CHAPTER XIV
CONQUEST AND REBELLION
The martyrdom of Thomas Becket served his cause better than his continuance in life could have done. Even if his murderers foolishly thought to serve the king by their deed, Henry himself was under no delusion as to its effect. He was thunderstruck at the news, and, in a frenzy of horror which was no doubt genuine, as well as to mark his repudiation of all share in the deed, he fasted and shut himself from communication with the court for days. But the public opinion of Europe would not acquit Henry of the guilt. Letters poured in upon the pope denouncing him and demanding his punishment. The interdict of his Norman dominions which had been threatened was proclaimed by the Archbishop of Sens, but suspended again by an appeal to the pope. Events moved slowly in the twelfth century, and before the pope could take any active steps in the case, an embassy which left Normandy almost immediately had time to reach him and to promise on the part of the king his complete submission to whatever the pope should decree after examination of the facts. Immediate punishment of any severity was thus avoided, and the embassy of two cardinals to Normandy which the pope announced could act only after some delay.
In the meanwhile in England Thomas the archbishop was being rapidly transformed into Thomas the saint. Miracles were reported almost at once, and the legend of his saintship took its rise and began to throw a new light over the events of his earlier life. The preparation of his body for the grave had revealed his secret asceticism,—the hair garments next his skin and long unchanged. The people believed him to be a true martyr, and his popular canonization preceded by some time the official, though this followed with unusual quickness even for the middle ages. It was pronounced by the pope in whose reign he had died on February 21, 1173. For generations he remained the favourite saint of England, and his popularity in foreign lands is surprising, though it must be remembered that he was a great and most conspicuous martyr of the official Church, of the new Hildebrandine Church, of the spirit and ideas which were by that date everywhere in command.
This long and bitter struggle between Church and State, unworthy of both the combatants, was now over except for the consequences which were lasting, and the interest of Henry's reign flows back into the political channel. The king did not wait in seclusion the report of the pope's mission. It may have been, as was suggested even at the time, that he was glad of an excuse to escape from Normandy before the envoys' coming and to avoid a meeting with them until time had done something to soften the feeling against him. Before his departure his hold on Britanny was strengthened by the death, in February, 1171, of Conan the candidate whom he had recognized as count. Since 1166 the administration of the country had been practically in his hands; and in that year his son Geoffrey had been betrothed to Constance, the daughter and heiress of Conan. Geoffrey would now succeed to the countship, but he was still a child; and Britanny was virtually incorporated in Henry's continental empire.
The refuge which the repentant Henry may have sought from the necessity of giving an answer to the pope at once, or a kind of preliminary penance for his sin, he found in Ireland. Since he received so early in his reign the sanction of Pope Hadrian IV of his plan of conquest, he had done nothing himself towards that end, but others had. The adventurous barons of the Welsh marches, who were used to the idea of carving out lordships for themselves from the lands of their Celtic enemies, were easily persuaded to extend their civilizing operations to the neighbouring island, where even richer results seemed to be promised. In 1166 Dermot, the dispossessed king of Leinster, who had found King Henry too busily occupied with affairs in France to aid him, had secured with the royal permission the help he needed in Wales, and thus had connected with the future history of Ireland the names of "Strongbow" and Fitzgerald. The native Irish, though the bravest of warriors, were without armour, and their weapons, of an earlier stage of military history, were no match for the Norman; especially had they no defence against the Norman archers. The conquest of Leinster, from Waterford to Dublin, and including those two cities, occupied some years, but was accomplished by a few men. "Strongbow" himself, Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, did not cross over till the end of August, 1170, when the work was almost completed. He married the daughter of Dermot and was recognized as his heir, but the death of his father-in-law in the next spring was followed by a general insurrection against the new rulers, and this was hardly under control when the earl was summoned to England to meet the king.
Henry could not afford to let the dominion of Ireland, to which he had looked forward for himself, slip from his hands, nor to risk the danger that an independent state might be formed so close to England by his own vassals. Already the Earl of Pembroke was out of favour; it was said that his lands had been forfeited, and he might easily become a rebel difficult to subdue in his new possessions. At the moment he certainly had no thought of rebellion, and he at once obeyed the summons to England. Henry had crossed from Normandy early in September, 1171, had paid a brief visit to Winchester, where Henry of Blois, once so powerful in Church and State, was now dying, and then advanced with his army through southern Wales into Pembrokeshire whence he crossed to Ireland in the middle of October. As he passed from Waterford to Cashel, and then again from Waterford to Dublin, chiefs came in from all sides, many of whom had never submitted to the Norman invaders, and acknowledged his overlordship. Only in the remoter parts of the west and north did they remain away, except Roderick of Connaught, the most powerful of the Irish kings, who was not yet ready to own himself a vassal, but claimed the whole of Ireland for himself. The Christmas feast Henry kept in Dublin, and there entertained his new subjects who were astonished at the splendour of his court.
A few weeks later a council of the Irish Church was held at Cashel, and attended by all the prelates of the island except the Archbishop of Armagh whose age prevented his coming. The bishops swore allegiance to Henry, and each of them is said to have made a formal declaration, written and sealed, recognizing the right of Henry and his heirs to the kingdom of Ireland. The canons adopted by the council, putting into force rules of marriage and morals long established in practice in the greater part of Christendom, reveal the reasons that probably led the Church to favour the English conquest and even to consider it an especially pious act of the king. A report of Henry's acceptance by the Irish kings and of the acts of the council was sent at once to the pope, who replied in three letters under date of September 20, 1172, addressed to Henry, to the Irish bishops, and to the Irish kings, approving fully of all that had been done.
It is not clear that Henry had in mind any definite plan for the political government of the conquest which he had made. The allegiance of those princes who were outside the territories occupied by the Norman adventurers could have been no more than nominal, and no attempt seems to have been made to rule them. Meath was granted as a fief to Hugh of Lacy on the service of fifty knights. He was also made governor of Dublin and justiciar of Ireland, but this title is the only evidence that he was to be regarded as the representative of the king. Waterford and Wexford were made domain towns, as well as Dublin, and the earl of Pembroke, who gave up the royal rights which he might inherit from King Dermot, was enfeoffed with Leinster on the service of a hundred knights. Plainly the part of Ireland which was actually occupied was not treated in practice as a separate kingdom, whatever may have been the theory, but as a transplanted part of England under a very vague relationship. As a matter of fact, it was a purely feudal colony, under but the slightest control by a distant overlord, and doomed both from its situation in the midst of an alien, only partly civilized, and largely unconquered race, and from its own organization or lack of organization, to speedy troubles.
Henry returned to England at Easter time, and went on almost at once to meet the papal legates in Normandy. By the end of May his reconciliation with the Church was completed. First, Henry purged himself by solemn oath in the cathedral at Avranches of any share in the guilt of Thomas's assassination, and then the conditions of reconciliation were sworn to by himself and by the young king. These conditions are a very fair compromise, though Becket could never have agreed to them nor probably would Henry have done so but for the murder. The Church insisted on the one thing which was most essential to its real interests, the freedom of appeals to the pope. The point most important to the State, which had led originally to the quarrel—the question of the punishment of criminous clerks by the lay courts—was passed over in silence, a way out of the difficulty being found by requiring of the king a promise which he could readily make, that he would wholly do away with any customs which had been introduced against the churches of the land in his time. This would not be to his mind renouncing the Constitution of Clarendon. The temporalities of Canterbury and the exiled friends of the archbishop were to be restored as before the quarrel, and Henry promised not to withdraw his obedience from the catholic pope or his successors. The other conditions were of the nature of penance. The king promised to assume the cross at the next Christmas for a crusade of three years, and in the meantime to provide the Templars with a sum of money which in their judgment would be sufficient to maintain 200 knights in the Holy Land for a year.