The Great Turning Points of British History (6 page)

Stephen made a series of concessions by which the imperium of Henry I shrank to something close to a provincial lordship. In 1136, Stephen ceded Carlisle to David, king of Scots, and subsequently he granted his son, Henry, the earldom of Northumbria. With civil war occupying English interests in the 1140s, the prospect of Scotland holding onto Northumbria was not out of the question, though in 1152 the early death of King David’s son Henry weakened Scottish power.

In 1136 also the Welsh gained a number of victories over the Norman settlers, and in 1139 the empress landed and established control over the West Country.

The battle of Lincoln was of short-term significance in England, but it led inexorably to the king’s losing control over Normandy. The take-over of the duchy by the empress’s husband, Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, completed in 1144, drew upon the lessons of what had happened in England in 1141, with the securing of a political consensus, and a leading role being taken by the citizens of Rouen, who were growing rich from trade along the Seine.

1100
Marriage of Henry I
. When William Rufus was killed hunting in the New Forest on 2 August, his younger brother, Henry, moved swiftly, being crowned at Westminster just three days later. He married Matilda (Maud, also known as Edith), daughter of Malcolm Canmore, king of Scots, and Margaret, daughter of Edward the Ætheling, later in the year. Their children would thus claim descent both from the Norman and the Anglo-Saxon kings of England.

1110
Betrothal of Henry’s daughter
. Matilda’s marriage to the German emperor, Henry V, was secured at the cost of a huge dowry of 10,000 marks, raised by a special geld taken at three shillings on the hide. The couple were married in 1114, when Matilda was not quite 12, but she was widowed in 1125. There were no children of this marriage.

1120
Wreck of the
White Ship
. The court returned from Barfleur to England on 25 November. One of the boats, the
White Ship
, ran aground on rocks close to the shore. Henry’s only legitimate son, William Ætheling (aged 17), was lost, along with two of the king’s illegitimate children and many of the nobility. The king’s plans for a peaceful succession went down with the ship.

1124
Accession of King David I of Scotland
. The Scottish king succeeded Alexander I to the throne. He is credited with moving Scottish society more towards the Anglo-Norman model and extending the reach of royal authority. A strong and capable king, he took advantage of the turmoil in England to expand his realm into Northumbria.

1132
Foundation of Rievaulx Abbey
. The spread of the Cistercian order, the ‘white monks’, was a particular feature of the first half of the twelfth century. Rievaulx in North Yorkshire would become the largest of these monasteries, growing under its superior, St Ailred (abbot 1147–67), to a community of 140 choir monks and 500 lay brothers.

1135
Death of Henry I of England
. The king died during the night of 1 December at the hunting lodge of Lyons-la-Forêt, near Rouen, having – according to Henry of Huntingdon – disobeyed his doctors and eaten a dish of lampreys, a fish delicacy. He was buried at Reading Abbey, which he had founded, on 5 January 1136, in the presence of his successor, Stephen, an outcome that would have disappointed but not surprised him.

1138
Battle of the Standard
. A Scottish army, invading in support of the empress, was stopped and defeated soon after it crossed the river Tees (the point at which a raid became an invasion in English eyes). The northern baronage and local militias, mustered by Thurstan, archbishop of York, fought under the banners of their saints: these were stacked up to form a ‘standard’, which gave the battle its name.

1147
The Second Crusade
. The English played a significant though a supportive role in the crusade – preached by St Bernard – whose armies set out in the spring of 1147. British forces shared in the capture of Lisbon but shared also in failure in the Holy Land. The wealthy William, third earl of Surrey (earl de Warenne) was killed in the defiles of Laodicea.

1149
Knighting of Henry fitz Empress
. Henry (1133–89), the eldest of Empress Matilda’s sons, was knighted at the age of 16 on Whitsunday at Carlisle by his uncle, David, king of Scots. This marked the beginning of the future Henry II’s adult career. When he returned to Normandy, his father, Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou (whom Matilda had married in 1128 – he was 11 years her junior), invested him with the duchy, as being his by right of inheritance.

On 17 October 1171 an armada of four hundred ships put in at Crook on the south coast of Ireland. That day, for the first time ever, a king of England set foot on Irish soil. Henry II landed in force, intending to make the Irish recognize him as their overlord. He stayed six months, long enough to change the course of Irish history. Writing only twenty-five years later a Yorkshire historian, William of Newburgh, in a chapter that he entitled ‘The Conquest of the Irish by the English’, summed up the impact of Henry II’s expedition thus: ‘a people who had been free since time immemorial, unconquered even by the Romans, a people for whom liberty seemed an inborn right, were now fallen into the power of the king of England.’

Not surprisingly, the whole episode has given rise to fierce controversy. Was it, as Irish nationalist tradition held, an invasion by a malevolent English king? Or had Henry II gone to Ireland, as the late Victorian historian J.H. Round put it in 1899, ‘because her people were engaged in cutting one another’s throats; we are there now because, if we left, they would all be breaking one another’s heads’. Or had he been reluctantly drawn in because he needed to retain control over his own most turbulent subjects – a number of lords of the Welsh Marches who were on the point of carving out independent territories for themselves in Ireland? One English chronicler reported that the Irish themselves asked him to come to their help against the most powerful of those lords, Richard de Clare, later known as Strongbow.

Three things are certain. The first is that 1171 had begun disastrously for King Henry II. He was at Argentan in Normandy when a New Year present reached him in the shape of the news that as darkness fell on 29 December 1170 four of his knights had killed the archbishop of Canterbury. Stunned by the knowledge that his own angry words had precipitated the murder of his one-time friend, for three days Henry refused to eat anything or talk to anyone. Whether genuine or feigned, this display of grief reveals Henry’s awareness of the damage done to his reputation by the widely held assumption that the killers had acted on his orders. During the following months he sought to save his honour, even offering to submit to the judgement of Pope Alexander III and, if need be, in person. It soon became clear that one of the cleverest moves he could make was to play the Irish card. By going to Ireland he could both create a cooling-off period and pose as the Church’s champion, bringing ecclesiastical and moral reform to a backward province.

The second certainty is that the logistical preparations for Henry’s expedition were massive. Supplies for the fleet arrived from all over England, including enormous quantities of food for the troops, and luxuries such as silks and no less than 569 pounds of almonds for Henry and his courtiers. Gloucestershire alone sent five carts, four wagons, 3,000 spades, 2,000 pickaxes and 60,000 nails, while Winchester provided 1,000 pounds of wax for candles and to seal documents. Economic development in England meant that its king disposed of military hardware – ammunition, armour and castles – on a scale that none of his Celtic neighbours could match. As a consequence, Henry II approached the conquest of Ireland with confidence.

The third certainty is that Henry’s preferred solution to the problems posed by men such as Strongbow was to take the whole of Ireland into his lordship, irrespective of the views of the Irish themselves. After all, the Irish, in Henry’s eyes, were both thoroughly uncivilized and in no position to make their opinions count. In truth, Ireland in 1171 was a deeply divided society. Learned Irish scholars taught that their land was divided into two halves, northern and southern; into five provinces – Leinster, Munster, Ulster, Connacht and Meath; and into more than a hundred peoples (
tuatha
), each one ruled over by a chief (
toisech
) or by a king (
rí
). A mini-kingdom with a radius of ten miles was by no means impossibly small. Each
rí túaithe
owed tribute and military service to more powerful neighbouring kings. They in turn owed allegiance to kings who were, or claimed to be, supreme in one of the provinces. When a powerful king died, a struggle for kingship within the family ensued while more established kings in other kingdoms took full advantage. In this state of flux scores of kings competed to be the strongest in a province, or even to be the greatest king in all Ireland, sometimes known as
rí Erenn
, king of Ireland, or the ‘high king’. The competition for resources and prestige took the form of war, of cattle raid and counter-raid, in which casualties were often high.

In one of these struggles for power, in 1166, Diarmait, king of Leinster, had been driven out of Ireland. With Henry II’s permission, he recruited a small band of soldiers and managed to regain a foothold in his family’s homeland in south Leinster. In 1169 and 1170 more mercenaries crossed the Irish Sea, lured by Diarmait’s promises of land and money. To Richard de Clare, Diarmait promised the hand of his daughter Aífe and, in flagrant breach of Irish custom, the succession to Leinster. In August and September 1170 Diarmait and Strongbow won some striking successes, capturing the two biggest towns in Ireland: Waterford and Dublin. When Diarmait died in the spring of 1171, Strongbow became
de facto
king of Leinster. It was at this point that Henry II decided to intervene. Strongbow travelled to England to come to terms with Henry and to do homage to him for Leinster. But the king of England had no intention of calling off his invasion plans.

On 18 October Henry entered Waterford, and there began the process of taking the submissions of Irish kings. Some of the ‘modernizers’ among Irish ecclesiastics welcomed the king of England as an ally in their attempts to reform the Irish Church. Letters from them led Alexander III to express his joy at the news that ‘a barbarous and uncivilised people has been made subject to the noble king of the English.’ Henry assumed the title ‘Lord of Ireland’ – which was retained by all subsequent kings of England until 1541, when another bruiser, Henry VIII, decided it would be nicer to be called king of Ireland too.

In November Henry II went to Dublin, where he had a new ‘Irish-style’ palace built. Here he celebrated Christmas 1171, holding court and trying to impress the invited Irish with a demonstration of nouvelle cuisine. By now many Irish kings had submitted; but not all. The high king, Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair (Rory O’Connor), king of Connacht, kept his distance. According to one of Henry’s clerks, despite the wet weather and the mountainous and boggy terrain, it would have been easy to defeat O’Connor, had not other urgent business meant that the king had to leave Ireland in a hurry in April 1172. That business was the arrival of papal legates in Normandy, who had come north, Henry had been informed, to settle the question of his responsibility for the murder of Thomas Becket.

Before Henry II left, however, he confirmed the conquests that the newcomers had already made. His decision to have Dublin, Wexford and Waterford administered by royal officials meant that the English crown kept the richest prizes for itself. When Laurence O’Toole, the last Irish archbishop of Dublin, died, he was replaced by John Comyn, one of Henry II’s chancery clerks.

Despite Henry’s burgeoning influence, most of the island remained in the hands of Irish kings. In 1175 Henry recognized O’Connor as their overlord in return for O’Connor’s recognition of him as his overlord and a payment of tribute measured in cattle hides. But this agreement – the Treaty of Windsor – soon lapsed. Nothing stopped Henry II and his successors from granting as yet unconquered Irish kingdoms to English favourites. As a result, Ireland remained, as it had always been, a land of war, no longer just between Irish and Irish, but often now between Irish and English.

For a hundred years or so Ireland remained a land of opportunity, and while Britain’s population continued to grow, thousands were willing to emigrate. By founding towns and villages, building mills and bridges, these colonists almost turned south and east Ireland into another England overseas. In King John’s reign, the ‘Anglicization’ of Ireland was made official government policy. But when the movement of settlers ran out of steam, in around 1300, a Gaelic resurgence drove the English back behind the Pale (the fortified area around Dublin). Not for many centuries would it be possible to say that the conquest of Ireland started by Henry II had been completed. Irish tradition identified 1169 as ‘the year of destiny’, but it was by going there in 1171 and leaving again in 1172 that Henry II set a pattern for that catastrophic mixture of force and neglect that was to characterize the English government’s treatment of the Irish for centuries to come.

*  *  *

It had been the rebranding of Ireland as the ‘island of barbarians’ that gave Henry his opportunity to strike: Henry II was certainly not the first king of England to turn his eyes towards Ireland.

The first two Norman kings, William the Conqueror and William II, William Rufus, were rumoured to have contemplated taking it over, the latter allegedly toying with the idea of building a bridge of boats from Wales. Henry II himself thought about it as early as 1155, perhaps at the request of the Church. The archbishops of Canterbury had been claiming to be primates of the whole of Britain and Ireland since the 1070s, but this claim took a severe blow in 1152 when a papal legate restructured the Irish Church with no reference to Canterbury whatsoever. It may have been as a result of lobbying from Canterbury that Adrian IV, still the only Englishman to have ever become pope, sent Henry II a letter giving him Ireland. But in 1155 other matters intervened and Henry dropped the idea – supposedly on his mother’s advice.