Henry the Second - Mrs. J. R. Green
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.
CHAPTER IX
REVOLT OF THE BARONAGE
All hope of progress, of any wise and statesmanlike settlement of
Ireland, utterly died away when, on Easter night, 16th April 1172, Henry
sailed from Wexford. The next morning he landed near St. David's. He
entered its gates as a pilgrim, on foot and staff in hand, while the
monks came out in solemn procession to lead him to the ancient church on
the other side of the river. Suddenly a Welsh woman sprang out from
among the crowd, and striking her hands together wildly, threw
herself at his feet crying with a loud voice, "Avenge us to-day,
Lechlavar! Avenge the people of this land!" The woman's bitter cry told
the first thought of all the thronging multitudes of eager Welshmen that
day, how Merlin had prophesied that an English king, the conqueror of
Ireland, should die on Lechlavar, a great stone which formed a rude
natural bridge across the stream, and round which the pagan superstitions
of an immemorial past still clung. When the strange procession reached the
river, Henry stood for a moment looking steadily at the stone, then with a
courage which we can scarcely measure, he firmly set his foot on it and
slowly crossed over; and from the other side, in the face of all the
people he turned and flung his taunt at the prophet, "Who will ever again
believe the lies of Merlin?" As he passed through Cardiff another omen met
him; a white-robed monk stood before him as he came out of church. "God
hold thee, Cuning!" he cried in the English tongue, and broke out into
passionate warnings of evil to come unless the king would show more
reverence to the Sunday, a matter about which there was at this time a
great stirring of religious feeling. "Ask this rustic," said Henry in
French to a knight who held his rein, "whether he has dreamed this." The
monk turned from the interpreter to the king and spoke again: "Whether I
have dreamed this or no, mark this day, for unless thou amendest thy life,
before this year has passed thou shalt hear such news of those thou lovest
best, and shalt win such sorrow from them, that it shall not fail thee
till thy dying day!"
From Wales Henry struck across England, "turning neither to right nor
left, and marching at a double pace." In a few days he was at Portsmouth.
To hinder further mischief the younger Henry was ordered to join him and
carried over sea; and the first news that reached Louis was the king's
arrival in Normandy. "The King of England," Louis cried in his amazement,
"is now in Ireland, now in England, now in Normandy; he may rather be said
to fly than go by horse or boat!" Henry hastened on his landing to meet
the legates. Negotiations were opened in May. Submission was inevitable,
for fear of the rebellion which was then actually brewing left him in fact
no choice of action. He agreed unreservedly to their demands. As an
earnest of repentance and reformation he consented to a new coronation of
his son; and on the 27th of August the young king was crowned again, along
with his wife, at Winchester. Henry completed his submission at Avranches
on the 27th of September. He swore that he had not desired the death of
Thomas, but to make satisfaction for the anger he had shown, he promised
to take the cross, to give funds to the Knights Templars for the defence
of Jerusalem, and to found three religious houses. He renounced the
Constitutions of Clarendon. He swore allegiance to Alexander against the
anti-Pope. He promised that the possessions of Canterbury should be
given back as they were a year before the flight of Thomas, and that his
exiled friends should be restored to their possessions. No king of
England had ever suffered so deep a humiliation. It seemed as thought he
martyr were at last victorious. A year after the murder, in December
1172, Canterbury cathedral was once more solemnly opened, amid the cries
of a vast multitude of people, "Avenge, O Lord, the blood which has been
poured out!" On the anniversary of the Christmas Day when Thomas had
launched his last excommunications, the excited people noted "a great
thunder sudden and horrible in Ireland, in England, and in all the
kingdoms of the French." Very soon mighty miracles were wrought by the
name of the martyr throughout the whole of Europe. The metal phials
which hung from the necks of pilgrims to the shrine of Canterbury became
as famous as the shell and palm branch which marked the pilgrims to
Compostella and Jerusalem. Before ten years were passed the King of
France, the Count of Nevers, the Count of Boulogne, the Viscount of
Aosta, the Archbishop of Reims, had knelt at his shrine among English
prelates, nobles, knights, and beggars. The feast of the Trinity which
Thomas had appointed to be observed on the anniversary of his consecration
spread through the whole of Christendom. Henry, in fact, had to bear the
full storm of scorn and hatred that falls on every statesman who stands in
advance of the public opinion of his day. But his seeming surrender at
Avranches won for the politic king immediate and decisive advantages. All
fear of excommunication and interdict had passed away. The clergy were no
longer alienated from him. The ecclesiastical difficulties raised by the
coronation, and the jealousies of Louis, were set at rest. The alliance
of the Pope was secured. The conquest of Ireland was formally approved.
Success seemed to crown Henry's scheme for the building up of his empire.
Britanny had been secured for Geoffrey in 1171; in June 1172 Richard was
enthroned as Duke of Aquitaine; in the following August Henry was crowned
for the second time King of England. Only the youngest child, scarcely
five years old, was still "John Lackland," and in this same year Henry
provided a dominion for John by a treaty of marriage between him and the
heiress of the Count of Maurienne. Her inheritance stretched from the Lake
of Geneva almost to the Gulf of Genoa; and the marriage would carry the
Angevin dominions almost from the Atlantic to the Alps, and give into
Henry's control every pass into Italy from the Great St. Bernard to the
Col di Tenda, and all the highways by which travellers from Geneva and
German lands beyond it, from Burgundy or from Gaul, made their way to Rome.
To celebrate such a treaty Henry forgot his thrift. The two kings of
England travelled with ostentatious splendour to meet the Count of
Maurienne in Auvergne in January 1173. The King of Aragon and the Count of
Toulouse met them at Montferrand, and a peace which Henry concluded
between Toulouse and Aragon declared the height of his influence. Raymond
bent at last to do homage for Toulouse, an act of submission which brought
the dominion of Anjou to the very border of the Mediterranean.
There was a wild outbreak of alarm among all Henry's enemies as from his
late humiliation he suddenly rose to this new height of power. The young
king listened eagerly to those who plotted mischief, and one night in
mid-Lent he fled to the court of Louis. In an agony of apprehension
Henry sought to close the breach, and sent messages of conciliation to
the French king. "Who sends this message to me?" demanded Louis. "The
King of England," answered the messengers. "It is false," he said;
"behold the King of England is here, and he sends no message to me by
you; but if you so call his father who once was king, know ye that he
asking is dead." The Counts of Flanders, of Boulogne, and of Blois,
joined the young king in Paris, and did homage to him for fiefs which he
bestowed on them--Kent, Dover, Eochester, lands in Lincolnshire, and
domains and castles in Normandy--while he won the aid of the Scot king
by granting him all Northumberland to the Tyne. The rebellion was
organized in a month. Eleanor sent Richard, commander of the forces of
Aquitaine, and Geoffrey, lord of Britanny, to take their share in the
revolt; she herself was hastening after them when she was seized and
thrown into prison. In Aquitaine, where the people impartially hated
both French and Normans, the enthusiasm for independence was stirred by
songs such as those of the troubadour, Bertrand de Born, lord of a
fortress and a thousand men, who "was never content, save when the kings
of the North were at war." In Normandy old hatreds had deepened year by
year as Henry had gone on steadily seizing castles and lands which had
fallen out of the possession of the crown. In 1171 he had doubled the
revenue of the duchy by lands which the nobles had usurped. In 1172 he
had alarmed them by having a new return made of the feudal tenures for
purposes of taxation. The great lords of the duchy with one consent
declared against him. Britanny sprang to arms. If Maine and Anjou
remained fairly quiet, there was in both of them a powerful party of
nobles who joined the revolt. The rebel party was everywhere increased
by all who had joined the young king, "not because they thought his the
juster cause," but in fierce defiance of a rule intolerable for its
justice and its severity. England was no less ready for rebellion. The
popular imagination was still moved by the horror of the archbishop's
murder. The generation that remembered the miseries of the former
anarchy was now passing away, and to some of the feudal lords order
doubtless seemed the greater ill. The new king too had lavished promises
and threats to win the English nobles to his side. "There were few
barons in England who were not wavering in their allegiance to the king,
and ready to desert him at any time." The more reckless eagerly joined
the rebellion; the more prudent took refuge in France, that they might
watch how events would go; there was a timid and unstable party who held
outwardly to the king in vigilant uncertainty, haunted by fears that
they should be swept away by the possible victory of his son. Such
descendants of the Normans of the Conquest as had survived the rebellions
and confiscations of a hundred years were eager for revenge. The Earl of
Leicester and his wife were heirs of three great families, whose power had
been overthrown by the policy of the Conqueror and his sons. William of
Aumale was descended from the Count who had claimed the throne in the
Conqueror's days, and bitterly remembered the time before Henry's
accession, when he had reigned almost as king in Northern England.
Hugh of Puiset, Bishop of Durham, whose diocese stretched across
Northumberland, and who ruled as Earl Palatine of the marchland between
England and Scotland; the Earl of Huntingdon, brother of the Scot king;
Roger Mowbray, lord of the castles of Thirsk and Malessart north of York,
and of a strong castle in the Isle of Axholm; Earl Ferrers, master of
fortresses in Derby and Stafford; Hugh, Earl of Chester and Lord of Bayeux
and Avranches, joined the rebellion. So did the old Hugh Bigod, Earl of
Norfolk, who had already fought and schemed against Henry in vain twenty
years before. The Earls of Clare and Gloucester on the Welsh border were
of very doubtful loyalty. Half of England was in revolt, and north
of a line drawn from Huntingdon to Chester the king only held a few
castles--York, Richmond, Carlisle, Newcastle, and some fortresses of
Northumberland. The land beyond Sherwood and the Trent, shut off by an
almost continuous barrier of marsh and forest from the south, was still
far behind the rest of England in civilization. The new industrial
activity of Yorkshire was not yet forty years old; in a great part of
the North money-rents had scarcely crept in, and the serfs were still
toiling on under the burden of labour-dues which had been found
intolerable elsewhere. The fines, the taxes, the attempt to bring its
people under a more advanced system of government must have pressed very
hardly on this great district which was not yet ready for it; and to the
fierce anger of the barons, and the ready hostility of the monasteries,
was perhaps added the exasperation of freeholder and serf.