THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND
Nearly a hundred years before William Rufus once stood on the cliffs of
Wales, and cried, as he looked across the waters towards Ireland, "For
the conquest of that land I will gather together all the ships of my
kingdom, and will make of them a bridge to cross over." The story was
carried to a king of Leinster, who listened thoughtfully. "After so
tremendous a threat as that," he asked, "did the king add, if the Lord
will?" Being told that Rufus used no such phrase, "Since he trusts to do
this by human power, not divine," said the shrewd Irishman, "I need not
greatly dread his coming." Prophecies which passed from mouth to mouth
in Ireland declared that the island should not be conquered till very
shortly before the great Day of Judgment. Even in England men commented
on the fact that while the Romans had reached as far as the Orkneys,
while Saxons and Normans and Danes had overrun England, Ireland had
never bowed to foreign rule. The Northmen alone had made any attempt at
invasion; but within the fringe of foreign settlements which they
planted along the coast from Dublin to Limerick, the various Irish
kingdoms maintained themselves according to their ancient customs, and,
as English tribes had done before in Britain, waged frequent war for the
honour of a shifting and dubious supremacy. The island enjoyed a fair
fame for its climate, its healthfulness, its pasturage, its fisheries;
English chroniclers dwelt on "the far-famed harbour of Dublin, the rival
of our London in commerce," and told of ships of merchandise that sailed
from Britanny to Irish ports, and of the busy wine trade with Poitou.
Ireland alone broke the symmetry of an empire that bordered the Atlantic
from the Hebrides to Spain, and the fame of empire had its attractions
for the heirs of the Norman conquerors. Patriotic and courtly historians
remembered that their king was representative of Gerguntius, the first
king of Britain who had gone to Ireland; the heir of Arthur, to whom
Irish kings had been tributary; the ruler over the Basque provinces,
from whence undoubtedly the Irish race had sprung. To fill up what was
lacking in these titles, he was proclaimed lord and ruler by a yet
clearer divine right, when in 1155 John of Salisbury brought to him from
Rome a bull, by which the English Pope, Hadrian IV., as supreme lord of
all islands, granted Ireland to the English king, that he might bring
the people under law, and enlarge the borders of the Church.
From the beginning, indeed, there rested on the unhappy country a curse
which has remained to the present moment. The invasion of the Ostmen was
the first of a series of half-conquests which brought all the evils of
foreign invasion with none of its benefits. In England the great rivers
and the Roman roads had been so many highways by which the Scandinavians
had penetrated into the heart of the country. But in Ireland no road and
no great river had guided the invader onwards past morass and bog and
forest. While the great host of the Danish invaders swooped down over
England and Gaul, the pirates that sailed to Ireland had only force to
dash themselves on the coast, and there cling cautiously to guarded
settlements. They settled as a race apart, as unable to mix with the
Irish people as they were powerless to conquer them. No memory as in
England of a common origin united them, no ties of a common language, no
sense of common law or custom, or of a common political tradition. The
strangers built the first cities, coined the first money, and introduced
trade. But they were powerless to affect Irish civilization. The tribal
system survived in its full strength, and Ireland remained divided
between two races, two languages, two civilizations in different stages
of progress, two separate communities ruled by their own laws, and two
half-completed ecclesiastical systems, for the Danish Church long looked,
as the Irish had never done, to the Archbishop of Canterbury as their
head. Earnest attempts had already been made by Hadrian's predecessor to
bring the Irish into closer connection with the see of Rome. In 1152 a
papal legate had carried out a great reform by which four archbishops,
wholly independent of Canterbury and receiving their palls from Rome, were
set over four provinces. But still no Peter's Pence were paid to Rome;
Roman canon law, Roman ritual, the Roman rules of marriage, had no
authority; the Roman form of baptism was replaced by a tradition which
made the father dip his new-born child three times in water, or, if he
were a rich man, in milk; there was no payment of tithes; clerks were
taxed like laymen when a homicide occurred; Irish nobles still demanded
hospitality from religious houses, and claimed, according to ancient
custom, provisions from towns on Church domains. Hadrian himself had long
been interested in Irish affairs. The religious houses which the Irish
maintained in Germany kept up communication with Pope and Emperor; an
Irish abbot at Nuremberg was chaplain to the Emperor Frederick; one of
Hadrian's masters at Paris had been a monk from the Irish settlement in
Ratisbon, and as Pope he still remembered the Irish monk with warm
affection. When he was raised to the Papacy in the very year of Henry's
coronation, one of his first cares was to complete the organization of
Christendom in the West by bringing the Irish Church under Catholic
discipline.
Henry, on his part, was only too eager to accept his new responsibility,
and less than a year after his coronation he called a council to discuss
the conquest of Ireland. The scheme was abandoned on account of its
difficulties, but the question was later raised again in another form.
Diarmait Mac Murchadha (in modern form Jeremiah Murphy), King of
Leinster, had carried off in 1152 the wife of the chief of Breifne
(Cavan and Leitrim). A confederation was formed against him under
Ruaidhri (or Rory), King of Connaught, and he was driven from the island
in 1166. "Following a flying fortune and hoping much from the turning of
the wheel," he fled to Henry in Aquitaine, did homage to the English
king for his lands, and received in return letters granting permission
to such of Henry's servants as were willing to aid him in their recovery.
Diarmait easily found allies in the nobles of the Welsh border, in whose
veins ran the blood of two warlike races. It was by just such an
enterprise as this that their Norman fathers and grandfathers had won
their Welsh domains. From childhood they had been brought up in the tumult
of perpetual forays, and trained in a warfare where agility and dash and
endurance of hunger and hardship were the first qualifications of a
soldier. Richard de Clare, Earl of Striguil, in later days nicknamed
Strongbow--a descendant of one of the Conqueror's greatest warriors,
but now a needy adventurer sorely harassed by his creditors--was easily
won by the promise of Diarmait's daughter and heiress, Aeifi, as his wife.
Rhys, the Prince of South Wales, looked favourably on the expedition.
His aunt, Nesta, had been the mistress of Henry I. of England; and
had afterwards married first Gerald of Windsor, and then a certain
Stephen; her sons and grandsons, whether Fitz-Henrys, Fitz-Geralds, or
Fitz-Stephens, were famous men of war; nor were the children of her
daughter, who had married William de Barri, behind them in valour. No less
than eighteen knights of this extraordinary family took part in the
conquest, where in feats of war they renewed the glories of their
ancestors both Norse and Welsh; a son of Nesta's, David, the Bishop of
St. David's, gave his sympathy and help; while her grandson, Gerald
de Barri, became the famous historian of the conquest.
In 1167 Diarmait returned to Ireland with a little band of allies, the
pioneers of the English conquest. Others followed the next year, among
them Strongbow's uncle, Hervey of Mount Moriss, a famous soldier in the
French army, distinguished for his beautifully proportioned figure, his
delicate long hands, his winning face, and graceful speech. With him
went Nesta's son Robert Fitz-Stephen, a powerful man of the Norman
type, handsome, freehanded, sumptuous in his way of living, liberal and
jovial, given to wine and dissipation. His nephew, Meiler Fitz-Henry,
showed stronger traces of Welsh blood in his swarthy complexion, fierce
black eyes, and passionate face. The knights carried on the war with the
virtues and vices of a feudal chivalry, with a frank loyalty to their
allies, a good comradeship which recognized no head but left each knight
supreme over his own forces, a magnificent daring in the face of
overwhelming forces, and a joyful acceptance of the savage privileges of
slaughter and rapine which fell to their lot. "By their aid Diarmait began
first to take breath, then to gain strength, and at last to triumph over
his enemies." The Irish, however, rallied under the king of Connaught
against the traitor who had brought the English into their land; and
Diarmait was forced to conclude a peace and promise to receive no more
English soldiers.
Meanwhile other knights were preparing for the Irish expedition. Maurice
Fitz-Gerald encamped on a rock near Wexford. Another Fitz-Gerald,
Raymond the Fat, fortified his camp near Waterford. In August 1170 came
Earl Richard himself, who had crossed to France in search of Henry, and
with persistent importunity implored for leave to join the Irish war.
Henry, at that moment busy in his last negotiations with Thomas, gave a
doubtful half-consent, and Richard sailed with an army of nearly fifteen
hundred men. We see in the pages of Gerald of Wales, the hero with whose
name the conquest of Ireland was to be for ever associated, red-haired,
gray-eyed, freckled, with delicate features like a woman's, and thin,
feeble voice; wearing a plain citizen's dress without arms, "that he
might seem more ready to obey than to command;" suave, gracious, politic,
patient, deferential, with his fine aristocratic air, and an undaunted
courage that blazed out in battle, when "he never moved from his post, but
remained a beacon of refuge to his followers." At his coming Waterford was
taken, as Wexford and Ossory had been before. Before the prudent Norman
went farther the marriage contract was carried out, and the beginning of a
strife which lasted for seven hundred years was celebrated in this first
alliance of a Norman baron and an Irish chief. Richard and Diarmait
marched against Dublin, and its Danishin habitants were driven over sea.
In a few months their king, Hasculf, returned with a great fleet gathered
from Norway, the Hebrides, the Orkneys, Man,--the last fleet of Northmen
which descended on the British Isles,--but again the Normans won the day.
Henry meanwhile was watching nervously the progress of affairs. The war
was, no doubt, useful in withdrawing from Wales a restless and dangerous
baronage, and in the rebellion of 1174 the hostility of the border
barons would have been far more serious if the best warriors of Wales
had not been proving their courage on the plains of Ireland. But Henry
had no mind to break through his general policy by allowing a feudal
baronage to plant themselves by force of arms in Ireland, as they had in
earlier days settled themselves in northern England and on the Welsh
border. The death of Diarmait in 1171 brought matters to a crisis. By
Celtic law the land belonged to the tribe, and the people had the right
of electing their king. But the tribal system had long been forgotten by
the Normans, whose ancestors had ages before passed out of it into the
later stage of the feudal system; and by Norman law the kingdom of
Leinster would pass to Aeifi's husband and her children. Rights of
inheritance and rights of conquest were judiciously blended together,
and Richard assumed rule, not under the dangerous title of king, but as
"Earl of Leinster." The title was strange and unwelcome to Irish ears.
Among envious Norman rivals it did not hide the suspicion that Richard
was "nearly a king," and rumours reached Henry's ears that he was
conquering not only Leinster but other districts to which neither he nor
his wife had any right. Henry immediately confiscated all the earl's
lands in England, and ordered that all knights who had gone to Ireland
should return, on pain of forfeiture of their lands and exile. In vain
Strongbow's messengers hastened to him in France, and promised that the
earl would yield up all his conquests, "since from the munificence of
your kindness all proceeds." While they still anxiously followed the
Court from place to place came the sudden tidings of the archbishop's
murder, and before many months were over Henry was on his way to Ireland
to take its affairs into his own hands. Strongbow was summoned to meet
him, forced to full submission, and sent back to prepare the way before
the king.
In Ireland Henry had little to do save to enter into the labours of its
first conquerors. The Danes had been driven from the ports. The Irish
were broken and divided, and looked to him as their only possible ally
and deliverer from the tyranny, the martial law, the arbitrary executions,
which had marked the rough rule of the invaders. The terrified barons were
ready to buy their existence at any price. The leaders of the Church
welcomed him as the supporter of Roman discipline. Henry used all his
advantages. He consistently carried through the farce of arbitration.
The Wexford men brought to him Fitz-Stephen, whom they had captured, as
the greatest enemy to the royal majesty and the Irish people. Henry threw
him into prison, but as soon as he had won the smaller kings of the south
separately to make submission to him, and given the chief castles into the
hands of his own officers, he conciliated the knights by releasing
Fitz-Stephen. He spent the winter in Dublin, in a palace built of wattles
after the fashion of the country. There he received the homage of all the
kings of Leinster and Meath. Order, law, justice, took the place of
confusion. Dublin, threatened with ruin now the Danish traders were driven
off, was given to the men of Bristol to found a new prosperity. Its trade
with Chester was confirmed, and from all parts of England new settlers
came in numbers during the next few years to share in the privileges and
wealth which its commerce promised. A stately cathedral of decorated
Norman work rose on the site of an earlier church founded by the Ostmen.
It seemed as though the mere military rule of the feudal lords was to be
superseded under the king's influence by a wiser and more statesmanlike
occupation of the country. A great council was held at Cashel, where a
settlement was made of Church and State, and where Henry for the first
time published the Papal Bull issued by Hadrian fifteen years before. He
had won a position of advantage from whence to open a new bargain with
the Pope. In the moment of his deepest disgrace and peril he defiantly
showed himself before the world in all the glory of the first foreign
Conqueror and Lord of Ireland.
Henry's work, however, was scarcely begun when in March there came a
lull in the long winter storms, and a vessel made its way across the
waters of the Irish Sea. It brought grave tidings. Legates from the Pope
had reached Normandy, with powers only after full submission to absolve
the king; unless Henry quickly met them, all his lands would be laid
under interdict. Other heavy tidings came. Evil counsellors were
exciting the young king to rebellion. It was absurd, they said, to be
king, and to exercise no authority in the kingdom, and the boy was
willing enough to believe that since his coronation "the reign of his
father had expired." All Henry's plans in Ireland were at once thrown
aside. At the first break in the adverse winds he hastily set sail, and
for two hundred years no English king again set foot in Ireland. The
short winter's work was to end in utter confusion. The king's policy had
been to set up the royal justice and power, and to break the strength of
the barons by dividing and curtailing their interests. He had left them
without a leader. The growing power of Strongbow had been broken; Dublin
had been taken from him; the castles had all been committed to knights
appointed by the king. Quarrels and rivalries soon broke out. Raymond
the Fat became the recognized head of Nesta's descendants. In his
enormous frame, his yellow curly hair, his high-coloured cheery face,
his large gray eyes, we seethe type of the old Norse conquerors who had
once harried England; we recognize it too in his carelessness as to food
or clothing, his indifference to hardship, his prodigious energy, the
sleepless nights spent in wandering through his camp where his resounding
shouts awoke the sleeping sentinels, the enduring wrath which never forgot
an enemy. Richard's uncle, Hervey of Mount Moriss, led a rival faction in
the interests of Strongbow. The English garrison in Ireland was weakened
by the loss of troops which Henry was compelled to carry away with him.
The forces that remained, divided, thinned, discouraged, were left to
confront an Irish party united in a revived hope. No sooner did rebellion
break over England in the next year than the Irish with one accord rose in
revolt. The treasury was exhausted, and there was no payment for the
troops. A doubtful campaign went on in which the English, attacked now by
the Ostmen of the towns, now by the Irish, fought with very varying
success, but with prodigies of valour. They were reckless of danger,
heedless of the common safeguards of military precaution. When Henry heard
of Raymond's daring capture of Limerick in 1176, and then of his retreat,
he made one of his pithy "Great was the courage in attacking it, and yet
greater in the subduing of it, but the only wisdom that was shown was in
its desertion."
The rivalry of Raymond and Strongbow was at its height when, in 1176,
Earl Richard died; and to this day his burial-place in the Norman
Cathedral in Dublin, and that of his wife Aeifi, are marked by the only
sculptured tombs that exist of these first Norman conquerors of Ireland.
Others besides the king heard with joy the news that the great warrior
was dead. Richard's sister, who had been married to Raymond, had cast in
her lot with her lord. She sent a cautious despatch to her husband, who
was unable himself to read, and had to depend on the good offices of a
clerk. "Know, my dearest lord," wrote the prudent wife, "that that great
tooth which pained me so long has now fallen out, wherefore see that you
delay not your return." The watchful Henry, however, at once recalled
Raymond to England, and sent a new governor, Fitz-Aldhelm, to hold the
restless barons in check, till his son John, to whom he now proposed to
give the realm of Ireland, should be of age to undertake its government.
When Fitz-Aldhelm saw the magnificent troop of Raymond's cousins and
nephews, who had thrown aside all armour save shields, and, mounted on
splendid horses, dashed across the plain to display their feats of
agility and horsemanship, he muttered to his followers, "This pride I
will shortly abate, and these shields I will scatter." He was true to
his word. The fortunes of the knights of both parties indeed rapidly
declined; "those who had been first had to learn to be last;" their
lands were taken from them on every excuse, and they were followed by
the enmity and persecution of the king. For the next ten years the
history of the English in Ireland is a miserable record of ineffective
and separate wars undertaken by leaders each acting on his own account,
and of watchful jealousy on the part of Henry. A new governor was sent
in 1177 to replace Fitz-Aldhelm. Hugh de Lacy was no Norman. His black
hair, his deep-set black eyes, his snub nose, the scar across his face,
his thin ill-shapen figure, marked him out from the big fair Fitz-Geralds,
as much as did his "Gallican sobriety" and his training in affairs, for
in war he had no great renown. Perhaps it was some quick French quality
in him that won the love of the Irish. But Henry was suspicious and
uneasy. He was recalled in 1181 on the news that without the king's leave
he had married the daughter of the King of Connaught, and rumour added
that he had even made ready a diadem for himself. But his services were
so valuable that that same winter he was sent back, only to be again
recalled in 1184 and again sent back. At last in 1186, "as though fortune
had been zealous for the king of England," he was treacherously slain by
an Irishman, to Henry's "exceeding joy."
Meanwhile the king had in 1185 made a further attempt at a permanent
settlement of the distracted island. John was formally appointed king
over Ireland, and accompanied by Glanville, landed in Waterford on
the 25th of April. His coming with a new batch of Norman followers
completed the misfortunes of the first settlers. The Norman-Welsh
knights of the border had by painful experience learned among their
native woods and mountains how to wage such war as was needed in
Ireland-a kind of war where armour was worse than useless, where
strength was of less account than agility, where days and nights of cold
and starvation were followed by impetuous assaults of an enemy who never
stood long enough for a decisive battle, a war where no mercy was given
and no captives taken. On the other hand, their half Celtic blood had
made it easy for them to mingle with the Irish population, to marry and
settle down among them. But the followers of John were Norman and French
knights, accustomed to fight in full armour upon the plains of France;
and to add to a rich pay the richer profits of plunder and of ransom.
The seaport towns and the castles fell into the hands of new masters,
untrained to the work required of them. "Wordy chatterers, swearers of
enormous oaths, despisers of others," as they seemed to the race of
Nesta's descendants, the new rulers of the country proved mere plunderers,
who went about burning, slaying, and devastating, while the old soldiery
of the first conquest were despised and cast aside. Divisions of race
which in England had quite died out were revived in Ireland in their full
intensity; and added to the two races of the Irish and the Danes we now
hear of the three hostile groups into which the invaders were broken--the
Normans, the English, and the men of the Welsh border. To the new comers
the natives were simply barbarians. When the Irish princes came to do
homage, their insolent king pulled their long beards in ridicule; at the
outrage they turned their backs on the English camp, and the other kings
hearing their tale, refused to do fealty. Any allies who still remained
were alienated by being deprived of the lands which the first invaders had
left them. Even the newly-won Church was thrown into opposition by
interference with its freedom and plunder of its lands; the ancient custom
of carrying provisions to the churches for safe keeping in troubled times
was contemptuously ignored when a papal legate gave the English armies
leave to demand the opening of the church doors, and the sale of such
provisions as they chose to require. There were complaints too in the
country of the endless lawsuits that now sprang up, probably from the
infinite confusion that grew out of the attempt to override Irish by
English law. But if Glanville tried any legal experiments in Ireland,
his work was soon interrupted. Papal legates arrived in England at
Christmas 1186 to crown the King of Ireland with the crown of peacocks'
feathers woven with gold which the Pope himself had sent. But John never
wore his diadem of peacocks' feathers. Before it had arrived he had been
driven from the country.
Thus ended the third and last attempt in Henry's reign to conquer
Ireland. The strength and the weakness of the king's policy had alike
brought misery to the land. The nation was left shattered and bleeding;
its native princes weakened in all things save in the habits of treachery
and jealousy; its Danish traders driven into exile; its foreign conquerors
with their ranks broken, and their hope turned to bitterness. The natural
development of the tribal system was violently interrupted by the
half-conquest of the barons and the bringing in of a feudal system, for
which the Irish were wholly unprepared. But the feudal conquerors
themselves were only the remnants of a broken and defeated party, the
last upholders of a tradition of conquest and of government of a hundred
years earlier. Themselves trembling before the coming in of a new order of
things, they could destroy the native civilization, but they could set
nothing in its place. There remained at last only the shattered remnants
of two civilizations which by sheer force were maintained side by side.
Their fusion was perhaps impossible, but it was certainly rendered less
possible by the perplexed and arbitrary interferences of later rulers in
England, almost as foreign to the Anglo-Irish of the Pale as to the native
tribes who, axe in hand and hidden in bog and swamp and forest, clung
desperately to the ancient traditions and inheritance of their
forefathers.