Is Ulster Right?

by Anonymous

I come now to what has been absurdly called the conquest of Ireland under Henry II.

That the English king was instigated in his efforts by the Pope is perfectly clear. The Bull of Pope Adrian, issued in 1155, is still extant:-

"... There is indeed no doubt but that Ireland, and all the islands on which Christ, the Sun of Righteousness, hath shone, and which have received the doctrine of the Christian faith, do belong to the jurisdiction of St. Peter and the Holy Roman Church ... therefore we are the more solicitous to propagate the righteous plantation of faith in this land, and the branch acceptable to God, as we have the secret conviction of conscience that this is more especially our bounden duty. You then, our dear son in Christ, have signified to us your desire to enter into the island of Ireland, in order to reduce the people to obedience under the laws, and to extirpate the plants of vice, and that you are willing to pay from each house a yearly pension of one penny to St. Peter, and that you will preserve the rights of the churches whole and inviolate. We, therefore, do hold it good and acceptable that ... you enter this island and execute therein whatever shall pertain to the honour of God and welfare of the land; and that the people of the land receive you honourably and reverence you as their lord."

And in 1172 Pope Alexander III ratified the action of his predecessor.

"Forasmuch as these things which have been on good reasons granted by our predecessors, deserve to be confirmed ... and considering the grant of the dominion of the land by the venerable Pope Adrian, we ... do ratify and confirm the same (reserving to St. Peter and to the Holy Roman Church, as well in England as in Ireland the yearly pension of one penny from every house) provided that, the abominations of the land being removed, the barbarous people, Christians only in name, may by your means, be reformed, and their lives and conversations mended, so that their disordered Church being thus reduced to regular discipline, that nation may, with the name of Christians, be so in act and deed."

Whether the description here given was literally correct, or whether the Pope's views were coloured by the fact that the Celtic Church did not acknowledge the supremacy of Rome and was heretical on certain points of doctrine, is a question outside the present subject. The Bulls are only quoted here as showing the part taken by Rome. And it must be admitted that in the succeeding century the power of the Pope became strong enough to enable him to levy taxes in Ireland for the purpose of carrying on his wars against the Emperor and the King of Aragon.

But Henry did not conquer Ireland. He did not even pretend to do so. Previous to his arrival there had been some little fighting done by a few adventurous Norman knights who had been invited by a native chief to assist him in a domestic war; but Henry II fought no battle in Ireland; he displaced no ancient national government; the Irish had no national flag, no capital city as the metropolis of the country, no common administration of the law. The English, coming in the name of the Pope, with the aid of the Irish bishops, with a superior national organization which the Irish easily recognised, were accepted by the Irish. The king landed at Waterford; his journey to Dublin was rather a royal progress than a hostile invasion. He came as feudal sovereign to receive the homage of the Irish tribes; the chiefs flocked to his court, readily became his vassals, and undertook to hold the lands they already occupied as fiefs of the Crown. But Henry did not take the title, or assume the position of King of Ireland. He merely sought to establish a suzerainty in which he would be the overlord. And in fact a conquest of Ireland in the modern sense of the term would have been impossible. England possessed no standing army; the feudal levies of mediæval times were difficult and expensive. It might of course have been possible to have organized a wholesale immigration and an enslavement of the natives, something like that which the Normans had accomplished in England, and the Saxons had done centuries before; but nothing of the kind was attempted. Whether Henry's original intention was simply to leave the Irish chiefs in possession or not, it is useless now to enquire. But if it was, he appears to have changed his views; for not long afterwards he granted large fiefs with palatinate jurisdiction to various Normans who had made their way over to Ireland independently.

It may be that Henry-knowing that the Conqueror, whilst taking care that no powerful seignories should grow up in the heart of his kingdom, as rivals to the throne, yet made exceptions in cases where the lands verged on hostile territory, such as Durham or Chester-thought that he could best follow the spirit of that policy by establishing what were practically semi-independent principalities in an island already inhabited by another race. But the result was disastrous.

That the Normans were savage and brutal, dealing out no justice or mercy to their victims, is proved by the account of their conquest of England. Yet they possessed certain great qualities, which eminently fitted them to become rulers in those wild, unsettled times; as their successes, not merely in Britain, but also in Southern Italy and Syria, show. They had the idea of a strong, centralized Government; and more than that they had a marvellous capacity for receptivity. Thus we see that in England, after a period of rough tyranny, they blended the existing Anglo-Saxon Government-the strength of which lay in its local organization-with their own; and from the union of the two has come the British Constitution. So too in the Lowlands of Scotland it was the Norman knight Robert Bruce who, accepting the already existing Saxon and Roman civilization, raised Scotland into a powerful kingdom. But in Ireland all was different. The only state of society which the Normans found was Celtic barbarism. Political institutions did not exist. As the Normans in England had become Anglified, and in Scotland Scottified, so in Ireland they became Ersefied. It is true that they built stone castles which at any rate were better than the hovels of the Irish Chiefs, and (like the Danes before them) founded a few towns, such as Kilkenny, Galway and Athenry; but there their efforts ended. Scattered amongst the tribes, they learnt their ways. They sank to the position of the Celtic Chiefs around them; local wars went on the same as before; the only difference being that they were waged sometimes by Normans against Normans or against Celts, but more frequently by one body of Celts against another, each side being aided by Norman allies.

One class of Nationalist writers has inveighed against the English kings for not having forcibly introduced English law and put an end to the barbarous Celtic customs. The simple answer is, How could they do so? Whilst England was being weakened by long continental wars or by struggles between rival Houses, what strength had she left to undertake the real conquest of Ireland? The English kings had turned to the only people who could have helped them-the Normans settled in Ireland; and they failed them. Other Nationalist writers have on the other hand declaimed with equal vehemence against the tyranny of England in forcing an alien system of law on an unwilling people. To this the answer is that nothing of the kind occurred. It is true that petitions were sent from Ireland to the King urging him to introduce English law; but these petitions came mainly from the poorer classes of English settlers who found that instead of attaining greater liberty in their new home they were being ground down to the miserable position of the native Irish. The King issued proclamations directing the English barons to permit the Irish to be governed by the law of England; but his orders were totally disregarded; many of the unhappy English settlers fled from the country and returned to England; the barons supplied their places with native retainers. Thus the Ersefication of the degenerate Normans became complete; they "donned the saffron"-that is, they adopted the yellow dress of the Celts-abandoned their original language, and gave themselves up to a life of constant plunder and rapine.