Henry the Second

waters towards Ireland, "For the conquest of that land I will gather together all the ships of my kingdom, and w

h they planted along the coast from Dublin to Limerick, the various Irish kingdoms maintained themselves according to their ancient customs, and, as English tribes had done before in Britain, waged frequent war for the honour of a shifting and dubious supremacy. The island enjoyed a fair fame for its climate, its healthfulness, its pasturage, its fisheries; English chroniclers dwelt on "the far-famed harbour of Dublin, the rival of our London in commerce," and told of ships of merchandise that sailed from Britanny to Irish ports, and of the busy wine trade with Poitou. Ireland alone broke the symmetry of an empire that bordered the Atlantic from the Hebrides to Spain, and the fame of empire had its

tical tradition. The strangers built the first cities, coined the first money, and introduced trade. But they were powerless to affect Irish civilization. The tribal system survived in its full strength, and Ireland remained divided between two races, two languages, two civilizations in different stages of progress, two separate communities ruled by their own laws, and two half-completed ecclesiastical systems, for the Danish Church long looked, as the Irish had never done, to the Archbishop of Canterbury as their head. Earnest attempts had already been made by Hadrian's predecessor to bring the Irish into closer connection with the see of Rome. In 1152 a papal legate had carried out a great reform by which four archbishops, wholly independent of Canterbury and receiving their palls from Rome, were set over four provinces. But still no Peter's Pence were paid to Rome; Roman canon law, Roman ritual, the Roman rules of marriage, had no authority; the Roman form

ion to such of Henry's servants as were willing to aid him in their recovery. Diarmait easily found allies in the nobles of the Welsh border, in whose veins ran the blood of two warlike races. It was by just such an enterprise as this that their Norman fathers and grandfathers had won their Welsh domains. From childhood they had been brought up in the tumult of perpetual forays, and trained in a warfare where agility and dash and endurance of hunger and hardship were the first qualifications of a soldier. Richard de Clare, Earl of Striguil, in later days nicknamed Strongbow-a descendant of one of the Conqueror's greatest warriors, but now a needy adventurer sorely harassed by his creditors-was easily won by the promise of Diarmait's daughter and heiress,

uous in his way of living, liberal and jovial, given to wine and dissipation. His nephew, Meiler Fitz-Henry, showed stronger traces of Welsh blood in his swarthy complexion, fierce black eyes, and passionate face. The knights carried on the war with the virtues and vices of a feudal chivalry, with a frank loyalty to their allies, a good comradeship which recognized no head but left each knight supreme over his own forces, a magnificent daring in the f

he hero with whose name the conquest of Ireland was to be for ever associated, red-haired, gray-eyed, freckled, with delicate features like a woman's, and thin, feeble voice; wearing a plain citizen's dress without arms, "that he might seem more ready to obey than to command;" suave, gracious, politic, patient, deferential, with his fine aristocratic air, and an undaunted courage that blazed out in battle, when "he never moved from his post, but remained a beacon of refuge to his followers." At his coming Waterford was taken, as Wexford and Ossor

electing their king. But the tribal system had long been forgotten by the Normans, whose ancestors had ages before passed out of it into the later stage of the feudal system; and by Norman law the kingdom of Leinster would pass to Aeifi's husband and her children. Rights of inheritance and rights of conquest were judiciously blended together, and Richard assumed rule, not under the dangerous title of king, but as "Earl of Leinster." The title was strange and unwelcome to Irish ears. Among envious Norman rivals it did not hide the suspicion that Richard was "nearly a king," and rumours reached Henry's ears that he was conquering not only Leinster but other districts to which neither he nor his wife

ison, but as soon as he had won the smaller kings of the south separately to make submission to him, and given the chief castles into the hands of his own officers, he conciliated the knights by releasing Fitz-Stephen. He spent the winter in Dublin, in a palace built of wattles after the fashion of the country. There he received the homage of all the kings of Leinster and Meath. Order, law, justice, took the place of confusion. Dublin, threatened with ruin now the Danish traders were driven off, was given to the men of Bristol to found a new prosperity. Its trade with Chester was confirmed, and from all parts of England new settlers came in numbers during the next few years to share in the privileges and wealth which it

l justice and power, and to break the strength of the barons by dividing and curtailing their interests. He had left them without a leader. The growing power of Strongbow had been broken; Dublin had been taken from him; the castles had all been committed to knights appointed by the king. Quarrels and rivalries soon broke out. Raymond the Fat became the recognized head of Nesta's descendants. In his enormous frame, his yellow curly hair, his high-coloured cheery face, his large gray eyes, we seethe type of the old Norse conquerors who had once harried England; we recognize it too in his carelessness as to food or clothing, his indifference to hardship, his prodigious energy, the sleepless nights spent in wandering through his camp where his resounding shouts awoke the sleeping sentinels, the enduring wrath which never forgot an enemy. Richard's uncle, Hervey of Mount Moriss, led a rival faction in the interests of Stro

ow proposed to give the realm of Ireland, should be of age to undertake its government. When Fitz-Aldhelm saw the magnificent troop of Raymond's cousins and nephews, who had thrown aside all armour save shields, and, mounted on splendid horses, dashed across the plain to display their feats of agility and horsemanship, he muttered to his followers, "This pride I will shortly abate, and these shields I will scatter." He was true to his word. The fortunes of the knights of both parties indeed rapidly declined; "those who had been first had to learn to be last;" their lands were taken from them on every excuse, and they were followed by the enmity and persecution of the king. For the next ten years the history of the English in Ireland is a miserable record of ineffective and separate wars undertaken by leaders each acting on his own account, and of watchful jealousy on the part of Henry. A new governo

o add to a rich pay the richer profits of plunder and of ransom. The seaport towns and the castles fell into the hands of new masters, untrained to the work required of them. "Wordy chatterers, swearers of enormous oaths, despisers of others," as they seemed to the race of Nesta's descendants, the new rulers of the country proved mere plunderers, who went about burning, slaying, and devastating, while the old soldiery of the first conquest were despised and cast aside. Divisions of race which in England had quite died out were revived in Ireland in their full intensity; and added to the two races of the Irish and the Danes we now hear of the three hostile groups into which the invaders were broken-the Normans, the English, and the men of the Welsh border. To the new comers the natives were simply barbarians. When the Irish princes came to do homage, their insolent king pulled their long beards in ridicule; at the outrage they turned their backs on the English camp, and the other kings hearing their tale, refused to do fealty. Any

interrupted by the half-conquest of the barons and the bringing in of a feudal system, for which the Irish were wholly unprepared. But the feudal conquerors themselves were only the remnants of a broken and defeated party, the last upholders of a tradition of conquest and of government of a hundred years earlier. Themselves trembling before the coming in of a new order of things, they could destroy the native civilization, but they could set nothing in its place. There rema