Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 26.djvu/13

Henry II coast from Waterford to Dublin; their leader, Richard de Clare (d. 1176) [q. v.], was married to Diarmait's daughter; on Diarmait's death (May 1171) he set himself up as Earl of Leinster, and was in a fair way to become the head of an independent feudal state whose growth might soon have threatened England with a new peril, if Henry had not summarily taken the matter into his own hands. The papal legates were on the point of entering Normandy when he announced to his barons that he was going to Ireland. Early in August he landed at Portsmouth; a month later he received the submission of Earl Richard, whom he had summoned to a meeting on the Welsh border; by the end of September he was at Pembroke, and a fleet of four hundred ships was gathering in Milford Haven; and on 17 Oct. he landed at Waterford with some four thousand men. He had left strict orders both in Normandy and in England that the ports should be closed to all clerks, and that no man should follow him unless specially summoned; but more effectual than these precautions was the stormy wind of the western sea, which for nearly six months severed all communication between Ireland and the rest of the world. Those six months were fateful alike for Ireland and for England; in them was laid the foundation of Ireland's subjection to the English crown. The hostile parties, whether of natives or invaders, all alike saw their only hope in submission to the new comer, and all alike laid themselves at his feet. Before Christmas 1171—which he kept at Dublin, in a palace built of wattles after the Irish fashion—Waterford, Wexford, Limerick, and Cork were in his hands, and all the Irish princes, except the king of Connaught, had given him hostages and promised tribute. The bishops and clergy made their formal submission to him at Cashel. With the promise of their spiritual obedience their conqueror might hope to strike a bargain with Rome; and the tidings which at last (March 1172) reached him from England made him feel that the bargain must be struck without delay. What little he could do for Ireland at the moment he did before he left her. He compelled Earl Richard and his fellow-adventurers to resign their conquests to him, and parcelled them out afresh as fiefs to be held in obedience to himself as sovereign; he appointed Hugh de Lacy to act as his representative and vicegerent; he fortified and garrisoned the coast towns; and he started Dublin, ruined as it was by three sieges in two years, on a new career of prosperity by granting it to the burghers of Bristol to colonise and raise into a trading centre as free and flourishing as their own native city. He sailed from Wexford on Easter night; by the middle of May he was in Normandy; on Sunday 21 May he met the legates at Avranches, purged himself of complicity in the primate's death, promised expiation, and abjured his ‘customs;’ four months later he repeated his submission, and was publicly absolved.

It was no light matter that had moved the king thus to break off the work which he had but just begun in Ireland and to surrender the constitutions which he had so stubbornly maintained for eight years in the teeth of primate and pope; it was the discovery that in leaving his eldest son as king in his stead he had placed within reach of his foes a weapon which they were quick to use against him, and which was only too ready to lend itself to their use. Father and son no sooner met again than the young king asserted his claim to be acknowledged as actual ruler of England, or, if not of England, then of Normandy and the Angevin lands. Henry, busy now with a scheme for the marriage of his youngest son John to the heiress of Maurienne, which would have given him command over all the passes of the Alps, not only refused the claim but proposed to settle upon John three of the most important castles in Anjou and Touraine. The young king hereupon fled to the court of France, and on his appearance there a vast conspiracy came to light. The French king, the counts of Blois, Flanders, and Boulogne, the king of Scots, a crowd of barons in England, Normandy, Aquitaine, and the Angevin lands, his brothers Richard and Geoffrey, his mother Queen Eleanor, ranged themselves at once upon his side; and Henry had scarcely time to fortify the Norman frontier, recall some of his troops from Ireland, and gather a force of Brabantine mercenaries at the cost of every penny he possessed, before a general war broke out (June 1173). Normandy, attacked on two sides at once, was saved by the death of the Count of Boulogne and by a rapid march of Henry which drove Louis from Verneuil; and another equally rapid march upon Dol crushed the revolt in Brittany. In a flying visit to England (, Itin. Hen. II, p. 173) Henry, it seems, had already concerted measures for its security with the justiciar, Richard de Lucy; here the actual outbreak had been delayed by the absence of the chief rebel, Earl Robert of Leicester; and Leicester no sooner landed in Suffolk than he was defeated and made prisoner by the royal forces (17 Oct.) Next spring, while Henry was crushing out rebellion in Anjou and Aquitaine, a Scottish