In my capacity as Chair of the Northern Ireland Fiscal Council, I made a quick trip to Belfast last week. We were launching a report on the challenges that the NI Executive faces in setting and sticking to a budget when its departments have been overspending since 2022-23 and the UK Treasury has been perhaps too willing to bail them out. 

The report was far from upbeat, but the trip at least was a pleasure. I had only visited Northern Ireland once before being asked to take on this role, but am now happily in the fifth year of what was supposed only to be a six-month appointment. So I have had the opportunity to visit Belfast many times and always enjoy doing so. 

As you walk around the city centre, many street signs – including the main shopping street and the square that surrounds the City Hall – reference either Donegall or Chichester. These are in honour of an 18th century Trinity alumnus – Arthur Chichester, the fifth Earl and first Marquess of Donegall. He was the greatest Irish landowner of the day, possessing a quarter of a million acres including the whole town of Belfast. 

Arthur was a notorious absentee landlord. When a fire destroyed Belfast Castle in 1708, the Chichester family moved to England and when Arthur came of age he chose to stay in a grand house in Staffordshire rather than live in Ireland. A contemporary author accused him of “draining a manufacturing country of £36,000 a year”, raising the sums that tenants had to pay for a lease “sufficient to impoverish a province, and transported them out of the kingdom to another land, where he is unknown and disregarded”. 

But he did leave an imprint on the city that some have described as an urban renaissance. He helped shape the central street plan; he required his leaseholders to build to higher standards and keep the streets clean; and he donated money or land for the Exchange, the Assembly Rooms, the White Linen Hall, the poor house and St Ann’s Church. When he attended a grand event in the Assembly Rooms in 1783 it was reported that: “His Lordship is exceedingly pleased with the Town and his Navigation, and we are pleased with him; he certainly is a courteous and well-disposed Nobleman”. 

Arthur arrived at Trinity in 1758, shortly after succeeding his “widowed, childless, witless uncle” as the 5th Earl. The Benefactors’ Book shows that he made a generous 20 guinea gift on coming up. He lived in what is now Room 2 on Staircase 15 with his servant Elliott conveniently billeted in Room 5. His tutor was Thomas Warton, elected Professor of Poetry in that year while still in his twenties. They were both in the circle of Samuel Johnson, who famously visited Trinity at the time to use the Old Library.

The historian W A Maguire has written that “the fact that [Arthur] troubled to take a degree at all, as many noble students did not, indicates at least his respect for learning”. He was awarded an MA in 1759 and made a Doctor of Civil Law in 1763, although our archivist Clare suspects that his social status freed him from the conventional requirements of terms kept and academic exercises performed. 

Arthur’s social status in College is visible in other ways. The photo below shows the Buttery Book for the week he came into residence. These ledgers record daily spending on basic food – bread, cheese and beer – and regular charges, such as for using the college barber or messenger. Once in residence, Arthur appears in the book by title immediately below the President and Vice President, and above the Fellows. He would also have dined at High Table rather than with the rest of his year group.

If we had had a Development Director at the time, she might have hoped that more of Arthur’s family wealth would over time rub off on the College. Unfortunately, his heir George (who declined an Oxford education) racked up £40,000 in gambling debts within nine months of coming of age and was a notorious spendthrift. He moved to Belfast in 1802, but only to flee his creditors, earning the soubriquet “Marquis of Done ’em all”.