The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (12 page)

At last he was master of the Irish territories he had won by marriage and by force of arms. But Strongbow remained a vassal – and his overlord was far from pleased with the pace of events. For Henry II, observing from mainland Europe, the unfolding story in Ireland was both good and bad news. It suited his purposes well enough to have the problematic Strongbow removed for a while from Wales, to face whatever fate awaited him across the Irish Sea; and it was equally important to have a bridgehead secured in Ireland. He was less than content, however, with the playing out of subsequent events; and especially displeased at the news that Strongbow had assumed, on the death of his father-in-law MacMurrough, the title of King of Leinster. Such a title was all very well in Ireland, where kings remained numerous: the concept in Europe, however, was beginning to cohere and become very restricted; this was not a club that just anyone could join. That a vassal of the Crown might himself set up as a monarch was anathema to Henry: there must be one pivot only in his realm, one centre of power; and Strongbow’s activities merely served to underscore the fragility of the king’s own authority.

Strongbow was no mere uppity provincial: he was a potential rival to Henry. And he was, like his liege lord himself, a descendant of William of Normandy: Henry needed no history lessons to remind him of what might happen should an alternative focus of power build up on the margins of one’s land, should a rival seize the opportunity to invade and occupy. William had given a master-class on this very subject at Hastings in 1066; and while Henry owed his throne to his great-grandfather’s daring, he would not permit Strongbow the same opportunity. Instead, the Anglo-Norman adventurers in Ireland would be kept firmly in line, lest the country develop into a safe haven for his rivals and enemies. This is the beginning of a theme that would become dominant as the centuries passed: Ireland would be persistently represented as a base, a springboard, a back door. Successive English governments in particular would imagine Ireland as a temptation to enemies eager to destabilize from afar, to invade from the rear, to overthrow the English state from a position of safety and proximity. But for Henry at this time, these fears were related to his whole power base, not merely to England.

It was against such a fraught geopolitical backdrop that the king now resolved to assert his rule and authority in Ireland. He had already begun to do so, in fact, issuing a series of decrees that signalled his engagement in Irish affairs and announced his determination to clip Strongbow’s wings: all Anglo-Norman ships in Ireland, for example, had been ordered to return to their home ports or risk the confiscation of their cargoes. Strongbow had responded by sending messages professing fealty to the king, and emphasizing that all that had been gained in Ireland was ultimately the possession of the Crown. Such a display of public grovelling was most welcome – but Henry knew well enough that they were merely fine words. He remained intent on coming to Ireland himself: and in advance of his journey he ordered Strongbow to a meeting in Pembrokeshire, where he might lay down the law once and for all.

In the event, there could be no mistaking the nature of the power relationship between the king and Strongbow. Had the latter ever contemplated the idea of an independent kingdom in Ireland, Henry’s show of strength would have put paid to such a fancy. Giraldus portrays a meeting that shifts gradually in tone from apoplectic rage to benevolent amiability. The nature of the feudal relationship between the two men was underscored: Strong-bow once more offered the king his public loyalty; and Henry recognized Leinster as his servant’s possession by right. But he would not go further than this; Strongbow’s most recent acquisitions in Meath were not mentioned, nor were the vital seaports of Dublin, Wexford and Waterford. And, on 16 October 1171, an imposing fleet sailed from Milford Haven, carrying some thousands of soldiers together with a force of archers and a good deal of sealing wax – the uses of which would soon become apparent. This fleet landed near Waterford the following day, and the city was formally surrendered to Henry.

This was another significant milestone in the history of the Anglo-Norman presence in Ireland, although later Irish annalists strove to suggest it was no such thing: the
Annals of Inisfallen
, for example, declines even to mention Henry’s name, instead implying that he was in some way still tied to the apron strings of his mother, Matilda: ‘The son of the Empress,’ it sniffs, ‘came to Ireland and landed at Port Láirge.’ But the Anglo-Norman barons, newly enriched with Irish lands, could be under no such illusion. They gathered at Waterford to greet the monarch – whose first act in response was an assertion of his own authority over his vassals. This was the beginning of the Crown’s formal presence in Ireland. Henry asserted the Plantagenet possession of Dublin, Wexford and Waterford and their immediate hinterlands; and Strongbow was confirmed in his authority over Leinster. These were the first edicts the monarch issued in Ireland, but there would be a good many more during his stay, the royal seal stamped in wax on all of them. He was in Ireland, in other words, not to shed blood but to legislate and to order the country’s affairs in his own interests.

It was not only these new Anglo-Norman landowners who came to submit to Henry – the native Irish were also eager to pay homage. Dermot McCarthy, king of the territory of Desmond in the southwest, was the first to arrive, and he was soon followed by others. Giraldus records these events with faithful loyalty:

[King Dermot of Cork] was drawn forthwith into a firm allegiance by the bond of submission, an oath of fealty and the giving of hostages; an annual tribute was imposed on his kingdom; of his own free will he submitted himself to the King of England. The king moved his army from [Waterford] and went first to Lismore, where he stayed for two days, and from there continued to Cashel. There, on the next day, Donal, King of Limerick, met him by the river Suir. He obtained the privilege of the king’s peace, tribute was assessed on his kingdom…and he too displayed his loyalty to the king by entering into the very strongest bonds of submission.
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As the royal progress moved towards Dublin, so a succession of Irish rulers – including Tiernan O’Rourke, much weakened by the upheavals of recent years – came to pay homage to Henry and submit to his rule. This rapid and apparently unproblematic submission may seem striking, but the Irish elite of the twelfth century had no particular philosophical problem with the concept of a foreign king – especially if he might well rein in the power of freelancing Anglo-Norman adventurers. The Irish rulers would also have hoped that Henry would depart as quickly as he had arrived: it would be a good deal more agreeable to be a vassal to a distant, absent king than to a neighbour always on the hunt for additional taxes and tribute – a neighbour such as Rory O’Connor, for example, who delayed his own submission to Henry and who remained the nominal high king. There was a good deal more to be gained from being loyal servants of Henry than from offering futile resistance to him.

Moreover, the size of the army that Henry had brought to Ireland – the largest force that had ever been seen on the island to that point – also played its part: pragmatism would always win the day in such a situation. Much better, the thinking went, to buy Henry off with a little flattery and conventional displays of loyalty. Such a formula cost very little; and was, moreover, by no means an unfamiliar cultural phenomenon, either in Ireland or in Europe as a whole. Dealing in such a way with another ruler created a personal bond; it was sealed practically and symbolically with hostages and tribute. And crucially, the power, lands and wealth of the subordinate all remained intact. It was a good deal – at least for the moment – and this was thoroughly understood by both parties to it.

The Irish bishops were also content to accept Henry as the country’s leader. The synod held at Cashel early in 1172 was the king’s work: his official reason for being in Ireland, after all, had been to implement the pope’s orders and regularize Church affairs along Roman lines; and he had, therefore, to be seen to do something in this direction. At Cashel, the bishops agreed the introduction of tithe in Ireland, along with firm rules governing marriage, property rights, church attendance and much else: the full introduction, in other words, of the Church’s Gregorian reforms (initiated by Pope Gregory I in the sixth century). Again, however, there were fine distinctions: authority over Ireland might have been ceded to Henry, but at no time did the pope – now Alexander III – or the Irish bishops cede their own ecclesiastical authority to the king. The Irish Church would continue to be answerable to Rome, and to Rome alone.

Henry now moved on to Dublin, where he spent the winter of 1171–2. Rather than stay inside the walled city – where Christ Church Cathedral on its hill was already more than a century old – he decided that he would establish his court just east of the city walls, close to where Trinity College stands today. This location was chosen presumably because of its historical resonances: the Norse Thing or gathering mound, where laws had been read and disputes settled in the days of the Viking supremacy, remained a prominent feature of this district of the city. Henry was signalling that he would take up where the Norse had so lately left off: that he, and nobody else, would henceforth be legislating for Dublin. He also ordered the construction of a large palace of wattle, in the Irish manner; and here he celebrated Christmas of 1171 with a feast, to which were invited the Irish great and good. But Henry’s stay was certainly not all festive cheer: he had Dublin’s Hiberno-Norse population forcibly removed to what would become the suburb of Oxmantown on the opposite bank of the river Liffey. And in the aftermath of this expulsion, measures to separate the two peoples became a feature of the social and political landscape. The women of Anglo-Norman Dublin, for example, could be fined sixpence for wearing kerchiefs dyed in saffron in the Irish style: it became imperative to display signs of cultural difference from, and superiority over, the surrounding population.
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Taking this civic engineering a step further, Henry now also made over the city itself to the traders of Bristol. Dublin already had, of course, long-standing trade links with the southwest of England, but Henry’s edict had the effect of decisively reorienting the city. No longer could Dublin foster its potent economic and cultural links with northern Europe and the Scandinavian world. Henceforth it would be formally an English colony, with its destiny and its economic vitality tied to the English market and the English Crown.

Henry sailed from Wexford in April 1172, his departure hastened by a stormy, icy, disease-ridden Irish winter and by troubling and long-feared changes that had taken place in his sprawling empire. His three eldest sons had risen against him, and Louis VII of France had taken advantage of his long absence to attack Normandy. The king would never return to Ireland, but his expedition had been a triumph and he had achieved what he had set out to do: Anglo-Norman authority had taken root firmly in the east and southeast; the vital seaports had been secured; potent connections had been made with the Irish kings and his own authority was now accepted by them; and he was now Lord of Ireland in addition to the long list of his other titles.

In the aftermath of Henry’s departure, skirmishes at once began on the shifting border between the new colony and Gaelic Ireland. In one such, Tiernan O’Rourke was killed: his head was brought back to Dublin and displayed on the city’s battlements. The Anglo-Norman position was further compromised by revolts against Henry’s rule in Brittany, Gascony and on the Scottish borders, and by yet more French attacks on Normandy. The king called on his Irish vassals to come to his aid and they obeyed, thus weakening their position in Ireland itself. The result was a period of political and military conflict, marked by attack and counter-attack across the south of the country and the expulsion of the Anglo-Norman garrisons from Waterford and Limerick. Once more the future of the newcomers appeared uncertain, and it took a formal document to bring a measure of order to Ireland.

The Treaty of Windsor, signed by Henry and Rory O’Connor on 6 October 1175, carved up the country between the Anglo-Normans and the Irish, with the former confirmed in their possession of Dublin and the southeast; outside these lands the high king’s authority was accepted, and O’Connor was also obliged to keep the peace among the Irish. The treaty looked sensible on paper – but within two years it had failed. Henry was too far away to curb the rapacity of his own Anglo-Norman knights, who were now pushing the borders of the colony north along the eastern coastline of Ulster, and O’Connor was simply incapable of wielding authority over the Irish. Meanwhile, the recent troubles throughout his empire had convinced Henry that a radically new direction was needed. The result was a marked change in policy: the Angevin entity would be split into units that would henceforth be governed directly by the king’s four sons; the youngest, John (1166–1216), would be the new King of Ireland. It was a decision that, like the Treaty of Windsor, made perfect sense: Henry’s vast lands were knitted together only by allegiance to a common lord and a common family; and by hiving off the empire’s component parts into family hands, Henry hoped to bequeath an empire that would outlast him. But from a practical point of view the new kingship of Ireland made no more sense than had the treaty that preceded it, for it presupposed that Ireland was, or at any rate soon would be, a united polity – when in truth it was nothing of the sort.

It would be eight years before the young John visited Ireland. In the interim Henry appointed a series of lieutenants, tasked with bedding down royal power. When John eventually arrived in his realm, in the spring of 1185, his visit – if the accounts are to be believed – proved to be a diplomatic disaster. Giraldus was on hand throughout and his chronicle is spiced with details of his lord’s failings, of his disrespect and arrogance, of an expedition that was doomed from the very first. John and his companions, he tells us, abused the Irish who came to submit themselves on his arrival at Waterford: ‘our newly arrived Normans treated them with contempt and derision, and showing them scant respect, pulled some of them about by their beards, which were large and flowing according to the native custom.’
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The Irish leaders, claimed Giraldus, left and began instantly to plot revenge. Furthermore, John and his uncouth entourage went to some pains to treat the resident Anglo-Norman lords with equal disrespect – with the result that anger and bitterness followed the young man wherever he went.