Let Erin remember the days of old,
Ere her faithless sons betrayed her.
We went to Ireland because her people were engaged in cutting one another’s throats; we are there now because, if we left, they would all be breaking one another’s heads. When an eminent patriot is good enough to inform us of his desire, but for the presence of a British judge, to wring a brother patriot’s neck, we are reminded that the sacred fire still burns in Celtic breasts. Ævum non animum mutant.[356] The leaders of the Irish people have not so greatly changed since the days when ‘King’ MacDonnchadh blinded ‘King’ Dermot’s son, and when Dermot, in turn, relieved his feelings by gnawing off the nose of his butchered foe. Claiming to govern a people when they cannot even govern themselves, they clamour like the baboo of Bengal against that pax Britannica, by the presence of which alone they are preserved from mutual destruction. No doubt, as one of them frankly confessed, they would rather be governed badly by themselves than well by any one else. But England also has a voice in the matter; and she cannot allow the creation of a Pandemonium at her doors.
VIII
The Pope and the Conquest of Ireland
One of the hottest historical controversies that this generation has known has been waged around a certain document popularly but erroneously styled “the Bull Laudabiliter.” Duly found in the Roman Bullarium (1739) and in the Annals of Baronius, its authenticity had remained unshaken by sundry spasmodic attacks, and, some thirty years ago, it was virtually accepted as genuine by Roman Catholic and by Protestant historians alike. But since its learned examination and rejection by Dr. (since Cardinal) Moran in November, 1872,[357] the tide of battle has surged around it, the racial and religious passions it aroused imparting bitterness to the strife.
“It is a question with me,” Mr. Gladstone wrote, of Adrian’s alleged donation, “whether as an abnormal and arbitrary proceeding, it did not vitiate, at the fountain head, the relation between English and Irish, and whether it has not been possibly the source of all the perversions by which that relation has been marked.... In Ireland the English fought with an unfair advantage in their hands; they had a kind of pseudo-religious mission, a mission with religious sanctions but temporal motives. I do not see how this could work well.”[358]
It may be as well to explain at the outset that, as befits an Irish controversy, the famous “Bull” in dispute is not really a Bull at all, and that of the two assertions for which it is so furiously assailed, the one is not to be found in it, but comes from another source, while the other rests upon documents which even an assailant of the Bull admits to be “certainly authentic.” But amidst the smoke and dust of battle, these elementary points seem to have been hopelessly obscured.
For the benefit of those who may not be acquainted with “the Bull Laudabiliter,”[359] I may explain that the document in question is inserted in the ‘Expugnatio Hibernica’ of Giraldus Cambrensis,[360] published in or about 1188, and is asserted by him to be the document brought from Rome by John of Salisbury in 1155. He also gives with it a confirmation of it by Alexander III., obtained, he states, by Henry II. after his visit to Ireland.
Apart altogether from these two documents are three letters from Alexander III., which are, similarly, only known to us at second hand, being transcribed in what is known as the Black Book of the Exchequer.[361] Broadly speaking, for the moment only, the main difference between these letters and “the Bull Laudabiliter” is that while, in the latter, Pope Adrian commends the intention of king Henry to go to Ireland and reform the gross scandals prevailing there, Pope Alexander, in the three letters, commends the action of the king in having gone there for that purpose.
Having thus given a general idea of the five documents to be considered, I must now glance at the motives that have animated the attack on the “Bull.” The first of these is the reluctance of the Irish, as Roman Catholics, to believe that it was the Pope who authorized an English king to reign over Ireland; the second is their refusal to admit that the state of things in Ireland is truly described in the “Bull.”