Henry the second 18

Henry the second 18

News of all these things travelled fast to the king in Normandy. The

excommunicated bishops, falling at his feet, told him of the evil done

against his peace; rumour, growing as it crossed the sea, said that the

archbishop had travelled through the country with a mighty army of paid

soldiers, and had sought to enter into the king's fortresses, and that

he was ready to "tear the crown from the young king's head." Henry,

"more angry than was fitting to the royal majesty," was swept beyond

himself by one of his mad storms of passion. "What a pack of fools and

cowards," he shouted aloud in his wrath, "I have nourished in my house,

that not one of them will avenge me of this one upstart clerk!" A

council was at once summoned. Thomas, the king said, had entered as a

tyrant into his land, had excommunicated the bishops for obedience to

the king, had troubled the whole realm, had purposed to take away the

royal crown from his son, had begged for a legation against Henry, and

had obtained from the Pope grants of presentations to churches, which

deprived knights and barons as well as the king himself of their

property. The council fell in with the king's mood. Thomas was worthy of

death. The king would have neither quiet days nor a peaceful kingdom

while he lived. "On my way to Jerusalem," said one sage adviser, "I

passed through Rome, and asking questions of my host, I learned that a

pope had once been slain for his intolerable pride!"

 

But while the king was still busied in devising schemes for the punishment

or ruin of Thomas, came news that he was rid of his enemy, and that the

archbishop had won the long looked-for crown of martyrdom. Four knights

who had heard the king's first outburst of rage had secretly left the

Court, and travelling day and night, had reached Canterbury on the 29th,

and had there in the cathedral slain the archbishop. Henry was at Argentan

when the news of the murder was brought to him. So overwhelming was his

despair that those about him feared for his reason. For three days he

neither ate nor spoke with any one, and for five weeks his door was closed

to all comers. The whole flood of difficulties against which he had so

long fought desperately was at once let loose upon him. In England the

feeling was indescribable. All the religious fervour of the people was

passionately thrown on the side of the martyr. The church of Canterbury

closed for a year. The ornaments were taken from the altar, the walls were

stripped, the sound of the bells ceased. Excitement was raised to its

utmost pitch as it became known that miracles were wrought at the tomb.

The clergy were forced into hostility; they dared no longer take Henry's

side. The barons saw the opportunity for which they had waited fifteen

years. Henry had himself provided them with a ready instrument to execute

their vengeance, and the boy-king, consecrated scarcely six months ago,

and already urged to revolt by his mother and the king of France, was

only too willing to hear the tale of their accumulated wrongs and

discontents. All Christendom had been watching the strife; all Christendom

was outraged at its close. The Pope shut himself up for eight days, and

refused to speak to his own servants. The king of France,--who had now a

cause more powerful than any he had ever dreamt of,--Theobald of Blois,

and William of Champagne, the Archbishop of Sens, wrote bitterly to Rome

that it was Henry himself who had given orders for the murder. The king's

messengers sent to plead with the Pope found matters almost desperate.

Alexander had determined to excommunicate him at Easter, and to lay an

interdiction on all his lands. In their despair, and not venturing to tell

their master what they had done, they swore on Henry's part an unreserved

submission to the Pope, and the excommunication was barely averted for a

few months, while a legation was sent to pronounce an interdiction on his

lands, and receive his submission. Henry, however, was quite determined

that he would neither hear the sentence nor repeat the oath taken by his

envoys at Rome. Orders were given to allow no traveller, who might intend

evil against the king, to cross into England; and before the legates could

arrive in Normandy Henry himself was safe beyond the sea. On the 6th of

August, as he passed through Winchester, he visited the dying Henry of

Blois, and heard the bishop's last words of bitter reproach as he

foretold the great adversities which the Divine vengeance held in store

for the true murderer of the archbishop. But England itself was no safe

refuge for the king in this great extremity. Hurrying on to Wales, he

rapidly settled the last details of a plan for the conquest of Ireland,

and hastened to set another sea between himself and the bearers of the

papal curse. As he landed on Irish shores on the 16th of October, a

white hare started from the bushes at his feet, and was brought to him

as a token of victory and peace. Here at last he was in safety, beyond

the reach of all dispute, in a secure banishment where he could more

easily avoid the interdict or more secretly bow to it. The wild storms

of winter, which his terrified followers counted as a sign of the wrath

of God, served as an effectual barrier between him and his enemies; and

for twenty weeks no ship touched Irish shores, nor did any news reach

him from any part of his dominions.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER VIII

 

 

THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND

 

Nearly a hundred years before William Rufus once stood on the cliffs of

Wales, and cried, as he looked across the waters towards Ireland, "For

the conquest of that land I will gather together all the ships of my

kingdom, and will make of them a bridge to cross over." The story was

carried to a king of Leinster, who listened thoughtfully. "After so

tremendous a threat as that," he asked, "did the king add, if the Lord

will?" Being told that Rufus used no such phrase, "Since he trusts to do

this by human power, not divine," said the shrewd Irishman, "I need not

greatly dread his coming." Prophecies which passed from mouth to mouth

in Ireland declared that the island should not be conquered till very

shortly before the great Day of Judgment. Even in England men commented

on the fact that while the Romans had reached as far as the Orkneys,

while Saxons and Normans and Danes had overrun England, Ireland had

never bowed to foreign rule. The Northmen alone had made any attempt at

invasion; but within the fringe of foreign settlements which they

planted along the coast from Dublin to Limerick, the various Irish

kingdoms maintained themselves according to their ancient customs, and,

as English tribes had done before in Britain, waged frequent war for the

honour of a shifting and dubious supremacy. The island enjoyed a fair

fame for its climate, its healthfulness, its pasturage, its fisheries;

English chroniclers dwelt on "the far-famed harbour of Dublin, the rival

of our London in commerce," and told of ships of merchandise that sailed

from Britanny to Irish ports, and of the busy wine trade with Poitou.

Ireland alone broke the symmetry of an empire that bordered the Atlantic

from the Hebrides to Spain, and the fame of empire had its attractions

for the heirs of the Norman conquerors. Patriotic and courtly historians

remembered that their king was representative of Gerguntius, the first

king of Britain who had gone to Ireland; the heir of Arthur, to whom

Irish kings had been tributary; the ruler over the Basque provinces,

from whence undoubtedly the Irish race had sprung. To fill up what was

lacking in these titles, he was proclaimed lord and ruler by a yet

clearer divine right, when in 1155 John of Salisbury brought to him from

Rome a bull, by which the English Pope, Hadrian IV., as supreme lord of

all islands, granted Ireland to the English king, that he might bring

the people under law, and enlarge the borders of the Church.

 

From the beginning, indeed, there rested on the unhappy country a curse

which has remained to the present moment. The invasion of the Ostmen was

the first of a series of half-conquests which brought all the evils of

foreign invasion with none of its benefits. In England the great rivers

and the Roman roads had been so many highways by which the Scandinavians

had penetrated into the heart of the country. But in Ireland no road and

no great river had guided the invader onwards past morass and bog and

forest. While the great host of the Danish invaders swooped down over

England and Gaul, the pirates that sailed to Ireland had only force to

dash themselves on the coast, and there cling cautiously to guarded

settlements. They settled as a race apart, as unable to mix with the

Irish people as they were powerless to conquer them. No memory as in

England of a common origin united them, no ties of a common language, no

sense of common law or custom, or of a common political tradition. The

strangers built the first cities, coined the first money, and introduced

trade. But they were powerless to affect Irish civilization. The tribal

system survived in its full strength, and Ireland remained divided

between two races, two languages, two civilizations in different stages

of progress, two separate communities ruled by their own laws, and two

half-completed ecclesiastical systems, for the Danish Church long looked,

as the Irish had never done, to the Archbishop of Canterbury as their

head. Earnest attempts had already been made by Hadrian's predecessor to

bring the Irish into closer connection with the see of Rome. In 1152 a

papal legate had carried out a great reform by which four archbishops,

wholly independent of Canterbury and receiving their palls from Rome, were

set over four provinces. But still no Peter's Pence were paid to Rome;

Roman canon law, Roman ritual, the Roman rules of marriage, had no

authority; the Roman form of baptism was replaced by a tradition which

made the father dip his new-born child three times in water, or, if he

were a rich man, in milk; there was no payment of tithes; clerks were

taxed like laymen when a homicide occurred; Irish nobles still demanded

hospitality from religious houses, and claimed, according to ancient

custom, provisions from towns on Church domains. Hadrian himself had long

been interested in Irish affairs. The religious houses which the Irish

maintained in Germany kept up communication with Pope and Emperor; an

Irish abbot at Nuremberg was chaplain to the Emperor Frederick; one of

Hadrian's masters at Paris had been a monk from the Irish settlement in

Ratisbon, and as Pope he still remembered the Irish monk with warm

affection. When he was raised to the Papacy in the very year of Henry's

coronation, one of his first cares was to complete the organization of

Christendom in the West by bringing the Irish Church under Catholic

discipline.

 

Henry, on his part, was only too eager to accept his new responsibility,

and less than a year after his coronation he called a council to discuss

the conquest of Ireland. The scheme was abandoned on account of its

difficulties, but the question was later raised again in another form.

Diarmait Mac Murchadha (in modern form Jeremiah Murphy), King of

Leinster, had carried off in 1152 the wife of the chief of Breifne

(Cavan and Leitrim). A confederation was formed against him under

Ruaidhri (or Rory), King of Connaught, and he was driven from the island

in 1166. "Following a flying fortune and hoping much from the turning of

the wheel," he fled to Henry in Aquitaine, did homage to the English

king for his lands, and received in return letters granting permission

to such of Henry's servants as were willing to aid him in their recovery.

Diarmait easily found allies in the nobles of the Welsh border, in whose

veins ran the blood of two warlike races. It was by just such an

enterprise as this that their Norman fathers and grandfathers had won

their Welsh domains. From childhood they had been brought up in the tumult

of perpetual forays, and trained in a warfare where agility and dash and

endurance of hunger and hardship were the first qualifications of a

soldier. Richard de Clare, Earl of Striguil, in later days nicknamed

Strongbow--a descendant of one of the Conqueror's greatest warriors,

but now a needy adventurer sorely harassed by his creditors--was easily won by the promise of Diarmait's daughter and heiress, Aeifi, as his wife. Rhys, the Prince of South Wales, looked favourably on the expedition.