Foreword

Summary

The very idea of the Chapel Royal in the city of Dublin asks questions and seeks answers. This book offers a fascinating series of perspectives on a building and an activity that was unique in its time and its place. It was the first new collegiate style choral foundation in Britain and Ireland since the Reformation. The origins of the concept of a Chapel Royal are to be found in the time of Henry VIII. Its primary function was to be an exemplar of divine service for the nation and to spread the expectations and outputs of the English Reformation as widely as possible. The Act of Union of 1800 effectively created the urgency for such a chapel in Ireland. The Chapel Royal finally came into being on the Dublin Castle site with the visit of King George IV in 1821, when he elevated the new Castle Chapel to the status of Chapel Royal. And so began the fascinating adventure in religious and liturgical development and in social and political history that gives us David O’Shea's brilliant and probing study of the impact of a changing, if at times seemingly static Ireland, on an Empire that thought it was never going to falter or fade. And musical Dublin rose to this challenge repeatedly as history dealt its unpredictable hand until all collapsed and closed in 1922.

O’Shea takes this royal peculiar, a government department with the Dean as its principal officer, and an entity in no coherent sense integrated into the regular life of what we now call the Church of Ireland, head on. He chronicles, analyses and re-presents the shifting political aspirations and fortunes of one specific voice of Anglican Dublin as an expression of the religious tastes of each successive Lord Lieutenant or Viceroy of the day. He also discerns and articulates the inestimable benefits given to the Dublin musical panorama through the Chapel Royal in its heyday. He comes into his own in the meticulous cataloguing of the music, the singers, the organists and his astute reflections on nineteenth-century Anglicanism through the life of the Chapel. We hope for more from him in this field as the sweep of his writing expands.

The Chapel Royal took its place in a kaleidoscopic experience of what O’Shea calls, not unrealistically, Protestant pomp. And we are all at our most potentially ridiculous when we are pompous.