CHAPTER XV
Richard II’s Invasions—Heroic Art MacMurrough
THE first half of the fourteenth century passed away quietly enough in Ireland, except for occasional conflicts between the Anglo-Normans and the Celtic tribes, or an odd encounter of the latter with one another. Edward III had so many quarrels with Scotland and France that he could do nothing in Ireland, even were he so inclined, and the sad experience of the Duke of Clarence in that country warned succeeding viceroys to let well enough alone. The Irish nation, Celtic, Norman, and Saxon, was gradually fusing and would soon have developed a composite strength nearly equal to that of England herself. In the wars with France, many Anglo-Irish septs fought under the orders of Edward, and, probably, some of the Celtic septs also joined his standard, rather as allies, through the bad policy of their chiefs, than as mercenaries.
By the time that Edward completed, or nearly so, the conquest of France, the English power in Ireland had so shrunken as to be almost nominal. Dublin, Drogheda, Kilkenny, and Waterford were the chief garrisons of the English. The Lacys, Burkes, Fitzgeralds, and other Norman-Irish houses and clans were scarcely to be distinguished from the Milesian families and septs. Such fighting as they indulged in between themselves was comparatively trivial. The island, blessed with partial peace, began to grow more populous and prosperous. Edward, the Black Prince, having crowned himself with glory in France, died before he could inherit the crown of England. Edward III, not so old as worn out by ceaseless warfare, died in 1377, and after him came to the English throne Richard, son of the Black Prince, a handsome boy of sixteen, who, at first, gave promise of great deeds, but who subsequently proved himself a weakling and voluptuary. In Ireland, Ulster, Connaught, and Munster remained tranquil for the most part, but, in Leinster, the royal house of MacMurrough—lineal descendants of the traitor of Strongbow’s time—showed a determination to drive the remnant of the English garrison into the sea. They were as loyal to Ireland as their accursed ancestor had been faithless. King Art I, after a long series of successes and failures, died, and was succeeded on the Leinster throne by King Art II—one of the bravest, wisest, and truest characters in Irish history. He continued the war his father had begun. Richard II, like all of his race, was vain and greedy of military glory. As the war with France had closed for a period, he thought Ireland a good field in which to distinguish himself as a general. He had heard of “MacMore,” as he called MacMurrough, and longed to measure swords with him. Accordingly, in the summer of 1394, he landed at Waterford with a large army. The historian McGee estimates it at 35,000 horse and foot, but we are inclined to think it was much less. That it was formidable, for those times, all historians who have dealt with the subject are agreed upon. He was accompanied, also, by a large retinue of nobility, among them Roger Mortimer, the young Earl of March, who, because of the childlessness of Richard, was heir to the British throne, through descent from the Duke of Clarence, in the female line. Richard did not wait long in Waterford, but proceeded on his march to Dublin, unfurling the banner of Edward the Confessor, for whom the Irish were supposed to have a deep veneration. MacMurrough, however, showed scant courtesy to the Confessor’s ensign, not because it was the banner of a saint, but because, for the time, it represented the rapacity of England. Richard was met boldly at every point. His bowmen got tangled up in the woods. His horsemen floundered in the bogs. MacMurrough’s army hovered in his front, on his flanks, and in rear. Not a single success did the English monarch gain. He summoned MacMurrough to a conference when he reached Dublin—having lost a third of his army while en route—and the Leinster king, having accepted the invitation, was ruthlessly thrown into prison. After a time, a treaty of some kind was patched up between King Richard and himself, and the Irish prince was allowed to go free. Richard then returned to England, leaving Roger Mortimer in command. Soon afterward, MacMurrough, objecting to the English encroachments in his territory, again rose in arms. He encountered Mortimer and the English army on the banks of the King’s River at Kenlis or Kells in Westmeath, and utterly routed them. England’s heir-apparent was among the slain. This circumstance had much to do with bringing about the bloody Wars of the Roses in the succeeding century.
About this time Art MacMurrough and his chief bard, who, as was then the Irish custom, accompanied his patron everywhere, were invited to a banquet by one of the Norman lords, who treacherously pretended friendship. The invitation was accepted. While seated at a window of the banquet-hall, the bard perceived a mustering of troops around the castle, and at once seized his harp and struck the chords to an ancient Irish air. The Gaelic words which accompanied the measure fell upon the ears of Art MacMurrough and warned him of his danger. His sword and buckler hung near by. On some trivial pretext, he arose and seized them, the bard having, meanwhile, armed himself. The two made a sudden onslaught and, surprising their foes, cut their way to the courtyard, where, fortunately, their horses still stood. They sprang upon them, and, before the astonished men-at-arms could rally, made good their escape. Art MacMurrough never again trusted the English, and remained their consistent foe to his latest hour.
But King Richard, maddened by the death of Mortimer, which he felt was dangerous to himself, raised another great army, and, in 1398, again invaded Ireland. He was accompanied by a younger son of his uncle, John of Gaunt, “time-honored Lancaster,” and also by Prince Henry, eldest son of Henry of Hereford and afterward Henry V, the hero of Agincourt. The boy was only in his twelfth year, but well grown and brave as a lion. In the first encounter with the formidable MacMurrough, in the glens of Carlow, he so distinguished himself that Richard II knighted him on the field. This march from Waterford to Dublin proved, in the end, even more disastrous than the former one. MacMurrough kept up his harassing tactics, as usual. The rain poured down in torrents. The Irish drove all the cattle away from the English line of march, and destroyed the growing crops. Nearly all the baggage-animals of the invading force died for want of forage, and the army was in a state of famine and revolt, when it finally reached the seacoast near the present town of Arklow, where some English ships, laden with provisions, saved it from actual starvation. The remnant made its way to Dublin, where other disastrous news awaited King Richard. Henry of Hereford, eldest son of John of Gaunt, whom he had unjustly exiled, and whose lands he had seized, now, on the death of his father, having become Duke of Lancaster, came back from the continent, having heard of Richard’s misfortunes in Ireland, and laid claim to the crown. Richard, after ordering young Prince Henry and his uncle to be imprisoned in the castle of Trim—still one of the finest Norman keeps in Ireland—set sail for England. Henry, who had by this time raised a large army, made him prisoner and sent him to Pontefract Castle, in Yorkshire, where, soon afterward, he was starved to death, or otherwise foully made away with. Prince Henry and his uncle were immediately released when the Duke of Lancaster ascended a usurped throne as Henry IV of England. And thus was laid the bloody foundation of the dreadful after wars between the rival royal houses of York and Lancaster, which ended in the extermination of the legitimate Plantagenets. An illegitimate branch, directly descended from John of Gaunt, still survives in the ducal house of Beaufort.
Art MacMurrough remained a conqueror to the end, and kept up the war with the Normans. In 1404, he defeated at Athcroe (Ford of Slaughter), near Dublin, Lord Thomas of Lancaster, brother of the king, putting most of the English to the sword, and desperately wounding the prince himself. Only a few years ago, Irish laborers, excavating for a railroad at Athcroe, came upon nearly a thousand bent swords, some of them badly decomposed by rust, buried in the river bed. They were the swords taken from the dead English, in 1404, and bent across the knees of the victorious Irish, according to their custom in those days.
MacMurrough’s career of glory continued until 1417, when, having captured all the important towns of Leinster, except Dublin and Drogheda, he died at his capital of New Ross—then the second city in Ireland—as some say by poison, in the sixtieth year of his age and forty-fourth of his reign. Taken for all in all, he was not alone the bravest, but the ablest, of Irish princes and warriors since the days of King Brian, and it was a sad day for Ireland when the word went through Leinster and rang around the island that King Art was dead. Many a dark generation passed away before such another chief, or any one worthy to be mentioned as a rival of his fame, arose in that unfortunate land.