Wars of the Irish Kings (2 page)

Yet, in spite of what Froissart thought, many people did manage to “war on the Irish effectively.” Beginning in the ninth century, Ireland experienced a new wave of invaders, and this time there was nothing mythical about them. The Viking raids began as just that: quick looting expeditions in which a ship or two would put ashore only long enough for its warriors to take what they could carry away. Later entire fleets came, but rather than leaving established settlements, they would pillage and go. It has been said that the Vikings’ great gifts to Ireland were red heads and cities. The gift of red hair may be debatable, but there were no cities in Ireland until Viking winter camps and trading posts alongside harbors all around the island grew and became known by names such as Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork, and Limerick.

As the years went by after the first raids, the Vikings—most of whom came from present-day Norway and Denmark—played greater social and commercial roles in Irish life. In occupied areas, Viking men were quartered in Irish homes. Viking armies took sides in local wars. And in the eleventh century, an obscure king from the west named Brian Boru grew in power and influence and became known—at least in retrospect—as the man who defeated the Vikings.

There are two great expulsion myths in early Irish history. One was that St. Patrick drove out the snakes in the fifth century, the other that Brian Boru drove out the Vikings in the eleventh. Of course there were no snakes to begin with and the Vikings never left, but both men—one in religion, one in government—became Ireland’s first national leaders. Brian challenged the traditional role of minor Irish kings by seeking control of more and more land and more and more kingdoms until much of the island (the very north excepted) was his to command. He forced the high king—an O’Neill, of course—to step aside and had himself crowned in his place, not at Tara, as tradition would have it, but on another sacred hill. This one, Cashel, was in the south. He was killed at Clontarf on Dublin Bay in 1014, defeating a combined army of rebellious Irish and Vikings from both Dublin and abroad. Afterward, in a pattern that would become familiar in Irish history, things went back pretty much to the way they were before. Only now, Brian’s family clan, who once called themselves the Dal Cais, would be known as the O’Briens, and they would do all they could to keep alive the memory of their family hero.

The next invasion came a century and a half later, and it would change Ireland forever. It used to be popular to call it the Norman invasion, although the invaders did not come from Normandy. Many call it the English invasion, although few of the invaders were actually English. Welsh nationalists have been heard to call it the Welsh Conquest of
Ireland, since the invaders—Normans whose families had settled in southern Wales after 1066—did indeed sail from there. But whatever its name, the little army that landed on the coast between Waterford and Wexford in 1170, and began its first battle against the Irish by driving a herd of captured cattle toward them, brought English rule to Ireland.

The situation, of course, was not as simple as it seemed. The Welsh-Normans (let’s call them that) had been invited over by an Irish king to fight with him against the high king, lured with promises of land and—in one case—marriage to the king’s daughter. They invaded without the permission of the English king, who, as it happened, had the blessing of the pope to make just such a move. The Irish, so Pope Adrian IV wrote King Henry II, had strayed from St. Patrick’s example. But Henry had other problems to worry about, the French in particular. As for the pope, who believed the sinful ways of the Irish needed to be straightened out by a firm hand from abroad, he was English, the only Englishman ever to be pope.

Led by an earl called Strongbow (his name was actually Richard de Clare), the invaders moved without too much trouble from Waterford to Dublin, and although there were a few sallies into the west, English power more or less centered on that broad corridor. King Henry rushed over belatedly to put the crown’s stamp on the earl’s upstart Irish enterprise and accept the allegiance of the Irish kings. Then the English got down to business making money in Dublin, while new Norman landowners got to work building castles on their new estates in the south and southeast. The Irish kings, for the most part, found themselves ignored and stronger than ever. It’s unclear whether the general moral tone of the land was changed one way or the other.

Next came the Scots in an invasion history has largely forgotten about, perhaps because there has always been a strong Scottish presence on the island. The strait between the east coast of Ulster and the west coast of Scotland is only about twenty miles wide, and as early as the third century a Celtic clan called the Dal Riada spanned the divide and in time introduced both Gaelic and Christianity eastward into Scotland. The Viking raids broke the clan in two, but a close relationship continued. In the twelfth century, the Irish kings began hiring Scots mercenaries called gallowglass (and later redshanks, because of their bare legs) to fight in their wars.

The gallowglass were not common foot soldiers (or kerns), but minor knights for hire, who, unlike the Irish, wore distinctive light armor, chain-mail jerkins, and pointed metal helmets that can still be easily spotted in medieval tombstone carvings. Their favorite weapon was a pole ax with a foot-long head; according to the military historian G. A. Hayes-McCoy, a contemporary described it as “resembling double bladed hatchets, almost
sharper than razors, fixed on shafts of more than ordinary length, which when they strike they inflict a dreadful wound.” Most gallowglass came attended by two young squires, one carrying weapons (which also included javelins and darts), the other, provisions. By the fifteenth century entire families of gallowglass had settled in northern Ireland, the MacDonalds and the MacSwineys being among the best known. Unlike their neighbors, they were still paid to fight, only now they lived locally.

A gallowglass soldier.

In 1315, a year after Robert Bruce defeated the English at Bannockburn in Scotland and became king of the Scots, his brother Edward led a huge army across the strait to Larne in Ulster and declared himself king of the Irish. There has always been debate over what the Bruces were up to. They may have just been putting another thorn in the side of the hated English. Or they may have honestly been trying to inspire their Gaelic brothers from across the sea to rise up and fight for a nation of their own. (A similar plan was in the works for Wales.) Perhaps Edward simply wanted a kingdom like his older brother’s. Whatever the motive, the Bruces had the support of a few Irish leaders in the north and clearly hoped their presence would inspire a general uprising against the English. One of the Scots’ allies was Donal O’Neill (Donnall Ua Neill), a local king who had been having his own problems with the English. In 1317 he sent Pope John XXII his “Remonstrance of the Irish Princes,” which, with its list of outrages committed by a foreign king and its justification for rebellion, bears a sometimes striking resemblance to the American Declaration of Independence written four and a half centuries later:

O’Neill, of course, was not choosing independence but an allegiance to a new monarch whom he saw, interestingly enough, as having a common ancestry with the Irish.

But an uprising of support never came. And in the three years before Edward was killed in battle not far from where his troops had originally landed, his forays around northern Ireland produced nothing but devastation and famine. Ireland returned to its old ways with the English pretty much keeping within what was called the English Pale, the area around Dublin that included what are now the counties of Meath, Louth, and Kildare, while elsewhere the kings continued their traditional rivalries. The area within the Pale (which at one time had actually been marked off with an earthen dike or pale) was called “The Land of Peace.” The “unprotected” rest of Ireland was “The Land of War.”

The next great struggle—the one that put an end to the notion that there were kings of Ireland or that there were parts of the island that were not under English domination—was triggered not by an invasion but by an edict from London. In 1536, Henry VIII, as part of his break with Rome, declared himself head of the church in England and Ireland. The churches, from country chapels to the two great cathedrals in Dublin, became Protestant, the monasteries were dissolved, and the Irish people had a new term of identity. The buildings may have converted, but most of the people did not. They were now not only Irish but Catholic as well. What followed was a series of revolts that culminated in Hugh O’Neill’s rebellion, which is often called the Nine Years War.

Under Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth, English policy was to no longer stay within the Pale but to control—or try to—the whole land. Confronted by O’Neill, who was the earl of Tyrone and a master of the Irish art of hit-and-run warfare, the English were baffled, at least until he changed his tactics. In 1601, O’Neill’s new ally, His Most Catholic Majesty Philip III of Spain, ordered a small army to Ireland to help the rebels. They landed in the south and took the walled city of Kinsale, near Cork. The English laid siege, and O’Neill, his fellow rebel Hugh O’Donnell, and their men rushed to aid the Spaniards. The traditional, and terribly brief, European-style battle that followed was a disaster that many came to believe blighted the cause of Irish independence for generations to come. There were—and still are—recriminations and bouts of what-if second-guessing, but no one, any longer, talked of Irish kings unless telling stories from the past.

This collection, however, is nothing but stories from the past about how, over the course of about a thousand years, a few kings from generations of kings in a country on the edge of the known world fought their battles. It does not attempt to be a detailed history of early Ireland. Every effort has been made to find source material that was written as closely as possible to the time of the events it describes. None of the texts is more recent than the seventeenth century, and even that material is based on earlier sources. This choice was made not because older material was thought to be more accurate. As most police officers understand, no one’s story is more untrustworthy than that of an eyewitness, unless it’s the story of someone an eyewitness told his story to. What the early sources do is create a vivid feeling for the times in which the original events took place and a sense of the biases and thought processes that combine with fact to create what we call history.

Henry Ford once got into a lot of trouble for calling history “more or less bunk.” It is unclear what he meant by
bunk
, but it is clear that in spite of our love of facts and tidy accuracy, history is more or less what the historians and storytellers down the ages have said it is. This collection is a compendium of lies, distortions, myths, dreams, facts, and amazing insights, and the best we can hope from it is a raw and perhaps astonishing appreciation of a time we can never fully understand. In its way, the collection is a history of how Irish history has come to be written.

The material includes the annals of medieval monks, the diary of a siege, unabashed political propaganda for one family or another, honest attempts at accurate history, and the record of early myths and tales. An Irish historian who looked at a proposed table of contents advised—vigorously—that readers must be warned that not all the entries should be treated with the same level of credulity. The introduction and notes in each chapter are intended to guide the reader toward a reasonable level of skepticism. The editor’s advice is to believe nothing outright, then enjoy everything for its sheer exuberance.