Soon after his accession, Adrian received, among other letters of
congratulation, one from Henry II. king of England, who had succeeded
to his crown at the same time as the pope. This letter was as
follows:--
"A sweet breath of air hath breathed in our ears, inasmuch as we learn
that the news of your elevation hath scattered like a refulgent
aurora, the darkness of the desolation of the Church. The Apostolic
See rejoiceth in having obtained such a consolation of her widowhood.
All the churches rejoice at beholding the new light arise, and hope to
behold it expand to broad day. But in particular our west rejoiceth
that a new light hath arisen to illuminate the globe of the earth; and
that, by divine favour, the west hath restored that sun of
Christianity which towards the east was set. Wherefore, most holy
Father, we, sharing in the general jubilee at your honors, and
celebrating with devout praise the bounties of the divine Majesty,
will lay open to you our desires, confiding as we do, with filial
devotion, in your paternal goodness. For, if the carnal son exposeth
to his father, in confidence, his carnal desires, how much more should
not the spiritual son do so with regard to his spiritual one?
Assuredly, among other desires of our heart, we do not a little
desire, that, as the Almighty's right arm hath chosen your most
reverend person to be spiritually planted, like a tree of life in the
midst of paradise, and to be transplanted from this land of ours, into
his orchard, you will chiefly take care to reform, by your conduct and
doctrine, all the churches, that all generations may call your land
blessed through your beatitude. This, too, we thirst for with a
sincere heart, that the spirit of tempests, which is wont to rage
furiously about the pinnacle of honor, may never wrest you from the
concern of your sanctification; lest, by reason of any deficiency in
you, the deepest abyss of disgrace should succeed to the highest
summit of dignity. And this we ardently long for, that, as the
regulation of the Church universal belongs to you, you will take care
to create such cardinals, free of reproach, as shall know how to
appreciate your burthen, and be willing and competent to aid you in
supporting it; not regarding ties of country, quality of birth, or
extent of power; but that they love God, hate avarice, thirst after
justice, and burn with the zeal of souls. Nor are we slightly affected
by the desire that, as the unworthiness of ministers is detrimental
above all things to the Church, you will vigilantly watch, whenever
your Providence shall happen to be petitioned, touching the collation
of benefices, lest any unworthy person intrude into the Patrimony of
the Crucified. And seeing that the Holy Land,--blest by the origin of
our redemption,--consecrated by the life and death of Christ,--a land
which Christian devotion holds in particular respect,--is distracted
by incursions of the infidels, and polluted by their abominations, we
wish from our very soul that you would provide men, of your own devout
solicitude, in its defence. And, in regard of that empire of
Constantinople,--once so illustrious, now so wofully desolate,--what
Christian man ought not to desire that, by your care and prudence, it
may receive timely consolation? For the rest, we confide and hope in
the Lord, that, as you have not failed, while rising from virtue to
virtue, and from honor to honor, to shine according to the exigence of
each of them, so you will not fail, now that you are called to the
apogee of apostolical elevation, to illustrate and inflame the subject
Church, in such a manner, as shall permit no one to hide himself from
your light and heat; and that, after your death, you will leave behind
such vestiges of sanctity, that your native land,--which congratulates
itself on your happy beginning,--will find much more glory in the
Lord, in your happier end. Finally, we request of your Paternity, with
full confidence, that you will be pleased to remember us, our family,
and kingdom, especially in your prayers and vows." [1]
A few months after the receipt of this letter,
Adrian was visited by his renowned countryman, John of
Salisbury,--afterwards bishop of Chartres,--who arrived in a diplomatic
capacity, from king Henry, to procure the papal sanction to a projected
conquest of Ireland, by England.
The motives to this ambitious scheme,--which William the Conqueror,
and Henry I., had also entertained,--were alleged to be the
civilisation of the Irish people, and the reformation of the Irish
Church; both of which were represented as given over to barbaric
anarchy, and the most crying abuses. And, indeed, such was the real
state of civil and religious affairs in that country in the 12th
century,--as will be shown lower down,--that the motives in question,
derived the greatest weight from the circumstance, and induced the
pope to give the sanction requested. This he did in the following
brief:
"Adrian, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to his most dear son
in Christ, the illustrious king of the English, health and apostolical
benediction.
"Thy Magnificence thinketh, praiseworthily and fruitfully, touching
the propagation of thy glorious name over the earth, and the laying up
a reward of eternal felicity in heaven, when, like a Catholic prince,
thou dost project the extension of the boundaries of the Church, the
proclamation of the Christian faith to ignorant and rude people, and
the extirpation of the weeds of vice from the Lord's vineyard; and
when, to the better execution hereof, thou dost request the advice and
favour of the Apostolic See. In which matter, we feel confident that,
as thou shalt proceed with higher counsel, and greater discretion, so
thou wilt make, under the Lord's favour, the happier progress, seeing
that those things usually reach a good issue, which have sprung out of
an ardour for the faith and love of religion. Certainly, there can be
no doubt that Ireland, as well as all the isles, which Christ the Sun
of justice hath illuminated, and which have borne testimony to the
Christian Faith, are subject to St. Peter, and the most Holy Roman
Church. On which account, we are all the more ready to plant therein,
the plantation of the Faith, and the seed which is grateful to God, as
we discover on close examination it is required of us. Forasmuch,
then, as thou hast signified to us, most clear son in Christ, that
thou art wishful to enter the island of Ireland, to subdue that people
under the laws, and to root out of it the weeds of vice, and art
wishful to pay to St. Peter, a pension of one penny a-year for each
house, and to preserve intact the rights of the Church in that
country; we, regarding favourably, and vouchsafing to thy petition our
gracious assent, hold it to be a grateful and acceptable thing, that
thou shouldst enter that island, to extend the boundaries of the
Church; to stem the torrent of crime; to correct morals; to introduce
virtue; to augment the Christian religion; and to execute what thy
mind may have found good for God's honor, and the country's
prosperity. And let the people thereof receive thee honorably, and
respect thee as their Lord; the rights of the Church remaining intact,
and saving the pension to St. Peter and the most Holy Roman Church of
one penny a-year for each house. And, shouldst thou be so fortunate as
to accomplish what thou hast planned, strive to improve the Irish
nation, by good morals; and act in such a manner by thyself, as well
as by those whom thou shalt employ, and whom thou shalt first have
proved to be trustworthy by reason of their fidelity, their opinions
and conduct, that the Church may be adorned, the Christian faith
extended, and everything that belongs to the honor of God, and
salvation of souls, so ordered by thee in Ireland, as to qualify thee
to deserve an eternal reward in heaven, and a glorious name on earth
through all ages." [2]
This famous brief, by which Henry II. of England held himself divinely
authorized to conquer Ireland, is strongly disapproved of by many
writers, especially by Irish ones; who will not alloy it the least
excuse, but overwhelm it with abusive censure. And yet the plain truth
is, Adrian meant it, as he worded it, for Ireland's good.
However false the grant of Constantine the Great,--on which the claim
set up for St, Peter's dominion over the islands is founded,--may have
been proved in later times to be; yet it is certain that both the
grant and claim in question were in the 11th, and 12th centuries
firmly believed in by all orthodox christians, just as much so as that
the Pope was literally our Saviour's vicar on earth, before whose
powers every other had to bow. That the king of England was secretly
guided by worldly motives, while ostensibly professing religious ones,
was his concern and not the pope's: whose business was to weigh the
merits of the case, not by reasons imputed, but by those propounded;
which, if he found them, from the religious point of view of his
times, sound, he was justified in accepting.
Now, there is the best evidence in cotemporary writings, especially in
those of Giraldus and St. Bernard, that Ireland was, as above said,
given up in the 12th century, to the worst demoralization in Church
and State, that a country, not wholly pagan or savage, could be.
Giraldus, who travelled in Ireland in the suite of King John, and
attentively observed its condition, expresses in his work [3] written
on the subject, his surprise that a nation, in which the Christian
faith had been planted so far back as the days of St. Patrick, and had
gone on increasing more or less ever since, should yet in his age be
so ignorant in the very rudiments of religion. "A nation" as he
proceeds to describe it, "filthy in the extreme, buried in vice, and
of all nations the most ignorant of the rudiments of the faith." In
support of this severe censure, he accuses the Irish of "despising
matrimony, of being addicted to incest, of refusing to pay tithes, and
of totally neglecting attendance at Church." In another place he
writes, that the people in many districts continued still to be
pagans, through the indifference of the clergy. St. Bernard draws a
picture not less darkly shaded. In his life of St. Malachy, [4]
adverting to the state of the Irish church on the promotion of that
saint to the episcopacy, he describes how the new bishop soon found
out that he had to do with "brutes and not with men; how that nowhere
he had met with such barbarism of every sort; nowhere found a race so
perverse in their morals, so savagely opposed to religious rites, so
impious towards the faith, so headstrong against discipline, so
barbarous towards the laws, so filthy in their habits of life; a
people, Christians in name, but heathens in practice, who paid no
tithes, who contracted no lawful marriages, who never confessed their
sins, who had hardly any one among them to ask or give a penance, in
whose churches neither the voice of the preacher nor the chorus of the
chanters was ever heard."
The political was in complete harmony with the religious state of the
country. Parcelled out among petty kings and chiefs, who seemed only
to subsist by devouring each other, and, in the crush and tumult of
their feuds, stood so thick on the ground, as hardly to have elbow
room, the whole island presented one untiring round of treacheries,
massacres, conflagrations and plunderings, wholesale and retail, such
as is without example elsewhere in history, with no other hope, so
long as left to itself, of anything but an aggravation of the evil--if
that were possible. That Adrian, with such a state of things before
his eyes, should readily give his sanction to a project which, however
liable to be clogged by human imperfection, could not at any rate make
things worse, but haply might make them better, was surely a
proceeding quite consistent with the character of a wise and zealous
pope; of a pope too, who lived and thought when the crusades were at
their height, and who may, therefore, be very well supposed to have
viewed the condition of Ireland,--once the island of saints, but now
the scene of worse than pagan abominations,--as not less calculated
for the efforts of holy chivalry, than Palestine.
If then it can appear that Adrian might have acted, in his brief to
Henry, just as well out of motives of religious duty, as out of those
of court policy, it is a perverse thing to award him the latter rather
than the former; because to do so is to make him not less absurdly
than wickedly inconsistent with his previous and subsequent
career:--which was marked by one unswerving purpose to defend the Church
against the encroachments of secular power, to maintain her doctrines
intact, and to extend her boundaries to the utmost. Besides, it should
not be forgotten, that his brief was confirmed by his illustrious
successor, Alexander III., who thus gave his testimony to the
uprightness of intention which originated it, as well as to its proper
adaptation in the spirit of that age, to the emergency which elicited
it; an emergency which, from the terms used by Alexander in conveying
his confirmation, would seem by no means to have diminished, but
rather to have increased in the mean time. In short, it is nothing
better than a logical solecism, to wish to maintain that two such
popes as Adrian IV. and Alexander III., educated in the school of the
sublime Hildebrand, and ranking among the very foremost of his
disciples, by the intelligent and dauntless manner in which they
withstood the storm of imperial usurpation, which threatened to
shatter the Church under their pontificates, should deviate from their
glorious career, to belie their principles,--the one, by granting out
of national prejudice and court sycophancy a license of spoliation to
a king of England,--and the other, by confirming it out of reasons
just as unworthy.
As it was, Providence did not see fit to allow the views either of
Adrian or Henry, to be carried out as originally intended. For the
expedition of the king against Ireland, was put off, on account of
various obstacles, for fourteen years, during which term, the papal
brief was consigned to the royal archives, and there forgotten. Nor
was it till six years after the actual invasion of Ireland by
Strongbow, that its existence was remembered by Henry; who, anxious to
consolidate his new conquest, had the authority of Adrian's brief
renewed, by procuring another in confirmation of it from Alexander,
and then caused both documents to be read up before the Irish bishops,
assembled in synod at Waterford; by whom his sovereignty had already,
without any reference to papal commands, been acknowledged.
That the English sway turned out so unjust and disastrous to Ireland,
reflects no blame on Adrian, than whom no one would have more deplored
the evil, and striven against its true causes, than he. Rather ought
he, from the spirit of his brief,--the only fair test to apply to
him,--to be regarded as the head of that small, unfortunately so very
small, band of Englishmen, who have ever meant well to the sister
isle; and who, to speak the sober truth, if their views might prevail,
would alone be likely to promote her true prosperity, by shielding her
not only against her outward, but her inward foes; to which
latter,--consisting in those elements of social discord so profusely, so
deeply rooted, as it would seem, in the nature of her people,---she owes
by far the worst portion of her calamities. No doubt Pope Adrian, a man
of the most shrewd practical intellect, and from the circumstances of
his life, of the deepest experience in human nature, saw clearly
enough then,--what continues to be seen so clearly by men of his stamp
now,--that Ireland could never truly prosper, so long as left to her
own management, by reason of the incurable defect mentioned above; and
that, therefore, to sanction her sisterly, not her slavish connection,
with a nation like the English, so eminent for those very qualities of
order and self maintenance, in which she is so wanting, would be a
work of as great charity in itself, as of mutual advantage to the
parties concerned. For the rest, it should not be forgotten, that,
however much the English occupation of Ireland may, through a series
of causes, not to be foreseen in Adrian's time, have turned out a
curse; yet the occupation in question had the immediate effect of
producing the reform of those religious abuses, which constituted the
worst misfortunes of the country, and which, till Henry had actually
arrived thither, continued in all their hideous deformity. This happy
result took place, under the auspices of Henry, at the synod of
Cashel, summoned by him at the beginning of the year 1172, and
attended by all the heads of the Irish clergy.
Besides the brief in question, Adrian gave to John of Salisbury, as
the latter relates in the last chapter of his Metalogicus, a gold ring
set with a fine emerald, for the king his master, in token of
investment with the Lordship of Ireland; which important jewel, whose
rare virtues, John of Salisbury adds, were he to describe, would
require a volume to enumerate, was also deposited in the royal
archives.
Not only Henry II. of England, but Louis VII. of France, a year or two
later, solicited Adrian's approbation of a scheme of foreign conquest,
which, in this case was intended to be carried out in Spain, where the
French monarch pretended he wanted to serve the Church, by expelling
the Saracens. But the pope treated the application of Louis, very
differently to that of Henry. For in his brief of reply [5] after
awarding all praise to the religious zeal alleged by the French king
as his motive, he points out the flagrant wrong which Louis would
commit in gratuitously interfering in the affairs of an independent
nation like Spain,--the consent of whose princes could alone justify
such a step: so that until such consent should be obtained, he,
Adrian, could do nothing else than totally condemn and warn, him
against his project.
Adrian's conduct in this instance, was not less consistent than in the
other. For as over Ireland in its character of an island, he believed
himself to possess, through the supposed testament of Constantine,
certain rights, and thought proper to exercise them; so over Spain,
being ignorant of any such rights, he arrogated none, but acted as
became him on the general principles of Christian justice.
[1] Baronius, Annus, 1154
[2] Baronius, Annus 1159; rectified by Pagi to 1155.
[3] Topograp. Hiber. Distinc. tertia cap. 14.
[4] De vita Malachiae Episcopi, cap. viii.
[5] Bouquet's Receuil, &c. t. 15. P. 690.