The Princes of Ireland

by Edward Rutherfurd

  “You are going to England?” Margaret asked him excitedly. “To fight for the boy?”

  He nodded.

  “You’re right to go, John,” her father said. “Do well, and there could be rewards.”

  “Let’s follow the procession,” her brother cried, and scooping Margaret up, he placed her on his shoulders and started to stride along the street with his father walking in a dignified manner beside him. And how happy and proud Margaret felt, to be riding on her brother’s shoulders, just like the boy king ahead of them, on that sunny morning in May.

  They went down the street between the high-gabled houses, with the fifes and drums sounding cheerfully in front; out through the eastern gateway known as Dame’s Gate, and across to Hoggen Green and the ancient Thingmount. Having made the circuit of that, the procession, still followed by a large crowd, made its way back to the city before finally disappearing through the gateway into Dublin Castle where there was to be a banquet given in the boy king’s honour.

  “Are you going to the banquet, Father,” Margaret asked, as her brother put her down.

  “No,” he replied, then smiled confidently. “But many of the great lords in there would be your kinsmen. Always remember this day, Margaret,” he went on firmly, “for it will go down in history. Remember you were here, with your brave brother and your father.”

  It was not only her father who was so confident. Within days, the Parliament of Ireland had met and the English gentlemen and Church representatives had enthusiastically ratified the crowning. They had issued a proclamation of his kingship. They had even caused new coins—groats and half-groats—to be struck with the boy’s head depicted on them. As well as the German landknechts, Thomas Fitzgerald had collected Irish mercenaries and young enthusiasts like John so that before the end of May he could tell his brother, Lord Kildare, “We’re ready to go. And we should strike at once.” Indeed, only one discordant note was sounded in those heady days.

  It might have been expected. If the two mighty earldoms of the Fitzgerald clan—Kildare stretching out from the centre of the Pale, and Desmond to the south—were the most powerful lordships in the land, the third great lordship, the Butler family’s earldom of Ormond, was still an impressive power to be reckoned with. Sometimes the Butlers and the Fitzgeralds were on good terms, but more often they were not; and it was hardly surprising if the Butlers were jealous of the Fitzgerald domination. So when Henry Tudor had taken the throne from the House of York, to which the Fitzgeralds were known to be so friendly, the Butlers had been quick to let Henry know that they were glad to support his Lancastrian cause.

  And now, just after the Parliament in Dublin had declared for him, a messenger came from the Earl of Ormond, the head of the Butlers. “Lord Ormond refuses to do homage to this boy pretender,” he announced, “and declares all these proceedings to be illegal.”

  The Fitzgerald reaction was swift. Lord Kildare had the messenger taken straight down to the Thingmount on Hoggen Green, and hanged.

  “That is harsh,” Margaret’s father declared with a shake of his head. “He was only the messenger.” But Margaret could hear the tone of sneaking admiration in his voice. Two days after that, Kildare’s brother Thomas and his little army set sail for England, taking her brother John with them.

  The boy king’s expedition landed in England on the fourth day of June. Making their way towards York, they were joined by some of the Yorkist lords and their retinues; soon their numbers had swelled to six and a half thousand men. Then they turned south.

  And Henry Tudor, caught by surprise, might even have lost his kingdom if several of the English magnates, who owed him loyalty and who reckoned that he offered the best chance of order, hadn’t rallied to him at once with unexpectedly large contingents of troops. On the morning of June 16, near a village called East Stoke in the Midlands, the boy king’s army found itself confronted by fifteen thousand well-equipped and trained fighting men. Though the Germans had deadly crossbows, Henry Tudor’s Welsh and English longbowmen could loose continuous volleys of arrows that fell like a hailstorm. Against the half-trained and mostly unarmoured contingents from Ireland, Henry had trained pikemen and armoured knights.

  The Irish army was smashed. The boy king was captured; and having secured him, Henry Tudor gave no quarter. At the place where they fought, there was a ditch which from that day onwards was to be known as Red Gutter since, it was said, by the end of the morning it was filled with blood. For they hacked the Germans and Irish to pieces, almost every one.

  Fortunately, Margaret only ever knew that her brother had been slain.

  But Henry Tudor was more than ruthless; he was also clever. Having got the boy Edmund alive, he did not kill him or even put him in prison. Still insisting that he was only an impostor called Lambert Simnel, he set him to work in the royal kitchens from which he would cheerfully summon him sometimes to serve the guests at feasts. During Henry’s reign, and for centuries to come, hardly anybody believed the boy to be the royal prince that, quite possibly, he really was.

  Yet the lessons which Margaret learned from these events had little to do with the boy king himself.

  In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, she knew only a numbing sense of grief. And though she had been brought up proud that she was English, the unconscious thought formed in her mind that England itself was somehow an alien and threatening place. How was it, she asked herself, if there was a God in heaven, that the English king could take her brother from her like this? But as she grew older and pondered the events that had led to his death, a new and more perceptive question occurred to her.

  “How was it, Father, that John was killed, but that the Fitzgeralds were not punished?” It was a question that went to the root of Ireland’s political situation.

  For when the boy king was crowned in Dublin, it was Kildare himself, head of the Fitzgeralds and, as Lord Deputy, King Henry Tudor’s own representative and governor on the island, who had led the treasonable business. The Butlers, on the other hand, had stayed loyal. Yet Henry had forgiven Kildare, while the Butlers had received no great reward for their pains.

  “The Fitzgeralds have the most territory. They’re intermarried with so many gentry families, and with the greatest Irish princes as well, that they can call on more men and more favours than any other clan,” her father told her. “Moreover,” he explained, “though the Butlers’ power is huge as well, their territory lies between the two Fitzgerald earldoms—Kildare on their northern flank and Desmond in the south. If the Fitzgeralds want to, they can squeeze the Butlers,” he made a gesture with his two hands, “like a pincer. So you see, Margaret, of the two great English lordships, Fitzgerald is the natural one to govern. And if the English king tries to ignore them both and send his own man to govern, they would soon make life so difficult for him that he gives up.”

  And during the rest of her childhood, this was exactly the political pattern that Margaret was to see. Even when Henry sent over his trusted deputy Poynings—who bluntly told the Irish Parliament they could no longer pass any laws without the Tudor king’s approval, and even arrested Kildare, who was sent to London—the Fitzgeralds made it so difficult for him to govern that before long even Poynings gave up. And back in England, when he was told, “All Ireland cannot govern Kildare and his Fitzgeralds,” Henry Tudor, that supreme realist, calmly observed, “If all Ireland cannot govern Kildare, then Kildare had better govern Ireland,” and sent the head of the Fitzgeralds back as his Lord Deputy again.

  “It’s Kildare who rules in Ireland, Margaret,” her father told her, “and always will be.”

  Margaret was thirteen when she learned that her father had been cheated. It happened quite by chance.

  It had promised to be an uneventful morning at Oxmantown. Her father had been at the house with no particular business to do that day, when a neighbour had come by to ask if he was going across the river to watch the fun. “Did you not hear,” he explained, “that a group of Butler’s and F
itzgerald’s men are having a fight over by Saint Patrick’s?”

  “What about?” her father asked.

  “Who knows? Because they’re Butlers and Fitzgeralds.”

  “I suppose I may as well,” said her father. And he certainly would have gone without Margaret if she had not begged him to let her come. “If there’s any danger,” he told her firmly, “you’ll have to go straight home.”

  When they got to Saint Patrick’s, they found a crowd gathered outside. They seemed in a cheerful mood, and their neighbour, who went ahead to find out what was happening, soon reported that the fight was now over and the rival groups, both in the cathedral, had agreed to a truce.

  “There’s only one problem,” he explained. “The Butler men are on one side of a big door and the Fitzgerald men on the other; but the door is locked and no one has the key. And until they’ve shaken hands neither side intends to move from the place where they are, on account of their mistrust.”

  “Do they mean to stay there forever, then?” asked her father.

  “Not at all. They will cut a hole in the door. But it’s a mighty door, so it will take some time.”

  It was just then that Margaret saw the little girl.

  She was standing with her mother, not far off. She might be five years old, Margaret guessed, but she was tiny. She was dressed in a bright patterned dress; her eyes were dark, her olive-coloured features finely drawn and delicate. She was the neatest little person that Margaret had ever seen. One glance at her mother, a small, elegant Mediterranean woman, explained the child’s looks at once. She must be Spanish.

  “Oh, Father,” she cried, “can I go and play with her?”

  It was unusual but not unexpected to encounter Spanish features in Ireland. The Black Irish, people often called them. Notwithstanding the legend that some of the island’s earliest inhabitants had come from the Iberian peninsula, the reason for the Black Irish was very simple. Centuries of trade between Spain and the Irish ports had probably resulted in a few intermarriages, but the greatest sources of the Black Irish were the regular visits of the great Spanish fishing fleets which for generations had come for the rich catch off the island’s southern coast, especially off the lands of the O’Sullivans and the O’Driscolls down in West Cork. Ships from these fleets would often put into the creeks to process their catch with salt, paying the O’Sullivan and O’Driscoll lords a levy for the privilege. Sometimes a sailor would find a local sweetheart and settle there, or leave a child.

  The mother had no objection to Margaret amusing her tiny daughter. Her name was Joan. For some time Margaret played with the doll-like child who was obviously fascinated by the older, red-haired girl and never took her large, brown eyes off her. Finally, however, her father called Margaret back and told her that it was time to be going. And he had just smiled in a friendly way at the Spanish woman and her daughter, and started to turn away, when a cheer from the crowd announced that the men from the cathedral were coming out, and so they stayed to watch.

  The Fitzgerald men came first, about a score of them. They moved off swiftly towards the city gate. A few moments later, the Butler group emerged. Most of them started to leave in the direction of Saint Stephen’s hospital; but a few split away, and one of these came through the crowd towards them. He was a handsome, well-set man with thinning brown hair and a broad, English-looking face. As he came out of the throng, the little Spanish girl caught sight of him, cried out, “Papa!” and in an instant had thrown herself into his arms. Margaret smiled. It was a charming scene. So she was surprised when she glanced at her father to see him scowling with fury.

  “We’re going,” Rivers said suddenly, and taking her by the arm, he almost dragged her away.

  “What has happened?” she asked. “Is it Joan’s father?”

  “I never guessed she was his child,” he muttered.

  “Who is he, Father?”

  “Henry Butler,” he said, but the anger in his voice warned her not to ask him any more.

  They had reached the bridge across the river before he broke his silence.

  “Many years ago, Margaret, there was an inheritance—not huge, but large enough—that fell between two cousins of my mother’s family. My mother was cheated of her rightful share. With the connivance of Ormond, it all went to the mother of that man you saw back there. His name is Henry Butler. He’s from a junior branch of the Butlers, but still a distant kinsman of the earl. And he has been living on the fruits of that fine estate which should have been mine. So it hurts me and angers me to see him.” He paused. “I never told you this before because I don’t like to speak of it.”

  A disputed inheritance: Margaret had often heard of such things.

  Disputes between heiresses, in particular, were common enough in Ireland.

  “Does Henry Butler know he has your inheritance?”

  “Most certainly he does,” her father replied. “I met the man once. As soon as he heard my name, he turned his back and walked away.”

  “Joan is sweet,” Margaret said. It made her sad that the pretty little child should be the daughter of her father’s enemy.

  “She has your money,” he answered grimly.

  They did not speak about it anymore, but that night, when her mother supposed she was asleep, Margaret heard her parents talking.

  “It was so long ago,” she heard her mother pleading, in a low voice. “Do not think of it.”

  “But that is why I am forced to live like this, a miserable agent working for others, instead of a gentleman on my own estate.”

  “We manage well enough. Can you not be happy with what you have? A wife and children who love you?”

  “You know I love my family more than anything in the world.” His voice descended so that she could not hear it, then rose again. “But how can I provide for them? Henry Butler has it all. Where is Margaret’s dowry, tell me? The little Spanish girl has it.” There was a pause. Then her father’s voice again, almost in tears. “Oh the pain of it. The pain.”

  After that, Margaret stopped her ears, and lay there shaking for a long time until at last she fell asleep.

  Margaret was eighteen when her father started the quest to find her a husband.

  “We shall look,” he told her confidently, “in Fingal. Fingal’s the place,” he said firmly, “for an English girl like you.” She knew what he meant. It was not only that Fingal was the area of English farms, where landlords looked out on huge orderly fields of wheat and barley; Fingal was a family network. There were the Fagans and the Conrans and the Cusacks; the Finglas family, the Usshers, the Bealings, the Balls, the Taylors up at Swords. All English gentry families who married amongst each other and with the greatest merchant families in Dublin. The marriage network spread outwards also, to the Dillons in Meath, the Bellews, the Sarsfields, and the Plunketts—some of the best of the English in Ireland. At the apex of the Fingal families were three, whose lands lay along the coast. The family of St. Lawrence held the headland of Howth; just to the north, by the next inlet, were the Irish branch of the great aristocratic family of Talbot, and nearby the Barnewalls. These were the people her father meant when he referred to Fingal.

  She knew a good many of them—not well, but enough to talk to. Sometimes her father would take her with him if he rode over to some fine estate on business. Occasionally the family would be invited to an entertainment in one of the houses; or one of her brothers might come by in the company of a friend who belonged to a Fingal family. Two years ago she had chanced to strike up a friendship with a younger daughter of the St. Lawrence family. For about a year they had been almost inseparable. Margaret would go across and stay with her friend for days at a time. They would walk along the strand above the Liffey estuary to where the Tolka stream came down at Clontarf; or on sunny days they would spend hours up on the headland gazing southwards across the bay and down the coast to where the volcanic hills rose magically through the haze. It was a happy friendship. The St. Lawrence family were always k
ind to her. But then they found a husband for her friend, who left Fingal; and there was no reason for Margaret to go to Howth after that.

  “Margaret’s hair,” her father said, “is her greatest asset.” And no one disagreed.

  Some might have said that her face was a little plain, but thanks to her hair, she had only to enter any gathering for all heads to turn. Rich, dark red—if she did not put it up it fell like a gleaming curtain down her back. She hoped that she also had other attractions: good skin, a handsome figure, a lively personality. But she wasn’t a fool. “They will notice you for your hair, Margaret,” her mother told her. “The rest is up to you.”

  The opportunity for all Fingal to see her came the summer when she was eighteen.

  It was a day in mid-June when her father came into the house one afternoon looking pleased with himself and announced, “Did you hear that one of the Talbot boys has just returned from England? Edward Talbot. He’s been there three years, you know. He visited the royal court. A fine young gentleman by all accounts. There’s to be a great entertainment out at Malahide,” he continued, “to welcome him back. All Fingal will be going.” He paused, so that they should think this was the end of the information. “We’re going, too, of course,” he added with a straight face that only gradually broke into a triumphant grin.

  How had her father managed to procure an invitation to such a grand event? Margaret didn’t know. But the next week was spent helping her mother make her a fine new gown and in all the other preparations necessary for such an occasion. As it happened, both her brothers were away at the time, and the day before her mother fell and sprained her ankle and so decided to remain at home, but Margaret and her father set off upon the afternoon in question in high spirits. Margaret’s gown, of green-and-black silk brocade, was a triumph. “It sets off your hair perfectly,” her mother assured her. And though he did not say much, she could see that her father was excited. When he said admiringly, “You’ll be the best-looking young lady there, Margaret,” she was quite as pleased that she had made him happy as she was by the thought of any good looks she might possess.