Princes of Ireland

by Edward Rutherfurd

  The homestead into which he finally turned was quite unlike the others. Indeed, it resembled nothing so much as a tiny castle. The main house, though not much bigger than its thatched and gabled neighbours, was three floors high, square, and made of stone. This fortified house belonged to Doyle, a prominent merchant in Dublin, who used it to store goods. And it was the man who lived in the house and worked for Doyle—Tom’s good friend and the one man in Dalkey he could trust—that Tom had come to see.

  Nobody would have been surprised at his going in there. Tom and Michael MacGowan had been friends ever since Tom had arrived in Dalkey. Despite their different ages they had much in common. Both were Dublin men. MacGowan’s brother was a well-regarded craftsman in the city. He himself had been taken on by Doyle as an apprentice, and now in his twenties, he had kept the store for his master in Dalkey for nearly five years. The girl he was courting in Dublin was quite content to move to Dalkey if they married, so it was likely that he would be remaining there for a long time. Tom Tidy had come to regard him as a steady young fellow, with a wise head on his shoulders. He could trust him to be discreet.

  He found MacGowan in the yard—a small, dark man with a mop of black hair and a face that seemed to look out a little quizzically at the world. He greeted Tom and, when Tom indicated that he wanted to talk, he led him to a pair of benches under an apple tree. He listened attentively while Tom told him what had happened and explained his dilemma.

  When Michael MacGowan was thinking, he performed a curious trick with his face. He would throw back his head, close one eye and open the other, under its raised eyebrow, very wide. As he did this now, staring up at the sky, it seemed to Tom that MacGowan’s open eye had grown almost as big as one of the ripening apples on the tree. When Tom had finished, his friend was silent, but only for a short time.

  “Are you asking my advice as to what you should do?”

  “I am.”

  “I think you should do nothing. Tell nobody. Forget what you heard.” He turned his single open eye upon the older man and stared at him disconcertingly. “There is danger here, Tom Tidy.”

  “I had thought perhaps that Doyle … I thought you would say we should tell him.” The great merchant who owned the fortified house was not only one of the most prominent of the city fathers but was a man of awesome reputation, on close terms with the Justiciar himself.

  One of the reasons why Dalkey had been especially popular as a landing place was that it had often been possible to avoid paying the customs which would have been due at the port of Dublin on all incoming goods. The customs tariffs were significant. A merchant who avoided them might easily increase his profits by a third. Taking the goods from Dalkey round the coast by lighter or overland by cart, it had not been too difficult to evade the customs inspectors. The problem had caused the government some irritation.

  When the suggestion had been made to the royal servants in Dublin that they should give Doyle the appointment of water bailiff for Dalkey, it had seemed a good solution to this problem. And indeed, ever since he had held the position, a steady stream of revenue had come from the little harbour. No one down there would dare to do anything behind Doyle’s back. His reach was long. It was not surprising, therefore, that Tom Tidy should have thought of the powerful merchant as a possible solution to his problem.

  “They say he can keep secrets and that he is cunning as well as powerful,” he ventured.

  “You do not know him, Tom.” MacGowan shook his head. “Doyle is a hard man. If we tell him, do you know what will happen? He will make sure that O’Byrne and his friends walk into a trap that will kill them all. And he will be proud of it. He’ll tell everyone in Dublin that he was responsible. And where do you think that will leave me, out here in Dalkey? The O’Byrnes are a large clan, Tom. They will come and get me. And once they work out what happened, they’ll kill you, too. You can count on it. Even Doyle could not prevent that if he tried—which he probably wouldn’t,” he added bleakly.

  “You’re saying that I should do nothing to save the Walshes and their people at Carrickmines?”

  “Let their walls protect them.”

  Tom nodded sadly. It was a hard thing that MacGowan had said, but he understood. He got up to leave.

  “Tom.” MacGowan’s voice was anxious. His eye was staring now like that of a creature caught in a trap and in pain.

  “Well?”

  “Whatever you’re going to do, Tom, don’t go to Doyle. Will you promise me that?”

  Tidy nodded and left. But as MacGowan watched him go he thought to himself: if I know you, Tom Tidy, and your sense of duty, you are going to find somebody to tell.

  There was no doubting the fellow’s good intentions. Harold had looked at Tom Tidy with some admiration when he turned up at his house with a wagonload of goods and demanded to speak with him. That had been an intelligent ruse to avoid suspicion, and he had gladly bought a number of useful provisions to give Tidy his necessary cover.

  “You have done the right thing,” he assured the carrier, when he learned the reason for Tidy’s visit, “and you have come to the right person.”

  Tidy was correct in thinking that Harold was a man who could be trusted to act, as well as to be discreet. No one was a more staunch upholder of English rule in Ireland than Robert Harold. Two centuries had passed since his ancestor Harold had returned to his father, Ailred the Palmer; in that time, the family had come to be known as the Harolds, and as the Harolds they had prospered. They had acquired a large tract of land, beginning south of Dublin at a place called Harolds Cross and stretching south-westwards down the borderland of the Dublin territory—the March, as the English called it—beyond which the rule of the crown was shaky nowadays. Marcher families like the Harolds, with their broad acres, fortified houses, and armed men, were important in preserving the established English order in this part of the island.

  It was ten years since he had been elected as head of his family. Several of the Marcher families, like the Celtic clans, had taken to choosing the head of the family by election. Sometimes they would even invite other families or an important figure like the archbishop to help them choose. That the Harolds had done this was just another sign of their determination to ensure that they had strong leadership in difficult times.

  Robert Harold was only of medium height. Quite early in life his hair had gone grey. His eyes, which were a startling, Nordic blue, usually had a soft expression; but they could grow suddenly hard, and when they did, whoever had crossed him discovered Harold’s ruthlessness. He had proved himself an effective leader, cautious but tough.

  As Tidy explained everything—from his sighting of the girl, to her conversation with the unseen man in the church—Harold watched him carefully. The fellow’s nervousness was plain to see.

  Again and again, Tom stressed that he had come to him, rather than the archbishop’s bailiff or the Justiciar’s officials, so that no one in Dublin would connect him with the business. “Please do not reveal where you got this information,” he pleaded. Up to a point, Harold could reassure him. He couldn’t see any reason why he should need to mention Tidy by name.

  Sometimes Harold thought that he was almost the only person who really understood what was going on in Ireland. The Justiciar did, probably. The men who kept the accounts at the royal Exchequer surely must have. But some of his fellow gentry, men like Walsh at Carrickmines, failed to appreciate the seriousness of the case. Privately, he considered them weak.

  The rot had really started when his father was a boy. Two things had set the downward course of events in motion. There had been several years of bad harvests and famines. That hadn’t helped. Then there had been the English war with the Scots. King Edward I—Longshanks, the Hammer of the Scots—might have destroyed the Scottish hero Wallace; but after Wallace, the Scots had struck back. Robert the Bruce and his brother Edward had defeated the English army at Bannockburn and given the Scots new heart. It was hardly surprising, then, if the great Irish
clans had started to wonder if they, too, might be able to take on the English power. A deal had been struck. The O’Connors and the O’Neills had allied themselves with Edward Bruce, who had brought over a big force of Scots to Ireland. “That way we give the English a war on two fronts,” they judged, “and we may drive them out of Ireland as well as Scotland.” If they succeeded, the Irish chiefs had promised Edward Bruce the position of High King.

  Could it have succeeded? Possibly. Bruce and his allies had made a big show up in the north and then advanced almost to the walls of Dublin. But the Dubliners had shut them out and the rest of Ireland had failed to rise for them. It was the old Irish problem: there was no unity across the island. The mighty and ancient O’Neills found they could only rally their friends. Before long, Bruce had been killed, and the Celtic military revival was over.

  Yet something had changed. For a start, Ireland was poorer. English settlers were less inclined to come; some started leaving; the English government invested less. The Black Death had only made the existing trend worse. By the time Robert Harold came to manhood, England and France had become locked in that endless conflict known as the Hundred Years War, and the English king had little use for Ireland except to get what money he could from it—which was less and less as every decade went by. To Harold’s knowledge, the King of England nowadays received only around two thousand pounds a year from Ireland; back in the days of Longshanks, it had been three times that amount. The king sent out his Justiciars, his royal servants, and even once his son; but the royal interest in the island was halfhearted.

  Some years ago, in a fit of panic when they had supposed, quite wrongly, that Dublin wasn’t safe, the royal Exchequer officials had decamped with all the accounts to a stronghold down in Carlow. It was the sort of feebleminded cowardice that Harold most despised. He had no great faith in the king’s men.

  “If the English in Ireland want to keep order, then they must do it themselves,” Harold liked to say. They had their own parliaments, with considerable powers, which often met in Dublin. “But we haven’t enough leaders,” he would add. “That’s the trouble.”

  It wasn’t only the crown which had suffered. Many great lords with estates in England as well as Ireland had decided that the western island with its disaffected native population was not worth the trouble. They left their Irish estates in the hands of stewards and remained, absentees, across the water. Just as bad, some of the greatest feudal holdings, like the huge inheritance of Strongbow himself, had been subdivided amongst heiresses, and in later generations split up yet again. So the magnates who might have formed a bulwark against the forces of disorder were largely missing. Recognising this weakness, the English king had enacted one important measure: he had created three great earldoms which could only pass down, without subdivisions, in the male line. The earldom of Ormond he gave to the mighty Butler family; the earldoms of Kildare and of Desmond went to two branches of the Fitzgeralds, who had come over with Strongbow. These earldoms dominated regions that lay beyond the king’s Dublin rule; but though they were certainly mighty enough to impose English order on large areas of the Irish hinterland, they were also more like independent Celtic kings than English noblemen and they were treated as such by the Irish chiefs. Their interests were all in Ireland. Privately, Harold suspected that if ever English rule collapsed in Ireland, the great earls would probably still be there, alongside the Irish kings.

  No, it was up to the gentry, men like himself, to maintain English order, if not in all Ireland, at least in the broad arc of territory around the Dublin seaboard. Manor house, parish church, and village; market towns with their little town councils; English shires with their courts and royal justices. This was the settled order that Harold wanted to preserve, safe for himself and modest folk like Thomas Tidy. And it could be preserved, if only the English in Ireland themselves held firm.

  But would they? Not long ago, down in the south, a descendant of bad old King Diarmait had proclaimed himself King of Leinster. Kavanagh, they called the fellow. It was an empty gesture, of course, just a native chief blowing his trumpet uselessly in the wind. But it was a reminder all the same. Show weakness now, and there would be other Kavanaghs. The O’Connors and the O’Neills could always rise again. This planned raid on Carrickmines might or might not be serious; but failure to deal with it would be seen as a token of the weakness of the English will, and be noted all over Ireland. It must be dealt with, and dealt with firmly.

  Tidy was nearly finished.

  “The essential thing,” he pointed out, “is that we give no hint to the O’Byrnes or their friends that they are expected. If troops are moved up from Dublin, it will need to be at the last moment, under cover of darkness.”

  “I agree.” Harold nodded.

  “And the squadron in Dalkey,” Tidy continued anxiously. “They’ll need to remain where they are. So as not to give the game away,” he explained.

  And so as not to put yourself under suspicion, thought Harold grimly. Aloud he said, “Do not worry, Thomas Tidy. We shall be careful.” And he gave Tom a reassuring smile.

  Did the poor fellow really imagine that they could afford to leave an entire squadron sitting uselessly at Dalkey while Carrickmines was attacked? Well, that would be up to the Justiciar, anyway. But Tidy had better realise one thing. If he wanted to live in a secure Ireland, then he would have to take some risks, like the rest of them. Harold had no wish to sacrifice Tom Tidy. But if necessary, he would.

  The conference was scheduled for noon. Doyle’s dark eyes surveyed the quay with satisfaction. So far, things were working out very well.

  If Ireland had suffered during the last century, you would not have known it from looking at Dublin quay. For a start, since the days of Strongbow, a steady process of land reclamation on both banks had altered the shape of the River Liffey so that, beside the town, it was only half its former width. A new stone wall now ran all the way along the waterfront from Wood Quay to the bridge, a hundred and fifty yards in front of the old rampart. Outside the city’s wall, straggling suburbs had grown up, especially along the road to the south so that, if you included Oxmantown across the river, there were nearly three people living in the suburbs for every one inside the walls. Parish churches as well as monastic buildings graced the suburbs. And to ensure an adequate water supply, one of the southern rivers had been diverted to flow through channels and aqueducts into the growing city in a fresh and constant stream.

  And few men in the new Dublin had done better than Doyle. Even the Black Death had worked to his advantage: for though the trade of the city had been hit, two of his business rivals had died, and he had been able to take over their trade as well as buy up all their property at very reasonable prices. Twenty years after the terrible plague, much of Dublin’s trade had recovered. Wars no longer provided shiploads of captives and coastal raids were a thing of the past, so Dublin’s old slave market had ceased to function. But Ireland had plenty of goods to export to Britain, France, and Spain.

  The greatest export from the English realms, for many generations, had been wool. The trade was regulated through a limited number of ports, known as the Staple Ports, where customs duties were levied. Dublin was one of them. “We have never bred sheep with the finest fleeces, like the best of the English flocks,” Doyle would readily admit. “But there’s a market for coarse wool, too.” Huge quantities of hides from the island’s great cattle herds and furs from her forest animals went out from the Dublin quays. The fishing catch from the Irish Sea was enormous. Fish, fresh or salted, were constantly being carried across the seas. Timber also from Ireland’s endless forest tracts was supplied to England. The roof timbers of some of England’s greatest cathedrals, such as Salisbury, came from Irish oaks.

  Doyle had a hand in all these shipments. But he found himself more interested in the import trade. The stout cogs with their single masts and deep bellies brought in all kinds of goods: iron from Spain, salt from France, pottery from Bristol, fine text
iles from Flanders. Italian merchants would arrive with loads of oriental spices for the great summer fairs outside the western gate. But the trade that he liked the best was the shipping of wine from southwest France. Hogsheads of ruby red wine from Bordeaux: he loved the look, the texture, the scent of the great sixty-three gallon barrels as they were lowered off the ships; though the shipments were so huge that they were usually reckoned by the tun—two hundred and fifty-two gallons each. It was the wine trade that had made Doyle, with all his ships, such a rich man.

  The Justiciar had summoned Doyle to the castle the day before, soon after Harold had been there. Indeed, the king’s representative had called for the merchant even before he had informed the city’s mayor. Like most of the larger cities in England, Dublin had a council of forty-eight who governed its roughly seven thousand inhabitants. The inner council, from which the mayor was chosen each year, consisted of only twenty-four of the city’s most powerful men, and Doyle was one of these. It was because he was so impressed with Doyle that the Justiciar had let him collect the valuable prise on the imports through Dalkey and he knew that the merchant was extremely well-informed. “Doyle has eyes and ears everywhere,” the Justiciar would say. “He is powerful, but he is also subtle. If he wishes something to happen, he will make it happen.” The Justiciar had given him a full and private account of the news that Robert Harold had just brought, and Doyle had listened attentively.

  “So if this information is correct,” the Justiciar had summarised, “they will strike at Carrickmines in a few days’ time. The question is, what should we do?”