Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [280]
The Pale: that was what they called the counties around Dublin now—a name that suggested an invisible palisade enclosing the region. Conditions there were pretty much as they had been the century before. Within the Pale, as in England, lay a pattern of parishes and counties, where sheriffs collected royal taxes and the justices decided cases by English common law. Around the edge of the Pale, the Marcher lords still led their frontier existence; and beyond the Pale, whether ruled over by Irish chiefs or the great magnates like the Butlers and Fitzgeralds, lay the world of Gaelic Ireland. Beyond the Pale, as far as Margaret’s father was concerned, civilization ended. But within the Pale, order was assured by the English in Ireland, the Irish of English blood, men like himself: not, perhaps, all that he might have liked to be, but in his own eyes at least and those of the nuns, an English gentleman.
Yet today, in Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral, gentlemen like himself were preparing to invade the English kingdom.
“Look, Father.” The cathedral doors were swinging open. Men-at-arms were coming out, pushing back the crowd. A broad pathway was being cleared. Figures were appearing, in glittering robes, in the doorway. Her father lifted her up and Margaret could see them clearly: three bishops with mitres on their heads led the procession; then came the abbots and priors. Next, in their robes of office, red and blue and gold, came the mayor and the aldermen of the city; behind them walked the Archbishop of Dublin with the Lord Deputy, the Earl of Kildare, head of the mighty Fitzgerald clan and the most powerful man in all Ireland. Next came the Lord Chancellor, and the Treasurer, followed by the major officeholders and nobility. And then came the boy.
He was only a little fellow, hardly older than herself. For a crown, they had taken a circlet of gold, which had formed the halo over a statue of the Blessed Virgin, and placed it upon his head. And to make sure that this new boy king should be clearly seen, they had selected a gentleman from Fingal, one Darcy by name, a giant of a man who stood six and a half feet tall, and put the boy king to ride upon his shoulders.
Bringing up the rear of the procession came two hundred German mercenary landknechts, sent from the Low Countries by the Duchess of Burgundy, carrying fearsome pikes and accompanied by fife and drum.
For the boy, Edmund, Earl of Warwick, had just been crowned King of England, and was about to set forth to claim his rightful kingdom. But how had it come to pass that he should be crowned in Dublin?
A generation ago, during a period when the royal house of York was in the ascendant over that of Lancaster, one of the princes of York had governed Ireland for a number of years and, uncommon for an Englishman, had made himself popular. Ever since, in many parts of the Irish community, and especially in Dublin, there had been a loyalty towards the Yorkist cause. But now the House of York had been defeated. Henry Tudor, who held the crown by right of conquest, had based his claim to royalty on the fact that his forebears, though only an upstart gentry family from Wales, had married into the House of Lancaster. As royalty goes, this was quite a shaky claim; and although the new Tudor king cleverly married a Yorkist princess to strengthen his royal position, he could not really sleep easy if there were other, more legitimate Plantagenet heirs still at large.
And suddenly, some months ago, an heir had appeared, with a far more legitimate claim to the throne than Henry Tudor. He was Edmund, Earl of Warwick, a royal prince of the house of York. His appearance under the care of a priest had caused consternation at the Tudor court. King Henry had immediately called him an impostor. “His real name is Lambert Simnel,” he declared, the son of an organ