Midleton College's founding charter dates from the reign of William III, the Dutch Protestant who had taken the English and Irish thrones from the Catholic James II in 1690. Elizabeth Villiers had been his mistress for years, and when he married off his ageing entanglement to George Hamilton, Earl of Orkney, in 1695, she received estates in Ireland as compensation. From those Irish estates she funded the school. The original endowment placed Midleton among the Anglican grammar schools that would, for the next two centuries, supply the Church of Ireland and the Protestant gentry with their sons. Money troubles closed the school for a time; in 1829 the Commissioners of Education repaired the main building, a new master was appointed in 1830, and the College reopened. When the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland sent commissioners in 1880 to inquire into all of Ireland's endowed schools, Midleton was inspected and described as a school of good tradition, proud of its charter.

Walk the school's roll-call and you walk through three centuries of Irish public life - some of it admirable, some appalling. John Philpot Curran (1750-1817), the orator and Master of the Rolls in Ireland, learned his Latin here before defending United Irishmen in the courtroom and fathering the doomed lover of Robert Emmet. Isaac Butt (1813-1879), the barrister who founded the Home Rule League and gave Irish parliamentary nationalism its first organised platform, was a Midleton boy. So was John O'Mahony (1815-1877), the Gaelic scholar who, in exile in New York, co-founded the Fenian Brotherhood. And so, less proudly, was Reginald Dyer (1864-1927), the Indian Army officer who, on 13 April 1919, ordered his troops to fire without warning into an unarmed crowd at the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, killing several hundred people in one of the worst atrocities of the British Raj. A single school produced both Home Rule and Amritsar.

The school motto is Spartam nactus es, hanc exorna - 'Thou hast found Sparta, adorn it.' The phrase is borrowed from Erasmus, who in turn was paraphrasing a line from Euripides's lost play Telephus. Erasmus translated it slightly wrong, but the misquotation stuck. The line was made famous in 1790 when Edmund Burke, the great Anglo-Irish conservative thinker, quoted it in his Reflections on the Revolution in France - using it to argue that one should improve and beautify the political inheritance one has been given, rather than tear it down and start over. The school shares the motto with Loretto School in Scotland. Pupils interpret it variously - some hear an instruction to develop their talents, some hear a heavier civic charge. The school crest, with its Williamite associations, leaves no doubt which reading the founders had in mind.

The College admitted girls for the first time in the 1970s. Today children arrive at twelve, spend three years in the junior cycle aiming at the Junior Certificate, take a Transition Year to sample subjects before committing, and then two years of senior cycle aimed at the Leaving Certificate that opens the door to Irish universities. The teaching is the modern Irish secondary curriculum - Irish, English, mathematics, three Continental languages, three sciences taught both separately and combined, classical studies for the still-curious, computing and music and art. Maximum class size at senior level is twenty. The Chairman of Governors is Paul Colton, the Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross. Among the governors sits Alan Brodrick, the current Viscount Midleton - a descendant of the first Viscount, the Williamite-era Speaker of the Irish House of Commons whose family gave the town its English-language name.

Like many Protestant-tradition Irish secondary schools, Midleton College has a strong rugby culture. Around ninety boys play; eight staff coach them; the senior and junior teams have collected Mungret Shields and Munster Development League wins. In an old gender split that the school has never quite revisited, rugby is a boys' game here and soccer a girls' game. In summer the boys play cricket, a sport that flickers in and out of Irish life depending on the decade and the school. Field hockey is taken seriously by both sexes - twelve coaches between them. Orienteering, where ninety percent of pupils have a go in winter, has sent Midleton students to the European and World Orienteering Championships. The recent past pupils now playing professional rugby include Ben Mitchell, Dave O'Callaghan, and Clive Ross. A Midleton boy or girl can be reasonably confident of leaving school with both a Leaving Certificate and a decent boot.