Also, the church had become rather temporal in its outlook; the monasteries had built up huge power, and in many cases the abbots controlled all the money for themselves and their cronies and their wives and their flocks of snotty-nosed children and their concubines. Now—be warned! There are some who will accuse you of blasphemy or heresy or something equally racy and thrilling if you’re heard to murmur, “Has nothing changed?”
In short, the Christian church in Ireland had dissipated much of its own glory in exchange for money and power, and Rome first, then Canterbury, became agitated. Some Irish priests and monks tried to improve matters from within, but they only succeeded in making the whole boiling a great deal messier, and they’re too insignificant to bother with here. A poor professor of history has few powers—but one of them is the right to ignore those who he thinks made no difference to the spin of the earth.
In eleven-fifty-five, the same Pope Adrian, whose maiden name, if you grasp the expression, was Nicholas Breakspear, gave Henry the Second a Papal Bull requesting him to bring Ireland into line. Many people believe it wasn’t a Papal Bull, that it was all bull, if you get my meaning—in other words, that the French-speaking English king had the crucial document forged. Such convenient penmanship crops up often in the history of England’s dealings with Ireland.
In any case, whether the Papal Bull was forged or not, it had balls, and you know how big a bull’s balls are; Henry was armed with the moral authority to tackle Ireland. But Henry was a busy man. He had wars to fight in his French provinces, and he had England to govern, and he knew that Ireland was never a country the English could manage; it always was and would always be a country the English could only subdue. So he sat on his Papal Bull, so to speak, and did nothing—even though he not only wanted control of Ireland, he needed it, because he had several sons to settle down, to get other kingdoms and lands for.
When politicians and those who observe them consider matters, they frequently fall into the trap of assuming—hopefully or desperately, depending which side they’re on—that a status quo may last forever. They forget what changes things—events. That’s what all politics are changed by—events. And eleven years after the ink dried on the behind of the Papal Bull, events here gave Henry his way into Ireland.
From the west, the great Rory O’Connor expanded his kingship of Connacht and became the High King, to whom all others should acknowledge loyalty. In order to become High King, he had had to defeat a gentleman called Dermot MacMurrough, the king of Leinster, a prime and driven man, who was no easy foe.
Now, the general interpretation you’ll have been given in school is like this: “Dermot MacMurrough was the greatest Irish traitor who ever lived—because he and he alone invited the Normans, i.e., the English, into Ireland and actually led them in here.”
That makes it sound as if Dermot had gone over and sold his country, lock, stock, and foaming barrel to the people who became the British—the slithering son of a bitch. No, no—that’s not how it was.
First of all, he went abroad because he was deposed as king of the eastern province of Leinster and banished from Ireland by the High King, Rory O’Connor. The fact that he had abducted the daughter of the High King and the wife of O’Rourke of Breffni, a passive sort of a dame called Devorgilla, had no small part to play in this. But the real reason he went is that he was simply trying to raise an army and regain his kingship of Leinster.
How many of our singers and whistlers, whose idea of patriotism is to hate England and all things English—how many of them would have been out of a job if Dermot had gone, say, to Belgium or to Morocco looking for help? But he didn’t. No, ladies and gentlemen, he did what any pragmatic man would do—he went to the nearest possible port of call.
As for Dermot MacMurrough being the traitor who sold out our glorious Isle of Saints and Scholars to these grunting barbarians—nonsense. Long before then, people from England were in and out of here like a fiddler’s elbow. No doubt about it, folk went back and forth between the two islands like a weaver’s shuttle, but that idea would, of course, rob Irish history of some of its drama. And heaven forfend that we do that—there’d be many people out of a job.
Anyway: Henry the Second gave Dermot permission to recruit such gentlemen as would be willing to embark upon an Irish adventure. Dermot’s method of recruitment was to read aloud, at markets and meeting places, a letter from the king. In Wales, where the land was poor and the king had long ignored the local gentry, some Norman knights living there heard the call and climbed aboard Dermot’s bandwagon in the years eleven-sixty-seven, eleven sixty-nine, and most powerfully in eleven-seventy.
According to popular opinion, that’s the time when Ireland’s doom at the hands of England was commenced and sealed. Popular opinion? What I suggest you do with popular opinion is morally questionable and biologically impossible. But it is true that platoons of soldiers arrived in Ireland, on the coasts of the southeast, led by Norman knights, and that surely and not so slowly they overwhelmed the incumbent people, mostly old Irish with some Viking intermarriage.
Ironically, in terms of colonization, the two cities first conquered by the new invaders had the Viking word fjord as suffixes to their names—Wex-fjord and Water-fjord—because they had been established by Norse raiders.
Within the first years of the Norman presence here, there began the great assimilation, which later caused the Normans to be accused of growing “more Irish than the Irish themselves.” And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where your course of study begins—in the year eleven-seventy, with the arrival of a very superior Norman gentleman by name of Richard FitzGilbert de Clare, the former earl of Pembroke; he will be more familiar to you by his nickname, “Strongbow.”
In the unlikely event that any of you has an imagination seeking further stimulus concerning this passage of history, some additional illumination may be derived from the very fine painting, The Marriage of Strongbow, by my distinguished relation, Daniel MacLise. It hangs in the National Gallery in Merrion Square, and admission is free. The costar in this epic, as you will see if you bother to go and look at it, is Strongbow’s wife, Aoife or Eva, the daughter of Dermot MacMurrough.
All-right-very-well-so: somewhere in my desiccated frame I harbor an irrepressible humanitarianism. Does anyone among you understand a syllable of that sentence? Ah, why should you, straight from the bogs and backyards of our green and bilious land? What I’m saying is—I always cut the first lecture short for first-year students in case you get brain fever or wind. This is the last concession you’ll get from me. Go now, explore the seamy delights of our capital city, which once had more whorehouses than Bombay, and make sure you’re back here, disease-free, in time for the next lecture.
T. Bartlett Ryle had halted in mid-flow. He swung right around, faced the wall for a long moment, then swung back again and peered up at the ascending rows of students.
“H’m,” he said—and nothing more.
Placing his long feet carefully ahead of him, he stalked from the podium like a stork in tweeds.
Ronan eyed his fellows jostling from the lecture. How many of them truly loved history? No point in talking to those who didn’t. A tall girl, gathering her books into a Red Riding Hood basket, eyed Ronan back.
“A scream, isn’t he?” she intoned. “A riot. A chuckle. A chortle. A hoot.”
Ronan laughed. “You sound like him.”
“If this is what he does to me in half an hour, I’ll be in tweed britches by Christmas.”
“Great, though, wasn’t it?”
“Was it?” She cocked her head to one side and tried to look like an owl. “If I don’t know yet, how do you know?”
Ronan shrugged. “He’s—exciting.”
She nudged her spectacles farther up on her nose.
“You’ll do well. If you suck up to him like that.”
Ronan protested. “No. I meant it. He was funny. He’s different.”
“H’m,” Red Riding Hood said. “Wa
it till you hand in an essay. They say that fella marks in blood.”
Kate had arranged to meet Ronan for lunch. She laughed at his account of Bartlett Ryle and asked merry questions.
“Did he have snuff stains down his lapels?
“And was he wearing a gray speckled tweed suit? The leather patches on the elbows, the cuffs?
“And did he have a dirty white shirt? I mean, very dirty? And a polka-dot bow tie?”
Ronan said, “Did you ever see such scratching?”
“You know, don’t you, that he was giving that lecture in your father’s time? And your father asked me these same questions after my first lecture.”
“I loved it.”
“His books are wonderful. He debunks everything. The bishops hate him.” She patted Ronan’s arm. “You’re going to have a great time.”
In 1960, Kate was thirty-seven—old now for marriage, even in slow rural Ireland. Yet she looked wonderful, brown eyes and hands of ivory. She herself disliked that her right ear protruded more than her left and she mostly arranged her black hair to hide it. With the looks came sweetness and light; a readiness to laugh; a gift for listening. Her speech was quick, and during conversation she groomed constantly, drawing strands of hair through her fingers, fixing a sleeve or a collar; sometimes, when very animated, she grasped the forearm of the other person.
Good with money (and with a sizable inheritance), she bought expensive clothes a notch above her friends’ taste. Waisted jackets that shaped her figure and long skirts over high boots gave her a Russian look years ahead of fashion; with a taste sharpened by fashion magazines, she wore black turtleneck sweaters and even owned cocktail dresses; high-complexioned, she rarely used cosmetics.
She also had a secret life. To the great disapproval of her sister, Kate spent much of her money on underwear. She shunned the armor of the day, all that rubber and whale-bone; she wore light fabrics in dainty colors. And she made it all part of her mood; the more dismal a day’s prospect, the more sensual the underwear—silks and satins next to her skin. With some added wit: she wore her spicier pieces on Sundays.
Ronan paid for lunch out of his allowance, and Kate taught him how to calculate the tip. She waited outside, and the cashier said, “Hey, your girlfriend left her hat.”
“We both win,” said Kate. “It means that you look older than eighteen, and I look younger than thirty-seven. What do you want to do now?”
“How about ‘the distinguished relation, Daniel MacLise’?”
Nobody else entered the National Gallery during their visit; no other footsteps clicked the solemn floors. The only sound came from a square-built lady attendant who sucked her teeth. When they were out of her earshot, Ronan began to suck his teeth, and Kate punched him on the arm.
Heroic, on a vast canvas, gory and epic, The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife by Daniel MacLise “ignored metaphor and irony”—according to Kate, who moved into lecture mode.
“But it has two principal values. It arrests time seven hundred and ninety years ago. Even though it can’t have the impact of an eyewitness record, it gives an artist’s impression. Which has a kind of truth. And secondly, it shows a moment in Ireland’s history of art, when a painter like MacLise used his skill and technique to say that his country needs its history.”
“You’re beginning to sound like Professor Ryle.”
“Seriously. Look at it. This might be mistaken for a classical scene, the great building and the tableau of the marriage, the corpses everywhere. And see the way Aoife is concentrating on getting married? She doesn’t care that her bridegroom has just slaughtered all these people—her own countrymen, for heaven’s sake. There’s blood running down the streets, and she loves the man who spilled it. This painting says that we too, on this little island, we have our own heroic past to match Greece and Rome.”
All that first week, Kate waited for Ronan in Saint Stephen’s Green, always in the same deck chair. They ate sandwiches as he told of his morning, and like everyone else, they fed the ducks with the crumbs. Her freckles swarmed in the sunshine. Everywhere they went, she took Ronan’s arm; man after man, Dublin turned its head to look at her.
Soon the term settled down for her too; she was the only woman on the teaching staff of Belvedere College, a Jesuit school for boys. And the household developed a routine; Ronan had late lectures two evenings; Kate always reached home by five o’clock; after supper Ronan studied, every night of the week. He resisted all social life—whether pushed by Kate or pulled by peers.
Toward the end of their second week, a letter arrived from John. After what he called “a casual inquiry,” the Folklore Commission had replied to say they had made a recording in county Cavan of a storyteller. If Ronan would care to contact them, they would try and arrange a playback.
Ronan cheered. “They’ll know where he was—they’ll know where to find him!”
From her school, Kate telephoned. That afternoon, she and Ronan sat in a small booth in the Folklore Commission’s offices with Sean O’Sullivan, the director, a man of quick dark eyes.
“The Scandinavians much admire us,” said Mr. O’Sullivan. “In fact, we’re the model for many countries who want to preserve their own history.” His voice seesawed in the accents of the far southwest. “Now, we don’t know if the man on this tape is the same man you’re interested in. Your father thinks it might be.”
The director instructed his technician to switch on a large green machine.
First, they heard the hissing that haunted all tape at that time. Through the sibilance echoed a hesitant voice: “Field Recording made on Sunday the nineteenth of July, nineteen-fifty-nine, at nine-thirty P.M., in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Kevin MacKenna of Cootehill. The recordist on behalf of the Irish Folklore Commission is Daniel P. Kelly.”
Then Daniel P. Kelly said, “You’re comfortable there, sir?”
Next, they heard the unmistakable voice: “Is that thing listening to me?”
“That’s the microphone—I’ll hold it here, and you just talk into it.”
Ronan quickened; this was the voice he wanted to hear every day of his life. It felt almost like a dream now—all the times he thought of the stories; all the days he wondered where the old man was. At the simplest level, this tape was a kind of breakthrough in his search—if this had been made fifteen months ago, the man was probably still alive. How many times had Ronan speculated the worst? Pneumonia; tuberculosis; age.
After some rustling and clearing of his throat, the Storyteller began. A few phrases in, and Ronan’s heart raced once more with the feeling that the old man spoke directly to him and him alone.
I’M GREATLY DRAWN TO EPIC PEOPLE. THE HEROIC in man is something for which we should all reach in ourselves. If we find we don’t possess our own heroism, we should respect it wherever we come across it, in friend or in foe.
This subject came to my mind last week when I was treading the low sand hills of the southeast, where the maritime counties of Waterford and Wexford meet. It was a sunny day, as it often is down there, and I began to think about a hero whose first contact with us was by way of the sea.
When you live in a country that’s surrounded by water, you think about things in a way that’s different from other countries, where the sea isn’t as important. Here in Ireland, nobody lives more than seventy miles from great water. This island is a hundred and forty miles wide at its broadest—and I make it about two hundred and seventy from top to bottom. So: in olden days when somebody came to us from foreign parts, they first had to deal with the sea.
Now, down around the tip of Wexford, the waters are mostly benign. I’m thinking of Kilmore Quay, where every Christmas the local families sing private hymns that are hundreds of years old. And I’m thinking of the Saltee Islands, where the birds bask in sunshine so sweet that some days you would think the place Mediterranean.
Therefore, if you wanted to send a raiding party to Ireland, that is probably the best coast on which to land. The point I’m
coming to is this—and some people say it’s the most important point in all our Irish history.
Once upon a time, on a summer day, a robber baron landed on that serene, sunny coast. He was a Norman, from Normandy in France, but he had lived many years in Wales, sixty miles across the sea from us. When he came here, he was already an epic figure, and when he left us for the next world, he was more than epic—he was a leading light in our history. Because from that robber baron’s arrival flowed everything that the outside world knows of Irish politics, if it knows anything. This man’s story is my tale tonight—his name was Strongbow.
Strongbow landed at Baginbun. You all know the old rhyme; “’Twas at the creek of Baginbun/Old Ireland, she was lost and won.” It was the first of August, eleven-seventy, the day that changed Ireland forever. Strongbow was tall amongst men of that time, which means that he was probably about five feet ten inches. If you look at the crusader knight in armor lying in Saint Michan’s Church in Dublin, you’ll marvel at how small were the men of long ago—but not Strongbow, with his broad shoulders and big head. He had other fine knights with him that August day, and a goodly array of strong and varied troops. Their mission was simple—their soldiers were under orders to capture land.
Now, long before Strongbow arrived, many Normans had already been here—men with names like Fitzgerald and de Prendergast and then, in May eleven-seventy, a fellow called Raymond le Gros, Raymond the Fat. He was the advance party for Strongbow, and he made camp on Bannow Island, a sandy bank by Baginbun Creek, which has long since been inundated by the sea.
Strongbow had been invited here by the king of Leinster, a man called Dermot MacMurrough, over whose character we must cast some grave doubts. But Dermot is a tale for another night, when the dogs have stopped barking and the birds have gone to sleep.
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