Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [243]
It was the following midwinter, nine months after King Henry of England had departed the island, that Archbishop O’Toole of Dublin summoned Father Gilpatrick to his private quarters and handed him three documents. When he had finished reading them, the young priest continued to stare at the parchments as though he had seen a ghost.
“You are sure this is genuine?” he asked.
“There is not a doubt of it,” replied the archbishop.
“I wonder,” Gilpatrick said quietly, “what my father will say.”
It had been a trying year. The marriage of Fionnuala to Ruairi O’Byrne had been necessary, of course. Her father had been unshakeable, and rightly so. The O’Byrnes themselves had been equally insistent. “Ruairi will not dishonour the Ui Fergusa,” they had declared. Indeed, Gilpatrick suspected that the presence of Brendan O’Byrne at the wedding was partly to make sure that Ruairi turned up and that the business was successfully concluded. Everyone had put the best face on it. Gilpatrick’s father had officiated. But there had been no mistaking the bride’s condition and though, as a mark of friendship, Archbishop O’Toole had attended, the whole family felt they had been lowered in everyone’s eyes. After the king taking their lands, it had been a bitter blow.
Indeed, these had been grim times for most of the old families in Dublin, with one notable exception.
Ailred the Palmer had got back his son. That had been a wonderful thing to see. Though he had not succeeded in making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, as his father had done, he had returned as the partner of Doyle the Bristol merchant and thereby ensured himself a position of some wealth in the port of Dublin. He was nowadays living in a house on the Fish Shambles. But most remarkable of all had been his marriage, not long after his return, to Una MacGowan. It seemed that he had taken her in deference to the wishes of his father, and more particularly his mother. And as a happy result of this union, when Una’s father had returned, a sick man, with his family that summer, his new son-in-law had been able to install him in his own house once again, since it was now in the ownership of Doyle the merchant. Though he did not know them intimately, Gilpatrick was happy for the family, and especially for Una, whom he had once rescued from a worse fate. But if this turn of events had reminded him that God was always watching over the lives of men, the parchment in his hands now seemed to show—if it were not sacrilege even to suppose it—that the eyes of God must be resting elsewhere.
The documents in question were letters from the Pope in Rome. One was addressed to the archbishop and his fellow bishops; the second was addressed to the kings and princes of Ireland. The third was a copy of a letter to King Henry of England.
The shortest was to the Irish princes. It commended them for submitting to “Our most dear son in Christ, Henry.” This was how the Pope referred to the man who caused the murder of Becket! He told them that Henry had come to reform the Church in Ireland. And he warned them to be humbly and meekly obedient to the English king, or risk the papal wrath. To the bishops, he commended Henry as a Christian ruler who would rid the Church in Ireland of its terrible vice and corruption, and urged them to enforce obedience “with ecclesiastical censure.”
“Does he mean we should excommunicate any of our chiefs who don’t obey him, do you think?” O’Toole asked in wonder. “The Holy Father also seems to think,” he added crossly, “that every prince in Ireland has come into King Henry’s house, which they haven’t.”
But it was actually worse than that. For as he had read the letters, Gilpatrick had noticed something else.