Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [261]
Some years ago, in a fit of panic when they had supposed, quite wrongly, that Dublin wasn’t safe, the royal Exchequer officials had decamped with all the accounts to a stronghold down in Carlow. It was the sort of feebleminded cowardice that Harold most despised. He had no great faith in the king’s men.
“If the English in Ireland want to keep order, then they must do it themselves,” Harold liked to say. They had their own parliaments, with considerable powers, which often met in Dublin. “But we haven’t enough leaders,” he would add. “That’s the trouble.”
It wasn’t only the crown which had suffered. Many great lords with estates in England as well as Ireland had decided that the western island with its disaffected native population was not worth the trouble. They left their Irish estates in the hands of stewards and remained, absentees, across the water. Just as bad, some of the greatest feudal holdings, like the huge inheritance of Strongbow himself, had been subdivided amongst heiresses, and in later generations split up yet again. So the magnates who might have formed a bulwark against the forces of disorder were largely missing. Recognising this weakness, the English king had enacted one important measure: he had created three great earldoms which could only pass down, without subdivisions, in the male line. The earldom of Ormond he gave to the mighty Butler family; the earldoms of Kildare and of Desmond went to two branches of the Fitzgeralds, who had come over with Strongbow. These earldoms dominated regions that lay beyond the king’s Dublin rule; but though they were certainly mighty enough to impose English order on large areas of the Irish hinterland, they were also more like independent Celtic kings than English noblemen and they were treated as such by the Irish chiefs. Their interests were all in Ireland. Privately, Harold suspected that if ever English rule collapsed in Ireland, the great earls would probably still be there, alongside the Irish kings.
No, it was up to the gentry, men like himself, to maintain English order, if not in all Ireland, at least in the broad arc of territory around the Dublin seaboard. Manor house, parish church, and village; market towns with their little town councils; English shires with their courts and royal justices. This was the settled order that Harold wanted to preserve, safe for himself and modest folk like Thomas Tidy. And it could be preserved, if only the English in Ireland themselves held firm.
But would they? Not long ago, down in the south, a descendant of bad old King Diarmait had proclaimed himself King of Leinster. Kavanagh, they called the fellow. It was an empty gesture, of course, just a native chief blowing his trumpet uselessly in the wind. But it was a reminder all the same. Show weakness now, and there would be other Kavanaghs. The O’Connors and the O’Neills could always rise again. This planned raid on Carrickmines might or might not be serious; but failure to deal with it would be seen as a token of the weakness of the English will, and be noted all over Ireland. It must be dealt with, and dealt with firmly.
Tidy was nearly finished.
“The essential thing,” he pointed out, “is that we give no hint to the O’Byrnes or their friends that they are expected. If troops are moved up from Dublin, it will need to be at the last moment, under cover of darkness.”
“I agree.” Harold nodded.
“And the squadron in Dalkey,” Tidy continued anxiously. “They’ll need to remain where they are. So as not to give the game away,” he explained.
And so as not to put yourself under suspicion, thought Harold grimly. Aloud he said, “Do not worry, Thomas Tidy. We shall be careful.” And he gave Tom a reassuring smile.
Did the poor fellow really imagine that they could afford to leave