There has sometimes been confusion over the likely birthplace in Dublin of the Hon Arthur Wellesley, future Duke of Wellington, since the location was given as Antrim House. The property known by this name stood at the junction of north Merrion Square and Lower Mount Street, a vast residence erected for the Earl of Antrim, often considered the most impressive such property in the area after Leinster House: although vacated after just a couple of decades by the Antrims and later turned into an hotel, it survived until 1938 when demolished to make way for an expansion of the National Maternity Hospital. More importantly, the house was only built in 1775, six years after Wellesley’s birth. The confusion arises because the aforementioned earl had previously been responsible for the construction of a previous house not far away on Merrion Street, and this building had been leased by the Earl of Mornington, Arthur Wellesley’s father, in 1765, meaning it might still be thought of in some quarters as Antrim House.

Garret Wellesley – created first Earl of Mornington in 1760 – was born in 1735 in his family seat in County Meath, the now-ruinous Dangan, which has featured here before (see Once One of the Grandest Places in Meath « The Irish Aesthete). From an early age, he demonstrated both interest and aptitude in music, with a particular facility for the violin and for composition: when he was aged 13, his godmother, Mary Delany, wrote that he was ‘a most extraordinary boy. . . [with] more knowledge than I ever met with in one so young.’ Seemingly when he asked composers Francesco Geminiani and Thomas Roseingrave for lessons, they both said he already knew everything they could teach him. So passionate was he about music that on the day of his wedding in February 1759 he also conducted a charity performance of Handel’s oratorio Acis and Galatea for Mercer’s Hospital. After receiving an MA in 1757, along with two other amateur composers, Kane O’Hara and Francis Hutcheson, Wellesley founded an Academy of Music in Dublin. Combining concerts with charitable fundraising, this was the first musical institution in Britain and Ireland to admit women members, its patrons including the Countesses of Tyrone, Charleville and Mornington. Lady Freke, Miss Cavendish and Miss Nichols were listed as harpsichord players, and there were five aristocratic female vocal performers. In 1764 Trinity College Dublin conferred Lord Mornington with a Doctor of Music before being appointed Professor of Music there later that year. He held this post for the next decade and when he resigned, the professorship lapsed and was only revived in the following century. Lord Mornington’s compositions are almost all vocal, including a five-act opera, Caractacus, which was performed at The Theatre Royal, Smock Alley in Dublin in 1764. Seemingly only one completely instrumental work by him survives, a march he wrote for the installation of the Duke of Bedford as Chancellor of Dublin University in 1768. This then was the man who was responsible for Mornington House.

Now part of the Merrion Hotel, Mornington House was not the earl’s first Dublin residence: he had previously occupied a property on Grafton Street. But with the move east following the completion of Leinster House in … he decided to find a new home for himself and his family. Initially, he intended to acquire a plot 100 feet wide on Merrion Square itself, the proposed house being flanked by a carriage arch on either side. However, Lord FitzWilliam, who owned the land here, turned down this scheme, hence Mornington opted to move around the corner and take the lease on Lord Antrim’s recently completed Merrion Street house. As seen today, the building is of five bays and three storeys over basement, faced in brick like its neighbours and with a pedimented stone doorcase flanked by Doric columns; it is thought to have been designed by architect Christopher Myers (he had previously been the architect of Lord Mornington’s Grafton Street house). Again, as is so often the case with Dublin townhouses, the plain exterior conceals a rich interior decorative scheme, although the entrance hall is largely unornamented. On the other hand, two reception rooms to the right of this have elaborate plasterwork ceilings are heavily ornamented with scallop shells, floral festoons and acanthus scrolls, as well as flower baskets and birds. While much in the style of Robert West, Professor Christine Casey attributes all this to the Dublin stuccodore James Byrne, who was similarly responsible around the same period for the decoration of 12 Merrion Square, where his client was William Brownlow, MP for Lurgan, Co. Armagh, who was a friend of Mornington and, like him, a keen amateur musician (he was reputed to have played the harpsichord at the first performance of Handel’s Messiah in Fishamble Street, Dublin in 1742). In May 1766 Brownlow paid a gratuity of £7-13s-6d to Byrne as a ‘present for doing his work well’. Back on Merrion Street, the most interesting space is the stair hall, lit by a large round headed window on the return. In contrast to the somewhat mean joinery of the stairs and dado rail, the plasterwork is most engaging, the wall panels containing garlands and festoons of fruit and flowers, while above them is an exceptionally deep coved cornice with a double row of ovals composed of scrolling acanthus leaves with flowers at their intersections. This was the house in which the future Duke of Wellington spent at least part of his childhood.

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