Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [244]
“The Holy Father does not understand Irish conditions,” he said sadly.
“He most certainly does not,” O’Toole burst out. “Look at this,” he pointed to a phrase in the first letter, “and this!” He jabbed his finger at the second. “As for this …” He picked up the third letter, then threw it down on the table in disgust.
There was no question, the letters were not only inappropriate, they were downright insulting. The Irish, according to the Pope, were an “ignorant and undisciplined” race, wallowing in “monstrous and filthy vice.” They were “barbarous, uncultured, ignorant of the divine law.” You might have thought that the seven hundred years since the coming of Saint Patrick, the great monastic schools, the Irish missionaries, the Book of Kells, and all the other glories of Irish Christian art had never existed. And the Holy Father was quite content, it seemed, to address the Irish bishops and princes and say it to their faces.
“What can he mean? What can he be thinking of?” the saintly archbishop demanded.
But Gilpatrick already knew. He saw it very clearly. The answer lay in the third letter, the letter to King Henry.
Congratulations. There was no other word for it. The pontiff sent the English king congratulations for this wonderful extension of his power over the stubborn Irish, who had rejected the practice of the Christian faith. Furthermore, to obtain complete forgiveness for his sins—these, no doubt, would chiefly be his complicity in killing the Archbishop of Canterbury—the king has only to keep up the good work. So Henry had got everything he wanted: not only a pardon, it seemed, for killing Becket but a blessing for his crusade against the Irish. “It might,” O’Toole complained, “have been written by the English Pope.”
And how had Henry done it? The text of the letter made it plain. The Pope had heard, he explained, of the disgraceful state of morals on the western island from an unimpeachable source: namely, the very churchman whom King Henry had sent him! And were not his words confirmed by the very report which they, the Irish churchmen, had sent him? He enumerated some of the abuses: improper marriages, failure to pay tithes, all the very things which the Council of Cashel had taken good care to address. Yet the Pope made no mention of the Cashel council. He was evidently quite unaware that it had taken place and of the reforms enacted there; just as he seemed also to be ignorant of all the fine work already done by Lawrence O’Toole and others like him.
And now at last Gilpatrick saw the cunning of the Plantagenet king. He had tricked the Irish churchmen into issuing that damning report, then run to Rome with it as proof of the state of things in Ireland. He’d suppressed all word of the council. The officials in Rome, who only knew a little of Ireland anyway, had found Pope Adrian’s earlier letter. And the trick was completed. The English king’s foray into Ireland to sort out Strongbow was now a papal crusade. “And we gave him the pretext. We condemned ourselves by our own hand,” Gilpatrick murmured.
It was devious. It was a betrayal. It was a brilliant lesson in politics from a master at the game.
IV
1192
On Saint Patrick’s Day in the year of Our Lord 1192, an important ceremony took place at Dublin. Led by the city’s archbishop, a procession of ecclesiastical dignitaries emerged from Christ Church Cathedral and made its way out through the city’s southern gate. Among them was Father Gilpatrick. Two hundred yards away down the road was the Well of Saint Patrick beside which, for a long time, there had been a tiny church. But today, on its site, there now stood a large though still uncompleted structure. Indeed, its size and its handsome proportions suggested that it might almost be intended