Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [245]
Indeed, everything about the new Saint Patrick’s was to be English. It was being built in the new Gothic style, now in fashion in England and France. Unlike the important Irish foundations, which were monastic, the new college of Saint Patrick was to be a collegiate church for priests, not monks—in the latest English fashion. Most of the priests were English, not Irish. And it could hardly have escaped anyone’s notice that this new English headquarters of the English bishop was situated outside the city wall and several hundred yards distant from the old Christ Church, where the monks still remembered the saintly Archbishop O’Toole with reverence and affection.
The wet March breeze caught Father Gilpatrick in the face. He should, he supposed, have felt grateful. It was, after all, a compliment that the English archbishop should have chosen him, an Irishman, to be one of the new canons. “You are held in high regard by everyone,” Cumin had told him frankly. “I know you will use your influence wisely.” Given the circumstances as they were nowadays, Gilpatrick had no doubt that it was his duty to accept. But as he glanced across at the site of his family’s old monastery on the rise to his left, and as he thought of the man he had asked, most reluctantly, to meet him as soon as the consecration was over, he could only think: thank God at least that my poor father is no longer alive to see this.
His father’s last years had not been happy. After the visit of King Henry, the old man had seen his world gradually being butchered, like a body losing limbs, one at a time. The final blow for him had been when a new Church council had declared that all the hereditary priests like himself should be thrown out of their positions and dispossessed. Archbishop O’Toole had utterly refused to let such a thing happen to him, but the heart had gone out of the old man after that. The end had come only half a year after the death of Lawrence O’Toole himself. His father had gone for a walk down to the old Thingmount. And there, by the tomb of his ancestor Fergus, he had suffered a single, massive seizure and fallen dead on the spot. It was a fitting end, Gilpatrick thought, for the last of the Ui Fergusa.
For his father had turned out to be the last chief. He himself, as a celibate priest, had no heirs. And his brother Lorcan, whether by chance or as divine punishment for marrying his brother’s widow, had been granted daughters but no son. In the male line, therefore, the family of the chiefs who had guarded Ath Cliath since before Saint Patrick came was about to die out.
There was one final indignity, however, which had been reserved for this day. It was a mercy, indeed, that his father was not there to see what he must do after the consecration.
The service was well done, you couldn’t deny it. And afterwards they were all very friendly to him, complimentary indeed. But it gave him no pleasure. He had no illusions. The Church was still predominantly Irish, so they needed a man like him as a go-between. For the time being. Until the English were in the majority. The present archbishop was not a bad man, in his way. He’d encountered other churchmen like him during his time in England. An administrator, a servant of the king: intelligent, but cold. How he longed, sometimes, for the less worldly spirit of O’Toole. When the business was over, he went outside and looked around. After a moment or two, he saw the lordly figure approaching, and inwardly he cringed. It was all his brother’s fault.
For a brief time, after King Henry had completed his visit to the island, it had seemed that the two parties occupying the land might live in an uneasy peace. The Plantagenet