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In practice Mortimer had real possession of only a fraction of this inheritance. And since the King’s departure from Ireland in 1395, one by one the Irish lords threw aside the oaths of loyalty they had made to Richard in person.
The great expedition the King had led to Ireland at such immense cost had been for nothing. Once the garrisons ringing the mountains had been withdrawn, Art MacMurrough once again assumed the title ‘King of Leinster’. Not only Gaelic chieftains but also Anglo-Irish lords went into rebellion.
In despair, Richard decided to come to Ireland again in 1399. After landing in Ireland, he wrote to his uncle, Edmund Duke of York:
Dear and well-beloved, we greet you with whole heart, making you to know that by the grace of God we have arrived in our city of Waterford the first day of this present month of June…Since our arrival we thank God both for a prey of a great number of beasts made by our nephew the Duke of Surrey, as well as for a ‘journey’ made upon MacMurrough, O’Byrne and the rest, to the discomfiture of the enemy. We have had a very good beginning, trusting in the Almighty that He will lead us, and that shortly, to a good conclusion of our undertaking.
Very soon after, the expedition began to fail. Richard recklessly forged into the dense woods of the mountains where his army was worn down by repeated ambushes. In addition, the royal coffers were fast emptying. So unpopular was this expedition in England that the Duke of Lancaster raised a successful rebellion there. Richard had to hasten back only to be made prisoner and be thrown into the Tower of London, and from there taken away to be murdered.
Almost a century of internecine warfare followed in England as the houses of Lancaster and York contested for the Crown in what became known as the Wars of the Roses. Inevitably, the Lordship of Ireland was once more in peril.
Most of the descendants of the Norman conquerors had either gone native and become rebels or had returned to live more safely in England. A great many ordinary colonists, believing their prospects to be bleak in Ireland, also left the island, as a petition to King Henry V from the Irish Parliament of 1421 made clear:
Day-to-day we are burdened with divers intolerable charges and wars, so that humble tenants, the artificers and labourers of the said land daily depart in great numbers from your said land to your kingdom of England and remain there, whereby the husbandry of your said land is greatly injured and disused and your said lieges greatly weakened in their power of resisting the malice of your said enemies.
Henry, preoccupied with French campaigns, offered no help. The author of ‘The Little Book on English Policy’ made this warning in 1427:
To kepen Yreland that it be not loste,
For it is a boterasse and a poste
Undre England and Wales is another.
God forbede but eche were othere brothere,
Of one ligeaunce dewe unto the kynge.
But most in Ireland felt no allegiance to the English Crown and the author pointed out that ‘the wylde Yrishe’ had regained so much of the Lordship of Ireland that
Our grounde there is a little cornere
To all Yrelande in treue comparisone.
This was a correct assessment. At the same time the Irish Council reported in desperation to Henry VI that ‘his land of Ireland is wellnigh destroyed, and inhabited with his enemies and rebels’ with the consequence that the royal writ only ran in an area around Dublin ‘scarcely thirty miles in length and twenty miles in breadth’.
The Council was referring to the ‘Pale’. The Dublin government had erected paling, put up fortifications, dug trenches, given grants towards the building of castles, appointed guards to hold the bridges, and assigned watchmen – paid by a tax called ‘smokesilver’ – to light warning beacons when danger threatened. The Pale ran from Dundalk in the north, inland to Naas in Co Kildare, and then back to the coast just eight miles south of Dublin at Bray. Other coastal towns such as Waterford, Cork and Galway also attempted to remain loyal to the English Crown. They included Carrickfergus, described in 1468 as a garrison of war…surrounded by Irish and Scots, without succour of the English for sixty miles.
And on the main gate of Galway was inscribed:
From the terror of the O’Flahertys, good Lord deliver us.
The truth was, most of Ireland was beyond the Pale.
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