The Real Founder of TCD: Luke Chaloner Remembered
Prior to the foundation of Trinity College Dublin (425 years ago) the site it now occupies was the location of an Augustinian priory: All Hallows, founded in 1166 by Dermot McMurrough, king of Leinster, and suppressed in 1538 by King Henry VIII. Visitors and students may be surprised that we continue to be blessed with the company of medieval monks; the 12th-16th century remains of the pious residents of All Hallows lie just beneath the grass in Library Square — a morbid fact that rogue sunbathers on the lawns have often neglected to note.
Some more recent ‘departures’ are more carefully tucked away from the hustle and bustle of Parliament Square. A small cemetery — the smallest in Ireland — known as Chaloner’s Corner, sits at the north-eastern corner of the current College Chapel. Dr Luke Chaloner (c.1550–1613), is one of the most notable of the individuals commemorated here and lends his name to the site.
Chaloner, an alumnus of Trinity College Cambridge, was a major driving force behind the establishment of Trinity College Dublin, and is named as one of its first three Fellows. He continued his involvement with the College after it admitted its first students in 1594, acting as Vice Chancellor and Vice Provost during the first Commencement ceremony of the University in 1601.
Chaloner was the chief negotiator concerning the grant of lands and other assistance from Queen Elizabeth to the support of the College. He corresponded with various other financial contributors to the founding of the College, and donated a significant amount of money to the project. He also oversaw the actual building operations.
Moreover, Chaloner appears to have directly supplied the College in its earliest and poorest days with provisions from his own farm in Finglas. In turn, the College passed the following resolution in December 1596: “It is agreed, by the consent of the Provost and Fellows of Trinity College Dublin, that Mr Lucas Chaloner, one of the Fellows of the said College,… in regard of his great travail and care for the good of said society, from the beginning and foundation of it unto the present,… shall be allowed henceforth his diet at the College charges whenever he shall think fit to take it in the College…”
In 1603, Chaloner was sent to London to purchase books on behalf of the College. There he met Sir Thomas Bodley, who was at that time similarly deployed to furnish the Library at Oxford which now bears his name. With characteristic generosity, Chaloner gifted £20 (a large sum of money at the time) worth of books to Bodley’s collection. Chaloner returned to Dublin with over 4000 volumes to add to the College collection, many of which can still be consulted by students in the Old Library today.
Chaloner was buried in the old College Chapel on 27 April, 1613, and beside the staircase to its gallery an inscription read: “Under this staircase lies Chaloner’s sad carcase, by whose prayers and intreaties this house now so great is” (trans. J.W. Stubbs). An alabaster effigy of Luke Chaloner was later installed. When the old Chapel was demolished in 1798 following the construction of the current building, the memorial was senselessly exposed to the elements at the eponymous corner. Eventually its features dissolved in the city rain; it is believed that the disfigured statue still remains in College, though its exact location is uncertain.
Like his alabaster statue, today Chaloner has faded from College’s memory — even the monks under Library Square garner a greater level of notoriety. Chaloner’s Corner is known to most students now as the location of an ATM and many consider it odd that there is one by a cemetery. It is impossible to take one’s wealth into the next world but it is possible to keep it close by.
Sources:
Trinity College Dublin 1592–1952, An academic history, R.B. McDowell & D.A. Webb: Trinity College Dublin Press, 2004
The History of the University of Dublin from its foundation to the end of the eighteenth century, J.W. Stubbs, Hodges, Figgis, & Co.: Dublin, 1889
‘Luke Challoner, D.D.’, N.J.D. White, Irish Church Quarterly 2, (1909), pp. 207–223.
Text © 2017, Joseph O’Gorman
Authenticity Tours & Arch Device © 2017, Authenticity Tours Ltd.
