Dublin (75 page)

  Ailred the Palmer had got back his son. That had been a wonderful thing to see. Though he had not succeeded in making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, as his father had done, he had returned as the partner of Doyle the Bristol merchant and thereby ensured himself a position of some wealth in the port of Dublin. He was nowadays living in a house on the Fish Shambles. But most remarkable of all had been his marriage, not long after his return, to Una MacGowan. It seemed that he had taken her in deference to the wishes of his father, and more particularly his mother. And as a happy result of this union, when Una's father had returned, a sick man, with his family that summer, his new son-in-law had been able to install him in his own house once again, since it was now in the ownership of Doyle the merchant. Though he did not know them intimately, Gilpatrick was happy for the family, and especially for Una, whom he had once rescued from a worse fate. But if this turn of events had reminded him that God was always watching over the lives of men, the parchment in his hands now seemed to show-if it were not sacrilege even to suppose it-that the eyes of God must be resting elsewhere.

  The documents in question were letters from the Pope in Rome.

  One was addressed to the archbishop and his fellow bishops; the second was addressed to the kings and princes of Ireland. The third was a copy of a letter to King Henry of England.

  The shortest was to the Irish princes. It commended them for submitting to "Our most dear son in Christ, Henry." This was how the Pope referred to the man who caused the murder of Becket! He told them that Henry had come to reform the Church in Ireland. And he warned them to be humbly and meekly obedient to the English king, or risk the papal wrath. To the bishops, he commended Henry as a Christian ruler who would rid the Church in Ireland of its terrible vice and corruption, and urged them to enforce obedience "with ecclesiastical censure."

  "Does he mean we should excommunicate any of our chiefs who don't obey him, do you think?"

  O'Toole asked in wonder. "The Holy Father also seems to think," he added crossly, "that every prince in Ireland has come into King Henry's house, which they haven't."

  But it was actually worse than that. For as he had read the letters, Gilpatrick had noticed something else. It was the terminology. For the Pope had used exactly the terms of feudal obedience and obligation that he would have used to French or English barons. And remembering his conversation with the intelligent Brendan O'Byrne, he realised how difficult it would be to explain all these differences to the archbishop.

  "The Holy Father does not understand Irish conditions," he said sadly.

  "He most certainly does not," O'Toole burst out. "Look at this," he pointed to a phrase in the first letter, "and this!" He jabbed his finger at the second. "As for this…" He picked up the third letter, then threw it down on the table in disgust.

  There was no question, the letters were not only inappropriate, they were downright insulting. The Irish, according to the Pope, were an "ignorant and undisciplined" race, wallowing in "monstrous and filthy vice." They were "barbarous, uncultured, ignorant of the divine law." You might have thought that the seven hundred years since the coming of Saint Patrick, the great monastic schools, the Irish missionaries, the Book of Kells, and all the other glories of Irish Christian art had never existed. And the Holy Father was quite content, it seemed, to address the Irish bishops and princes and say it to their faces.

  "What can he mean? What can he be thinking of?" the saintly archbishop demanded.

  But Gilpatrick already knew. He saw it very clearly. The answer lay in the third letter, the letter to King Henry.

  Congratulations. There was no other word for it. The pontiff sent the English king congratulations for this wonderful extension of his power over the stubborn Irish, who had rejected the practice of the Christian faith. Furthermore, to obtain complete forgiveness for his sins-these, no doubt, would chiefly be his complicity in killing the Archbishop of Canterbury-the king has only to keep up the good work. So Henry had got everything he wanted: not only a pardon, it seemed, for killing Becket but a blessing for his crusade against the Irish. "It might," O'Toole complained, "have been written by the English Pope."

  And how had Henry done it? The text of the letter made it plain. The Pope had heard, he explained, of the disgraceful state of morals on the western island from an unimpeachable source: namely, the very churchman whom King Henry had sent him! And were not his words confirmed by the very report which they, the Irish churchmen, had sent him? He enumerated some of the abuses: improper marriages, failure to pay tithes, all the very things which the Council of Cashel had taken good care to address. Yet the Pope made no mention of the Cashel council. He was evidently quite unaware that it had taken place and of the reforms enacted there; just as he seemed also to be ignorant of all the fine work already done by Lawrence O'Toole and others like him.

  And now at last Gilpatrick saw the cunning of the Plantagenet king. He had tricked the Irish churchmen into issuing that damning report, then run to Rome with it as proof of the state of things in Ireland. He'd suppressed all word of the council. The officials in Rome, who only knew a little of Ireland anyway, had found Pope Adrian's earlier letter. And the trick was completed. The English king's foray into Ireland to sort out Strongbow was now a papal crusade.

  "And we gave him the pretext. We condemned ourselves by our own hand," Gilpatrick murmured.

  It was devious. It was a betrayal. It was a brilliant lesson in politics from a master at the game.

IV

  On Saint Patricks Day in the year of Our Lord 1192, an important ceremony took place at Dublin. Led by the city's archbishop, a procession of ecclesiastical dignitaries emerged from Christ Church Cathedral and made its way out through the city's southern gate. Among them was Father Gilpatrick. Two hundred yards away down the road was the Well of Saint Patrick beside which, for a long time, there had been a tiny church. But today, on its site, there now stood a large though still uncompleted structure. Indeed, its size and its handsome proportions suggested that it might almost be intended to rival the great cathedral of Christ Church itself. Nor was it to be only a church; for the foundations of the accompanying school could already be seen.

  One thing might have struck the onlookers as incongruous about the procession to this fine new foundation dedicated to Ireland's patron saint. The Archbishop of Dublin who led it was named John Cumin: and he was resolutely English.

  Indeed, everything about the new Saint Patrick's was to be English. It was being built in the new Gothic style, now in fashion in England and France.

  Unlike the important Irish foundations, which were monastic, the new college of Saint Patrick was to be a collegiate church for priests, not monks-in the latest English fashion. Most of the priests were English, not Irish. And it could hardly have escaped anyone's notice that this new English headquarters of the English bishop was situated outside the city wall and several hundred yards distant from the old Christ Church, where the monks still remembered the saintly Archbishop O'Toole with reverence and affection.

  The wet March breeze caught Father Gilpatrick in the face. He should, he supposed, have felt grateful. It was, after all, a compliment that the English archbishop should have chosen him, an Irishman, to be one of the new canons. "You are held in high regard by everyone," Cumin had told him frankly. "I know you will use your influence wisely." Given the circumstances as they were nowadays, Gilpatrick had no doubt that it was his duty to accept. But as he glanced across at the site of his family's old monastery on the rise to his left, and as he thought of the man he had asked, most reluctantly, to meet him as soon as the consecration was over, he could only think: thank God at least that my poor father is no longer alive to see this.

  His father's last years had not been happy. After the visit of King Henry, the old man had seen his world gradually being butchered, like a body losing limbs, one at a time. The final blow for him had been when a new Church council had declared that all the hereditary priests like himself should be thrown out of their positions and dispossessed. Archbishop O'Toole had utterly refused to let such a thing happen to him, but the heart had gone out of the old man after that. The end had come only half a year after the death of Lawrence O'Toole himself. His father had gone for a walk down to the old Thingmount. And there, by the tomb of his ancestor Fergus, he had suffered a single, massive seizure and fallen dead on the spot.

  It was a fitting end, Gilpatrick thought, for the last of the Ui Fergusa.

  For his father had turned out to be the last chief. He himself, as a celibate priest, had no heirs. And his brother Lorcan, whether by chance or as divine punishment for marrying his brother's widow, had been granted daughters but no son. In the male line, therefore, the family of the chiefs who had guarded Ath Cliath since before Saint Patrick came was about to die out.

  There was one final indignity, however, which had been reserved for this day. It was a mercy, indeed, that his father was not there to see what he must do after the consecration.

  The service was well done, you couldn't deny it. And afterwards they were all very friendly to him, complimentary indeed.

  But it gave him no pleasure. He had no illusions. The Church was still predominantly Irish, so they needed a man like him as a go-between.

  For the time being. Until the English were in the majority. The present archbishop was not a bad man, in his way. He'd encountered other churchmen like him during his time in England. An administrator, a servant of the king: intelligent, but cold. How he longed, sometimes, for the less worldly spirit of O'Toole. When the business was over, he went outside and looked around. After a moment or two, he saw the lordly figure approaching, and inwardly he cringed.

  It was all his brother's fault.

  For a brief time, after King Henry had completed his visit to the island, it had seemed that the two parties occupying the land might live in an uneasy peace.

  The Plantagenet monarch and the O'Connor High King had even made a new treaty dividing the island between them, rather as it had been divided into the two halves of Leth Cuinn and Leth Moga, north and south, in times before. All over the English-occupied territory, the Norman motte and bailey castles started to appear. Big wooden palisades enclosed a high earthwork mound crowned with a timber keep. These stout little working forts certainly dominated the estates, the new manors that Strongbow and his followers had set up. But had it stopped at that?

  Of course not. The Irish were unhappy; the settlers were greedy for still more land. Before long the truce had broken down and the lords of the borderland manors were raiding into the High King's domain, stealing territory. Ironically, during this process, Strong- bow, who had been the cause of it all, had died. But that had made no difference.

  The land grabbing had developed a momentum of its own. One aristocratic adventurer named de Courcy had even raced into Ulster and seized a little kingdom for himself up there.

  These events in the borderlands had not much affected Gilpatrick's family in the relative quiet of Dublin; but a new development was to have profound consequences for his brother. For in the year 1185, Ireland had received a second royal visit; not from Henry, this time, but from his youngest son.

  Prince John had none of the glamour of his elder brother, Richard the Lionheart. All his life he seemed to make enemies. He was clever but tactless; he did everything by fits and starts.

  Arriving in Ireland and meeting Irish chiefs whose dress and flowing beards he thought funny, the young man mocked them to their faces and cheerfully insulted them. But behind this arrogance and vulgarity lay another, darker calculation. Prince John cared nothing for the feelings of the Irish: he had come to impose order, and with him he brought ruthless henchmen with names like de Burgh, and the family of administrators known as the Butlers, who were very good at imposing order indeed.

  For occupied Ireland was to be administered on English lines: ancient tribal territories were to be administered as baronies; town- lands, like the English hundreds, were to be set up. The seats of modest chieftains would become the fortified manors of English armed knights.

  English courts, English taxes, English customs, even English counties were planned. There were also the further contingents of knights, many of them friends of the prince, who must be given Irish estates.

  And if that meant kicking a few more of the Irish off their land, Prince John couldn't have cared less.

  Amongst those who had suffered had been Ailred the Palmer. One day he had suddenly been informed that his holdings to the west of the city, which supported the hospital, had been given to two Englishmen of Prince John's acquaintance; and although both his son, Harold, and the grandson of Doyle were by now important men in Dublin, not even their influence had been able to prevent it. But within months, the kindly Palmer and his wife, instead of giving way to anger, had persuaded both the men who had obtained his land to grant most of it back to the hospital, which received a formal blessing from the Pope himself soon afterwards. "So you see," his wife sweetly declared,

  "in the end everything turned out for the best."