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bourhood of Lough Neagh, where, after having seen the flower of his nobility fall around him, O'Lochlin was himself slain.

A. D.

In the course of the reign of this active monarch, who stands distinguished as a munificent friend of the Church, there was held some synods at different places, of which the transactions and decisions belong fully as much to temporal as to 1156. ecclesiastical history. Thus, at a great synod,* at Mellifont, in the year 1157, convoked for the purpose of consecrating the church of that place, there were present, besides the primate, Gelasiust and a numerous body of the clergy, the monarch himself, and a number of provincial kings. After the consecration of the church, the whole assembly, lay and clerical, proceeded to inquire into some charge brought against Melaghlin, King of Meath; and, on his being found guilty of the alleged offence, he was first excommunicated by the clergy, and then deprived of his principality by the monarch and the other princes.

On this occasion, the king gave, as a pious offering for his soul, to God and the monks of Mellifont, 140 oxen or cows, 60 ounces of gold, and a town-land, near Drogheda, called Finnavair of the Daughters. Sixty ounces of gold were also presented by Carrol, Prince of Oriel, and as many more by Dervorgilla, the celebrated wife of the Prince of Breffny,the fair Helen, to whose beauty and frailty romantic history has attributed the invasion of Ireland by the English. This lady presented, likewise, on that occasion, a golden chalice for the altar of the Virgin, together with sacred vestments and ornaments for each of the nine other altars that stood in the church.

In the year 1158, was held another synod, at a place in Meath, called Brigh-Thaig, at which, after various enactments relating to discipline and morals, it was resolved that Derry should be raised to the rank of a regular episcopal see; and, a few years after, the synod of Clane conferred upon Armagh, more fully than it had ever before been enjoyed by that school, the rank and privilege of a university, by ordering that in future no person should be admitted a Professor of Theology in any church in Ireland, unless he had previously pursued his studies for some time at Armagh.‡

On the death of Murtogh O'Lochlin, the supremacy reverted to the house of O'Connor; and Roderic, the son of the monarch Tordelvach, was in a short time recognised A. D. throughout the country as king of all Ireland. One of his first measures on his 1166. accession had been to march with a sufficient force to Dublin, and secure the allegiance of the Dano-Irish of that city; over which he then reigned, say the annalists, in more worthy state than ever king of the Irish had reigned there before. From thence, being joined by a considerable number of the inhabitants, he directed his royal progress northward, and received in turn the submission of all the leading chieftains of Leath-Cuinn.

Being now recognised through all the provinces as monarch, Roderic assembled a great convention of the princes and clergy at Athboy, among the number of whom A. D. were the primate Gelasius and the illustrious St. Lawrence O'Toole. This good 1167. and great man, who was destined to act, as we shall find, a distinguished part in the coming crisis of his country's fate, possessed qualities, both of mind and heart, which would have rendered him an ornament to any community, however advanced in civilization and public virtue. Besides these heads of the clergy, there were also at this meeting the Kings of Ulidia and Meath, Tiernan O'Ruarc, Prince of Breffny, Donchad O'Carrol, Prince of Oriel, together with a number of other princes and nobles, attended by their respective forces of horse and foot, to the amount, as stated, of more than 30,000 men.||

By some modern historians, this great convention at Athboy is represented as a grand and national revival of the ancient Feis, or Triennial Meeting of the States; and it has been remarked,-with but too much justice, on such a supposition,-how melancholy was the pride exhibited by this now doomed people, in thus calling up around them the forms and recollections of ancient grandeur, at the very moment when even their existence, as an independent nation, was about to be extinguished for ever. But there is

* IV. Mag. ad an. 1157. Said by the Four Masters to have been held at Drogheda, but meaning, as is sup posed, in the monastery of Mellifont, which is near that town.-See Ware (Bishops) at Gelasius. †The Irish name of this distinguished prelate (for an account of whom see Ware, in loc. citat.) was Gilla Mac Lieg.

IV. Mag. ad an. 1162. "Communibus suffragiis sanciretur ne ullus in posterum per totam Hiberniam in aliqua ecclesia ad sacræ paginæ professionem sive ad Theologiam publicè docendam admittatur, qui non prius Armachanam Scholam sive academiam frequentaverat."-Colgan, Trias Thaumaturg.

IV. Mag. ad. an. 1166, "Ro righ ann Ruaidhri ua Concob. feb as onor. e ro righ riamh do Gaoindaibh." See, for the distribution of this force under the different princes present at the convention, the Four Mas ters ad ann. 1167.

¶ Warner, Whitty, &c.

no authority in our native records for such a notion; nor with the exception of the unusually large display of troops on the occasion, does this meeting appear to have, in any way, differed from those other conventions, or synods, which were held, as we have seen, so frequently at this period. In the same manner as at all those other meetings, various laws and regulations, relating to the temporal as well as the ecclesiastical affairs of the country, were enacted or renewed; and, so far from the assembly having any claim to the character of a Convention of all the States, it was evidently summoned only for the consideration of the affairs of the northern half of the island; and the only personage from the south, mentioned as having been present at it, was Donchad O'Fealan, Prince of the Desies.

As we have now reached the last of Ireland's monarchs, and are about to enter into the details of that brief struggle which, after so many ages of stormy, but still independent, existence, ended in bringing this ancient kingdom under subjection to the English crown, the reader will be enabled to understand more clearly the narrative of the transactions connected with this memorable event by being made acquainted with the previous lives and characters of a few of the personages who figured most prominently on the scene.

The monarch Roderic, who was, at this time, in his fiftieth year, had not hitherto very much distinguished himself above the rest of his fellow-chieftains, in those qualities common, it must be owned, to them all, of personal courage and activity; while in some of those barbarian features of character, those sallies of fierce, unmitigated cruelty, which were, in like manner, but too common among his brother potentates, he appears to have been rivalled but by few. We have seen that by his father, the monarch Tordelvach, he was kept confined for a whole year in chains; and that he was of a nature requiring some such coercion, would appear from his conduct on taking possession of the throne of Connaught, when, with a barbarity, the only palliation of which is the frequency of the crime in those days, he had the eyes of two of his brothers put out,* in order to incapacitate them from being his rivals in the race of ambition and power. Combining with this ferocity a total want of the chivalrous spirit which alone adds grace to mere valour, it is told of him, that, having got in his power a chieftain of the clan of Suibhne,† he had him loaded with fetters, and, in that helpless state, slew him with his own hand. It is added, as an aggravation of the atrocity, that this chieftain was then under the immediate protection of the Vicar of St. Cieran.‡

While such was the character of the monarch upon whom now devolved the responsibility of watching manfully over the independence of his country, in this its last struggle and agony, the qualities of the prince whose ambition and treachery were the immediate cause of bringing the invader to these shores, were, if possible, of a still more odious and revolting nature. Derinot Mac-Murchad, King of Leinster, the memorable author of this treason, had long been distinguished for his fierce activity and courage in those scenes of turbulence which the state of the country had then rendered familiar. He had, even so early as the year 1140, excited a general feeling of horror throughout the kingdom, by treacherously seizing, at once, seventeen of the principal nobles of Leinster, and having some of the number put to death, while of the remainder he ordered the eyes to be plucked out. Between this prince and Tiernan O'Ruarc,-the Lord of Breffny, a territory in the eastern part of Connaught,-a hostile feeling had early arisen, to which the constant collision of their respective clans and interests gave every day increased bitterness; and, at length, an event, in which Dervorgilla, the fair wife of O'Ruarc, was guiltily involved, raised this animosity to a degree of rancour which was only with their respective lives extinguished.

An attachment previously to her marriage with O'Ruarc, is said to have existed between Dervorgilla and the King of Leinster; a supposition which, if it be founded, acquits the lady, at least, of that perverseness of nature, which would seem to be implied by her choosing as paramour, her husband's deadliest foe. But, however this may have been, and there exists but little, if any, authority for much of the romance of their amour-the elopement of the heroine from an island in Meath, to which she had been sent during O'Ruarc's absence on one of his military expeditions, was the plan agreed upon by the two lovers, and which, with the discreditable aid of the lady's brother, Melachlin, they were enabled to accomplish. The wronged husband appealed for redress to the monarch Tordelvach, who, taking up his cause with laudable earnestness, marched an army the following year into Leinster, and having rescued Dervorgilla from

Regnum auspicatus a fratrum excocatione, malo augurio."-Rer. Hib. Script. tom. 3. DCCLXXXIX. t Sweeny. IV. Mag. ad ann. 1161.

the adulterer, together with the dowry and valuable ornaments which she had carried away, replaced her in the care of her relatives in Meath.

This event, the abduction of the wife of O'Ruarc by the King of Leinster, which took place so early as the year 1153, has, by the majority of our historians, been advanced in date, by no less than thirteen years, for the purpose of connecting it with Dermod's expulsion from his kingdom, A. D. 1166, and his consequent flight, as we shall see, into England, to solicit aid from Henry II. The ready adoption of so gross an anachronism, by not a few even of our own native historians, may be cited as an instance of that strong tendency to prefer showy and agreeable fiction to truth, which has enabled Romance, in almost all countries, to encroach upon, and even sometimes supersede, History.

*

As long as the monarch Tordelvach lived, O'Ruarc was sure of a powerful friend and champion, and one of the last acts of this sovereign's life was to form a league of peace and amity with the Prince of Breffny. But, as soon as O'Lochlin succeeded to the supremacy, the fortune of Dermot rose into the ascendant,—that prince having espoused warmly his cause; and the very first step of the new monarch, on his accession, was to march an army into Leinster, in order to secure to his unworthy favourite the full possession of that province. During the whole of this reign, the restless, but now crestfallen, Lord of Breffny had to bear every variety of wrong and insult that a triumphant rival could invent or compass to torment him.

But O'Ruarc's turn of triumph and retribution was now at hand. Roderic O'Connor, the son of his late powerful protector, still extended to him the hand of alliance 116 and friendship;t and the accession of this prince to the throne of Ireland, in the 1166. year 1166, gave signal at once for the triumph of O'Ruarc and the downfall of his rival Dermot. Not all the territorial and personal influence which this latter chief had at different periods attained, now availed him aught against the general odium which a long course of crime had heaped upon his head. A munificent founder of religious houses, he had established in Dublin, in the county of Kilkenny, at Ballinglass, and at his own residence, Ferns, many large and most richly endowed monasteries and abbeys, the greater number of which continued to flourish for many centuries, while of some the names and sites may even to this day be traced.

But his cruelty and insolence were remembered far more freshly than his munificence; and the many whom he had trodden down in his prosperity, now took advantage of the turn of his fortune to be revenged. The forces of Breffny, of Meath, of his own kingdom of Leinster, where he had long rendered himself odious by his cruelties, of the Dano-Irish of Dublin, whom he had kept down by the force of his arms,—all these were now eagerly mustered, under the command of his inveterate enemy, Tiernan O'Ruarc, and proceeded to invade his territory. Being thus assailed from all quarters, and deserted even by his own vassals, Dermot retired at first to Ferns; but, seeing no A. D. hope of being able to stand against his pursuers, he adopted the resolution of seek1168. ing for foreign aid, and, having first set fire to the town of Ferns, took flight privately and embarked for England; while, in the mean time, his kingdom was declared to have been forfeited, and another prince of his family was nominated to be its ruler.

In having recourse for assistance to England, it does not appear that Dermot was influenced by any previous concert with Henry II., that prince being absent, at this time, in Normandy, and too deeply engaged in his humiliating and harassing struggle with Becket to afford much thought to any less urgent concerns. It is well known, however, that this ambitious monarch had many years before projected the acquisition of Ireland, and had even provided himself with that sort of sanctified title to it, which, in those days, the spiritual lords of the earth were but too ready to furnish to the temporal,-thus lowering religion into the mere handmaid of earthly ambition and power. This plan had been conceived by him so far back as the year 1155; but having neither a legal right to the possession of Ireland, nor any ground of quarrel to justify an invasion of it, he saw that by no other means could he plausibly attain his object than by masking the

IV. Mag. ad ann. 1156.

For proofs of the friendship subsisting between Roderic O'Connor and O'Ruarc, see the Four Masters, at the years 1159 and 1160.

The names and sites of the religious establishments attributed to him may be found in the List of the Abbeys and Monasteries of Ireland given in Harris's Ware, chap xxxviii. Among the religious houses founded by him was an abbey, near Dublin, called the Nannery of St. Mary de Hogges, meaning thereby, it is supposed, St. Mary of the Virgins,-the word ogh in Irish signifying a virgin. This establishment was for nuna following the rule of St. Augustin, according to the order of Aroasia.-See Archdall Monast. Hibern. Dermot was also the founder of the priory of All Saints, which stood on Hoggin Green, now called College Green, and on that part of it where Trinity College stands.-Lanigan, chap. xxviii. 8. 10.

The Ostmen of Dublin were overrun and spoiled by Dermot Mac-Murrogh, King of Leinster, who bore a greater away over them than any other king bad done for a long time."-Harris's Annals of Dublin, ad ann.

162.

real motive of his enterprise under a pretended zeal for the interests of morality and religion. With this view he despatched an envoy to Rome, where lately an Englishman, named Breakspear, had, under the title of Adrian IV., been raised to the pontifical throne. The king had previously conciliated the favour of the new pope by sending to congratulate him on his accession; and the request of which his envoy, John of Salisbury, was now the bearer, was such as could not fail to meet with a gracious reception, as, in applying to the pope for leave to take possession of Ireland, Henry acknowledged in him an extent of temporal power such as no pope had ever before thought of assuming; and the address with which Adrian, in his politic answer to the king, repeated and extended this admission, claiming, on the strength of it, a right and jurisdiction, not only over Ireland, but over all other Christian islands, crowned most worthily this strange and audacious transaction; which presents, in all respects, a perfect instance of that sort of hypocritical prelude to wrong, that holy league for purposes of rapine, between the papal and regal powers, in which most of the usurpations, frauds, and violences of those dark and demoralized times originated.

*

The permission accorded to Henry by the pope to invade and subdue the Irish for the purpose of reforming them, was accompanied by a stipulation for the payment to St. Peter of a penny annually from every house in Ireland, this being the price for which the independence of the Irish people was thus coolly bartered away. Together with the Bull, containing the grant and stipulation, was sent also to Henry a gold ring, adorned with a valuable emerald, as a token of his investiture with the right to rule over Ireland; and this ring, as we are informed by the bearer of it, John of Salisbury, was, by Adrian's orders, deposited in the public archives.

It has been supposed that Henry, in speculating on the conquest of Ireland, intended that kingdom for the youngest of his brothers, Prince William, for whom no provision had been made by their late father Geoffry. Whatever might really have been his design, at the time when he sought the papal sanction for his views, other schemes and interests, more pressing, diverted his attention from this object; and among the most urgent was the not very creditable operation of possessing himself forcibly of some territories in Anjou, which his brother Geoffry, had inherited under the will of the late king; a will which Henry himself had sworn to see faithfully fulfilled,-though in utter ignorance, as appears, of the dispositions which it contained respecting his brother. In addition to these various demands on his attention, the opinion of his mother, the Empress Matilda, was decidedly opposed, it is said, to his Irish enterprise; and the Bull was, accordingly, left to repose undisturbed for some years in the archives of Winchester.

Owing to the secrecy, doubtless, with which this singular grant was negotiated, no intimation seems to have reached Ireland of even the existence of such a document, during the whole of the long interval that elapsed between its first grant and the time of its promulgation. Some writers, it is true, have surmised that the Irish clergy were from the first informed of it; and account thereby for the increased activity with which from the date, as they say, of Adrian's Bull, public synods were assembled, and decrees and regulations multiplied,-as if to remove from the Church that stigma of general laxity in morals and discipline which had been made the pretext for so deliberate a design against the independence of the whole country. But it is by no means easy to believe, that, had any knowledge of this singular document transpired in Ireland, there should have occurred no allusion or reference to it at any of the numerous synods held throughout the country; nor even the slightest notice taken in any of our native records of a transaction so full of moment to the future destiny of the kingdom.

That Dermot's resolution to apply for aid to England was, in any degree, prompted by a knowledge of the papal grant, is by no means necessarily to be implied. Already the proximity of the two islands must not unfrequently have suggested the likelihood of an invasion, at no distant time, from the shores of the larger and more powerful. Up to

* "Jam Hiberniam et omnes insulas quibus Sol justitiæ Christus illuxit, et quæ documenta Fidei Chris. tiane receperunt, ad jus beati Petri et sacrosanctæ Romanæ Ecclesiæ (quod tua etiam nobilitas recognoscit,) non est dubium pertinere."

† Some zealous champions, as well of the papacy as of Ireland, have endeavoured, but without any success, to demonstrate that both this Bull, and the Bull of Alexander III. confirming it, are, upon the face of them, rank forgeries. See Gratianus Lucius, loc. citat.; and the abbé Geoghegan's Hist. d'Irlande, tom. i. c. 7. The chief argument of the latter writer is founded on the improbability, as he conceives, that either of these popes could have thought of selecting as an apostle for the reformation of Ireland so irreligious and profligate a prince as Henry II. "Voila donc (says the abbé) l'Papôtre, voila le réformateur que le saint Siege auroit choisi pour convertir l'Irlande."

Gratianus Lucius, on much more convincing grounds, attributes this increased zeal for the reform of ecclesiastical discipline to the example and remonstrances of that great luminary of the ancient Irish church, St. Malachy:-Etenim post Hibernos ad bonam frugem a S. Malachia revocatos, sæpe sæpius indicta sunt comitia multo principum et antistitum numero frequentata."—Cambrens. Evers.

this period, the tide of incursion appears to have been entirely from the Irish side of the Channel; and, in all the struggles of Wales against English domination, troops were wafted over to her aid in the corachs of her warlike neighbours. In the rebellion of Godwin and his sons against Edward the Confessor, Ireland furnished, as we have seen, men and ships in their cause; and, after the defeat at Hastings, three sons of the conquered king sought refuge and succour in the same country, and were enabled to fit out from thence a large fleet for the invasion of England. On the other hand it appears pretty certain that both William the Conqueror and the first Henry entertained serious thoughts of adding the realm of Ireland to their dominions; and William Rufus, in one of his expeditions against the Welsh, is reported to have said, as he stood on the rocks in the neighbourhood of St. David's, and looked at the Irish hills, that he would "make a bridge with his ships from that spot to Ireland."*

CHAPTER XXVII.

Dermot solicits aid from King Henry.-Receives permission to raise forces in England.Negotiates with the Earl of Pembroke and others.-Returns to Ireland.-Arrival of FitzStephen.-Surrender of Wexword.-First British settlement in Ireland.-Invasion of Ossory.-Arrival of Maurice Fitz-Gerald.—Unworthy conduct of the Monarch Roderic.— His negotiations with Dermot and the Foreigners.-Dermot aspires to the Monarchy.Encouraged in his design by the English.-Arrival of Raymond Le Gros.-Barbarous execution of Irish prisoners.-Landing of Strongbow.-His marriage with the King of Leinster's daughter.-March to Dublin.-Roderic's weakness.-His cruelty.-Remarkable Synod at Armagh,

It has been already stated that Dermot, the dethroned King of Leinster, finding himself an object of general odium in his own country, and without the means of encountering his enemies in the field, took the resolution of applying for succour to England; and the port of Bristol, then most in use for communication between the two islands, was that to which he sailed.† On his arrival, however, he learned that the English king, to whom it was his intention to apply for assistance, was at that time in Aquitaine, and thither he accordingly hastened to seek him. Though engaged anxiously then in his protracted and mortifying contest with Becket, and also in breaking the refractory spirit of some barons of Bretagne, over whose territories he had acquired authority, Henry yet listened with politic complacence to the fugitive Irish prince, while he told indignantly of the treatment he had met with from his rebellious subjects, and offered, if restored to his kingdom by Henry's aid, to receive it as a fief, and render him homage as his vassal.

Fully aware of the advantage to be derived, towards the fartherance of his views upon Ireland, not more from the personal alliance and co-operation of a powerful native prince,

See Leland, book i. chap. i. Girald. Cambr. Itinerar. Cambr. 1. ii. cap. i. Instead of citing the words of the original, I shall give the whole anecdote, as rendered by Hanmer, in his Chronicle:-"Cambrensis in his Itinerarie of Cambria, reporteth, how that King William, standing upon some high rocke in the farthest part of Wales, beheld Ireland, and said, I will have the shippes of my kingdome brought hither, wherewith I will make a bridge to invade this land.' Murchardt, King of Leynster, heard thereof, and after he had paused awhile, asked of the reporter, Hath the king, in that his great threatening, inserted these words, if it please God?' 'No.' Then, said he, seeing this king putteth his trust only in man, and not in God, I feare not his comming.'"

·

"Ad nobilis oppidi Bristolli partes se contulit; ubi etiam occasione navium, quæ de Hibernia eo in portu crebris applicationibus suscipi consueverant, &c." Girald. Cambrens, Hib. Expug. 1. i. c. 2.

Giraldus says nothing of the sixty followers who, according to some writers, accompanied Dermot in his flight; though Leland has carelessly cited him as his authority for the assertion. Considering the circum. stances of his departure, it would seem improbable that he should have taken with him such an escort. We find, however, in Sayer's History of Bristol, the following curious notice:-" One of our MS. Calendars says, that he (Dermot) came to Bristol in 1168, with sixty friends and attendants, and was here entertained by the ancestors of the lords of Berkely, that is, by Robert Fitzharding or his family.'" Chap. ix. According to the English chronicler Bromton, Dermot's first step had been to send over his son into Eng. land, in consequence of which, says Bromton, he received from thence some trifling aid:-"Cum autem cito post contra eundem regem ferocissimi totius Hiberniæ populi indignari et tumultuari inciperent, eo quod gentem Anglicanam Hibernia immisisset, illi Angli paucitate suæ metuentes, accitis ex Anglia viris inopia laborantibus et lucri cupidis, vires paulatim auxerunt." There is, however, I believe, no authority for this mission of Dermod's son in any of our native annals.

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