CHAPTER V
IT has been customary in writing of the efforts made to conquer Ireland during the reign of Henry II to speak of the country as uncivilized and barbarous. The evidence does not bear this out: conditions there do not seem much different, at least, from what they had been in England a relatively short time before. The Danish invasions had never penetrated far beyond the eastern coast, and the population was divided into two sections: the inhabitants of the cities along the Irish Sea, the Ostmen, as they were called, where living was on much the same scale as in England at the time of the Conquest, and the real Irish who had to themselves the beautiful country of the interior and the west, the Ireland of mountain and lake, of red deer and wild boar, the Ireland of green fields and soft winds. The real Irish people were wild and untamable, but they do not deserve to be described as savage kerns existing in bogs and little better than the beasts they hunted. The historian of the invasion, Giraldus Cambrensis speaks of the people in the most uncomplimentary way and yet allows himself to lapse into references which leave the opposite impression. Nature, he says, “leads each to man’s estate, conspicuous for a tall and handsome form, regular features, and a fresh complexion.” The priests, he found, were scrupulously regular in the performance of their duties and never allowed themselves more than one meal a day (but were less abstemious in the matter of drink); all the people were musical and played on two instruments, the lute and the timbrel. The Irish were a race of minstrels, as the huge mass of their earliest literature attests, the Ulster cycle of romances and the Ossianic songs which continue of interest to the present day. Irish enamels had already set the mold for all Byzantine and European work.
It must be said that the Irish people were so prone to quarrel among themselves that they were broken up into many small kingdoms, as the English had been before the time of Egbert, but they had developed the beginnings of a democracy of their own. The choice of a king was always, in theory at least, in the hands of the people. Certainly they had never allowed themselves to be held in the iron slavery of feudalism as had the people of Normandy, from whom the criticisms come. The Brehon Code contained some enlightened conceptions of law.
Two excuses for the invasion are generally given. There was the slave trade between the two countries which had existed for centuries. It seems to have been one-sided. The Ostmen bought Anglo-Saxons as fast as they could be shipped across the narrow sea, and the victims of the traffic constituted the servant class along the eastern coast of Ireland. Clearly, however, the odium must attach to the sellers, who were prepared to bargain away their natural children and their dependents, in even greater degree than to the buyers. The second excuse was the independent status of the Church in Ireland. Although the people showed then the same devotion they have continued to display throughout the centuries, no effort had been made to organize the Church along the lines followed elsewhere. They had archbishops but no central authority, and they did not pay Peter’s pence to Rome. The bull of Adrian IV, if it had actually been promulgated, was the first tangible evidence of the desire which all pontiffs had shared to see the Irish Church brought into uniformity with the rest of Christianity.
The real reason was that the Norman kings wanted to add Ireland to their possessions. William Rufus would have made the effort if he had lived long enough. Although Morogh O’Brien of Leinster had sent logs of bog oak grown along the Liffey to serve for the roof of the great new hall the Red King was building at Westminster as a gesture of friendship, the latter had boasted he would make a bridge of his ships over which his soldiers could march on their mission of conquest. The motive for the invasion cannot be explained or condoned on any grounds of necessity or expediency. It was the final phase of the roving instinct which had brought the marauding sea dogs to the north of France in the first place.
Perhaps the fact that Irish independence had been maintained in the face of Roman and Danish aggression, while the people of England had succumbed, acted as a challenge to the ironclad warriors who had made themselves the masters of the English. Where the legion of Rome and the galley of the vikings had failed, the Norman might would prevail.
2
A quarrel among Irish rulers was what served to set into execution the plans which had been maturing so long in the mind of Henry. Dermod, son of Morogh, sometimes called McCarty-More, was now King of Leinster. He was a hot-tempered, proud, and savage man, big of frame and loud of voice. He cannot have been entirely bad, however, because Giraldus, who accompanied the first expedition and saw everything with his own eyes, says of him, “He became an oppressor of the nobility and began to tyrannize in a grievous and intolerable manner over the great men of the land.” The fact that many of the common men rallied around him at the most critical stage of his later troubles might suggest that he had done his tyrannizing in the right place. One of the most grievous and least tolerable things he did was to steal Devorgilla, the wife of Tieghernan O’Rourke, King of Breffny and East Meath. As Tieghernan was nicknamed Monoculus or the One-Eyed, it may have been that Devorgilla was so anxious to be stolen that the full blame cannot be laid on the shoulders of the amorous King of Leinster. At any rate, it was fourteen years after the theft before a confederacy was formed with Tieghernan which drove Dermod from Leinster, and so the assertion of Giraldus that it was his wife-stealing which cost him his throne is not an acceptable explanation. The confederacy was headed by Roderick, King of Connaught, and as many of the great men of Leinster did not like being tyrannized over and deprived of their hereditary rights, they joined in with the enemies of their ruler and saw to it that he was forced to quit Ireland.
At this stage Dermod displayed the worst side of his nature. Prepared to sell the liberty of the people of Ireland to avenge himself on his enemies, he went to Aquitaine, where Henry was stationed at the time, and offered to do homage for his kingdom if the English ruler would aid him in regaining his throne. Henry was unable to undertake an expedition then, but he gave a letter to the renegade which read as follows:
Henry, king of England, duke of Normandy and Aquitaine and count of Anjou to all his liegemen, English, Norman, Welsh and Scots, and to all nations subject to his sway, sends greetings. Whensoever these our letters shall come unto you, know ye that we have taken Dermod, prince of the men of Leinster, into the bosom of our grace, and good-will. Wherefore, too, whosoever within the bounds of our dominions shall be willing to lend aid to him, as being our vassal and liegeman, to the recovery of his own, let him know that he hath our favor and permission to that end.
This was not what Dermod had hoped for, but at any rate it opened a way for him. He betook himself to Wales and found there two men who were willing to provide him with assistance. The first was Rhys, Prince of South Wales, a descendant of Princess Nesta, who had been one of the many mistresses of Henry I. She had later married Gerald of Windsor and, as the Norman patronymic had come into general use, her descendants were variously known as Fitz-Henrys and Fitz-Geralds. They were mostly landless men and ready for an adventure in Ireland. The second was Richard de Clare, the Earl of Striguil and nicknamed Strong-bow, who was at Bristol when Dermod came to that city. This Norman nobleman was in worse straits than the Welsh-Norman descendants of Nesta, having a pack of creditors on his trail. He seems to have been curiously different from the typical Norman adventurer, red-haired and with features as fine as a woman’s, a high-pitched voice, and the most courteous of manners. His arms were so long that he could touch his knees while standing upright. Dermod had heard of him as a man of desperate courage and great resource, and he was amazed at their first meeting, believing there had been a mistake. He soon became conscious, however, of the power under the almost effeminate manners of this landless nobleman. Strongbow lent a willing ear to the proposals of the dispossessed Irishman. It was agreed between them that Strongbow would get together a large force of volunteers and that, if the venture proved a success, he was to have Dermod’s eldest daughter Eva as his wife and come into the overlordship of Leinster in due course.
Not waiting for his confederates to join him, Dermod sailed across the Irish Sea at once, accompanied by one young Norman only, Richard Fitz-Godobert, and a few servants. His arrival created a stir, but he was permitted to stay on condition that he send all members of his party back and that he himself take up his residence in the monastery of Ferns. Dermod agreed and went into seclusion for the winter. He was closely watched, for the Norman escort had served as a warning of what was in the wind. Dermod, however, was as circumspect as he had always before been rash and injudicious, and he gave them no excuse for interference.
Early in the following May the first of his buccaneering confederates sailed across the Irish Sea. Robert Fitz-Stephen was in command with one hundred men-at-arms and three hundred Welsh archers, armed with the great longbow which later was to win so many battles for the English. They landed in a creek called Bannow south of Wexford and encamped there on an island. The deposed King promptly appeared with five hundred of his former subjects who had rallied to his banner. The combined forces so surprised the defenders of Wexford with their shining armor and their caparisoned horses that, instead of giving battle in the open as they had intended, the Irish retreated behind the walls of the city. It took two days of continuous assault to storm the walls, and the defenders then gave in, acknowledging Dermod as their lawful lord again. The conquest of Ossory followed in quick order, and this placed Dermod in full possession of his domain of Leinster. He gave lands along the coast between Wexford and Waterford to his Norman allies in conformance with his promises. It looked as though the Irish adventure had been brought to a successful conclusion before the man whose name was later to be associated with it as leader, the deceptively mild Richard de Clare, had stirred from his English base.
In the meantime, however, Ireland was stirring. The return of Dermod, obnoxious enough in itself, had been rendered triply distasteful by the presence of his former allies. Roderick of Connaught, who was recognized as the High King of Ireland, called a conference of national leaders, with the result that a large army was assembled for a drive against the renegade King of Leinster. Before a battle could be fought, however, the politic Roderick reached an agreement with Dermod by which the latter would remain in possession of Leinster and would promise that no more Norman mercenaries were to be allowed in the country. This was not as pusillanimous on the part of Roderick as it may seem, for the Irish had begun to realize it was impossible to face men arrayed in heavy armor, who advanced and wheeled in well-trained columns, with undisciplined levies in the Irish wambais, a quilted linen jacket which offered no real protection. The Irish spear, lacking in temper and weight, was a poor weapon to combat the deadly Norman sword.
It was now impossible, however, to keep the Normans out of the country. No sooner was the treaty signed than another band arrived at Wexford, avid for spoils. It occurred then to Dermod, who never forgot an injury, that the time had come to punish the people of Dublin. They had murdered his father, the kind and just Morogh, and had buried him beside the body of a dog. The new allies were sent to attack Dublin, and the future capital of the country was forced to yield after sustaining heavy losses.
Dermod should have been satisfied at this stage. He had his kingdom back, he had tasted the sweetness of revenge, he had sacked part of the unfriendly city on the Liffey. But that man of ill intent was becoming ambitious. If he could reconquer Leinster with the help of these steel-clad mercenaries, why should not all Ireland be brought under his sway? The fili (an Irish term for poet) came out in him when he sat down and indited a letter to Strongbow. “We have watched the storks and swallows,” he wrote, “and the summer birds have come; come, aye, and flown again before the ocean blast. Neither easter breeze nor zephyr’s breath wafts to us your longed-for presence. Let the prompt fulfillment of your promise cure this malady of delay.”
The admonition was not needed. Strongbow had been getting ready. Early in August he began his march to St. David’s with a picked body of men. Recruits flocked to him and, when he finally embarked at Milford Haven, he had two hundred men-at-arms and a thousand foot soldiers under his banner with its three crosses. With this force, much the largest to engage in the campaign, he landed north of Waterford. The great man had come, forerunner of a greater, as an old prophecy had it, who “would set his heel on Desmond’s neck and bruise the head of Leinster.”
Waterford fell, and then the combined forces of Strongbow and Dermod marched against Dublin again, that city having shown further signs of resistance. The earlier arrivals had given a good account of themselves, but it remained for Richard de Clare to complete the work of aggression. He carried Dublin by storm and expelled the Ostmen. When they gathered their forces off the Isle of Man and came back with a fleet, the last demonstration Ireland was to see of viking strength, Strongbow promptly dispersed it.
The following year Dermod died with no one to mourn him. In the Annals of the Four Masters it is said that this man “who had made a trembling sod of all Ireland became putrid while living, through the miracle of God, Columcille and Finnan and other saints of Ireland, and he died without penance, without unction, as his evil deeds deserved.” The Brehon Code left the choice of a successor in the hands of the people, but this was not the Norman way. Strongbow had married Eva in the meantime and he announced himself the new ruler in her right, although he took the title of earl instead of king.
If Henry had not been so engrossed in his struggle with Thomas à Becket, he would have taken a hand in Ireland long before this because it was clear now that the island was ripe for conquest and permanent occupation. He became alarmed when the news reached him of Strongbow’s seizure of power and he promptly wrote to his ambitious subject, demanding that all knights who had gone to Ireland should return on pain of losing their possessions in England. This threat had no effect on the leader of the invasion who had no lands in England to lose. He answered his monarch’s command as follows:
Most puissant prince and my dread sovereign: I came into this land with Your Majesty’s leave (as far as I remember) to aid your servant MacMorogh. What I won was with the sword. What was given me, I give you.
I am yours, life and living.
This made it clear to Henry that he must act at once if he expected to benefit by the operations in Ireland. The next year he crossed the Irish Sea with a considerable force.
He found on arriving that there was little for him to do. The Ostmen had been driven from the eastern cities, the Irish kings were in a humble mood and prepared to swear allegiance to him as the best way out of their desperate plight, Strongbow had come to heel and had submitted to him. He remained in the country for the winter, making Dublin his headquarters. The city had been badly battered in the incessant fighting, and much of it had been burned. Henry lived in a house of some size but of no pretensions to anything but utility, all on one floor and with a high wattled palisade about it. He dined at a trestle table at which his officers joined him with little regard to rank and title, and he slept on a bed made by stretching a bearskin between four posts.
He had not yet made his penance at the tomb of the Martyr and he was still in doubt, therefore, as to the attitude of Rome. Before leaving England he had renewed his orders that every port must be watched and every man searched before he was allowed to land, so that no papal emissaries could get into the country with bulls of excommunication or interdict. Equal care was being shown along the Irish coast, and no one was permitted to approach the King, particularly priests, until his mission had been ascertained. In the face of all his difficulties, which seemed to be mounting as he grew older, Henry did not change. He was thorough, methodical, farseeing, alive to every need as he had been at the start of his reign, when England was in such dire straits.
He occupied himself while in Ireland with establishing order and setting up an administration along the sound lines of his reforms in England. Officers trained in his ways were put in charge of justice and the raising of taxes. It had been the same everywhere, in sunny Aquitaine, in Anjou, and in Brittany. Always he had proceeded to codify the laws and set the wheels of justice to turning. Always it had been done in the face of bitter opposition from the nobility, who saw their feudal advantages reduced by a system which took the law out of their hands.
He did much to establish what was later known as the Pale, a strip of territory along the eastern coast and centering at Dublin, in which the supremacy of the invaders was acknowledged and English ways of living were introduced. The Pale changed in shape and size in the centuries which followed, sometimes shrinking, sometimes growing, but it remained the core of Anglo-Saxon occupation and the one part of the country where the imprint of the invaders was never wiped out.
3
More than ten years later, after Strongbow had died and various governors had followed him, Henry formally declared his son John King of the country. John, now seventeen years of age, was well loved by Henry, although he was beginning to show the traits which were to make him later the most execrated of all rulers. He had, moreover, been a sorry failure in some military operations in France. Henry was determined that his youngest son was to be a king in his own right, and so to Ireland sailed the smiling, indolent, false John with a considerable force to make good his claim to the full suzerainty of the island. By his side was Ranulf de Glanville, the shrewdest lawyer and administrator in England and the general who captured William the Lion. Henry never allowed his sons out of leading strings. He might make them kings and dukes, but always beside them were long-nosed Normans who knew exactly what Henry himself would want under any circumstances and who had authority to see that things were done his way.
All the skilled officers Henry had trained since the days of the magic chancellorship of Thomas à Becket would have failed to keep John in control. That young man discovered that the Welsh-Normans who had conquered the coast and who were in the main well disposed to the Irish people had become to some degree assimilated. These tall, fair knights had married Irish wives (adopting the native custom of a trial marriage of one year from the Feast of Samhain but liking their mates well enough to put the relationship on a permanent basis) and had settled down on their lands with no more desire for destruction or conquest. This was all the excuse the amiable John needed to shove them aside for the men he had brought with him. They were Normans fresh from France, as rapacious as the adventurers who had followed the Conqueror into England, looking for spoils and ransoms. They started the trouble all over again, burning, slaying, making little distinction between the native Irish and the men of Strongbow.
John himself behaved like a malicious schoolboy, pulling the long beards of the Irish kings and chiefs when they bent the knee to him in submission. He allowed his men to commit the final offense, which was to break open churches and to despoil them of their sacred vessels.
Glanville could do nothing in the face of the bloody and yet farcical turmoil which John created about him. He seems to have given up in despair. Anything he accomplished would, in any event, have been swept aside in the fury of resentment which brought all Ireland raging about the Pale.
It had been arranged that John would be crowned on Christmas Day of the following year. The Pope, who seems to have remained blind to what was going on, sent a crown of gold in the form of peacock feathers to be used at the coronation. Neither could His Holiness have had any realization of the peculiar fitness of such a crown for the vain and arrogant youth on whose brow it was to rest.
But the crowning never took place. John had not lived up to Merlin’s prediction of him, “Born of the fell fire-king, a sparklet prince shall dart his bolt of icy fear to Erin’s quaking heart.” There was no trace of icy fear in the kings of Limerick, Connaught, and Meath when they met his forces at Tegas and scored a decisive victory over them. In the chronicle of Benedict it is said that most of the prince’s troops had deserted and gone over to the natives. At any rate, John found himself in a most precarious position and decided that personal safety was better than a coronation. He sailed back to England.
After this reverse Henry gave up his efforts to reduce Ireland. The Pale remained the only part of the country where English rule was maintained.