He was also rejected “if his arms trembled in his hands”; or if, in running through the wood, “a single braid of his hair had been loosened out of its plait.”
He was not admitted if, in his flight, his foot had broken a single withered branch. Neither could he pass muster “unless he could jump over a branch of a tree as high as his forehead, and could stoop under one as low as his knee, through the agility of his body.” He was rejected, also, if he failed “to pluck a thorn out of his heel with his hand without stopping in his course.” Each member, before being admitted to the Order, was obliged to swear fidelity and homage to the Righ-Feinnedh (Ree-Feena) or king of the Fenians, which is the English translation of the title.
There were also other military bodies—not forgetting the more ancient “Red Branch Knights,” whom Moore has immortalized in one of his finest lyrics, but the Fenians and their redoubtable chief hold the foremost place of fame in Irish national annals.
It would seem that a kind of loose federal compact existed, from time to time, between the High King and the other monarchs, but, unfortunately, there does not appear to have been a very strong or permanent bond of union, and this fatal defect in the Irish Constitution of pre-Norman times led to innumerable disputes about succession to the Ard-Righship and endless civil wars, which eventually wrecked the national strength and made the country the comparatively easy prey of adventurous and ambitious foreigners. The monarchical system was, in itself, faulty. Where a monarchy exists at all, the succession should be so regulated that the lineal heir, according to primogeniture, whether a minor or not, must succeed to the throne, except when the succession is, for some good and sufficient reason, set aside by the legislative body of the nation. This was done in England in the case of Henry IV, who, with the consent of Parliament, usurped the crown of Richard II; and also in the case of William and Mary, who were selected by the British Parliament of their day to supplant James II, the father-in-law and uncle of the former and father of the latter. The act of settlement and succession, passed in 1701, ignored the male line of the Stuarts, chiefly because it was Catholic, and placed the succession to the throne, failing issue of William and Mary and Anne, another daughter of the deposed King James, in a younger, Protestant branch of the female line of Stuart—the House of Hanover-Brunswick—which now wears the British crown. But, in general, as far as the question of monarchy is concerned, the direct system of succession has proven most satisfactory, and has frequently prevented confusion of title and consequent civil war. We can recall only one highly important occasion when it provoked that evil—the sanguinary thirty years’ feud between the kindred royal English, or, rather, Norman-French, Houses of York and Lancaster. Even in that case the quarrel arose from the original bad title of Henry IV, who was far from being the lineal heir to the throne. Our own democratic system of choosing a chief ruler is, no doubt, best of all. We elect from the body of the people a President whose term of office is four years. In some respects he has more executive power than most hereditary monarchs, but if at the end of his official term he fails to suit a majority of the delegates of his party to the National Convention, some other member of it is nominated in his stead. The opposition party also nominates a candidate, and very often succeeds in defeating the standard-bearer of the party in power. Sometimes there are three or more Presidential candidates in the field, as was the case in 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was elected. Succession to the Presidency, therefore, is not confined to any one family, or its branches, in a republic, and the office of President of the United States may be competed for by any eligible male citizen who can control his party nomination. The example of Washington, who refused a third term, has become an unwritten law in America, and it defeated General Grant’s aspiration to succeed Mr. Hayes in the Republican National Convention of 1880. In France, under Napoleon, every French soldier was supposed to carry a marshal’s baton in his knapsack. In the United States, every native-born schoolboy carries the Presidential portfolio in his satchel.
CHAPTER VII
Period of Danish Invasion
THE Irish people, having settled down to the Christian form of worship, were enjoying “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” building churches and colleges, and sending out a stream of saints and scholars to the rest of Europe, when, about the end of the eighth century, the restless Norsemen, universally called “Danes” in Ireland, swept down in their galleys by thousands on the Irish coasts, and, after many fierce conflicts, succeeded in establishing colonies at the mouths of many of the great rivers of the island. There they built fortified towns, from which they were able to sally forth by sea or land to change their base of operations and establish new conquests. Dublin at the mouth of the Liffey, Drogheda at the mouth of the Boyne, Wexford at the mouth of the Slaney, Waterford at the mouth of the Suir, and Limerick at the estuary of the Shannon, are all cities founded by the Danes, who were natural traders and fierce warriors. They did not confine their attentions exclusively to Ireland, but, about the same period, conquered Saxon England, ruling completely over it; and they established a strong colony on the north coast of France, which is called Normandy to this day, and from which sprang, by a combination of Scandian with Gallic blood, the greatest race of warriors—the Romans, perhaps, excepted—the world has known.
The native Irish met their fierce invaders with dauntless courage, but they had been so long at peace that they were no longer expert in the use of arms, and the Danes were all-powerful on the seas. Those Norsemen were pagans, and had no respect for revealed religion, literature, works of art, architecture, or, in, short, anything except land-grabbing and plunder. It must be remembered that most of northern Europe, at the period written of, was in a benighted state, and that Great Britain itself was barely emerging from the intellectual and spiritual gloom of the Dark Ages. The Norse invaders, whenever successful in their enterprises against the Irish chiefs, invariably demolished the churches and colleges, murdered the priests, monks, and nuns—often, however, carrying the latter into captivity—and burned many of the priceless manuscripts, the pride and the glory of the illustrious scholarship of ancient Ireland. In the middle portion of the ninth century—about 840—when Nial III was Ard-Righ of Ireland, came the fierce Dane Turgesius, at the head of an immense fleet and army. He at once proceeded to ravage the exposed portions of the coast, and then forced his way inland, laying the country under tribute of all kinds as he advanced. He made prisoners of Irish virgins and married them, by main force, to his barbarous chiefs. He even occupied the celebrated monastery of Clonmacnois and its university as a headquarters, converted the great altar into a throne, and issued his murderous edicts from that holy spot. Clonmacnois, translated into English, means “the Retreat of the Sons of the Noble,” and was the Alma Mater of the princes and nobility of Ireland. This crowning outrage, coupled with insults offered to Irish ladies, finally aroused the spirit of burning vengeance in the breasts of the Irish people. Tradition says that thirty handsome young men, disguised as maidens, attended a feast given at Clonmacnois by Turgesius and his chiefs. When the barbarians were sated and had fallen into a drunken stupor, the youths rose upon and slew them all. The body of Turgesius, with a millstone tied around the neck, was thrown into a neighboring lake. Then the nation, under the brave Nial III, rose and drove the Norsemen back to the seacoast, where they rallied. Another raid on the interior of the island was attempted, but repelled. Sad to relate, the gallant King Nial, while attempting to save the life of a retainer who fell into the Callan River, was himself drowned, to the great grief of all Ireland. The name of the river in which he perished was changed to the Ownarigh (Ownaree) or King’s River—a designation which, after the lapse of ages, it still retains.
A period of comparative repose followed. Many of the Danes became converts to Christian doctrine, and there was, probably, more or less of intermarriage among the higher classes of the rival races. But the Norsemen retained much of their old-time ferocity, and, occasionally, the ancient struggle for supremacy was renewed, with varying success. It is humiliating for an Irish writer to be obliged to admit that some of the Irish Christian princes, jealous of the incumbent Ard-Righ, did not remain faithful to their country, and actually allied themselves with the Danes, participating in their barbarous acts. This explains why, for a period of about three hundred years, in spite of repeated Irish victories, the Norsemen were able to hold for themselves a large portion of Ireland, especially the districts lying close to the sea, where they had no difficulty in receiving supplies and reinforcements from Denmark and Norway. Many of those old Irish princes were, indeed, conscienceless traitors, but the people, as a whole, never abandoned the national cause.