Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [260]
It was ten years since he had been elected as head of his family. Several of the Marcher families, like the Celtic clans, had taken to choosing the head of the family by election. Sometimes they would even invite other families or an important figure like the archbishop to help them choose. That the Harolds had done this was just another sign of their determination to ensure that they had strong leadership in difficult times.
Robert Harold was only of medium height. Quite early in life his hair had gone grey. His eyes, which were a startling, Nordic blue, usually had a soft expression; but they could grow suddenly hard, and when they did, whoever had crossed him discovered Harold’s ruthlessness. He had proved himself an effective leader, cautious but tough.
As Tidy explained everything—from his sighting of the girl, to her conversation with the unseen man in the church—Harold watched him carefully. The fellow’s nervousness was plain to see.
Again and again, Tom stressed that he had come to him, rather than the archbishop’s bailiff or the Justiciar’s officials, so that no one in Dublin would connect him with the business. “Please do not reveal where you got this information,” he pleaded. Up to a point, Harold could reassure him. He couldn’t see any reason why he should need to mention Tidy by name.
Sometimes Harold thought that he was almost the only person who really understood what was going on in Ireland. The Justiciar did, probably. The men who kept the accounts at the royal Exchequer surely must have. But some of his fellow gentry, men like Walsh at Carrickmines, failed to appreciate the seriousness of the case. Privately, he considered them weak.
The rot had really started when his father was a boy. Two things had set the downward course of events in motion. There had been several years of bad harvests and famines. That hadn’t helped. Then there had been the English war with the Scots. King Edward I—Longshanks, the Hammer of the Scots—might have destroyed the Scottish hero Wallace; but after Wallace, the Scots had struck back. Robert the Bruce and his brother Edward had defeated the English army at Bannockburn and given the Scots new heart. It was hardly surprising, then, if the great Irish clans had started to wonder if they, too, might be able to take on the English power. A deal had been struck. The O’Connors and the O’Neills had allied themselves with Edward Bruce, who had brought over a big force of Scots to Ireland. “That way we give the English a war on two fronts,” they judged, “and we may drive them out of Ireland as well as Scotland.” If they succeeded, the Irish chiefs had promised Edward Bruce the position of High King.
Could it have succeeded? Possibly. Bruce and his allies had made a big show up in the north and then advanced almost to the walls of Dublin. But the Dubliners had shut them out and the rest of Ireland had failed to rise for them. It was the old Irish problem: there was no unity across the island. The mighty and ancient O’Neills found they could only rally their friends. Before long, Bruce had been killed, and the Celtic military revival was over.
Yet something had changed. For a start, Ireland was poorer. English settlers were less inclined to come; some started leaving; the English government invested less. The Black Death had only made the existing trend worse. By the time Robert Harold came to manhood, England and France had become locked in that endless conflict known as the Hundred Years War, and the English king had little use for Ireland except to get what money he could from it—which was less and less as every decade went by. To Harold’s