The Conquering Family

by Thomas B. Costain

  In the meantime, however, Ireland was stirring. The return of Dermod, obnoxious enough in itself, had been rendered triply distasteful by the presence of his former allies. Roderick of Connaught, who was recognized as the High King of Ireland, called a conference of national leaders, with the result that a large army was assembled for a drive against the renegade King of Leinster. Before a battle could be fought, however, the politic Roderick reached an agreement with Dermod by which the latter would remain in possession of Leinster and would promise that no more Norman mercenaries were to be allowed in the country. This was not as pusillanimous on the part of Roderick as it may seem, for the Irish had begun to realize it was impossible to face men arrayed in heavy armor, who advanced and wheeled in well-trained columns, with undisciplined levies in the Irish wambais, a quilted linen jacket which offered no real protection. The Irish spear, lacking in temper and weight, was a poor weapon to combat the deadly Norman sword.

  It was now impossible, however, to keep the Normans out of the country. No sooner was the treaty signed than another band arrived at Wexford, avid for spoils. It occurred then to Dermod, who never forgot an injury, that the time had come to punish the people of Dublin. They had murdered his father, the kind and just Morogh, and had buried him beside the body of a dog. The new allies were sent to attack Dublin, and the future capital of the country was forced to yield after sustaining heavy losses.

  Dermod should have been satisfied at this stage. He had his kingdom back, he had tasted the sweetness of revenge, he had sacked part of the unfriendly city on the Liffey. But that man of ill intent was becoming ambitious. If he could reconquer Leinster with the help of these steel-clad mercenaries, why should not all Ireland be brought under his sway? The fili (an Irish term for poet) came out in him when he sat down and indited a letter to Strongbow. “We have watched the storks and swallows,” he wrote, “and the summer birds have come; come, aye, and flown again before the ocean blast. Neither easter breeze nor zephyr’s breath wafts to us your longed-for presence. Let the prompt fulfillment of your promise cure this malady of delay.”

  The admonition was not needed. Strongbow had been getting ready. Early in August he began his march to St. David’s with a picked body of men. Recruits flocked to him and, when he finally embarked at Milford Haven, he had two hundred men-at-arms and a thousand foot soldiers under his banner with its three crosses. With this force, much the largest to engage in the campaign, he landed north of Waterford. The great man had come, forerunner of a greater, as an old prophecy had it, who “would set his heel on Desmond’s neck and bruise the head of Leinster.”

  Waterford fell, and then the combined forces of Strongbow and Dermod marched against Dublin again, that city having shown further signs of resistance. The earlier arrivals had given a good account of themselves, but it remained for Richard de Clare to complete the work of aggression. He carried Dublin by storm and expelled the Ostmen. When they gathered their forces off the Isle of Man and came back with a fleet, the last demonstration Ireland was to see of viking strength, Strongbow promptly dispersed it.

  The following year Dermod died with no one to mourn him. In the Annals of the Four Masters it is said that this man “who had made a trembling sod of all Ireland became putrid while living, through the miracle of God, Columcille and Finnan and other saints of Ireland, and he died without penance, without unction, as his evil deeds deserved.” The Brehon Code left the choice of a successor in the hands of the people, but this was not the Norman way. Strongbow had married Eva in the meantime and he announced himself the new ruler in her right, although he took the title of earl instead of king.

  If Henry had not been so engrossed in his struggle with Thomas à Becket, he would have taken a hand in Ireland long before this because it was clear now that the island was ripe for conquest and permanent occupation. He became alarmed when the news reached him of Strongbow’s seizure of power and he promptly wrote to his ambitious subject, demanding that all knights who had gone to Ireland should return on pain of losing their possessions in England. This threat had no effect on the leader of the invasion who had no lands in England to lose. He answered his monarch’s command as follows:

  Most puissant prince and my dread sovereign: I came into this land with Your Majesty’s leave (as far as I remember) to aid your servant MacMorogh. What I won was with the sword. What was given me, I give you.

  I am yours, life and living.

  This made it clear to Henry that he must act at once if he expected to benefit by the operations in Ireland. The next year he crossed the Irish Sea with a considerable force.

  He found on arriving that there was little for him to do. The Ostmen had been driven from the eastern cities, the Irish kings were in a humble mood and prepared to swear allegiance to him as the best way out of their desperate plight, Strongbow had come to heel and had submitted to him. He remained in the country for the winter, making Dublin his headquarters. The city had been badly battered in the incessant fighting, and much of it had been burned. Henry lived in a house of some size but of no pretensions to anything but utility, all on one floor and with a high wattled palisade about it. He dined at a trestle table at which his officers joined him with little regard to rank and title, and he slept on a bed made by stretching a bearskin between four posts.

  He had not yet made his penance at the tomb of the Martyr and he was still in doubt, therefore, as to the attitude of Rome. Before leaving England he had renewed his orders that every port must be watched and every man searched before he was allowed to land, so that no papal emissaries could get into the country with bulls of excommunication or interdict. Equal care was being shown along the Irish coast, and no one was permitted to approach the King, particularly priests, until his mission had been ascertained. In the face of all his difficulties, which seemed to be mounting as he grew older, Henry did not change. He was thorough, methodical, farseeing, alive to every need as he had been at the start of his reign, when England was in such dire straits.

  He occupied himself while in Ireland with establishing order and setting up an administration along the sound lines of his reforms in England. Officers trained in his ways were put in charge of justice and the raising of taxes. It had been the same everywhere, in sunny Aquitaine, in Anjou, and in Brittany. Always he had proceeded to codify the laws and set the wheels of justice to turning. Always it had been done in the face of bitter opposition from the nobility, who saw their feudal advantages reduced by a system which took the law out of their hands.

  He did much to establish what was later known as the Pale, a strip of territory along the eastern coast and centering at Dublin, in which the supremacy of the invaders was acknowledged and English ways of living were introduced. The Pale changed in shape and size in the centuries which followed, sometimes shrinking, sometimes growing, but it remained the core of Anglo-Saxon occupation and the one part of the country where the imprint of the invaders was never wiped out.

  3

  More than ten years later, after Strongbow had died and various governors had followed him, Henry formally declared his son John King of the country. John, now seventeen years of age, was well loved by Henry, although he was beginning to show the traits which were to make him later the most execrated of all rulers. He had, moreover, been a sorry failure in some military operations in France. Henry was determined that his youngest son was to be a king in his own right, and so to Ireland sailed the smiling, indolent, false John with a considerable force to make good his claim to the full suzerainty of the island. By his side was Ranulf de Glanville, the shrewdest lawyer and administrator in England and the general who captured William the Lion. Henry never allowed his sons out of leading strings. He might make them kings and dukes, but always beside them were long-nosed Normans who knew exactly what Henry himself would want under any circumstances and who had authority to see that things were done his way.

  All the skilled officers Henry had trained since the days of the magic chancellorship of Thomas à
Becket would have failed to keep John in control. That young man discovered that the Welsh-Normans who had conquered the coast and who were in the main well disposed to the Irish people had become to some degree assimilated. These tall, fair knights had married Irish wives (adopting the native custom of a trial marriage of one year from the Feast of Samhain but liking their mates well enough to put the relationship on a permanent basis) and had settled down on their lands with no more desire for destruction or conquest. This was all the excuse the amiable John needed to shove them aside for the men he had brought with him. They were Normans fresh from France, as rapacious as the adventurers who had followed the Conqueror into England, looking for spoils and ransoms. They started the trouble all over again, burning, slaying, making little distinction between the native Irish and the men of Strongbow.

  John himself behaved like a malicious schoolboy, pulling the long beards of the Irish kings and chiefs when they bent the knee to him in submission. He allowed his men to commit the final offense, which was to break open churches and to despoil them of their sacred vessels.

  Glanville could do nothing in the face of the bloody and yet farcical turmoil which John created about him. He seems to have given up in despair. Anything he accomplished would, in any event, have been swept aside in the fury of resentment which brought all Ireland raging about the Pale.

  It had been arranged that John would be crowned on Christmas Day of the following year. The Pope, who seems to have remained blind to what was going on, sent a crown of gold in the form of peacock feathers to be used at the coronation. Neither could His Holiness have had any realization of the peculiar fitness of such a crown for the vain and arrogant youth on whose brow it was to rest.

  But the crowning never took place. John had not lived up to Merlin’s prediction of him, “Born of the fell fire-king, a sparklet prince shall dart his bolt of icy fear to Erin’s quaking heart.” There was no trace of icy fear in the kings of Limerick, Connaught, and Meath when they met his forces at Tegas and scored a decisive victory over them. In the chronicle of Benedict it is said that most of the prince’s troops had deserted and gone over to the natives. At any rate, John found himself in a most precarious position and decided that personal safety was better than a coronation. He sailed back to England.

  After this reverse Henry gave up his efforts to reduce Ireland. The Pale remained the only part of the country where English rule was maintained.

  CHAPTER VI

  The Sin of Absalom

  HENRY’S troubles came upon him when his power was at its height. In 1171 his third son Geoffrey was married to Constance, the heiress of Brittany, and assumed the title of duke of that rugged corner of France, with its rocky shores and tumultuous streams, jutting out between the Sleeve (as the French always called the Channel) and the Bay of Biscay. Now all of northern France was included in the Angevin empire, as well as the west and some of the south. Henry was titular head of the Norman dynasty in Sicily and through his marriage to Eleanor occupied the same suzerainty to the Aquitainian kings of Antioch. England stood higher in the Christian world than at any time before. In London there were always special ambassadors (though that term for them had not yet been coined) from other countries to negotiate military or trade agreements. Englishmen were playing prominent parts on the Continent. As a final step in fitting the futures of his children into his dream of empire, Henry arranged a marriage for John with the heiress of Maurienne.

  This mountainous province, lying south of Lake Geneva and extending almost to the Gulf of Genoa, was of much greater importance than its relatively small size would suggest. It controlled the approaches to Italy. With a foothold here, the English King would be able to gaze across the Alps at Frederick Barbarossa with a sense of equality. Nay, at the moment the elements in Germany opposed to their red-bearded Emperor were secretly negotiating with Henry to take his place, and so the English ruler had every reason to see himself as another and greater Charlemagne.

  The little heiress of Maurienne would not live long enough to play any part in the designs of the ambitious King, but this was in the future and no premonition of it placed a damper on the good spirits of the scheming fathers when they met in the city of Limoges to settle the details of the match. Henry had brought his whole ménage with him: Eleanor, young Henry and his French wife Marguerite, the younger French princess, Alice, who was to marry Richard when she was old enough, and, of course, the youthful John, who undoubtedly derived a sense of importance from the role he was playing.

  Limoges had never seen since the days of the Roman occupation, when it had been a large place, such an assemblage of the great of the earth within the walls of the Château, as the more ancient half of the city was called. In addition to the English royal family and the nobility of Aquitaine, who always flocked around when Eleanor appeared, there was the Count of Maurienne and a train of Italian noblemen and, to the excitement of everyone, Raimund of Toulouse. This important and elusive feudal figure had come to pay homage for the first time to Henry for his rich and extensive domain which included all of the southwestern corner of France. The arrival of Raimund was the capstone in Henry’s arch of glory, for now at last his sway extended from the farthest north corner of the British Isles to the southernmost part of France.

  Limoges was to see the beginning of one of the strangest situations in history. This ancient city, the capital of Limousin, had grown up on the banks of the Vienne and was built solidly of stone, which gave it a notable air of permanence in the eyes of the visitors familiar with the precarious state of wooden London. It was of a great quaintness and charm, a cluster of fine slate-topped spires and much rich-stained glass. Here the bellows of the apprentices blew hot fires for the making of the new champlevé enamel, and here came the pilgrims, who had never heard of St. Thomas the Martyr, to pray at the tomb of St. Martial, filling the narrow streets with their processions on donkeys. The visitors had been taken in at the castle of the viscounts of Limousin, and they were even sleeping up under the battlements.

  It was in the hall of the castle that Raimund of Toulouse paid homage to Henry. He was a man of proud and unstable humors, as were most of the rulers of south Gaul, and his decision to acknowledge the suzerainty of the English King instead of the French was a matter of policy, from which at this particular moment he expected to reap some benefit. He swore the usual oath, which contained a promise to reveal any information he might have of machinations against the King. When he came to this part the tall count paused with deliberate intent.

  “It becomes my duty,” he said in a whisper meant only for the ears of the King, “to warn you. Make safe your fortresses in Poitou and Aquitaine. Distrust your wife and sons.”

  The hands of the new vassal were in Henry’s when he said this. The King’s hands tightened their grip instinctively, but he said nothing to indicate he had heard. The ceremony was carried through and the incident seemed to have ended there.

  Supper that night was a sumptuous affair of many courses with “warners” in between which usually consisted of feathered and roasted peacocks or figures done in pastry. There was, of course, a succession of the finest wines of the south. Seated between Eleanor and Raimund of Toulouse, the King imposed enough restraint on himself to stay in his chair and not get up for his usual jaunts around the room. He had little desire for food and his hand seldom raised the jeweled wine cup to his lips. Although not a man of subtle mood, Henry was conscious of a tension in the room. He stole many side glances at Queen Eleanor, who also appeared to have lost her appetite. Ordinarily she talked easily and beguilingly, and much; but this evening her eyes were lowered and she had little to say. She had passed the fifty mark and was no longer the radiant beauty who had once scandalized Europe, but Henry as usual was aware that she had remained a woman of great charm. Her dark eyes made light of the lines at their corners and they were as animated, or nearly so, as when she and her sister Petronille had been queens of the Courts of Love. Her hair, still dark and still lustr
ous, was held in a gold net called a crespine, over which she wore a small and severely plain circlet of gold. The tight fit of her upper tunic, under which was a bodice strengthened by bone, showed that she was almost as slender as when he had first seen her.

  What Raimund of Toulouse had told him was not new to Henry. He had realized for some time that his sons were turning against him and he knew that Eleanor was the chief cause of it. He had hoped this triumph would quiet them down, that they would perceive at last the greatness of what he was striving for and be content to have shares in it. The rift with Eleanor was, of course, an entirely different matter. He allowed his eyes to stray down the table to where the fifteen-year-old Princess Alice was sitting. She also was feeling the tension in the air. At any rate, he had not heard her low-pitched voice all evening. He could not see much of her now, only the blackness of her hair beyond the gold circlet of her sister Marguerite. Eleanor, who always seemed to know everything which went on, was well aware of the interest he took in Princess Alice.