The Princes of Ireland

by Edward Rutherfurd

  “It would do very well,” said MacGowan with a laugh. “You shall be Maurice Smith.”

  And so it was, early in the autumn of 1535, while Silken Thomas was on the perilous sea to London, that a descendant of the princely O’Byrnes and the noble Walshes, and, though he did not know it, of Deirdre and of Conall and of old Fergus himself, came down to live in Dublin under the English name of Maurice Smith.

  One week later, to his great surprise, Maurice received a visitor. It was his father.

  It had taken Sean a little while to find his son. He had supposed that Maurice might have gone to MacGowan, but when he first approached the merchant’s house and asked if there was a young man named O’Byrne living there, he had been told by the neighbours that there was not. He did not seem particularly put out by Maurice’s decision not to use his proper name.

  “You’ve been living under another name for so many years, that I expect it has become a habit,” Sean told him with a smile.

  He did not stay long, but with him he had brought a square box.

  “You may not choose to live at Rathconan,” he said, “but you may as well have something to remember your family by.”

  Then he left.

  After his father had gone, Maurice opened the box. To his surprise and delight, he found that it contained the drinking skull of old Fergus.

  In the Irish Parliament that met from May of 1536 until December of the following year, no member was more assiduous in his efforts to please the king than William Walsh the lawyer.

  Acting under the direction of the king’s council in London, the Irish Parliament passed measures to centralise the rule of Ireland in England, to raise taxes, and, of course, to recognise King Henry, and not the Pope, as Supreme Head of the Irish Church, while allowing his divorce and remarriage to be valid. And whether William Walsh and his fellow Members of Parliament liked all these measures or not, they passed them because they had to.

  The fall of the Fitzgeralds was terrifying. Silken Thomas, having first been politely received at the English court as promised, had been suddenly transferred to the Tower. Then his five uncles, including the two who had actually been on the English side, were taken to London and sent to the Tower, too. “We are to accuse them all of treason,” Walsh told his wife grimly when he returned from the Parliament one day. In the depths of that winter, the six Fitzgeralds were taken to London’s public gallows at Tyburn and brutally executed. It was vicious, it broke assurances given, it had been legalised by Parliament: it was pure Henry.

  Meanwhile, seventy-five of the principal men in Ireland who had acted with Silken Thomas were sentenced to execution. It sent a shudder through the community. And the lesser gentry, like William Walsh, who had gone along with the Fitzgeralds, were told that, depending upon the royal will, they might be able to get a pardon in return for a fine. “Thank God,” Walsh remarked, “that I had witnesses to prove that I took that damned oath under duress. But what the fine will be I don’t yet know, and half the men in Parliament are in a similar position.” Henry was keeping them waiting until they had passed all his legislation. “He has us,” Walsh confessed, “exactly where he wants us.”

  Some opposition there was, from gentlemen not under threat. When Henry demanded a harsh new tax on income, these loyal men were able to persuade him to be more lenient. “By the grace of God,” Walsh reported back to his family, “the tax will only be paid by the clergy.” But this was one of the few concessions that Henry made; and so that no one should doubt his determination to be Ireland’s lord and master, his lieutenants continued the forays around the edge of the Pale to subdue the territories and implacably hunted down any remaining members of the Kildare family who could give any trouble.

  Even so, it rather surprised Margaret that there was not more protest about Henry’s taking over the Church and his attack on the Pope. “Some of the clerical members have protested,” William told her. “But some of the strongest voices were so involved with Silken Thomas that they’ve either been deprived of their benefices or fled abroad. The fact is,” he added, “that although Henry has put himself in place of the Pope—which is an outrage, of course—there’s little sign that he means to make any changes to the forms and doctrines of the faith.” A new archbishop named Browne appeared in Dublin, who was said to have Protestant leanings, but so far he hadn’t said or done anything offensive. “The real question is what Henry means to do about the monasteries.”

  In England, the great process had already begun. Under the guise of a religious reform, the Tudor king, who always spent money faster than he got it, was planning to take all the rich lands and possessions of England’s medieval monasteries into his own hands and to sell them. Would he do the same in Ireland?

  “One effect of the business in England,” Walsh told his son Richard at the family meal one day, “is that it’s creating a huge amount of work for lawyers. Every monastery wants to be legally represented and to argue its case.” Working closely with his father, Richard had already made himself well liked by a number of the monastic houses. “For lawyers like ourselves, Richard,” his father continued, “the fees could be lucrative.”

  Though she said nothing, Margaret was secretly a little shocked by this attitude. Whatever their faults, surely the ancient monasteries of Ireland merited better treatment than this? When a measure to close just thirteen of the Irish monasteries was set before the Parliament, she was glad to hear that there had finally been some opposition. And when William, who had been away at the debates for several days, returned to the house one afternoon, she questioned him quite eagerly.

  “I was sure, in the end, our people wouldn’t stand for it,” she said.

  But William only chuckled.

  “That isn’t it at all,” he let her know. “The problem is who gets the land. The fear is that it will go to the king’s men and the Butlers. Some of your friends, the Fingal gentry, are going to Henry to demand their share. Doyle and his fellow aldermen have already been promised one of the monasteries to reward the city for opposing Silken Thomas.”

  “You make it sound as if it’s all about money,” she objected.

  “I’m afraid,” the lawyer sighed, “that it usually is.”

  The subject of money could never be far from Walsh’s mind at this time. Not only was the question of his royal pardon and fine an unresolved issue for many months but there was also the debt to Joan Doyle which remained unpaid. “And yet,” he remarked upon several occasions to Margaret, “these difficulties have also been a kind of blessing.” This was because of the effect they had on young Richard.

  For if Richard Walsh had cost his family more than they could afford while he lived as a young gentleman in London, he was only too painfully conscious of the fact now. If he had lost none of his boyhood charm, if with his mother’s dark red hair he possessed the most striking good looks, he was also a tolerably good lawyer and as determined as any young man could be to repay to his family what he believed he owed them, and then to make for himself a fortune in the world. Side by side with his father, he worked assiduously. He himself made any journey that he thought might tire his father; if William at day’s end needed to pore over ancient documents, he’d sit up all night with them so that his father would awake to find the job already done. He sought out new business, covered for William when he was busy in Parliament, learned everything he could about Ireland’s law.

  “I have to tell him, sometimes, to stop,” his father said proudly. “But he’s young and strong, these efforts will do him no harm.”

  Despite all these efforts, however, the Walshes were so far only able to pay the interest on Dame Doyle’s loan and put a little aside towards the coming royal fine.

  If he hadn’t been aware of the transaction before, the alderman himself was clearly aware of his wife’s loan now. Walsh knew this for a certainty one morning when he encountered Doyle on his way to a parliamentary session. He had heard the day before that the alderman’s daughter Mary had just
been granted the freedom of the city and so he politely congratulated him on this event, which Doyle received with affability. Then, falling in beside Walsh, the alderman genially murmured, “Here’s the fellow that’s borrowed a fortune from my wife.” Seeing Walsh wince, he grinned. “She told me all about it. I haven’t the least objection, you know.”

  It was easy enough for Doyle to be sanguine, Walsh thought a little enviously. As a loyal alderman who’d opposed Silken Thomas, with a wife connected to the Butlers and who’d even been attacked by O’Byrne, the rich merchant was high in royal favour and likely to profit from any monastic property or royal offices that might be going.

  “I can pay the interest,” William had answered, “but repaying the principal is going to take a time. I’ve the royal fine to consider, too.”

  “They say your son Richard is helping you.”

  “He is,” Walsh added with a little flush of pride, and told him of the young man’s efforts.

  “As to your loan,” Doyle said when Walsh had finished, “I’d just as soon she lent to you as any other borrower. You’re sounder than most.” He paused. “As to the fine, I’ll be glad to speak to the royal officials on your behalf. I have some credit there at present.” And a week later, encountering him again, Doyle had told him, “Your fine will be a token payment only. They know you’re not to blame.”

  When William related these conversations back to Margaret, she greeted the good news with a smile. But she still trembled inwardly. No word of her involvement in the kidnap attempt had ever been heard, so that she supposed that O’Byrne had kept silent or that, if he had told MacGowan, the grey merchant had for his own reasons decided to say nothing. But he could change his mind, or O’Byrne could talk. And hardly a day went by when, in her imagination, she didn’t find herself confronted by the memory of MacGowan’s terrible, cold, accusing eye, or the echo of the last words she had spoken to O’Byrne when he asked her what to do with Joan Doyle if he couldn’t complete the kidnap. “Kill her.”

  It was in the autumn of 1537, with the Parliament still in full deliberation, that Richard Walsh called at the house of Alderman Doyle to deliver a payment to his wife. He had only meant to remain there for as long as it took her to check the amount, and as he had been busy investigating some records in Christ Church that morning, he was in a rather dusty state. He was a little disconcerted, therefore, on being ushered into the parlour to find several of the Doyle family there. Besides Dame Doyle, there was the alderman, looking resplendent in a tunic of red and gold, one of his sons, his daughter Mary, and a younger sister. They might, he thought, have been taken for the family of a rich merchant or courtier in fashionable London whereas he, now, looked like a dusty clerk. It was a little humiliating, but it couldn’t be helped. They eyed him curiously.

  “I didn’t mean to intrude upon your family,” he said to Dame Doyle politely. “I only came to leave with you what was owed,” and he passed to her a small bag of coins. “I can return another time.”

  “Not at all.” Joan Doyle took it with a kindly smile. “I shan’t need to check it,” she remarked.

  “I hear you’re holding everything together while your father and I get through this session of Parliament,” Doyle remarked with a friendly nod; and Richard was grateful for this implication that the rich alderman and his father were on collegial terms. “He speaks well of you,” he added.

  It seemed to Richard that the alderman’s son, despite these encouraging words, was looking at him without much respect; the daughter Mary was watching him also, but he couldn’t tell what she was thinking. It was the youngest girl—she might have been thirteen, he supposed—who giggled. He looked at her enquiringly.

  “You’re all dirty.” And she pointed.

  He hadn’t seen the great dirt mark he had collected down one side of his sleeve. He also noticed that the cuff was frayed. He might have blushed. But fortunately the years in London as a fashionable fellow now came to his aid. He burst out laughing.

  “So I am. I hadn’t noticed.” He glanced at Doyle. “This is what comes of working in the Christ Church records. I hope,” he turned to Joan Doyle, “that I haven’t been dropping dust all over your house.”

  “I don’t expect you have.”

  “It has to be said, Richard,” Doyle’s tone might have been used to a member of his own family, “that you need some new clothes.”

  “I know,” Richard answered him frankly. “It’s true. I suppose that until our affairs are in a better state, I’m putting it off as long as I can.” He turned to the girl who had giggled and gave her a charming smile. “And when I get a nice new tunic, you may be sure I’ll come straight and show it to you.”

  Doyle nodded, but apparently bored by the subject of clothes, now cut in.

  “You mean to make your fortune, Richard?”

  “I do. If I can.”

  “A lawyer like yourself can do well enough in Dublin,” Doyle remarked, “but there’s more money in trade. A legal training can be useful in trade.”

  “I know, and I considered it; but I’ve no means of starting in that line. I must work with the assets I have.”

  Doyle nodded briefly, and the interview was over. Richard bowed politely to them all and turned to go. Just as he reached the door, he heard Joan Doyle.

  “You’ve wonderful hair,” she said.

  He was already out in Skinners Row when Mary Doyle spoke.

  She was quite a handsome girl, with her mother’s Spanish looks and her father’s hard, intelligent eyes.

  “He was at the Inns of Court?” She addressed her father.

  “He was.”

  “Is he a Walsh of Carrickmines?”

  “A branch of them, yes.” He gazed at her. “Why?”

  She looked back at him, with the same eyes.

  “Just wondering.”

  It was early in the year 1538 that MacGowan, chatting to Alderman Doyle one afternoon, was rather surprised when the rich merchant turned to him and asked him what he thought of young Richard Walsh.

  “It seems,” he confessed, “that my daughter Mary’s interested in him.”

  MacGowan considered. He thought of all that he knew of the parties concerned. He thought of the O’Byrne business, and of the strange figure who had come to Rathconan. O’Byrne had refused to tell him who it was. If O’Byrne wouldn’t tell him, MacGowan reckoned, he wouldn’t be telling anybody. But then he already knew. The idea had occurred to him as soon as the attack had begun. Apart from a few people around Silken Thomas, no one else could have known of Joan Doyle’s journey. And when, on the way back from poor Fintan’s wake, he had learned that Margaret had ridden out early that fatal day, he had been certain. He wasn’t sure why she’d done such a thing, but it had to be the Walsh woman. And hadn’t he seen it all in her face when he had stared at her: fear, guilt, terror?

  Could he prove it? Would any purpose be served if he could? Would it do his friend Doyle any good to know such a thing? No, he did not think it would. There were some secrets that were so dark they were better left at rest, under the hills. Let Margaret Walsh fear him and be grateful for his silence. That had always been his power: to know secrets.

  “I’ve heard nothing against young Richard Walsh at all,” he answered with perfect truth. “Everyone seems to like him.” He looked at Doyle curiously. “I’d have thought that you might be looking for a rich young gentleman. A girl like Mary—why, she’s even got the freedom of the city—would be a fine match for any family in Fingal.”

  Doyle grunted. “I thought of that, too. The trouble is,” and here the merchant sighed with a lifetime of experience, “rich young gentlemen don’t usually want to work.”

  “Ah,” MacGowan acknowledged quietly, “this is true.”

  When, in the summer of 1538, her son Richard asked her to call upon Joan Doyle, Margaret experienced a moment of panic. To enter the big Dublin house, to find herself face-to-face with the woman whose daughter Richard was about to marry—and she st
ill has no idea, she thought, that I tried to kill her. How could she sit there and look the woman in the eye?

  “She keeps asking when you’re coming to see her,” Richard reported. “She’ll think it very rude if you don’t.”

  And so, inwardly quaking, on a warm summer day, Margaret Walsh found herself entering through the heavy street door whose lineaments she remembered so well, to find herself moments later sitting comfortably in the parlour, alone with the wealthy little woman who thought she was her friend—and who disconcerted her even more, after embracing her warmly, by declaring with the happiest smile: “I’ll tell you a secret. I always thought that this would happen.”

  “You did?” Margaret could only stare at her in confusion.

  “Do you remember the time I came to you for shelter in the storm and he talked to us? I thought then: that’s just the boy for Mary. And look how well he’s turned out.”

  “I hope so. Thank you,” poor Margaret stammered.

  There was a pause, and hardly knowing how to fill the little silence, Margaret offered, “You were very good to us with the loan.” She thanked God that at least the royal fine had all been paid off recently so that, William had told her, he would soon be able to start the repayments to the Doyle woman. At the mention of the loan, Joan positively beamed.

  “It was my pleasure. As I said to your husband, ‘If it will help that lovely boy, that’s all I need to know.’ ” She sighed. “He has your wonderful hair.”

  “Ah,” Margaret nodded weakly. “He does.”

  “And our husbands being in this Parliament together—my husband has such a high regard for yours, as you know—it has brought our two families quite close together.”

  For a moment Margaret wondered whether to say it was a pity they’d been on opposite sides in Silken Thomas’s revolt, and then thought better of it. But one question did come into her mind.

  “There was a time,” she was watching the Doyle woman carefully, “when my husband had hoped to enter Parliament and was denied.”