Through the medium of these Irish suffragans the archbishops of Canterbury endeavoured to gain a hold upon the Irish Church by cultivating the friendship of the different Irish princes who from time to time succeeded in winning from the Ostmen an acknowledgement of their overlordship. In the struggles of the provincial kings for the supreme monarchy of Ireland it was always the Ostmen who turned the scale; their submission was the real test of sovereignty. The power which had been wielded by Dermot Mac-Maelnambo passed after his death first to Terence or Turlogh O’Brien, king of Munster,[393] a grandson of Brian Boroimhe, and then to Terence’s son Murtogh.[394] Both were in correspondence with the successive English primates, Lanfranc and Anselm,[395] and both were recognized as protectors and patrons, in ecclesiastical matters at least, by the Ostmen,[396] whose adherence during these years enabled the O’Briens to hold their ground against the advancing power of Donnell O’Lochlainn, king of Aileach or western Ulster,[397] a representative of the old royal house of the O’Neills which had fallen with Malachi II. On Murtogh’s death in 1119[398] a new aspirant to the monarchy appeared in the person of the young king of Connaught, Terence or Turlogh O’Conor. A year before, Terence had won the submission of the Ostmen of Dublin;[399] in 1120 he celebrated the fair of Telltown,[400] a special prerogative of the Irish monarchs; and from the death of Donnell O’Lochlainn next year[401] Terence was undisputed monarch till 1127, when a joint rising of Ostmen and Leinstermen enabled both to throw off his yoke.[402] Meanwhile Murtogh O’Lochlainn, a grandson of Donnell, was again building up a formidable power in Ulster; at last, in 1150, all the provincial kings, including Terence, gave him hostages for peace;[403] and Terence’s throne seems to have been only saved by a sudden change in the policy of the Ostmen, whose independent action enabled them for a moment to hold the balance and act as arbitrators between northern and southern Ireland.[404] Four years later, however, they accepted Murtogh as their king,[405] and two years later still he was left sole monarch by the death of Terence O’Conor.[406]

The anarchy of the Irish state was reflected in that of the Church. If Lanfranc, when he consecrated Patrick of Dublin, knew anything at all of the ecclesiastical condition of Ireland, he may well have thought that it stood in far greater need of his reforming care than England itself. The Irish Church had never felt the organizing hand of a Theodore; its diocesan and parochial system was quite undeveloped; it had in fact scarcely advanced beyond the primitive missionary stage. Six centuries after S. Patrick’s death, the Irish clergy were still nothing but a band of mission-priests scattered over the country or gathered together in vast monastic establishments like Bangor or Durrow or Clonmacnoise; the bishops were for the most part merely heads of ever-shifting mission-stations, to whose number there was no limit; destitute of political rank, they were almost equally destitute of ecclesiastical authority, and differed from the ordinary priesthood by little else than their power of ordination. At the head of the whole hierarchy stood, as successor and representative of S. Patrick, the archbishop of Armagh. But since the death of Archbishop Maelbrigid in 927 the see of Armagh had been in the hands of a family of local chieftains who occupied its estate, usurped its revenues, handed on its title from father to son, and were bishops only in name.[407] The inferior members of the ecclesiastical body could not escape the evil which paralyzed their head. The bishops and priests of the Irish Church furnished a long roll of names to the catalogue of saints; but they contributed little or nothing to the political developement of the nation, and scarcely more to its social developement. The growth of a class of lay-impropriators ousted them from the management and the revenues of their church-lands, reduced them to subsist almost wholly upon the fees which they received for the performance of their spiritual functions, stripped them of all political influence, and left them dependent solely upon their spiritual powers and their personal holiness for whatever share of social influence they might still contrive to retain.[408] The Irish Church, in fact, while stedfastly adhering in doctrinal matters to the rest of the Latin Church, had fallen far behind it in discipline; to the monastic reforms of the tenth century, to the struggle for clerical celibacy and for freedom of investiture in the eleventh, she had remained an utter stranger. The long-continued stress of the northern invasions had cut off the lonely island in the west from all intercourse with the world at large, so completely that even the tie which bound her to Rome had sunk into a mere vague tradition of spiritual loyalty, and Rome herself knew nothing of the actual condition of a Church which had once been her most illustrious daughter.

But it was the northmen, too, who were now to become the means of knitting up again the ties which had been severed by their fathers’ swords. The state of things in Ireland, as reported to Canterbury from Dublin and Waterford, might well seem to reforming churchmen like Lanfranc and Anselm too grievous to be endured. Lanfranc had urged upon Terence O’Brien the removal of two of its worst scandals, the neglect of canonical restraints upon marriage and the existence of a crowd of titular bishops without fixed sees;[409] Anselm used all his influence with Murtogh O’Brien for the same end;[410] at last, finding his efforts unavailing, he seems to have laid his complaints before the Pope. The result was that, for the first time, a papal legate was appointed for Ireland. The person chosen was Gilbert, who some two or three years before Anselm’s death became the first bishop of the Ostmen of Limerick. Gilbert seems, like the first Donatus of Dublin, to have been himself an Irish prelate; he lost no time, however, in putting himself in communication with Canterbury,[411] and displayed an almost exaggerated zeal for the Roman discipline and ritual.[412] In 1118 he presided over a synod held at Rathbreasil, where an attempt was made to map out the dioceses of Ireland on a definite plan.[413] Little, however, could be done till the metropolitan see was delivered from the usurpers who had so long held it in bondage; and it was not until 1134 that the evil tradition was broken by the election of S. Malachi.

Malachi was the wisest and most enlightened as well as the most saintly Irish prelate of his time; he had already been labouring for nearly ten years at the reform of the diocese of Connor; in that of Armagh itself he had earlier still, as vicar to Archbishop Celsus, laid the foundations of a similar work which he now took up again as primate.[414] After a successful pontificate of three years he again retired to the humbler position of a diocesan bishop at Down;[415] but he still continued to watch over the interests of the whole Irish Church; and in 1139 he went to Rome specially to lay its necessities before the Pope, and if possible to obtain from him the gift of a pallium for the archbishop of Armagh, and another for the bishop of Cashel as metropolitan of southern Ireland.[416] The pallium was now generally regarded as an indispensable note of metropolitical rank, but it had never been possessed by the successors of S. Patrick.[417] Innocent II. refused to grant it save at the request of the Irish clergy and people in council assembled; he sanctioned, however, the recognition of Cashel as metropolis of southern Ireland, and moreover he transferred to Malachi himself the legatine commission which Gilbert of Limerick had just resigned.[418] Gilbert seems to have died shortly afterwards: his successor in the see of Limerick went to Theobald of Canterbury for consecration; but his profession of obedience was the last ever made by an Irish bishop to an English metropolitan.[419] In 1148 a synod held at Inispatrick by Archbishop Gelasius of Armagh, with Malachi as papal legate, decided upon sending Malachi himself to the Pope once more, charged with a formal request for the two palls, in the name of the whole Irish Church. Malachi died on the way, at Clairvaux;[420] but he left his commission in safe hands. Nine years before, when on his first journey to Rome he had passed through the “bright valley,” its abbot had recognized in him a kindred spirit.[421] From that moment S. Bernard’s care of all the churches extended itself even to the far-off Church of Ireland; and if it was not he who actually forwarded his dying friend’s petition to Eugene III., there can be little doubt that Eugene’s favourable reception of it was chiefly owing to his influence. The result was the mission of John Paparo as special legate to Ireland. Stephen’s refusal to let John pass through his dominions caused another year’s delay;[422] but at the close of 1151 John made his way through Scotland safe to his destination.[423] In March 1152 he held a synod at Kells, in which the diocesan and provincial system of the Irish Church was organized upon lines which remained unaltered till the sixteenth century. The episcopal sees were definitely fixed, and grouped under not two but four archbishoprics. The primacy of all Ireland, with metropolitical authority over Ulster and Meath, was assigned to Armagh; Tuam became the metropolis of Connaught, Cashel of Munster; while the rivalry of Armagh and Canterbury for the spiritual obedience of the Ostmen was settled by the grant of a fourth pallium, with metropolitical jurisdiction over the whole of Leinster, to Bishop Gregory of Dublin himself.[424]

It is plain that Bernard and Eugene aimed at applying to Ireland’s troubles the same remedy which they were at that very time applying to those of England. They hoped to build up an united nation and a strong national government on the basis of a free and united national Church. But the foundation-stone of their work for Ireland was scarcely laid at Kells when both the wise master-builders were called away. On the other hand, their labours for England were crowned by the accession of the young Angevin king, whose restless temper, before he had been nine months on his throne, was already seeking for another sphere of activity still further beyond the sea; overwhelming the newly-crowned, English-born Pope with suggestions of work and offers of co-operation in every quarter of Christendom,[425] and proposing to begin at once with the reduction of Ireland to political, ecclesiastical and social order after the pattern of England and Normandy.[426] Adrian IV. would have needed a wisdom and a foresight greater than those of S. Bernard himself to enable him to resist the attractions of such an offer. The so-called “Donation of Constantine”—a donation which is now known to be forged, but whose genuineness no one in Adrian’s day had ever thought of doubting—vested the ultimate sovereignty of all islands in the Papacy.[427] The best and greatest Popes, from S. Gregory down to Adrian himself, seem to have interpreted this as making them in a special way responsible for the welfare of such outlying portions of Christendom, and bound to leave no means untried for providing them with a secure and orderly Christian government.[428] The action of Alexander II. in sanctioning the Norman conquest of England was a logical outcome of this principle, applied, however unwisely or unjustly, to a particular case. But there was infinitely greater justification for applying the same principle, in the same manner, to the case of Ireland. Neither the labours of S. Malachi, nor the brief visit of John Paparo, nor the stringent decrees passed at the synod of Kells, could suffice to reform the inveterate evils of Ireland’s ecclesiastical system, the yet more inveterate evils of her political system, or the intellectual and moral decay which was the unavoidable consequence of both. On the Pope, according to the view of the time, lay the responsibility of bringing order out of this chaos—a chaos of whose very existence he had but just become fully conscious, and which no doubt looked to him far more hopeless than it really was. In such circumstances Henry’s proposal must have sounded to Adrian like an offer to relieve him of a great weight of care—to cut at one stroke a knot which he was powerless to untie—to clear a path for him through a jungle-growth of difficulties which he himself saw no way to penetrate or overcome. John of Salisbury set forth the plan at Rome, in Henry’s name, in the summer of 1155; he carried back a bull which satisfied all Henry’s demands. Adrian bade the king go forth to his conquest “for the enlargement of the Church’s borders, for the restraint of vice, the correction of morals and the planting of virtue, the increase of the Christian religion, and whatsoever may tend to God’s glory and the well-being of that land;”[429] and he sent with the bull a gold ring, adorned with an emerald of great price, as a symbol of investiture with the government of Ireland.[430]