henry the second 20

henry the second 20

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.