The Conquering Family

by Thomas B. Costain

  Deeper than all would be his regrets for the dream, now shattered beyond repair. The star of empire which had always blazed above him had fallen from the sky. He could expect no acceptance of what had been in his mind now that this had happened. Sixteen words, uttered in a sudden fury, had undone all his striving and planning.

  When Henry emerged from his tower room at last, he walked out on the narrow space behind the battlements of the keep. It was getting late, and he wondered why the bells of the abbey which he could see just beyond the walls of the town had not sounded compline. This set him to thinking, and he realized then that he had not heard the bells at all that day.

  In a sudden panic he raced down the stairs and into the hall, where people were idling about in readiness for supper. He stopped by one of them to ask a question in an urgent whisper. Was it true, then, that the ban had been placed?

  The answer was a reluctant affirmative. The Archbishop of Sens, without waiting on Rome for confirmation, had laid all Normandy under an interdict. No bells had rung, no masses had been said. All day people had been coming to the gates, white-faced, asking questions. What would happen to them? Could they no longer be married by the Church? Would there be no chance to confess their sins? Would the dying be allowed to go from the world unshriven?

  Although Henry has been called irreligious, this is far from the truth. He shared the faith of all men and, in addition, he had a thorough respect for the power of the Church. The thought in his mind now would be what he might expect if he were placed under the ban himself. Would other men shun a king? Would he be hampered in carrying on the affairs of state? Would he have to sit alone as he had compelled the two bishops to do?

  But a few moments of anxious reflection would suffice for Henry. With him a desperate prospect called for action. First he indulged in a large and furiously quick meal, having three days of fasting to make up for, and then he set his mind to ways of repairing this disaster, of facing the whirlwind he had unleashed. The result was that the Archbishop of Rouen, with two other high ecclesiastical officers, was sent off to Rome, where the Pope had now established himself, with explanations of the mistake which had produced the tragedy and a statement of the amends Henry was prepared to make. This done, he realized that the archbishop was an old man and would travel in slow and solemn state. Accordingly he made up another party of younger men, abbots and archdeacons, with instructions to reach Rome as fast as they could and hold matters in abeyance there until the properly authorized trio of older men put in an appearance.

  It was well that he took this double precaution. The young men, reaching the Eternal City long before His Grace of Rouen, found themselves in an atmosphere of the most bitter hostility. Alexander had been so outraged that he had gone into seclusion himself for five days, in vain regrets, no doubt, for the vacillating part he had played while Thomas à Becket was alive. Now he was ready to loose the lightning of his wrath, to excommunicate Henry and lay England under an interdict. By a desperate canvass of the whole papal court, the first envoys accomplished what they had been sent to do, however; they persuaded Alexander to suspend judgment until the bishops arrived and had been heard.

  When the Pontiff realized that Henry was ready to submit to penalties and also to abate some of the more objectionable clauses of the Constitutions of Clarendon, his hand was stayed. The excommunication of a monarch as powerful as Henry would have been a serious matter, and without a doubt Alexander was relieved that he need not, after all, proceed to this dangerous extreme.

  It was agreed that the English King would not hold the Church in England responsible to him in points of law but would again allow appeals to Rome. Infringement of church rights previously established would cease. Henry was to take the cross and fight in Palestine or, if this should prove impossible, he would pay the cost of maintaining two hundred of the Knights Templars in the field for a period of three years. Less important stipulations were made. His son Henry would be crowned a second time in full accord with church practice, the adherents of Becket would be pardoned and left in the posts they occupied, ample compensation would be made for the years of looting at Canterbury, and funds would be provided for the sisters of the murdered man, Mary and Agnes Becket.

  It will be seen from this that Henry did not throw himself entirely on the mercy of the Pope. He made concessions, but they were not sweeping enough to have satisfied Thomas à Becket had the primate been alive to pass on them. The King was too tough of fiber for unconditional surrender. He had been guilty of a series of mistakes and of a great sin, but he did not whine for pardon as his son John was to do at a later period. Henry never forgot his responsibilities as King of England.

  The penance he took on himself to pay was no convenient gesture, no halfhearted effort. After his journey to Ireland, which will be dealt with in the next chapter, he came back to England for the purpose. It was at the most critical stage of his whole reign. His sons had united in a family mutiny and had allied themselves with the perpetual enemy, Louis of France, in an attack on Normandy. Eleanor was at the side of her beloved Richard, who could do no wrong. The King of Scotland, William the Lion, was invading Northumberland. The Earl of Leicester, espousing the cause of the rebellious sons, had landed with an army of mercenaries in Norfolk. It seemed quite possible that Henry would go down against such a powerful combination.

  He landed at Southampton and rode from there to Canterbury without a stop, except to change horses and for hurried meals. He dismounted at the chapel of St. Nicholas outside the city and walked to St. Dunstan’s Oratory, where he put on a hair shirt and over that the gown of a pilgrim. With bare feet, with staff in one hand and the essential penny in the other, he walked through the streets of Canterbury to the cathedral. News of his coming had preceded him and the streets were filled with people, awed into silence by the spectacle of the much-feared King walking on bare feet, which had already begun to bleed, to plead like any common penitent.

  Henry played the role fully and humbly. He prostrated himself and kissed the stones where Thomas à Becket had fallen. Then he went to the crypt and lay before the tomb. Here he made confession that, although he had not willed the death of the Martyr, he was responsible for it because of the words he had spoken. He begged forgiveness for his wickedness and pride.

  Baring his back, he asked that the waxed cord of flagellation be used, that each high officer of Canterbury strike him five times and each of the monks three. The hundreds of strokes he thus demanded bruised and lacerated him so badly that the last ones to wield the cord had to be driven to it by royal insistence. Following this extreme measure, the King sat in silence before the tomb for the balance of the day and all of the night which followed. As the doors of the cathedral had been thrown open at his express command, the townspeople ventured in and stood at a distance while their ruler kept his long vigil. This was indeed something to see, the mighty monarch, master of so large a part of the known world, sitting in sackcloth, doing humble penance for his sins.

  Henry did not rise until dawn. He again crossed Canterbury on bare feet. At the oratory he dressed and took to horse. On reaching London he went to the Tower, and on his first night he slept soundly in the belief that he had at last purged himself of his fault.

  He was awakened before dawn by a loud rapping at his chamber door. A servant entered with word that a messenger had arrived from the north and was waiting outside. Crawling from his bed with the greatest difficulty, for his back was now stiff and painful, the King hobbled to the door. The messenger, he saw, was covered with dust from many hours in the saddle.

  “My lord, I am servant to Ranulf de Glanville,” said the man, “and I come with good tidings.”

  The King waited. He was badly in need of good tidings. The thought undoubtedly was in his mind, Can this be a sign that I am forgiven?

  “Behold, my lord, he holds your enemy, the King of Scots, in chains at Richmond!”

  Henry’s mind took fire at this news. William the Lion defeated an
d captured! A victory indeed! He would confound all his enemies with such a start as this. Painfully he walked to a window, a narrow slit in the thick masonry. All the bells in London were starting to ring for the victory. People were pouring into the streets, shouting to each other jubilantly. The sun was just rising over the river.

  In the mood of humility which gripped him still, the King was certain that this was his reward, the proof that he had been forgiven. It must have seemed to him as he watched the rays of the sun gild the waters of the estuary that this would be the finest day he had ever known.

  CHAPTER V

  The Invasion of Ireland

  IT has been customary in writing of the efforts made to conquer Ireland during the reign of Henry II to speak of the country as uncivilized and barbarous. The evidence does not bear this out: conditions there do not seem much different, at least, from what they had been in England a relatively short time before. The Danish invasions had never penetrated far beyond the eastern coast, and the population was divided into two sections: the inhabitants of the cities along the Irish Sea, the Ostmen, as they were called, where living was on much the same scale as in England at the time of the Conquest, and the real Irish who had to themselves the beautiful country of the interior and the west, the Ireland of mountain and lake, of red deer and wild boar, the Ireland of green fields and soft winds. The real Irish people were wild and untamable, but they do not deserve to be described as savage kerns existing in bogs and little better than the beasts they hunted. The historian of the invasion, Giraldus Cambrensis speaks of the people in the most uncomplimentary way and yet allows himself to lapse into references which leave the opposite impression. Nature, he says, “leads each to man’s estate, conspicuous for a tall and handsome form, regular features, and a fresh complexion.” The priests, he found, were scrupulously regular in the performance of their duties and never allowed themselves more than one meal a day (but were less abstemious in the matter of drink); all the people were musical and played on two instruments, the lute and the timbrel. The Irish were a race of minstrels, as the huge mass of their earliest literature attests, the Ulster cycle of romances and the Ossianic songs which continue of interest to the present day. Irish enamels had already set the mold for all Byzantine and European work.

  It must be said that the Irish people were so prone to quarrel among themselves that they were broken up into many small kingdoms, as the English had been before the time of Egbert, but they had developed the beginnings of a democracy of their own. The choice of a king was always, in theory at least, in the hands of the people. Certainly they had never allowed themselves to be held in the iron slavery of feudalism as had the people of Normandy, from whom the criticisms come. The Brehon Code contained some enlightened conceptions of law.

  Two excuses for the invasion are generally given. There was the slave trade between the two countries which had existed for centuries. It seems to have been one-sided. The Ostmen bought Anglo-Saxons as fast as they could be shipped across the narrow sea, and the victims of the traffic constituted the servant class along the eastern coast of Ireland. Clearly, however, the odium must attach to the sellers, who were prepared to bargain away their natural children and their dependents, in even greater degree than to the buyers. The second excuse was the independent status of the Church in Ireland. Although the people showed then the same devotion they have continued to display throughout the centuries, no effort had been made to organize the Church along the lines followed elsewhere. They had archbishops but no central authority, and they did not pay Peter’s pence to Rome. The bull of Adrian IV, if it had actually been promulgated, was the first tangible evidence of the desire which all pontiffs had shared to see the Irish Church brought into uniformity with the rest of Christianity.

  The real reason was that the Norman kings wanted to add Ireland to their possessions. William Rufus would have made the effort if he had lived long enough. Although Morogh O’Brien of Leinster had sent logs of bog oak grown along the Liffey to serve for the roof of the great new hall the Red King was building at Westminster as a gesture of friendship, the latter had boasted he would make a bridge of his ships over which his soldiers could march on their mission of conquest. The motive for the invasion cannot be explained or condoned on any grounds of necessity or expediency. It was the final phase of the roving instinct which had brought the marauding sea dogs to the north of France in the first place.

  Perhaps the fact that Irish independence had been maintained in the face of Roman and Danish aggression, while the people of England had succumbed, acted as a challenge to the ironclad warriors who had made themselves the masters of the English. Where the legion of Rome and the galley of the vikings had failed, the Norman might would prevail.

  2

  A quarrel among Irish rulers was what served to set into execution the plans which had been maturing so long in the mind of Henry. Dermod, son of Morogh, sometimes called McCarty-More, was now King of Leinster. He was a hot-tempered, proud, and savage man, big of frame and loud of voice. He cannot have been entirely bad, however, because Giraldus, who accompanied the first expedition and saw everything with his own eyes, says of him, “He became an oppressor of the nobility and began to tyrannize in a grievous and intolerable manner over the great men of the land.” The fact that many of the common men rallied around him at the most critical stage of his later troubles might suggest that he had done his tyrannizing in the right place. One of the most grievous and least tolerable things he did was to steal Devorgilla, the wife of Tieghernan O’Rourke, King of Breffny and East Meath. As Tieghernan was nicknamed Monoculus or the One-Eyed, it may have been that Devorgilla was so anxious to be stolen that the full blame cannot be laid on the shoulders of the amorous King of Leinster. At any rate, it was fourteen years after the theft before a confederacy was formed with Tieghernan which drove Dermod from Leinster, and so the assertion of Giraldus that it was his wife-stealing which cost him his throne is not an acceptable explanation. The confederacy was headed by Roderick, King of Connaught, and as many of the great men of Leinster did not like being tyrannized over and deprived of their hereditary rights, they joined in with the enemies of their ruler and saw to it that he was forced to quit Ireland.

  At this stage Dermod displayed the worst side of his nature. Prepared to sell the liberty of the people of Ireland to avenge himself on his enemies, he went to Aquitaine, where Henry was stationed at the time, and offered to do homage for his kingdom if the English ruler would aid him in regaining his throne. Henry was unable to undertake an expedition then, but he gave a letter to the renegade which read as follows:

  Henry, king of England, duke of Normandy and Aquitaine and count of Anjou to all his liegemen, English, Norman, Welsh and Scots, and to all nations subject to his sway, sends greetings. Whensoever these our letters shall come unto you, know ye that we have taken Dermod, prince of the men of Leinster, into the bosom of our grace, and good-will. Wherefore, too, whosoever within the bounds of our dominions shall be willing to lend aid to him, as being our vassal and liegeman, to the recovery of his own, let him know that he hath our favor and permission to that end.

  This was not what Dermod had hoped for, but at any rate it opened a way for him. He betook himself to Wales and found there two men who were willing to provide him with assistance. The first was Rhys, Prince of South Wales, a descendant of Princess Nesta, who had been one of the many mistresses of Henry I. She had later married Gerald of Windsor and, as the Norman patronymic had come into general use, her descendants were variously known as Fitz-Henrys and Fitz-Geralds. They were mostly landless men and ready for an adventure in Ireland. The second was Richard de Clare, the Earl of Striguil and nicknamed Strong-bow, who was at Bristol when Dermod came to that city. This Norman nobleman was in worse straits than the Welsh-Norman descendants of Nesta, having a pack of creditors on his trail. He seems to have been curiously different from the typical Norman adventurer, red-haired and with features as fine as a woman’s, a high-pitched voi
ce, and the most courteous of manners. His arms were so long that he could touch his knees while standing upright. Dermod had heard of him as a man of desperate courage and great resource, and he was amazed at their first meeting, believing there had been a mistake. He soon became conscious, however, of the power under the almost effeminate manners of this landless nobleman. Strongbow lent a willing ear to the proposals of the dispossessed Irishman. It was agreed between them that Strongbow would get together a large force of volunteers and that, if the venture proved a success, he was to have Dermod’s eldest daughter Eva as his wife and come into the overlordship of Leinster in due course.

  Not waiting for his confederates to join him, Dermod sailed across the Irish Sea at once, accompanied by one young Norman only, Richard Fitz-Godobert, and a few servants. His arrival created a stir, but he was permitted to stay on condition that he send all members of his party back and that he himself take up his residence in the monastery of Ferns. Dermod agreed and went into seclusion for the winter. He was closely watched, for the Norman escort had served as a warning of what was in the wind. Dermod, however, was as circumspect as he had always before been rash and injudicious, and he gave them no excuse for interference.

  Early in the following May the first of his buccaneering confederates sailed across the Irish Sea. Robert Fitz-Stephen was in command with one hundred men-at-arms and three hundred Welsh archers, armed with the great longbow which later was to win so many battles for the English. They landed in a creek called Bannow south of Wexford and encamped there on an island. The deposed King promptly appeared with five hundred of his former subjects who had rallied to his banner. The combined forces so surprised the defenders of Wexford with their shining armor and their caparisoned horses that, instead of giving battle in the open as they had intended, the Irish retreated behind the walls of the city. It took two days of continuous assault to storm the walls, and the defenders then gave in, acknowledging Dermod as their lawful lord again. The conquest of Ossory followed in quick order, and this placed Dermod in full possession of his domain of Leinster. He gave lands along the coast between Wexford and Waterford to his Norman allies in conformance with his promises. It looked as though the Irish adventure had been brought to a successful conclusion before the man whose name was later to be associated with it as leader, the deceptively mild Richard de Clare, had stirred from his English base.