Next year Rees, provoked as he alleged by Henry’s non-fulfilment of his promises and also by the shelter given to the slayer of his nephew by Earl Roger of Clare, harried the whole border and roused all Wales to fling off the yoke of the “Frenchmen,” as the Welsh still called their Norman conquerors.[893] Henry was obliged to delay his vengeance till the following summer, when it furnished him with an excellent pretext for escaping from his ecclesiastical and political entanglements on the continent.[894] He set out from Oswestry[895] at the head of a vast army drawn from all parts of his dominions, both insular and continental, and reinforced by Flemish and Scottish allies.[896] All the princes of Wales were arrayed against him, and both parties intended the campaign to be decisive. But the wet climate of the Welsh hills proved a more dangerous foe than the mountaineers themselves; and after remaining for some time encamped at Berwen, Henry was compelled to beat an ignominious retreat, completely defeated by the ceaseless rain,[897] and venting his baffled wrath against the Welsh in a savage mutilation of their hostages.[898] For six years after this, as we have seen, he never had time to visit his island realm at all, and the daring “French” settlers in Wales or on its borders, such as the Geraldines or the De Clares, were free to fight their own battles and make their own alliances with the Welsh just as they chose; it was not till Henry in 1171 followed them to their more distant settlement in Ireland that he again entered South Wales. Then he used his opportunity for a series of personal interviews with Rees,[899] which ended in a lasting agreement. Rees was left, in the phrase of his native chronicler, as the king’s “justice” over all South Wales.[900] How far he maintained, along the border or within his own territories, the peace and order whose preservation formed the main part of an English justiciar’s duty, may be doubted; but in the rebellion of 1174 he shewed his personal loyalty to the king by marching all the way into Staffordshire to besiege Tutbury for him, and some of his followers did equally good service in the suppression of the Norman revolt.[901] David of North Wales, too, if he did nothing to help the king, at least resisted the temptation of joining his enemies; and the war was no sooner fairly over than, anxious that some reflection of the glories of English royalty should be cast over his own house, he became an eager suitor for the hand of Henry’s half-sister Emma—a suit which Henry found it politic to grant.[902] A few months later, in June 1175, the king made an attempt to secure the tranquillity of the border by binding all the barons of the district in a sworn mutual alliance for its defence.[903] The attempt was not very successful; the border-warfare went on in much the same way as of old; but it was not till the summer of 1184 that it grew serious enough to call for Henry’s personal intervention, and then a march to Worcester sufficed to bring Rees of South Wales once more to his feet.[904]

It was the latest-won dependency of the English crown which during these years gave the most trouble to its wearer. If Henry found it hard to secure fit instruments for the work of government and administration in England, he found it harder still to secure them for the same work in Ireland. At the outbreak of the barons’ revolt he had at once guarded against all danger of the rebels finding support in Ireland by recalling the garrisons which he had left in the Irish coast-towns and summoning the chief men of the new vassal state, particularly Richard of Striguil and Hugh de Lacy, to join him personally in Normandy.[905] Richard served him well in the war as commandant of the important border-fortress of Gisors;[906] and it may have been as a reward for these services that he was sent back to Ireland as governor in Hugh’s stead[907] at the close of the year. For the next two years, while the king had his hands full in Normandy and England, matters in Ireland went much as they had gone before his visit there; the Norman-English settlers pursued their strifes and their alliances with their Irish neighbours or with each other, and granted out to their followers the lands which they won, entirely at their own pleasure.[908] But the lesson which Henry was meanwhile teaching their brethren in England was not thrown away upon them; and at the close of 1175 it was brought home to them in another way. Roderic O’Conor, moved as it seems by the fame of Henry’s successes, and also perhaps by two papal bulls—Adrian’s famous “Laudabiliter,” and another from the reigning Pope Alexander—which Henry had lately caused to be published at Waterford,[909] at last bent his stubborn independence to send three envoys to the English king with overtures for a treaty of peace. The treaty was signed at Windsor on October 6. Roderic submitted to become Henry’s liegeman, and to pay him a yearly tribute of one hide “pleasing to the merchants” for every ten head of cattle throughout Ireland; on these conditions he was confirmed in the government and administration of justice over the whole island, except Leinster, Meath and Waterford, and authorized to reckon upon the help of the royal constables in compelling the obedience of his vassals and collecting from them their share of the tribute.[910]

This scheme might perhaps have answered at least as well as a similar plan had answered during a few years in South Wales, had it not been for the disturbed condition of the English settlement. The death of Richard of Striguil in 1176[911] left the command in the hands of his brother-in-law and constable, Raymond the Fat, who for some years had been not only the leader of his forces, but also his chief adviser and most indispensable agent in all matters political and military.[912] A jealous rival, however, had already brought Raymond into ill repute at court,[913] and the king’s seneschal William Fitz-Aldhelm was sent to supersede him.[914] William appears to have been a loyal servant of the king, but his tact and wisdom did not equal his loyalty. At the moment of landing his suspicions were aroused by the imposing display of armed followers with which Raymond came to meet him; the muttered words which he incautiously suffered to escape his lips—“I will soon put an end to all this!”—were enough to set all the Geraldines against him at once; and the impolitic haste and severity with which he acted upon his suspicions, without waiting to prove their justice,[915] drove the whole body of the earlier settlers into such a state of irritation that early in the next year Henry found it necessary to recall him.[916] Meanwhile the aggressive spirit of the English settlers had made Henry’s treaty with Roderic almost a dead letter. In defiance of the rights which that treaty reserved to the Irish monarch, they had profited by the mutual dissensions of the lesser native chieftains to extend their own power far beyond the limits therein laid down. A civil war in Munster had ended in its virtual subjugation by Raymond and his Geraldine kinsfolk;[917] a like pretext had served for an invasion of Connaught itself by Miles Cogan;[918] John de Courcy was in full career of conquest in Ulster.[919] Henry could scarcely have put a stop to all this, even had he really wished to do so; and by this time he was probably more inclined to encourage any extension of English power in Ireland, for he had devised a new scheme for the government of that country.

The bride of John “Lackland,” Alice of Maurienne, had died within a year of her betrothal.[920] The marriage-contract indeed provided that in case of such an event her sister should take her place; but the connexion had begun too inauspiciously for either Henry or Humbert to have any desire of renewing it; and Henry now saw a possibility of more than repairing within his insular dominions the ill-luck which had befallen his plans of advancement on the continent for his favourite child. In the autumn of 1176 John was betrothed to his cousin Avice, the youngest of the three daughters of Earl William of Gloucester, and Avice was made heiress to the whole of the vast estates in the west of England and South Wales which her father had inherited from his parents, Earl Robert of Gloucester and Mabel of Glamorgan.[921] But a mere English earldom, however important, was not enough to satisfy Henry’s ambition for his darling. In his scheme Avice’s wealth was to furnish her bridegroom with the means of supporting a loftier dignity. He had now, it was said, obtained Pope Alexander’s leave to make king of Ireland whichever of his sons he might choose. On the strength of this permission he seems to have reverted to his original scheme of conquering the whole island.[922] In May 1177 he publicly announced his intention of bestowing the realm of Ireland upon his youngest son John, and parcelled out the southern half of the country among a number of feudal tenants, who did homage for their new fiefs to him and John in a great council at Oxford.[923] As however John was too young to undertake the government in person, his father was again compelled to choose a viceroy. He fell back upon his earliest choice and re-appointed Hugh de Lacy;[924] and with the exception of a temporary disgrace in 1181,[925] it was Hugh who occupied this somewhat thankless office during the next seven years. With the internal history of Ireland during his administration and throughout the rest of Henry’s reign we are not called upon to deal here; for important as are its bearings upon the history of England, their importance did not become apparent till a much later time than that of the Angevin kings.

Map V.