Building for Defence

Military Planning

Andrew Tierney

This extraordinary, unpublished volume of one hundred drawings by Jaques de Wibault, or more usually in the record Jacques Wibault, reflects a formative endeavour of early professional architectural practice in Ireland. As Renaissance learning spread north of the Alps during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it did so amidst the turmoil of religious and dynastic war. With it came the intricate star-shaped bastions first devised by Italian engineers to resist canon fire and remove ‘les angles morts’. Techniques of siege and counter-siege dominated early modern warfare and transformed towns and forts across the continent. Paul Kerrigan’s Castles and Fortifications in Ireland, 1485-1945 (Cork, 1995) first showed the range of Renaissance fortifications in Ireland. Most are now destroyed, ruined or overgrown but their distinctive outlines can sometimes be appreciated from the air or in surviving plans. Forts at Maryborough (Portlaoise) and Philipstown (Daingean), built during the Marian plantation in the mid sixteenth century pre-date the arrival of such innovations, but new continental influences can be seen in towns and forts of the Munster and Ulster plantations, and the refortification of older English settlements. The best surviving examples are Elizabeth Fort in Cork city and Charles Fort commanding the entrance to the harbour at Kinsale (2.1), both of which are open to the public.

Ostentatious though these designs may be, what is most apparent is Wibault’s professional draughtsmanship: his manner of combining plans, elevations, sections and perspectives to configure his design as a technically and aesthetically legible whole. He has been trained to deploy colour in a taxonomic fashion to distinguish between different elements and points of view, drawing heavily on cartographic practice. Pink wash indicates the outline of a masonry or brick cross-section, a convention that would spread to French civil architecture during the first half of the eighteenth century but only finds its way to Britain after 1750;(3) orange for the cross-section of an earthwork; green, more mimetically, to show the grassy surface. Shading indicates the sloping embankments or glacis. Thus becomes clear what might otherwise be confusing sequences of parallel lines circuiting the inner line of defence. We also encounter the military engineer’s proficiency in isometric drawings and cross-sections – like those for his gallerie (2.3) where both form and construction are effectively demonstrated with line and shadow. More decorative are the pentagonal guerites or sentry boxes (2.4), shown in elevation, plan and section, with beautifully moulded corbelling, channelled masonry, and handsomely domed roofing topped with ball finials. An example very close in style to these can be found at Charles Fort, Kinsale. Another prominent architectural elaboration of such forts was the great rusticated gateway (2.5), reminiscent of the famous mid sixteenth-century exemplars by Sanmicheli at Verona in Italy and Zara in Dalmatia.

Military engineering of this type, with its well-established graphic conventions and ornamental elaborations, is crucial to understanding the emergence of the architectural profession in a country like Ireland, which had limited civic and domestic investment before 1700. Rolf Loeber, in his survey of early modern practitioners in the country, showed that officer architects were particularly prevalent on this side of the Irish sea. Captain John Paine, Captain James Archer, Captain John Morton and Captain William Kenn were amongst the most prominent.(4) As Loeber notes, the chief architects of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, such as William Robinson and Thomas Burgh (both military men) held the formal title of ‘Surveyor-General of the Fortifications and Buildings’. It is unsurprising then that the first major public building in Dublin was William Robinson’s hospital at Kilmainham for retired soldiers (2.6), followed soon after by the great barracks built by his successor, Burgh, on the opposite side of the Liffey (now Collins Barracks). The great driving force of these architectural works were the Dukes of Ormond; it was to the second Duke, James Butler (1665-1745), that Wibault dedicated his book in 1701. It was not the only, or even the first, such book aimed at Ormond’s patronage. The first English translation of Vauban’s work, published in London in 1691 by Abel Swall, was dedicated to the young duke.(5) Swall, who had already published a London edition of François Blondel’s Nouvelle Manière de fortifier les places in 1684, was responding to ‘the general Complaint of the want of Books of Fortification in our English Tongue.’

Half Irish, half Dutch, the second Duke of Ormond was one of the most prominent military figures of the age and saw himself as a rival to the Duke of Marlborough. ‘War’, he wrote, ‘was my Sphere and every Thing else was insufferable to me.’(6) Already by the age of eighteen he was colonel of an Irish regiment of horse and at nineteen joined French forces at the siege of Luxembourg, one of the most important military engagements of the era, where Vauban was in command. He had at a young age what he himself described in his memoirs as ‘a martial Genius that was more than common in so tender a Youth.’(7) In 1690 he fought for William of Orange (his mother’s second cousin) at the Battle of the Boyne and remained one of the king’s closest confidants until his death. Having inherited debts of some £100,000 from his grandfather, his participation in military campaigns was a constant drain on his finances. But such was his value to the king that private acts of parliament were passed in 1695 and 1701 to protect his estates.(8) This latter year was that in which Wibault, who fought with him on campaign, dedicated his book to the Duke and it may well be due to his straitened finances that the book never made it into print.