The Wicked Earl & the House He Built

1740 — The Hunting Lodge

Robert Rochfort was 32 when he commissioned Belvedere. He hired Richard Castle, one of the great Palladian architects of Georgian Ireland — the same hand behind Powerscourt House, Westport House and Russborough. Castle gave Rochfort a compact, elegant hunting lodge overlooking Lough Ennell, with three follies planted as Gothic ornamentation across the grounds.

The house was never meant to be Rochfort's primary residence. He owned the much larger Gaulstown House nearby. Belvedere was for shooting, fishing and escape.

1743 — The Accusation

Robert had married Mary Molesworth, daughter of the 3rd Viscount Molesworth, in 1736. By 1743 he had convinced himself — or was prepared to act as if he had — that Mary was having an affair with his younger brother Arthur.

Whether the affair was real remains debated. What is not debated is what Robert did next. He had Mary locked in the family house at Gaulstown. He removed her children. He forbade her from seeing visitors. He sued Arthur for £20,000 — an enormous sum — and had him jailed in a debtor's prison, which dispossessed Arthur's nine children of their inheritance. Arthur would spend decades rebuilding his life.

Mary, meanwhile, remained imprisoned. For over thirty years.

When Mary was finally released on Robert's death in 1774, she was said to be almost unrecognisable to her own children. She had been confined for longer than most marriages lasted. Her only visible allies during that time had been the servants who smuggled letters out.

1760 — The Jealous Wall

While Mary remained imprisoned, Robert turned his attention to another brother, George Rochfort, whose home Tudenham House (then called Rochfort House) was visible from the Belvedere grounds. Robert quarrelled with George so bitterly that he could not bear to see his house.

So he built a wall to hide it.

Not a boundary wall. A monumental Gothic fake-ruin, styled to look like the crumbling side of a medieval abbey. It stood tall and wide enough to block the offending sightline from Belvedere entirely. It's still there today — the largest folly in Ireland.

1774 — A Fractured Skull

On 13 November 1774, Robert Rochfort's body was found near Belvedere House. He had a fractured skull. He was 66.

There was no inquest worthy of the name. Some believed he had slipped and struck his head on a rock. Others — neighbours, tenants, his surviving siblings — believed that someone had finally ended a reign of petty cruelty that had lasted three decades.

Whatever the truth, Mary was freed shortly afterward. Her son George (the 2nd Earl) inherited the estate. Arthur, released from prison years earlier, eventually regained some standing.

The House After the Earl

Belvedere passed through the Rochfort family and later the Marlay family before being acquired by the Irish state in the 1980s. It's now operated by Westmeath County Council with Heritage Ireland. The interior has been painstakingly restored — Robert Rochfort's own small library, the Georgian plasterwork, the Rococo reception rooms.

In 2026 a major Phase 3 conservation programme, funded by Fáilte Ireland and the EU Just Transition Fund, is preparing the house for its next century. The house interior is currently closed to the public and is expected to reopen later in the year. Full status on the visit page.

The People of Belvedere — Quick Reference

Name	Role	Years
Robert Rochfort, 1st Earl of Belvedere	Commissioner, "The Wicked Earl"	1708–1774
Mary Molesworth Rochfort	Imprisoned wife	c.1720–1791
Arthur Rochfort	Brother, jailed for debt	?–c.1780
George Rochfort	Brother, owner of Tudenham	?–1761
Richard Castle	Architect	c.1690–1751