winter season to feasting and entertainment on a right royal scale, Henry now set about exercising his authority as general pacificator and regulator; and his first exercise of it was marked by that profound policy and sagacity which seem to have guided all his acts since he landed. He began, not by openly aggrandising himself or his followers-that might have excited suspicion-but by evidencing a deep and earnest solicitude for the state of religion in the country. This strengthened the opinion that estimated him as a noble, magnanimous, unselfish, and friendly protector, and it won for him the favor of the country. As his first exercise of general authority in the land, he convened a synod at Cashel; and at this synod, the decrees of which are known, measures were devised for the repression and correction of such abuses and irregularities in connection with religion as were known to exist in the country. Yet, strange to say, we find by the statutes and decrees of this synod nothing of a doctrinal nature requiring correction; nothing more serious calling for regulation than what is referred to in the following enactments then made :

1. That the prohibition of marriage within the canonical degrees of consanguinity be enforced.

2. That children should be regularly catechized before the church door in each parish.

3. That children should be baptized in the public fonts of the parish churches.

4. That regular tithes should be paid to the clergy rather than irregular donations from time to time.

5. That church lands should be exempt from the exaction of "livery," etc.

6. That the clergy should not be liable to any share of the eric or blood-fine, levied off the kindred of a man guilty of homicide.

7. A decree regulating wills.

Such and no more were the reforms found to be necessary in the Irish Church under Henry's own eye, notwithstanding all the dreadful stories he had been hearing, and which he (not without addition by exaggeration) had been so carefully forwarding to Rome for years before! Truth and candor,

however, require the confession, that the reason why there was so little, comparatively, needing to be set right just then was because there had been during, and ever since, St. Malachy's time vigorous efforts on the part of the Irish prelates, priests, princes, and people themselves, to restore and repair the ruins caused by long years of bloody convulsion.

The synod over, Henry next turned his attention to civil affairs. He held a royal court at Lismore, whereat he made numerous civil appointments and regulations for the government of the territories and cities possessed by the Norman allies of the late prince of Leinster, or those surrendered by Irish princes to himself.

While Henry was thus engaged in adroitly causing his authority to be gradually recognized, respected, and obeyed in the execution of peaceful, wise, and politic measures for the general tranquillity and welfare of the country-for, from the hour of his landing, he had not spilled one drop of Irish blood, nor harshly treated a native of Ireland-he suddenly found himself summoned to England by gathering troubles there. Papal commissioners had arrived in his realm of Normandy to investigate the murder of St. Thomas A'Becket, and threatening to lay England under an interdict, if Henry could not clear or purge himself of guilty part in that foul deed. There was nothing for it, but to hasten thither with all speed, abandoning for the time his Irish plans and schemes, but taking the best means he could to provide meantime for the retention of his power and authority in the realm of Ireland.

I do not hesitate to express my opinion that, as the Normans had fastened at all upon Ireland, it was unfortunate that Henry was called away at this juncture. No one can for an instant rank side by side the naked and heartless rapacity and bloody ferocity of the Normans who proceded and who succeeded him in Ireland, with the moderation, the statesmanship, and the tolerance exhibited by Henry while remaining here. Much of this, doubtless, was policy on his part: but such a policy, though it might result in bringing the kingdom of Ireand under the same crown with England many centuries sooner than it was so brought eventually by other means,

would have spared our country centuries of slaughter, persecution, and suffering unexampled in the annals of the world. There are abundant grounds for presuming that Henry's views and designs originally were wise and comprehensive, and certainly the reverse of sanguinary. He meant simply to win the sovereignty of another kingdom; but the spirit in which the Normans who remained and who came after him. in Ireland acted was that of mere freebooters-rapacious and merciless plunderers-whose sole redeeming trait was their indomitable pluck and undaunted bravery.

XX. HOW HENRY MADE A TREATY WITH THE IRISH KINGAND DID NOT KEEP IT.

OON the Irish began to learn the difference between king Henry's friendly courtesies and mild adjudications, and the rough iron-shod rule of his needy, covetous, and lawless lieutenants. On all sides the Normans commenced to encroach upon, outrage, and despoil the Irish, until, before three years had elapsed, Henry found all he had won in Ireland lost, and the English power there apparently at the last extremity. A signal defeat which Strongbow encountered in one of his insolent forays, at the hands of O'Brien, prince of Thomond, was the signal for a general assault upon the Normans. They were routed on all sides; Strongbow himself being chased into and cooped up with a few men in a fortified tower in Waterford. But this simultaneous outbreak lacked the unity of direction, the reach of purpose, and the perseverance which would cause it to accomplish permanent rather than transitory results. The Irish gave no thought to the necessity of following up their victories; and the Norman power, on the very point of extinction, was allowed slowly to recruit and extend itself again.

Henry was sorely displeased to find affairs in Ireland in this condition; but, of course, the versions which reached him

laid all the blame on the Irish, and represented the Norman settlers as meek and peaceful colonists driven to defend themselves against treacherous savages. The English monarch, unable to repair to Ireland himself, bethought him of the Papal letters, and resolved to try their influence on the Irish. He accordingly commissioned William Fitzadelm De Burgo and Nicholas, the prior of Wallingford, to proceed with these documents to Ireland, and report to him on the true state of affairs there. These royal commissioners duly reached that country, and we are told that, having assembled the Irish prelates, the Papal letters were read. But no chronicle, English or Irish, tells us what was said by the Irish bishops on hearing them read. Very likely there were not wanting prelates to point out that the Pope had been utterly misinformed and kept in the dark as to the truth about Ireland; and that so far the bulls were of no valid force as such; that as to the authority necessary to king Henry to effect the excellent designs he professed, it had already been pretty generally yielded to him for such purpose by the Irish princes themselves without these letters at all: that, for the purposes and on the conditions specified in the Papal letters, he was likely to receive every coöperation from the Irish princes; but that it was quite another thing if he expected them to yield themselves up to be plundered and enslaved—that they would resist for ever and ever; and if there was to be peace, morality, or religion in the land, it was his own Norman lords and governors he should recall or curb.

Very much to this effect was the report of the royal commissioners when they returned, and as if to confirm the conclusion that these were the views of the Irish prelates and princes at the time, we find the Irish monarch, Roderick, sending special ambassadors to king Henry to negotiate a formal treaty, recording and regulating the relations which were to exist between them. "In September, 1175," we are told, "the Irish monarch sent over to England as his plenipotentiaries, Catholicus O'Duffy, the archbishop of Tuam; Concors, abbot of St. Brendan's of Clonfert; and a third, who is called Master Laurence, his chancellor, but who was no other than the

holy Archbishop of Dublin, as we know that that illustrious man was one of those who signed the treaty on this occasion. A great council was held at Windsor, within the octave of Michaelmas, and a treaty was agreed on, the articles of which were to the effect, that Roderick was to be king under Henry, rendering him service as his vassal; that he was to hold his hereditary territory of Connaught in the same way as before the coming of Henry into Ireland; that he was to have jurisdiction and dominion over the rest of the island, including its kings and princes, whom he should oblige to pay tribute, through his hands, to the king of England; that these kings and princes were also to hold possession of their respective territories as long as they remained faithful to the king of England and paid their tribute to him; that if they departed from their fealty to the king of England, Roderick was to judge and depose them, either by his own power, or, if that was not sufficient, by the aid of the Anglo-Norman authorities; but that his jurisdiction should not extend to the territories occupied by the English settlers, which at a later period was called the English Pale, and comprised Meath and Leinster, Dublin with its dependent district, Waterford, and the country thence to Dungarvan.

The treaty between the two sovereigns, Roderick and Henry, clearly shows that the mere recognition of the English king as suzeraine was all that appeared to be claimed on the one side or yielded on the other. With this single exception or qualification, the native Irish power, authority, rights, and liberties, were fully and formally guaranteed. What Henry himself thought of the relations in which he stood by this treaty towards Ireland, and the sense in which he read its stipulations, is very intelligibly evidenced in the fact that he never styled, signed, or described himself as either king or lord of Ireland, in the documents reciting and referring to his relations with and towards that country.

But neither Henry nor his Norman barons kept the treaty. Like that made with Ireland by another English king, five hundred years later on, at Limerick, it was

"broken ere the ink wherewith 'twas writ was dry."