be traced is the passionate desire for vengeance. To glut that
desire Dermot was ready, not only to call in the alien against his
fellow-countrymen, but even to promise ‘Strongbow’ the succession to
Leinster and his followers landed possessions, which he could only do
at the cost of enraging his own kinsmen and subjects. Giraldus, indeed,
is at pains to justify the position of the English in Ireland, and to
claim that it was virtually brought about by consent rather than by
conquest. Here again we may best picture to ourselves the situation by
comparing the treaties or concessions wrung from barbarous potentates
by the adventurous Englishmen of to-day. Dermot had notoriously
promised what was not his to give, without the least consideration for
the rights or interest of his people. But just as, at the conquest
of England itself, Norman casuistry had enabled William to claim the
succession by gift of his kinsman, and to forfeit as traitors all those
who opposed that claim, and just as his followers, by Norman law,
though standing in the shoes of English thegns, assumed the position of
feudal lords, so, in Ireland, the new settlers looked at things from a
feudal standpoint, and so originated that conflict of irreconcilable
polities which has practically continued without intermission ever
since. In the end indeed, especially outside of Meath and Leinster,
they adapted themselves, as is well known, to the native system of
government, and became, in the eyes of the English, more or less Irish
chieftains. But at first the necessities of the case accentuated their
alien status. For on the one hand the weakness of the royal power, and
on the other the danger of their position, conspired to give their
settlement an intensely feudal character. Our poem, as we have said,
shows us the lords of Meath and Leinster, respectively, enfeoffing
their followers to hold of them by knight service, and these became, it
should be noticed, the “barons” of Meath or of Leinster, a term which
in England was only found in the border palatinates of Chester and of
Durham. These barons were encouraged to construct castles at once as
the best defence against those sudden raids in which the Irish were
wont to indulge. In accordance with the policy of the Romans in their
day, and with our own at the present time, when extending the borders
of the Empire, the shrewd Gerald strongly urged that the country
should be opened up by constructing roads through its wilds, and then
held by fortified posts, or, as he expressed it, by castles. Writing
within twenty years of earl Richard’s landing, he had already to lament
that the Irish had learnt from their foes the use of the bow, and
had so greatly improved their tactics that the easy victories of the
early invaders were no longer possible: by castles alone could their
successors hope to hold the land.
In the conquest of Ulster we have, perhaps, the most striking exploit
of the whole invasion. Accomplished by individual, and indeed
unauthorized, enterprise, it was not complicated, as in the south, by
native co-operation or royal interference, but was carried through by
the reckless daring of a single adventurer and his band. With two
and twenty knights and some three hundred followers, John de Courci
set forth from Dublin, about the close of January, 1177, to conquer
the kingdom of Ulster. Eager for plunder and the joys of the foray,
there had flocked to his standard those adventurous spirits who chafed
beneath the strict rule of the governor, William Fitz Audelin. In the
depth of winter they hurried forth, and reaching Down by forced marches
on the fourth day from leaving Dublin, were enabled to seize it by a
_coup de main_. Masters thus of the capital of the land, they had also
secured a maritime base invaluable for their further operations. The
Irish, stunned by the suddenness of the blow, had fled, carrying their
king with them, and the adventurers were soon revelling in the plunder
they had sought. In vain the natives, rallying from their flight,
endeavoured to recapture their lost stronghold. Like the garrison
of Dublin when beset by Roderick O’Conor and his host, John and his
handful of followers sallied forth upon their foes. Giraldus shows us
their leader as he lived, towering in height above his fellows, a man
of war from his youth up, whose only fault was the martial ardour that
led him, when the battle raged, to forget the general in the soldier,
as he charged headlong on his foes. Mounted on his famous white war
horse, he now performed, as usual, Homeric deeds of valour, lopping
off the heads and limbs of his enemies with a sweep of his tremendous
sword. The Irish, though beaten at length, attacked him again in the
summer, only to experience again defeat at his hand. But so desperate
was the struggle for the land that in one of his battles he was left
with only eleven knights. With their horses slain, and without food,
the little band fought their way, for thirty miles, through their foes,
and made good their escape. By sheer hard fighting ‘Ulvestere’--now
Down and Antrim--was at length virtually subdued and then ‘castled’
by John. In time there rose on every side those strongholds of which
the crumbling ruins long bore witness to the harassed lives of the
alien lords of the land. Dreading the perils of the cloud-swept glens,
and creeping from rock to rock within sound of that troubled sea, the
“Barons of Ulster,” in their eyries, perched on the basalt crags,
wrought about the land a belt of conquest of which we have the noblest
relic in the wild glory of Dunluce. Their heirs still lingered on, four
centuries later, clinging “in great poverty and peril” to the lands
their ancestors had won. The Savages, the Jordans, the Russells could
still be recognised by their names, but we read of the “Fitzurses, now
degenerate, and called in Irish McMaghon, the Bear’s son.”[353]
Like the proud lords of Leinster and of Meath, John de Courci had
his feudal officers, his “constable” and “marshal,” his “seneschal”
and his “chamberlain.” Ulster, in fact, had duly become a typical
feudal principality. Essentially obnoxious as such a development must
have been in the eyes of the English Crown, its weakness in Ireland
compelled it to temporize, nor could it find any better way of checking
this growth of feudal power than by playing off, in Ulster, the Lacys
against De Courci, just as it played them off against the Fitzgeralds
in the south. Thus was initiated that policy of see-saw which, in
practice, has always been, and is still, pursued. A striking passage
on the subject in the quaint Book of Howth is not inapplicable at the
present time, when the prospect of that steady government which Ireland
so badly needs seems as distant as ever.[354]
By reason that the Irish heard this alteration and change of
governors, they did wholly swear never after to obey to the
English men, and said, ‘Seeing that themselves cannot agree, why
should we condescend to them ever after? For seeing that they
cannot love each one and other of themselves, they would never
love us that is strangers, and their mortal enemies. Therefore
let us take part together, and do that which please God we
shall; and first, here is in Connaught some of their knights,
and if we get the upper hand upon them we shall the easier win
the rest.’
‘Divide et impera’ was the policy adopted, and the spirit of faction
which the nobles seem to have imbibed from their Irish neighbours
was thus encouraged by the Crown. This system may be said to have
lasted down to the days of Elizabeth, to be succeeded, in the 17th
century, by the new rivalry of Catholic and Protestant, Cavalier
and Roundhead. But still the island was allowed to become the battle
ground of parties, favoured now, in turn,, by England, according to
the government in power at the time. But never, perhaps, has this
unfortunate system been more recklessly or disastrously pursued than
since Mr. Gladstone’s bid for the votes of the ‘Nationalist’ party.
Although Giraldus has been bitterly assailed for criticising with no
sparing hand the undoubted failings of the Irish, he showed, we think,
on the contrary, far more fairness than might reasonably be expected
from a writer in his position. But he did far more than this. It might
indeed be truly said of him ‘Rem acu tetigit’: he boldly gave the
reasons why the conquest of Ireland was a failure, and added frank
and shrewd advice as to its government in the future. Even as we have
been often told that Cromwell would have settled the Irish question,
had only his ‘thorough’ policy been relentlessly pursued, so Giraldus
justly reminds us that the first flood of conquest was checked by Henry
II., when the work was only half done, and that Henry himself, in like
manner, only put his hand to the plough to turn back at once and leave
the work to others. Those others, again, were commissioned only to be
recalled: the strong centralized administration that was shaping the
English realm was never organized in Ireland; the Crown harassed, but
it did not govern. The four prophets of Ireland, he wrote, had duly
foretold that the island would not be mastered by the English till the
eve of the day of judgment. If he accused the Irish of shiftiness and
treachery, as the failings that accompanied their natural quickness,
he sternly rebuked his own countrymen for despoiling their native
allies of their lands, and wantonly insulting the native chieftains
when they came to pay their respects to John as lord of Ireland. He
even charges them with being corrupted by their intercourse with the
natives into sometimes imitating their treachery. That this charge was
not without foundation we learn from the French poem, which gives a
spirited description of the action of Maurice de Prendergast--one of
its heroes--when he brought his ally the king of Ossory to the English
camp, having pledged his word for his safety. The king of Munster
urged that his rival should be treacherously seized, “E li baruns, san
mentir, le voleient tuz consentir.” But Maurice, indignantly denouncing
their contemplated breach of faith, swore by his sword that he would
cleave the head of the first man who should dare to lay a hand upon the
king.
It is chiefly, I think, because his evidence is fatal to the idle dream
of an Irish golden age that the evidence of Giraldus on the state of
the country has been so bitterly assailed. For my part, I believe his
statement as to the corruption in church matters to be entirely honest,
and deem them in accordance with what we know from other sources. In
his curious sketch of the lay ‘ecclesiastics,’ with their long flowing
hair, and with nothing clerical about them but the absence of weapons,
he touches one of the worst abuses from which the church suffered in
Ireland. The very see of Armagh itself had been held for at least two
centuries in hereditary succession by lay chieftains, and the practice
had spread widely to the degradation of the church. For half a century,
indeed, before the coming of the invaders, efforts had been made at
church reform; but the initiative had come from England and from Rome,
and little encouragement was given by the native rulers themselves. Nor
will those who are acquainted with Irish society in the past reject as
improbable the statement of Giraldus that the clergy, though greatly
distinguished by their chastity and fervent devotion to divine service,
were apt to spend their evenings in drinking somewhat deeply. But even
to this he is careful to add, there were found honourable exceptions.
The important fact to be remembered is that, if Ireland had once been a
centre of Christianity, a bright star in a heathen age, its church had
deteriorated, not advanced, amidst the ceaseless and murderous strife
of native rule.
To say that the Anglo-Norman settlement, with its conquest, or rather
half conquest, of the country, proved a blessing to Ireland, is a
proposition that no one, probably, would care to maintain. Why this
should have been so is one of those fascinating problems that must ever
arouse the speculation and stir the interest of the student. The far
earlier Scandinavian settlements in Normandy and in Eastern England
have little in common with the exploits of Strongbow’s daring band.
Sicily in every way affords a closer parallel. Nearer in time to the
events we have discussed, its conquest, also, was no less essentially
a private enterprise. What the sons of Tancred had accomplished in the
south, the children of Nesta well might hope to bring to pass in the
west. Indeed the adventurers of the 11th century had faced a task,
to all seeming, harder than that which confronted the adventurers of
the 12th. Some might hold that the Norman race was no longer in its
prime, that its great conquering and governing powers were already
impaired. That its enterprise was less ardent, that in England it was
settling down, is, no doubt, the case: from the turbulent regions of
Wales adventurers were still forthcoming, but the pioneers of Irish
conquest were not supported by that inflow from England which was
needed for so great an undertaking, and which, in earlier days, would
probably have hastened to their support. But this was only one among
the causes of the great Irish failure. Sicily, like England, fortunate
in its kings, was fortunate also in that position of isolation which
enabled its Norman conquerors to work out their own destiny. If only
Ireland had enjoyed the same geographical advantage, if it had been far
enough distant from England, its invaders might, in the same fashion,
have established a dynasty of their own, and have quickly accommodated
themselves, with the marvellous adaptability of their race, to those
native ways to which indeed many of them did, ultimately, so strangely
conform. It is now recognised that the kings of England did not, and
could not, become true English kings till the loss of their Norman
possessions drove them to find in England their true home and country.
Giraldus was right when he urged that his friends should have been let
alone, or the royal power, if brought into play, exercised in full
force. One can, indeed, imagine what might have been the fate of
England, if, half conquered by adventurous bands of Normans, she had
then been half governed, from abroad, by a Norman duke.
Deeper still, however, lay the root of the trouble. The Normans had
found England a kingdom ready made, its people accustomed to governance
and recognising the reign of law. Coming of a kindred stock, and
possessing kindred institutions, the English had only to receive the
addition of a feudal system for which their own development had already
made them ripe. In Ireland, on the contrary, the new comers found no
kindred system. Its tribal polity had placed between its people and
themselves a gulf impassable because dividing two wholly different
stages of civilization. With no common foundation on which to build,
they could only hope to become Irish by cutting themselves off from
their own people. If, on the other hand, they wished to substitute law
and order for native anarchy, there was no indigenous machinery for
the purpose such as the Norman kings had found and used in England:
they had no alternative but to introduce the system they had brought
with them, a system absolutely irreconcilable with all native ideas
of land tenure. Whether Ireland, if left to herself, would even yet
have emerged from the tribal stage of society becomes doubtful when we
contemplate the persistence of the _mores Hibernici_. A comparison
of the changes in our own people between the 12th century and the days
of Queen Victoria--or even of Queen Elizabeth--and those discernible
in the Irish people suggests relative stagnation. It clings to its
ways as the peasant clings to that patch of soil which he will not
leave, and on which he can exist only in squalor and in want.[355]
Of one thing at least we may be sure. No fonder dream has enthralled
a people’s imagination than that of an Irish golden age destroyed by
ruthless invaders. The first invaders who entered Ireland did so by the
invitation of one of her own sons; and they found it, as an Irishman
has said, “a vast human shambles.”
Let Erin remember the days of old,
Ere her faithless sons betrayed her.
We went to Ireland because her people were engaged in cutting one
another’s throats; we are there now because, if we left, they would all
be breaking one another’s heads. When an eminent patriot is good enough
to inform us of his desire, but for the presence of a British judge, to
wring a brother patriot’s neck, we are reminded that the sacred fire
still burns in Celtic breasts. _Ævum non animum mutant._[356]
The leaders of the Irish people have not so greatly changed since the
days when ‘King’ MacDonnchadh blinded ‘King’ Dermot’s son, and when
Dermot, in turn, relieved his feelings by gnawing off the nose of his
butchered foe. Claiming to govern a people when they cannot even govern
themselves, they clamour like the baboo of Bengal against that _pax
Britannica_, by the presence of which alone they are preserved from
mutual destruction. No doubt, as one of them frankly confessed, they
would rather be governed badly by themselves than well by any one else.
But England also has a voice in the matter; and she cannot allow the
creation of a Pandemonium at her doors.
VIII
The Pope and the Conquest of Ireland
One of the hottest historical controversies that this generation
has known has been waged around a certain document popularly but
erroneously styled “the Bull Laudabiliter.” Duly found in the Roman
Bullarium (1739) and in the Annals of Baronius, its authenticity had
remained unshaken by sundry spasmodic attacks, and, some thirty years
ago, it was virtually accepted as genuine by Roman Catholic and by
Protestant historians alike. But since its learned examination and
rejection by Dr. (since Cardinal) Moran in November, 1872,[357] the
tide of battle has surged around it, the racial and religious passions
it aroused imparting bitterness to the strife.
“It is a question with me,” Mr. Gladstone wrote, of Adrian’s alleged
donation, “whether as an abnormal and arbitrary proceeding, it did
not vitiate, at the fountain head, the relation between English and
Irish, and whether it has not been possibly the source of all the
perversions by which that relation has been marked.... In Ireland the
English fought with an unfair advantage in their hands; they had a kind
of pseudo-religious mission, a mission with religious sanctions but
temporal motives. I do not see how this could work well.”[358]
It may be as well to explain at the outset that, as befits an Irish
controversy, the famous “Bull” in dispute is not really a Bull at all,
and that of the two assertions for which it is so furiously assailed,
the one is not to be found in it, but comes from another source, while
the other rests upon documents which even an assailant of the Bull
admits to be “certainly authentic.” But amidst the smoke and dust of
battle, these elementary points seem to have been hopelessly obscured.
For the benefit of those who may not be acquainted with “the Bull
Laudabiliter,”[359] I may explain that the document in question is
inserted in the ‘Expugnatio Hibernica’ of Giraldus Cambrensis,[360]
published in or about 1188, and is asserted by him to be the document
brought from Rome by John of Salisbury in 1155. He also gives with it a
confirmation of it by Alexander III., obtained, he states, by Henry II.
after his visit to Ireland.
Apart altogether from these two documents are three letters from
Alexander III., which are, similarly, only known to us at second
hand, being transcribed in what is known as the Black Book of the
Exchequer.[361] Broadly speaking, for the moment only, the main
difference between these letters and “the Bull Laudabiliter” is that
while, in the latter, Pope Adrian commends the intention of king Henry
to go to Ireland and reform the gross scandals prevailing there, Pope
Alexander, in the three letters, commends the action of the king in
having gone there for that purpose.
Having thus given a general idea of the five documents to be
considered, I must now glance at the motives that have animated
the attack on the “Bull.” The first of these is the reluctance of
the Irish, as Roman Catholics, to believe that it was the Pope who
authorized an English king to reign over Ireland; the second is their
refusal to admit that the state of things in Ireland is truly described
in the “Bull.”
Taking these reasons for attack separately, the first, as I hinted at
the outset, is a curious misconception. I need only, to prove that it
is so, print side by side the words of two bitter assailants of the
Bull--Father Gasquet and Father Morris.
FATHER GASQUET. FATHER MORRIS.
By this instrument ... The document by which Pope
Adrian IV. gave the sovereignty Adrian is supposed to have made
of the island to our English over Ireland to Henry
king Henry II.... From time Plantagenet....
to time the ‘fact’ that an
English Pope made a donation of In this letter there is not one
Ireland to his own countrymen word which suggests the idea of
is used ... for the purpose temporal domination.[363]
of trying to undermine the
inborn and undying love and
devotion of the Irish people for
the sovereign Pontiffs....
(But) Dr. Moran, the learned
Bishop of Ossory, adduced many
powerful, if not conclusive,
reasons for rejecting the ‘Bull’
as spurious.[362]
The fact is that the unfortunate document, denounced for its sanction
of Henry’s enterprise, does little, if anything, more than the three
Black Book letters, which emphatically approve that enterprise, when
undertaken, and sanction its results. Yet these letters are accepted,
we shall see, while the Bull is denounced as “spurious.”
So, also, the general charges against the character and morals of the
Irish people at the time, implied by the words of the ‘Bull,’ are
actually eclipsed by those formulated in the Black Book letters. And
yet the authenticity of the ‘Bull’ is assailed on the ground of these
charges while that of the letters is either accepted or discreetly let
alone.
It may have been observed that, in my opinion, these letters have by no
means played that important part in the controversy to which they are
entitled. The reason, perhaps, may be found in the fact that while the
defenders of the documents in the ‘Expugnatio Hibernica’ are conscious
that these letters by no means help their case, the assailants would
rather ignore evidence which confirms those statements in the “Bull”
that have specially aroused their hostility and forced them to denounce
it as ‘spurious.’
Father Gasquet, for instance, only refers to these letters as affording
“some very powerful arguments against the genuineness of Pope Adrian’s
Bull,”[364] and is careful not to commit himself, personally, to their
authenticity.
The vigorous attack by Father Morris, in his “Adrian IV. and Henry
Plantagenet,”[365] on “the document by which Pope Adrian IV. is
supposed to have made over Ireland to Henry Plantagenet” is painfully
disappointing. For he tells us, at the outset, in his Introduction that
were it not for the argument which it is supposed to carry with
it against the character of the Irish Church in the twelfth
century, the document itself would not have much importance (p.
xxxii.).
It is, therefore, his avowed aim to redeem the character of that
church, and his attack on Adrian’s “Bull” is only undertaken to that
end. He wishes to destroy the “impression that the Church in Ireland
in the twelfth century was corrupt and disorganized”; he repels “the
accusation that Ireland, in the 12th century had lapsed into barbarism,
and had so far lost her place in the Christian commonwealth that the
Pope was in a way compelled to come to the rescue.”[366] To prove his
case he is bound, of course, to deal with and reject the three letters
of Alexander III. (1172), which contained so detailed and fearful an
indictment of the state of morals and religion in Ireland at the time.
What, then, is our astonishment when he abruptly observes:
Our inquiry comes down no farther than Pope Adrian. Subsequent
letters of Roman pontiffs on the subject of Ireland stand by
themselves (p. 141).
Is it possible that he felt himself estopped by the verdict of his
predecessor, Cardinal Moran, whose “judicial spirit” he commends,[367]
and who, while rejecting “Laudabiliter,” accepts as “certainly
authentic” these awkward letters. It seems to me equally uncandid in
Miss Norgate to avoid discussing the “Privilegium” of Alexander III.,
and in Father Morris to ignore his letters in the ‘Liber Niger’ which
affect so gravely his case, and indeed impugn his arguments.
In their blind animosity to the “Bull,” its Roman Catholic opponents
have been led into most astounding, and indeed contradictory,
assertions. Father Gasquet, for instance, prints side by side with
“Laudabiliter” the letter of Adrian to Louis VII., in order to prove
that their opening passages are “almost word for word the same.”[368]
Yet Father Morris, who appeals to this letter, and assures us that
“there is no question as to the authenticity of this document,”[369]
insists that the style of “Laudabiliter” is “in glaring contradiction
to all the authentic ‘Bulls’ of Adrian IV.”[370] It may be retorted
that the letter to Louis was not a “Bull.” But, then, no more was
‘Laudabiliter’: the two documents belong to precisely the same class.
Stranger still, in assailing what he terms “the spurious letter,” he
points out, as a flaw, that
in the supposed commission to Henry the judge comes, as it
were, with lance in rest, as if he were charging the Moslem,
without any reference to those “undiminished rights (_jura
illibata_) of each and every church,” in the defence of
which, as we have seen, Pope Adrian was ever inexorable.[371]
It will scarcely be believed that the “spurious letter” contains the
very words for the omission of which it is condemned (“jure nimirum
ecclesiarum illibato et integro permanente”), and that the test of
Father Morris thus recoils against himself. It is difficult to treat
seriously so careless, or so reckless, a controversialist.