Lordship of Ireland

A wife who loved another lord

formationDrafted from Furnivall), Early English Text Society (1896)

Diarmait Mac Murchada ruled Leinster as one of Ireland's more powerful provincial kings, and had, by most accounts, made himself hated among his own nobles as thoroughly as any of his rank. The event later chroniclers fixed on as the seed of his eventual ruin was one born of private passion rather than politics: Tigernán Ua Ruairc of Bréifne held as his wife a woman named Derbforgaill, and she and Diarmait had loved each other for some time before either found the chance to act on it.

An abduction with the lady's own consent

The opportunity came when Ua Ruairc left his own territory on business abroad. Derbforgaill sent word to Diarmait that she was ready to do as he wished if he would only come for her, and he gathered a following and carried her off into Leinster - by the chronicle's own telling, willingly on her part, whatever show of distress she made for appearances. Ua Ruairc, informed of the affair on his return, was consumed less by the loss of his wife, the account says, than by the shame of it, and set about gathering every ally he could find against Diarmait.

A grudge with a long memory

Nothing about the affair itself immediately cost Diarmait his throne; years passed before the consequences caught up with him. But the enmity it created in Ua Ruairc proved durable in a way few political quarrels of the period were, and when a wider coalition against Diarmait finally formed in 1166, Ua Ruairc's own old grievance was central to it - a private wrong from fourteen years earlier furnishing the occasion, if not quite the sole cause, for driving one of Ireland's provincial kings into an exile that would change the country's history far beyond anything either man could have intended.

A letter instead of an army

formationDrafted from Furnivall), Early English Text Society (1896)

In 1166 the coalition Tigernán Ua Ruairc had spent years assembling - joined by the high king Rory O'Connor himself - drove Diarmait Mac Murchada out of Leinster entirely. He crossed first to England, then on to France, where King Henry II was occupied with other business of his own. Diarmait had nowhere else obvious to turn: he asked Henry for help restoring him to his kingdom.

A grant of permission, not of soldiers

Henry received him courteously and sympathized with his case, but had no intention of committing an army of his own to an Irish succession dispute. What he gave instead was a letter, addressed to all his subjects - English, Norman, Welsh and Scottish alike - declaring that he had received Diarmait into his grace and permitting any who wished to help restore him to do so freely, with the king's own blessing. Diarmait, provided with money from Henry's own treasury besides, crossed to Bristol to make what he could of the offer.

National Library of Ireland · Furnivall), Early English Text Society (1896) · Gerald of Wales · Public domain

Recruiting an army from a royal permission slip

He spent time at Bristol reading the king's letter aloud to whoever would listen, and promising land, rents, and rich gifts to any who would come fight for him. For a long while no one of real substance answered. Only when Richard de Clare, Earl of Strigoil - a man whose own fortunes in England had faded, and who had every reason to want what Diarmait was offering - finally came to him did the enterprise gain the backing it needed. Their agreement was blunt: Strongbow would help Diarmait with all the force he could muster the following summer, and in return would receive Diarmait's own daughter in marriage, along with the whole of Leinster to go with her.

A king follows his own barons

peakDrafted from Orpen, 4 vols (1911-1920)

Strongbow's own campaign succeeded faster and more completely than anyone, Henry II included, had quite expected. He landed at Waterford in August 1170, stormed the town, and married Aoife, Diarmait's daughter, among the ruins that same day - a wedding conducted, by every account, with the ordinary business of a battle's aftermath still visible around it. Dublin fell soon after. When Diarmait died the following spring, Strongbow claimed the whole of Leinster as his own inheritance through his wife, exactly as their agreement had promised.

National Gallery of Ireland · Orpen, 4 vols (1911-1920) · Daniel Maclise · Public domain

An earl grown too independent

A Norman baron ruling an Irish kingdom in his own right, answerable to no one, was not the outcome Henry II had authorized when he wrote his permissive letter at Diarmait's request. Alarmed at what his own subject was building across the Irish Sea, Henry crossed to Waterford in person that October, at the head of a force large enough to leave no doubt about who held the greater power between them.

Submission, and a synod to match it

Strongbow submitted at once, surrendering Dublin and the coastal towns to the crown and holding the rest of Leinster only as the king's own tenant thereafter. Irish provincial kings, watching an army larger than any yet seen in Ireland, largely followed his example rather than risk finding out what resistance would cost. A synod convened at Cashel that winter brought the Irish church's own practices - on marriage, tithes and the sacraments - into closer conformity with Rome and, by extension, with the reforming programme Henry's own bishops were pursuing in England. What had begun as one exiled king's private bid to reclaim his throne ended, within five years, as a lordship of the English crown spanning most of the island's eastern half.

Orpen, 4 vols (1911-1920) · Mike Searle · CC BY-SA 2.0

A seneschal builds an earldom

peakDrafted from Orpen, 4 vols (1911-1920)

The century after Henry II's submission at Waterford was the lordship's own territorial peak, and no single family did more to reach it than the de Burghs, whose conquest of Connaught turned a province still ruled by its own Irish kings into the last great Anglo-Norman earldom on the island.

A kingship inherited like a fief

When the Connaught king Cathal Crobderg died in 1224, his son Aedh succeeded him in a manner the Irish annals themselves treated as unusual - not through the acclamation of the Uí Briúin's own chieftains by ancient custom, but as something closer to a hereditary fief passing from father to son, backed by the English justiciar's own support. The succession was contested almost immediately. Rival claimants among Cathal's own kinsmen, backed by the king of Tyrone, rose against Aedh within the year, and the fighting that followed drew in Anglo-Norman forces from both the north and south of the province - among them Richard de Burgh, recently appointed seneschal of Munster, whose own family had held a hereditary claim on Connaught since the previous generation. Aedh could not do without Norman help, and the Norman lords who supplied it did not do so for nothing.

A conquest paid for in installments

What followed was not a single campaign but decades of intervention, each round of internal Connaught politics giving Anglo-Norman lords a fresh pretext to intervene, extract concessions, and entrench their own following further into the province's own territory. Richard de Burgh built his own position methodically rather than by outright conquest, marrying into the local nobility, securing royal grants confirming his claims, and gradually converting a role as an Irish king's indispensable ally into direct lordship over most of the province. By the time his family's hold on Connaught was fully secured, the de Burghs held not only that earldom but, through the same generations, the earldom of Ulster as well - two of the largest Anglo-Norman territorial blocks in Ireland, controlled by a single family whose founder had begun as one lord among many competing for influence at an Irish king's court.

Orpen, 4 vols (1911-1920) · Sarah Samoraj · CC BY-SA 3.0

A peak the lordship would not reach again

By the last decades of the thirteenth century, Anglo-Norman lordship stretched, in some form of overlordship or direct control, across most of the island - Leinster under royal administration, Munster divided between the Butlers and the Geraldines, Ulster and Connaught under the de Burghs, with only the most remote and mountainous Irish-held territories remaining fully outside the reach of English law and English lords. It was the widest extent the lordship would ever achieve. The murder of the last de Burgh Earl of Ulster in 1333 - by his own Anglo-Norman kinsmen, in a killing that fractured the earldom and pushed many of his own family into adopting Irish custom rather than defending English lordship - marked the point from which the territory so painstakingly assembled began, permanently, to contract.

A Scottish king of Ireland

contractionDrafted from Orpen, 4 vols (1911-1920)

Edward Bruce, brother of Robert the Bruce of Scotland, landed in Ulster in 1315 at the invitation of Irish lords hoping to use Scotland's own war against England as cover for a rising against the colony closer to home. The Earl of Ulster's forces were routed at Connor that September, and for the next three years Bruce's presence turned loosely connected local grievances into something closer to a general war against English rule across much of the island.

Towns burned from Sligo to Athlone

The fighting spread well beyond Ulster. In Connaught, rival claimants to the kingship there took Bruce's invasion as their own opportunity, burning English towns and castles from Sligo to Athlone under his encouragement, while in Thomond the Anglo-Norman lord Richard de Clare found the local Irish dynasty he had depended on switching allegiance to the invaders. No part of the English colony could simply wait the crisis out; garrisons and settlers across the country found themselves drawn into a conflict none of them had chosen.

Faughart

The invasion ended, after three years that left much of the colony devastated, at the Battle of Faughart near Dundalk in October 1318. English forces broke the Scottish line in a single rush; Edward Bruce himself was found dead beneath the body of an English knight named John Maupas, and the leader who brought his head to the king, John de Bermingham, was made Earl of Louth for it. The immediate danger ended with Bruce's death, but the colony that survived him was not the one that had existed three years before - poorer, more exposed, and considerably less confident that English rule in Ireland was permanent.

Orpen, 4 vols (1911-1920) · Eric Jones · CC BY-SA 2.0

A silk fringe on every helmet

contractionDrafted from Bagwell, 3 vols (1885-1890)

By the last decades of the fifteenth century, the lordship the Statutes of Kilkenny had tried to wall off from Irish influence had shrunk to a fortified enclave around Dublin, the Pale, defended by a brotherhood of thirteen landowners with barely two hundred paid soldiers between them. Real power over what remained of English Ireland belonged, for most of two generations, to a single family: the Earls of Kildare.

A house too useful to remove

Under Edward IV and Richard III, the House of Kildare eclipsed its old rival the Butlers so completely that the crown found it simpler to govern through the Fitzgeralds than around them. Successive kings confirmed Kildare earls as viceroy or deputy governor not because London trusted the family, but because no one else could hold the lordship's shrunken territory together as cheaply or as effectively. The arrangement suited Kildare as much as the crown: the earls governed Ireland largely as they pleased, answerable to a king an ocean away who had neither the money nor the inclination to install a rival administration.

A young man given a naked sword

That arrangement ended in 1534, when the ninth Earl, summoned to London to answer charges of misgovernment, handed the sword of his own deputyship to his twenty-year-old son and heir, Thomas Lord Offaly - advising him to be guided by older, cooler heads among his own kinsmen. The advice went unheeded. A false rumor reached Dublin that the old earl had been executed in the Tower, and his son, convinced his father was already dead, resolved on open rebellion before the truth could catch up with him. On St Barnabas's Day he rode into Dublin at the head of a hundred and forty armed retainers, each wearing a fringe of silk on his helmet - the flourish that gave him the name by which he has been remembered ever since, Silken Thomas. Interrupting a meeting of the royal council at St Mary's Abbey, he publicly renounced his father's office and threw down the sword of state, ignoring the Archbishop of Dublin's own tearful warning that "they are not yet born that shall hereafter feel the smart of this uproar." His cousin Lord Butler, offered a share of Ireland in exchange for joining the revolt, refused in writing, declaring he would rather die Thomas's enemy than live as his partner.

Bagwell, 3 vols (1885-1890) · Egardiner0 · CC BY-SA 3.0

An eclipse the family did not recover from

Silken Thomas held the field against royal forces for over a year, laying siege to Dublin Castle and rallying Irish allies to his cause, but the rebellion collapsed once an English army under Skeffington arrived in strength. He surrendered in 1535 on a promise of mercy that the crown did not honor: after an act of attainder stripped him of his title, he and five of his uncles were taken to Tyburn in 1537 and executed together, ending the Kildare ascendancy in a single afternoon. The rebellion's real casualty was the whole system of governing Ireland through a semi-independent Anglo-Irish magnate family. Henry VIII drew the obvious lesson: within a few years the crown would govern Ireland directly, through English-appointed deputies backed by an English garrison rather than through any Irish family's own private loyalty - the change of policy that led, by 1541, to Henry claiming not merely to be Ireland's lord but its king.

A law against marrying the neighbours

contractionDrafted from Bagwell, 3 vols (1885-1890)

By the 1360s the gap between how much of Ireland the English crown claimed and how much it actually governed had grown too wide to ignore. Lionel of Clarence, sent as viceroy and married into the earldom of Ulster, found even the country immediately around Dublin difficult to hold - his own soldiers cut off by local raiders more than once - and spent much of his time in England rather than in the lordship he had nominally come to strengthen. In 1367 he returned to summon a parliament whose enactments gave legal recognition to a reality that had been building for decades.

Bagwell, 3 vols (1885-1890) · Unknown artist · Public domain

Naming the Pale by not yet naming it

The Statute of Kilkenny drew a formal line between shires still answering reliably to English law and territory beyond it - ten counties required to render account at Dublin, others excused altogether because of distance. The word "Pale" itself would not come into use for another century, but the statute's own text already described exactly the thing that word would later name: a narrow, defended core of English government surrounded by land the crown no longer administered directly.

Treason defined as intermarriage

The statute's substance went well beyond administrative boundaries. It recited that the English in Ireland had once spoken English and lived as Englishmen, but that many had since adopted Irish language and custom to the crown's own detriment - and it made marriage, fosterage, or even friendly social bonds with the Irish into acts of high treason for the colonists still living inside the shrinking zone of direct rule. Englishmen were required to keep English names, English dress, and the English tongue on pain of forfeiture. That such a law needed writing at all was itself the clearest evidence of how far the colony's own assimilation into the country it ruled had already gone.

Risen again from death to life

endDrafted from Bagwell, 3 vols (1885-1890)

By 1541 the title Henry II had claimed at Waterford three hundred and seventy years earlier - Lord of Ireland, granted in the shadow of a papal bull - had come to look like a liability rather than an honour. Friars sympathetic to Rome had spent years encouraging the idea that the English crown's own authority in Ireland was merely delegated from the pope, a notion the recent break with Rome in England made considerably more awkward than it had once been.

Bagwell, 3 vols (1885-1890) · Suffolk County Council, Riccardo Caravello · CC BY 2.0

A parliament that voted itself out of one name

Anthony St. Leger, the king's deputy, summoned a parliament to Dublin that summer, attended by the Anglo-Irish peerage and, unusually, by a number of Gaelic lords as observers or agents. On the appointed day a bill declaring Henry VIII King of Ireland, rather than merely its lord, was read aloud in both English and Irish, to what the record calls general acclamation. It passed its three readings the same day and was sent to the Commons, where it passed just as quickly; the Lords, St. Leger noted, subscribed it at once, "lest they should thereafter be tempted to deny their consents."

What a change of title actually settled

St. Leger himself, writing to the king afterward, described the honour of presiding over the change as being no less to his own comfort than "to be risen again from death to life." The language was not simply flattery. The new royal title answered, at a legal and symbolic level at least, the very question the friars had been raising - that English authority in Ireland rested on the pope's grant and could therefore be dissolved by the pope's displeasure. A kingdom, unlike a lordship, claimed no such derivative status. The unanimous vote that created it settled nothing about how much of Ireland the crown actually governed, which remained, as it had for two centuries, considerably less than the whole island - but it closed, on paper at least, an argument about where that authority had come from in the first place.