Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [334]
Were they right? It wasn’t long before news came back that the Earl of Kildare was still alive. He hadn’t been executed, although as soon as King Henry had heard of the revolt he had put the earl in the Tower. MacGowan suspected the earl probably approved of his son’s actions. Kildare was a dying man, but King Henry was clearly rattled. His officials at court were denying that there was any trouble in Ireland at all. As for the Gunner, who should have been rushing to Ireland with troops and artillery, he was showing no sign of wanting to take up his post at all. Meanwhile, a Spanish envoy had arrived, given Lord Thomas supplies of gunpowder and shot, and told him that Spanish troops would follow. This was exciting news indeed. If people had suspected his declaration in Dublin had just been a bluff, the usual Fitzgerald troublemaking to force King Henry to restore them to office again, the news from Spain put matters in a different light.
“With Spanish troops,” young Lord Thomas told his friends, “I can remove Ireland from King Henry by force.” And soon afterwards he issued a startling proclamation. “The English are no longer wanted in Ireland. They must get out.” Who was English? “Anyone not born here,” Fitzgerald declared. That meant King Henry’s men. Everyone could agree about that. Archbishop Alen of Dublin and the other royal servants hastily locked themselves up in Dublin Castle. In a fine gesture, Silken Thomas even turned out his young English wife and sent her back to England, too.
And if many people had been sympathetic to Lord Thomas’s cause, during the summer their feelings were strengthened by events in England. All Christendom knew that King Henry had been excommunicated. Spain was talking of invasion; even the cynical King of France thought Henry a fool. But now, in the summer of 1534, the Tudor king went further. Brave men like Thomas More had refused to support his claims to make himself, in effect, the English pope; now, when the English order of friars likewise refused, Henry closed their houses and started throwing them into prison. The holy friars: the men most loved and revered in Ireland, inside and outside the Pale. It was an outrage. No wonder then that Silken Thomas now declared to the Irish people that his revolt was in defence of the true Church as well. Envoys were sent with this message to the Hapsburg Emperor and to the Holy Father. “My ancestors came to Ireland to defend the true faith,” Fitzgerald declared, “in the service of an English king. Now we must fight against an English king to preserve it.”
At the end of July, Archbishop Alen made a run for it and tried to jump on a ship leaving Ireland. Some of Fitzgerald’s men caught him, there was a skirmish, and the archbishop was killed. But nobody was shocked. He was only a royal servant wearing a bishop’s mitre. The friars were holy men.
As August began, it seemed to MacGowan that young Silken Thomas might get away with it. The city was in a curious mood. The gates were closed by the council’s orders, but since Fitzgerald was out at Maynooth and his troops widely scattered, the small doors in the gates were open for people to pass in and out, and life was proceeding almost as normal. MacGowan had just been on his way to visit Tidy in his gatehouse when he chanced to meet Alderman Doyle in the street, and pausing to talk, expressed the opinion that Dublin would soon be forced to welcome Lord Thomas with his Spanish troops as its new ruler. But Doyle shook his head.
“The Spanish troops will be promised, but they will never arrive. The Emperor will gladly embarrass Henry Tudor, but open war with England would cost him too much. Lord Thomas will have to manage alone. He’ll be weakened also by the fact that the Butlers are already using this opportunity to get favours from Henry. Fitzgerald may be stronger than the Butlers, but they can undermine him.”
“Yet King Henry has difficulties of his own,” MacGowan pointed out. “Perhaps he can’t afford to subdue Lord Thomas. He’s done nothing so