Stanford’s Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. London.
London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd.
1181–1185
The internal condition of the so-called “English” dominion in Ireland, meanwhile, was not altogether satisfactory to the king. It was of course necessary that he should have a viceroy there to represent him and to hold the feudataries in check; but for that very reason the viceroy was always, simply as viceroy, an object of jealousy to the other barons; and the viceroy who had been appointed in 1177, Hugh de Lacy, presently incurred the distrust of the king himself. Hugh’s rivals accused him of currying favour with the Irish in the hope of making himself an independent sovereign; and on his marriage with a daughter of the king of Connaught, a marriage contracted “according to the manner of that country” and without King Henry’s leave, Henry in May 1181 removed him from his office and summoned him to England, sending the constable of Chester and Richard de Pec to Ireland as joint governors in his stead. Hugh’s disgrace, however, lasted only six months; he returned to Dublin as governor at the end of the year.[73] Meanwhile Henry was providing himself with a new instrument for working out his purposes in Ireland. The saintly and patriotic archbishop of Dublin, S. Laurence O’Toole, had died in November 1180;[74] Henry kept the see vacant ten months, and then, in September 1181, gave it to an English clerk and confidant of his own, John Cumin. The new archbishop was consecrated by the Pope on March 21, 1182;[75] but more than two years elapsed before he set foot in his diocese. At last, in August 1184, he was sent over by Henry to prepare the way for the coming of John.[76] It was doubtless for the same purpose that Hugh de Lacy was again superseded as governor; at the beginning of September he was replaced by Philip of Worcester, whose first work was to recover for the Crown certain lands which Hugh had alienated, and whose next undertaking was a plundering raid upon the clergy and churches of Armagh, achieved with great success in March 1185.[77]
1185
On April 24 John sailed from Milford[78] with a fleet of sixty ships,[79] which carried some three hundred knights, a large body of archers, and a train of other followers. Next day they all landed at Waterford.[80] There the neighbouring Irish chieftains came to salute the son of the English king. The knights of John’s suite, young and reckless like himself, jeered at the dress and manners of these Irishmen, and even pulled some of them by their beards, which they wore long and flowing according to their national custom. The insulted chieftains reported to their brethren in more remote districts the indignity with which they had been treated; and in consequence, the kings and princes of Munster and Connaught not only refused to attend John’s court, but agreed among themselves to oppose him by force.[81] Archbishop Cumin, who had been sent over on purpose that he might set an example of clerical submission and lend John the support of his countenance as spiritual head of the province over which John was to be the secular ruler, of course welcomed the lad as his sovereign and gave him his homage and fealty, and so did the lay barons who owed their possessions in Ireland to King Henry; but among the survivors and representatives of the original Norman-Welsh conquerors the king’s son—like the king himself fourteen years before—evidently received but a half-hearted welcome;[82] and John did nothing to gain their confidence or their respect. He ordered castles to be built at Lismore and at two places on the Suir, Ardfinnan and Tibraghny;[83] beyond this he seems to have taken no measures to oppose the threatened coalition of the Irish princes and people; and while they were openly joining hands against him, he was spending in riotous living the money which had been destined for the pay of the soldiers who had come with him from England. When these soldiers demanded their wages, he met them with a refusal.[84] Some of them, whom he had left to garrison the new castles at Ardfinnan and Tibraghny, provided for themselves by making plundering raids into Munster, till they were defeated with great slaughter by the king of Thomond, Donell O’Brien;[85] most of the others refused to serve John any longer, and went over to the Irish.[86] Such was the characteristic beginning of John’s public life. Equally characteristic was the facility with which he escaped from the consequences of his criminal folly. In September, finding himself on the verge of ruin, he hurried back to his father’s court and laid the blame of his ill-success upon Hugh de Lacy, whom he accused of plotting with the Irish against him.[87] The task of repairing the mischief wrought by his five months’ stay in Ireland was entrusted by Henry to John de Courcy as governor-general.[88]
1186–1187
Within a few months, however, the king again took up his cherished scheme with renewed eagerness and hope. “Lord of Ireland” was the title which John had assumed during his visit to that country,[89] as it was the title by which Henry had claimed authority over the Irish princes; but ever since 1177 Henry had been planning to secure for his son a more definite basis of power, by having him crowned and anointed as king. For this the Pope’s permission was necessary; Alexander III. was said to have granted it,[90] but his grant seems never to have been embodied in a bull, and Lucius III., who succeeded him in 1181, absolutely refused to sanction Henry’s project. When Lucius died, in November 1185, Henry at once despatched an embassy to his successor, Urban III., “and from him he obtained many things which Pope Lucius had strongly resisted; of which things this was one, that whichever of his sons he might choose should be crowned and anointed king of Ireland.”[91] This grant Urban is said to have confirmed by a bull, and by sending to Henry a crown of peacock’s feathers set in gold.[92] Bull and crown were probably brought by two legates who are expressly described as commissioned by Urban as legates for Ireland, “to crown John king of that country.” But these envoys did not reach England till Christmas Eve 1186;[93] and meanwhile, in August, news had come that “a certain Irishman had cut off the head of Hugh de Lacy,” whereupon Henry bade John proceed at once to Ireland and seize Hugh’s vast estates there.[94] John, however, was still in England when the legates arrived; possibly his father detained him on learning that they were actually on their way. But they had no sooner landed than they offended Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury by wearing their mitres and having their crosses carried before them in his cathedral church; and they repeated the insult in the king’s court, to the great indignation of Baldwin and his suffragans.[95] Under these circumstances it would obviously have been impossible to let them crown John in Baldwin’s province; and if Henry entertained any idea of sending them and John to Ireland together, that the rite might be performed there, he speedily abandoned it. Baldwin, in fact, to rid himself of the legates, advised the king to employ them in France, as mediators in the disputes which were arising between Henry and Philip Augustus out of the death of Geoffrey of Britanny, the minority of Geoffrey’s daughter, and the critical condition of his widow. Henry accepted the suggestion, sent John to Normandy instead of to Ireland,[96] and himself followed with the legates on February 17 (1187).[97]
1187
No pacification between the kings was arrived at, and at Whitsuntide both openly prepared for war. This was the first real war in which John took part; for his attacks upon Aquitaine in 1184 had been mere raids, probably directed by Geoffrey, and it was not under his personal leadership that his mercenaries had fought their losing fight with the Irish in Munster. Now he was appointed to command one of the four bodies into which King Henry divided his host; the other three being entrusted to Richard, Earl William de Mandeville, and Geoffrey the chancellor.[98] The position of these different bodies of troops at the opening of the campaign is obscure. One English authority states that when Philip began the war by laying siege to Châteauroux, Richard and John were both within its walls.[99] A contemporary French historian, however, who was probably better informed, says that when Philip besieged Châteauroux Henry and Richard proceeded together to its relief;[100] and it appears that John accompanied his father and brother, for we are told that “John who is called Lackland, being sent by his father, chanced to be present” when one of Richard’s mercenaries broke off an arm of a statue in the church of Our Lady, whereupon the figure bled as if it were alive; and John picked up the severed arm and carried it off as a holy relic.[101] One contemporary asserts that Richard’s subsequent desertion of his father was owing to Philip’s communicating to him a letter in which Henry proposed that Philip’s sister Adela, Richard’s betrothed, should marry John instead of Richard, and that John should succeed to the whole of his dominions except England and Normandy.[102] Whether this letter was genuine or forged, there is nothing to show; if such a proposition was really made by Henry, it was probably only as a temporary expedient for putting off Philip’s importunity on the awkward question of Adela’s marriage. In the autumn Henry and Richard were again reconciled,[103] and a little later both were for a moment reconciled to Philip by a common vow of crusade.