30.04.2026
New Book Highlights Overlooked Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral
Book on Benjamin Culme to be launched on May 19.
Benjamin Culme was Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, for 32 years in the 1600s and yet, until now, there was little known about him. A new book by the Revd Robert Kingston aims to put this right and documents the life of Benjamin Culme and the turbulent times he lived in.
‘Benjamin Culme, D D, Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral Dublin 1625–1657 – An Overlooked Dean’ will be launched by the current Dean, the Very Revd William Morton in the Deanery of St Patrick’s Cathedral on Tuesday May 19 2026 at 6.30pm.
Robert Kingston is Chaplain to the Mageough in Dublin having served as Rector in a number of parishes. When he became Rector of Virginia in Co Cavan he discovered that one of his predecessors, Culme, had gone on to be Dean of St Patrick’s. When he went to learn more about him he found that no biography had been written and that began many years of fascinating research.
“Culme has been more or less overlooked in the literature but I believe he held a vital appointment at a time of violent tensions in society and tensions between low church Puritans, high church Laudians like Bishop Bramhall and those who, like Culme, sought a broad church middle way,” Robert explains. “He sought an accommodating approach to peace between Christians. In some ways a situation not unlike that in our own time. I believe there is much we can learn from Culme and hope this book might spark a discussion about seeking a conciliatory and eireinic approach.”
Benjamin Culme was reared in an upwardly mobile farming family in Devon in the late 1500s. Having graduated from Oxford in the early 1600s he followed two of his brothers to Ireland where they had benefitted from the Elizabethan plantation of Ulster.
Robert Kingston was Rector of Virginia in Co Cavan from 1984 where the local view, backed by some contemporary sources, was that Culme had been the first Reformed minister. However, his name does not appear in Canon Leslie’s lists of the clergy of Kilmore Diocese and so the search began to find the truth. As an amateur in this area the author was led down all sorts of interesting byways in Cavan, Meath, Dublin, Kilkenny, St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin and finally Wiltshire which highlighted many of the issues of the time in church and state matters which affected Culme personally.
“This is a personal rather than an academic account but hopefully doing justice to the available information we have about him and as interesting in the reading as it was in the writing,” Robert commented.
The new book is published by Hinds Publishing and will be available at the launch and on Hinds’ website www.hinds.ie.