We hear not a word of Pope Adrian’s bull, but we can hardly doubt that its existence and its contents were in some way or other certified to the Irish prelates before ... they met in council at Cashel in the first weeks of 1172.
Going even further, in another passage (ii. 81), she boldly spoke of Henry’s “conquest won with Adrian’s bull in his hand.” And yet, when afterwards, in her article, she wished to deny the difficulty, she could turn round and confidently urge that “Henry said nothing about the Pope’s letter, because it was a matter of no practical consequence whatever.”[411] Such a volte-face as this does not tend to inspire confidence in her arguments. But even if we accept this, her later conclusion, it only increases the difficulty of explaining why Henry II. formally made the “Bull” public a year or two later (and still more, why he should have done so, as she holds he did, in “1175”). And this difficulty, so far as I can find, she does not attempt to meet.
Everything then, it seems to me, points to the clear conclusion that Giraldus substituted for the genuine letters from the Pope, in the ‘Liber Niger,’ a concocted confirmation of an equally concocted “Bull” from his predecessor Adrian.
Having arrived at this conclusion, I propose to ask three questions:
- (1) Why did Giraldus do this?
- (2) How were his documents concocted?
- (3) Was there a conspiracy, in which Giraldus joined?
As to the Welshman’s motive, it has been urged by his critics that he wished to gratify the king. Miss Norgate retorts:
At no period of his life is it likely that Gerald would have had any personal interest in putting in circulation, for King Henry’s benefit, a document which he knew or suspected to be forged; least of all would he have cared to do it for the sake of bolstering up Henry’s claims upon Ireland.[412]
But whatever may have been his personal feelings towards Henry II. his eagerness to prove the right of the English Crown to Ireland is one of the leading features of his ‘Expugnatio Hiberniæ.’ He sets forth more than once the arguments on which he bases it, and he treats the Papal action as the crowning argument of all:
Et quod solum sufficere posset ad perfectionis cumulum et absolutæ consummationis augmentum, summorum pontificum, qui insulas omnes sibi speciali quadam jure respiciunt, totiusque christianitatis principum et primatum confirmans accessit auctoritas (v. 320).
The reference, in this passage, to the Donation of Constantine, and therefore to “Laudabiliter,” is clear.