T'alkiner — The PJicenix Pari;, its Origin and early History. 467 



Amsterdam, and wherever else the scattered followers of Charles II. 

 found a refuge in Continental centres did nothing else for them, 

 adversity was not without its uses in enlarging their experience of 

 men and cities. Ormond and his adherents retiu-ned with new and 

 liberal ideas of what a capital ought to he, and to these they speedily 

 gave eflPect. Houses everywhere sprang up without the walls of 

 Dublin. The space from Cork-hill to College Green was largely filled 

 up. Oxmantown Green became so built upon that, in less than eight 

 years, Ormond was obliged to requisition St. Stephen's Green, then 

 lately walled in, as an exercise ground for his garrison, and the northern 

 quays began to be formed as we now know them.^ So rapid was the 

 extension that the citizens, mindful of their past troubles, called the 

 attention of the Viceroy to the difficulties likely to be occasioned in 

 time of war by reason of the large number of dwellings which now lay 

 without the fortifications ; and the Earl of Essex,^ one of Ormond's 

 successors in the Yiceroyalty, writing in 1673, observes that '' the city 

 of Dublin is now very near, if not altogether, twice as big as it was at 

 His Majesty's restoration, and did, till the Dutch war began, every day 

 increase in building." But of all the adornments and additions then 

 planned and accomplished by far the greatest was the fonnation and 

 enclosure of "His Majesty's Park of the Phoenix," of the origin and 

 history whereof it is the object of this paper to give some account. 



Although the Phoenix Park, as it now is, and as it has been known 

 to the citizens of Dublin for above two centuries, has for its southern 

 boundary the road running by the north bank of the Liffey from 

 Dublin to Chapelizod, it originally embraced both sides of the river 

 and included the land on which the Poyal Hospital, Kilmainham, 

 now stands. Here it was that the Duke of Ormond found the nucleus 

 of the Park. At the time of his retmrn from exile the lands of 

 Kilmainham had been for exactly a century in the undisturbed 

 possession of the Crown. Originally granted by Strongbow to the 

 Knights Templars in 1174, they had become, on the suppression of 

 that Order by Edward II., the appanage of what Ware calls " the most 

 noble priory of St. John's of Jerusalem in Ireland " f but had been 

 sun-endered to Henry VIII. in the thirty-third year of that monarch's 



^ See the Description of England and Ireland by Mons. Jorevin de Rocheford 

 Paris, 1672, a translation of whicli appeared in "The Antiquarian Eepertory," vol. ii., 

 published in London in 1779, where the writer, in describing Dublin in about the 

 year 1666, says "the finest palaces in Dublin are along the Quay near Oxmanstown." 



-Essex Papers, Camden Soc, New Series, vol. 47. 



^ "Ware's Annals, p. 259. 



