from other invasions and conquests, not the least singular feature about
it being that nearly the whole of that famous band of knightly
adventurers who took part in it, and to whose audacity it was in the
first instance due, were more or less closely related to one another,
either as brothers, nephews, uncles, or cousins. The connecting link
between these variously-named relations was one Nesta, princess of South
Wales, daughter of a Welsh king, Rice ap Tudor, a heroine whose
adventures are of a sufficiently striking, not to say startling,
character. By dint of a succession of alliances, some regular, others
highly irregular, she became the ancestress of nearly all the great
Anglo-Norman families in Ireland. Of these the Fitzgeralds, Carews,
Barrys, and Cogans, are descended from her first husband, Gerald of
Windsor. Robert FitzStephen, who plays, as will presently be seen, a
prominent part in the conquest, was the son of her second husband,
Stephen, the Castlelan of Abertivy, while Robert and Meiler FitzHenry,
of whom we shall also hear, are said to have been the sons of no less a
person than King Henry I. of England.
[Illustration: WEST FRONT OF ST. CRONAN'S CHURCH, ROSCREA. (_From a
Photograph_.)]
Conspicuous amongst this band of knights and adventurers was one who was
himself no knight, but a priest and the self-appointed chronicler of the
rest, Gerald de Barri--better known as Gerald of Wales, or Giraldus
Cambrensis, who was the grandson of Nesta, through her daughter
Angareta.
Giraldus is one of those writers whom, to tell the truth, we like a
great deal better than they deserve. He is prejudiced to the point of
perversity, and gullible almost to sublimity, uncritical even for an
eminently uncritical age, accepting and retailing any and every
monstrous invention, the more readily apparently in proportion to its
monstrosity. For all that--despite his prejudices, despite even his
often deliberate perversion of the truth, it is difficult to avoid a
certain kindliness for him. To the literary student he is indeed a
captivating figure. With his half-Welsh, half-Norman blood; with the
nimble, excitable, distinctly Celtic vein constantly discernible in him;
with a love of fighting which could hardly have been exceeded by the
doughtiest of the knights, his cousins and brothers; with a pen that
seems to fly like an arrow across the page; with a conceit which knows
neither stint nor limit, he is the most entertaining, the most vividly
alive of chroniclers; no historian certainly in any rigid sense of the
word, but the first, as he was also unquestionably the chief and prince
of war correspondents.
Whether we like him or not, we at any rate cannot dispense with him,
seeing that nearly everything we know of the Ireland of the Conquest, we
know from those marvellous pages of his, which, if often exasperating,
are at any rate never dull. In them, as in a mirror, we see how, when,
and where the whole plan of the campaign was laid; who took part in it;
what they said, did, projected; their very motives and thoughts--the
whole thing stands out fresh and alive as if it had happened yesterday.
There were no lack of motives, any of which would have been temptation
enough for invasion. To the pious it took on the alluring guise of a
Crusade. The Irish Church, which had obtained such glowing fame in its
early days, had long since, as we have seen, grown into very bad repute
with Rome. Despite that halo of early sanctity, she was held to be
seriously tainted with heresy. She allowed bishops to be irregularly
multiplied, and consecrated contrary to the Roman rule by one bishop
only; tithes and firstfruits were not collected with any regularity;
above all, the collection of Peter's pence, being the sum of one penny
due from every household, was always scandalously in arrears, nay, often
no attempt was made to collect it at all. She did many wrong things, but
it may shrewdly be suspected that this was one of the very worst
of them.
[Illustration: WEST DOORWAY OF FRESHFORD CHURCH, CO. KILKENNY. _(From a
Photograph.)_]
It is not a little edifying at this juncture to find the Danes of Dublin
amongst those who were enlisted upon the orthodox side. Cut off by
mutual hatred rather than theological differences from the Church of
Ireland, they had for some time back been regularly applying to
Canterbury for their supply of priests. These priests upon being sent
over painted the condition of Irish heterodoxy in tints of the deepest
black for their own countrymen. Even before this there had been grave
complaints. Lanfranc, Anselm, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, all had had
their theological ire aroused against the Irish recusants. Many of the
Irish ecclesiastics themselves seem to have desired that closer union
with Rome, which could only be brought about by bringing Ireland under
the power of a sworn son of the Church. Henry I--little as that most
secular-minded of monarchs cared probably for the more purely
theological question--was fully alive to its value as supporting his own
claims. He obtained from Pope Hadrian IV. (the Englishman Brakespeare),
a Bull sanctioning and approving of the conquest of Ireland as prompted
by "the ardour of faith and love of religion," in which Bull he is
desired to enter the island and therein execute "whatever shall pertain
to the honour of God, and the welfare of the land."
Fourteen years elapsed before the enterprise thus warmly commended was
carried into effect. The story of Dermot McMurrough, king of Leinster,
and his part in the invasion, has often been told, and does not, I
think, need dwelling upon at any great length. He was a brutal,
violent-tempered savage, detested in his own country, and especially by
his unfortunate subjects in Leinster. How he foully wronged the honour
of O'Rorke, a chieftain of Connaught; how, for this and other offences,
he was upon the accession of Roderick O'Connor driven away from Ireland;
how he fled to England to do homage to Henry, and seek his protection;
how, finding him gone to Aquitaine, he followed him there, and in return
for his vows of allegiance received letters authorizing the king's
subjects to enlist if they choose for the Irish service; how armed with
these he went to Wales, and there succeeded in recruiting a band of
mixed Norman and Norman-Welsh adventurers--all this is recorded at large
in the histories.
Of the recruits thus enlisted, the most important was Robert de Clair,
Earl of Pembroke and Chepstow, nicknamed by his contemporaries,
Strongbow, whom Dermot met at Bristol, and won over by a double
bribe--the hand, namely, of his daughter Eva, and the succession to the
sovereignty of Leinster--a succession which, upon the Irish mode of
election, he had, it may be observed, no shadow of right to dispose of.
Giraldus, who seems to have been himself in Wales at the time, speaks
sentimentally of the unfortunate exile, and describes him inhaling the
scent of his beloved country from the Welsh coast, and feasting his eyes
tenderly upon his own land: "Although the distance," he more prosaically
adds, "being very great, it was difficult to distinguish mountains from
clouds." As a matter of fact, Dermot McMurrough, we may be sure, was not
the person to do anything of the sort. He was simply hungry--as a wild
beast or a savage is hungry--for revenge, and would have plunged into
any number of perjuries, or have bound himself to give away any amount
of property he had no right to dispose of in order to get it. He could
safely trust, too, he knew, to the ignorance of his new allies as to
what was or was not a legal transfer in Ireland.
His purpose achieved, "inflamed," says Giraldus, "with the desire to see
his native land," but really the better to concoct his plans, he
returned home, landing a little south of Arklow Head, and arriving at
Ferns, where he was hospitably entertained during the winter by its
bishop. The following spring, in the month of May, the first instalment
of the invaders arrived under Robert FitzStephen, a small fleet of Welsh
boats landing them in a creek of the bay of Bannow, where a chasm
between the rocks was long known as "FitzStephen's stride."
Here they were met by Donald McMurrough, son of Dermot, and ten days
later drew up under the walls of Wexford, having so far encountered no
opposition.
In this old Danish town a stout fight was made. The townsfolk, no longer
Vikings but simple traders, did what they could in their own defence.
They burnt their suburbs, consisting doubtless of rude wooden huts; shut
the gates, and upon the first two assaults drove back the assailants. So
violently were they repelled, "that they withdrew," Giraldus tells us,
"in all great haste from the walls." His own younger brother, Robert de
Barri, was amongst the wounded, a great stone falling upon his helmet
and tumbling him headlong into one of the ditches, from the effects of
which blow, that careful historian informs us incidentally, "Sixteen
years later all his jaw teeth fell out!"
Next morning, after mass, they renewed the assault; this time with more
circumspection. Now there were at that time, as it happened, two bishops
in the town, who devoted their energies to endeavouring to induce the
citizens to make peace. In this attempt they were successful, more
successful than might have been expected with men descended from the old
Land Leapers. Wexford opened its gates, its townsmen submitting to
Dermot, who thereupon presented the town to his allies, FitzStephen,
true to his Norman instincts, proceeding forthwith to build a castle
upon the rock of Carneg, at the narrowest point of the river Slaney, the
first of that large crop of castles which subsequently sprang up upon
Irish soil.
The next sharers of the struggle were the wild Ossory clans, who
gathered to the defence of their territory under Donough McPatrick, an
old and especially hated enemy of Dermot's. The latter had now three
thousand men at his back, in addition to his Welsh and Norman allies.
The Ossory men fought, as Giraldus admits, with furious valour, but upon
rashly venturing out of their own forests into the open, were charged by
FitzStephen, whose horsemen defeated them, killing a great number, over
two hundred heads being collected and laid at the feet of Dermot, who,
"turning them over, one by one, to recognize them, lifted his hands to
heaven in excess of joy, and with a loud voice returned thanks to God
most High." So pious was Dermot!
After this, finding that the country at large was beginning to take some
note of their proceedings, the invaders fell back upon Ferns, which they
fortified according to the science of the age under the superintendence
of Robert FitzStephen. Roderick O'Connor, the Ard-Reagh, was by this
time not unnaturally beginning to get alarmed, and had gathered his men
together against the invaders. The winter, however, was now at hand, and
a temporary peace was accordingly patched up; Leinster being restored to
Dermot on condition of his acknowledging the over-lordship of Roderick.
Giraldus recounts at much length the speeches made upon both sides on
this occasion; the martial addresses to the troops, the many classical
and flowery quotations, which last he is good enough to bestow upon the
unlucky Roderick no less than upon his own allies. Seeing, probably,
that all were alike imaginary, it is hardly necessary to delay to
record them.
The next to arrive upon the scene was Maurice Fitzgerald, half brother
of Robert FitzStephen and uncle of Giraldus. Strongbow meanwhile was
still upon the eastern side of the channel awaiting the return of his
uncle, Hervey de Montmorency, whom he had sent over to report upon the
condition of affairs. Even after Hervey's return bringing with him a
favourable report, he had still the king's permission to gain. Early in
1170 he again sought Henry and this time received an ambiguous reply,
which, however, he chose to interpret in his own favour. He sent back
Hervey to Ireland, accompanied by Raymond Fitzgerald, surnamed Le Gros,
and a score of knights with some seventy archers. These, landing in
Kilkenny, entrenched themselves, and being shortly afterwards attacked
by the Danes of Waterford, defeated them with great slaughter, seizing a
number of prisoners. Over these prisoners a dispute arose; Raymond was
for sparing their lives, Hervey de Montmorency for slaying. The
eloquence of the latter prevailed. "The citizens," says Giraldus, "as
men condemned, had their limbs broken and were cast headlong into the
sea and so drowned."
Shortly after this satisfactory beginning, Strongbow himself appeared
with reinforcements. He attacked Waterford, which was taken after a
short but furious resistance, and the united forces of Dermot and the
Earl marched into the town, where the marriage of the latter with Eva,
Dermot's daughter, was celebrated, as Maclise has represented it in his
picture, amid lowering smoke and heaps of the dead and dying.
Dermot was now on the top of the wave. With his English allies and his
own followers he had a considerable force around him. Guiding the latter
through the Wicklow mountains, which they would probably have hardly got
through unaided, he descended with them upon Dublin, and despite the
efforts of St. Lawrence O'Toole, its archbishop, to effect a pacific
arrangement, the town was taken by assault. The principal Danes, with
Hasculph, their Danish governor, escaped to their ships and sailed
hastily away for the Orkneys.
Meath was the next point to be attacked. O'Rorke, the old foe of Dermot,
who held it for King Roderick, was defeated; whereupon, in defiance of
his previous promises, Dermot threw off all disguise and proclaimed
himself king of Ireland, upon which Roderick, as the only retaliation
left in his power, slew Dermot's son who had been deposited in his hands
as hostage.
It was now Strongbow's aim to hasten back and place his new lordship at
the feet of his sovereign, already angry and jealous at such unlocked
for and uncountenanced successes. He was not able however to do so at
once. Hasculph the Dane returned suddenly with sixty ships, and a large
force under a noted Berserker of the day, known as John the Mad,
"warriors," says Giraldus, "armed in Danish fashion, having long
breast-plates and shirts of mail, their shields round and bound about
with iron. They were iron-hearted," he says, "as well as
iron-armed men."
In spite of their arms and their hearts, he is able triumphantly to
proclaim their defeat. Milo de Cogan, the Norman governor of Dublin,
fell upon his assailants suddenly. John the Mad was slain, as were also
nearly all the Berserkers. Hasculph was brought back in triumph, and
promptly beheaded by the conquerors.
He was hardly dead before a new assailant, Godred, king of Man, appeared
with thirty ships at the mouth of the Liffy. Roderick, in the meanwhile,
had collected men from every part of Ireland, with the exception of the
north which stood aloof from him, and now laid siege to Dublin by land,
helped by St. Lawrence its patriotic archbishop. Strongbow was thus shut
in with foes behind and before, and the like disaster had befallen
Robert FitzStephen, who was at this time closely besieged in his own new
castle at Wexford. Dermot their chief native ally had recently died.
There seemed for a while a reasonable chance that the invaders would be
driven back and pushed bodily into the sea.
Discipline and science however again prevailed. The besieged, excited
both by their own danger and that of their friends in the south, made a
desperate sally. The Irish army kept no watch, and was absolutely
undrilled. A panic set in. The besiegers fled, leaving behind them their
stores of provisions, and the conquerors thereupon marched away in
triumph to the relief of FitzStephen. Here they were less successful. By
force, or according to Giraldus, by a pretended tale of the destruction
of all the other invaders, the Wexford men seized possession of him and
the other English, and had them flung into a dungeon. Finding that
Strongbow and the rest were not destroyed, but that on the contrary they
were marching down on them, the Wexford men set fire to their own town
and departed to an island in the harbour, carrying their prisoner with
them and threatening if pursued to cut off his head.
Foiled in this attempt, Strongbow hastened to Waterford, took boat
there, and flew to meet the king, whom he encountered near Gloucester
with a large army. Henry's greeting was a wrathful one. His anger and
jealousy had been thoroughly aroused. Not unwarrantably. But for his
promptness his head-strong subjects--several of them it must be
remembered of his own dominant blood--would have been perfectly capable
of attempting to carve out a kingdom for themselves at his very gates.
Happily Strongbow had found the task too large for his unaided energies,
and, as we have seen, had barely escaped annihilation. He was ready,
therefore, to accept any terms which his sovereign chose to impose. His
submission appears to have disarmed the king. He allowed himself to be
pacified, and after a while they returned to Ireland together. Henry II.
landed at Waterford in the month of October, 1171.
[Illustration: SOUTH WINDOW OF ST. CAIMIN'S CHURCH, INISMAIN.]
XI.
HENRY II. IN IRELAND.
This was practically the end of the struggle. The king had four thousand
men-at-arms at his back, of whom no less than four hundred were knights.
In addition his ships contained vast stores of provisions, a variety of
war devices never before seen in Ireland, artizans for building bridges
and making roads--a whole war train, in short. Such a display of force
was felt to be irresistible. The chieftains one after the other came in
and made their submission. Dermot McCarthy, lord of Desmond and Cork,
was the first to do homage, followed by Donald O'Brien, Prince of
Thomond; while another Donald, chieftain of Ossory, rapidly followed
suit. The men of Wexford appeared, leading their prisoner with them by a
chain, and presenting him as an offering to his master, who, first
rating him soundly for his unauthorized proceedings, ordered him to be
chained to another prisoner and shut up in Reginald's tower. Later,
soothed by his own triumph, or touched, as Giraldus tells us, with
compassion for a brave man, he, at the intercession of some of his
courtiers, forgave and restored him to his possessions, reserving,
however, the town of Wexford for himself.
From Wexford Henry marched to Dublin, having first visited Tipperary and
Waterford. The Danes at once submitted and swore allegiance; so also did
O'Carrol of Argial, O'Rorke of Brefny, and all the minor chieftains of
Leinster; Roderick O'Connor still stood at bay behind the Shannon, and
the north also remained aloof and hostile, but air the other chieftains,
great and small, professed themselves willing to become tributaries of
the king of England.
The idea of an Ard-Reagh, or Over-lord, was no new one, as we have seen,
to any of them. Theoretically they had always acknowledged one,
although, practically, he had rarely exercised any authority save over
his own immediate subjects. Their feeling about Henry was doubtless the
same. They were as willing to swear fealty to him as to Roderick
O'Connor, more so in fact, seeing that he was stronger than Roderick,
but that was all. To Henry and to his successors this recognition
carried with it all the complicated dependence of feudalism, which in
England meant that his land and everything else which a man possessed
was his only so long as he did service for it to the king. To these new
Irish subjects, who had never heard of feudalism, it entailed nothing of
the sort. They regarded it as a mere vague promise of adhesion, binding
them at most to a general muster or "hosting" under his arms in case of
war or some common peril. This was an initial misconception, which
continued, as will be seen, to be a deeper and deeper source of
confusion as the years went on.
In the meanwhile Henry was established in Dublin, where he kept
Christmas in high state, occupying a palace built in the native fashion
of painted wicker-work, set up just outside the walls. Here he
entertained the chiefs, who were naturally astonished at the splendour
of his entertainments. "They learnt," Giraldus observes with
satisfaction, "to eat cranes"--does this mean herons?--"a species of
food which they had previously loathed;" and, in general, were suitably
impressed with the greatness and glory of the conqueror. The bishops
were most of them already warmly in his favour, and at a synod shortly
afterwards held at Cashel, at which all the Irish clergy were
represented, the Church of Ireland was solemnly declared to be finally
united to that of England, and it was laid down that, "as by Divine
Providence Ireland has received her lord and king from England, so she
should also submit to a reformation from the same source."
The weather that winter was so rough that hardly a ship could cross the
channel, and Henry in his new kingdom found himself practically cut off
from his old one. About the middle of Lent, the wind veering at last to
the east, ships arrived from England and Aquitaine, bearers of very ill
news to the king. Two legates were on their way, sent by the Pope, to
inquire into the murder of Becket, and armed in case of an
unsatisfactory reply with all the terrors of an interdict. Henry hastily
made over the government of Ireland to Hugo de Lacy, whom he placed in
Dublin as his representative, and sailed from Wexford upon Easter
Monday. He never again revisited his new dominions, where many of the
lessons inculcated by him--including possibly the delights of eating
cranes--were destined before long to be forgotten.
XII.
EFFECTS OF THE ANGLO-NORMAN INVASION.
Henry had been only six months in Ireland, but he had accomplished
much--more certainly than any other English ruler ever accomplished
afterwards within the same time. He had divided the ceded districts into
counties; had appointed sheriffs for them; had set up three Law
Courts--Bench, Pleas, and Exchequer; had arranged for the going on
circuit by judges; and had established his own character for orthodoxy,
and acquitted himself of his obligations to the papacy by freeing all
church property from the exactions of the chiefs, and rigidly enforcing
the payment of tithes.
In a still more important point--that about which he was evidently
himself most tenacious--his success was even more complete. He once for
all put a stop to all danger of an independent lordship by forcing those
who had already received grants of land from the native chiefs to
surrender them into his hands, and to receive them back direct from
himself, according to the ordinary terms of feudal tenure.
That he had larger and more statesmanlike views for the new dependency
than he was ever able to carry out there can be no question. As early as
1177 he appointed his youngest son John king of Ireland, and seems to
have fully formed the intention of sending him over as a permanent
governor or viceroy, a purpose which the misconduct of that youthful
Rehoboam, as Giraldus calls him, was chiefly instrumental in foiling.
It is curious to hear this question of a royal viceroy and a permanent
royal residence in Ireland coming to the front so very early in the
history of English rule there. That the experiment, if fairly tried, and
tried with a man of the calibre of Henry himself, might have made the
whole difference in the future of Ireland, we cannot, I think,
reasonably doubt. Any government, indeed, so that it was central, so
that it gathered itself into a single hand and took its impress from a
single mind, would have been better a thousand times than the miserable
condition of half-conquest, half-rule, whole anarchy and confusion which
set in and continued with hardly a break.
This is one reason more why it is so much to be regretted that Ireland,
save for a few years, had never any real king or central government of
her own. Had this been the case, even if she had been eventually
conquered by England--as would likely enough have been the case--the
result of that conquest would have been different. There would have been
some one recognized point of government and organization, and the
struggle would have been more violent and probably more successful at
first, but less chronic and less eternally renewed in the long run. As
it was, all the conditions were at their very worst. No native ruler of
the calibre of a Brian Boru could ever again hope to unite all Ireland
under him, since long before he arrived at that point his enemies would
have called in the aid of the new colonists, who would have fallen upon
and annihilated him, though after doing so they would have been as
little able to govern the country for themselves as before.