This strange crusade was postponed for the moment, as we have seen, in deference to objections made by the Empress Matilda.[431] Adrian’s bull and ring were stored up in the English chancery, and there, long after Adrian was dead, they still lay,[432] unused and, as it seemed, forgotten amid an ever-increasing throng of more urgent cares and labours which even Henry found to be quite as much as he was capable of sustaining. At last, however, the course of political events in Ireland itself took a turn which led almost irresistibly to a revival of his long-forsaken project. Two years before Henry’s accession Dermot Mac-Murrough, king of Leinster, had made a raid upon the district of Breffny in Connaught, on the borders of Ulster and Meath, and carried off Dervorgil, the wife of its chieftain Tighernan O’Ruark.[433] From that hour Tighernan’s vengeance never slept. During the next fourteen years, while Murtogh O’Lochlainn was striving for the mastery first against the veteran Terence O’Conor and after Terence’s death with his son Rory or Roderic, the swords of the men of Breffny were thrown alternately into either scale, as their chieftain saw a hope of securing the aid of either monarch to avenge him of his enemy.[434] In 1166 the crisis came. Murtogh drew upon himself the wrath of his people by blinding the king of Uladh, for whose safety he was pledged to the archbishop of Armagh; Ulster, Meath, Leinster and Dublin rose against him all at once; he was defeated and slain in a great battle at the Fews; the Ostmen of Dublin acknowledged Roderic as their king, and all the princes of southern Ireland followed their example. Dermot’s submission, however, was in vain; the first act of the new monarch was to banish him from the realm.[435] The Leinstermen forsook him at once, for their loyalty had long been alienated by his harsh government and evil deeds.[436] Left alone to the justice of Roderic and the vengeance of O’Ruark, he fled to Cork and thence took ship to Bristol. Here he found shelter for a while in the priory of S. Augustine, under the protection of its founder Robert Fitz-Harding;[437] at the close of the year he made his way to Normandy, and thence, with some difficulty, tracked Henry’s restless movements into the depths of Aquitaine,[438] where he at last laid his appeal for succour at the feet of the English king.

At the crisis of his struggles with Thomas of Canterbury, with Louis of France and with the rebel barons of Poitou, all that Henry could do was to accept Dermot’s offer of homage and fealty,[439] promise to send him help as soon as possible,[440] and furnish him with a letter authorizing any loyal English, Norman, Welsh, Scottish or Angevin subjects who might be so disposed to join the standard of the Irish prince, as of a faithful vassal of their sovereign.[441] Another stay of some weeks in Bristol[442] convinced Dermot that his best chance of aid lay beyond the Severn. Wales was still in the main a Celtic land, ruled in primeval Celtic fashion by native princes under little more than nominal subjection to the king of England. The Norman conquest of Wales, so far as Wales could be said to have been conquered at all, had been effected not by the royal power but by the daring and prowess of individual adventurers who did, indeed, seek the royal sanction for their tenure of the lands which they had won, but who were scarcely more amenable to the royal authority than their Welsh neighbours, with whom they not unfrequently made common cause against it. It was Robert of Bellême’s connexion with Wales, through his border-earldom of Shrewsbury and his brother’s lordship of Pembroke, which had made him so formidable to Henry I.; it was Robert of Gloucester’s tenure of the great Welsh lordship of Glamorgan, even more than his English honours, which had enabled him to act as an independent potentate against Stephen. Another border-chieftain who played some part in the civil war was Gilbert de Clare, whose father had received a grant of Cardigan from Henry I. in 1107,[443] and upon whom Stephen in 1138 conferred the title of earl of Pembroke.[444] His son Richard appears under the same title among the witnesses to Stephen’s proclamation of the treaty of Wallingford in 1153;[445] the writers of the time, however, usually describe him as earl of Striguil, a fortress which seems to have occupied the site whence the ruins of Chepstow castle now look down upon the Wye. His earldom of Pembroke, indeed, as one of Stephen’s fictitious creations, must have been forfeited on Henry’s accession; but the lord of Striguil was still a mighty man on the South-Welsh border when in the spring of 1167 he promised to bring all the forces which he could muster to aid in restoring Dermot, who in return offered him his daughter’s hand, together with the succession to his kingdom.[446] A promise of the town of Wexford and its adjoining territory won a like assurance of aid from two half-brothers in whose veins the blood of Norman adventurers was mingled with the ancient royal blood of South-Wales: Maurice Fitz-Gerald, a son of Gerald constable of Pembroke by his marriage with Nest, aunt of the reigning prince Rees Ap-Griffith, and Robert Fitz-Stephen, son of the same Nest by her second husband, Stephen constable of Cardigan.[447] Another Pembrokeshire knight, Richard Fitz-Godoberd, volunteered to accompany Dermot at once with a little band of Norman-Welsh followers.[448] With these Dermot returned to Ireland in August 1167;[449] he was defeated in a pitched battle with Roderic O’Conor and Tighernan O’Ruark;[450] but in his own hereditary principality of Kinsellagh[451] he was safe; there throughout the winter he lay hid at Ferns,[452] and thence, when spring returned, he sent his bard Maurice Regan to claim from his Welsh allies the fulfilment of their promises.[453]

In the first days of May[454] Robert Fitz-Stephen landed at Bannow, between Wexford and Waterford, with thirty picked knights of his own immediate following, and a body of auxiliaries to the number of sixty men-at-arms and three hundred archers.[455] With him came three of his nephews, Meiler Fitz-Henry, Miles Fitz-David[456] and Robert de Barri;[457] and also a ruined knight called Hervey of Mountmorris, uncle of Richard de Clare.[458] Next day an independent adventurer, Maurice de Prendergast, arrived from Milford with ten more knights and a band of archers.[459] Dermot himself came to meet them with some five hundred Irishmen. The united force marched upon Wexford, and took it in two days;[460] they then established their head-quarters at Ferns,[461] and thence made an expedition into Ossory, whose chieftain was specially hostile to Dermot. In spite of overwhelming odds, through all the difficulties of an unknown country full of woods and marshes, and traps laid against them by their skilful foes, the Norman-Welsh knights and archers made their way into the heart of Ossory; and a great battle ended in the rout of the Irish and the bringing of two hundred heads to Dermot’s feet in his camp on the banks of the Barrow.[462] A successful raid upon Offaly was followed by one upon Glendalough, and a third upon Ossory again,[463] till in the following year the state of affairs in Leinster had become threatening enough to drive all the Irish princes and the Ostmen of Dublin into a confederacy under Roderic O’Conor for the expulsion of the intruders.[464] Dermot pledged himself to acknowledge Roderic as monarch of Ireland, and was in his turn acknowledged by Roderic as king of Leinster on condition that he should dismiss his foreign allies.[465] The agreement was however scarcely made when Maurice Fitz-Gerald landed at Wexford with some hundred and forty men;[466] these at once joined Dermot in an expedition against Dublin, and harried the surrounding country till the citizens were reduced to promise obedience.[467] Early in the next year Dermot’s son-in-law Donell O’Brien, king of Limerick or Northern Munster, succeeded by the help of Robert Fitz-Stephen in throwing off the authority of Roderick O’Conor.[468] Encouraged by these successes, Dermot now began to aspire in his turn to the monarchy of all Ireland;[469] but his auxiliaries were numerically insufficient; and the one from whom he had expected most had as yet failed to appear at all.

The history of Richard of Striguil is far from clear. From the number of troops which eventually accompanied him to Ireland it is evident that he had been during these two years actively preparing for his expedition; and it may even be that the extent of his preparations had drawn upon him the suspicions of King Henry. We only know that, for some cause or other, he was now a ruined man; his lands were forfeited to the Crown;[470] and he seems to have lingered on, absorbed in a desperate effort to regain Henry’s favour, and clinging to his lost home with a feeling that if he once turned his back upon it, he would never be allowed to see it again. A letter from Dermot, telling of the successes of his party in Leinster and renewing his former offers, forced him into action.[471] He made a last appeal to the king, intreating either for restoration of his lands or for the royal license to go and repair his fortunes elsewhere. Henry ironically bade him go, and he went.[472] On S. Bartholomew’s eve, 1170, he landed at Waterford with twelve hundred men;[473] next day he was joined by Raymond “the Fat,” a young warrior whom he had sent over three months before[474] with ten knights and seventy archers, and who with this small force had contrived to beat back an assault of three thousand Irishmen of Decies and Ostmen of Waterford upon his camp of wattle and thatch, hastily thrown up on the rocky promontory of Dundonulf.[475] On August 25 Richard and Raymond attacked Waterford; three assaults in one day carried both town and citadel;[476] seven hundred citizens were slaughtered,[477] and the officers of the fortress, whose names tell of northern blood, were made prisoners.[478] A few days later Richard was married at Waterford to Dermot’s daughter Eva.[479] He then joined his father-in-law in a circuitous march across the hills and through Glendalough,[480] whereby they avoided a great host which Roderic had gathered at Clondalkin to intercept them, and arrived in safety on S. Matthew’s day beneath the walls of Dublin.[481] Dermot sent his bard to demand the instant surrender of the town, with thirty hostages for its fidelity. A dispute arose, probably between the Irish and Danish inhabitants, as to the selection of the hostages;[482] Archbishop Laurence was endeavouring to compose the difficulty,[483] and Hasculf Thorgils’ son, a chieftain of northern blood who commanded the citadel, had actually promised to surrender it on the morrow,[484] when a sudden attack made by Raymond the Fat on one side and by a knight called Miles Cogan on the other carried the town before the leaders of either party knew what had happened.[485] A second rush won the citadel; Hasculf escaped by sea and took refuge in the Orkneys;[486] Dublin was sacked,[487] and left throughout the winter under the command of Miles Cogan,[488] while Richard of Striguil was guarding Waterford against the men of Munster,[489] and Dermot, from his old head-quarters at Ferns,[490] was making raid after raid upon Meath and Breffny.[491]