While many of his alterations were felicitous and have survived, one addition to the building – the construction of a study perched to the rear – proved unsuccessful, not least due to damp, and was taken down by his successor, Charles Brodrick. He is believed to have carried out further alterations to the palace, not least the insertion of dormer windows on the top floor but consideration of Brodrick’s interventions here must wait for another time. 

On May 19th next, I shall be giving a paper on ‘Diocesan domesticity: daily life in Cashel Palace during the episcopacy of Charles Agar, 1779-1801’ at the 23rd Historic Houses Conference held in Maynooth University. For more information, please see: CSHIHE 2025 conference programme Final.pdf

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