Elizabeth I issued the founding charter for the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity near Dublin, modeled on Oxford and Cambridge. It was designed explicitly to educate the Anglo-Irish elite in Protestant doctrine and prevent students from being sent to Catholic universities on the continent, entangling the institution in Ireland's religious and political struggles from its very first day.
The founding charter's language makes the political intent almost blunt: the college was meant to combat the spread of "popish" education and keep young Irish Protestants from studying abroad in Catholic Europe, where they might return home radicalized against the crown. Dublin was chosen for its symbolic weight as the seat of English administration in Ireland.
For centuries afterward, Trinity remained closed to Catholics in practice, and the Catholic Church itself forbade its own adherents from attending well into the 20th century, a ban lifted only in 1970. The university nonetheless became a crucible of Irish intellectual life, producing figures as varied as Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, and Samuel Beckett.
Trinity's single-college structure — it has no other colleges affiliated with it the way Oxford or Cambridge do — makes it unusual among ancient universities, essentially one institution wearing the clothes of a university system. Its Old Library, home to the Book of Kells, later became one of the most visited sights in Ireland, ironic for an institution founded explicitly to suppress the very Gaelic Catholic culture that manuscript represents.