The Princes of Ireland

by Edward Rutherfurd

  “This comes from the Church of Saint Kevin in Dublin,” he said quietly. “It contains the finger bone of Saint Kevin of Glendalough himself.”

  And this time, Eva heard her husband give a little intake of breath as they all gazed at the jewelled box with awe.

  The most splendid of the holy relics, like the Bachall Iosa of Saint Patrick, were to be found in the Cathedral of Christ Church; but several of the lesser churches had treasures of great sanctity which, everybody knew, had awesome powers. When you touched the relic before them now, you were in the presence of the Saint of Glendalough himself.

  “Will you place your hand, Sean O’Byrne, over the body of Saint Kevin and swear that you have never had carnal knowledge of the Brennan woman?” the friar invited quietly. “Will you do it?”

  There was silence. The three of them watched him. Sean stared first at the friar, then at the little box. For a moment it really seemed that he might stretch forth his hand.

  But whatever his faults, Sean O’Byrne still had a healthy fear of God and of the power of His saints. After an agonising hesitation, he scowled at the three of them and drew his hand back.

  “You cannot do it,” said the friar. “And you should be glad you could not; for if you had, Sean O’Byrne, it would have been a sin so terrible that nothing could have kept you from the eternal fire of Hell. Thank God that you did not.”

  But if Sean O’Byrne was thanking God, he did not show it. As the friar put the lid back on the dark little box, he sat sullenly staring at the table, saying not a word. In the end, it was Eva who spoke.

  “The Brennans go. Seamus can take over their place.”

  Sean turned towards her and gazed, fixedly, at her face.

  “I will decide about that,” he said.

  “You can decide what you like,” she answered. “But if the Brennans stay, then it’s me who’ll be leaving, tomorrow.” She meant it, and he could see it. She’d thought it all out. She’d take little Fintan and the youngest girl with her; the older ones could stay. There wasn’t much Sean could do about it. Anything was better than staying here with Sean and the Brennan girl mocking her every day.

  The silence that followed was broken by Father Donal.

  “It would be good for Seamus to have that land,” he remarked.

  There was a pause.

  “I should lose the Brennans’ rent.”

  “The land might still be worth more to you,” the priest observed.

  “The Brennans will have to go,” O’Byrne said finally, as if by saying it he was recovering control of the situation. “They’re tenants-at-will, you know. They can be told to go at any time.” He glanced at Eva, who quietly nodded. “They’ll be told we need the farm for Seamus.”

  The next day, the Brennans were sent away. The explanation given was that their place was required for young Seamus. Whether Brennan believed this or not was unclear.

  He might have done. For just as O’Byrne himself occupied a small portion of the wide territories of his princely ancestors, so, all over Ireland, as one generation succeeded another, these smaller holdings were being subdivided amongst the descendants until even their humblest tenants might find themselves turned out to make way for one of the family’s many heirs. O’Tooles, O’Byrnes, even the mighty O’Neills—it was always the same. “Every damned Irish cottager seems to think he’s the descendant of princes,” the English would sometimes complain. The reason was that many of them were.

  So the Brennans left in search of another place, and young Seamus O’Byrne made himself a home in their hut, and Eva repaired her dignity.

  Before he had left, the friar had given the couple some good advice. “It’s the right thing that you’ve done,” he told Sean. “You’ve a fine wife and I hope you’ve the wisdom to see it. And you,” he turned to Eva, “have a fine husband. Remember that now and honour him.”

  In the weeks and months that followed, she had done her best to take his advice, and to make herself agreeable and attractive to her husband in every way she knew. It seemed to work. He became quite amorous, if not exactly affectionate. And God knows, she thought, one might as well be grateful for that. During that winter and far beyond she had no cause, she thought, to regret what she had done.

  It did not occur to her that in the mind of Sean O’Byrne, only one thing had happened on the day that the friar brought the relic. He, Sean O’Byrne of Rathconan, a prince among men, had been tricked and humiliated by her in front of the priest. He had had his position usurped. He wasn’t the master in his own house. That was all that he knew; but he said nothing.

  NINE

  SILKEN THOMAS

  1533

  THE YEARS that followed her marriage should have been happy for Cecily; and in a way they were. She loved her husband. She had two pretty little girls. Tidy’s business was thriving: he made some of the best gloves in Dublin; MacGowan and Dame Doyle recommended him to all their friends; he already had a boy apprentice in the workshop. He had also become a busy and rising member of his craft guild; on feast days, Cecily would watch him go off dressed in the guild’s bright livery, so pleased with himself that it was touching to see. And, of course, he had the freedom of the city.

  “Your husband is making quite a name for himself,” Dame Doyle remarked to her with a smile when they met in the street one day. “You must feel very proud of him.”

  Did she? She knew she should. Wasn’t he everything a good Dublin craftsman should be? Hardworking, reliable. When she saw him sitting in his chair in the evening, with a little girl on each knee, she felt a deep sense of joy and contentment; and she would go to him and kiss him, and he would smile happily up at her, and she would secretly pray for more children, and hope that she might also give him the son for whom—though he denied it—she knew he longed. Yes, her husband was a good man, and she loved him. She could go to her confessor with a clear conscience, secure in the knowledge that she was never cold towards her husband, never denied him her body, scarcely ever showed anger, and always made amends if she did. What could she possibly confess except that, from time to time—perhaps quite frequently—she wished he were different?

  Yet the occasion for their first serious disagreement had nothing to do with their own lives at all. It had to do with events in faraway England.

  To most people in Dublin, the last eight years had seemed like business as usual. The rivalry between the Butlers and the Fitzgeralds had continued. Building on King Henry’s suspicions of the Fitzgerald family’s foreign intrigues, the Butlers had persuaded him to give them the office of Lord Deputy for a while, but the great pincer of Fitzgerald power had soon squeezed them out again. Dublin itself had been quiet enough, but out in the hinterland, the Irish allies of the Fitzgeralds had been extorting protection money from the weaker chiefs and landowners—Black Rent, they called it—and on one occasion they had kidnapped one of the Butler commanders and held him for ransom for several months. Even in Dublin, these shenanigans were viewed with some wry amusement. “The cheek of those fellows,” people said. For in Ireland, there was always an element of sport in these skirmishes. Hadn’t brave young Celtic warriors been raiding their enemies since time immemorial?

  But blunt King Henry in London and his order-loving officials never saw the joke. “I have told you before that if you will not govern yourselves, we’ll rule you from England,” he declared. And so, in 1528, an English official arrived to take over the ordering of the island. Nobody wanted him, of course; but he also came with one enormous handicap.

  As far as King Henry was concerned, if he sent a royal servant to govern in his name, then that servant was invested with his kingly authority, and should be obeyed, no matter who you were. But that wasn’t how things were seen in Ireland at all. The genealogies of Irish chiefs, whether real or imagined, stretched back into the mists of Celtic time. Even the English magnates like the Butlers and Fitzgeralds had been aristocrats when they first came to the island more than three centuries ago. Irish society w
as and always had been aristocratic and hierarchical. Irish servants in traditional Irish houses might eat and sleep beside their masters, but the family of the chief was treated with reverence. The thing was mystical.

  The new Lord Deputy was the king’s Master of Artillery. A bluff soldier, whose blood was fiery red but not blue. “I have come to bring English order,” he let the Irish know. “Has he indeed,” they responded. “Princes of Ireland bow the knee to this lowborn fellow?” they protested. “Never.” The Gunner, they contemptuously called him. And though he did his best, and though Kildare himself, on King Henry’s orders gave him a grudging support, it wasn’t long before they undermined him.

  King Henry was furious. And had there not been other larger problems to deal with in his realm, he might have taken sterner measures. But as he had neither money nor energy to involve himself more deeply with Ireland just then, he impatiently gave the island back to Kildare. “Let him rule there for the time being,” he declared grumpily, “until we can think of something better.” To the Irish it seemed that, once again, they had proved that the English king could never impose himself upon them. For better or worse, Kildare was back. It was business as usual.

  But in England, greater changes were now beginning.

  When, around the time the Gunner came to Ireland, King Henry had let it be known that he wished to annul his longstanding marriage to his Spanish queen, Catherine of Aragon, there were riots in London, where the pious queen was popular. But few people in Ireland had been much concerned. In the territories outside the Pale, divorce had never been viewed as such a shocking business. Even in the stricter English Pale, most people knew that annulments were commonly granted to aristocrats and princes; and the king believed he had valid grounds for an annulment anyway. This was a matter between the English king and the Holy Father. Besides, everyone in Dublin was too busy trying to get rid of the Gunner to worry about Queen Catherine very much.

  Why then should King Henry’s business have been the cause of a quarrel between Cecily and her husband? The truth was that she hardly knew herself. It had begun so innocently, too, with a chance remark from her one day that it hardly seemed right that the king should be putting away his loyal wife after all these years.

  “Ah,” he had looked at her with a trace of condescension, “but you must consider his difficulty. He only has a daughter, and he needs a son.”

  “So if I only give you daughters,” she demanded, “will you be putting me away?”

  “Don’t be foolish, Cecily,” he said. “I am not a king.”

  Why was it that his manner irritated her? Was it the trace of smugness in his voice? Since he had been making a name for himself in the guild, he had become a little bit self-important sometimes, in her view.

  “His daughter could be queen. There have been reigning queens in their own right before now,” she pointed out correctly.

  “You don’t understand the situation in England,” he replied, dismissively. There was no doubt of it now. He was talking to her as if she were a fool. She stared at him furiously. Who did he think he was? But then hadn’t there always been a trace of contempt in his attitude towards her, ever since that foolish incident with the saffron scarf, before they were even married? However, she had no wish to quarrel with her husband, and so she did not reply.

  As time went by, the events in England became more shocking. Every kind of pressure was put on the poor queen to make her give up her position, but her Spanish pride and her piety made her declare, quite rightly, that she was King Henry’s loyal wife until the Holy Father told her otherwise. Meanwhile the king, it was said, was bewitched by a young lady called Anne Boleyn, and wanted to marry her as soon as possible. But though the Pope agreed to look into the matter, he still had not granted King Henry his annulment even though the king had begun to hint that he might go ahead anyway. Cecily had been shocked.

  “How can the king even think of marrying his whore”—this was how many people referred to Boleyn, despite Anne’s well-known refusal to give her body to the king without a wedding ring—“until the Holy Father has issued his ruling?” she asked.

  “You have not considered the Pope’s position,” Tidy replied, in a somewhat pompous tone. And he explained how the new King of Spain, who was Queen Catherine’s nephew, had also inherited the huge Hapsburg family dominions in other parts of Europe, together with the title of Holy Roman Emperor. Hapsburg family pride was too strong. The Emperor would never allow his aunt to be cast aside by the upstart Tudor king of little England. “The Pope dare not offend the Emperor, so he can’t give Henry his annulment,” Tidy explained. “Everyone knows that,” he added, unnecessarily.

  But to Cecily, this wasn’t the point. King Henry was defying the Pope. And when King Henry declared that he was Supreme Head of the English Church instead of the Pope, and told the Holy Father that if he excommunicated him “I care not a fig,” her outrage and contempt for the king were complete. The English Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, resigned at once. “More at least is a true Catholic,” she declared. But what of the rest of Henry’s subjects? What of the English Catholics of Dublin and the Pale?

  “It was you and your friends,” she pointed out to her husband, “who told me I was too Irish. Wasn’t it to defend the true Church that the English came to Ireland with a papal blessing in the first place? Yet it’s I who protest at this infamy, while I don’t hear a word from any of you.” And seeing that he had no answer to this she continued, “They say the Boleyn whore is a Lutheran heretic as well.”

  “That doesn’t make it true,” Tidy snapped. But she knew he’d heard the stories, too. And when a rumour came to the port that the Emperor might invade the English kingdom and seek help in Ireland, she irritably remarked, “Let him come, I say.”

  “Dear God don’t even think such things,” he cried in horror. “That would be treason. How can you say such wickedness?”

  “Wickedness?” she retorted. “And is it wicked of poor Queen Catherine to refuse to deny her wedding vows and the Holy Father, and to make herself a heretic like King Henry’s whore?”

  For it seemed to Cecily that she saw the matter very clearly. She imagined the poor queen’s pain. Didn’t Tidy think of that? She saw the cruelty of the English king. Did such things count for nothing? Not in the harsh world of politics. The unhappy queen in England was being put upon, just as, in her insignificant way, she had been put upon that day years ago when she’d been so stupidly arrested. It was all the same thing, the tyranny of men who would never be happy until they forced every woman to submit to their foolishness. She admired the queen for standing up for the truth and for her rights; and she admired, certainly, the few like Thomas More who had the courage of their convictions. But as for the rest of the men, whether in England or in Dublin, who thought they knew everything, she saw now that behind their pompous bluster, there lay only cowardice. And it was painful to think that her husband was no better than the rest of them. As the years of these stormy events in England went by, therefore, in her heart—though she never admitted it to her confessor and scarcely even to herself—she loved her husband less.

  It was soon after this last conversation that Cecily began to want a new house.

  Their lodgings lay outside the city walls in the Liberty of Saint Patrick and consisted of a workshop and two rooms. They had been happy enough there, but the rooms were not large and were overlooked by everyone else in the little courtyard; the children were growing, and so it was not unreasonable that Cecily should one day tell her husband, “We need more space.” During the last two years, Tidy had become aware of Cecily’s occasional irritation and dissatisfaction, but he had never quite known what to do about it; so he was only too glad of the chance to do something that would apparently make her happy. He started to look for something at once. But after a month, he had still not found anything that seemed satisfactory, and he was wondering what to do, when one day as he and Cecily were walking into the old walled city, she suddenly rema
rked, “I wish we could live in one of the towers.”

  There were numerous towers nowadays in Dublin’s city wall; each century seemed to have added a few. There were gate towers at the five big entrances in the outer wall, not counting the various river gates along the waterfront. Besides these, there were numerous small towers at intervals between the gates, some of which were habitable. A number of these gates provided lodgings, mostly for city functionaries of some kind, but some were let to craftsmen.

  “It would be nice to look out on something, instead of being overlooked,” she sighed.

  “If you had one of those towers, do you think you would be happy?” he had asked.

  “Yes,” she said, “I believe I should.”

  “I shouldn’t think there’s much chance,” he said; but secretly he set to work to secure one if he could, applying to Doyle himself for help. It would be a wonderful way to surprise and delight her.

  The months that followed had been particularly trying. Several times he heard that there might be a tower becoming available, but each time it proved to be a false report. He was so determined to surprise her that he never told her about his efforts, with the result that she would often badger him to find lodgings, and several times went out to look for something herself. In the meantime, events in England were going from bad to worse. Not only had King Henry made all the clergy submit to him, but he had appointed his own archbishop, who declared his marriage void and obligingly married him to Anne Boleyn who, whatever her earlier scruples, was now visibly pregnant. The final shocking event came in May of that year, when, with every pomp and ceremony, Anne was formally crowned queen. Cecily was beside herself with disgust.